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Sequoia picks its horse in the consumer carbon offset market, leading a $2.5 million round for Joro

Published December 14, 2020

Sanchali Pal first woke up to the world’s climate crisis after watching the 2008 documentary Food Inc.

The Princeton undergraduate saw the film in 2011, and it started her on the journey that would lead her to launch Joro, the Sequoia-backed startup that monitors consumer spending to offer tips on how to offset and reduce a user’s carbon footprint.

After scoring a job at the development firm Dalberg, then working in India and Ethiopia, Pal returned to the U.S. to pursue an MBA at Harvard Business School. She initially thought she’d focus on transportation, but her mind kept returning to consumer consumption habits and the potential to reduce CO2 emissions by targeting consumer behavior.

“I started thinking about it in the fall of my first year at business school, and I kind of put it on the back burner because I didn’t know how to do it from a practical stand. I wasn’t a technology person. I didn’t build software myself,” Pal told Jason Jacobs, the host of the My Climate Journey podcast. “I didn’t know how we would capture the data to show someone their carbon footprint and help them reduce it until I met my co-founder [J. Cressica Brazier], and I met her at an MIT event in the spring of that year two years ago, and the wheels started turning, maybe there’s a tool here that we could build together.”

The Joro app uses consumer spending data culled from integrations with Plaid to identify changes in users’ personal habits that can make an impact on their overall carbon footprint — based on their personal spending.

The app also has a community component, connecting users with sustainability challenges, classes and other educational tools, along with a social network to communicate with peers to track relative progress.

Consider it a version of keeping up with the Joneses, but for planetary health and eco-consciousness.

To date, the app’s community of users have reduced nearly 6 million kilograms of carbon dioxide emissions in 2020. Which sounds impressive, but given reductions in travel due to COVID-19 mitigation restrictions, the largest contribution that a consumer can make is reducing their meat consumption. While that only leads to roughly 4% reductions in global carbon emissions, it reduces about 1,200 pounds of carbon emissions. Over the 6 million kilograms that would mean a little bit over 10,000 people may be using the app.

Pal would not comment on the number of users her company’s app has managed to attract.

Image Credit: Joro

What the company does have now is $2.5 million in seed funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, which doubled down on its $1 million pre-seed commitment made when Joro was part of the firm’s early-stage founder program.

Sequoia Capital has internal crash courses for its founders — here’s how they work

Other investors and advisors include the venture firms Expa and Amasia, and angel investors and advisors like James Park, the co-founder of Fitbit; Rich Pierson, the co-founder of Headspace; Sebastian Knutsson, the chief creative head and co-founder of King; the actress Maisie Williams; Philian, the private investment company of Karl-Johan Persson, chairman of H&M; Tom Baruch; and Anjula Acharia, a partner at Trinity Ventures.

“At Expa we are focused on backing remarkable founders that are passionate about the product they are building,” said Expa founder Garrett Camp in a statement. “We saw that in Sanchali – she had a big vision and conveyed it very strongly to us. We have conviction that Joro can build a great product and a great business. The world will be a better place because of what Joro will bring to market.”

Pal estimates that behavioral changes and better consumer choices can reduce an individual’s carbon footprint by up to 30%.

It’s a bet that other companies are making too. For instance, the Los Angeles challenger bank Aspiration, founded by Andrei Cherny, has a tool that can measure the “social impact” of a consumer’s monthly spending — that includes the climate impact of daily consumption.

Aspiration can now tell you the ‘social impact’ of your monthly spending

Pal hopes that through the education and community components of the app, consumers can put pressure on the systems and industries that are the primary producers of greenhouse gas emissions to change their ways.

“Systems are made of people. Like us,” Pal wrote in a blog post. “Companies and governments change when enough people demand it through their actions and behaviors. No, we’re not a silver bullet — we need policymakers and businesses to take sweeping action. But we’re not powerless either. Together we can accelerate the pace of change by demonstrating our demand for a cleaner society.”

iCIMS acquires video recruiting startup Altru for $60M

Published December 14, 2020

Enterprise recruiting company iCIMS is announcing that it has acquired Altru.

ICIMS declined to comment on the terms of the deal, but a source with knowledge of the companies told us that the price is a combination of cash and stock, totaling around $60 million.

Founded in 2000, iCIMS offers a “talent cloud” used by more than 4,000 employers to attract, engage and hire new employees, and to help existing employees continue to develop their careers.

Former Marketo chief executive Steve Lucas became CEO in February, and he told me that the recruiting world is overdue for reinvention. After all, every company says they want to hire the most talented people around, so he wondered, “Well, okay, if you want that, why do you create such boring content? Why do you take a job that is exciting and should demand amazing human beings and create this super boring job description?”

Lucas sees video as a key piece of the solution, allowing companies to bring more “authenticity” to what can be a stuffy and bureaucratic process. Just over a month ago, iCIMS announced another acquisition in this area — Paris-based Easyrecrue.

Altru raises $1.3M to improve recruiting with employee videos

Lucas said that while Easyrecrue has created tools to enrich video interviews, Altru can be most helpful earlier in the recruiting process, when companies are trying to stay connected with the most promising candidates and get them excited about a potential job.

Altru CEO Alykhan Rehmatullah (who founded the startup with CTO Vincent Polidoro — they’re both pictured above) told me that while the company started out with a focus on recording and sharing employee videos for recruitment, its asynchronous videos are becoming used more broadly across companies. He suggested that’s particularly true this year, while teams are working from home and everyone’s looking for ways to communicate that are more expressive than Slack and don’t require putting “another 30-minute Zoom call on your calendar.”

In fact, Lucas said that before talking to me, he’d actually been recording videos on Altru to explain the acquisition to his own team. He praised the platform’s ease of use, joking, “If I can use this thing, anybody can use it.”

Rehmatullah said the entire Altru team will be joining iCIMS, where he’ll become vice president of content strategy. The goal is to continue operating Altru as a standalone product while also finding new ways to integrate it into the iCIMS platform.

Altru previously raised a total of $1.3 million from Birchmere Ventures, Active Capital and Techstars.

Why CEOs should spend up to half their time recruiting

Vista acquires IT education platform Pluralsight for $3.5B

Published December 14, 2020

The hectic M&A cycle we have seen throughout 2020 continued this weekend when Vista Equity Partners announced it was acquiring Pluralsight for $3.5 billion.

That comes out to $20.26 per share. The company stock closed on Friday at $18.50 per share on a market cap of over $2.7 billion.

With Pluralsight, Vista gets an online training company that helps educate IT professionals, including developers, operations, data and security, with a suite of online courses. As the pandemic has taken hold, it has breathed new life into edtech, but even before that, there was a market for upskilling IT Pros online.

This trend certainly didn’t escape Monti Saroya, co-head of the Vista Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista. “We have seen firsthand that the demand for skilled software engineers continues to outstrip supply, and we expect this trend to persist as we move into a hybrid online-offline world across all industries and interactions, with business leaders recognizing that technological innovation is critical to business success,” he said in a statement.

Pluralsight prices its IPO at $15 per share, raising over $300M

As is typical for acquired companies, Pluralsight CEO Aaron Skonnard sees this as a way to grow the company more quickly. “The global Vista ecosystem of leading enterprise software companies provides significant resources and institutional knowledge that will open doors and help fuel our growth. We’re thrilled that we will be able to leverage Vista’s expertise to further strengthen our market leading position,” Skonnard said in a statement.

In a 2017 interview with TechCrunch’s Sarah Buhr, Skonnard described the company as an enterprise SaaS learning platform. It goes beyond simply offering the courses by giving professionals in a given category such as developer or IT operations the ability to measure their skills and abilities against other pros in that category. He saw this assessment capability as a big differentiator.

“Our platform is ultimately focused on closing the technology skills gap throughout the world,” Skonnard told Buhr.

Pluralsight, which was founded in 2004, raised more than $190 million before going public in 2018. The company has 1,700 employees and more than 17,000 customers. The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory oversight, but is expected to close in the first half of next year. Once that happens, the company will go private once again.

Private equity firms can offer enterprise startups a viable exit option

EA to acquire Codemasters for $1.2 billion

Published December 14, 2020

Everybody thought the deal was done — Take-Two was supposed to acquire Codemasters for nearly $1 billion. Take-Two even reached an agreement with the board of Codemasters. But Electronic Arts crashed the party at the last minute and offered even more money. EA now plans to buy Codemasters for $1.2 billion.

Sky News originally reported that EA was planning a knockout bid. Since then, EA has officially announced that it has reached an agreement with the board of Codemasters.

If you’re not familiar with Codemasters, the British game studio has been around since 1986, making it one of the oldest game studio operating today. It has developed and published dozens of games. In recent years, the company has been focused on racing games across multiple franchises, such as Dirt, Dirt Rally, Formula One, Grid and (of course) Micro Machines.

EA is offering to buy Codemasters for £6.04 per share ($7.98) in an all-cash deal. The acquisition is expected to close during the first quarter of 2021.

EA has had a tumultuous relationship with racing games. It has created the Need for Speed franchise, which is one of the most popular racing franchises. But is has also neglected racing games in recent years, which led to disappointing games.

Similarly, EA has acquired Criterion Games in 2004 — the game studio behind Burnout games. But Criterion Games now mostly work as a secondary studio on Battlefield and Star Wars Battlefront games.

Codemasters will be able to take advantage of EA’s distribution resources, including EA Play, EA’s subscription service. It positions EA Play as an interesting subscription if you care about racing games.

Microsoft set to acquire Bethesda parent ZeniMax for $7.5B

Take-Two probably didn’t expect to lose the deal, but the company is going to be fine. Take-Two owns Rockstar Games (GTA, Red Dead), Firaxis Games (Xcom, Civilization), 2K Sports (NBA 2K) and a lot of other studios.

2020 has been an important year of video game consolidation. Microsoft has been leading this trend with the acquisition of ZeniMax Media, the parent company of Bethesda, id Software and Arkane. Microsoft also acquired Double Fine Productions, Obsidian Entertainment and Ninja Theory in the past couple of years.

German Bionic raises $20M led by Samsung for exoskeleton tech to supercharge human labor

Published December 14, 2020

Exoskeleton technology has been one of the more interesting developments in the world of robotics: Instead of building machines that replace humans altogether, build hardware that humans can wear to supercharge their abilities. Today, German Bionic, one of the startups designing exoskeletons specifically aimed at industrial and physical applications — it describes its Cray X robot as “the world’s first connected exoskeleton for industrial use,” that is, to help people lifting and working with heavy objects, providing more power, precision and safety — is announcing a funding round that underscores the opportunity ahead.

The Augsburg, Germany-based company has raised $20 million, funding that it plans to use to continue building out its business, as well as its technology, both in terms of the hardware and the cloud-based software platform, German Bionic IO, that works with the exoskeletons to optimize them and help them “learn” to work better.

The Cray X currently can compensate up to 30 kg for each lifting movement, the company says.

“With our groundbreaking robotic technology that combines human work with the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), we literally strengthen the shop floor workers’ backs in an immediate and sustainable way. Measurable data underscores that this ultimately increases productivity and the efficiency of the work done,” says Armin G. Schmidt, CEO of German Bionic, in a statement. “The market for smart human-machine systems is huge and we are now perfectly positioned to take a major share and substantially improve numerous working lives.”

The Series A is being co-led by Samsung Catalyst Fund, a strategic investment arm from the hardware giant, and German investor MIG AG, one of the original backers of BioNtech, the breakthrough company that’s developed the first COVID-19 vaccine to be rolled out globally.

Storm Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (founded and led by Eric Benhamou, who was the founding CEO of Palm and before that the CEO of 3com) and IT Farm also participated. Previously, German Bionic had only raised $3.5 million in seed funding (with IT Farm, Atlantic Labs and individual investors participating).

German Bionic’s rise comes at an interesting moment in terms of how automation and cloud technology are sweeping the world of work. When people talk about the next generation of industrial work, the focus is usually on more automation and the rise of robots to replace humans in different stages of production.

But at the same time, some robotics technologists have worked on another idea. Because we’re probably still a long way away from being able to make robots that are just like humans, but better in terms of cognition and all movements, instead, create hardware that doesn’t replace, but augments, live laborers, to help make them stronger while still being able to retain the reliable and fine-tuned expertise of those humans.

The argument for more automation in industrial settings has taken on a more pointed urgency in recent times, with the rise of the COVID-19 health pandemic: Factories have been one of the focus points for outbreaks, and the tendency has been to reduce physical contact and proximity to reduce the spread of the virus.

Exoskeletons don’t really address that aspect of COVID-19 — even if you might require less of them as a result of using exoskeletons, you still require humans to wear them, after all — but the general focus that automation has had has brought more attention to the opportunity of using them.

And in any case, even putting the pandemic to one side, we are still a long way away from cost-effective robots that completely replace humans in all situations. So, as we roll out vaccinations and develop a better understanding of how the virus operates, this still means a strong market for the exoskeleton concept, which analysts (quoted by German Bionic) predict could be worth as much as $20 billion by 2030.

In that context, it’s interesting to consider Samsung as an investor: The company itself, as one of the world’s leading consumer electronics and industrial electronics providers, is a manufacturing powerhouse in its own right. But it also makes equipment for others to use in their industrial work, both as a direct brand and through subsidiaries like Harman. It’s not clear which of these use cases interests Samsung: whether to use the Cray X in its own manufacturing and logistics work, or whether to become a strategic partner in manufacturing these for others. It could easily be both.

“We are pleased to support German Bionic in its continued development of world-leading exoskeleton technology,” says Young Sohn, corporate president and chief strategy officer for Samsung Electronics and chairman of the board, Harman, in a statement. “Exoskeleton technologies have great promise in enhancing human’s health, wellbeing and productivity. We believe that it can be a transformative technology with mass market potential.”

German Bionic describes its Cray X as a “self-learning power suit” aimed primarily at reinforcing lifting movements and to safeguard the wearer from making bad calls that could cause injuries. That could apply both to those in factories, or those in warehouses, or even sole trader mechanics working in your local garage. The company is not disclosing a list of customers, except to note that it includes, in the words of a spokesperson, “a big logistics player, industrial producers and infrastructure hubs.” One of these, the Stuttgart Airport, is highlighted on its site.

Roam debuts a robotic exoskeleton for skiers

“Previously, efficiency gains and health promotion in manual labor were often at odds with one another. German Bionic Systems managed to not only break through this paradigm, but also to make manual labor a part of the digital transformation and elegantly integrate it into the smart factory,” says Michael Motschmann, managing partner with MIG in a statement. “We see immense potential with the company and are particularly happy to be working together with a first-class team of experienced entrepreneurs and engineers.”

Exoskeletons as a concept have been around for over a decade already — MIT developed its first exoskeleton, aimed to help soldiers carrying heavy loads — back in 2007, but advancements in cloud computing, smaller processors for the hardware itself and artificial intelligence have really opened up the idea of where and how these might augment humans. In addition to industry, some of the other applications have included helping people with knee injuries (or looking to avoid knee injuries!) ski better, and for medical purposes, although the recent pandemic has put a strain on some of these use cases, leading to indefinite pauses in production.

Investors double down on tech stocks in massive DoorDash, Airbnb, C3.ai IPOs

Published December 12, 2020

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7 a.m. PT). Subscribe here.

Maybe it is a stock market bubble, or a tech-stock bubble at least. And maybe DoorDash, Airbnb and C3.ai and their bankers should have priced higher regardless to take advantage of all of the enthusiasm. It’s hard to avoid reactions like that, after DoorDash, for example, doubled its final private share price to $102 for its public debut on Wednesday — only to see the price climb to $175 at the end of the week.

Or maybe none of this will matter, because the future is way bigger and the companies are going to get there regardless. That’s what Saar Gur tells Connie Loizos this week about DoorDash, which he had invested in many years ago:

I actually started my career at Lehman Brothers on the investment banking team, and so having seen the IPO process, while I can appreciate [frustration that a] company left some money on the table based on the pricing, the tactical challenge [is that] it’s very hard to predict. You know what the market will bear once it moves to retail investors.

What’s exciting to me is [that] DoorDash is raising money because they are just getting started. I do think this could be a $500 billion-plus company. There’s so much to be excited about. As for the capital-raising event, I think it’s hard for the bankers to know where it will land with the broader market, so I’m not as negative as maybe some others.

Here’s the blow-by-blow coverage of the craziest tech IPO week in the craziest (IPO) year in decades, resuming from where I left off last Friday:

DoorDash amps its IPO range ahead of blockbuster IPO (EC)

The IPO market looks hot as Airbnb and C3.ai raise price targets (EC)

Wish wants to be the Amazon for the rest of us; will retail investors buy it?

DoorDash said to price at $102 per share, doubling its final private price

Airbnb said to price IPO between $67 and $68

While several marketplace unicorns prepare IPOs, a VC digs into the data (EC)

DoorDash, C3.ai skyrocket in public market debuts

How DoorDash and C3.ai can defend their red-hot IPO valuations (EC)

Airbnb’s first-day pop caps off a stellar week for tech IPOs (EC)

In public and private markets, cloud earnings and valuations heat up (EC)

Photo via Natasha Mascarenhas

Meet Natasha Mascarenhas, your future Startups Weekly newsletter author

The year is coming to a close for my time writing this newsletter, too. I’m going to be returning full-time to my regular job editing Extra Crunch and stuff in the back offices here at TechCrunch virtual HQ. My colleague Natasha Mascarenhas will be taking over starting next week.

You’re in good hands. In fact you may have noticed many of her articles and her weekly contributions to Equity showing up here already. Since joining us from Crunchbase News earlier this year, she’s been covering early-stage startups and the San Francisco tech scene in general, with a big focus on edtech. We have a lot more planned across Equity, Extra Crunch and more, and she’ll be able to tie it all together around her daily coverage. Stay tuned for an action-packed 2021 (and follow her on Twitter in the meantime).

How to bootstrap to $200m+ in revenue

Alex Wilhelm hears from one startup founder who has taken a bit of an alternative approach to building a SaaS company. Here’s more:

Now north of $200 million in revenue, [Nextiva] is a quiet giant and, notably, has not taken venture capital funding along its path to scale. Chatting with CEO and co-founder Tomas Gorny, I got to dig a little under the skin of the company’s history. It goes a little something like this: After moving to California in 1996 at the age of 20, Gorny eventually founded a web hosting company in 2001 after working for tech companies during the dot-com boom. The web hosting company wound up selling to another company called Endurance International in 2007, which sold as a combined entity for around a billion dollars in 2011, later going public before being taken private last month for $3 billion — you can read this TechCrunch piece that mentions Endurance from 2010 for a bit of the historical record.

Gorny founded Nextiva in 2008, focused on what it describes today as “UcaaS,” or unified communications as a service. The startup grew to about $40 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), at which point it ran into issues with a third-party system that would integrate hardware, and support and services software, which sparked a shift in its thinking. The company set out to build a platform.

Nextiva expanded horizontally, adding CRM software, analytics and other functionality to its broader suite as it scaled. And it grew efficiently; starting with money from its founding team, Gorny told TechCrunch that even if he had used someone else’s money, he would have built the company in the same manner.

So why does TechCrunch cover so many early-stage funding rounds, anyway?

Here’s Natasha’s take, from a little explainer we did this week following some Twitter conversations:

The reason I love writing about tech and do the sometimes formulaic funding-round story is because I meet people who are crazy enough to bet their entire legacy on a napkin-stage idea. That’s the story, and the surprise and the tension. The dollar sign is just the first way in.

Having raised fundings that got covered in TechCrunch, and having written many many funding round articles over the year, I agree. The funding round is often the only way to prove that you have traction, if you are trying to get more attention.

Klarna CEO and co-founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

The Klarna founding story

Swedish fintech decacorn Klarna pioneered new ways for users to buy online without credit cards over the decade, and is now battling rivals large and small across the world. How did it all happen? Steve O’Hear sits down with founder Sebastian Siemiatkowski for an exclusive in-depth interview that Extra Crunch subscribers have been eating up this week. Here’s his description:

In a wide-ranging interview, Siemiatkowski confronts criticisms head on, including that Klarna makes it too easy to get into debt, and that buy now, pay later needs to be regulated. We also discuss Klarna’s business model and the balancing act required to win over consumers and keep merchants onside.

We also learn how, under his watch and as the company began to scale, Klarna missed the next big opportunity in fintech, instead being usurped by Adyen and Stripe. Siemiatkowski also shares what’s next for the company as it ventures further into the world of retail banking after gaining a bank license in 2017.

Here’s a painfully fascinating excerpt from Siemiatkowski:

One of the drawbacks that we had at the company was that none of the three co-founders had any engineering background; we couldn’t code. We were connected to five engineers that by themselves were amazing engineers, but we had a slight misunderstanding. Their idea was that they were going to come in, build a prototype, ship it, and then leave for 37% of the equity. Our understanding was that they were going to come in, ship it, and if it started scaling they would stay with us and work for a longer period of time. This is the classic mistake that you do as a startup.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Those Facebook antitrust lawsuits

It seems that the US government has finally had enough of Facebook’s aggressive expansion and acquisition practices. After years of light regulation, the Federal Trade Commission and, separately, 49 state attorneys general are suing to break up social networking company. You can find lots of commentary about the details on TechCrunch and elsewhere.

But here’s my take for you to remember, as you watch headlines about this continue into next year: Facebook was always ready. I covered the company closely during its early years, and even back then it was talking about being the operating system for the internet, like Microsoft Windows was for desktop. The implied and whispered goal was to get as big as possible before regulations inevitably hit, like what Microsoft did. Here we are, with Facebook in a leading market position, with a massive army of lawyers who have been preparing for years. Without getting further into the lawsuits or political landscape where it’s all happening… I don’t expect a breakup. But maybe new restrictions on acquisitions or something could limit growth potential? Its big wins this decade have been from acquisitions.

One boring scenario I don’t see discussed much is simply that its products remain the phone book of the era for much of the world. Somewhat regulated this way or that way in various jurisdictions and banned outright in some — and very big and successful still.

Around TechCrunch

TC Sessions: Space 2020 launches next week

Announcing the final agenda for TC Sessions: Space 2020

Don’t miss the university research showcase at TC Sessions: Space 2020

Hear the latest from Kayhan Space and Firehawk Aerospace at TC Sessions: Space

Give the gift of Extra Crunch for 25% off

Extra Crunch Partner Perk: Find peace of mind with ‘Spotify for Mindfulness & Sleep’ app Aura

Across the week

TechCrunch

Survey: Americans think Big Tech isn’t so bad after all

Despite the pandemic, small business optimism persists

Mixtape podcast: Making technology accessible for everyone

Macron promotes European tech ecosystem in an interview with Zennström

Equity Monday: Airbnb pricing, Sequoia makes money and early-stage rounds

Extra Crunch

What to expect while fundraising in 2021

3 ways the pandemic is transforming tech spending

Why Sapphire’s Jai Das thinks the Salesforce-Slack deal could succeed

China watches and learns from the US in AR/VR competition

Is 2020 bringing more edtech rounds than ever, or does it simply feel that way?

#EquityPod

From Alex:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week, yeah? Instead of the news cycle slowing as the year races to a close, things are still as hot as ever. We have funding rounds big and small, IPOs, first-day extravaganza and more.

Luckily we had the whole crew around — Chris and Danny and Natasha and me. Here’s the rundown:

Career Karma raised $10 million, and we have thoughts and concerns.
Skyflow raised $17.5 million in an effort to try to get the Equity team to understand the nuances of different encryption types.
Calm raised $75 million, which felt pretty reasonable given reports and its fundraising history.
Squire tripled its valuation in a new round that included $45 million in equity capital along with some debt.
We also talked about the DoorDash and C3.ai IPO pops, where Airbnb priced, and who is coming next.
We rounded off with what’s up with TikTok stars investing in tech startups. Danny was not a fan.

And that’s that! If you aren’t tired, have you even been paying attention?

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.

General Catalyst’s Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce are looking for ‘obsessive’ founders

Published December 11, 2020

General Catalyst has made early bets on some of the biggest companies in tech today, including Airbnb, Lemonade and Warby Parker.

We sat down with Katherine Boyle and Peter Boyce, who co-lead the firm’s seed-stage investments, to discuss what they look for in founders, which sectors they’re most excited about and how business has changed in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This conversation is part of our broader Extra Crunch Live series, where we sit down with VCs and founders to discuss startup core competencies and get advice. We’ve spoken to folks like Aileen Lee, Mark Cuban, Roelof Botha, Charles Hudson and many, others. You can browse the full library of episodes here.

Check out our full conversation with Boyce and Boyle in the YouTube video below, or skim the text for the highlights.

Which personality traits are most important in founders

Katherine Boyle: I look for what I would call this obsessive trait, where they are learning more about the regulatory complications, where they are constantly trying to figure out how to solve a problem.

I’d say that the common theme among the founders that I support are that they have this sort of obsessive gene or personality, where they will go deeper and deeper and deeper. When we invest in these companies, it becomes very clear that they often have sort of a contrarian view of the industry. Maybe they are not industry-native. They come at it from a different perspective of problem solving. They’ve had to defend that thesis for a very, very long time in front of a variety of different customers and different people. In some ways, that makes them much stronger in terms of the way they approach problems.

Peter Boyce: I think the first would be being magnetic for talent. It ends up influencing the speed of learning and development. Really incredible founding teams that can be magnetic for talent and learning just kind of spirals out of control in really good ways over time. I really look for the speed and the sources of learning. And can folks be really intentional? Can they get the right set of advisors and teammates around them?

The second would be the personal connection to the problem space. It’s like there’s this kind of deep-seated source of energy and fuel that actually isn’t going to run out. Catherine and I’ve been lucky to work across a number of different particular thematic areas, but the thing they have in common is just this personal connection to how and why their business needs to exist. Because I just think that that fuel doesn’t run out, you know what I mean? Like, that’s renewable.

On fundraising and building trust remotely

Boyle: If you’re someone who’s comfortable presenting on Zoom, making connections on Zoom, or using Signal and using Twitter and being very online, then I 100% think that you can make investments, build community and build connections through digital worlds and digital platforms. If you really like that in-person connectivity, then you might consider staying in a tech hub, or you might consider sort of these distanced walks until things go back to normal.

What to expect while fundraising in 2021

Published December 11, 2020

Russ Heddleston
Contributor

Russ is the co-founder and CEO of DocSend. He was previously a product manager at Facebook, where he arrived via the acquisition of his startup Pursuit.com, and has held roles at Dropbox, Greystripe and Trulia. Follow him here: @rheddleston and @docsend

We’ll interact through a mix of the old and the new

The pandemic forced all of us to drastically change how we work and interact with colleagues and clients. When the pandemic subsides and vaccines are widely available, in-person meetings and gathering back at the office will definitely resume, but it’s safe to say the old ways of networking and fundraising won’t shift back 100%. Founders and VCs alike have navigated the ups and downs of remote networking and fundraising interactions and will stick to what works and what doesn’t.

Is traveling to a conference the best way for a founder to have a chance at meeting the VC who is right to support their business? Will a VC want to drive an hour through Bay Area traffic for an in-person status update meeting on their latest investment? Zoom fatigue aside, video conference calls do have some benefits — efficiency, no travel time — although not all meetings are best conducted virtually.

No matter what 2021 has in store, founders can still take proactive steps to help them succeed in their fundraising efforts.

The extent to which businesses go in-person or stick to virtual meetings could depend directly on what round of fundraising they are working toward or have completed. Businesses in the pre-seed round might stick with more Zoom meetings in order to conserve resources.

Founders in the seed round will likely split between video and in-person meetings as they are under pressure to show traction in this round, as we found in our report on seed fundraising, yet will also need to conserve resources and time. For Series A, they might have to meet less in person because they have established relationships with their investors. Series B might see more in-person meetings as their business has reached a level of complexity that is difficult to communicate via a deck or video conference.

The funding divide may widen for those outside Silicon Valley

Cloud-gaming platforms were 2020’s most overhyped trend

Published December 11, 2020

It was an unprecedented year for [insert anything under the sun], and while plenty of tech verticals saw shifts that warped business models and shifted user habits, the gaming industry experienced plenty of new ideas in 2020. However, the loudest trends don’t always take hold as predicted.

This year, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon each leaned hard into new cloud-streaming tech that shifts game processing and computing to cloud-based servers, allowing users to play graphics-intensive content on low-powered systems or play titles without dealing with lengthy downloads.

It was heralded by executives as a tectonic shift for gaming, one that would democratize access to the next generation of titles. But in taking a closer look at the products built around this tech, it’s hard to see a future where any of these subscription services succeed.

Massive year-over-year changes in gaming are rare because even if a historically unique platform launches or is unveiled, it takes time for a critical mass of developers to congregate and adopt something new — and longer for users to coalesce. As a result, even in a year where major console makers launch historically powerful hardware, massive tech giants pump cash into new cloud-streaming tech and gamers log more hours collectively than ever before, it can feel like not much has shifted.

That said, the gaming industry did push boundaries in 2020, though it’s unclear where meaningful ground was gained. The most ambitious drives were toward redesigning marketplaces in the image of video streaming networks, aiming to make a more coordinated move toward driving subscription growth and moving farther away from an industry defined for decades by one-time purchases structured around single-player storylines, one dramatically shaped by internet networking and instantaneous payments infrastructure software.

Today’s products are far from dead ends for what the broader industry does with the technology.

But shifting gamers farther away from one-off purchases wasn’t even the gaming industry’s most fundamental reconsideration of the year, a space reserved for a coordinated move by the world’s richest companies to upend the console wars with an invisible competitor. It’s perhaps unsurprising that the most full-featured plays in this arena are coming from the cloud services triumvirate, with Google, Microsoft and Amazon each making significant strides in recent months.

The driving force for this change is both the maturation of virtual desktop streaming and continued developer movement toward online cross-play between gaming platforms, a trend long resisted by legacy platform owners intent on maintaining siloed network effects that pushed gamers toward buying the same consoles that their friends owned.

The cross-play trend reached a fever pitch in recent years as entities like Epic Games’ Fortnite developed massive user bases that gave developers exceptional influence over the deals they struck with platform owners.

While a trend toward deeper cross-play planted the seeds for new corporate players in the gaming world, it has been the tech companies with the deepest pockets that have pioneered the most concerted plays to side-load a third-party candidate into the console wars.

It’s already clear to plenty of gamers that even in their nascent stages, cloud-gaming platforms aren’t meeting up to their hype and standalone efforts aren’t technologically stunning enough to make up for the apparent lack of selection in the content libraries.

Don’t miss these breakout sessions at TC Sessions: Space 2020

Published December 11, 2020

Ready to blast off and join thousands of attendees around the world at TC Sessions: Space 2020 on December 16-17? The event, focused on space technology and dedicated to helping early-stage startups succeed in this exciting yet daunting industry, features panel discussions and interviews with the top leaders, visionaries and makers on the planet.

Want to save $50? Buy your pass before Tuesday, December 15 at 11:59 p.m. (PT) to lock in the Late Registration price before rates increase.

While you’ll find many of these brilliant experts speaking from the Main Stage, don’t miss the focused programming we have lined up for the Breakout Sessions. That’s where you’ll find our partners sharing their in-depth expertise on a range of topics. Check out these breakouts waiting to drop a galaxy’s worth of knowledge on you.

Wednesday, December 16

(all times in PST)

9:00 – 10:00 a.m.

Fast Money — SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators

Learn how SMC Space Ventures, AFWERX and Space Force Accelerators work together to connect startups to government organizations and resources in the space industry.

10:00 – 11:00 a.m.
Sponsored by SP8CEVC

Introducing the launch of the World’s First Space Technology and Human Longevity focused Rolling Fund in partnership with AngelList

Fireside chat with the general partners and team from SP8CEVC covering the verticals of Space Technology and Human Longevity.

11:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Fast Money — Working with the Army to Operationalize Science for Transformational Overmatch

Learn about DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory and the xTech Program of prize competitions that accelerate innovative solutions that can help solve Army challenges.

11:30 – 12:30 p.m.

Pitch Feedback Session

Join us for a pitch feedback session open to all startups exhibiting at TC Sessions: Space 2020 moderated by TechCrunch staff.

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.
Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation

University Showcase — Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part One)

Technologies to Go Boldly in Space — For the past half century, space exploration and technology has been earth-centric. We’ve studied the earth, orbited the earth and sent images of distant places back to earth. In the coming decade, we’ll embark on a new commitment: We’re going to space to stay. We’re committing to space commerce, space habitation and space exploration in order to not just stay in space, but to extend our human footprint into this solar system. To be successful, we need bold people and new technology to build and deploy the next generation of space capabilities. We need to capture these space opportunities, avoid potential threats and deliver on the promise of a multi-planet human race. This session showcases our partners USC and MIT, as they provide insight into their space programs. They are joined by university partners UCLA, ASU and Caltech, showcasing a range of emerging space technologies. Working with the Aerospace Corporation, these emerging capabilities can be evaluated and integrated into government space-faring missions for communicating, navigating and exploring in space with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

Thursday, December 17

9:00 – 9:30 a.m.

Cislunar Space: Building a Self-Sustaining Lunar Economy

We are standing on the threshold of a post-scarcity human future. Cislunar space, the area between the Earth and the moon, holds the keys to a tremendous wealth of opportunities.

9:30 – 10:00 a.m.

Fast Money — Advancing Space Technology with NASA SBIR

Learn about the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and the Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs powered by NASA.

10:00 – 10:30 a.m.

Fast Money — NAVWAR SBIR/STTR Primer: The SBIR/STTR is a robust program designed to help small businesses address government needs while promoting commercialization. This session is dedicated to providing a primer on the program with tips on getting involved and getting engaged with the Naval Information Warfare Systems Command (NAVWAR).

10:30 – 11:00 a.m.

Fast Money — Introduction to In-Q-Tel’s investing activities in the commercial space sector: In-Q-Tel is a strategic investment firm that works with the national security community of the United States. For 20 years, In-Q-Tel has served one mission: to deliver the most sophisticated strategic technical knowledge and capabilities to the U.S. government and its allies through its unique investment model. Over the past decade, In-Q-Tel has been one of the most active investors in the commercial space sector, with a broad investment thesis that touches many aspects of the sector. This session will provide an overview of In-Q-Tel as a whole, as well as a discussion of the firm’s activities in the commercial space sector.

11:00 – 11:30 a.m.

Fast Money — Enabling a dual-use business model with Defense Innovation Unit (DIU)

Learn how you can take a part of DIU’s development of on-demand access to space, persistent satellite capabilities and broadband space data transfer

11:30 – 12:30 p.m.

Starburst x TechCrunch — Pitch Me to the Moon: Starburst Aerospace and TechCrunch are teaming up to launch a pitch competition like no other – Pitch Me to the Moon. Think “Startup Battlefield,” but for space. Ten promising early-stage space startups (selected by Starburst) will have an opportunity to present their innovations live to a panel of high-profile judges from across the industry.

1:00 – 1:50 p.m.
Sponsored by The Aerospace Corporation

University Showcase — Boldly Innovating in Space, for Space (Part Two)

Bold Missions — For the past half century, space exploration and technology has been earth-centric. We’ve studied the earth, orbited the earth and sent images of distant places back to earth. In the coming decade, we’ll embark on a new commitment: We’re going to space to stay. We’re committing to space commerce, space habitation and space exploration in order to not just stay in space, but to extend our human footprint into this solar system. To be successful, we need bold people and new technology to build and deploy the next generation of space capabilities. We need to capture these space opportunities, avoid potential threats and deliver on the promise of a multi-planet human race. This session showcases our partners USC and MIT, as they provide insight into their space programs. They are joined by university partners UCLA, ASU and Caltech, showcasing a range of emerging space technologies. Working with the Aerospace Corporation, these emerging capabilities can be evaluated and integrated into government space-faring missions for communicating, navigating, and exploring in space with NASA, NOAA and the Air Force.

Whew, talk about a great lineup. You might say it’s out-of-this-world — which raises the question: Can you hear a rimshot in space? Don’t forget to peruse the rest of our programming in the event agenda and start planning your schedule now.

Pro Tip: Say goodbye to FOMO. Our virtual platform makes it easy to toggle between the Main Stage and Breakout Sessions. Plus, you’ll have access to video on demand, so you won’t miss a beat (excluding the Expo Ticket).

Remember, late registration savings end on Tuesday, December 15 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). We also offer discount passes for groups, students and government, military and nonprofit employees. Buy the pass that’s right for you today!

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.