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Is the Great 2020 Tech Rally slowing?

Published October 30, 2020

Yesterday’s earnings deluge made plain that tech shares are not rocketing higher as 2020 comes to a close. Indeed, in pre-market trading this morning, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon are all down.

Alphabet is the only member of the Big Five that is worth more today than yesterday. Strong advertising and cloud results helped the search giant post a return-to-form quarter. But in most other reports there were signs of weakness or underperformance compared to expectations that could undermine the relentlessly bullish attitude tech shares have enjoyed for several months.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

The tailwinds that lifted much of tech this year remain. Every CEO I speak to still thinks that the COVID-19 bump to digital services demand has room to run, and that the digital transformation’s acceleration that has been a regular point of optimism for VCs, founders and public company leaders, will continue.

But that doesn’t mean all tech companies will benefit or post outsize results. Those facts don’t imply that pandemic-induced friction won’t add up.

It’s not only the biggest companies that are treading water. We’re seeing valuations pause in tech’s hottest category — SaaS and cloud — despite continued growth in its constituent companies. The combined sentiment-and-share change could dampen enthusiasm for startup shares, perhaps undercutting some of the hype and FOMO that we keep hearing is driving private valuations higher.

Are we seeing a change in tech’s temperature while the weather changes? Let’s take a look.

Good news, bad news

Starting with the biggest tech companies, Alphabet’s results were pretty good. The company’s YouTube and cloud segments outperformed expectations, helping the company best expectations.

From there, things get choppier. Apple beat expectations, but its shares fell after investors were less than impressed with its aggregate results. Microsoft posted good calendar Q3 earnings, including strong Azure performance, but its guidance left investors underwhelmed and its shares also fell. Facebook beat expectations in the quarter, but rising costs seemed to dampen investor sentiment. It lost a little ground after earnings. Amazon’s Q3 was hot, but its Q4 should reduce operating income due to COVID-19 costs. It also lost ground after reporting.

From that malaise we turn to the SaaS and cloud world. Redpoint’s Jamin Ball is doing his usual roundups, one of which we’re borrowing this morning. Here’s his digest of SaaS and cloud earnings thus far:

Takeaways? Every SaaS and cloud company crushed Q3, but Q4 is looking a bit more dicey. Beats look slim, some companies are declining to project and aside from an outlier or two, the numbers look slimmer overall.

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Smartphone shipments dip in China for Q3, led by Huawei decline

Published October 30, 2020

China was the first major global smartphone market to rebound from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Stringent lockdown measures were able to help the country recover from the virus relatively quickly during the first wave, as sales started to return well ahead of other areas.

In Q3, however, things have begun to decline again. New numbers from Canalys point to an 8% drop between quarters — and a 15% drop year-over-year. The firm chalks much of the slowdown to longtime market leader Huawei’s ongoing issues with the U.S. government. The problems had a kind of cascading effect that served to impact the number two companies, Vivo and Oppo.

Image Credits: Canalys

“Huawei was forced to restrict its smartphone shipments following the August 17 US sanctions which caused a void in channels in Q3 that its peers were not equipped to fill. Huawei is facing its most serious challenge since taking the lead in 2016,” analyst Mo Jia said in a release. “If the position of the US administration does not change, Huawei will attempt to pivot its business strategy, to focus on building the [Harmony] OS and software ecosystem, as the Chinese government is eager to nurture home-grown alternatives to global platforms.”

Huawei dropped 18% in Mainland China, year-over-year. Vivo and Oppo posted similar declines at 13% and 18%, respectively. Xiaomi was able to make up ground at third place, gaining 19% y-o-y per the figures. Apple, meanwhile, remained relatively steady, in spite of the delated launch of the iPhone 12. Huawei’s continued struggles could provide a vacuum for the competition to fill.

Analyst Nicole Peng notes that the arrival of the 5G handset put the U.S. company in a strong position, looking forward: “iPhone 12 series will be a game changer for Apple in Mainland China. As most smartphones in China are now 5G-capable, Apple is closing a critical gap, and pent-up demand for its new 5G-enabled family will be strong.”

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Illinois is taking a data-driven approach to its mask-wearing ad campaign

Published October 30, 2020

Here’s an example of ad targeting that’s actually good for public health: In a campaign encouraging people to wear masks, the Illinois state government has been focusing its digital ad dollars on the counties with the highest COVID risk.

To achieve this, the government’s been working with Civis Analytics, the data science company founded by Dan Wagner, who was previously chief analytics officer for Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign. The campaign kicked off in August, but the state is now sharing more details about its work, including a map that shows the week-by-week risk assessment that it used for targeting.

Crystal Son, Civis’ director of healthcare analytics, explained that every week, her team pulls together the latest county-level COVID data for Governor J.B. Pritzker’s team, who then use it to determine where ad dollars for the It Only Works If You Wear It campaign should be spent.

Cameron Mock, chief of staff at the Governor’s Office of Management and Budget, said in a statement that the government is using “a one-of-a-kind formula to concentrate media dollars in the areas with the most risk.”

Mock continued, “The risk-based formula uses trends of cases and mobility on the county level to designate higher, medium and lower-risk counties. It then uses a pro rata share to dedicate the most dollars to the highest-risk areas.”

All In Illinois

Image Credits: State of Illinois

This formula divides counties into five tiers, with Tier 1 being the highest risk and Tier 5 being the lowest. Tiers 4 and 5 still receive a baseline level of ad spend, but Tier 3 counties see more spending and Tiers 1 and 2 receive the maximum amount.

While the mask campaign isn’t limited to online advertising, the formula is only being used on the digital side because it’s more difficult to adjust funding for more traditional ad channels on a week-by-week basis.

“Each county has unique and changing circumstances due to the virus, so we designed this campaign to respond to the on-the-ground situation in all 102 counties in Illinois,” said Alex Hanns, deputy press secretary to Governor Pritzker, in a statement. “As an area’s risk increases, so too will its concentration of public health messaging. As the pandemic continues and another wave of coronavirus looms, the state of Illinois will continue to listen to scientists and follow the data to keep our residents safe.”

Son said she’s not aware of any other campaign responding to COVID-19 that uses a similar model to prioritize spending in the highest-risk geographies. Is it working? While this data doesn’t show the effects of a specific campaign, according to Carnegie Mellon University, 89% of Illinois residents wear masks — currently the 15th-highest usage rate in the U.S.

In the future, Son said she’s hopeful that we’ll see other organizations adopt “a much more customized communications approach” for healthcare.

“We still have the habit in healthcare of treating groups of people as if they are homogenous, as if they all act the same and think the same,” she said. “There are widespread applications beyond mask-wearing for more tailored approaches.”

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PORTL Hologram raises $3M to put a hologram machine in every home

Published October 30, 2020

What does a hologram-obsessed entrepreneur do for a second act after setting up a virtual Ronald Reagan in the Reagan Memorial Library, or beaming Jimmy Kimmel all the way from Hollywood to the Country Music Awards in Nashville?

If that entrepreneur is David Nussbaum, the founder of PORTL Hologram, the next logical step is to build a machine that can bring the joy of hologram-based communication to the masses.

That’s the goal thanks to a new $3 million round that Nussbaum’s company raised from famed venture investor Tim Draper, former Electronic Arts executive Doug Barry and longtime awards-show producer Joe Lewis.

Barry is not only backing the company, he’s also coming on board as its first chief operating officer.

Much of this interest can be traced back to the hologram performance given posthumously by Tupac Shakur back at Coachella about eight years ago.

Nussbaum turned the excitement generated by that event into a business. He bought the patents that powered Tupac’s beyond-the-grave performance, and used the technology to beam Julian Assange out of the Ecuadoran embassy he had been holed up in during his years in London and making dead stars live (and tour) again.

Those visual feats were basically just an updated version of the Pepper’s Ghost technique that stage illusionists and moviemakers have been using since it was invented by John Pepper in the 19th century.

The PORTL is a significant upgrade, according to Nussbaum.

The projector can transmit images any time of the day or night, and using PORTL’s capture studio-in-a-box means that anyone with $60,000 to spend and a white background can beam themselves into any portal anywhere in the world.

The company has sold a hundred devices and already delivered several dozen to shopping malls, airports and movie theater lobbies. “We’ve manufactured and delivered several dozen,” Nussbaum said.

Part of the selling point, beyond just the gimmick of the hologram’s next-level verisimilitude, is its interactivity. Through the studio rig and PORTL hardware, users can hear what people standing around the PORTL are saying and then respond.

For its next trick, PORTL is looking to build a miniaturized version of its system that would be about the size of a desktop computer and could be used to both record and distribute the holograms to anyone with a PORTL device.

“The minis will have all of the features to capture your content and rotoscope you out of our background and have the studio effects that is important in displaying your realistic volumetric like effect and they will beam you to any other device,” Nussbaum said.

To build out the business, the PORTL minis will have more than just communications capabilities, but recorded entertainment as well, Nussbaum said.

“The minis will be bundled with content like Peloton and Mirror bundled with very specific types of content. We are in conversations with a number of extremely well-known content creators where we would bundle a portal but will also have dedicated and exclusive content… [and] bundle that for $39 to $49 per month.”

It’s a vision that Nussbaum admits is far more expansive than his intentions — and the person he has to thank for the more ambitious vision of the business is none other than Draper.

“When I started this I thought it was going to be a novelty company,” he said. “When the pandemic hit he knew we needed to do much more than that.”

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PUBG Mobile to terminate access for users in India on October 30 following ban order

Published October 29, 2020

PUBG Mobile, the sleeper hit mobile game, will terminate all service and access for users in India on October 30, two months after New Delhi banned the game in the world’s second largest internet market over cybersecurity concerns.

India on September 2 banned PUBG Mobile Nordic Map: Livik and PUBG Mobile Lite, along with more than 100 apps with links to China. The ban came after India banned TikTok and dozens of other popular Chinese apps in late June.

These apps were “prejudicial to sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of state and public order,” the country’s IT Ministry said on both the instances.

But unlike other affected apps that became unavailable within days — if not hours — PUBG Mobile apps remained accessible in the country for users who already had them installed on their phones, tablets and PCs. In fact, according to one popular mobile insight firm, PUBG Mobile had retained more than 90% of its monthly active users in the country, a mobile-first market where 99% of smartphones run Android, in the weeks following New Delhi’s order.

(Following the ban, Google and Apple pulled PUBG Mobile apps from their app stores in India. But soon enough, guides on how to work around the ban and obtain and install the apps became popular on several forums.)

PUBG Mobile had about 50 million monthly active users in India, tens of millions of users ahead of Call of Duty: Mobile and Fortnite and any other mobile game in the country.

“PUBG Mobile kickstarted an entire ecosystem — from esports organisations to teams and even a cottage industry of streamers that made the most of its spectator sport-friendly gameplay,” said Rishi Alwani, a long-time analyst of Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet The Mako Reactor.

“Granted Tencent did a lot of the heavy lifting in building it out, but the game’s quality itself was heads and shoulders above what most Indians were used to on smartphones. And that’s a reason many kept coming back, some eventually monetising as well,” he added.

South Korea-headquartered PUBG Mobile attempted to assuage New Delhi’s concern by cutting ties with Tencent, the game’s publishing and distribution partner in India.

On Thursday, PUBG Mobile said, “protecting user data has always been a top priority and we have always complied with applicable data protection laws and regulations in India. All users’ gameplay information is processed in a transparent manner as disclosed in our privacy policy.”

“We deeply regret this outcome, and sincerely thank you for your support and love for PUBG Mobile in India,” it added.

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Precursor Ventures promotes Sydney Thomas, its first hire, to principal

Published October 29, 2020

In 2019, only one Black woman was named partner in venture capital, according to All Raise, a nonprofit focused on accelerating female founders and investors. The data has shown, shows, and will continue to show how the tech industry fails to invest in underrepresented women of color.

Thus, hiring the next generation of founders and decision-makers is key (and promoting them is, too).

Sydney Thomas, who was the first hire at Precursor Ventures, a seed and early-stage focused fund led by Charles Hudson, has been promoted from senior associate to principal. Thomas is joined by Hudson, analyst Ayanna Kerrison and entrepreneur-in-residence Chapman Snowden, to make up Precursor.

After graduating from the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in 2016, Thomas joined Precursor to do what Hudson says most applicants wouldn’t: the operational work of bringing a solo-GP fund, then with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place.

“The fund was basically running out of my inbox,” Hudson said. “She really helped us get to a much better place operationally.” Thomas started off as an intern, toggling time between working for a Precursor portfolio company and the fund itself, and eventually came on as a senior associate.

As a principal, Thomas will now have more discretion to do deals and make decisions for the firm. “The goal was always for her to get us to a place operationally where she wasn’t as critical,” Hudson notes. Thomas did not respond to request for comment.

Roles within venture have grown increasingly, and often intentionally, vague over time. At any given fund, there can be principals, investors, partners, investing principal partners and senior associate investors. Depending on the fund, each person could just go under the guise of “partner” and call it a day. But in action, every member on a venture team has a varying range of investment autonomy, decision-making authority and weight at the firm.

While the vagueness can balance out egos within a firm, it can often leave founders confused over who has the ability to give them money.

Hudson says he takes role differentiation seriously, and (patiently) wants to build Precursor into a place that helps people in venture get their first start. With Thomas’s promotion, she has the ability to green light investments without the mass overhead of what it means to be a partner.

“I think the only reason to make someone a principal is if you think that they could develop into a partner,” he said.

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Tech optimism…in this economy?

Published October 29, 2020

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

A few notes before we get into this. One, we have a bonus episode coming this Saturday focused on this week’s earnings reports. And, second, we did not record video this week. So, if you like watching the show on YouTube, this is not the week for that!

Right, here’s what Natasha, Danny and your humble servant got into this week:

We capped off with the latest from r2c, and then got the hell off the mics. Catch you all Saturday, and then back to regular programming on Monday morning.

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

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Two weeks left to score early-bird savings at TC Sessions: Space 2020

Published October 29, 2020

NASA just made history by landing a spacecraft on an asteroid. If that kind of technical achievement carbonates your glass of Tang, join us on December 16-17 for TC Sessions: Space 2020, an event dedicated to early-stage space startups.

We’ve launched early-bird pricing, and $125 buys you access to all live sessions, plus video on demand. Don’t procrastinate. Buy your pass now before the early-bird reenters Earth’s atmosphere (and prices go up) on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

More ways to save: Go further together with early-bird group tickets ($100) — bring four team members and get the fifth one free. We also offer discount passes for students ($50) and government, military and nonprofits ($95). Looking for out-of-this-world exposure? An Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package ($360) includes four tickets, digital exhibition space, a pitch session to attendees and the ability to generate leads. Bonus savings: Extra Crunch subscribers get a 20% discount.

TC Sessions: Space is an unrivaled opportunity to learn from, connect and network with boundary-pushing founders, investors and officials from NASA, the Aerospace Corporation, the U.S. Air Force and leading space companies spanning public, private and defense sectors.

We’ve packed the conference with outstanding presentations, fireside chats and interviews. Plus, you’ll find breakout sessions on specialized topics, audience Q&As with Main Stage speakers and the expo area for partners and early-stage startups.

Here’s a taste of the topics, but keep an eye on the agenda, because we’ll add more speakers and sessions in the coming weeks.

Asteroid Rocks and Moon Landings

Lisa Callahan, vice president/general manager of commercial civil space at Lockheed Martin Space, discusses all aspects of scientific and civil exploration of the solar system — from robots scooping rockets from the surface of galaxy-traveling asteroids, to preparing for the return of humans to the surface of the moon.

Sourcing Tech for Securing Space

Lt. General Thompson is responsible for fostering an ecosystem of non-traditional space startups and the future of Space Force acquisitions, all to the end goal of protecting the global commons of space. He’ll discuss what the U.S. looks for in startup partnerships and emerging tech, and how it works with these young companies.

Bridging Today and Tomorrow’s Tech

Corporate VC funds are a key source of investment for space startups, in part because they often involve partnerships that help generate revenue, and because they understand the timelines involved. SpaceFund’s Meagan Crawford and Lockheed Martin Ventures’ J. Christopher Moran discuss how these funds fit in with more standard venture to power the ecosystem.

TC Sessions: Space 2020 takes flight on December 16-17, but we’re starting our early-bird countdown right now. Great savings disappear in two weeks on November 13 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your early-bird passes today and celebrate your savvy shopping with a tall glass of Tang.

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

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Developer productivity tools startup Raycast raises $2.7M from Accel

Published October 29, 2020

Workplace SaaS tools for teams have seen rocket ship growth in the past several years, and that adoption has given rise to a host of software tools geared toward improving individual productivity. Many of the startups behind these tools see building a cult following among individual users as the best way to set themselves up for later enterprise-wide success.

Raycast is a developer-focused productivity tool that aims to be the quickest way to get common tasks done. Today, it’s launching into public beta and sharing with TechCrunch that the team has raised new funding from Accel months after graduating from Y Combinator.

The company has closed a $2.7 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from YC, Jeff Morris Jr.’s Chapter One fund, as well as angel investors Charlie Cheever, Calvin French-Owen and Manik Gupta .

The desktop software takes a note from peers like Superhuman and Command E, allowing users to quickly pull up and modify data with keyboard shortcuts. Users can easily create and re-modify issues in Jira, merge pull requests in GitHub and find documents. The software is very much a developer-focused version of Apple’s Spotlight search that aims to help software engineers navigate with a single tool all the parts of their job that aren’t development work.

Image via Raycast.

Like plenty of workplace tools startups, one of the keys for Raycast is building out a network of extensions that can encompass a user’s workflow. For now, the software supports integrations from Asana, Jira, Zoom, Linear, G Suite, Calendar, GitHub and Reminders, alongside core functionality that can help manage system settings and a calculator that can handle complex math problems. As the startup launches out of public beta, they’re looking to double down on extensions and are rolling out a developer program for early access to their API.

The Mac-only software is free while in public beta, but the company does plan on charging a monthly subscription for the service eventually, though they aren’t quite ready to talk about pricing yet.

Raycast’s team is interested in appealing to individual users for now, but might eventually expand to becoming a teams-level enterprise product that could help onboard new employees faster by quickly orienting them with their office’s software suite, but that’s all a bit down the road, the team says.

“We’re staying focused on single-player mode for a while,” CEO Thomas Paul Mann tells TechCrunch.

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India’s WareIQ raises $1.65M for its Amazon-like delivery platform for sellers

Published October 29, 2020

Despite e-commerce firms Amazon and Walmart and others pouring billions of dollars into India, offline retail still commands more than 95% of all sales in the world’s second largest internet market.

The giants have acknowledged the strong hold neighborhood stores (mom and pop shops) have in the country, and in recent quarters scrambled for ways to work with them. Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, has made the dynamics more interesting in the past year as he works to help these neighborhood stores sell online.

But the market opportunity is still too large, and there are many aspects of the old retail business that could use some tech. That’s the bet WareIQ, a Bangalore-headquartered, Y Combinator-backed startup is making. And it has just raised a $1.65 million seed financing round from YC, FundersClub, Pioneer Fund, Soma Capital, Emles Venture Advisors and founders of Flexport.

The one-year-old startup operates a platform to leverage the warehouses across the country. It has built a management system for these warehouses, most of which largely engage in offline business-to-business commerce and have had little to no prior e-commerce exposure.

“We connect these warehouses across India to our platform and utilize their infrastructure for e-commerce order processing,” said Harsh Vaidya, co-founder and chief executive of WareIQ, in an interview with TechCrunch. The company offers this as a service to retail businesses.

Who are these businesses? Third-party sellers (some of whom sell to Amazon and Flipkart and use WareIQ to speed up their delivery), e-commerce firms, social commerce platforms, as well as neighborhood stores and social media influencers.

Any online store, for instance, can send its products to WareIQ, which has integrations with several popular e-commerce platforms and marketplaces. It works with courier partners to move items from one warehouse to another to offer the fastest delivery, explained Vaidya.

The infrastructure stitched together by WareIQ also enables an online seller to set up their own store and engage with customers directly, thereby saving fees they would have paid to Amazon and other established e-commerce players.

“The sellers were not able do this on their own before because it required them to talk directly to warehousing companies that maintain their own rigid contracts, and high-security deposits, and they still needed to work with multiple technology providers to complete the tech-stack,” he said. WareIQ also offers these sellers last-mile delivery, cash collection and fraud detection among several other services.

“In a way, we are building an open-source Amazon fulfilment service, where any seller can send their goods to any of our warehouses and we fulfil their Amazon orders, Myntra orders, Flipkart orders or their own website orders. We also comply with the standard of these individual marketplaces, so our sellers get a Prime tag on Amazon,” he said.

WareIQ is free for anyone to sign up with any charge and it takes a cut by the volume of orders it processes. The startup today works with more than 40 fulfilment centres and plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its network to tier 2 and tier 3 cities, he said. It’s also hiring for a number of tech roles.

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