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3 views on the future of geographic-focused funds

Published September 4, 2020

For many investors, the coronavirus has effectively taken geography out of the equation when it comes to vetting new opportunities.

While this dynamic opens up startups to more investment opportunities, venture capital firms that focus on a specific region are in a thornier spot. The competitive advantage they once had when raising — the notion that they’re focused on an area no one else is — is potentially threatened.

Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and Alex Wilhelm of the TechCrunch Equity crew discussed the future of geographic-focused funds given the uptick of remote investing:

  • Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused
  • Alex: Geo-focused venture funds will be weakened, but won’t die
  • Danny: Geo-focused venture funds are dead (and should never have existed)

Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused

Since 2014, Steve Case and his team have made an annual bus trip across the country to meet startups in emerging startup hubs. Five days, five cities and at least $500,000 of investment dollars given to startups. Case would even offer to fly out promising and hard-to-reach startups to have them join the trip.

The Rise of the Rest fund, with more than $300 million in assets under management, has invested in over 130 startups across 70 cities, including Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.

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Palantir’s concentrated governance is great for execs, but what about shareholders?

Published September 4, 2020

A few days ago I wrote down a few notes making a bullish case for Palantir, searching to find good news amidst the company’s huge historical deficits.

Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public markets, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the best possible shot during its impending debut.

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

And we finally did get a new S-1/A filing, a document that our own Danny Crichton quickly parsed and covered. What he found was a set of amendments that seem to increase the chance that three Palantir insiders will control more than 50% of the company’s voting power forever, possibly making it a controlled company, which would loose the firm from select regulatory requirements.

Danny dryly noted that “given the diminished voting power of employee and investor shares, it is possible that these voting provisions will negatively impact the final price of those shares.” That’s being polite.

Mulling this over this morning, I kept thinking about Snap, which sold stock in its IPO that gave new shareholders no votes at all, and Facebook, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg as his personal fiefdom. The two are not alone in this matter. There are a number of other public tech companies that provide certain groups of pre-IPO shareholders more votes than others on a per-share basis, though perhaps to a smaller degree than what Facebook has managed.

It feels like many startups (and former startups) have decided over time that having material shareholder input is a bad idea. That, in effect, they must run companies as not merely monarchies, but unquestioned ones, to boot.

I am not entirely convinced that this is the best way to create long-term shareholder wealth.

If you are on the other side of this particular fence, I understand. After all, Facebook is a global juggernaut and Snap has finally managed to eke out stock-market gains to bring its value back around to where it was when it went public. (A three-year journey.)

But those arguments are only so good. You could easily argue that the two companies could have done much more with less self-sabotage (Facebook) and a bit more spend discipline (Snap).

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Mustard raises $1.7M to improve athletic mechanics with AI

Published September 4, 2020

Athletic coaching is a massive, multi-billion-dollar industry. No surprise, really, given the massive revenue some top athletes are able to generate. Mustard is working to supplant — or at least augment — some of that pricey coaching with the launch of a new mobile app designed to analyze an athlete’s mechanics and offer corrective tips to help them improve.

The company was co-founded by Tom House, a former reliever whose coaching career has earned him the reputation as one of the “father[s] of modern pitching mechanics.”

“Too many kids miss out on the power of play and the many physical and mental benefits of sports—studies show that 70% of kids stop playing sports by the age of 13 due to cost and lack of access to quality coaching. Mustard offers every kid access to the same coaching programs and extensive biomechanical analysis used by the best athletes in the world, and the same personalized training protocols that I use with the Hall of Famers I see in person,” House says in a release tied to the news. “We want to make elite personalized coaching accessible to all.”

Mustard announced this week that it has raised $1.7 million to improve its tool, led by Shasta Ventures and Intersect VC, along with a number of angel investors, including David Novak and Mike Dixon, and all-star athletes Nolan Ryan and Drew Brees. Ryan, in fact, has become one of the main faces of the company, gracing its home page, along with a color scheme that appears inspired by his days with the Astros.

The name isn’t great. It’s a reference to the phrase “put some mustard on it” — which refers to the act of adding a bit of an edge to a throw.

The app is opening up for a limited, free public beta, focused solely on baseball to start. “The product will be entirely free at first,” CEO Rocky Collis tells TechCrunch. “Over time, we will add premium features for a low monthly subscription. Even when premium features are added, we plan to continue to offer a free version of the app that offers tremendous value to users.”

The system relies on the smartphone’s camera and then uses proprietary AI algorithms to monitor the player’s motion and approximate human athletic coaching. For the baseball side of things, the company has employed engineers from Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM). Future sports will be added at some point down the road.

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Qualcomm-powered Chinese XR startup Nreal raises $40 million

Published September 4, 2020

Nreal, one of the most-watched mixed reality startups in China, just secured $40 million from a group of high-profile investors in a Series B round that could potentially bring more adoption to its portable augmented headsets.

Kuaishou, the archrival to TikTok’s Chinese version Douyin, led the round, marking yet another video platform to establish links with Nreal, following existing investor iQiyi, China’s own Netflix. Like other major video streaming sites around the world, Kuaishou and iQiyi have dabbled in making augmented reality content, and securing a hardware partner will no doubt be instrumental to their early experiments.

Other backers in the round with plentiful industry resources include GP Capital, which counts state-owned financial holding group Shanghai International Group and major Chinese movie studio Hengdian Group as investors; CCEIF Fund, set up by state-owned telecom equipment maker China Electronics Corporation and state-backed investment bank China International Capital Corporation; GL Ventures, the early-stage fund set up by prominent private equity firm Hillhouse Capital; and Sequoia Capital China.

In early 2019, Nreal brought onboard Xiaomi founder’s venture fund Shunwei Capital for its $15 million Series A funding. As I wrote at the time, AR, VR, MR, XR — whichever marketing coinage you prefer — will certainly be a key piece in Xiaomi’s Internet of Things empire. It’s not hard to see the phone titan sourcing smart glasses from Nreal down the road.

The other key partner of Nreal, a three-year-old company, is Qualcomm . The chipmaker has played an active part in China’s 5G rollout, powering major Chinese phone makers’ next-gen handsets. It supplies Nreal with its Snapdragon processors, allowing the startup’s lightweight mixed reality glasses to easily plug into an Android phone.

“Its closer partnership with Qualcomm will allow it to access Qualcomm’s network of customers, including telecoms companies,” Seewan Toong, an industry consultant on AR and VR, told TechCrunch.

Indeed, the mixed reality developer has already signed a deal with Japanese telco KDDI and in Korea, it’s working with LG’s cellular carrier LG Uplus Corp.

The latest round brings Nreal’s total raise to more than $70 million and will accelerate mass adoption of its mixed reality technology in the 5G era, the company said.

It remains to be seen how Nreal will live up to its promise, secure users at scale and move beyond being a mere poster child for tech giants’ mixed reality ambitions. So far its deals with big telcos are in a way reminiscent of that of Magic Leap, which has been in a legal spat with Nreal, though the Chinese company appears to burn through less cash so far. The troubled American company is currently pivoting to relying on enterprise customers after failing to crack the consumer market.

“Nreal is patient and not in a rush to show they can start selling high volume. It’s trying to prove that there’s a user scenario for its technology,” said Toong.

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Teemyco creates virtual offices so you can grab a room and talk with colleagues

Published September 4, 2020

Meet Teemyco, a Stockholm-based startup that wants to reproduce office interactions in a virtual environment. The company wants to foster spontaneous interactions and casual collaboration with a room-based interface. Each employee moves from one room to another just like in a physical office.

If you’re no longer working from an office, chances are you rely heavily on email, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Meet or a combination of all those tools. While those tools work perfectly fine for what they’re designed to achieve, many companies feel like important information is getting lost. It’s harder to bump into a colleague next to the coffee machine and ask a quick question.

With Teemyco, each person is working in a virtual room. By default, you work in the lobby. You can consider it as an open space with multiple desks. When you want to get together for a planned or unplanned meeting, you can pull someone from the lobby and create another room.

In that room, you can start an audio call or a video call. You can see your colleagues in the corner of your screen and stay focused on a document at the same time, or you can put a video call in full screen. When someone is done, they can leave the room.

Those interactions are less formal than what you get with video-conferencing services. You don’t have to send a link to a Zoom room, you don’t have to send a calendar invite. People hop in and hop out.

If you’re working on something important, you can move to a focus room so that you don’t get interrupted every 15 minutes. Other people won’t be able to pull you from your virtual desk. If you have to run some errands, you can also put yourself in a room that says you’re not there — those rooms can act as a status.

Teemyco also helps you work next to your favorite colleague. You can create a room and use a walkie-talkie feature for quick interactions throughout the day. And, of course, you can create a break room for non-work-related discussions.

Teemyco is still a young company. The product is only available in beta. The company raised a $1 million seed round led by Luminar Ventures with Antler, Gazella and various business angels also participating.

It’s also not going to work for all companies. I’m not sure it scales well for a company with hundreds of employees, for instance. Introverts might not be fans of real-time communication either.

If you’re a remote-first company, you know that it’s important to have a culture of transparency. And written information is always more transparent than video conferences.

And yet, depending on your corporate culture, something like Teemyco can be useful. It can augment information stored in shared documents and internal communication tools.

It’s an interesting product that proves that the inevitable debate between physical offices and remote teams is not a binary problem. There is some granularity, and companies can adjust the knob depending on specific needs.

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Cyber threat startup Cygilant hit by ransomware

Published September 3, 2020

Cygilant, a threat detection cybersecurity company, has confirmed a ransomware attack.

Christina Lattuca, Cygilant’s chief financial officer, said in a statement that the company was “aware of a ransomware attack impacting a portion of Cygilant’s technology environment.”

“Our Cyber Defense and Response Center team took immediate and decisive action to stop the progression of the attack. We are working closely with third-party forensic investigators and law enforcement to understand the full nature and impact of the attack. Cygilant is committed to the ongoing security of our network and to continuously strengthening all aspects of our security program,” the statement said.

Cygilant is believed to be the latest victim of NetWalker, a ransomware-as-a-service group, which lets threat groups rent access to its infrastructure to launch their own attacks, according to Brett Callow, a ransomware expert and threat analyst at security firm Emsisoft .

The file-encrypting malware itself not only scrambles a victim’s files but also exfiltrates the data to the hacker’s servers. The hackers typically threaten to publish the victim’s files if the ransom isn’t paid.

A site on the dark web associated with the NetWalker ransomware group posted screenshots of internal network files and directories believed to be associated with Cygilant.

Cygilant did not say if it paid the ransom. But at the time of writing, the dark web listing with Cygilant’s data had disappeared.

“Groups permanently delist companies when they’ve paid or, in some cases, temporarily delist them once they’ve agreed to come to the negotiating table,” said Callow. “NetWalker has temporarily delisted pending negotiations in at least one other case.”

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Nintendo rips the seal off the next generation of nostalgia, but fans fret

Published September 3, 2020

It has always been considered a matter of if, and not when, Nintendo would begin capitalizing in earnest on content from beyond the SNES generation. The company is finally showing its intent to do so today — but with an uneven approach that leaves some fans worried about its intentions for other all-time gaming classics from the 64-bit era and beyond.

In a celebratory video of 35 years of Super Mario Bros. history, Nintendo announced a litter of new and old games starring its iconic plumber protagonist.

Some of its announcements were very Nintendo, in a good way. Making a Mario Kart that, like the Labo DIY projects, bridges the gap between reality and game is a brilliant idea and very unlike what others in console gaming are doing. And the retro-style “Game & Watch” handheld pre-loaded with Super Mario Bros. and the Lost Levels will no doubt be a popular gift this holiday season.

Nintendo also demonstrated a willingness to experiment with its oldest and in some ways most conservative franchise with Super Mario Bros. 35, a sort of battle royale version of the original game where 35 players compete on the same level, sending hazards to one another and attempting to finish with a variety of win conditions. A logical sequel to Tetris 99, which applied a similar transformation to everyone’s favorite block-based puzzler, and potentially a lot of fun.

But when it came to bringing fan favorites from the N64 and GameCube to the Switch, the company left much to be desired.

Nintendo’s approach to resurrecting its back catalog has been haphazard: Giving away NES and SNES games for free to Nintendo Online subscribers is a nice bonus in a way, but many players have already paid for those games on previous consoles, perhaps multiple times. Why, players have asked, can’t someone just bring their purchase of Kid Icarus over from the Wii’s Virtual Console to the Switch and play it without a subscription? Nintendo has never provided a good answer to this; in the SNES Mini it has provided an excellent alternative — though of course it means buying the game yet again.

The question on countless players’ minds was: Will Nintendo add N64 titles to the library of past-generation games for anyone to access, or gussy them up and sell them separately? With both Mario and Zelda’s 35th anniversaries approaching, this was a very material concern.

As it turns out, Nintendo has somehow threaded the needle with a solution seemingly made to leave everyone wanting something more.

Image Credits: Ninendo

The Super Mario 3D All-Stars collection includes Super Mario 64, Super Mario Sunshine and Super Mario Galaxy, from the N64, GameCube and Wii respectively, and has a full-size $60 price tag. These are all great games, obviously. But being classics doesn’t mean there’s no way to update them for modern audiences.

Take Mario 64. Universally beloved and hugely influential, it is nevertheless a bit long in the tooth in some ways. But the Mario 64 in All-Stars is only brought up to the barest standard of playability on modern consoles: It works with current Switch controllers and runs at an updated resolution. They didn’t even bother changing the original 4:3 aspect ratio!

Amazingly, Nintendo didn’t even include the substantial upgrades it made itself for the DS re-release of the game. As with the original All-Stars for SNES, which included re-drawn sprites and other improvements, this was an opportunity to show the quality of these games while also doing right by fans who have for years had to resort to emulators and mods to make the games suitable for 21st-century consumption.

Instead Nintendo has opted to do the absolute minimum while charging the absolute maximum. What’s more, there seems to be some kind of limited availability that the company hasn’t quite made clear — what goes on sale in a couple weeks will only be available until March of next year. Then what? Nintendo hasn’t said. (I’ve asked for clarification and will update this article if I hear back.)

Image Credits: Nintendo

Long-time customers will not be surprised by Nintendo’s oblique strategy and seeming lack of ambition here. The company has institutionalized a unique combination of extreme conservatism and eye-popping risk-taking. Overdeliver with one hand and underdeliver with the other is Nintendo’s approach, and it was hoped by many players that the former hand would be the one with the Mario anniversary content in it.

It’s troubling not simply because there’s one game that doesn’t justify its price tag good value, but because it signals an underwhelming approach to the entire library of Nintendo classics. With the 35th anniversary of other beloved franchises on the horizon — Zelda and Metroid, for a start — it is a legitimate worry that Nintendo may likewise let down the fan base.

Sure, it may sound a bit like the notorious entitlement expressed by gamers over things like microtransactions, exclusivity agreements and so on. But with Nintendo and these very important titles from its vault, expectations are justifiably different.

With almost no releases on third-party platforms and an aggressive approach to shutting down what it views as IP offenses, Nintendo exercises an iron grip over its content, especially its crown jewels, Mario and Zelda. If we are ever to receive an improved version of Mario 64, or Sunshine, or for that matter Ocarina of Time, not to speak of dozens of other classics, Nintendo is the only one that can provide it.

Sometimes that means a beautiful total redo of a game like Link’s Awakening. But at other times it means we must make do with scraps from the table, as with the arbitrary trickle of NES and SNES games coming to Nintendo Switch Online (itself a bundle of scraps compared with other console subscriptions, it must be said). Everyone right now is thinking that the inevitable Zelda collection will be equally bare bones (and expensive).

The dream players have for decades cherished for example, a multiplayer Mario 64, will never emerge in the wilds of the internet because Nintendo will swoop in with a cease and desist in record time. So they must rely on the company to make those dreams come true, and it is remarkably inconsistent in doing so.

The treasure chest of games Nintendo has just opened the lid on is potentially a source for years of content and will partly define the company’s overarching strategy going forward. But it makes gamers nervous to see Nintendo aiming at their wallets instead of their hearts. Usually it’s at least both.

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Nintendo is remaking the first portable gaming system it ever built

Published September 3, 2020

Quick, what was the first portable gaming system Nintendo made?

If you said “Game Boy”… solid guess, but not quite. For nearly a decade before Nintendo released that iconic gray beast, it was making the Game & Watch — a collection of handheld devices, each dedicated to playing just one or two simple games and, occasionally, doubling as a clock.

Hammering that nostalgia button in a way that few other companies can, Nintendo announced this morning that the Game & Watch will be making a modernized, but limited edition, return.

Released as part of the celebration around the 35th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., it’s fully Mario themed — and, appropriately, called “Game & Watch: Super Mario Bros.”

As with the original Game & Watch lineup, it seems like this one is meant to be pretty limited in the number of different titles it can play. On the official product page, Nintendo mentions “Super Mario Bros.,” “Super Mario Bros. 2: The Lost Levels” (or just “Super Mario Bros. 2,” as it was known in Japan) and a Mario-skinned remake of “Ball,” the first Game & Watch title that shipped back in April of 1980. So three games in all… but given what we’ve seen happen with previous devices like this, I wouldn’t be surprised if the fans crack it open and have it running a whole lot more than that in no time flat.

A lot has changed in 40(!) years, so Nintendo is sneaking a few upgrades into this Game & Watch that probably seem like givens today. It has a full-color LCD, for example, whereas the original displays were black and white — and you’ll be able to charge it over USB-C, rather than having to burn through a stack of button cell batteries. Nintendo says it should last around eight hours per charge.

Clock Mode!

When you’re not playing one of the included games, this thing turns into a little portable clock (thus the “& Watch” part of its name), with 35 different Mario-themed scenes in all. If Nintendo does that clock feature right, I can see these things earning a permanent spot on a lot of people’s desks.

While Nintendo notes that it’ll be a “limited” run, they haven’t said exactly how many of these they’ll be making… and while pre-order details are “coming soon,” they’re not getting more specific than that. They do say it’ll ship on November 13th with an MSRP of $50… but beyond that, if you’re worried about getting one of these, you’ll want to keep an eye out for more details.

 

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Daily Crunch: Apple delays ad-tracking changes

Published September 3, 2020

Apple announces a surprising delay, Facebook bans new political ads for the week before the U.S. election and SpaceX is testing its Starlink internet system. This is your Daily Crunch for September 3, 2020.

The big story: Apple delays ad-tracking changes

At this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Apple announced that in iOS 14 (currently in public beta), app developers would have to ask users whether they wanted to be tracked for ad purposes.

The move seems like a straightforward win for privacy, but some developers and advertisers have been pretty worried — Facebook, for example, predicted that this could render its Audience Network ad network completely ineffective. So Apple announced today that it’s delaying the changes until early next year.

“We want to give developers the time they need to make the necessary changes, and as a result, the requirement to use this tracking permission will go into effect early next year,” Apple said in a statement.

The tech giants

Facebook to block new political ads 1 week before Nov 3, adds more tools and rules for fair elections — Campaigns can still run ads to encourage people to vote, and they can still run older political ads.

Nintendo’s latest trick is turning the Switch into an RC controller for an AR Mario Kart game — The idea is that you can control real RC cars in your home.

Amazon launches an Alexa service for property managers — The company’s goal is to Alexa a tool for smart home management, even for those without their own Amazon account.

Startups, funding and venture capital

SpaceX confirms Starlink internet private beta underway, showing low latency and speeds over 100Mbps — While the current private beta is limited to SpaceX employees, the company said that the public Starlink beta is still on track to kick off later this year.

Optimizely acquired by content management company Episerver — In a statement, Episerver CEO Alex Atzberger said this is “the most significant transformation in our company’s history – one that will set a new industry standard for digital experience platforms.”

India’s Zomato raises $62 million from Temasek — The food delivery startup announced in January that Ant Financial had committed to provide it with $150 million, but apparently the firm has yet to deliver two-thirds of that capital.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

9 top real estate and proptech investors: Cities and offices still have a future — Optimism still runs high for startup hubs as well as supercities like New York and San Francisco.

Media Roundup: Patreon joins unicorn club, Facebook could ban news in Australia — Are you interested in the media business? Do you appreciate my news-gathering skills? Then this is the roundup for you!

What happens when public SaaS companies don’t meet heightened investor expectations? — The lesson for startups is clear: You’d better be damn impressive.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Spirit Airlines starts testing biometric check-ins — It’s starting at Chicago’s O’Hare airport.

NSA call records collection ruled illegal by US appeals court — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the NSA’s “bulk collection” of call records violated the law, but the judges fell short of ruling the program unconstitutional.

Disrupt 2020 Labor Day flash sale — Starting today, you can save $100 off the price of a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass.

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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Oracle loses $10B JEDI cloud contract appeal yet again

Published September 3, 2020

Oracle was never fond of the JEDI cloud contract process, that massive $10 billion, decade-long Department of Defense cloud contract that went to a single vendor. It was forever arguing to anyone who would listen that that process was faulty and favored Amazon.

Yesterday it lost another round in court when the U.S. Court of Appeals rejected the database giant’s argument that the procurement process was flawed because it went to a single vendor. It also didn’t buy that there was a conflict of interest because a former Amazon employee was involved in writing the DoD’s request for proposal criteria.

On the latter point, the court wrote, “The court addressed the question whether the contracting officer had properly assessed the impact of the conflicts on the procurement and found that she had.”

Further, the court found that Oracle’s case didn’t have merit in some cases because it failed to meet certain basic contractual criteria. In other cases, it didn’t find that the DoD violated any specific procurement rules with this bidding process.

This represents the third time the company has tried to appeal the process in some way, four if you include direct executive intervention with the president. In fact, even before the RFP had been released in April 2018, CEO Safra Catz brought complaints to the president that the bid favored Amazon.

In November 2018, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied Oracle’s protest that it favored Amazon or any of the other points in their complaint. The following month, the company filed a $10 billion lawsuit in federal court, which was denied last August. Yesterday’s ruling is on the appeal of that decision.

It’s worth noting that for all its complaints that the deal favored Amazon, Microsoft actually won the bid. Even with that determination, the deal remains tied up in litigation as Amazon has filed multiple complaints, alleging that the president interfered with the deal and that they should have won on merit.

As with all things related to this contract, the drama has never stopped.

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