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As remote work booms, Everphone grabs ~$40M for its ‘device as a service’ offer

Published July 28, 2020

The latest startup to see an uplift in inbound interest flowing from the remote work boom triggered by the coronavirus pandemic is Berlin-based Everphone, which sells a “mobile as a service” device rental package that caters to businesses needing to kit staff out with mobile hardware plus associated support.

Everphone is announcing a €34 million Series B funding round today, led by new investor signals Venture Capital. Other new investors joining the round include German carrier Deutsche Telekom — investing via its strategic investment fund, Telekom Innovation Pool — U.S.-based early-stage VC AlleyCorp and Dutch bank NIBC.

The Series B financing will go on expanding to meet rising demand, with the startup telling TechCrunch it’s expecting to see a 70-100% increase in sales volume versus the pre-crisis period, thanks to a doubling of inbound leads during the pandemic.

“The global pandemic has been a catalyst for growth in the field of digitization,” said CEO and co-founder, Jan Dzulko, in a statement. “We are currently experiencing a significant increase in demand at home and abroad, which is why we are aiming for European expansion with the funding.”

Everphone describes its offer as a one-stop shop, with the service covering not just the rental of (new or refurbished) smartphones and tablets but an administration and management wrapper that covers support needs, including handling repairs/replacements — with the promise of replacements within 24 hours if needed and less client risk from not having to wrangle traditional rental insurance fine print.

Other touted pluses of its “device as a service” approach include flexibility (users get to choose from a range of iOS and Android devices); lower cost (pricing depends on customer size, device choice and rental term but starts at €7,99 a month for a refurbished budget device, rising up to €49,99 a month for high-end kit with a 12-month upgrade); and rental bundles, which can include standard mobile device management software (such as Cortado and AirWatch) so customers can plug the rental hardware into their existing IT policies and processes.

Everphone reckons this service wrapper — which can also extend to include paid apps (such as Babbel for language learning) as an employee on-device perk/benefit in the bundle — differentiates its offer versus incumbent leasing providers, such as CHG-Meridian or De Lage Landen, and from wholesale distributors.

It also touts its global rollout capability as a customer draw, checking the scalability box.

Its investors (including German carrier, DT) are being fired up by the conviction that the COVID-19-induced shift away from the office to home working will create a boom in demand for well-managed and secured work phones to mitigate the risk of personal devices and personal data mingling improperly with work stuff. (On that front, Everphone’s website is replete with references to Europe’s data protection framework, GDPR, repurposed as scare marketing.)

“Everphone envisions that every employee will one day work via their smartphone,” added Marcus Polke, partner at signals Venture Capital, in a supporting statement. “With this employee-centric approach and integrated platform, everphone goes far beyond the mere outsourcing of a smartphone IT infrastructure.”

The 2016-founded startup has more than 400 customers signed up at this point, both SMEs and multinationals such as Ernst & Young. It caters to both ends of the market with an off-the-shelf package and self-service device management portal that’s intended for SMEs of between 100 and 1,500 employees — plus custom integrations for larger entities of up to 30,000 employees.

It says it’s able to offer “highly competitive” prices for renting new devices because it gives returned kit a second life, refurbishing and reselling devices on the consumer market. “Thanks to this profitable secondary lifespan, we are able to offer highly competitive prices and extensive service levels on our rental devices,” Everphone writes on its website.

The second-hand smartphone market has also been seeing regional growth. Swappie, a European e-commerce startup that sells refurbished iPhones, aligning with EU lawmakers’ push for a “‘right to repair” for electronics, raised its own ~$40 million Series B only last month, for example. Its second-hand marketplace is one potential outlet for Everphone’s rented and returned iPhones.

Tandem snags $5.7M for its language buddy app amid COVID-19’s e-learning boom

Published July 27, 2020

The Berlin-based startup behind Tandem, an app for practicing a second language, has closed a £4.5 million (~$5.7 million) Series A round of financing to capitalize on growth opportunities it’s seeing as the coronavirus crisis continues to accelerate the switch to digital and online learning.

With many higher education institutions going remote as a result of concerns over virus exposure risks of students mixing on physical campuses, there’s a growing need for technology that helps language students find people to practice with, as Tandem tells it. And while language learning apps make for a very crowded space, with giants like Duolingo and Babbel, Tandem focuses on a different niche: native speaker practice.

As the name suggests, its app does pair matching — connecting users with others who’re trying to learn their own language for mutual practice, by (their choice of) text, phone chat or video call.

The platform also incorporates a more formal learning component by providing access to tutors. But the main thrust is to help learners get better by practicing chatting to a native speaker via the app.

Because of the pandemic push to socially distant learners, that’s a growing digital need, according to Tandem co-founder and CEO Arnd Aschentrup. He says the coronavirus crisis spurred a 200% increase in new users — highlighting a “clear appetite” among consumers for digital language learning.

The team has taken another tranche of funding now so it can scale to meeting this growing global opportunity.

The Series A is led by European VC firm Brighteye Ventures, with Trind Ventures, Rubylight Limited and GPS Ventures also participating. It brings the startup’s total raised to date to £6.8 million.

“Given the accelerated user-uptake and clear market opportunity, we felt that 2020 was the right time to partner with the team at Brighteye to bring Tandem into the mainstream,” says Aschentrup, adding: “We anticipate significant growth opportunities for online learning and social learning in the wake of coronavirus.”

He says two “key trends” have emerged over the past few months: “Firstly, schools and universities providing language courses have either temporarily shut down, or moved almost entirely to remote lessons. Students are therefore relying on additional platforms to learn and practice languages, which is precisely what Tandem offers.

“Secondly, we know that lockdown has enormously limited people’s ability to socialise. Friendships have been harder to maintain, and new connections more difficult to spark. We’re excited about Tandem’s ability to connect people all across the globe despite lockdown. Since coronavirus began, engagement on Tandem’s video chat feature has increased three-fold, and new user signups have increased 200%.”

Tandem had been growing usage prior to COVID-19 — increasing membership from around a million back in 2017 (when we last spoke), to more than 10 million members now, spread across 180 countries.

Aschentrup couches the underlying growth as “strong organic demand,” noting the platform has been profitable since 2019 (hence not taking in more outside funding ’til now). But, with the pandemic curve ball accelerating the switch to remote learning, it’s expecting usage of its platform to keep stepping up.

“We’ve successfully increased our community numbers ten-fold in recent years, profitably and organically,” he tells TechCrunch. “More people than ever value digital learning solutions combined with human connection, and so the time is ripe to introduce Tandem to language learners more widely around the globe. With the team at Brighteye on our side we’re excited to further develop Tandem’s reach and voice over the coming period.”

“We expect increased interest in online learning to sustain well after lockdown lifts. In China — where lockdown sanctions were implemented and lifted earlier — user engagement has remained buoyant.”

“Once people experience the value of learning as part of a like-minded global community, it often becomes a lasting part of their lifestyle,” he adds.

Tandem’s best markets for language learners are China (10%), the U.S. (9%) and Japan (9%) — which combined make up close to a third (27%) of its user base.

While the most popular language pairs (in ranked order of popularity) are:

English – Spanish
Spanish – Portuguese
English – Chinese
English – French
Chinese – Japanese

While the vast majority (94%) of Tandem’s user base is making use of the freemium offering, it monetizes via a subscription product, called Tandem Pro, which it introduced in 2018 to cater to members who “preferred taking a community approach to language learning,” as Aschentrup puts it.

“For $9.99 per month, members can access key features such as: translating unlimited messages, finding Tandem partners nearby or in specific locations — for example ahead of international travels or studying abroad — and having enhanced visibility in the community as a featured Pro member,” he explains.

Aschentrup describes the “community aspect” of Tandem as a key differentiator versus other language learning apps — saying it helps users “develop and maintain cross-cultural friendships.”

“Members are often on opposite sides of the world to each other, yet able to enjoy a window into another culture entirely. Now more than ever, we’re pleased to be facilitating members’ healthy curiosity about other languages, countries and styles of living.”

The new funding will go on developing additional features for the app, and expanding the team across marketing and engineering, per Aschentrup. Currently Tandem has 24 full-time employees — it’s planning to double that to a 50-member team globally, post-Series A.

Commenting in a statement, Alex Spiro, managing partner at Brighteye Ventures, lauded the team’s “innovative and effective strategy” in building a community platform that tackles the language gap by connecting learners with fluent speakers.

“The product has not only proven resilient in this global crisis but has seen impressive growth during the period, and the team is now very well equipped to come out of it stronger and to continue to support loyal language learners that now number in the millions and will number many more in the coming years,” he added.

Nebraska and Iowa win advanced wireless testbed grants for rural broadband

Published July 27, 2020

Everyone wants more bandwidth from the skies, but it takes a lot of testing to turn laboratory research projects into real-world performant infrastructure. A number of new technologies, sometimes placed under the banner of “5G” and sometimes not, is embarking on that transition and being deployed in real-world scenarios.

Those research trials are crucial for productizing these technologies, and ultimately, delivering consumers better wireless broadband options.

We’ve talked a bit about one of those testbeds called COSMOS up in northern Manhattan near Columbia University, which is pioneering 5G technologies within a dense urban environment. The same National Science Foundation-funded research group that financed that project, the Platforms for Advanced Wireless Research program (PAWR), has now selected two finalists for its fourth location, which has a specific focus on rural infrastructure.

The 5G wireless revolution will come, if your city council doesn’t block it first

Research teams in Ames, Iowa affiliated with Iowa State University, and Lincoln, Nebraska affiliated with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, each won $300,000 grants to accelerate their planning for the testbeds. Those teams will use the grants to optimize their proposals, with one expected to receive the final full grant next year.

The goal for this latest testbed is to find next-generation wireless technology stacks that can deliver cheaper and better bandwidth to rural America, areas of the country that are not well-served by traditional cable and fiber networks nor current wireless cell tower coverage.

Whoever wins will join the existing three wireless testbeds in New York City, Salt Lake City and the Research Triangle in North Carolina.

PAWR itself is a joint public-private initiative with $100 million in funding to accelerate America’s frontier wireless innovation. It’s co-led by US Ignite, an NSF-run initiative to bring smart city ideas to fruition, and Northeastern University.

Y Combinator’s Vitable Health is bringing basic healthcare to underserved populations

Published July 27, 2020

Joseph Kitonga, the 23-year-old entrepreneur behind Vitable Health, first saw the need for a new kind of healthcare service growing up in Philadelphia and seeing the experience of the home healthcare workers who worked at his parents’ business.

The Kitongas immigrated to the United States a decade ago and settled down in Philadelphia, where they started a home-care business matching workers with patients in need. What was surprising to the younger Kitonga was that the people who worked for his parents taking care of others couldn’t afford basic healthcare coverage themselves.

It was that observation that provided the seed for the business idea that would become Vitable Health, Kitonga’s first business and a recent member of Y Combinator’s latest summer cohort.

The company provides affordable acute healthcare coverage to underinsured or un-insured populations and was born out of his experience watching employees of his parents’ home healthcare agency struggle to receive basic healthcare coverage.

A lot of caregivers make $10 per hour, which is too much to qualify for Medicaid and too little to afford health insurance, Kitonga says.

Even with the Affordable Care Act, many workers in the home-care business that Kitonga’s parents ran in Philadelphia were unable to receive care.

So Kitonga built a service that could cover everything but catastrophic coverage for lower costs than the company’s customers would have to pay if they went to an urgent care facility.

Vitable is able to lower the cost of care through its use of nurse practitioners instead of doctors to provide the care. For a small monthly fee, the company will send providers to make house calls or customers can receive a consultation over the phone.

“We focus on acute and preventive coverage,” says Kitonga. “Most high deductible plans are geared toward providing catastrophic coverage.”

What Kitonga saw with his parents’ employees was that they would wind up going to the emergency room and put $1,300 in charges on their credit cards rather than pay for insurance per month.

Vitable’s lowest plan levels start at $15 per month and the co-payment is $30, according to Kitonga. Vitable’s technicians will do in-home lab tests.

There’s just no low-cost care option available for the population that Kitonga wants to serve, he said. These are people who will be referred to emergency rooms by nearby care providers because they lack the necessary insurance. “The population that we service has been ignored by healthcare providers,” said Kitonga.

For now, the service is only available in Philadelphia, but Kitonga says there are already 1,000 people who receive care through Vitable. “We work with a lot of small businesses that might have 10 or 20 employees,” Kitonga said.

Digital elective care and telemedicine provider Ro raises $200 million at a reported $1.5 billion valuation

Published July 27, 2020

In three years Zachariah Reitano’s startup, Ro, has managed to hit a reported $1.5 billion valuation for its transformation from a company focused on treating erectile dysfunction to a telemedicine service for a range of elective and urgent care-focused treatments.

Through Rory for women’s health, Roman for men’s health and Zero for smoking cessation, Reitano and fellow co-founders Saman Rahmanian, and Rob Schutz, built a company that now treats 20 conditions, including sexual health, weight loss, dermatology, allergies and more, according to a statement from the company.

Image Credit: Zero

Ro also has a new pharmacy business, Ro Pharmacy, which is an online cash pay pharmacy offering more than 500 generic medications for just $5 per month per drug. And the company is getting into the weight loss business through a partnership with the private equity-backed healthcare company, Gelesis.

Ro’s also becoming a gateway into patient acquisition for primary care providers through Ribbon Health, and a test-case for the use of Pfizer’s Greenstone service, which provides certification that a generic drug is validated by one of the major pharmaceuticals.

The company’s $1.5 billion valuation is courtesy of a new $200 million investment from existing investors led by General Catalyst and including FirstMark Capital, Torch, SignalFire, TQ Ventures, Initialized Capital, 3L and BoxGroup. New first-time investor The Chernin Group also participated. In all, Ro has raised $376 million since it launched in 2017.

“This new investment will further our mission to become every patient’s first call. We’ll continue to invest in our vertically-integrated healthcare ecosystem, from our Collaborative Care Center to our national pharmacy operating system. This is just the beginning of Ro’s patient-centered healthcare platform.”

It’s all part of the company’s mission to provide a point of entry into the healthcare system independent of insurance qualifications.

“Telehealth companies like Ro are using technology to address long-standing healthcare disparities that have been exacerbated by COVID-19,” said Dr. Joycelyn Elders, MD, Ro Medical Advisor and Former U.S. Surgeon General. “By empowering providers to leverage their skills as efficiently and effectively as possible, Ro delivers affordable, high-quality care regardless of a patient’s location, insurance status, or physical access to physicians and pharmacies.”

Ro’s new financing is one of several forays by tech investors into reshaping the healthcare system at a time when patient care has been severely disrupted by attempts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19.

Digital medicine is assuming a central position in the healthcare world, with most consultations now occurring online. Reimbursement schemes for telemedicine have changed dramatically and investors see an opportunity to capitalize on these changes by aggressively backing the expansion plans of companies looking to bring digital healthcare directly to consumers.

That’s one of the reasons why Ro’s major competitor, Hims, is reported to be seeking access to public markets through its sale to a special purpose acquisition company for roughly $1 billion, according to Reuters.

Top mobile apps see declines in consumer engagement amid increased competition

Published July 27, 2020

Mobile consumers are downloading and using more apps than ever before. According to recent data from App Annie, mobile users now have 93 apps on their phone as of the end of 2019, up from 85 apps at the end of 2015. They also now use around 41 apps per month, up from 35 in 2015. Related to this increase, users are now also spending more hours per day using apps. Worldwide, daily time spent in apps has grown to 3.1 hours per day in 2019, up from 2.1 hours per day in 2015, for instance.

But with that growth has also come increased diversity among the top apps, the report found. That means top apps now make up a smaller proportion of consumers’ total time spent in apps, compared with five years ago.

Image Credits: App Annie

It’s worth noting that this report was commissioned by Facebook, App Annie says, with a goal of offering a more detailed look at the evolving app ecosystem over the past five years. The report aims to determine how growth is playing out in terms of popular app categories, among the top publishers, and how quickly newly successful apps are achieving sizable growth.

Facebook, in the past, had generated this sort of market research data first-hand by way of its Onavo VPN application — now shuttered over privacy concerns — and other similar efforts.

Turning to App Annie’s data team is just a new way for the company to get at the same sort of data.

App Annie’s market analysis, in part, is similarly derived by way of third-party apps. The company acquired Distimo in 2014, and as of 2016 has run the VPN app Phone Guardian under the Distimo brand. It also acquired Mobidia in 2015 and has operated My Data Manager (now on the App Store under Distimo). Both apps disclose their relationship with App Annie and explain that the apps are used for market research purposes, with specific examples of the type of data collected.

The new report’s findings may not be all good news for Facebook and other top app publishers. As the app economy evolved, users now have more places to spend time on mobile.

Image Credits: App Annie

Over the past five years, worldwide downloads continued to grow to reach a record of 120 billion in 2019, with several key countries now driving growth, including India (10% year-over-year growth in 2019), Brazil (9%), Indonesia (8%) and Russia (7%).

Downloads in mature economies also hit record levels in 2019, including the U.S. (12.3 billion), Japan (2.5 billion), U.K. (2.1 billion), South Korea (2 billion), Germany (1.9 billion), and France (1.9 billion).

As users grew their time in app to 3.1 hours per day, they also began to use more of a variety of apps. According to the report, 35 of the top 100 apps were new entrants in 2019, up from 27 in 2016 across categories that included social, photography, video, communications, entertainment and more.

Image Credits: App Annie

This is likely worrisome data for top app publishers, like Facebook, which has for years maintained a suite of top apps, including not only its flagship app, but also Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. As the competitive pressure increases, these top apps make up a smaller proportion of the time spent on mobile devices as users have grown more comfortable trying out newcomers — particularly across gaming, entertainment and video categories.

The top 30 non-game apps accounted for 69.4% of U.S. users’ total time spent in 2016 among non-games. That dropped to 65.5% in 2019, a nearly 4% decline. Among games, the share fell from 49% to 39%, a 10% drop. (This data was sourced from Google Play in the U.S.)

Image Credits: App Annie

Not only are consumers more open to trying new apps, the report found that new apps can also quickly achieve app store success. In the U.S., for example, more than 60% of apps are able to reach their category’s Top 30 in their first six months.

This is aided by larger initial marketing pushes as well as improvements in terms of consumer’s devices themselves — like more storage and processing power, which encourages more downloads.

Image Credits: App Annie

There are also more apps capable of achieving the once milestone metric of 1 million monthly active users (MAUs). In 2019, more than 4,600 apps saw 1 million MAUs, including those outside of social and communications like Netflix, Roku, Disney, CBS, Amazon, Alibaba, Walmart, Target, PayPal, Venmo, Chase, Capital One, Uber, DoorDash, McDonald’s and Starbucks.

Image Credits:App Annie

Image Credits: App Annie

Apps are also achieving the 1 million downloads milestones more quickly, in data analyzed from 2015 to 2018. In the video, finance, communications, social, photo and entertainment categories, 67% of apps achieved the 1 million downloads milestone within their first 12 months, App Annie says.

Because of the increases, there’s now a lot of overlap in between top apps. Today, mobile consumers will often choose and use multiple apps within and across categories to address similar needs, including on social, the report found.

For example, 89% of Snapchat’s users also used YouTube in April 2020 in the U.S., and 75% also used Instagram.

Image Credits: App Annie

TikTok saw the greatest year-over-year increase in cross-app usage of Snapchat, rising from 17% in April 2019 to April 2020 — an indication of how much it has captured the youth demographic.

Meanwhile, video apps and gaming are taking up more of users’ time spent in apps. This broad category of “play”-focused apps accounted for 22% of the growth in time spent in apps in 2019.

Image Credits: App Annie

Plus, top gaming apps are also implementing social features, including Top 50 games like Fortnite, Clash of Clans, Call of Duty: Mobile, Township, Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, New Yahtzee with Buddies, Golf Clash and Slotomania, for example.

More than two-thirds of the Top 50 games have added at least one social feature, whether that’s inviting friend to play, social assists for progressing, guilds or clans or in-app chat. This, in turn, has led to players spending more time in games as they can connect with friends there.

Image Credits: App Annie

Fortnite, as one key example of this trend, rolled out Party Hub based on its acquired Houseparty technology, in September 2019. In the three months after the rollout, time spent in Fortnite grew 130%.

Image Credits: App Annie

Outside of games, TikTok has risen by blending elements of top categories like social, video and entertainment. After merging with Musical.ly, it has rapidly rolled out more video editing features and increased ad spend aggressively to grow its user base and drive engagement. By December 2019, U.S. users were spending 16 hours, 20 minutes in the app per month, on average, up from 5 hours, 4 minutes in August 2018.

Image Credits: App Annie (note above chart only showcases Google Play data)

The full report also delves into country-by-country breakdowns but, overall, found that most countries saw record downloads in 2019 and similar trends in terms of app usage frequency increases and time spent.

One notable point of comparison is that U.S. users have more apps installed than in other markets (97 versus 93), but tend to use fewer apps compared with worldwide trends (36 versus 41). They also spend slightly fewer hours per day in apps, on average, than the worldwide average at 2.7 hours versus 3.1 hours.

“This report shows that the app industry is more competitive today than ever. New companies are succeeding with innovative apps that meet needs people might not even know they have,” said Ime Archibong, head of Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team, an internal team at Facebook looking to find new models for social apps. “All of this choice and competition fuels innovation, and that’s the heart of our work at Facebook,” he added.

App Annie’s report is available upon request here.

Crisis management tips from startup whisperer Margit Wennmachers

Published July 27, 2020

When it comes to building a company, lots of things can and do go wrong. Margit Wennmachers — an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz and long one of the most powerful public relations pros in the startup world — knows this firsthand.

Thankfully for all of you, Wennmachers was able to join us for our recent Early Stage event, where she shared some of her tips and tricks for dealing with everything from fast-ballooning crises that reporters catch wind of, to laying off people during a pandemic, to why lawsuits can actually fuel some companies’ growth.

It’s advice you might save for future reference. As she noted, how a crisis is handled can make or break a startup, and the list of things that can go wrong at even the smallest outfit is “long,” including a product needing to be recalled, a site going down, a cyber breach, a founding team that doesn’t get along, inappropriate behavior, lawsuits and cultural issues.

Some of her most actionable advice included:

Prepare for the inevitable crisis

First, said Wennmachers, spend time modeling out the scenarios, and “let your imagination run wild” as you do. Spend a month on this if necessary. As you’re thinking of worst-case scenarios, also figure out the team that would be involved in a crisis response. Legal will always have to be involved but also, often, HR, outside counsel, and, if a startup can afford it, the help of an outside crisis communications team. If it’s a product failure, you’ll also need the product lead, too, she noted.

Boston’s Q2 shows that the startup rebound isn’t ahead of us, it’s upon us

Published July 27, 2020

The coronavirus caused some disagreement amongst Boston’s venture capital community. Looking back at our mid-2020 survey of its VCs, some saw the city’s strength in biotech and healthcare as a competitive advantage, while others saw Boston’s diverse startup ecosystem as key to its survival.

And some were worried that activity was about to clamp down. Jeff Bussgang, Flybridge Ventures, put it most frankly: “Q2 financing for Boston is going to fall off a cliff. The biotech industry may see some bright spots […] but the financing market has frozen up as solid as the Charles River in February.”

With fresh data in hand, it appears that the more bullish were more right than the bears and that, in a good turn of affairs for Boston startups, Bussgang was wrong.

The city, much like the country, did not see the sharply negative quarter that many anticipated. Boston posted record venture capital investment in the period, its highest total since at least Q3 2018 according to CB Insights data.

The same dataset also says that Boston-area companies raised $3.7 billion across 126 deals. Indeed, the good news from Boston’s Q1 bested better-than-anticipated-results from both the global venture capital community, and the domestic VC world in Q2.

Bussgang sent an updated metaphor to the TechCrunch team in response to this data: “It was a tundra in March and April but, as happens in Boston, April showers and May flowers kicked in and the financing markets started to gush again in the late spring/early summer, just in time to save Q2 .”

While the data isn’t historically definitive due to reporting lags, it can be used as a directional sign that Boston’s rebound isn’t ahead of us, it’s upon us.

The solid numbers are a sign that COVID-19 and economic turmoil have put many startups in greater demand than before, which means that they need to amass money to meet growth needs.

Equity Shot: All about the Qualtrics IPO

Published July 27, 2020

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

After the morning show went out, the Equity crew could not shut up about the Qualtrics-SAP deal, so we had no choice but to jump back into recording mode for an off-the-cuff Equity Shot. As always, Shots are short-form Equity episodes that focus on a single, news topic.

Why is SAP spinning Qualtrics out via an IPO?

Building off of Danny’s SAP knowledge, Natasha’s curiosity about the future Qualtrics S-1, and my own recent dive into the SAP and Qualtrics numbers, we managed to cover quite a lot of ground. So, if you wanted to know:

Why did SAP have to pay so much for Qualtrics back in the day?
Why is SAP willing to part with Qualtrics so soon after buying it?
How much might Qualtrics be worth?
And, of course, did the Equity team expect to see this news in 2020?

Then you are probably going to like what we have in store for you.

Spoiler on that last as the answer is a firm no, but, all the same, what fun. That’s about it for this Equity Shot, hit play, have fun, and we are back Friday morning unless something else happens, like a Palantir S-1.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Friday at 6:00 a.m. PDT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

Without desks and a demo day, are accelerators worth it?

Published July 27, 2020

As a result of the pandemic, accelerators have moved operations fully remote to abide by social distancing. The shift has forced well-known programs like 500 Startups, Y Combinator and Techstars to go fully online, while encouraging existing venture capital firms to launch new digital-only fellowships like Cleo Capital and NextView Ventures.

Before the pandemic, accelerators could advertise their value by lending desk space once used by Airbnb, Twilio and Brex’s co-founders, plus a glitzy demo day. Now, stripped of their in-person element, the actual value of an accelerator program — and the network they provide — is being tested in new ways.

So a question remains for participating founders: Are they getting the benefits of what they thought they signed up for?

In the Zoom where it happened

The last thing Michael Vega-Sanz wanted to do was was join another Zoom get-together for entrepreneurs. But the car-sharing company he co-founded with twin brother Matthew was in the middle of a pivot, so they joined NextView Ventures’ inaugural remote accelerator program.

“I envisioned an accelerator with awkward happy hours, mass Zoom calls,” Vega-Sanz said. Fast-forward one month into the program, he says it “has been quite the opposite.”

Before joining NextView’s accelerator, Vega-Sanz did an in-person incubator at Babson College in Boston, but there’s “a lot less fluff” in being virtual, he told TechCrunch.

“[With in-person] the reality was you’d go to lunch, and by the time you drove over there and had all your side talk, small talk, chit-chat and actually got into the nitty-gritty of the event, there was a lot of time loss,” he said. “You could have been working for your company during that time.”

If possible, Vega-Sanz still recommends that first-time founders attend a physical accelerator instead of a virtual one for the energy it brings, even with the downside of useless events.