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What to expect from Samsung’s next Unpacked

Published August 6, 2021

Foldables! Two, probably! Those are your headliners. Samsung tipped its hand with the event invite, which features a pair of geometrical objects that pretty clearly represent the new Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip.

The other headliner is what we won’t be seeing at the event (Deadliner? Endliner?). The company already confirmed via corporate blog that we won’t be seeing the next version of the Galaxy Note next week. That’s a big break from the device’s long-standing annual refresh cycle.

We still don’t know if this is the end-end of the line for the phablet. Samsung told TechCrunch, “We will not be launching new Galaxy Note devices in 2021. Instead, Samsung plans to continue to expand the Note experience and bring many of its popular productivity and creativity features, including the S Pen, across our Galaxy ecosystem. We will share more details on our future portfolio once we are ready to announce.”

Image Credits: Samsung

Rumors surfaced prior to this revelation that the company may have been forced to put the device on hold, as global supply chain issues continue to hamstring manufacturers. There’s also an argument to be made, however, that Samsung has gradually made the Note redundant over the past several Galaxy S updates.

It seems telling that the company referred to a forthcoming “flagship” in its official Unpacked copy. With the Note out of the picture and the Galaxy S about six months out from a refresh, this appears to refer to the Galaxy Fold gaining the (admittedly ceremonial) title. Whether that means two or three flagships in the company’s Armada remains to be seen.

What we do know, however, is that — like the Galaxy S before it — at least one of the forthcoming foldables will be blurring that Note line.

“I hope you’ll join us as we debut our next Galaxy Z family and share some foldable surprises — including the first-ever S Pen designed specifically for foldable phones,” the company’s president and head of Mobile Communications Business, TM Roh wrote. The executive also promised “even more refined style, armed with more durable, stronger material” on the new Galaxy Z Flip.

Previous — and subsequent — leaks have given us good looks at both the Galaxy Z Flip 3 and Galaxy Z Fold 3. Hell, it wouldn’t be a Samsung event if pretty much everything didn’t leak out prior to the event.

A series of tweets from EVLeaks has given us nearly every angle of the upcoming foldable smartphones, along with (European) prices that put the Fold and Flip starting at €1,899 and €1,099, respectively. Both mark a sizable decrease from the previous generation. That’s nice — if not entirely surprising. Samsung’s plan all along has clearly been a prolonged drop in pricing as foldable technology scaled. We’re still a long ways away from cheap here, but perhaps nudging our way toward the realm of possibility for more users.

Other leaked details for the Fold/Flip include a 7.6/6.7-inch internal display, a Snapdragon 888 processor (both) and 12MP triple/dual cameras, respectively. Interestingly, water resistance is also reportedly on board here.

With a year of virtual events under its belt, the company seems to have a better idea of pacing. Samsung — along with many other companies in the space — took liberties when events went more from in-person to online, meting out announcements event by event. Thankfully, next week’s Unpacked is a much bigger, self-contained event.

The other expected highlights are both wearables. First is the long-awaited fruits of the partnership between Samsung and Google that was announced at I/O. We didn’t get a lot of info at the time, beyond the fact that it will potentially be a boon for users and developers, with the ability to jointly create apps for both the beleaguered Wear OS and Samsung’s custom brand of Tizen.

Image Credits: Samsung

“Samsung and Google have a long history of collaboration, and whenever we’ve worked together, the experience for our consumers has been dramatically better for everyone,” Google SVP Sameer Samat said at a June follow-up to the I/O news. “That certainly holds true for this new, unified platform, which will be rolling out for the first time on Samsung’s new Galaxy Watch. In collaboration with Samsung, we’re thrilled to bring longer battery life, faster performance and a wide range of apps, including many from Google to a whole new wearable experience.”

The company held an (admittedly disappointing) event at MWC focused on the forthcoming watch. There was, however, one key thing missing: the watch. Based on pure speculation, I’d suggest that the wearable just didn’t come together on the timeline Samsung was expecting, but the company went ahead and did a virtual presser at the (mostly virtual) trade show.

The company did, however, announced One UI Watch — a wearable version of its streamlined OS interface. Samsung notes in a press release:

One UI Watch together with the new unified platform will create an entirely new Galaxy Watch experience. As part of the new experience, once you install watch-compatible apps on your smartphone, they will be swiftly downloaded onto your smartwatch. If you’ve customized your clock app on your phone to show the time in different cities around the globe, this will be automatically reflected on your watch as well. And if you block calls and messages from your watch, they will now be blocked on your smartphone, too.

Leaks have also revealed the Galaxy Watch 4 and Galaxy Watch 4 Classic models along with (again) European pricing. They’re reportedly set to start at €279 and €379, respectively, with each featuring multiple sizing options. That last bit was always a sticking point for me with Samsung watches, which have traditionally been fairly massive, knocking out a good number of potential buyers in the process.

The last big piece of the puzzle are the Galaxy Buds 2. The latest upgrade to the company’s entry-level buds are said to be gaining active noise canceling.

Will there be surprises once things kick off at 7AM PT/10AM ET on August 11? Little, ones, probably. These leaks have a tendency to capture things in broad strokes but miss some of the key nuances in the process. And while the company is more than a little familiar with pre-show leaks, it’s still managed to surprise us in the past.

Samsung will announce new foldables on August 11

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Best Buy investing millions in Brown Venture Group, a firm exclusively backing BIPOC founders

Published August 5, 2021

Last summer, in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, Best Buy committed to “do better” when it came to supporting communities of color. As part of the retail giant’s self-proclaimed mission to better address underrepresentation and technology inequities, the company announced today that it is investing up to $10 million in Brown Venture Group.

Minnesota-based Brown Venture Group is a three-year-old venture capital firm that has pledged to exclusively back Black, Latino and Indigenous technology startups in “emerging technologies.” Black and Latin communities were the recipients of just 2.6% of total funding in 2020, according to Crunchbase data. 

Brown Venture Group is in the process of fundraising for its targeted inaugural $50 million fund, 75% of which has been committed, according to its principals. This means that Minneapolis-based Best Buy’s pledge to invest “up to $10 million” could represent as much as 20% of the total capital raised, making it a lead LP in the fund.

Brown Venture Group co-founder and managing partner Dr. Paul Campbell said that in the early days of forming the firm, he and co-founder Dr. Chris Brooks were told by “multiple people locally” that they should leave the Twin Cities metro area because “all the capital was on the coasts.”

“We just made a firm decision in the very early stages to stay put in the Twin Cities and that we wanted this to be a Twin City story,” Campbell told TechCrunch. “So when we thought about our Twin Cities ecosystem and who we wanted to be leading partners with, Best Buy was at the top of the list. So we are just more than excited to have Best Buy as a lead LP in our fund.” 

For its part, Best Buy — which notched $47 billion in revenue last year — said the move is aimed at helping “break down the systemic barriers often faced by Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) entrepreneurs — including lack of access to funding — and empowering the next generation within the tech industry.”

The company added: “The partnership with Brown Venture Group will work toward making the technology startup landscape more inclusive and creating a stronger community of diverse suppliers.”

A glimpse inside the minds of tech’s DEI leaders

In conjunction with announcing Best Buy’s commitment to the fund, the company and venture firm said they would jointly launch an entrepreneurship program at Best Buy Teen Tech Centers to help develop young entrepreneurs through education, mentorship, networking and funding access.

Brown Venture Group — whose name was chosen to represent an “inclusive” skin color of the groups it represents — has so far invested in five companies, including clean energy startup Ecolution kwh.

Ten million dollars seems like a drop in the bucket for a company that generated sales of $47 billion last year. Best Buy said this initiative is just one of several that it has underway to support BIPOC businesses, including plans to provide $44 million to expand college prep and career opportunities for BIPOC students and a pledge to spend at least $1.2 billion with BIPOC and diverse businesses by 2025. The company has also said that by 2025 it will fill one out of three new non-hourly corporate positions with BIPOC employees and hire 1,000 new employees to its technology team, with 30% of them being diverse, specifically Black, Latinx, Indigenous and women.

“We’re committed to taking meaningful action to address the challenges faced by BIPOC entrepreneurs,” Best Buy CEO Corie Barry said in a written statement. “Through partnerships like this, we believe we can begin to do this by helping to build a stronger, more vibrant community of diverse innovators in the tech industry, some of whom we hope will become partners of Best Buy in the future.”

HP outlines ambitious diversity goals

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How Ward van Gasteren thinks about growth hacking today

Published August 5, 2021

Ward van Gasteren embraces the “growth hacker” term, despite the fact that some in the profession prefer the term “growth marketing” or simply “growth.” What’s the difference to him? The hacking part should be a distinct effort on top of ongoing marketing, he says.

“Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work,” he tells us. “Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant.”

Based in The Netherlands, he has developed his own growth hacking courses, Grow With Ward, and worked with large companies like TikTok, Pepsi and Cisco, and startups like Cyclemasters, Somnox and Zigzag. In the conversation below, van Gasteren shares the importance of building internal processes around growth for the long term, the state of growth today and his own development.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’re a certified growth hacker — how do you think this sets you apart from others? How has this certification changed the way you approach working with clients?

I was part of the first-ever class from Growth Tribe (when they still offered multimonth traineeships), which was an amazing experience. The difference that a certification shows is that you know that a certified growth hacker has knowledge of the beginning-to-end process of growth hacking, and that this person is supposed to look at more than just a single experiment to hack their growth.

There are a lot of cowboy growth hackers who simply repeat the same tactics, instead of trying to work from a repeatable process, where you identify problems through data, have a non-biased prioritization process for ideas and will focus on long-term learnings over direct impact. A proper certificate shows that you know what it takes.

When do you think clients should invest in the beginner growth hacking course you offer on your website rather than investing in working with you directly?

I created the course to make growth hacking available to a larger audience. I noticed that almost all other growth hacking courses fell into one of two buckets: (1) cheap (<$200), but focused on superficial growth tactics, or (2) good quality in-depth content, but very expensive ($1,500-$5,000). And I believe everybody should have access to that knowledge of how to build a systematic process to achieve long-term sustainable growth, so I created my own course, since I know that working one-on-one with me is also too expensive for most people.

Especially if you’d look at students or junior marketeers, for whom I created a proper beginner growth hacking course that will teach you 20% of the knowledge that is necessary to achieve the first 80% of the results.

Growth hacking does have some noticeable differences from marketing, as outlined on your website. How should clients make the decision between working with you, a growth hacker, instead of with a marketer?

The choice between working with a growth hacker versus a digital marketer is not a one-or-the-other choice; the fields are very different in focus and actually complementary to each other. Growth hacking is great to kickstart growth, test new opportunities and see what tactics work. Marketeers should be there to continue where the growth hackers left off: build out those strategies, maintain customer engagement and keep tactics fresh and relevant. You shouldn’t hire a growth hacker to maintain your marketing strategies; they’re excited to make new growth steps and would get bored when they can’t test new ideas.

Most of the time, I help a client get up to speed, show which opportunities are valuable and give them a strategy to execute. Then I hand it over to marketing for the long-term execution and coach them on the execution, and step back in when there’s a need for new growth input.

What are some common misconceptions about growth hacking?

A lot of growth hackers still present growth hacking as a perfect approach, where thanks to our data-driven way of working we can always make the right moves. But that’s not true: The hard data that you see in your analytics tools, can only tell you what is slowing down your growth, but not why your growth slows down there. While the “why” is what we build our experiments on top of … many growth hackers just fill that with their own assumptions to keep their speed, but that’s not sustainable long term.

Next to the hard data, you need soft data: the why. And that comes from talking with customers, running hypothesis-focused experiments (not result-focused) and maybe by looking at your feedback from customer support or surveys. Every time I implement a soft data feedback loop with my clients, I see that we increase our experiment effectiveness from 1 in 10 up to 1 in 3.

What trends are you seeing in the growth hacking world right now?

The growth industry is definitely maturing. Less hacks, more teams, more focus on velocity. Everybody within the field is getting to know the best practices very quickly and implementing them even quicker. So then what? We need more knowledge, more qualitative feedback and a more systematic approach to scale up our impact, to be able to rise above best practices and implement truly relevant and sophisticated tactics for our businesses. Since the field is maturing, you see people starting to get rid of the shoestring tools.

For this reason, I’m currently rolling out a growth management tool for growth teams, called Upgrow, where teams can more easily manage their experiment velocity, report to stakeholders with the click of a button and make sure that they systemize the knowledge retention from their articles to build companywide knowledge. And you see that mature growth teams need this kind of software to really level up and manage these trends that are putting stress on their process due to the growth of their company.

What do startups continue to get wrong?

Most startups just keep perfecting their product forever-and-ever: “Just this one extra feature and then we go live.” I can understand that, since north-star metrics, NPS scores and product-led growth are dominating the conversation around startup growth nowadays, but let me be real: You will never be fully done. There will always be a next feature. And you will only have a benefit if you grow alongside your customers. Put a “coming soon” on your website for the features that are in the making, and just start selling and scaling up your growth efforts: Different channels bring different kinds of users, who will have new demands, so you have to be adapting all the time. Not just now.

5 companies doing growth marketing right

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Founders must learn how to build and maintain circles of trust with investors

Published August 5, 2021
Matt Cohen
Contributor

Founder and managing partner at Ripple Ventures, Matt Cohen is a business operator turned early-stage investor.

Tony Conrad
Contributor

Having founded about.me and Sphere (both acquired by AOL), Tony brings founder and startup leadership expertise to his partner role at True.

Many VCs tout their mentorship and hands-on approach to founders, especially those who run early-stage startups. But in the recent era of lightning-fast rounds closing at sky-high valuations, the cap tables of early-stage startups are becoming increasingly crowded.

This isn’t to say that the value VCs bring has diminished. If anything, it’s quite the opposite — this new dynamic is forcing founders to be extremely selective about exactly who is sitting around their mentorship table. It’s simply not possible to have numerous deep and meaningful relationships to extract maximum value at the early stage from seasoned investors.

Founders should definitely pursue big rounds at sky-high valuations, but it’s important that they recognize how important it is to manage who they allow into their mentorship circles. Initially, founders should make sure their first layer consists of the real “doers” — usually angels and early venture investors who founders meet with weekly (or more frequently) to help solve some of the most granular problems.

Everything from hiring to operational hurdles all the way to deeper, more personal challenges like balancing family life with a rapidly growing startup.

This circle is where the real mentorship happens, where founders can be open and vulnerable. For obvious reasons, this circle has to be small, and usually consist of two to six people at most. Anything more simply becomes unwieldy and leaves founders spending more time managing these relationships than actually building their company.

How founders manage their VC circles can mean the difference in success or failure for a thousand different reasons.

The second layer should consist of the “quarterly crowd” of investors. These aren’t necessarily people who are uninterested or unwilling to participate in the nitty gritty of running the company, but this circle tends to consist of VCs who make dozens of investments per year. They, like their founders, aren’t capable of managing 50 relationships on a weekly basis, so their touch points on company issues tend to move slower or less frequently.

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A blueprint for building a great startup founding team

Published August 5, 2021
Sudheesh Nair
Contributor

Sudheesh Nair is CEO of ThoughtSpot, a business intelligence company that has built an intuitive Google-like interface for data analytics. Before ThoughtSpot, Sudheesh was president at Nutanix.

In a company’s early days, the difference between C-level executives and the rest of the organization is simple — employees can walk away from a failure, but the leaders cannot. Under these conditions, certain kinds of people thrive in leadership roles and can take a company from ideation to production.

While there’s no magic formula for what works and what doesn’t, successful startups share common traits in terms of the way their foundational leadership teams are built.

We’ve all experienced what it looks like on the negative end of the spectrum — people making points simply to hear their own voice, leaders competing for credit and clashing agendas. When people would rather be heard than contribute, the output suffers. Members of a healthy leadership team are unafraid to let others have the limelight, because they trust the mission and the culture they’ve built together.

An honest self-assessment is necessary and this is something that only exceptional and selfless founders are capable of.

We are all imperfect human beings, founders included. There are always going to be moments that leaders can’t predict, and mistakes come with the territory. The right leadership team should be able to mitigate the unexpected, and sometimes make the future easier to predict. Putting the right people in the right roles early on can be the difference between success and failure — and that starts at the top.

Start by determining who will lead as CEO

Investors love founder-CEOs, and founders are often fantastic candidates for this role. But not everyone can do it well, and more importantly, not everyone wants to.

Startup founders should ask themselves a few questions before they lose sleep over the prospect of handing over the reigns:

  • Do I even want to be CEO? If yes, for how long?
  • Can I maximize the potential of the company if I’m not the CEO?
  • Am I really the best person for this job at this stage?

An honest self-assessment is necessary and this is something that only exceptional and selfless founders are capable of. In many cases, founders decide they need outside help to fill the role. While a CEO may not be your first hire — or even one of the first five — the person you choose will ultimately occupy your organization’s most critical leadership role, so choose wisely.

What to look for: Ambitious vision grounded in execution reality. Your CEO should have hands-on experience that allows them to see around corners, predict pitfalls and identify opportunities.

What to watch out for: Leaders who lack respect for the founding vision or the ability to hire and balance an executive team quickly. A good CEO should be able to manage short-term cash flow and go-to-market needs without compromising the true north, while building a foundation and culture for the long term.

Then, hire a leader for your engineering team

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John Deere buys autonomous tractor startup Bear Flag Robotics

Published August 5, 2021

In the world of robotic startups, acquisition is often as good an outcome as any. And when it comes to robotic tractor startups, you could do worse than being acquired by John Deere. The agricultural technology giant announced today that it’s set to acquire Bear Flag Robotics for $250 million.

The Bay Area-based firm, which specializes in autonomous farming heavy machinery, was founded in 2017. They first crossed our radar the following year, as a member of YC’s Winter 2018 cohort.

“We got a tour of an orchard and just how pronounced the labor problem is,” co-founder Aubrey Donnellan told TechCrunch at the time. “They’re struggling to fill seats on tractors. We talked to other growers in California. We kept hearing the same thing over and over: Labor is one of the most significant pain points. It’s really hard to find quality labor. The workforce is aging out. They’re leaving the country and going into other industries.”

In the intervening years, John Deere tapped Bear Flag for its own Startup Collaborator initiative. And the robotics firm has also begun to deploy its technology to an undisclosed (“limited,” per their wording) number of sites in the U.S.

“One of the biggest challenges farmers face today is the availability of skilled labor to execute time-sensitive operations that impact farming outcomes. Autonomy offers a safe and productive alternative to address that challenge head on,” co-founder and CEO Igino Cafiero, says in a release. “Bear Flag’s mission to increase global food production and reduce the cost of growing food through machine automation is aligned with Deere’s and we’re excited to join the Deere team to bring autonomy to more farms.”

Volocopter and John Deere team up for a crop-spraying autonomous agricultural drone

Agricultural is one of several robotics categories that have seen a spike in interest in the past year, due to labor shortages that predate but were exacerbated by the global pandemic. Of course, that interest doesn’t make anyone immune from the difficulties of launching a robotics startup.

Last month, apple-picking robotics firm Abundant confirmed it was closing up shop, noting, “After a series of promising commercial trials with prototype apple harvesters, the company was unable to raise enough investment funding to continue development and launch a production system,” the company noted at the time.

An acquisition seems like a reasonable outcome for a company like Bear Flag. The startup gains a lot of resources from its massive new owner, and its new owner adds some new tech to its portfolio. Indeed, John Deere has been pretty aggressively looking to expand into more cutting-edge technologies like robotics and drones in recent years.

Bear Flag will retain operations in the Bay Area.

Bear Flag Robotics wants to sell an autonomous tractor for farms

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups

 

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Allocations sees a world where myriad, smaller private equity funds are the norm

Published August 5, 2021

This morning Allocations, a fintech startup building software to help smaller private equity funds form and operate, announced that it has raised a $4 million round at a $100 million valuation.

The startup also shared a host of performance metrics, including that it reached a $4.6 million revenue run rate in June, and a $6 million bookings run rate in the same month.

Allocations also told TechCrunch that it has posted 28% monthly revenue growth over the last 12 months. With metrics like that, our curiosity was piqued. What is Allocations building that is attracting so much early demand? And how does the company’s thesis regarding the future of private equity funds intersect with microventure funds themselves?

What Allocations does

Born from CEO Kingsley Advani’s efforts in building a community of angel investors, and the issues that he ran into spinning up special purpose vehicles (SPVs), Allocations started off as software built to scratch its founder’s itch. SPVs are an increasingly common way to raise capital for a single investment from pooled sources, and in today’s rapid-fire venture capital market, Advani had to race to get capital into deals before they closed.

As with many technology startups, Allocations is software designed to solve a known pain point. The old way of putting together SPVs just didn’t match the expected pace at which private investors are expected to commit to investing.

Today the startup’s software helps its users to create new SPVs and funds more quickly, also helping investors manage capital calls and the like after their fund is formed. The startup charges either one-time (in the case of an SPV, by definition a single-shot investment), or recurring fees (multiasset SPVs and funds). A 30-investment fund will cost its managers $15,000 per year through Allocations.

But how many funds are there for the startup to support? Is there enough market to allow Allocations to become a large enterprise itself? So far, the company has attracted some 300 funds to its roster. Advani thinks that there will be plenty of demand. In an interview with TechCrunch, the founder noted that present-day denizens of major funds locked out of material carry — venture economic upside, more simply — can peel off and start their own fund, allowing them much better economics. That dynamic could spur demand for his startup’s services.

Advani also said that family offices and other major capital pools that once fought for allocation into brand-name venture capital funds and other private equity vehicles — venture capital is a subset of private equity — are increasingly chasing smaller funds that may post better returns than larger investing partnerships can manage. This is the law of large numbers in reverse; it’s easier to 10x a $10 million fund than a $10 billion vehicle.

Advani expects his customers will put together multiple funds. Per the CEO, the goal of new fund managers is to get to their second fund. So, new managers often invest their first fund quickly in hope of reaching their second more quickly — more funds means more fees for Allocations.

In the startup’s view, the market will see many more small-scale private equity funds in time, perhaps smaller than $10 million in capital. This perspective mirrors what TechCrunch has seen in the market lately, with rolling funds rising to prominence in the early-stage startup investing, and solo GPs putting together what feels like more microfunds than ever.

Allocations fits into the larger trend of fintech startups taking antiquated models in the world of money and making them faster, more modern and often lower cost. Sure, there’s miles of distance between Allocations and Robinhood, but as both are about smaller investors, democratization of investing access, and using tech to tear down old walls, they are more brethren than different species.

Update: It’s a $4 million round, not $5 million. Post has been corrected.

How public markets can help address venture capital’s limitations

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3 invaluable founder lessons I learned on my immigration journey

Published August 5, 2021
Mustafa Bayramoglu
Contributor

Mustafa Bayramoglu is the founder and CEO at Preflight. Previously, he was the software architect and the first engineer at ShipBob.

I was four years old when my dad first showed me a computer. I immediately asked him if we could take it apart to see how it worked. I was hooked.

When I learned that Windows and Mac were based in the United States, I was 10. Since then, I’ve wanted to come here to launch my own tech business.

What I didn’t realize back then was that the first half of that dream — coming to the U.S. — would provide me with essential training for realizing the second half — launching a business.

As it turns out, the behaviors, attitude and mindset required to traverse the U.S. immigration system are many of the same ones required to navigate the uncertain waters of entrepreneurship.

The behaviors, attitude and mindset required to traverse the U.S. immigration system are many of the same ones required to navigate the uncertain waters of entrepreneurship.

In 2019, I launched Preflight, which makes smart and fast no-code test automation software for web applications. One big reason the business currently exists is that, in my journey to getting asylee status in the United States, I became really good at three things: accepting uncertainty, building resilience and maintaining a positive mental attitude.

I needed them all to get Preflight off the ground.

The many paths to the U.S. (and launching a startup)

I had my first shot at making my longtime dream a reality when I was applying to college as an undergraduate. I figured if I could go to school in the United States, I could find a way to stay and start a business.

After doing some research, though, I realized that U.S. colleges were too expensive.

But I figured getting out of Turkey, my home country, would be a start. I looked around for affordable schools and saw that France had good options. So I went to France.

Unfortunately, even after three attempts, I wasn’t able to get a student visa. So I headed back to Turkey and went to college there. After graduation, I knew I had a second shot at the U.S.: a master’s degree. I applied to computer science programs and got accepted — a huge win!

I first arrived in Georgia, where I got my TOEFL certification, then enrolled at Tennessee State University, where I got a teaching assistantship.

Keep in mind, to do all this, I had to have the right visas. I needed a student visa for my master’s degree, but if I wanted to work after graduation, I’d need a work visa.

The thing is, though, I didn’t want to work at a “job.” I wanted to start my own business, which requires a different type of visa altogether.

Oh, and there was another factor at play: I was enrolled at Tennessee State from 2014 to 2016, during the lead-up to the election of Donald Trump. So in addition to trying to figure out which visa I could reasonably get, I had to deal with the fact that the rules for visas could all change in the coming months.

These experiences are similar to what many founders deal with every day in the process of launching and running a business.

We don’t know if our products will work or if they’ll find a market. We don’t know how changing regulations might affect what we’re doing. We have no idea when something like a pandemic will pull the rug out from everything we’ve built.

But we keep going anyway. In my experience, the most successful founders are the ones who don’t wait for all the pieces to fall into place — they know that will never happen. They’re the ones who do the best they can with what they have. They trust that they’ll be able to adapt and adjust when things inevitably change.

Which brings me to my next lesson.

Resilience: Hearing “no” as “not yet”

Hearing “no” isn’t fun, especially when that “no” is about something you’ve wanted for more than a decade.

I experienced a lot of “no”s in my immigration journey, as one visa attempt after another failed. If I’d let any one of those failures stop me, I wouldn’t be where I am today — working at my own startup in the U.S.

The lesson I learned was to hear “no” as “not yet.” It’s been invaluable to me in my journey to becoming a founder.

For example: In 2014, while I was in graduate school, I learned about Y Combinator and decided that I wanted to be a part of it. Throughout grad school, I applied and got rejected three times.

The clock was ticking on my student visa, so I decided to shift my tactics. I applied to jobs at companies that were Y Combinator graduates to see what I could learn.

In 2016, I got hired at ShipBob, a Chicago-based company that was in Y Combinator’s Summer 2014 batch. I joined the team as its first full-time developer and the first one based in the States. From there, things changed dramatically.

For starters, I learned a lot. In my time with ShipBob — just two and a half years — we grew from 10 people to more than 400. I built two apps and applied to Y Combinator twice more and got rejected both times.

4 lessons I learned about getting into Y Combinator (after 13 applications)

But in my work growing and leading a team of developers, I saw a need for a product that didn’t yet exist: a smart, fast, no-code test automation tool.

My team was spending way too much time building tests for ShipBob’s latest updates to make sure existing functionalities worked when we deployed. But when the code changed too quickly, our tests were outdated. It was incredibly frustrating.

Then we hired two quality assurance engineers and it took them four months to get 10% automated test coverage.

These problems led me to an aha moment: I could build a company to address this. A tool that is fast in test creation and can adapt to the UI changes.

That company is Preflight, and it’s the one that finally got me admitted to Y Combinator in the Winter 2019 batch. I was ecstatic when I heard that we’d been accepted. But then I realized that I couldn’t actually work on Preflight full time with my current visa status — at least, if I wanted to one day make a salary, I couldn’t.

And that brings me to my next point.

Maintaining a positive mental attitude as you face (many) challenges

My professional life wasn’t the only thing that changed dramatically while I was at ShipBob. My immigration status also evolved.

ShipBob applied for and got me an H-1B visa, which made me eligible to work in the U.S.

But when I got accepted to Y Combinator on my sixth application, I knew I needed an alternative: If I left ShipBob to run Preflight, I would lose my H-1B and my ability to work in the U.S.

This kind of conundrum is all too familiar to most startup founders: There’s no new opportunity without a new challenge to accompany it.

So I did what any founder would do: I focused on the positive (I’d gotten into YC!) and dedicated myself to figuring out a different way to stay in the country.

First, I tried to apply for the EB-1 visa, but the required documentation was too burdensome. I don’t think any founder could prepare for that application without several months of preparation.

Then I tried the O-1. No luck.

Dear Sophie: Can I transfer my H-1B to a startup I founded?

So I asked ShipBob if I could take an unpaid sabbatical, which would let me keep my H-1B status while I attended Y Combinator and worked on Preflight. They agreed. My brothers, who had both moved to Chicago and started working at ShipBob (you’re welcome, guys!) agreed to support me (thanks, guys!).

Finally, I had a solution that worked — but only for the time being. If Preflight was successful, I’d have to find a different way to stay in the country.

Transferring my H-1B to Preflight wouldn’t work, in part because it would require me to yield 70% to 80% ownership to my co-founder and agree that he could fire me at any time.

But there was another option I’d been reluctant to lean on: asylee status. In 2016, there was an attempted coup in Turkey (that’s the official story, anyway). I won’t get into the political details, but my family and I were supporters of the movement blamed for the attempt. As a result, we were at risk of imprisonment if we stayed in Turkey — and eligible for asylum status in the U.S.

I applied, but hoped that I’d land a work visa in the meantime, partly because asylum status can take years to get approved and partly because there was no telling whether the current administration would change the rules to make me ineligible before my status came through.

When I got accepted to Y Combinator, my asylum status was pending. When my initial sabbatical from ShipBob ran out, it was still pending. I asked for an extension and got it (thanks, ShipBob!). A few months later, I figured I could not get the visa sorted. I wanted to focus on my business and use asylum-pending status, which would give me work authorization for two years. I was therefore able to work on and take a salary from Preflight.

Putting it all together

My asylum was granted early this year, four years after applying. Getting asylee status was a big win because it meant I could realize my dream of running a business in the U.S. So I was, in some ways, at the resolution of my immigration journey — but I was just at the beginning of my journey as a founder.

Right away, I had my first experience applying all the lessons I’d learned in the last six years: We wanted to raise our first funding round. That funding would let me start taking a salary.

All told, we approached more than 100 VCs before we got a yes. But we did get that yes, and we raised a seed round of $1.2 million in September 2019.

It was a big win for Preflight, but it didn’t have the transformational power for the company I’d hoped for. That’s because, after closing our round, we didn’t focus on sales and marketing to the extent that we should have.

After several months of frustrating results, I consulted with my advisers about how to proceed. They offered me insight that seemed obvious once I had it — but that I may not have gotten on my own — which was discussing everything that’s happening internally with the investors. And the outcome was me being the CEO.

In the month and a half after I adjusted course based on my vision, I grew Preflight’s revenue 600% in just about two months.

The only constant is change

The whole startup ethos of disrupting what’s not working to improve people’s lives is based on the premise that the world is constantly changing. The global disruption caused by COVID-19 underscored that in a major way.

Founders who accept that change is inevitable and who embrace uncertainty, develop resilience for when things go wrong, and maintain a positive mental attitude about the ups and (especially) the downs of running a startup will be the ones who succeed for the long haul.

I’ve known since I was 10 that I wanted to run a company in the United States. Given the choice, I would have opted for a much smoother road to entrepreneurship. But what I’ve discovered is that the difficult immigration path I had to follow provided exactly the training I needed to succeed in the challenging role of a founder.

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Avoid these common financial mistakes so your startup doesn’t die on the vine

Published August 5, 2021
Swapnil Shinde
Contributor

Swapnil Shinde is the co-founder and CEO of Zeni, the first AI-powered finance concierge for startups.

The startup world can be a rollercoaster. While investment continues to pour in — with both founders and investors looking for the next unicorn — the reality is that 90% of startups fail, with over half of those going under in the first three years.

I’ve founded two companies that I grew and sold (Mezi and Dhingana). I encountered many of the issues that new founders face, learned on the job, and thankfully persevered. Using the knowledge that I acquired in my previous companies, I’ve founded a third — Zeni — to try and help founders make more informed, sustainable financial decisions.

For many founders, a transformative idea and initial outside investment doesn’t translate into understanding the underlying financial complexities of running a business.

Whether you’re just wrapping your seed round, or on to Series B, avoiding these common issues is the best way to ensure that you’re set on solid ground and free to focus on your vision.

Why most startups fail

Startups go under for a variety of reasons. Some fail to achieve product-market fit in a scalable way. Many others simply run out of money. While the above two reasons are often cited as the two primary reasons for startup failure, they’re also related. If you don’t solve a market problem and don’t generate customers, you’re eventually going to run out of money.

Unfortunately, many of the startups that fail shouldn’t. They’re led by bright entrepreneurs with a great idea. But for many founders, a transformative idea and initial outside investment doesn’t translate into understanding the underlying financial complexities of running a business.

When you break down the various complexities founders face in understanding business finances, there are three primary hurdles they face:

  1. Fragmentation of financial systems.
  2. Time-consuming manual tasks.
  3. Lack of real-time financial insights.

All of the above issues put increased workload and strain on founders, which can lead to burnout. Owners, on average, spend around 40% of their working hours on tasks like hiring, HR and payroll. While hiring is integral to a founders’ day-to-day role, other administrative tasks related to finance, HR and payroll distract founders from focusing on their overall vision and goals.

The good news is that by being aware of the above issues, you can solve them and eliminate the consequences of burnout, distraction and, ultimately, failure. Let’s talk about how.

Consolidate fragmentation

The financial decision-making and tasks of most startups start and stop with the founder. This means that bookkeeping, bill paying, invoicing, financial projections, employee payments and taxes all run into a bottleneck. Even worse, each of these functions requires another employee, vendor or third-party expert — finance firms, admins, CFOs, CPA firms — each using its own software and applications to accomplish their goals.

Each of these parties is reporting back up to the founder, who is then in charge of making sense of it all and disseminating the information to the entities that need it. This means that not only is everything slower, but often things fall through the cracks, as communication can become a serious issue.

Worse still, this creates cash flow problems, as bills go unpaid, invoices go unsent, and important financial documents are delayed. I’ve seen revenue go unreported and invoices unsent and uncollectable due to the fragmentation-bottleneck system most founders experience.

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