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Happs raises $4.7 million for a multicast livestream platform creator community

Published June 24, 2021

Happs, an app that lets creators stream live video simultaneously across social platforms, has raised $4.7 million in a post-seed round. The product originally began as a platform for independent journalists, but expanded its mission last year to offer tools to all online creators while connecting them through a new social network.

The funding was led by Bullpen Capital and Crosslink, Goodwater, Corazon, Rob Hayes of First Round Capital and Bangaly Kaba, previously at Instagram and Sequoia, also participated.

What sets Happs apart from some established competitors in the space is the team’s desire to not only build tools that help video creators produce professional-looking online streams, but to cultivate a kind of meta-community that brings people together from across other social media sites.

“We kind of view this as the essence of what the creator economy is all about,” Happs CEO Mark Goldman told TechCrunch. “The idea of locking creators into an individual platform is a very traditional way of thinking about content creation.”

Happs app multistreaming

Like Goldman, the other co-founders, David Neuman and Drew Shepard, come from the media world. Goldman was the founding COO of Current TV, an experimental TV channel that dabbled in user-generated content and eventually sold to Al Jazeera in 2013.

“The whole idea was to democratize media and open it up,” Goldman said of his time working on Current TV, which he connects directly to his interest in building Happs. “[We] loved the creativity unleashed by that.”

Online creators tend to be siloed within the app where they’ve built the biggest community, but Happs wants to empower them to reach as many followers as possible in a platform-agnostic way. For creators, the appeal with multistreaming is maximizing reach while making content efficiently. There’s a risk of alienating YouTube followers at the expense of your Twitch community if you don’t play your cards right, but some savvy content creators have turned toward the model to grow their audiences.

Happs connects people across platforms in a few ways. For one, Happs users can broadcast live to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Twitch simultaneously. The app also collects live comments from all supported social media sites and beams them into its own interface where they appear in a continuous cross-platform stream.

The integrated comment feature is nice built-in option for anyone who’s straddled comments across multiple devices simultaneously while livestreaming, which is no easy feat. When you’re streaming live you can feature a comment so that followers can see it on the screen no matter what platform they’re watching on.

Other companies in the space like OBS, Streamlabs and Restream are focused on the tools part of the equation, offering power users a useful backend for pushing out multi-streamed live video. Streamyard also offers multistreaming to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other platforms through a simple browser interface.

Restream raises $50M to help creators program and stream to multiple platforms

Unlike those services, Happs feels more like a social network, with familiar features like user profile photos, follower counts and a feed next to a “go live” button. Anyone can use the multi-streaming platform through its iOS or Android apps or a web interface, whether they’re a creator signing up for the tools or a fan looking to support the content they love.

Happs lacks some of its competitors’ bells and whistles, stuff like fancy customized graphics and lower-thirds, but has a few interesting tricks of its own. While streaming live on Happs, you can invite someone else on the app to join your feed for a real-time collaboration. The social networking elements are meant to encourage cross-platform creativity, so a YouTuber and a Twitch personality could hang out together and boost both of their reaches, all while streaming to a bunch of other apps.

Happs also offers users monetization tools from the get-go, with no requirements before they can start making money. That speaks to the app’s appeal for creators who might be less established or just starting out. Happs could be a much harder sell for a popular creator deeply invested in a platform like Twitch, which has rules against multi-streaming for most accounts that are allowed to monetize.

There are a few different ways to monetize. One lets anyone on Happs sponsor a broadcaster through regular monthly payments. The other is a one-off option that lets you chip in an award for any livestream, or to the VOD (video on demand) after the fact. The in-app currency is a virtual coin that users can buy or earn through doing stuff on the app. There are no plans for ads (yet, anyway).

The company will take 30% cut of subscription earnings, though according to Goldman they’ll be waiving those fees for an unspecified period of time to attract people to the platform.

“We raised this round to really build up product and tech team [and] to make the platform much more stable and reliable,” Goldman said. The company is looking forward to leveraging the new resources to “really go out now and get in front of creators so they know Happs exists.”

Logitech acquires popular game streaming tool Streamlabs for around $89M

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Firebolt raises $127M more for its new approach to cheaper and more efficient Big Data analytics

Published June 24, 2021

Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups that’s hoping to disrupt the disruptor is announcing a big round of funding to expand its own business.

Firebolt, which has built a new kind of cloud data warehouse that promises much more efficient, and cheaper, analytics around whatever is stored within it, is announcing a major Series B of $127 million on the heels of huge demand for its services.

The company, which only came out of stealth mode in December, is not disclosing its valuation with this round, which brings the total raised by the Israeli company to $164 million. New backers Dawn Capital and K5 Global are in this round, alongside previous backers Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Angular Ventures.

Nor is it disclosing many details about its customers at the moment. CEO and co-founder Eldad Farkash told me in an interview that most of them are U.S.-based, and that the numbers have grown from the dozen or so that were using Firebolt when it was still in stealth mode (it worked quietly for a couple of years building its product and onboarding customers before finally launching six months ago). They are all migrating from existing data warehousing solutions like Snowflake or BigQuery. In other words, its customers are already cloud-native, Big Data companies: it’s not trying to proselytize on the basic concept but work with those who are already in a specific place as a business.

“If you’re not using Snowflake or BigQuery already, we prefer you come back to us later,” he said. Judging by the size and quick succession of the round, that focus is paying off.

The challenge that Firebolt set out to tackle is that while data warehousing has become a key way for enterprises to analyze, update and manage their big data stores — after all, your data is only as good as the tools you have to parse it and keep it secure — typically data warehousing solutions are not efficient, and they can cost a lot of money to maintain.

How to ensure data quality in the era of Big Data

The challenge was seen firsthand by the three founders of Firebolt, Farkash (CEO), Saar Bitner (COO) and Ariel Yaroshevich (CTO) when they were at a previous company, the business intelligence powerhouse Sisense, where respectively they were one of its co-founders and two members of its founding team. At Sisense, the company continually came up against an issue: When you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power their analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity. And that started to become very expensive.

Firebolt set out to fix that by taking a different approach, rearchitecting the concept. As Farkash sees it, while data warehousing has indeed been a big breakthrough in Big Data, it has started to feel like a dated solution as data troves have grown.

“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’” he told me back in December. Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake are fitting answers for that issue, he believes, but “we see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”

The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses with a SQL-based system that works on academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity. And lower costs.

Fast forward to today, and the company says the concept is gaining a lot of traction with engineers and developers in industries like business intelligence, customer-facing services that need to parse a lot of information to serve information to users in real time and back-end data applications. That is proving out what investors suspected would be a shift before the startup even launched, stealthily or otherwise.

“I’ve been an investor at Firebolt since their Series A round and before they had any paying customers,” said Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. “What had me invest in Firebolt is mostly the team. A group of highly experienced executives mostly from the big data space who understand the market very well, and the pain organizations are experiencing. In addition, after speaking to a few of my portfolio companies and Firebolt’s initial design partners, it was clear that Firebolt is solving a major pain, so all in all, it was a fairly easy decision. The market in which Firebolt operates is huge if you consider the valuations of Snowflake and Databricks. Even more importantly, it is growing rapidly as the migration from on-premise data warehouse platforms to the cloud is gaining momentum, and as more and more companies rely on data for their operations and are building data applications.”

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This QR code startup just raised $5 million co-led by Coatue and Seven Seven Six

Published June 23, 2021

Amazon revolutionized one-click shopping, and it has a nearly $2 trillion market cap to show for the effort.

Now, a 10-person startup founded by JD Maresco, who previously cofounded the public safety app Citizen, says it plans to make it a lot easier for retailers who sell directly to their customers to make re-ordering their products just as fast and simple through its QR codes. Indeed, Maresco’s new startup, Batch, is already working with numerous products and brands that use Shopify, promising their customers “one-tap checkout” when it’s time to reorder an item as long as the retailer has slapped one of Batch’s codes on their items or incorporated the codes directly into their packaging.

For the moment, New York-based Batch is wholly reliant on Apple’s App Clip technology, which produces a lightweight version of an app to save people from having to download and install it before using it. (Users can instead load just a small part of an app on demand, and when they’re done, the App Clip disappears.)

But Maresco — whose company just raised $5 million in seed funding co-led by Coatue and Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six, with participation from Weekend Fund, Shrug Capital, and the Chainsmokers, among others — says Batch will eventually work on both iOS and Android phones. We talked with him yesterday to learn more about its ambitions to make the physical world “instantly shoppable.” Our chat has been edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: Citizen and Batch are very different companies. Is there a unifying thread?

JM: I’ve spent a good portion of my career, trying to change the way people think about and interact with their physical environment. With Citizen, we were questioning why everyone doesn’t have immediate access to information about what the police are doing in our neighborhoods. With Batch, we’re asking a simpler question but something that matters to me as a consumer: Why isn’t it easier for me to get more of a product I love and use?

With subscriptions in general, I’ve found myself constantly frustrated because every few weeks I’m emailing to either pause a subscription,  or restart it. I wanted an easier way to use my phone to reorder in 10 seconds on the spot. Our phones are capable of much more than we put them to use for and, so we set out to tackle that problem.

iOS 14’s App Clips will save you from always needing ‘an app for that’

TC: Right now, Batch integrates with Shopify alone, correct?

JM: We have a Shopify plugin that brands can connect into the Batch platform, and then we integrate the experience, all the way from the physical world wherever this QR code lives, through the purchase experience on the mobile side of things into their fulfillment on the back end. But we’re also expanding to other e-commerce platforms.

TC: And Batch takes a per-transaction fee from every item that’s purchased using your codes?

JM: We’re developing our pricing model over time, but currently we’re taking a service percentage-based fee.

TC: How are you getting brands to partner with you?

JM: Brands are starting to wake up to this idea that they can actually create a new retail channel off their physical packaging, where a customer can effectively shop throughout their home or their place of work or anywhere where they interact with these products the moment they run out of an item. So we’ve been able to spend time with dozens of brands now, and work with them to actually reengineer their packaging and say, ‘Let’s put QR codes front and center and figure out how to make this a really important customer touchpoint.’

TC: How many brands are using the codes currently?

JM: We’re launching dozens of brands this summer. We’ve had overwhelming demand, to be honest, and we haven’t really even fully launched yet.

TC: These are physical codes that you’re sending off to your retail partners — stickers, magnets. Are you also creating digital QR codes?

JM: We have customers that are integrating QR codes into out-of-home advertisements, into direct mail, into T shirts, into promotional vans, so we’re not just limited to packaging. There’s a wide range of places that you can integrate QR codes for your customers.

PayPal and Venmo QR Code checkout is coming to 8,200 CVS stores in Q4

TC: It’s interesting that Coatue led your round. We’ve seen the firm delve more into early-stage deals but a seed round seems anomalous. How did you connect with the firm?

JM: We met during the seed process. They reached out to me and I developed a relationship with Andy Chen and Matt Mazzeo and it was a great opportunity to to work with their platform — the way they support the go-to-market motion around B2B companies; they have a great data platform. Alexis [Ohanian’s] experience in the consumer space was really appealing, too.

TC: Your company makes sense, but I wonder what’s special about these codes. What’s to prevent countless other startups from doing what you’re doing?

JM: QR codes are all over the place. The product we’re building makes it really easy for brands to create high converting shopping experiences and a native mobile interface. It’s a combination of our Shopify integration and our native product design experience and the relationships we have with these brands and how we help them with their packaging that’s not something you can spin up overnight.

TC: I have to ask about Citizen, which was in the headlines recently for all the wrong reasons. Is there anything you want to say about the company or the app or some of that recent coverage?

JM:  I’m not going to comment on the recent press, but I continue to be proud of what the company is continuing to do to help communities stay safe and understand what police and first responders are doing in their neighborhoods.

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6 strategies for running more effective startup board meetings

Published June 23, 2021
Sylvain Kalache
Contributor

Sylvain Kalache is the co-founder of Holberton, an edtech company training digital talent in more than 10 countries. An entrepreneur and software engineer, he has worked in the tech industry for more than a decade. Part of the team that led SlideShare to be acquired by LinkedIn, he has written for CIO and VentureBeat.
More posts by this contributor

For many companies in the United States, a board of directors is a fact of doing business. While sole proprietorships and LLCs are not obligated to have one, C and S corporations must. The board’s goal is to ensure the best is done for the company and its shareholders. While many entrepreneurs see board meetings as a chore, they can be a powerful tool if used well.

Communicate often

While board meetings usually happen quarterly, it’s good practice to keep the conversation going in between them. Sending a monthly email update to the board offers multiple advantages:

  • Shorter updates: Business professionals’ attention spans are shrinking. Shorter content is easier to digest, and therefore more likely to be read.
  • Timely feedback: A quarter can be a long time, especially for young startups or during challenging times. The monthly format allows the company to receive help or feedback from the board earlier. In business, speed of iteration is key!
  • Keep them posted: Keeping directors up to date will avoid lengthy updates during board meetings, ensuring focus remains on strategic conversations.

Reach out when in need

When meeting online, founders should pause often and regularly ask if there are questions — even if moments of silence feel awkward at times — to give directors a better opportunity to speak up.

Board members can also be solicited on an ad-hoc basis — founders should keep in mind that board members are here to help the company. If you have doubts about a project decision or want a second, informed opinion, reach out to a board member. This is especially true of directors who have expertise on a specific topic. A quick five-minute call can be a game changer.

Being a founder can be a lonely experience because it can be difficult to discuss sensitive matters with the team. Board members should sign nondisclosure agreements, allowing entrepreneurs to share confidential information and get a different perspective on things.

Discuss goals for the next fundraising event

Founders should make sure to regularly discuss business goals to ensure they reach their next round of funding. Because the industry landscape or economy evolved or the competition stepped up, investors may reconsider their expectations to further fund the company.

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Before an exit, founders must get their employment law ducks in a row

Published June 23, 2021
Rob Hudock
Contributor

Rob Hudock is an experienced litigator focusing his 20-plus years in practice on helping companies recruit the best talent available while avoiding distracting workplace issues or lawsuits.

Successfully selling a business has much to do with timing. For many entrepreneurs, it’s the high-stakes end game where they cash out and reap the rewards of their efforts. At a certain point, when both buyers and sellers are working hard to close the deal, negotiations can move very quickly. If you’re the seller, this is not the time to discover unanticipated problems in your business.

Distressingly often, these problems are related to employment. Inattention to employment issues can have a significant impact on deals — from preventing closings and reducing the deal value to altering the deal terms or significantly limiting the pool of potential buyers.

Poor compliance, lack of policies or flawed practices mean potential liability exposure or expensive policy revisions and employee retraining — all of which can devalue your business.

Fortunately, such issues typically can be resolved well in advance with a little forethought and legal guidance. It’s important to get your employment ducks in a row long before you start planning your exit.

What follows is an overview of the three main categories of employment issues that can derail or delay a sale. For the most part, these assume an asset sale, but may vary in the case of a stock sale.

Compliance

By far the most significant problem is general employment law compliance. This means creating strong employment policies and practices that are documented, in place and operating long before you pursue a deal. The key area is wage and hour issues — timekeeping and payroll practices, worker classification issues (employee vs. independent contractor; exempt vs. non-exempt), meal and rest periods, PTO policies and payouts at termination.

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PairTree speeds adoption process with an online, self-matching platform and $2.25M seed

Published June 23, 2021

Making the choice to adopt, or to find an adopting family, is a legally complex, emotionally taxing, expensive and time-consuming process. PairTree aims to make one part at least considerably easier and faster with its online matching platform where expectant mothers and hopeful adopters can find each other without the facilitation of an agency or other organization. The company has just raised a $2.25 million seed round, a rarity in the industry.

The path to adoption is different for everyone, but there are generally some things they have in common: Once the process is started, it can take upwards of $50,000 and over a year-and-a-half to organize a match. While some of this comprises the ordinary legal hurdles involved in any adoption, a big part of it is simply that there are limited opportunities for adoption, and compatibility isn’t guaranteed. As many people considering adoption are doing so on the heels of unsuccessful fertility treatment, it can be a lot to take on and a dispiriting wait.

Erin Quick, CEO and co-founder (with CTO Justin Friberg) of PairTree, said that the modern adoption landscape is marked by the fact that nearly 95 percent of adoptions are open, meaning there is ongoing contact between a biological mother and adopting family.

“They’ll be working together forever, and that makes finding a highly compatible match that much more important,” Quick, herself a happy adopter, told TechCrunch in an interview. But because of the way adoption is generally done — through agencies licensed by states — there are limitations on how far anyone involved can reach.

“It’s so bound by geography,” she said. “It’s regulated at the state level and has been facilitated by state level, not because of state laws — there’s no rule saying you can’t adopt out of state — but because the facilitators are small nonprofits. They bind themselves to their geographic region because that’s what they can serve. We’re building a platform that makes what people are already doing much easier and more efficient.”

That platform is in many ways very much like a dating app, though of course the comparison is not exact and does not reflect the gravity of choosing to adopt. But like in the dating world, in adoption you have a cloud of people looking to connect over something highly dependent on personality and individual needs.

Screenshot of the way expectant mothers can filter and search for compatible adopting families.

PairTree onboards both expectant mothers and adopters with personality tests — not the light-hearted stuff of OkCupid but a broader, more consequential set of Jungian archetypes that signal a person’s high-level priorities in life. Think “wants to travel and learn” versus “wants to provide and nurture” (not that these are necessarily incompatible) — they serve as important indicators of preferences that might not be so easily summarized with a series of checkboxes. That’s not the only criterion, of course. Other demographic and personal details are also collected.

The adopters are added to a pool through which expectant mothers can sift and, if desired, contact (in this, Quick suggested, PairTree mirrors Bumble, where women must message first). PairTree also does basic due diligence stuff like identify verification and confirmation of other important steps like home studies.

If a likely match is found, all the relevant information is passed to the adoption facilitator, who will be coordinating the other legal and financial steps. PairTree isn’t looking to replace these agencies — in fact Quick said that they have been huge proponents of the platform, since it can shorten wait times and improve outcomes. She said based on their existing successful adoptions that the wait can be cut by half or even two-thirds, and thus the cost (which involves recurring payments as the agency searches and does the legal work) by a similar amount.

It’s a new era for fertility tech

“These are small nonprofits; they don’t have a lot of tech chops. When we launched we went to attorneys first, actually, and we were surprised when agencies started reaching out,” she explained.

Agencies have been referring their adopters to PairTree, which has led to a lot of early traction, Quick said. And importantly, they’ve seen great diversity in their early success.

“Adoption has historically been denied by faith-based systems — LGBTQ families and single women have been subject to discrimination,” she noted. And in fact just last week a Supreme Court decision held up the right of religious adoption agencies to deny services to same-sex couples. Quick was proud to say that they have already facilitated adoptions by same-sex couples and single parents.

The company will also set aside 5 percent of its net profits, which hopefully will manifest in volume, for the Lifetime Healing Foundation, which offers counseling and support to birth mothers who have gone though the adoption process.

The $2.25 million seed round was led by Urban Innovation Fund, with Founder Collective, Female Founders Alliance and Techstars participating. It will surprise few to hear that adoption is not a particularly hot industry for venture capital, but rising interest and investment in fertility tech may have shed light on opportunities in adjacent spaces. Adoption is one where significant improvements can be enabled by technology, meaning startups can grow fast while having a positive impact.

The company plans to use the money to expand its product portfolio, pursue more partnerships, and perhaps most importantly for its users, build a native mobile app, since 90 percent of the service’s viewership is mobile.

“We’re grateful to our expert and diverse group of investors who share our vision that adoption should be a viable path to parenting for more people,” said Quick in the release announcing the raise. “Like us, our investors believe in the importance of supporting Biological and Adopting Families along with the Adoptees, because adoption is not a single transaction but a journey they’re taking over the course of a lifetime.”

Future Family raises $9M to make fertility treatments more accessible and expand its clinic network

Mate Fertility is aiming to create a franchise of fertility clinics open to everyone

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Autonomous trucking startup Embark to go public in $5.2B SPAC deal

Published June 23, 2021

Five-year old self-driving truck startup Embark Trucks Inc. said Wednesday it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp. II in a deal valued at $5.2 billion.

Embark takes a different approach to autonomous trucking: As opposed to manufacturing and operating a fleet of trucks themselves, which is the route rival TuSimple is taking, Embark offers its AV software as a service. Carriers and fleets can pay a per-mile subscription fee to access it. The company includes carriers Mesilla Valley Transportation and Bison Transport, and companies Anheuser-Busch InBev and HP Inc., among its partners.

Carriers purchase trucks with compatible hardware directly from OEMs, so Embark says it has designed its system to be “platform agnostic” across multiple components and manufacturers. The company says its software can simulate up to 1,200, 60-second scenarios per second, and make adaptive predictions using those scenarios for the behavior of other vehicles on the road.

Embark said in an investor presentation for the SPAC deal that it was targeting “driver-out,” or operating on roads without a safety driver, by 2023 and launching at a commercial scale across the American sunbelt the following year. However, Embark still has technical milestones yet to achieve, noting in the presentation that the software still needs to accomplish actions, such as interactions with emergency vehicles and responding to blown tires and other mechanical failures.

Inside Embark’s mission to make autonomous trucking a reality

Upon closing, the transaction will inject Embark with around $615 million in gross cash proceeds, including $200 million in private investment in public equity (PIPE) funding from investors, including CPP Investments, Knight-Swift Transportation, Mubadala Capital, Sequoia Capital and Tiger Global Management.

Embark also said former Department of Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao was joining its board, likely a boon for a company operating in the autonomous trucking industry, which is still only authorized for commercial deployment in 24 states.

Embark was founded in 2016 by CEO Alex Rodrigues and CTO Brandon Moak, who worked together on autonomous driving while completing engineering degrees from Canada’s University of Waterloo. After launching out of Y Combinator, the company quickly went on to raise $117 million in total funding, including a $30 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital and a $70 million Series C led by Tiger Global Management.

The transaction is anticipated to close in the second half of 2021. The company joins competitor AV trucking developer Plus in going public via a SPAC merger. TuSimple opted for a traditional initial public offering in March.

How autonomous delivery startups are navigating policy, partnerships and post-pandemic operations

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Electronic Arts buys mobile game studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion

Published June 23, 2021

Video game giant Electronic Arts is continuing to make M&A moves as it looks to bulk up its presence in the mobile gaming world.

Fresh off the $2.4 billion acquisition of Glu Mobile this past April, their biggest purchase to date, Electronic Arts announced Wednesday that they are buying Warner Bros. Games’ mobile gaming studio Playdemic for $1.4 billion in an all-cash deal. The Manchester studio is best known for its release “Golf Clash” which the studio boasts has more than 80 million downloads globally.

The rather ominously named startup is being jettisoned to its new home ahead of the $43 billion WarnerMedia-Discovery deal where the rest of the Warner Bros. Games division will live post-merger.

AT&T confirms deal to combine its WarnerMedia subsidiary with Discovery Inc in ‘pure play’ $43B deal

Electronic Arts is the second-largest Western video games company with a market cap around $40 billion. Their success has largely come from desktop and console titles, including titles in their most popular franchises like Battlefield, Star Wars and Titanfall. Mobile dominance hasn’t come easy to the company, which has spent much of the past decade or so trying to keep pace with competitors like Activision Blizzard which struck gold with its 2016 King acquisition. 

Electronic Arts has been on a studio-buying spree as of late — in 2021 they’ve announced three major acquisitions worth some $5 billion combined.

 

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Product design expert Scott Tong will join us at TC Early Stage in July

Published June 23, 2021

Thoughtful and high-quality product design is no longer optional. Gone are the days that a startup could launch with a bare-bones app or website. The demand side of the design equation has only grown — consumers are used to beautiful, intuitive products — while the supply side is struggling to keep up.

How are startups supposed to educate themselves in product design, hire the right people for those positions and think about product design as a core piece of their business?

A good starting point is an upcoming TC Early Stage: Marketing & Fundraising session with Scott Tong on July 8 & 9.

Tong was a principal designer at IDEO, a co-founder at IFTTT, head of product design at Pinterest, an EIR at IMO Ventures and is now a startup advisor at Design Fund.

When it comes to thoughtfully crafting products, and ensuring that those designs fit in line with the company’s broader short and long-term goals, there is perhaps no one better suited to show us how it’s done.

Tong joins a long list of experts in a variety of startup core competencies who will be speaking at TC Early Stage in July. That list includes Sequoia’s Mike Vernal (Product Market Fit Is All About Tempo), Coatue’s Caryn Marooney (formerly Facebook’s head of comms) and Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra (Growth Hacking). You can check out the agenda here.

The coolest part of TC Early Stage is that all sessions are designed with plenty of time for audience Q&A, so founders can get specific, tailored advice about their own business challenges.

These mini-bootcamps kick off in just two weeks so we hope you’ll be joining us at TC Early Stage— Grab your ticket here!

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