Category: Tech news

Extra Crunch Live is off to a great start this year.

Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt taught us how to nail the narrative. Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque showed us how valuable a simple pitch deck can be. And yesterday, Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig discussed the challenges of pricing and packaging your product. Next week, we’ll sit down with Bain Capital Ventures’ Matt Harris and Justworks’ Isaac Oats.

For those of you who followed the series last year, Extra Crunch Live is a brand new beast in 2021. We take a look at early-stage funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, and those same tech leaders go through your pitch decks and give feedback and advice. Every single Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST!

Extra Crunch Live is available for EC members only. It is but one of many reasons to join Extra Crunch, including but not limited to investor surveys, market maps and guest posts from proven thought leaders. Hit up this link to get started.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the March slate for Extra Crunch Live. (Registration info for these events is at the bottom of the post.)

Sarah Kunst (Cleo Capital) + Julia Collins (Planet FWD)

March 10, 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST

Julia Collins built a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics-focused pizza startup. Her latest venture, Planet FWD, has raised $2.7 million for climate-friendly food. Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital, invested in the round, adding Planet FWD to a portfolio that includes mmhmm, Lunchclub, StyleSeat and more. Hear why they chose one another, what matters most in the relationship between an investor and a founder, and get their live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks.

Emmalyn Shaw (Flourish Ventures) + Adam Roseman (Steady)

March 17, 12 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. EDT

Emmalyn Shaw co-manages a $500 million fintech fund at Flourish Capital, with portfolio companies that include Brigit, Chime, Clerkie, Cushion, EarnUp, Kin, Propel, and SeedFi. She also led the Series A deal for Steady, founded by Adam Roseman, back in 2018. Hear from Emmalyn and Adam about how they came together, what it takes to get funding and be successful in the fintech space, and get their live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks.

Navin Chaddha (Mayfield) + Manish Chandra (Poshmark)

March 24, 12 p.m. PDT/3 p.m. EDT

Poshmark raised upward of $150 million before filing to go public in 2019. Today, it has a market cap north of $5 billion. Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha led the company’s Series A all the way back in 2011, back when Poshmark was called Gosh Posh. Hear Chaddha and Poshmark founder Manish Chandra discuss a decade of growth, and walk us through how they came together more than 10 years ago. Then the duo will take a look at pitch decks submitted by audience members.

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is available for EC members only. It is but one of the many reasons to join Extra Crunch, including but not limited to Investor Surveys, Market Maps and the EC Perks Program. Interested? Hit up this link to get started.

Register for the March episodes of Extra Crunch Live below.

See you there!

Google announced today the Apple TV+ streaming service has now arrived on the Google TV platform, starting with Chromecast with Google TV. It will also become available on Google TVs from both Sony and TCL, with expansions to other Android TV-powered devices in the months to come, Google says.

Google TV was introduced last September as the new way Google will refer to its interface for Chromecast, where it combines streaming services, live TV via YouTube TV and other Google offerings, into one user interface — making it more competitive with similar offerings from Apple and Amazon. Today, the platform supports a wide range of top streaming services, like Disney+, Netflix, HBO Max, Peacock, Prime Video, CBS All Access, Hulu, Soing and others, including, of course, YouTube.

With the added support for Apple TV+, users who already have subscriptions will be able to tune into its original programming, which includes movies, documentaries and series like “Ted Lasso,” “For All Mankind,” “Servant,” “The Morning Show,” “Dickinson” and others. The app also provides access to the user’s library of movies and shows purchased from Apple, recommendations, and supports Family Sharing. The latter allows up to six family members to share a subscription to Apple TV+ and Apple TV channels.

Following the app’s launch on Google TV, users in the U.S. will be able to browse Apple’s Originals in Google TV’s personalized recommendations and surface its content in search results. Users can also ask Google Assistant to open the Apple TV app or they can request an Apple Original title by name. And they’ll be able to add Apple TV+ programming to the Google TV Watchlist. Google says these features will arrive in the “coming months,” however, instead of at launch.

The launch makes Google TV one of the last of the major streaming device platforms to support Apple’s streaming service, which is otherwise broadly available.

Apple TV+ debuted in November 2019 for Apple customers, and later rolled out to non-Apple platforms including, that same year, Roku devices and Amazon’s Fire TV platform. Today, it’s also now available across a variety of smart TVs by Samsung, LG, Vizio and Sony; gaming consoles including PlayStation (PS4 & PS5) and Xbox (One, Series X, Series S); and via the web.

From the chemical refineries that line the Gulf Coast to oilfields of West Texas, heavy industry has always been a big part of the economy in the Lone Star State.

Now, as venture capital moves in to the state as part of an exodus from California, a new fund is combining Texas’ industrial past with its high technology future.

That fund is Ironspring Ventures, which has closed its first investment vehicle with $61 million nearly two years after it launched its fundraising efforts.

The fruit of a partnership between Adam Bridgman and Peter J. Holt, the co-founders of an earlier investment vehicle called Holt Ventures, and Ty Findley, a former investor at G.E. Ventures and the Pritzker Group, the firm’s mission is to “accelerate digital adoption across legacy heavy industries,” according to Bridgman.

Each member of the Ironspring team has a long history with industrial technologies and deep roots in the Texas economy. Findley, a managing partner, grew up “in the middle of nowhere in East Texas” but comes from a family of entrepreneurs who built businesses along the Texas and Louisiana border.

“I joined up with our other co-founder and managing partner, Peter Holt,” said Bridgman. “That was really step one for us pursuing this broader mission of investing in legacy industry at the early stage of digital innovation. We were fortunate to find a strong cultural alignment and rare experience with Ty [Findley]. After co-investing over a period of time we got to know each other very well. We joined forces and it’s been a nice journey over the last year-and-a-half of formally launching and formally closing the fund in December.”

The first deal that the three men invested in together was Augmentir, a service providing information and support for remote workers. “Everything comes back to these words ‘digital industrial’ for us,” said Findley. “There’s this massive gap where people forget that almost the majority of GDP in this country is manufacturing.”

So far, Ironspring has invested in four portfolio companies, Mercado, which is developing a service to improve the import process; Icon Build, a company developing 3-D printing tools and technologies for the building industry;  FastRadius, which brings design tools and services for prototyping and industrial design; and GoContractor, a safety and compliance management service.

The firm’s average check size is around $2.5 million and investments will range from $1 million on the low end to $4 million on the high end, according to the firm’s partners. That means looking for what the firm called “post-seed” deals.

And the firm is looking for technology that is transforming how businesses design products, build them, and provide services and operate across the wide range of industrial output.

“We’re trying to organize around those themes,” said Bridgman. 

Parler returns from limbo, Uber lobbies Europe and we have more details about Notion’s outage. This is your Daily Crunch for February 15, 2021.

The big story: Parler is back online

The social network known for its far-right user base was dropped by infrastructure provider Amazon Web Services for posts advocating violence. Now it’s back online, albeit with all old posts and content removed for reasons that are currently unclear.

The company says the new site is built with “sustainable, independent technology and not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations.”

In addition to a new website, Parler also has a new chief executive. Following the ouster of John Matze, Parler is now led by interim CEO Mark Meckler, founder of the Tea Party Patriots — one of the groups involved in organizing the January 6 pro-Trump demonstration that turned into a storming of the U.S. Capitol.

The tech giants

Uber lobbies for ‘Prop 22’-style gig work standards in the EU — The ride-hailing and on-demand food delivery giant has published a white paper in which it lobbies European policymakers for what it describes as a “new standard” for platform work.

GM unveils a refreshed Chevy Bolt EV and its bigger, yet compact crossover sibling — The new vehicles share much of the same DNA but have their own distinct differences.

Google slapped in France over misleading hotel star ratings — Google has agreed to pay a €1.1 million fine over misleading star ratings for hotels.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Notion’s hours-long outage was caused by phishing complaints — With the company’s domain offline, users were unable to access their files, calendars and documents.

Delivery company goPuff is in talks to acquire the UK’s Fancy — Fancy has a strikingly similar model to its potential buyer, leading some to describe it as a mini goPuff.

Private equity firm Marlin snatches up e-commerce optimization platform Lengow — For merchants using Lengow, the platform is the glue that makes all the moving parts of e-commerce stick together.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Investors’ SPAC push could revamp the private market money game — Is this venture capital’s natural evolution?

From dorm rooms to board rooms: How universities are promoting entrepreneurship — Earlier this year, 15 top U.S. universities joined forces to launch a one-stop shop where corporations and startups can discover and license patents.

The Series A deal that launched a near unicorn: Meet Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig — Their episode of Extra Crunch Live streams on Wednesday at 3 p.m. EST/12 p.m. PST.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Examining the ‘pipeline problem’ — An AI Now researcher analyzes the history behind a common excuse for the lack of diversity in tech.

India lifts restrictions on mapping and surveying to help local firms — The Indian government said local firms will no longer need a license or other permission to collect, generate, store and share geospatial data of the country.

Meet the Black Female Founders from TC Include at TC Sessions: Justice 2021 — Don’t miss your chance to meet some founders currently participating in TechCrunch’s Include program.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

In an earlier article, I wrote about how and when to build go-to-market teams at deep tech companies. There, I noted that it is more important for growth hires at deep tech companies to have functional expertise than industry expertise.

But how do deep tech companies connect and cultivate strong relationships with talented nontechnical growth people outside of their industry? In this article, I answer this question, articulating exactly how to:

• Write role descriptions that entice talented growth people.
• Create company marketing materials that brands your startup well to talent.
• Craft thoughtful end-to-end candidate experiences for growth talent.
• Close top growth candidates.

Write a job description that explains how you operate

Underscore the autonomy. Incredible growth people are independent and creative and are drawn to environments that explicitly value these traits. Growth talent wants to know that they have room to experiment, fail and iterate with the support and trust of their company. Highlight the creative agency you give to your growth team. Paint the role as one of managing a subset of the startup and its initiatives.

Show you are ready for a growth marketer. Do not expect your growth person to be a panacea for the company. Growth people work cross-functionally, but there are boundaries where the growth role starts and ends. Growth people cannot sell a product that is not ready. Growth people cannot fix product bugs. Growth people cannot replace excellent customer service. Ensure your role description is clear on what the growth person would do and what they would lean on other teams for. Demonstrate that you have a team structure in place where a growth marketer could fit in and thrive.

Articulate your talent needs. Growth is a broad category. Some growth marketers are more creative. Others are more quantitative. Some have more industry experience. Others have more functional experience. Be clear on what type of growth marketer you need and how this person’s talents would complement those of the existing team.

Use marketing to share your history and chart the future

Generate excitement and establish credibility. People can naturally be skeptical about new technologies and younger companies. Do anything you can to ameliorate these concerns. Link to relevant news articles from well-known publications and thought leaders in your industry. Incorporate customer testimonials that speak to the transformative impact your product creates. Name drop well-known advisors, investors and team members.

Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, renowned early Twitter execs who served as the company’s CEO and its chief operating officer, respectively, have quietly closed a second venture fund just one-and-a-half years after disclosing they’d secured $135 million for a debut fund for their firm, 01 Advisors.

According to an SEC filing, they wrapped up their second fund late last week with $325 million in capital commitments from 81 investors.

We’ve reached out to the firm and hope to share more soon. In the meantime, its strategy appears to center around more concentrated bets in both the consumer and enterprise spheres — with checks going out both early and sometimes later in a startup’s trajectory.

Among these recipients is Literati, a nearly five-year-old, Austin, Texas-based book club subscription service that raised $40 million in Series B funding in January led by Felicis Ventures; Tipalti, a 10-year-old, Israel-based company that develops automation software for global payments and raised $150 million in Series E funding at a $2 billion valuation back in October (01 Advisors joined as a follow-on investor); and SpotOn Transact, a payments software startup that raised $50 million in Series B funding last year led by 01 Advisors. (Worth noting: the company raised a $60 million Series C round just six months later. DST Global led that next round, with participation from 01 Advisors and others.)

In fact, numerous of the outfit’s investments have hit the gas during the pandemic, including the San Francisco-based mental health and wellness platform Modern Health, which last week announced $74 million in Series D funding just a few months after announcing a $51 million Series C funding. The startup, reportedly now valued at $1.17 billion, has raised roughly $170 million to date; 01 Advisors has joined the last two rounds.

01 Advisors has itself largely remained the same size since it publicly launched in August 2019, years after Costolo and Bain began investing in startups on an individual and joint basis.

In addition to Costolo and Bain and Dave Rivinus, who spent four years in corporate development and finance at Twitter and is also a founding partner of the firm, Kelly Kovacs is a partner at the firm. Kovacs was Costolo’s chief of staff at Twitter before joining Color Genomics in a similar capacity, then founding her own startup meant to empower executive assistants. She joined 01 Advisors full time in 2018.

Lacey Behrens has meanwhile the firm’s operations manager since 2019.

01 Advisors also recently listed a position for a senior associate.

Costolo, who great up in Troy, Michigan, found himself in the headlines in October when he fired off an incendiary tweet about the decision of Coinbase founder and CEO Brian Armstrong to publicly discourage employee activism and political discussions at work, a stance that drove at least 60 employees to take a severance package offered to them afterward.

While some business leaders were quick to praise Armstrong, Costolo wasn’t shy about hiding his disgust over Armstrong’s position. “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution,” he tweeted. “I’ll happily provide video commentary.”

Bain, a long-suffering-yet-cautiously-optimistic Browns fan, has meanwhile been busy, too. In addition to scouting for startups, he now sits on the public company boards of both the real estate tech outfit Opendoor and the space tourism company Virgin Galactic.

01 Advisors served as a co-sponsor of the SPAC that took Opendoor public, along with investor Chamath Palihapitiya. Palihapitiya also spun up the blank-check company that took public Virgin Galactic, and the company invited Bain to be a director as that merger was coming together.

Earlier bets by the pair — as angel investors — include the corporate travel site TripActions and the connected fitness startup Tonal.

Nature’s Fynd, the food technology company with a new food offering cultivated from fungus found in the wilds of Yellowstone National Park, is releasing its first products for pre-order. 

Pitching both a non-dairy cream cheese and meatless breakfast patties, Nature’s Fynd had managed to attract some serious investors, including Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management and the Bill Gates-backed investment fund, Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company most recently raised $80 million in its last round of funding.

The company is part of a wave of innovative products using a range of bacteria, fungi and plants to create meat alternatives. Last year, companies developing meat alternatives raised well over $1 billion in financing and investors show no sign of slowing down in their commitments to the industry.

The commercial launch of the Fy Breakfast Bundle, vegan and non-GMO alternatives to traditional breakfast products, will be the first commercial test for Nature’s Fynd as it looks to go to market.

These limited release bundles are available for $14.99 plus shipping, according to the company, and the products will be available across the 48 contiguous U.S. states.

The company’s product is grown using fermentation technology to cultivate the bacteria that Nature’s Fynd’s chief scientists discovered during their research into organisms around Yellowstone National Park.

Nature’s Fynd touts the resilience and efficiency of the microbe it discovered, leading to a more sustainable production process that uses a fraction of the land, water and energy resources that traditional animal husbandry requires, the company said.

“We choose optimism so that we can find a way to do more with less. Using our novel liquid-air surface fermentation technology, we’re creating a range of sustainable foods that nourish our bodies and nurture our planet for generations to come. We’re really excited to be at the beginning of this journey with the launch of our first-ever limited release of Fy Breakfast Bundles,” said Nature’s Fynd CEO Thomas Jonas. “We’ve deeply studied our consumers and we know that Fy’s unique versatility, which delivers great tasting meat and dairy alternatives for every occasion, is highly appealing.” 

Nature’s Fynd chief executive, Thomas Jonas. Image Credit: Nature’s Fynd

A French security agency warns that the destructively minded group has exploited an IT monitoring tool from Centreon.

Earlier this year, 15 top U.S. universities joined forces to launch a one-stop shop where corporations and startups can discover and license patents.

Working in concert, Brown, Caltech, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, the University of Illinois, Michigan, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton, SUNY Binghamton, UC Berkeley, UCLA, the University of Southern California and Yale formed The University Technology Licensing Program LLC (UTLP)  to create a centralized pool of licensable IP.

The UTLP arrives as more higher education institutions are beefing up their investment in the entrepreneurial pipeline to help more students launch startups after graduation. In some instances, schools serve as accelerators, providing students with resources and helping them connect with VCs to find seed funding.

To get a better look at the new program and more insight into the university-to-startup pipeline, we spoke to:

• Jennifer Dyer, executive director, USC Stevens Center for Innovation
• Orin Herskowitz, senior vice president of Intellectual Property and Tech Transfer, Columbia University
• Marc De Leeuw, partner, Sullivan & Cromwell LLP

The UTLP initiative seems to be more focused on licensing IP to existing companies, rather than accelerating university startups.

Orin Herskowitz: The UTLP effort is really much more about licensing to the somewhat broken interface between universities and very large companies in the tech space when it comes to licensing intellectual property. But I know USC and Columbia and many of our peers, especially over the last three to seven years, have pivoted in a massive way to helping our faculty students fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams and launch startups around this exciting university technology.

The word “broken” jumped out at me. Historically, what has the problem been?

Orin Herskowitz: Universities have traditionally been a source of amazing, life-saving and life-improving inventions, for decades. There’s been a ton of new drugs and medical devices, cybersecurity improvements, and search engines, like Google, that have come out of universities over the years, that were federally funded and developed in the labs, and then licensed to either a startup or the industry. And that’s been great. At least over the last couple of decades, that interface has worked really, really well in some fields, but less well in others. So, in the life sciences, in energy, in advanced materials, in those industries, a lot of the time, these innovations that end up having a huge impact on society are based really on one or two or three core eureka moments. There’s like one or two patents that underlie an enormous new cancer drug, for instance.

In the tech space though, it’s a very different dynamic because, a lot of the time, these inventions are incredibly important and they do launch a whole new generation of products and services, but the problem is that a new device, like an iPhone, or a piece of software, might rely on dozens or even hundreds of innovations from across many different universities, as opposed to just one or two.

Obviously not every breakthrough necessitates the launch of a startup. I assume that the vast majority of these things that are coming would make the most sense to work with existing companies.

Jennifer Dyer: We’ve all had this renewed focus on innovation within the university and really helping our students and faculty that want to start companies, launch those companies. If you look at the space, helping educate our students that launching a company in a high-tech space may mean that they have to go out and acquire 100 different licenses, so maybe it doesn’t make sense. We’re going to be doing nonexclusive licensing, and it doesn’t preclude anyone from moving forward with this technology. This is probably the first pool for nonstandard essential patents in the high-tech space, which makes it somewhat unique. Because if you look back, most of the pools have been around standard essential patents.

The question of exclusivity is an interesting one. You wouldn’t grant exclusive rights for the right fee?