Don Mal discusses the trends in budgeting and forecasting software. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by giving our audience a little bit of context. We have talked to you before, so we’ll just link to the...

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Back in 2017 Ometria, an “AI-powered” customer marketing platform, raised $6 million in Series A funding to add to the $11 million it had already raised. Its platform is all about allowing retailers to send individually personalized marketing messages across several brand touchpoints.

Today it announced that it has raised $21 million in a Series B funding led by London-based Octopus Ventures, with existing investors Sonae IM, Summit Action, Samos and Adjuvo, as well as 10 early angel investors, making further investments. Marieke Christmann from Octopus Ventures and Eduardo Piedade from Sonae IM both join Ometria’s board.

The funding will be used to accelerate Ometria’s product development, expanding the platform’s specialist retail marketing capabilities and further innovating its AI-based technology.

Off the back of the funding round, Ometria will also be opening its first U.S.-based operation in New York.

Ometria’s schtick is that it addresses the fact that consumers will no longer tolerate the torrent of communication sent toward them that is basically irrelevant, especially as the retail environment becomes ever more competitive.

Its main competitors are spread across companies like email service providers (Emarsys, Sailthru, Selligent, Bronto, Dotmailer), behavioral marketing tools (CloudIQ, SaleCycle, Yieldify) and customer insight companies (More2, AgileOne). Its argument is that none of these companies were developed specifically for retail, or to create and use a unified predictive profile of each customer.

Ometria’s CEO and founder Ivan Mazour says: “We’re all overloaded with information and communication, it’s relentless and must be addressed. Retail marketing has contributed heavily to this, with most marketing experiences being ones we simply don’t enjoy. Ometria solves this ever-increasing problem for hundreds of retailers, and hundreds of millions of customers.”

It now has a client base of 200 retailers, including Hotel Chocolat, Fred Perry, MADE.com and Notonthehighstreet.com. Its senior leadership team now includes Pete Crosby (formerly of Triptease) as chief revenue officer, Rob Lord (formerly of CheetahMail) as VP of Professional Services and Jennifer Yorke (formerly of Bazaarvoice) as VP of Customer Success.

Christmann says, “We are very excited to have led Ometria’s Series B — a great example of how we invest in truly pioneering entrepreneurs that are creating innovative solutions through tech. Ometria will use this investment to revolutionize the retail marketing industry with its AI capabilities. We want to see entrepreneurs put their customers at the heart of the business and that is precisely what the team is doing.

Since its IPO in October last year, cloud-based enterprise planning services provider Anaplan (NYSE:PLAN) has delivered robust growth. Last month, Anaplan announced its second quarterly results that...

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Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered “talent investor” that recruits and backs individuals pre-team and pre-idea to enable them to found startups, has announced its plans to expand to Canada.

It marks the first time EF has entered North America. Along with London, EF currently operates in Berlin, Paris, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bangalore.

The new Canadian outpost, due to launch in early 2020, will be in Toronto and follows EF’s $115 million first closing of a new fund in February.

At the time of the fund announcement, the talent investor/company builder said it would use the capital to continue scaling globally — specifically, enabling it to back more than 2,200 individuals who join its various programs over the next three years.

This, we were told, should amount to around 300-plus venture-backed companies being created, three times the number of startups EF has helped create since being founded by McKinsey colleagues Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck all the way back in 2011. Clearly, setting up shop in Toronto is part of the plan to achieve this.

Often — mistakingly — described as an accelerator, EF stands out from the many other startup programmes because of the way it backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea.” This means that participants typically find their co-founder and found their respective companies on the programme, and that these startup may never have seen the light of day without EF.

It’s a new type of venture model that appears to be working so far — measured both in terms of exits and follow-on funding — although question marks remain with regards to how scalable it can be, given that what works in one city and ecosystem with one set of EF staff may not be entirely replicable in another. Or, as one VC put it to me, “there’s only one Matt and Alice.”

With that said, others, such as Greylock partner and co-founder of LinkedIn Reid Hoffman, are convinced EF can scale. Greylock is an investor in EF and Hoffman previously told TechCrunch he can see there being between 20-50 cities “where Entrepreneur First is integral to creating a set of interesting tech companies in those areas.”

Cue a statement from Matt Clifford: “By launching a programme in a third continent, we’re a step closer to achieving our goal of giving the world’s most ambitious individuals the tools to build a company wherever they happen to be… Toronto is one of the fastest growing tech ecosystems in North America in terms of capital and talent, and the city represents a great opportunity for EF to encourage the next generation of ambitious founders.”

It’s often said that smaller businesses get the short end of the stick when it comes to technology solutions: they are more high-maintenance than consumers, but not as lucrative as larger enterprises, leaving them caught somewhere in an unsatisfying middle.

But today, two serial entrepreneurs who have already built one big startup catering to SMBs — loans platform Kabbage — are launching another effort to help fill that gap. Drum, billed as a marketplace for businesses both to source sales people and sell their goods and services, not just for SMBs but any direct online brands seeking to market to SMBs or consumers, has raised $11 million in funding to launch its company and to — yes — drum up new business.

“We’re democratizing access to a physical salesforce by aggregating all the fractionalised or partial demand into a common platform and dispersing that to individuals in the gig economy,” said Rob Frohwein — the CEO of Kabbage who is co-founding Drum with his Kabbage co-founder and COO Kathryn Petralia and Troy Deus — said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The money comes from a group of investors, some of whom have previously backed Frohwein and Petralia. Deus himself is a longtime Kabbage employee whose most recent role there has been head of new venture sandbox Kabbage Labs. (Frohwein, who is CEO of the new venture, and Petralia, are also keeping their day jobs running Kabbage.) Backers include Propel Venture Partners (the investment arm of banking giant BBVA), Felicis Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, American Express Ventures, GroTech Ventures, Wildcat Venture Partners, BoxGroup and SV Angel.

“Drum unlocks a three-sided marketplace connecting any business to the customers they want through an on-demand network of salespeople,” said Harshul Sanghi, managing partner at American Express Ventures, in a statement. “This has the potential to dramatically accelerate new product introduction and customer acquisition for businesses. Amex Ventures is pleased to support Drum in its future growth.”

Part of the strength of that list likely comes from the fact that Kabbage has been a strong growth story (pun intended), with the company demonstrating that it can build products that speak to the needs of SMBs.

Kabbage’s loans platform — which uses AI to quickly determine an applicant’s suitability to get a loan — is now valued at more than $1 billion and is growing at more than 55% at the moment, Frohwein said, and is starting to branch out into a new range of other financial services such as marketing and payments. (Some of Kabbage’s growth has come through partnerships; for example, it works closely with the likes of Alibaba in the U.S. to provide financing for businesses on their platform; through white-label services; and through its own direct channels.)

With Drum, Frohwein said that this was about identifying another problem area for businesses that aren’t being met by current services that SMBs have found to be a challenge in fixing themselves, but that sit outside of the kinds of problems that Kabbage itself is aiming to solve. Specifically, here it’s about pulling together sales teams — called “Drummers” on the platform — to help market their products, either locally or further afield by using digital channels and the sales expertise they bring to the table.

With the rise in internet usage, a lot of businesses have shifted their sales and marketing efforts to digital platforms, essentially managing the work themselves by way of Google AdWords campaigns, through Facebook and so on. One big reason for that has been because hiring sales people — much less having them on the payroll — has just felt like a financial and organizational step too steep.

The idea behind Drum is to provide these businesses with a platform that lets both salespeople who have time or want to work on a project basis connect with businesses that might not want to take the step of full-time hires, but could use the expertise and human power of people to help them with sales. It borrows from the concept of the on-demand, gigging model made popular by many other enterprises, from home services through to transportation and food delivery that have been built around contract-based work in specific fields.

While you can see some of the benefits of viewing the engagement of salespeople in the context of an on-demand, gig economy model, it seems there might also be drawbacks.

I noted to Frohwein that matching a driver to a particular delivery may be less personality-specific than matching a salesperson to a particular sales job. However, it’s a challenge that he believes is not as big as it seems because Drum will be able to size up the capabilities and experience of specific people to make them better matches for the businesses looking to retain their services (using AI-based tools). It’s less like finding a perfect cultural fit, it seems, than finding the people with the right experience and administrative skills.

“Most of the sales that happen won’t be for complex items,” he predicted. “They are products and services like floor refinishing or repairing roof, who are looking for a better way to sell what they do.”

Another potential issue might be the fact that some salespeople might prove to use approaches that are not ultimately the ones you would want to have for your own brand or business. Again, this is a problem Frohwein believes can be addressed. The platform will have ratings on it, and the idea will be that those that are not good at their jobs simply won’t get business in the future. (In that regard, this is not unlike something like Airbnb, which mostly seems to work very well for people, with a few troubling hiccups among the many success stories.)

The next step past connecting businesses and salespeople is the third side of this three-sided marketplace. Drum aims to provide a platform for the products and services themselves to get sold, whether they are concert tickets or roofing supplies. This will be developed over time, Frohwein said, and will serve to complement the work of the Drummers who might be working in physical, real-world sales as well as across digital channels.

The main message is that it will be harnessing a large group of businesses that want to connect to customers, and salespeople who will be looking for platforms to sell their clients’ goods, and the platform will become one component of how that works — again, addressing the fact that some of these businesses have not made the leap to e-commerce in part because they’ve found the options out there today, which might include Amazon or eBay, not quite what they want.

“This is a huge opportunity to acquire customers and a huge number of direct brands that could use a physical last mile,” said Frohwein. “Today, they use things like email lists and Facebook but they could use boots on the ground and talking about their businesses and promoting them.” He says he envisions most of the sales and help to come in the form of human, in-person selling.

Sramana Mitra: What about number of travelers? Are we looking mostly at couples traveling or are we looking at group travel? Ruben Martinez: Our demographic is between the ages of 25 and 42. There...

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The 71st Primetime Emmy Award Ceremony was held tonight in Los Angeles. This feature from Forbes covers the event which saw streaming services make a big impact. Tech Posts Zscaler Punished for Weak...

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It makes lazy people like me work out. That’s the genius of the Peloton bicycle. All you have to do is Velcro on the shoes and you’re trapped. You’ve eliminated choice and you will exercise. Through a succession of savvy product design choice I’ll break down here, Peloton removes the friction to getting fit. It’s the leader in a movement I call “pushbutton health.” And this is why I think Peloton will be a big success no matter what short-term investors do when it IPOs this week after raising $994 million in venture capital.

Basically, Peloton is a $2,300 stationary bike with a tablet stuck to the front. The $40 per month subscription unlocks thousands of live and on-demand video cycling classes, where instructors positively yell at you. When you think you’re tired already, they look into your eyes, tell you “you got this,” the soundtrack crescendos, you crank up the resistance and you pedal harder at home. The resulting endorphin rush is addictive, and you find yourself persuading friends they need a Peloton too.

That viral loop, which adds to its 500,000 subscribers, is how Peloton plans to raise ~$1.16 billion going public this week at an ~$8 billion valuation. Its revenue doubled this year as it began to dominate the connected exercise equipment market, though losses quadrupled as it burned cash to become a household name. But after riding 110 of 150 days I’ve been home since buying its bike, I’m confident in the company. Whatever it invests now to build its lead will likely be paid back handsomely by its increasingly handsome customers who can’t bear to clip out. Here’s why.

The brilliance of this bike

The Shoes – Usually the activation energy to start a workout requires dragging yourself to the gym or suiting up to face the elements outside. That can be daunting enough that you rarely do. But once you slip into the Peloton bike shoes, you can hardly walk normally, which means you can hardly procrastinate. You’re home, so you don’t even need clothes. Just a few Velcro straps and you’re over the hump and resigned to exercise.

The Clips – Home gym equipment reduces the barrier to entry but also the barrier to exit. You can tell yourself you’ll keep doing push-up sets or squats or jumping rope, but you can stop any time. Yet after you’re clipped into the Peloton bike, you’re almost assured to keep pedaling until the instructor gives you that end-of-ride congratulations.

The Schedule – You can get a sweat in just 10 or 20 minutes going hard on a Peloton. Combined with zero commute, that means you’ll practically always be able fit in a ride regardless of how busy you are. No more “I don’t have time to make it to the gym so I’ll just skip out.” When my calendar gets crunched or I dawdle a little before deciding to ride, classes as short as five minutes ensure there’s no weaseling out.

The Instructors – I wish I had these coaches to motivate me through sorting email. Peloton’s 20+ instructors range from hippie-dippie gurus to no-nonsense trainers that fit your personality type. You find yourself craving your favorite’s special brand of relentless positivity. I burn far more calories in a shorter time than exercising solo because they inspire me to push a little harder or they slow their countdown to add a couple all-out seconds to the end of a sprint. They’re even becoming celebrities, with bankers lining up for selfies during Peloton’s IPO road show. Sick of them? You can always Scenic Ride through video of some of the world’s prettiest bike paths.

The Intimacy – You’re eye-to-eye with those instructors as they stare into the camera and out of the giant 22-inch Android screen bolted to your handlebars [Update: Not an iPad. I was being facetious]. That generates intimacy despite them broadcasting to thousands. Even in person, a SoulCycle coach across the room can feel farther away. You’re mostly guided by audio cues, but their gaze compels you to perform. Peloton almost feels like FaceTime, and that’s a sense of connection many long for more of these days.

The Pavlovian Response – Your brain quickly begins to associate the sounds of Peloton with the glowing feeling of finishing a workout: The rip of the Velcro shoe straps, the click of clipping into the bike, but most of all the instructor catch-phrases. You get hooked on hearing the bubbling British accent of “I’mmmm Leeaannne Haaaaainsby” as she introduces herself, Ben Alldis’ infectious “You got 5, you got 4…” countdowns or Emma Lovewell reminding you to “Live, learn, love well.” That final “namaste” followed by wiping down the bike and jumping in a cold shower forms a ritual you’re inclined to repeat.

The Soundtrack – Popular songs are more than just a pump-up accompaniment to Peloton classes. Your pedaling pace is often pegged to the tempo, with sprints starting when the beat drops. As your legs tire, you feel obliged to maintain your speed so you don’t fall behind the drums. You can even search classes by music genre and preview each’s playlist. Peloton has paid out $50 million in royalties for its music, and faces $300 million-plus in lawsuits for copyright infringement. But having the best tunes to bike to might end up worth the penalty because it helped Peloton race ahead in a lucrative market.

The Bike as Decor – Most home exercise equipment ends up in a closet or as a clothing rack. By designing its bicycles for beauty, Peloton coerces you to place them conspicuously in your home. You might have seen the hysterical Twitter thread parodying this practice, but it’s funny because it’s true. You’re a lot more likely to ride it if it’s central to your home (ours is between our bed and the doors to the veranda), and you’ll be embarrassed if visitors ask about it and you haven’t hopped on recently.

The Network Effect – Many of these smart product design moves could be copied by competitors. But by amassing a community of 1.4 million members to date, Peloton benefits from social features and economies of scale. You can ride together with pals over video chat, send each other digital high-fives or race and compare achievements. Each friend that joins Peloton is one more reason not to sign up for a competitor. The whole concept of virtual personal training is being legitimized. And the cost of producing more classes gets spread wider as membership grows.

The Shared Accounts – Peloton has even built in a way to feel noble about your sanctimonious proselytizing about how it “jumpstarted your metabolism.” Each $39 on-bike subscription allows unlimited accounts on up to three devices, so you can hook up some friends if you convince them to buy the big-budget gadget.

The Growth Hacks – Peloton streaks are for adults what Snapchat streaks are to kids: a clever way to reward consistent usage. But beyond the achievement badges displayed on your profile, you’ll get in-ride leaderboards full of people to proudly pass, progress bars to fill by pedaling and kilojoule output high scores to beat. Peloton makes exercise a game you want to win.

The Shoutouts – Yet Peloton’s most explicit levering of our psychology comes from the in-class name-drop shout-outs instructors give. Whether mentioning the screen names of a few participants at the start of a session or congratulating users hitting their 50th, 200th or 500th ride, the recognition pushes people to join the dozen live-streamed classes each day that add urgency to the on-demand catalog. Proof it works? People strategize to ensure their 100th ride is a long live class to maximize the chance of a shout-out.

The ‘Transcendence’ – Peloton minimizes the isolation from working out at home. In fact, its whole product enables people to feel “glamorous” and “manifested” yet nonchalant in ways going to a sweaty gym or using a personal trainer can’t. It’s like being able to buy a little piece of the smug satisfaction and in-group affiliation of going to Burning Man. That’s why the company even sends you a free “Century Club” t-shirt when you hit your 100th ride. You’re meant to feel cool sharing that you “Peloton,” using the startup’s name as a verb.

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Still, Peloton has plenty left to optimize. There’s room to expand use of its camera to offer premium one-on-one coaching, head-to-head racing, group video chat with friends and augmented reality filters to make people feel comfortable on screen and take shareable selfies. A wider range of intense but short classes could appeal to overworked professionals who picked Peloton precisely because they don’t have an hour for the gym.

Novelty could come from celebrity guest instructors, or themed classes for pre-gaming for a night out, fans of a particular artist or songs about a certain topic. And it should definitely have some iconic sounds like an om or singing bowl chime that play before each class to center you and after to release you.

Most excitingly, the Peloton screen has the potential to be a platform for exercise-controlled gaming and apps. Whether pedaling to escape zombies chasing you or piece together a puzzle, maintaining an output level to keep your cross-hairs locked on an enemy plane as you dogfight, or making a garden bloom by growing each flower during a different interval, Peloton could evolve riding to be much more interactive. Apps could offer training simulators for different sports focused on sprints for basketball or marathons for soccer. Or just put Netflix on it! By opening up to outside developers, Peloton could build a moat of extra experiences competitors can’t match.

With the strengths and opportunities of its core product, Peloton is poised to absorb more of your fitness time and money. It’s already branching out with yoga, meditation, lifting, bootcamp and jazzercise classes you can do standing next to your bike (or without one) on its $19 per month app. Its second gadget is a $4,300 treadmill.

From there it could break into more of the “pushbutton health” business. I categorize these as wellness products and services that rely on convenience instead of your will power. Think delivery health food instead calorie-counting apps that are a chore. My pushbutton regimen includes Peloton, six salads per week dropped off in batches by Thistle, monthly packages of Nomiku vacuum-sealed meals that RFID scan into its sous vide machine and a Future remote personal trainer who nags me by text message.

Peloton could easily dive into selling meal kits, personal training or a wider range of workout clothes to compete with Lululemon. If it’s the center of your fitness routine, the company could become a gateway to new health products it owns or partners with.

I’m bullish on Peloton because I’m betting people are going to stay busy, lazy and competitive. It offers the effectiveness of a spin class but with scheduling flexibility. It removes every excuse for staying on the couch. And in an age of visual communication where many seek to share both the journey to and the destination of an Instagrammable body and the discipline to get there, Peloton provides conspicuous self-actualization through consumerism. Plus, finishing a ride feels damn good.

If you’re at all familiar with esports, chances are you’ve heard of 100 Thieves. The esports org, founded by Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, has grown over the past couple years into an absolute powerhouse of esports and a household name for those who follow gaming.

Which is why we’re thrilled to have Nadeshot and 100 Thieves part owner Scooter Braun join us at Disrupt SF 2019.

Matthew Haag got his start as a pro gamer when esports were still in their infancy. He became one of the most decorated esports athletes in history, serving as Captain of the legendary Optic Gaming CoD team where he led the team to an X Games Gold Medal and a CoD World Championship.

In 2015, Nadeshot retired from competitive gaming and started some of the most-watched YouTube and Twitch channels in the gaming world. A year later, he founded his own esports org with 100 Thieves, which combines streaming content, competitive esports and apparel under a single brand name.

Scooter Braun is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, managing megastars like Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande. But Braun is also the founder of SB Projects, which is a highly diversified media company that focuses on music management, film/TV, as well as Silent Labs, a tech incubator which holds investments in companies like Uber, Spotify, Songza, Casper, Waze, and Pinterest.

Braun is also at the helm of Ithaca Holdings, which made waves this year with the acquisition of Big Machine Label Group (Taylor Swift’s former label). Ithaca also owns Mythos Studios with Marvel Founding Chairman David Maisel, Atlas Publishing and has partnerships with various management companies.

In 2018, Drake and Scooter Braun became co-owners in 100 Thieves through a $25 million Series A investment.

At Disrupt SF, we’ll ask Braun and Nadeshot about the opportunities ahead in the esports industry, what it’s like to grow a brand and team from scratch, and how they see esports evolving over the next few years.

Nadeshot and Braun join an amazing list of speakers, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Will Smith and Ang Lee, Snap CEO Evan Spiegal, Zola CEO Shan Lyn Ma, and many more.

Disrupt runs October 2 to October 4 right in San Francisco. If you still need tickets, you can pick those up right here.

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According to a new WSJ report, certain members of WeWork’s board, which includes co-founder and CEO Adam Neumann, are planning to pressure Neumann to step down and instead become We’s non-executive chairman. The move, says the outlet, “would allow him to stay at the company he built into one of the country’s most valuable startups, but inject fresh leadership to pursue an IPO that would bring We the cash it needs to keep up its torrid growth.”

The WSJ and Bloomberg are reporting that it is SoftBank specifically that wants Neumann to step down. Neither WeWork nor SoftBank is commenting publicly.

It’s a fascinating development, the kind we saw when Uber’s board successfully forced co-founder and longtime CEO Travis Kalanick to abandon his role as CEO. Still, we’d caution against drawing too close a comparison. While the venture firm Benchmark, which spearheaded Kalanick’s ouster, stood to lose billions of dollars if Kalanick dragged down Uber and continued to push off an IPO, Benchmark was not in a do-or-die situation because of its Uber investment.

SoftBank appears to be in more dire straights, making this standoff a particularly meaningful one.

Let’s back up a minute first, though, and consider who is involved and which way this could potentially go. A few days ago, Business Insider put together a useful cheat sheet about WeWork’s board members that may hint at their allegiance.

1) Ronald Fisher — who is vice chairman at SoftBank Group after founding SoftBank Capital, a U.S. venture arm of SoftBank — joined SoftBank’s board last year. He oversees 114 Class A shares, each of which carries one vote. Obviously, he’s going to side with SoftBank.

2) Lewis Frankfort — the chairman of a fitness studio chain called Flywheel Sports — has been a board member of WeWork for roughly five years, and BI says WeWork once loaned him $6.3 million, which he repaid with interest earlier this year. We have to think he’d stick with Neumann out of loyalty. At the same time, he doesn’t wield much power unless he has the right to block significant actions at the company (some shareholders get these blocking rights; some don’t). What we know: He controls 2 million shares, and 750,000 of them are Class B shares that carry 10 votes each.

3) Benchmark, which first backed WeWork in 2012, is represented on the board by Bruce Dunlevie, the founding partner of the venture firm. Benchmark owns 32.6 million Class A shares, and could go either way, seemingly. On the one hand, Benchmark doesn’t want to establish a reputation for pushing out founders after the Kalanick debacle, and if it supports SoftBank over Neumann, it risks this exact thing happening. On the other hand, Benchmark might not want to battle with SoftBank if it thinks it has staying power or it’s concerned (suddenly) that it allowed Neumann to amass too much control.

4) Steven Langman, the co-founder of private equity firm Rhône Group, has ties that go back a ways with Neumann, and he has benefited richly from the association. According to an April story in the WSJ, Langman met Neumann through a shared rabbi in WeWork’s earlier days and joined the board in 2012. He also invested in the company (he owns 2.28 million shares, according to a bond filing). Langman is on both the company’s compensation committee and its succession committee. He also runs a real estate investment vehicle in partnership with We that buys and develops buildings to then lease back to the co-working company, despite that it raises conflict-of-interest questions. We’d guess he’s on Team Neumann.

5) Mark Schwartz is a former Goldman Sachs exec who stepped off the board of SoftBank earlier this year but who remains on WeWork’s board. Why he left SoftBank’s board may or may not hold clues here. According to The Information, he remains a confidante of SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son.

6) John Zhao is the chairman and CEO of Hony Capital, which partnered with SoftBank and WeWork to create a standalone entity called WeWork China back in 2017, and Hony has subsequently poured more capital into that subsidiary. We’re not sure how close Zhao is to SoftBank, but if SoftBank brought Hony into WeWork, we’re guessing he will back the Japanese conglomerate on this one. Hony doesn’t own 5% or more of WeWork’s parent company, so its share holdings aren’t listed publicly.

Harvard Business School professor Frances Frei was also brought in roughly a minute ago to add a much-needed sprinkling of gender diversity to WeWork’s all-male board. Frei’s name first came to be more broadly recognized when she was hired to help address Uber’s battered culture, so presumably she has ties to Benchmark. We’d guess she’ll side with Dunlevie, meaning that we have no idea whose side she will take.

Neumann, it’s very worth noting, is himself far more powerful than any of these individuals. Even after the company recently revised Neumann’s supervoting rights, which gave him 20 times the voting power of ordinary shareholders and now give him 10, he could fire the entire board if he so chooses, notes the WSJ.

Naturally, that wouldn’t be a good look for Neumann, who is already battling growing public perception that, among other negatives for a public company CEO, he smokes a whole lot of pot and that he may be delusional. (A WSJ piece last week reported that Neumann likes to smoke marijuana with friends and while airborne. It also said that Neumann has confided to different people his interest in becoming Israel’s prime minister and president of the world.)

All that said, SoftBank is also fast losing credibility. While its CEO, Son, has been long revered as a visionary, a growing number of sources we’ve spoken to question the viability of his entire Vision Fund operation. They see WeWork’s ever-soaring valuation on the private market, from $20 billion to, more recently, $47 billion — which was almost single-handedly SoftBank’s doing — as just one in a costly string of poor calls.

Indeed, despite the roughly $10 billion that SoftBank has sunk into WeWork, the financial loss it would take if WeWork falls apart would pale in comparison to the reputational hit Son would suffer, and you can bet there will be ripple effects.

Our suspicion: Given the Vision Fund’s impact on the startup industry over the last few years, there’s a lot more riding on what happens with WeWork than meets the eye. Stay tuned.

Correction: An earlier version of this story did not include WeWork board member Mark Schwartz.

We might have just completed a full-day program devoted completely to enterprise at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise last week, but it doesn’t mean we plan to sell that subject short at TechCrunch Disrupt next month in San Francisco. In fact, we have something for everyone from startups to established public companies and everything in between along with investors and industry luminaries to discuss all-things enterprise.

SaaS companies have played a major role in enterprise software over the last decade, and we are offering a full line-up of SaaS company executives to provide you with the benefit of their wisdom. How about Salesforce chairman, co-CEO and co-founder Marc Benioff for starters? Benioff will be offering advice on how to build a socially responsible, successful startup.

If you’re interested in how to take your startup public, we’ll have Box CEO Aaron Levie, who led his company to IPO in 2015 and Jennifer Tejada, CEO at PagerDuty, who did the same just this year. The two executives will discuss the trials and tribulations of the IPO process and what happens after you finally go public.

Meanwhile, Slack co-founder and CTO Cal Henderson, another SaaS company that recently IPOed, will be discussing how to build great products with Megan Quinn from Spark Capital, a Slack investor.

Speaking of investors, Neeraj Agrawal, a general partner at Battery Ventures joins us on a panel with Whitney Bouck, COO at HelloSign and Jyoti Bansal, CEO and founder of Harness (as well as former CEO and co-founder at AppDynamics, which was acquired by Cisco in 2017 for $3.7 billion just before it was supposed to IPO). They will be chatting about what it takes to build a billion dollar SaaS business.

Not enough SaaS for you? How about Diya Jolly, Chief Product Officer at Okta discussing how to iterate your product?

If you’re interested in security, we have Dug Song from Duo, whose company was sold to Cisco in 2018 for $2.35 billion, explaining how to develop a secure startup. We will also welcome Nadav Zafrir from Israeli security incubator Team 8 to talk about the intriguing subject of when spies meet security on our main stage.

You probably want to hear from some enterprise company executives too. That’s why we are bringing Frederic Moll, chief development officer for the digital surgery group at Johnson & Johnson to talk about robots, Marillyn A. Hewson, chairman, president and CEO at Lockheed Martin discussing the space industry and Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg going over the opportunity around 5G.

We’ll also have seasoned enterprise investors, Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins and Michelle McCarthy from Verizon Ventures, acting as judges at the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition.

If that’s not enough for you, there will also be enterprise startups involved in the Battlefield and Startup Alley. If you love the enterprise, there’s something for everyone. We hope you can make it.

Still need tickets? You can pick those up right here.

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Sramana Mitra: What did you see on the horizon that if you could do that, it would move to the next level? Ruben Martinez: Some of the strategy was built around normalizing the word glamping itself....

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As Facebook prepares to launch its new cryptocurrency Libra in 2020, it’s putting the pieces in place to help it run. In one of the latest developments, it has acquired Servicefriend, a startup that built bots — chat clients for messaging apps based on artificial intelligence — to help customer service teams, TechCrunch has confirmed.

The news was first reported in Israel, where Servicefriend is based, after one of its investors, Roberto Singler, alerted local publication The Marker about the deal. We reached out to Ido Arad, one of the co-founders of the company, who referred our questions to a team at Facebook. Facebook then confirmed the acquisition with an Apple-like non-specific statement:

“We acquire smaller tech companies from time to time. We don’t always discuss our plans,” a Facebook spokesperson said.

Several people, including Arad, his co-founder Shahar Ben Ami, and at least one other indicate that they now work at Facebook within the Calibra digital wallet group on their LinkedIn profiles. Their jobs at the social network started this month, meaning this acquisition closed in recent weeks. (Several others indicate that they are still at Servicefriend, meaning they too may have likely made the move as well.)

Although Facebook isn’t specifying what they will be working on, the most obvious area will be in building a bot — or more likely, a network of bots — for the customer service layer for the Calibra digital wallet that Facebook is developing.

Facebook’s plan is to build a range of financial services for people to use Calibra to pay out and receive Libra — for example, to send money to contacts, pay bills, top up their phones, buy things and more.

It remains to be seen just how much people will trust Facebook as a provider of all these. So that is where having “human” and accessible customer service experience will be essential.

“We are here for you,” Calibra notes on its welcome page, where it promises 24-7 support in WhatsApp and Messenger for its users.

Servicefriend has worked on Facebook’s platform in the past: specifically it built “hybrid” bots for Messenger for companies to use to complement teams of humans, to better scale their services on messaging platforms. In one Messenger bot that Servicefriend built for Globe Telecom in the Philippines, it noted that the hybrid bot was able to bring the “agent hours” down to under 20 hours for each 1,000 customer interactions.

Bots have been a relatively problematic area for Facebook. The company launched a personal assistant called M in 2015, and then bots that let users talk to businesses in 2016 on Messenger, with quite some fanfare, although the reality was that nothing really worked as well as promised, and in some cases worked significantly worse than whatever services they aimed to replace.

While AI-based assistants such as Alexa have become synonymous with how a computer can carry on a conversation and provide information to humans, the consensus around bots these days is that the most workable way forward is to build services that complement, rather than completely replace, teams.

For Facebook, getting its customer service on Calibra right can help it build and expand its credibility (note: another area where Servicefriend has build services is in using customer service as a marketing channel). Getting it wrong could mean issues not just with customers, but with partners and possibly regulators.