Welcome to this transcribed edition of The Operators. TechCrunch is beginning to publish podcasts from industry experts, with transcriptions available for Extra Crunch members so you can read the conversation wherever you are.

The Operators highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Google, Brex, Slack, Docsend, Facebook, Edmodo, WeWork, Mint, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like product management and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.

This week’s edition features Whitney Sales, a general partner at Acceleprise, the leading enterprise SaaS accelerator, and Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of DocSend, a fast-rising document management and sharing product.

Whitney brings sales experience from LoopNet, Meltwater, SpringAhead/Tallie, and People Data Labs, before starting her own sales consultancy aptly named “The Sales Method.” Russ brings experience from founding and selling his first company to Facebook, before becoming the first salesperson of the second company he founded, DocSend.

Neil Devani and Tim Hsia created The Operators after seeing and hearing too many heady, philosophical podcasts about the future of the world and the tech industry, and not enough attention on the practical day-to-day work that makes it all happen.

Tim is a Venture Partner at Digital Garage and the CEO & Founder of Media Mobilize, a media company and ad network. Neil is an early-stage investor based in San Francisco with a focus on companies that solve serious problems, including Andela, Clearbit, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Vicarious Surgical, and Kudi.

If you’ve ever had to convince anyone of anything, or are interested in a career in sales or starting a company where you will have to hire or manage salespeople, you can’t miss this episode.

The show:

The Operators, hosted by Neil Devani and Tim Hsia, highlights the experts building the products and companies that drive the tech industry. Speaking from experience at companies like Google, Brex, Slack, Docsend, Facebook, Edmodo, WeWork, Mint, etc., these experts share insider tips on how to break into fields like product management and enterprise sales. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs to hire and manage experts in fields outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 1, we’re talking about sales. Neil interviews Whitney Sales, an investor with Acceleprise, the leading enterprise SaaS accelerator, and Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of Docsend.

Neil Devani: Hi and welcome to the first episode of The Operators when we talk to the people building the companies of today and tomorrow. We publish every other Monday and you can find us online at operators.co.

Today’s episode is sponsored by Four Sigmatic. Four Sigmatic’s Lion’s Mane Mushroom Coffee has all of coffee’s focusing bark with none of the jittery bite. Lion’s Mane provides productivity, focus, and creativity all while being a healthy alternative to that daily cup of coffee. Go to www.foursigmatic.com/operators-special to try out Four Sigmatic.

I’m your host Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage here in sunny San Francisco. Joining me is Russ Heddleston, founder and CEO of DocSend, a popular product for managing and sharing sensitive documents.

Also joining us is Whitney Sales, partner at Acceleprise, the premier SaaS accelerator. Whitney has 10 years of startup sales experience and is the founder of the sales method, a consultancy that helps startups with go-to-market and sales. Whitney and Russ, thank you for joining us. It’s a pleasure to have you. If we could start if just give us a little bit of your background that would be great.

Russ Heddleston: I’ll start. I’m Russ Heddleston, as you said, co-founder and CEO of DocSend. My background is not in sales it’s in software engineering. I was at Stanford for my Bachelor’s and Masters in computer science. And then I worked at a bunch of different tech companies over the years as an intern at Microsoft, as a PM intern, I was the first engineering intern at Trulia, I ran the engineering team in a company called Greystripe for a few years, an early intern at Dropbox. 

And then DocSend is actually my second company. I started the first one in 2010 while I was in business school at Harvard, and then ended up being acquired by Facebook. And I started DocSend about six years ago here in San Francisco.

Whitney Sales: Hi, my name is Whitney Sales. I’m a GP, general partner at Acceleprise Ventures. My background is an early stage sales. Before Acceleprise I actually started a sales consultancy called The Sales Method where I worked with founders in getting to $1M in ARR, really in the early stages of the problem solving of sales. 

Before that I worked for several startups. LoopNet in the early days, helped launch two products for them. I worked at a company called Meltwater before they were acquired. 

And I worked for a company called SpringAhead. They are now Tallie, they were also acquired. Ran sales for a company called People Data Labs. And then I just spun out on my own and started the Sales Method which ended up bringing me to Acceleprise. 

Devani: Awesome, really great story. Just to start, I would love to hear from both of you a little bit about your organizations and how you think about sales. And maybe you can give us a little bit of the definitions around different roles that you see in a sales organization, whether it’s your company or other companies you’re investing in or have worked with in the past. 

Sales: There’s a lot of different roles in sales. It really depends on the type of organization you’re running, candidly. But traditionally there’s an SDR, sales development rep. I usually recommend that being the first hire in a sales team for a founder, so they can scale up their own time.

Then there’s an account executive within an organization that’s typically doing a direct sale. There may be senior account executives or junior account executives, like a mid-market enterprise executive depending on the type of sales cycle they’re running.

Sales engineers, if you’re dealing with a complex dev tool, traditionally, or a more heavy enterprise implementation tool. 

Many roles inside of startups and tech companies are clear: marketers market, salespeople sell, engineers engineer. Then there are the roles like “product manager” that seem obvious on the surface (product managers “product,” right?) but in reality are very fuzzy roles that can be highly variable across different companies.

A few weeks ago, TechCrunch editor Jordan Crook interviewed J Crowley, who is head of product for Airbnb Lux and was formerly at Foursquare. Crowley came up in the consumer product world without a technical background, and he spoke to overcoming some of his own insecurities to become a leading product thinker in the Valley.

This week, I wanted to offer another perspective on product from Anjul Bhambhri, who is Vice President, Platform Engineering at Adobe, where she and her team conceived Adobe’s new Experience Platform for real-time customer experience management.

Across Bhambhri’s more than two decade career straddling the line between software engineering and product, she has worked on deeply technical, enterprise projects at Sybase and Informix as startups, big data infrastructure at IBM, and now at Adobe.

We discuss the challenges and opportunities of moving from an engineering career into product (and management more generally) as well as the ways she thinks about building compelling products that are sold B2B.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity

Scaling out product after product

Danny Crichton: Anjul, thanks for joining us. One of the major initiatives that we’ve been doing as part of Extra Crunch is to interview experts in their fields, talking about how they go about doing their job, and how you think about the decisions that come up on a day-to-day basis in the work that you do. So to start, I would love to talk a little about your background.

Anjul Bhambhri: Very nice to meet you, and happy to share my journey, Danny. I have been in the software industry now for really almost 30 years. I’m an electrical engineer, and basically, my entire career has been in data, databases, and big data analytics.

Fintech startup Brex went from 0 to a valuation of $1 billion in less than two years. It is a fascinating company, and so is Brex’s co-founder and CEO Henrique Dubugras. He’s coming to TechCrunch Disrupt SF to tell us more about the company’s explosive growth.

Brex started with a corporate card for startups. Compared to legacy corporate cards, there are a ton of benefits. First, it’s easy to sign up to Brex, as the company doesn’t require any personal guarantee or security deposit.

Second, you instantly get a virtual card that you can use for online subscriptions and other online purchases. After a few days, you receive a good-old plastic card that you can use anywhere around the world — there’s no foreign transaction fees.

And it’s not just about a better on-boarding experience. Brex is a great way to access credit as the credit limit is around 10 times higher than the credit limit of traditional corporate cards. At the end of the month, all expenses are consolidated.

Given that Brex attended Y Combinator and is a good product for startups, it became an instant hit in Silicon Valley. More recently, the company created cards for other verticals, such as life sciences companies and e-commerce companies.

And the company raised a new funding round last week — Brex is now valued at $2.6 billion.

This isn’t Henrique Dubugras’ first startup. Originally from Brazil, Dubugras created payment company Pagar.me when he was just 16. He sold the company after reaching $1.5 billion in transaction volume.

He then enrolled at Stanford University, but didn’t stay long. He left school after eight months to found Brex. And I’m quite curious to hear how he knew for sure that it was the right decision when Brex was still just an idea.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt SF to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on October 2-4.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

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Machine learning is the holy grail of data analysis, but unfortunately, that holy grail oftentimes requires a PhD in Computer Science just to get started. Despite the incredible attention that machine learning and artificial intelligence get from the press, the reality is that there is a massive gap between the needs of companies to solve business challenges and the availability of talent for building incisive models.

YC-backed Intersect Labs is looking to solve that gap by making machine learning much more widely accessible to the business analyst community. Through its platform, which is being launched fully publicly, business analysts can upload their data, and Intersect will automatically identify the right machine learning models to apply to the dataset and optimize the parameters of those models.

The company was founded by Ankit Gordhandas and Aaron Fried in August of last year. In his previous job, Gordhandas deployed machine learning models to customers and started working on a tool that would speed up his work. “I actually realized I could build a version of the tool that was a little more advanced,” he said, and that work ultimately led to the foundation of Intersect Labs. He linked up with Fried in October, and the two have been working on the platform since.

Intersect’s goal is to move analysts from purely retrospective analysis to creating models that can predictively determine business strategy. “People who live in SQL and Excel, they are really good at pulling the data of the past, but we are giving them the superpower of seeing the future,” Gordhandas explained. “All you need is your historical data, upload to our platform, and answer two questions.”

Those questions essentially ask what the model should predict (the outcome variable). From there, Intersect begins by cleaning up the data and ensuring that the various columns are properly scaled for data analysis. Then, the platform begins constructing a range of machine learning models and evaluating their performance against the target output. Once an ideal model is identified, customers can integrate it into their other systems through a REST-style API.

What’s interesting here is that Intersect can get better and better at identifying models over time based on the increasing diversity of datasets that it gets access to. Plus, as researchers identify new models or ways to tune them, the platform can potentially proactively improve the models it had previously identified for its customers, ensuring that they stay at the cutting edge of the field.

Today, the platform can handle one table of standard rows and columns for processing. Gordhandas said that the company intends to expand in the future to “image processing, audio processing, video processing, unstructured data processing” so that the platform can be applied to as diverse a set of data sources as possible

Gordhandas says that Intersect is attempting to sit in the middle of more specialized machine learning platforms that are limited to hyper-focused niches, while also offering more analytical power than comparably simpler solutions.

Certainly the space has seen a proliferation of options. New York City-based Generable (formerly Stan) uses Bayesian modeling and probabilistic programming to improve drug discovery, while Mintigo uses AI modeling to improve customer engagement. A huge number of other startups target different stages of the data analysis pipeline as well.

In the end, Intersect hopes to make these tools more widely accessible. The company has a couple of early customers already, and is going through the Y Combinator accelerator this batch.

Slack, the workplace messaging platform that has helped define a key category of enterprise IT, made its debut as a public company today with a pop. Trading as “WORK” on the New York Stock Exchange, it opened at $38.50 after setting a reference price last night of $26, valuing it at $15.7 billion, and then setting a bid/asking price of $37 this morning.

The trading climbed up quickly in its opening minutes and went as high as $42 but in the end closed only a little higher than its opening price, at $38.62. Slack’s market cap is now around $20 billion.

Note: There was no “money raised” with this IPO ahead of today because Slack’s move into being a publicly traded company is coming by way of a direct listing — meaning the shares went directly on the market with no pre-sale. This is a less-conventional route that doesn’t involve bankers underwriting the listing (nor all the costs that come along with the roadshow and the rest). It also means Slack does not raise a large sum ahead of public trading. But it does let existing shareholders trade shares without dilution and is an efficient way of going public if you’re not in need of an immediate, large cash injection. It’s a route that Spotify also took when it went public last year, and, from the front-page article on NYSE.com, it seems that there might be growing interest in this process — or at least, that the NYSE would like to promote it as an option.

Slack’s decision to go slightly off-script is in keeping with some of the ethos that it has cultivated over the last several years as one of the undisputed juggernauts of the tech world. Its rocket ship has been a product that has touched on not one but three different hot growth areas: enterprise software-as-a-service, messaging apps and platform plays that, by way of APIs, can become the touchstone and nerve center for a seemingly limitless number of other services.

What’s interesting about Slack is that — contrary to how some might think of tech — the journey here didn’t start as rocket science.

Slack was nearly an accidental creation, a byproduct that came out of how a previous business, Tiny Speck, was able to keep its geographically spread-out team communicating while building its product, the game Glitch. Glitch and Tiny Speck failed to gain traction, so after they got shut down, the ever-resourceful co-founder Stewart Butterfield did what many founders who still have some money in the bank and fire in their bellies do: a pivot. He took the basic channel they were using and built it (with some help) into the earliest public version of what came to be known as Slack.

But from that unlikely start something almost surprising happened: the right mix of ease of use, efficient responsiveness and functionality — in aid of those already important areas of workplace communication, messaging and app integration — made Slack into a huge hit. Quickly, Slack became the fastest-growing piece of enterprise software ever in terms of adding users, with a rapid succession of funding rounds (raising over $1.2 billion in total), valuation hikes and multiple product improvements along the way to help it grow.

Today, like many a software-as-a-service business that is less than 10 years old and investing returns to keep up with its fast-growing business, Slack is not profitable.

In the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2019, it reported revenues in its S-1 of $400.6 million, but with a net loss of $138.9 million. That was a slight improvement on its net loss from the previous fiscal year of $140.1 million, with a big jump on revenue, which was $220.5 million.

But its growth and the buzz it has amassed has given it a big push. As of January 31, it clocked up over 10 million daily active users across 600,000 organizations, with 88,000 of them on paid plans and 550,000 using the free version of the app. It will be interesting to see how and if that goodwill and excitement outweighs some of those financial bum notes.

Or, in some cases, possibly other bum notes. The company has made “Work” not just its ticker but its mantra. Its slogan is “Where work happens” and it focuses on how its platform helps make people more productive. But as you might expect, not everyone feels that way about it, with the endless streams of notifications, the slightly clumsy way of handling threaded conversations and certain other distracting features raising the ire of some people. (Google “Slack is a distraction” and you can see some examples of those dissenting opinions.)

Slack has had its suitors over the years, unsurprisingly, and at least one of them has in the interim made a product to compete with it. Teams, from Microsoft, is one of the many rival platforms on the market looking to capitalise on the surge of interest for chat and collaboration platforms that Slack has helped usher in. Other competitors include Workplace from Facebook, Mattermost and Flock, along with Threads and more.

For more on Slack’s first day, see Kate’s story here.

Law firms have little incentive to build or buy software that will save their lawyers time because they often bill clients by the hour. Tasks like tracking down legal documents, extracting key information and drawing up hiring offers or funding term sheets add up to make lawyers expensive, even if they’re constantly repeating mindless busy work.

That’s why legal startup Atrium is so exciting — even though it’s developing tech that might seem boring on the surface. After raising $75 million from Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst while growing to 400 clients, today Atrium is announcing its first customer-facing products.

Atrium Records creates a collaborative file locker for you and your lawyer so you always have access to the latest versions of corporate documents. Atrium Hiring automatically generates hiring offers and contracts from details you add to a form, and tracks everyone’s approvals and signatures.

Rather than having to pay for these tools separately, they come as part of a subscription to a bundle of Atrium’s legal services, with special projects like counsel through an acquisition costing extra. This business model incentivizes Atrium to work as efficiently as possible instead of bilking hourly rates, and build tools to eliminate less-skilled work or assist with common corporate duties. That’s allowed it to speed up legal work on incorporations, financings, M&A and contract negotiations.

“One of the reasons we partnered with Andreessen Horowitz on the last round [a $65 million Series B] was we really align with the way they approach venture capital,” Atrium co-founder and CEO Justin Kan tells me. “Marc’s initial observation was . . .  let’s not just provide capital but also other services like a talent network. We have kind of done the same stuff. Not only are we helping people with the legal stuff they want to get done but with the other stuff surrounding it.”

For example, Atrium’s Fundraising Concierge service provides assistance to startups for defining their narrative, setting up investor meetings and generating fair term sheets. Atrium has to date aided startups with raising more than $1 billion, from seed rounds of $200,000 to huge $50 million rounds

Developing drab but useful software for enterprises is a drastic shift for Kan. He pioneered life vlogging by strapping a camera to his head at his startup Justin.tv that eventually blossomed into Twitch and sold to Amazon for $1 billion. It’s been quite an adjustment for Kan going from making video-game-streaming consumer apps and angel investing to Atrium. “Two years. It has been an interesting and crazy ride. I wanted to get back to starting companies. That was the fastest learning I’d ever had. But I forgot learning means failing a lot,” he says with a wry smile.

Whatever tribulations they required seem worth it now that Atrium’s new products are ready. Atrium Records improves on the clumsy status quo where clients have to dig through emails from their lawyers hoping to find the most up-to-date versions of important corporate documents. If they can’t, they wait around after emailing their lawyer who has to hope they remember where they buried that term sheet or cap table in their firm’s file tree. This messy process can rack up billable hours, lead to data mismatches and let important signatures or approvals fall through the cracks.

Kan says he’s seen some grisly situations. “You never signed your equity documents so you actually have no equity in this company. And now that there’s financing, there could be a taxable event. There’s often surprisingly serious problems that happen.” Atrium’s senior product manager Sahil Bhagat walks me through how Atrium can help clients avoid an issue like, “Maybe you hired 10 employees but didn’t update your cap table and then you’re hiring the 11th employee but you don’t have any equity to grant so you have to go through the hassle of increasing your options pool.”

Atrium Records acts like your searchable legal Dropbox. The startup works with your last law firm to ingest your documents around equity, taxes, employees and IP, and make sure they’re all up to date. Machine learning extracts critical data about financings and cap tables so that’s instantly available in the Atrium dashboard and you don’t have to dig into the original docs. Plus, you don’t have to pay for lawyers or paralegals to do that manually. And your lawyer can build a task list of documents for you to edit or sign so you always know what to do next, which is a relief when you’re wrangling approvals from all your existing investors.

Atrium Hiring operationalizes one of the biggest founder time-sucks. Instead of writing hiring contracts from scratch each time, you fill out a form and use menu selections to set the salary, share count, vesting schedule and offer expiration. Looking across its anonymized data set of contracts, Atrium can recommend the best clauses and most common set ups, like four-year vesting with one-year cliffs. You can see the status of the contracts every step of the way, from drafting and finalizing to getting employees to accept.

Kan tells me Atrium’s goal is to continue building on its archive of more than 100,000 legal documents to develop aggregated pools of data clients could opt into. If they’re willing to share their salary data, vendor contract pricing and more, they’ll get access to that of Atrium’s other clients. “You’ll be able to see if you’re on the high end of being paid by Salesforce for a contract,” Kan explains. That’s a much more data-driven approach than when most lawyers just think of the last few salaries they saw for that position and give you a rough average.

“Being able to tell what the market norms are is a powerful negotiating tool.” The startup has even been offering its tips for free as part of fundraising workshops it uses to attract clients. The challenge for the company will be ensuring efficiency doesn’t mean cutting corners.

Atrium has grown to 150 staffers split between legal practitioners and its product team in its two years since launch. Kan is trying to build a culture where everyone cooperates, unlike infamously cutthroat law firms where partners can compete for cases. He hopes that talent will stick with Atrium because it’s deleting the most tedious parts of their jobs. “No one wanted go to law school to review 1,000 hiring docs.”

Hopper, the handy travel app that uses AI to predict airfare pricing, is today expanding its service to include hotels. Like airfare, hotel pricing is also dynamic — it can fluctuate with traveler demand. During busy times, prices are higher. And when a hotel has rooms to fill, the prices drop. Now, Hopper is bringing its same prediction technology to more than 270,000 hotels in more than 200 countries and territories worldwide.

The hotels, which can be booked directly within the Hopper app itself, span 1,600 major cities.

The company began testing hotel prediction algorithms back in October 2017, but only in New York. At the time, Hopper CEO Frederic Lalonde explained how online hotel booking differed from airfare. With plane tickets, people are usually just in search of the best price. But with hotels, other factors come into play.

That’s why the new feature lets travelers narrow searches not only by city, but also by neighborhood and points of interest. Hotels can additionally be filtered by the neighborhood, rating, price and their amenities.

Hopper says people who book at the right time will save $62 per night, on average, off the peak rates. But when people go shopping for hotels, they usually only spot-check prices or wait until the last minute to book. To get a better deal, the company suggests you set the app to monitor hotel prices and send push notifications when the hotel prices drop or when private rates become available.

These private rates can include package deals, member rates, geofenced rates, closed user rates, pre-purchased inventory blocks and more. Most people don’t know if these sort of rates are available to them, or if they would qualify. Hoppers says it will monitor these private rates, too, then alert you if you’re able to book a private deal.

In addition, the app offers a “Watch a Hotel” feature that will forecast and track the prices of specific hotels. That way, you can choose a handful of favorites places, then book when the prices become affordable to you — without having to waste time comparison shopping.

Over time, Hopper will learn more about your hotel preferences — for example, if you always book four or five-star hotels or those with pools. It will then use this understanding, combined with your usage of the app, to make better recommendations in the future.

The company says it’s already seeing good results from using these sorts of AI-based recommendations for airfare, as now 25% of bookings are the result of people booking a trip they weren’t planning for, but Hopper knew to suggest.

Hopper will take a commission that varies by property, but that’s never more than 10% — anything higher is passed along to the customer in the form of savings. The company is using a number of different hotel data suppliers as well as working with hotels directly on the new feature, it says.

The expansion comes at a time when Hopper’s business is growing. Last fall, the company raised another $100 million, valuing its business at $780 million. Last year, it booked more than a billion in sales, and users are today tracking $18 billion worth of flights and hotels per year in its app, which has passed 40 million downloads.

Since the beginning of 2019, Hopper’s sales are up 100% and conversion is up 80%, it says.

The hotel booking feature is live today in the Hopper app for iOS. It will roll out to Android in the next few weeks.

When Armoire first emerged from MIT’s accelerator program back in 2016, the company’s vision was already fully formed — combine StitchFix and Rent the Runway to give women a low-cost, sustainable way to get a high-fashion, high-functioning wardrobe for every day.

Ambika Singh, the Seattle-based company’s chief executive, set out to solve two problems: the amount of time wasted on shopping, some 216 hours spent in stores or online, and the waste associated with the impulse purchases and fast fashion that have become the byproduct of an accelerating consumer culture.

Carried along by two trends — the proliferation of direct to consumer brands trying to capture the attention of a new customer and the rise of the rental movement — Singh thought Armoire could provide a daily wardrobe for professional women at a price point that could be attractive enough to switch from an ownership to a rental model for fashion.

(Or as The New York Times put it in a strong contender for headline of the year: “They see it. They like it. They want it. They rent it.“)

It may have taken three years, but investors are now renting out some space of their own on the company’s cap table. Armoire recently raised a $4 million seed round from investors, including Jesse Draper’s Halogen Ventures; Zulily co-founder, Darrell Cavens; Vijay Talwar, the former chief executive of BlueNile; and Rajeev and Jill Singh, former executives at Concur.

A subscription to Armoire’s service costs $149 per month and covers four items per shipment. The company’s average customer (Singh would not disclose how many of those there are), typically receive between 12 and 15 items in a month by swapping out the clothes they order.

Singh says this $149 per month is a discount to inventory that would otherwise cost around $300 if bought directly from stores.

The other benefit, says Singh, is that the company focuses on women-owned brands. Current suppliers include Of Mercer, Brass Clothing and Zuri.

While the relationship between the company and its clothing providers is more of a wholesale model (Armoire buys the clothes at a discount), Singh envisions a time when the company could reduce costs or add revenue by marketing styles from its clothing suppliers to customers.

Other companies that are also taking the rental retail model to the masses have a consignment relationship where their suppliers are getting a portion of rental revenues.

The number of companies pitching rental retail has grown significantly since Armoire’s chief executive first stepped on the MIT pitch competition stage in Boston years ago. Now there’s Gwynnie Bee, Haverdash and the grand dame of rental fashion, Le Tote.

Why enter a market when there’s already a global contender backed by more than $62 million in venture financing?

Some competitors and retailers have a consignment relationship from which they’re getting a portion of a rental revenue.

“We’ve got a particular focus that a woman post-30 needs. We focus on maternity and nursing and we have a focus on fit,” says Singh. “And the fact that rental has major headwinds around us and we have this consumer that is underserved and finding her voice in her wallet.”

Armoire’s team is 90% women and was hired from places like TheRealReal, Amazon, Zulily and Rover. The company owns all of its own inventory, and is targeting a 30-to-60 year-old woman who’s typically a working mother.

Singh uses a $70,000 median household income as its targeting proxy on Facebook, but says she’s hoping to bring the price point down for middle-class consumers. “This is a good way to get the volume ‘she’ might desire with a fixed budget,” says Singh.

And Armoire does have an option to buy the clothes that customers are renting — should they feel inclined. Singh expects the company booked roughly $200,000 in May.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the kinds of B2C ventures you like to invest in. Besides the ventures doing good element, is there other parameterization that you could put on your preferred...

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You’ll truly appreciate CrunchMatch as you explore more than 1,200 startups and exhibitors showcasing their tech and talent in Startup Alley. Maybe you want to be one of those startups, in which case, you have two opportunity-packed options.

You can purchase a Startup Alley Exhibitor Package or you can apply to the TC Top Picks program for a chance to exhibit in Startup Alley for free. It’s a competitive process, and the application deadline for consideration is July 19.  Note — to qualify, your startup must fall into one of these categories: AI/Machine Learning, Biotech/Healthtech, Blockchain, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, Retail/E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware, SaaS and Social Impact & Education.

There’s tons more going on at Disrupt SF: an impressive roster of speakers, Q&A Sessions, workshops, demos, the All Raise AMA series for women founders and investors and, of course, the Startup Battlefield.

Disrupt SF 2019 takes place October 2-4. You have just 48 hours left to score the lowest possible price on passes. Super-early-bird pricing ends June 21 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Don’t delay, folks. Buy your pass now and save.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Today’s 447th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, June 20 at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 447th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, June 20, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...

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Nearly a year ago, security services provider Zscaler (Nasdaq: ZS) went public. And what a year it has been. Since then, Zscaler’s valuation has grown almost five times, and a slowdown does not...

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It started with a hashtag. Amanda de Cadenet, photographer, author and TV host, was spending time with her sister, a director and photographer in her own right, when an ACLU study on the lack of diversity among directors was published in the NYT Magazine, with de Cadenet’s sister an interviewee in the cover story.

“It’s about damn time,” she said to her sister, launching a conversation that would re-route de Cadenet’s path forward. Her experience as a photographer, able to book editorial jobs but rarely getting paid gigs, cemented what she had just read in the magazine article.

“The glass ceiling was so low that I couldn’t get off my knees,” she explained of that time.

Over the next 48 hours she would design a logo and a font and contact everyone in her creative network, brands and artists alike, to answer the call when she tweeted a call to action. She simply asked for female photographers and videographers to share their photos alongside the hashtag #girlgaze.

“The majority of pictures taken of females are taken by men,” said de Cadenet. “If the goal is for us to be accepted and embrace who we are, our flaws and all, we’re never going to see those pieces of ourselves depicted in media when taken from the perspective that doesn’t have an experience of those things.”

Thousands of photos flooded in over the first 72 hours and were re-shared on the GirlGaze Instagram. It was de Cadenet’s way of highlighting the amazing work being done by creative women, and showing the different story that is told in content created from the perspective of a female. But more importantly, it’s how she built an army of 200,000+ female-identifying photographers and directors to eventually launch the GirlGaze Network.

Today, at Cannes Lion festival, nearly three years later, de Cadenet did just that.

The GirlGaze Network allows brands to sign up and find diverse, female-identifying and non-binary creatives to generate amazing content. The network has been in beta for the past few months, and was integral in a global campaign from Dove, which employed 400 photographers and directors across 62 countries.

In essence, the GirlGaze Network acts as representation for a group of people who have not gotten equal pay or equal respect within their field. It also gives brands the opportunity to right the ship and hire diverse creative talent to generate their troves of content, whether it’s for social media, a campaign or otherwise.

Here’s how it works:

Creatives pay nothing to be on the platform and share their portfolio.

Brands join the platform through a paid subscription, where they can see the portfolios of thousands of photographers, directors and creatives. These brands have access to an à la carte menu to establish what kind of jobs they’d like to post, putting the compensation quote up at the very beginning so that whomever receives the job is paid a fair amount for the gig.

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Big brands looking to hire a large amount of people, as Dove did with the #showus campaign, join the Enterprise tier to customize their exact offer, including per-project talent as well as full-time positions.

Brands can search for talent by title, skills, location and availability. But perhaps even more interesting, the GirlGaze Network has an “Unbiased Browsing” feature, allowing brands who genuinely want to rid themselves of unconscious bias to browse portfolios only, without access to any details about the creative herself.

GirlGaze also handles all of the back-end nitty gritty, including casting and NDAs and all the other paperwork involved.

“The biggest challenge for GirlGaze is to let brands and companies know that they’re not doing this underserved community a favor by hiring them,” said de Cadenet. “This community creates work that is incredibly impactful, really powerful, smart, beautiful. Ultimately, it’s going to add to the bottom line of their business because we’re in a time where the world is very attuned to what is BS and what isn’t. This community tells stories. They have a perspective.”

Thus far, GirlGaze has worked with brands such as Levi’s, Nike, Google and Warby Parker, and has brought in more than $1 million in pay to their network of female-identifying and non-binary creatives.

One such creative is photographer Nolwen Cifuentes, who has been following GirlGaze from the start and also worked on the Dove campaign.

“This is for really cool brands that want female photographers so they can focus on a story they didn’t have before,” said Cifuentes. “I’ve heard criticism against brands from people who believe they might be queer baiting or using inclusion as a trend. But the thing about GirlGaze is that they are genuinely passionate about female photographers and the stories being told by female photographers, so the brands that come to them are going to be genuine, as well.”

As businesses continue to move more of their computing and data to the cloud, one of the startups that has made a name for itself as a provider of cloud-based solutions to protect and manage those IT assets has raised a big round of funding to build its business.

Druva, which provides software-as-a-service-based data protection, backup and management solutions, has raised $130 million in a round of funding that CEO and founder Jaspreet Singh says takes the company “well past the $1 billion mark” in terms of its valuation.

Alongside this news, it’s making an acquisition to continue building out the storage part of its business (one of several product areas that it’s developing): it’s acquiring CloudLanes, a startup that was backed by Microsoft and others, for an undisclosed sum, in a deal that will likely be formally announced in early July.

The funding is being led by Viking Global Investors, the hedge fund and investment firm, with participation from two other new investors, Neuberger Berman and Atreides Capital, and existing investors Riverwood Capital, Tenaya Capital and Nexus Venture Partners (which were part of Druva’s last round of $80 million in 2017). The company, Singh said, is now nearly at a $100 million annual run rate. And although he would not disclose revenues, he said it’s now in a strong position to consider going public as its next step (or finally entertaining one of the many acquisition offers Singh admitted Druva gets).

“As we look at growth and the potential of what we are doing, the next obvious step is to look at public markets in the next 12 to 18 months,” he said in an interview.

The strong numbers (in terms of funding raised, valuation and performance) are a sign not just of Druva’s own business health, but of the opportunity it is tackling.

Spurred by a number of factors — the unfortunate rise of malicious hacking and data breaches, a massive wave of computing services that are creating mountains of data that can now be parsed for insights and a big move to cloud computing — the data protection industry is booming, with IDC predicting that it will collectively cost some $55 billion by 2020 to store and manage “copy data” (backups of the data), and that the data protection market will likely see revenues of $8 billion by 2020. Druva itself works with some 4,000 organizations today, with many in the mid-market in terms of size, with customers ranging across a number of verticals and including the likes of Build Group, American Cancer Society and Port of New Orleans — but as a measure of the opportunity, IDC notes that as of 2017 it had only about a 1% share (it doesn’t have more updated figures yet).

With a huge opportunity like this, it’s also an unsurprisingly crowded area in terms of competition. Singh points out that others looking to provide services in the same area include huge incumbents like CommVault and IBM, as well as newer entrants like Rubrik (itself on something of a fundraising tear in the last few years to capitalise on the same opportunity).

Singh notes that Druva stands out from these because it is the only one in the pack that started that remains an exclusively cloud-based, SaaS offering, meaning a company requires no hardware changes or appliance purchases in order to use it. While that’s an area that everyone is now moving into, his argument is that having started out here gives Druva a level of expertise and experience that cannot be matched by others — an important point when data protection is at stake.

The reality of today’s enterprise world is that there are a number of companies that are very far from being “in the cloud.” Despite the song and dance that we hear all the time about how cloud is the future, they are more often than not either relying entirely still on on-premises computing, or a hybrid solution. As Singh talks about it, this is almost irrelevant to what Druva is offering, and is in fact a segue to helping those companies come to trust and move more off premises, by giving them a strong example of how a cloud-based solution not only works, but can be less expensive and better than on-premise alternatives.

The CloudLanes acquisition fits in with this strategy, too: the company’s solution stack includes cloud storage that leverages on-premise data as a cache; ransomware protection; audit logs and more. “It will help us cover the gap between the data center and cloud more effectively,” Singh said.

This is also the belief that is propelling Druva to expanding into newer areas of business. Singh noted that business intelligence is going to be a big focus for the company, which makes sense: now that there is a lot of data being stored and managed by Druva, the next obvious move is to help parse it for insights. Security and making a wider move to secure endpoints are also areas that the company is considering, he said.

“We invest in companies based on a thorough assessment of their business models and fundamentals, the quality of their management teams, and cyclical and secular industry trends,” said Harish Belur, managing director, Riverwood Capital, in a statement. “Druva is doing something unique and special and, as a result, has grown at a phenomenal rate over recent years, all while keeping the trust and loyalty of its enterprise customers around the globe. We know this market is taking off and we continue to invest in Druva because we are sure it has the right product, executive team, and market execution to maintain leadership in the industry.”

I asked if companies like Amazon or Microsoft are friends, or frenemies, considering that they have a big part to play in cloud services. Singh said that so far, so good, since they are all more focused on infrastructure — or at least that’s where most of their strength has been up to now. Amazon, in particular, is a strong partner to the company he said, where Druva is often an early adopter of new tools of Amazon’s, and the AWS sales team regularly suggests Druva to customers for data protection and management services. Druva even happened to include a quote from the company in its news release:

“Druva is a leading Advanced Technology Partner in the AWS Partner Network,” said Mike Clayville, vice president Worldwide Commercial Sales and Business Development, Amazon Web Services, Inc., in a statement. “Druva’s solutions powered by AWS are changing the way data is managed and protected at thousands of companies globally. We’d like to congratulate Druva on its latest fund raise, and look forward to innovating with Druva to create new solutions that benefit our customers.”

Seems like that could be one to watch, as well, as both companies continue their cloud expansion, both independently and in competition with others.

In a bid to expand its educational offerings, iRobot has acquired local Massachusetts-based startup, Root Robotics. The company is the creator of the eponymous coding robot, a two-wheeled device designed to draw on whiteboards and other surfaces, scanning colors, playing music and otherwise playing out coding instructions.

We had the company at our CES stage last year, and it managed to stand out among a sea of educational ‘bots at the event. iRobot clearly sees a lot of value in the Wyss Institute at Harvard University spin-off, and will integrate the startup’s offering into its portfolio immediately.

“The acquisition of Root Robotics allows iRobot to broaden the impact of its STEM efforts with a commercially available, educational robotic platform already being used by educators, students and parents,” iRobot CEO Colin Angle said in a press release. “Root also helps increase the reach of iRobot’s educational robot line by offering a proven system for people of all ages, including students in elementary school.”

iRobot’s no stranger to STEM education. The company has long offered the Create robot — a hackable version of its popular Roomba platform — for schools. The addition of Root creates a far more accessible place for students to start, along with a clever recruiting method for future iRobot roboticists and engineers.

Root is currently available for $199. Details of the deal were not disclosed.

Nigerian motorcycle transit startup MAX.ng has raised a $7 million funding round led by Novastar Ventures, with participation from Japanese manufacturer Yamaha.

Based in Lagos, the company’s app-based platform coordinates motorcycle taxi and delivery services for individuals and businesses. Six million of the investment is in Series A capital followed by $1 million in grants.

MAX has an extended menu for the round. “We intend to invest massively in our technology capabilities,” including the company’s payment infrastructure, CFO Guy-Bertrand Njoya told TechCrunch.

The startup will also expand to 10 cities in West Africa (starting in Ghana and Ivory Coast) and add new vehicle classes — including watercraft and three-wheeled tuk tuk taxis.

And in what could be a first in Africa’s growing motorcycle ride-hail market, MAX will use its new funding for EV development. “We’re piloting electric motorcycles in partnership with EV manufacturers and working with grid operators across Nigeria to deploy charging stations,” Njoya said.

He would not name EV partners, except to clarify Yamaha is not currently part of the e-pilot. The research also includes renewable energy as an e-moto power source, according to Njoya. MAX’s current fleet consists primarily of Yamaha Crux Rev and Indian manufacturer Bajaj’s Pulsar motorcycles.

Co-founded in 2015 by MIT Sloan alumns Adetayo Bamiduro and Chinedu Azodoh, MAX has completed over 1 million trips and is one of the largest delivery partners in West Africa for Jumia — the e-commerce unicorn that recently listed on the NYSE.

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Zrosk Investment Management and Alitheia Capital joined Novastar Ventures and Yamaha in the $7 million round — which takes MAX’s total funding to $9 million.

Yamaha confirmed its investment in MAX to TechCrunch. Part of the company’s interest in the startup connects to market research and Yamaha’s existing Nigeria operations. “We want to work with good entrepreneurs in Africa to develop new business in Africa,” Shoji Shiraishi of Yamaha Motor Company’s New Venture Business Development Section told TechCrunch.

He added that Yamaha sells and manufactures motorcycles in Nigeria. “We really want to understand local needs for motorcycles and…to support [MAX] expanding their business,” he said.

This is Yamaha’s second move in less than a year in an emerging market ride-hail company. In December it invested $150 million in Grab, a Southeast Asian two and four-wheel on-demand transit company.

Yamaha’s investment in MAX suggests global interest in Africa’s two-wheel ride-hail space. Overall, the motorcycle taxi market is becoming a significant sub-sector in the continent’s mobility startup landscape.

Motorcycle transit ventures are vying to digitize a share of Africa’s boda boda and okada markets (the name for motorcycle taxis in East and West Africa) — representing a collective revenue pool of $4 billion (now) that’s expected to double by 2021, per a TechSci study.

Uber began offering a two-wheel transit option in East Africa in 2018, around the same time Bolt (previously Taxify) started motorcycle taxi service in Kenya.

Last month, MAX competitor Gokada (also based in Lagos) raised a $5.3 million round and announced it would expand in East Africa. Rwanda has motorbike taxi startups SafeMotos and Yegomoto. Uganda-based motorcycle ride-hail company SafeBoda expanded into Kenya in 2018 and recently raised a Series B round, co-led by the venture arms of Germany’s Allianz and Indonesia’s Go-Jek.

On the question of how MAX (a 2018 TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa participant) will compete in a market with more players, co-founder Chinedu Azodoh named diversification and satisfying drivers. “We’re a very driver-centric business and at the end of the day the driver is where the business is at,” he said, highlighting the ability of MAX’s platform to deliver market-share to those drivers.

Azodoh also believes MAX’s mix of business delivery and personal transit offers an advantage over competitors. He noted that MAX.ng has a local developer team and is always looking at new revenue opportunities. “Strategic for us is making sure we’re doing the right thing at the right time,” he said, indicating the company has already scaled up and scaled down certain service offerings in response to market needs.

“If we find that maybe there’s something else we’re missing out on, we’re happy to jump into that,” Azodoh said.

One of those areas could be development of EV mobility services for Nigeria and Africa. “The economics are promising and could offer significant value to the drivers and end-users,” MAX CFO Guy-Bertrand Njoya told TechCrunch.

So electric motorcycle taxis in African cities powered by renewable energy could become a reality. That would definitely place the continent in a unique position in the transformation of global mobility.

After London and Johannesburg, startup accelerator and incubator Founders Factory is launching a third city — Paris. Once again, the company is partnering with a corporate backer — insurance company Aviva France is backing Founders Factory Paris.

Albin Serviant is heading the team in Paris; the plan is to hire 50 people. There will be more corporate backers coming soon, which should provide enough runway for the next five years.

For now, given Aviva’s industry, Founders Factory Paris is going to focus on fintech startups. The company plans to develop a hybrid model between a traditional startup accelerator and a startup studio. Founders Factory has already applied this model in London and Johannesburg to launch and accelerate 100 startups.

For existing startups, you can take part in a six-month program that often leads to implementing pilots with corporate partners. In other words, if your startup targets big companies, Founders Factory wants to help you talk with corporate clients and sign deals.

Founders Factory also promises to support startups in multiple ways thanks to the accelerator’s network. It could be helpful when it comes to launching in new countries, attracting foreign talent and raising money.

But a good chunk of the team is going to work on the startup studio. Founders Factory plans to recruit a traditional startup-like team, with engineers, designers, sales people and more. They’ll start new projects from scratch.

This isn’t the first time Aviva and Founders Factory have worked together. In the U.K., Aviva has worked with 20 startups as part of the startup studio or accelerator. The company has conducted 16 pilot programs with them and signed seven enterprise contracts. Aviva has also invested in two startups directly, Acre and Shepper.

Other Founders Factory backers include L’Oréal, easyJet, Guardian Media Group, CSC, Holtzbrinck, Marks & Spencer and Standard Bank.

Slack’s public debut is happening Thursday on the NYSE and the company has set a reference price of $26 per share for its direct listing, according to WSJ, which would value the company at around $15.7 billion.

The company’s stock is expected to pop at open, according to the WSJ’s sources. Slack is pursuing a direct listing, eschewing the typical IPO process in favor of putting its current stock on to the NYSE without doing an additional raise or bringing on underwriter banking partners.

This isn’t a first for the technology industry, as Spotify did the same thing about this time last year, but it is still an outlier in terms of common practice for startups looking to the public markets for their liquidity event.

Slack, launched in 2013 by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield, was initially built as a side project to support team communication for Butterfield’s game company Tiny Speck. In the intervening years, it has risen to become one of the most recognized enterprise communication tools currently available.

Update: Slack’s pricing and symbol, ‘WORK’ are now officially confirmed.