Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We are back, as promised. Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm re-convened today to discuss the latest from the Uber IPO. Namely that it opened down, and then kept falling.

A few questions spring to mind. Why did Uber lose ground? Was it the company’s fault? Was it simply the macro market? Was it something else altogether? What we do know is that Uber’s pricing wasn’t what we were expecting and its first day was not smooth.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why Uber went out the way it did. Firstly, the stock market has had a rough week. That, coupled with rising U.S.-China tensions made this week one of the worst of the year for Uber’s monstrous IPO.

But, to make all that clear, we ran back through some history, recalled some key Lyft stats, and more.

We don’t know what’s next but we will be keeping a close watch, specifically on the next cohort of unicorn companies ready to IPO (Postmates, hi!).

Uber finally made its debut Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, ending its decade-long journey from startup to publicly traded company.

So far, it’s been a ho-hum beginning, with shares opening at $42, down from the IPO price. The share price is hovering just under $44.

Thirteen people, including executives, early employees, drivers and customers, were on the balcony for the historic bell ringing that opened the markets Friday. Noticeable absentees were co-founder Garrett Camp and former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who was ousted from the company in June 2017 after a string of scandals around Uber’s business practices.

Kalanick, who still sits on the board and has an 8.6% stake in Uber, wasn’t part of the opening bell ceremony. However, Kalanick and Camp were both at the NYSE for the event.

Here is who participated in the opening bell ceremony.

The bell ringer

Austin Geidt, who rang the bell, was employee No. 4 when she started as an intern in 2010, and is one of Uber’s earliest employees.

Geidt joined Uber in 2010 and has since worked in numerous positions at the company. She led Uber’s expansion in hundreds of new cities and dozens of new countries. Geidt now heads up strategy for Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, the unit working on autonomous vehicles.

Executives

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stood next to Geidt at the opening of the market Friday. Khosrowshahi joined Uber in 2017 after Kalanick resigned and the board launched an extensive search for an executive who could change the culture at the company and prepare it for an eventual IPO.

Khosrowshahi was the CEO of Expedia before joining Uber. Khosrowshahi gave a one-year update on his time at Uber during TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2018.

Uber CTO Thuan Pham has been with the company since 2013. Prior to coming to Uber, Pham was vice president of engineering at VMware.

Rachel Holt, vice president and head of New Mobility, was also on hand. Holt has worked at Uber since October 2011, when the company was live in just three cities. In May 2016, she became VP and regional general manager of Uber’s operations in the U.S. and Canada.

She was promoted to head up new mobility in June 2018. She’s responsible for the ramp-up and onboarding of additional mobility services, including public transit integration, scooters, car rentals and bikes.

Other executives included Pierre-Dimitry Gore-Coty and Andrew MacDonald, both vice presidents and regional general managers at Uber, as well as Jason Droege, a vice president who heads up Uber Eats.

Droege, who joined Uber in 2014, has the official title of head of UberEverything. This is the team that created the food delivery service Uber Eats, which now operates in 35 countries.

Drivers

Uber had five drivers on hand for the opening bell, who represented different services and geographies.

Among the drivers were:

Jerry Bruner, a Los Angeles-based driver who is a military veteran and former professional golfer. Bruner has completed more than 30,000 Uber trips.Tiffany Hanna, a military veteran, is based out of Springfield, Missouri. Hanna is a truck driver who uses the Uber Freight carrier app. Jonelle Bain, a New York-based driver. Uber, which shared the bios of the drivers, said Bain is taking coding classes and plans to become a software engineer.Onur Kerey is a driver based out of London. Kerey is deaf. According to his bio, “He doesn’t let his disability get in the way of his passion for driving or connecting with others.”J. Alexander Palacio Sanchez is based in Australia and has been driving with Uber since 2015. His true passion is acting, according to Uber, and at the urging of his riders, he auditioned for the role of Kevin in “The Heights” — and landed it.

Customers

One customer, Elise Wu, also participated in the opening bell. Wu owns Kampai, a family of restaurants in France that serves affordable cuisine made available for delivery through Uber Eats.

Don’t like the idea of your baby guzzling down liquid candy all day? It may surprise you to find corn syrup is the main ingredient in most infant formulas in the U.S. That’s where Bobbie, a Bay Area-based baby formula delivery startup promising only wholesome ingredients, hopes to fill in.

Just go down the baby food aisle of any supermarket in America and start reading the ingredients and you’ll likely find corn syrup, soy bean oil, glucose syrup, maltodextrin and palm oil at the top. Even “organic” options often add these ingredients.

While it’s high-fructose corn syrup we should be most concerned with when it comes to diabetes (and some doctors might even recommend adding some sort of syrup to your baby’s diet to combat constipation), corn syrup is not something some parents may want their baby drinking all day.

Touting itself as “European” style, Bobbie’s first product features fresh, grass-fed cows’ milk as the main ingredient. What it does not include, however, is key for the concerned parent. There’s zero corn syrup, maltodextrin or other artificial sugars or unhealthy oils.

Of course, some babies might not be able to stomach the lactose from bovine sources, but grass-fed and corn syrup-free is music to the ears of many parents (me included) who’ve resorted to ordering bulk from Germany just to avoid feeding our kids Snickers in a bottle.

Yes, it seems crazy to order all the way from Europe when there are so many choices here in the U.S. — and there are some formula manufacturers here making an effort to offer better options — but finding something that meets the simple standard of no sugar, corn syrup or processed oils in the baby food is weirdly difficult.

The other nugget Bobbie provides is delivery. Heaven knows every second is precious when you are a new parent. Delivery can be an especially big help in maintaining some semblance of order in those early days. Sure, Amazon delivers many baby things — it even ships the popular, German-based Hipp brand of formula — but it comes at a premium price and will only ship in bulk.

You can also get the European brands delivered straight from sites like Organic Start, Huggable and a number of others easily Googled. But for those wanting something local, slightly less expensive and with presumably less of a carbon footprint than shipping from another continent, Bobbie is here for you (and we’re told will be delivered with a soft knock on the door, in case baby is sleeping).

The company was founded by two San Francisco moms and former Airbnb operation leaders Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy. Both found out how hard it was, after returning from maternity leave, to pump each day while keeping up with the demands of the job. However, neither of them liked the formula options they found at the grocery store for their own little broods.

Modi and Hardy thought it was time to give parents a more local choice in healthy formula. The two founded the company in 2018 and pulled in $2.5 million in funding last year from Bolt Capital, Nextview Ventures, Lakehouse and Precursor while Modi was pregnant, closing the round a week before giving birth to her baby boy.

Bobbie will (appropriately) begin taking orders this Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, Bobbie only delivers to the Bay Area for now. However, those interested can order one 400 g trial box for $27, which should make about 22 bottles at 6 ounces per bottle, according to a company spokesperson. You can also sign up for the subscription package for $23 per box.

Bobbie Baby – Evolving the conversation of parenthood from Laura Modi on Vimeo.

Uber’s much heralded public offering has arrived not so much with a bang as with a whimper, thanks largely to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

Overnight, the U.S. government made good on the threat from President Donald Trump to hike tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25% up from 10%.

As a result, stock markets slid further on Friday, and their decline hit Uber’s initial public offering. The company’s shares began trading at $42.54, below its initial pricing of $45 per share.

At its initial pricing, Uber was valued at $75.5 billion, below the $120 billion price that Wall Street thought the company would fetch late last year, but still among the biggest public offerings in history. Only Facebook’s $81 billion public offering and the whopping $169 billion debut of Alibaba were bigger, according to a Dealogic analysis cited by Business Insider.

Uber’s historic public offering — which was designed to raise at least $90 billion for the ride-hailing giant — was no match for the equally historic struggle between the U.S. and China’s emerging economic superpower.

The rising tariffs were designed to hit business equipment, but will also affect prices on some $40 billion in consumer goods — ranging from clothes to furniture, refrigerators, washers and dryers.

Trump boosted tariffs after China reneged on certain concessions it had made during the trade negotiations. Chiefly, the U.S. was looking for written commitments from the Chinese government that it would provide less direct support to its state-owned enterprises and loosen restrictions on U.S. companies operating in the country.

Uber’s disappointing debut can’t be chalked up to trade woes alone. Its immediate American rival, Lyft, has seen its stock decline precipitously since its opening at nearly $79 per share. Lyft is now trading at around $55 per share.

Yesterday, Lyft reported its first earnings as a public company, losing $1.14 billion on $776 million in revenue.

While Lyft is focused on consumer transportation, Uber has expanded to include freight shipping and meal delivery as part of its attempts to become an all-in-one hub for consumer and business logistics.

That expansion has come at a cost. The company may have generated revenues of $11.3 billion in 2018, but it operated at a $3 billion loss for the year. And Uber is deeply in the red. With deficits reaching nearly $8 billion by the end of 2018, as MarketWatch points out.

Trade wars, it seems, trump transportation disruption.

David Lambert: To talk about pivots a little more, we’ve got data across a thousand different companies that we’ve seen evolve over time. The most important thing at these early stages is cash burn....

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At long last, it’s lift-off for Uber. After pricing its initial public offering at $45 per share, at the bottom end of the range it set previously, to raise $8.1 billion, the transportation startup began trading today on the New York Stock Exchange, and the shares opened at $42, down from the IPO price.

Ahead of Uber finally making its debut, the company had an indication price that went as low as $42 ahead of live trading. With the overall market in a slump this week over trade woes with China, it’s a challenging time to list, to say the least.

Uber had raised $28.5 billion as a private company from no less than 166 different backers, with its last valuation in the region of $75 billion. The $82.4 billion valuation that it finally settled on for the IPO (selling 180 million shares at $45/share) is definitely up from that, but far from the lofty projections of $120 billion that banks and analysts that floated in the months leading up to today.

The figures nevertheless cement Uber, alongside Alibaba and Facebook, as one of the most valuable tech IPOs in history, and a major beacon for breaking ground in a new area of tech, transportation.

But if it is the sheer scale and potential of Uber that catapulted it to such financial heights (real and imaginary), it’s the bare financials that have tempered some of those notions.

On one side, Uber essentially created and currently dominates the market for on-demand transportation, which started with the premise of connecting drivers with passengers by way of an app that tracked the location of both, but eventually evolved into a wider two-sided marketplace ambition that brings together different modes of transportation — including bikes, public buses and more — with human passengers, as well as the movement of other goods like food, all on a global scale.

That model has propelled Uber to 93 million active platform consumers (from 70 million a year ago) and 17 million trips per day across 700 cities on six continents, along with a lot of high hopes from others like PayPal — which are making very late-stage, strategic investments to bank on what it believes could shape up to be a lucrative e-commerce empire in the years to come.

But Uber’s prospects are not without competition — which includes a host of more regional players like Lyft, Gett, Heetch, MyTaxi, Bolt and more — and not without controversy. Even as it goes public, the company is dealing with high-profile driver protests, lawsuits and ongoing regulatory pressures, not to mention a bigger cloud over its business practices that has hovered for years that the company has worked to dispel.

Even today, during the iconic bell ringing, there was a notable absence: former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who was ousted over the controversies around business practices but still sits on the board, was not up there — although he did show up at the NYSE for the event.

Outside, meanwhile, protesters against the company were also making their voices heard.

On the pure metric of profit and loss, Uber’s been firmly in the latter column, most recently posting a loss of some $1 billion in the last quarter on revenues of $3 billion-$3.1 billion, versus $2.6 billion a year ago.

Today’s listing is a small pause on the bigger question of how and if Uber will ever turn that boat around. It has made some significant shifts, such as divesting certain regional assets and reducing some of the incentive payments and discounts it made to drivers around the world to lure them to its platform; and under current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, it has made a concerted effort to play nice on a number of fronts. Khosrowshahi acknowledged the new set of challenges that staff would be facing as of today in a memo he sent out this morning:

As we move from a private to a public company, our jobs will no doubt become harder and all eyes will be on us. We’ll have an even deeper responsibility to our customers, to our shareholders, to our cities, and to each other. With every share purchased, someone else will join us as a co-owner of Uber — and we’ll gain another person to whom we owe a duty to always ‘do the right thing, period.’

Remember: while the public markets will keep their version of the ‘score’ and the value of what we build, our true north will be determined over the long term. We will go through periods when we will be misunderstood, as well as periods when we will be hailed as heroes. It’s during those days, regardless of the ups and downs, that we should focus on our work: on creating opportunity, on moving the world, and relentlessly innovating and executing.

But the big question will still remain of whether all these changes and the recast approach will be enough, and whether — now that it’s listed — public investors will be patient enough. At least in the short term, the performance of its smaller rival, Lyft, which largely operates on similar metrics and business model to Uber, might give some pause: it is currently trading at around $55, well below its debut of $78.29 on March 29.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about the insurance side. It’s notorious. Physical therapy not being covered by insurance is a notorious issue. How do you think about that? What can be done,...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 444th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 16, 2019, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Mountain View-based Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), the largest online marketplace that enables businesses to find and work with highly-skilled freelancers, went public last year. I am a huge fan of this...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest, Eghosa Omoigui, Managing Partner at EchoVC Partners, a firm focused on the African market. It was a fascinating discussion. The Westland Concept As...

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As I started analyzing various paths to success via bootstrapping, a second formula also became absolutely obvious: doing services projects and then formulating a product through that process. We...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we had the full Equity staff on hand to dig through the week’s news, helmed by Kate Clark and Connie Loizos, with Alex Wilhelm in the studio too. Plus, Om Malik, a former scribbler and current venture capitalist, joined us to riff on the latest.

Before we dig into what we covered, a small note from the team: As this episode is going out before Uber will trade, we’ll have another episode coming to you tomorrow after the madness. Stay tuned.

Uber priced its IPO at $45 per share right before we hit record, so we first touched on the final pricing of what should be the year’s largest tech IPO. Pricing toward the lower-end of its range, Uber could be setting itself up for a strong first day. Or, demand was lower than expected following Lyft’s slide. Either way, Uber will trade tomorrow as a public company at last. Om predicts Uber and Lyft rides will get a whole lot more expensive in the next eighteen months, so hold onto your hats, the future for riders and drivers alike is… unclear.

Next, we debated Harry’s exit to Edgewell Personal Care. The direct-to-consumer razor supplier sold this week for more than $1 billion in a deal reminiscent of the Dollar Shave Club’s sale to Unilever. From there, we spoke about the latest from the Luckin Coffee IPO. The news, in brief, is that its IPO is moving forward. Next up is pricing; we’ll be sure to discuss any updates on the podcast.

In big deal news, Carta closed a $300 million round. Connie has learned a lot about the business in recent weeks and it turns out, Om wishes he was an investor!

Finally, Cruise’s latest new round, and the capital needs of autonomous driving. As we all quickly agree, it’s an expensive business and not one that will get cheaper. But, given that so many companies are working on the tech, we hope it works out. Especially Om, who doesn’t have a driver’s license, it turns out.

All that and we had fun! Chat tomorrow!

Daye, a “femcare” startup developing a new type of tampon that uses CBD to help tackle dysmenorrhea, has quietly raised $5.5 million in funding from high-profile investors in the U.S. and Europe, TechCrunch has learned.

Backing the seed round is Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, along with London’s Index Ventures and Kindred Capital. The investment sees Khosla’s chief of staff Kristina Simmons, Khosla venture partner Tim Westergren (who also founded Pandora), and Hannah Seal, principle at Index, join Daye’s board.

Other investors in the London-based company include Sophia Bendz (former global director of Marketing at Spotify and now a partner at VC firm Atomico), Irina Havas (a principle of Atomico), David Schiff (founding partner at United Talent Agency) and Kristin Cardwell (VP of International Business Development at Refinery29).

Founded by 24-year-old Valentina Milanova and launching later this year, Daye has set out to build a new brand for female health products “designed with women in mind.” The startup’s first product is a newly developed tampon that uses CBD to help tackle period cramps (or dysmenorrhea) as an alternative to traditional painkillers (CBD is the extract derived from the flower of the industrial hemp plant, a legal relative to marijuana). Daye also claims its product will be more hygienic and sustainable than legacy tampons, and if successful could be a wake-up call to the incumbent and stagnant tampon industry, which has seen little innovation in decades.

“Our goal is to raise the standards of women’s hygiene products by tackling three primary issues: dysmenorrhea, manufacturing standards and sustainability,” Milanova tells TechCrunch. “Women have largely been left out of medical innovation. In fact, until 1993, researchers banned women from participating in [early] clinical trials, as it was believed female hormone fluctuations polluted medical data. To this day, most medications, including those for pain relief, depression and sleeping aids, have not been tested on women. We’re redefining localised cramp-relief, relying on an ingredient that we’ve tested on women first.”

Milanova says she first had the idea for a cramp-fighting tampon in November 2017 and initially used her salary from a day job and credit cards to fund product development. In September 2018, she quit her job to work on the business full-time and build a team, and to finalise clinical trials for the product.

Describing CBD as “having its 15 minutes of fame,” Milanova says the company doesn’t believe cannabidiol should be added to everything, from dry shampoo to cocktails. However, she says CBD is much safer than over-the-counter painkillers, and that the vaginal canal has the highest concentration of cannabinoid receptors and is also the fastest route of absorption into the bloodstream when it comes to pain relief.

“Unlike most CBD products on the market today, our product does not contain any tetrahydrocannabinol (THC),” she explains. “This is why we believe we’re going to be attractive to every consumer who experiences menstrual discomfort.”

Beyond the novel idea of a cramp-fighting CBD tampon, Milanova says Daye wants to raise the bar for tampon production standards and sustainability.

“In Europe, tampons are not classified as medical devices, which means there are no manufacturing guidelines — for context, plasters are more regulated and better sanitised than tampons,” she tells me, to my astonishment. To address this, Daye is introducing pharmaceutical-grade standards and will keep manufacturing in-house.

Period care is also “wreaking havoc” on the environment. “Over the course of her lifetime, the average woman uses enough tampons to fill two double-decker buses. That waste either ends up in our oceans or landfills. We want to relieve the burden period care has on the environment, and offer a product that is equal parts body-safe, effective and as sustainable as possible.”

To begin to answer the question of why something like this hasn’t been done before, Milanova says that menstrual discomfort in general is a massively overlooked problem and that “even the mention of the word tampon makes most people feel uncomfortable.”

The existing market is also monopolised “to the point where innovation suffers.” All tampons on the market today perform and look the same, using the same materials and the same manufacturing processes. Yet, because there’s barely any product differentiation, the Daye founder says most women remain loyal to the first tampon brand they ever tried.

“What we’re bringing to market is a completely novel product, and we’re operating in a very sensitive, intimate area of consumer goods. As a newcomer, we have to gain consumer trust by ensuring we’re in constant contact with our users, taking note of their feedback and iterating on our proposition fast.”

Cloud kitchens are the big thing in food delivery, with ex-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s new business one contender in that space, with Asia, and particularly Southeast Asia, a major focus. Despite the newcomers, a more established startup from Singapore has raised a large bowl of cash to go after regional expansion.

Founded in 2014, Grain specializes in clean food while it takes a different approach to Kalanick’s CloudKitchens or food delivery services like Deliveroo, FoodPanda or GrabFood.

It adopted a cloud kitchen model — utilizing unwanted real estate as kitchens, with delivery services for output — but used it for its own operations. So while CloudKitchens and others rent their space to F&B companies as a cheaper way to make food for their on-demand delivery customers, Grain works with its own chefs, menu and delivery team. A so-called “full stack” model, if you can stand the cliched tech phrase.

Finally, Grain is also profitable. The new round has it shooting for growth — more on that below — but the startup was profitable last year, CEO and co-founder Yi Sung Yong told TechCrunch.

Now it is reaping the rewards of a model that keeps it in control of its product, unlike others that are complicated by a chain that includes the restaurant and a delivery person.

We previously wrote about Grain when it raised a $1.7 million Series A back in 2016, and today it announced a $10 million Series B, which is led by Thailand’s Singha Ventures, the VC arm of the beer brand. A bevy of other investors took part, including Genesis Alternative Ventures, Sass Corp, K2 Global — run by serial investor Ozi Amanat who has backed Impossible Foods, Spotify and Uber among others — FoodXervices and Majuven. Existing investors Openspace Ventures, Raging Bull — from Thai Express founder Ivan Lee — and Cento Ventures participated.

The round includes venture debt, as well as equity, and it is worth noting that the family office of the owners of The Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf — Sassoon Investment Corporation — was involved.

Three years is a long gap between the two deals — Openspace and Cento have even rebranded during the intervening period — and the ride has been an eventful one. During those years, Sung said the business had come close to running out of capital before it doubled down on the fundamentals before the precarious runway capital ran out.

In fact, he said, the company — which now has more than 100 staff — was fully prepared to self-sustain.

“We didn’t think of raising a Series B,” he explained in an interview. “Instead, we focused on the business and getting profitable… we thought that we can’t depend entirely on investors.”

And, ladies and gentleman, the irony of that is that VCs very much like a business that can self-sustain — it shows a model is proven — and investing in a startup that doesn’t need capital can be attractive.

Ultimately, though, profitability is seen as sexy today — particularly in the meal space, where countless U.S. startups have shuttered, including Munchery and Sprig — but the focus meant that Grain had to shelve its expansion plans. It then went through soul-searching times in 2017 when a spoilt curry saw 20 customers get food poisoning.

Sung declined to comment directly on that incident, but he said that company today has developed the “infrastructure” to scale its business across the board, and that very much includes quality control.

Grain currently delivers “thousands” of meals per day in Singapore, its sole market, with eight-figures in sales per year, he said. Last year, growth was 200 percent, Sung continued, and now is the time to look overseas. With Singha, the Grain CEO said the company has “everything we need to launch in Bangkok.”

Thailand — which Malaysia-based rival Dahamakan picked for its first expansion — is the only new launch on the table, but Sung said that could change.

“If things move faster, we’ll expand to more cities, maybe one per year,” he said. “But we need to get our brand, our food and our service right first.”

One part of that may be securing better deals for raw ingredients and food from suppliers. Grain is expanding its “hub” kitchens — outposts placed strategically around town to serve customers faster — and growing its fleet of trucks, which are retrofitted with warmers and chillers for deliveries to customers.

Grain’s journey is proof that startups in the region will go through trials and tribulations, but being able to bolt down the fundamentals and reduce burn rate is crucial in the event that things go awry. Just look to grocery startup Honestbee, also based in Singapore, for evidence of what happens when costs are allowed to pile up.

OneDegree, an insurance technology startup based in Hong Kong, announced today it has extended its Series A round to $30 million, up from the $25.5 million it announced in September. Its extension, which the company is calling its “A2” round, was led by BitRock Capital, an investment firm that focuses on financial tech. Cyberport Macro Fund, Cathay Venture and investors from its initial Series A also participated.

The company is preparing to launch its online insurance platform, designed to make buying insurance plans easier for both consumers and providers by using data analytics to automate the most tedious parts of the process. The company will start with medical insurance for pets after its license is approved by the Hong Kong Insurance Authority before expanding into other products, including travel, cyber and human medical insurance.

In a press statement, OneDegree co-founder Alvin Kwock said its strategy is “not to compete head-on with traditional insurers, but rather to work together, steering the whole industry towards a fully digital ecosystem.”

In Riga, Latvia, an 80-person startup called Printify is reimagining the on-demand printing business.

Gone are the days where small merchants have to sell their customized products on platforms like Zazzle, Society6, CafePress or Teespring . Using Printify, e-commerce business owners can create clothes, accessories and more fixed with their designs, logos, art or photos, then sell them directly on their very own online stores.

The “first wave” of on-demand printing companies, Printify founder and chief executive officer James Berdigans explained to TechCrunch, typically require that merchants sell their items on the provider’s platforms.

“The problem is that these merchants don’t have the capability to build their own brand,” Berdigans said. “At the end of the day, you end up building the Teespring brand, not your own brand.”

Printify, a graduate of the 500 Startups accelerator, has attracted a $3 million investment from Bling Capital, a venture capital fund launched five months ago by Ben Ling, a former general partner at Khosla Ventures.

“Printify is perfectly positioned to enable the new trend of micro and boutique brands,” Ling said in a statement. “Consumers and SMBs alike can benefit from Printify’s high-quality, low-cost and fast printing platform — and create their own micro-brands.”

Founded in 2015 by Berdigans, Artis Kehris and Gatis Dukurs, Printify had previously raised a $1 million round following a big pivot. Initially, the business “pretended to be the manufacturer,” opting to be less transparent as a means to entice customers.

“That was a terrible idea,” Berdigans said. “Even though you aren’t lying, you end up not being a very honest company and that’s not the business model we wanted.”

Now, Printify operates as a B2B marketplace that connects manufacturers with e-commerce stores. Plus, the startup handles the mundane tasks of fulfilling orders, including billing, manufacturing requests and shipping so store owners can focus on brand building. The switch allowed the startup to begin growing 30% month-over-month, as well as add hundreds of unique products to its catalog.

The founders say Printify most often caters to political campaign employees, designers & artists, and influencers & “hustlers,” or people who are self-taught experts on managing digital sales. With a fixed pricing scheme, merchants know exactly what they are paying Printify, but have the flexibility of pricing their own product. Other print-on-demand marketplaces, like the aforementioned “first wave” businesses, don’t give merchants the ability to determine their own margins.

“If you use Zazzle, for example, you only get a small portion of revenue share but on Printify, you pay us a small fee,” Berdigans said. “If you were selling t-shirts for $25 and the average production cost is $10, our sellers will see a 50 to 60% margin.”

Dozens of angel investors, including YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, ClassPass co-founder Fritz Lanman, DoorDash co-founder Evan Moore, Google AdSense pioneer Gokul Rajaram and Facebook’s vice president of product Kevin Weil, also participated in the company’s latest round.

“What Airbnb did for the hospitality industry, that’s basically what we can do for the print-on-demand industry,” said Kehris, Printify’s chief operating officer.

Such hate. Such dismay. “How Slack is ruining work.” “Actually, Slack really sucks.” “Slack may actually be hurting your workplace productivity.” “Slack is awful.” Slack “destroys teams’ ability to think, plan & get complex work out the door.” “Slack is a terrible collaboration tool.” “Face it, Slack is ruining your life.”

Contrarian view: Slack is not inherently bad. Rather, the particular way in which you are misusing it epitomizes your company’s deeper problems. I’m the CTO of a company which uses Slack extensively, successfully, and happily — but because we’re a consultancy, I have also been the sometime member of dozens of others’ Slack workspaces, where I have witnessed all the various flavors of flaws recounted above. In my experience, those are not actually caused by Slack.

Please note that I am not saying “Slack is just a tool, you have to use it correctly.” Even if that were so, a tool which lends itself so easily to being used so badly would be a bad tool. What I’m saying is something more subtle, and far more damning: that Slack is a mirror which reflects the pathologies inherent in your workplace. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our Slacks, but in ourselves.

Existing approaches to blocking malicious advertising aren’t working — at least according to digital ad veteran Seth Demsey.

That should resonate with anyone who’s ever encountered an ad that immediately redirected them to a website filled with annoying gift card offers. And it’s the issue that the startup Demsey co-founded, clean.io, is working to address.

Today, the company is unveiling the new clean.io name (a rebrand from its old moniker of Clean Creative), and also announcing that it has raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Real Ventures.

“When you think about what we’re really dealing with, forget media, forget ads — we’re dealing with the beautiful openness of the web,” Demsey said. “That allows you to compose different elements from different people on the page, but that power of composition also opens the door to abuse.”

Hence the aforementioned ads that suddenly overwhelm you with scammy-sounding offers.

Demsey — who worked at Microsoft and Google before spending several years as CTO for TechCrunch-owner AOL’s advertising business — said companies have tried to fight back by scanning website code and by creating blacklists of bad advertisers. But the clean.io team saw that “these things were moving and changing so fast that blacklists were not effective anymore, and that scanning wasn’t effective anymore.”

Instead, Demsey said the company has created “a general-purpose system for JavaScript security that allows us to determine what should and should not be allowed to execute in JavaScript.” Put another way, clean.io provides “granular control over who gets to load JavaScript.”

As a simple example, if clean.io detects JavaScript that redirects your browser, it can check to see who’s actually calling for the redirect — if it’s the publisher whose page you’re on, then that’s probably fine. But, Demsey said, if it’s “some random JavaScript CDN,” then clean.io will say, “Let’s block this one.”

CEO Matt Gillis (also a former AOL ad exec) added that clean.io’s approach is particularly tough on the sources of malicious advertising, which he described as “the most sophisticated performance advertisers on the planet.” That’s because the startup’s technology doesn’t simply block the ad. Instead, it runs the ad and blocks the bad JavaScript, which means the advertiser pays for the impression without getting results.

“We make it unprofitable for the bad actors,” Gillis said. “Most of the others who are scanning or URL blocking are not really eliminating [the bad behavior], they’re just playing the game of cat and mouse.”

As for why the company changed its name, Demsey suggested that clean.io could eventually apply this technology in areas beyond advertising.

“The name change is to really signify the fact that our ambitions and our technology are broader than merely cleaning up the ad ecosystem,” he said.

Docpack is offering businesses a simple way to share their documents — particularly with customers at large enterprises that may block services like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Founder and CEO Rurik Bradbury said he encountered this issue while serving as the head of conversational strategy at LivePerson (he’s also been an executive and/or co-founder at Trustev and Unison Technologies, and he operates the beloved Prof Jeff Jarvis parody account). Many of the largest companies that LivePerson was working with just wouldn’t accept file-sharing links, so “we had to print out things and FedEx things” — and in at least one case, ship Android tablets pre-loaded with documents.

Apparently this is a broader issue, with research suggesting that services like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive remain among the most blacklisted apps by enterprise IT departments.

In particular, Bradbury said companies are worried about “full, two-way file sharing,” so he found a way around it by “building these microsites for each company,” where someone could download documents. From the IT perspective, they are just regular websites, with no capabilities for employees to share documents back, so they stayed off the blacklists.

The problem with microsites, however, is that they’re “not scalable.” So with Docpack, Bradbury aims to make it quick and easy to create them for a wide range of clients. He compared his approach to website builders like Wix and Squarespace, “Where you can make a website even if you’re not technical.”

Similarly, it should only take Docpack users a few clicks to create a new microsite, add customized branding and upload documents. These documents can be protected with security that limits access to users with a specific company email domain, and the publisher can also track which documents are actually getting downloaded.

Docpack has raised less than $500,000 in funding from Asian accelerator Zeroth, Trustev founder Pat Phelan and other individuals.

The startup’s standard plan costs $10 per seat. Bradbury suggested that the service could be useful across sales, business development and marketing: “There’s a huge amount of business transacted via document-sharing.” He also suggested that PR professionals and journalists could use it to share documents, and he’s offering free accounts for credentialed journalists.

As for competition from the big file-sharing services, Bradbury suggested that as they try to accommodate enterprise needs, they’re creating “a product that’s stretched out, that was not really designed at all for cross-company sharing.”

“This is a big enough space … that it deserves its own thing,” he added.