Sramana Mitra: There’s another company that I encountered. It was an Australian company that also did very well starting in Australia. It was also this mobile temporary workforce management type of...
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Mosaic, founded by Blue Apron’s former senior director of operations Matt Davis and Sam McIntire, is entering the next phase of direct-to-consumer meal services, with frozen foods.
Phase one of meal kits entailed prepared ingredients (Blue Apron) or pre-made meals that went into the refrigerator (Munchery). Blue Apron has since gone public, albeit experiencing a rocky road on the public market, while Munchery was forced to cease operations.
Launching today in select East Coast cities, Mosaic’s first line of products entails six vegetarian bowls made with fresh ingredients. Mosaic cooks those ingredients via roasting, grilling or sauteing, then freezes them.
“We decided to do it because there’s so much potential in frozen food that’s untapped,” Davis told TechCrunch. “There’s an opportunity to make amazing frozen foods.”
Davis, who spent almost four years at Blue Apron, said he realized frozen food is the last frontier within the food category.
“Frozen food is an amazing way to work at scale, preserve food and reduce food waste,” Davis said. “What we offer is a cut above anything you see in the aisles today.”
Each bowl comes with packaged sauces and garnishes. They range in price from $8.99 per meal to $12.49 per meal, depending on the size box you get. A four-meal box costs $12.49 per meal while a 12-meal box costs $8.99 per meal. Customers can subscribe for deliveries every one, two, four or eight weeks.
Mosaic is trying to serve the needs of two types of customers: the ones who already shop in the frozen food aisle and those looking for a convenient solution but have yet to try frozen.
“Frozen is this crazy category that sits in the middle of the grocery store,” McIntire said. “And it’s sort of a broken category. We’ve talked about food being full of preservatives, but frozen is also not really cooked. Most frozen food is a bunch of veggies that are boiled but not roasted or seasoned. No one has thought about how to change these processes for a really long time. Our mantra is real ingredients, actual cooking using real techniques like ovens and seasoning, and rethinking the packaging food comes in. We’re reclaiming this category and we want to bring it back into good standing.”
Mosaic, which raised a seed round of funding last summer, plans to launch in additional cities throughout the country. Currently, Mosaic is available via one-day shipping in New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, the Washington, D.C. area and parts of Connecticut, Delaware and New Jersey.
In the two years since GrainChain launched its distributed ledger-based transaction platform for bulk dry goods, the company has brokered thousands of contracts on everything from corn, sorghum, wheat and soybeans to even sand from its headquarters in McAllen, Texas.
Now the company is expanding its services to Mexico, partnering with the government of Tamaulipas to help farmers and grain elevators with commodity management and settlement.
Integrating with existing grain elevator equipment, GrainChain will deploy its sensors and software to automate the certification of inventory, invoice settlement and reporting to buyers and sellers, according to a statement from the company.
Although the company’s blockchain adoption is new, GrainChain began developing its technology six years ago as an inventory supply chain management toolkit for farmers.
The company’s founder and chief executive Luis Macias had sold his previous software business Verge Data to an insurance company in 2005 and took some time off before wading back into the software development business in McAllen.
In 2012, Macias says he was approached by Hi Star Grain about developing software to manage the sales process for bulk dry goods.
The company spent the next five years working on the technology.
Before a commodity is ever shipped, GrainChain sets up a contract between a buyer and a farmer for their supply, negotiated through GrainChain’s digital portal. That contract is submitted to the chain along with an agreed upon payment that’s held in escrow until delivery.
In the field and at the silo, GrainChain’s system consists of a logistics toolkit to monitor and track harvests coming out of the fields and through individual silos. The goods are certified for quality assurance using the company’s sensor technology, and that certification is recorded onto a HyperLedger-based blockchain.
Once the shipment is verified, payment is released to the farmer in the form of a dollar-backed GrainPay stablecoin that allows instant settlement of the transaction. The asset-backed token is burned once the contract is filled and the tokens are converted into whatever fiat currency was agreed upon in the initial contract.
GrainChain makes its money by charging a commission on every transaction that moves through its platform.
The company raised $2.5 million from Medici Ventures — the investment arm of Overstock — back in October and is now expanding into international markets.
“We’re giving the farmer the ability to work with a higher-risk customer because they’re getting guaranteed payment,” says Macias. “Sometimes, they can’t go past the normal broker they go through.”
Currently the company has 14 commodities including: corn, soybeans, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, sorghum, coffee, cocoa and sand.
“We have the ability to do any dry commodity that has the ability to be graded,” says Macias. “What we really found is that when there’s a contract that’s built and it’s slow-pay or no-pay or arbitration that comes through on the contract, it’s devastating to the farmer. This gives them the security to take on what would otherwise be riskier customers.”
Cedric Kovacs-Johnson launched Flume Health after watching his own family struggle with payments for his sister’s surgery.
“When we looked at who was calling the shots [on prices] it was this litany of service providers that was unknown to us and the cost was unknown to us until we got the bill weeks later,” says Kovacs-Johnson.
The family thought their medical bills would be covered by one insurance provider, but as bills kept rolling in, they realized that what had been promised as one insurance company was actually an insurance plan managed by a benefits manager whose plan was not as extensive — and that the insurer was only managing the relationship with the benefits manager.
So the former MakerBot employee launched Flume in February 2017 to make the payment process more transparent for the hundreds of companies that are self-insuring their employees to cope with rising healthcare premiums.
Roughly 80% of companies with more than 500 employees are providing their own insurance plans, or outsourcing the administration of insurance coverage to plan administrators and startups that see the woefully poor service these companies provide.
Collective Health is one of the best funded, with $230 million* in capital committed to the company, including a $110 million round last year. Another startup, Limelight Health, has raised $40 million in financing as it tries to grab market share by providing tools to make the self-insured health management process easier for companies.
Those companies and upstarts like Flume, Apostrophe and Eden Health are all tackling services and support for companies providing self-insurance.
“We become the independent administrator [and] instead of buying a whole bundle of services from a carrier we let them buy it from independent providers.”
Flume is able to offer lower prices for procedures than competitors by offering payment on the day of an operation or within three days of a visit.
“Our difference is that you have an ability to change the fundamental relationship between payer and provider,” said Kovacs-Johnson. “We pay for a bundle. We know ahead of time that a procedure is pre-authorized… when we give them the approval on this estimated date of service… now that we know we’ve authorized the service we are going to pay that before or at the time of service. So we get discounts because providers hate the billing process.”
Traditional insurance administrators usually offer a bundled package of services that companies just pay for. Instead, Flume offers companies transparent pricing for independent services that allows patients and providers to pick and choose — cutting out much of the claims processing that creates additional administrative overhead for care providers, according to the company.
To navigate the world of third-party administrators, Flume hired one. The company’s chief operating officer was the chairman of the board of the Society of Professional Benefit Administrators, Kevin Schlotman.
“As SPBA chairman, I am constantly looking at the future of our industry and have been frustrated by the lack of transparency in the cost and quality of healthcare, and the structural barriers in place that restrict flexibility in plan design and reimbursement methods that our clients are demanding,” Schlotman said in a statement when he joined the company in September.
So far, Flume has eight customers who’ve signed on to its digital health plan administration service, pulling its first clients from unions and school districts across five states.
The New York-based company has also managed to attract a few investors, raising $4 million from New York investors, including Primary Venture Partners, Accomplice, Founder Collective and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator.
By working directly with providers to get cash prices for services, patients avoid surprise bills and know what they’re paying before an appointment, according to the company.
“Cedric and team have created a solution to one of the most crippling problems facing America right now, and their early success is strong evidence that employers are desperate for change. What they’re doing has huge implications for the future of healthcare in our country,” said TJ Mahoney, a partner at Accomplice .
*An earlier version of this article mistakenly said Collective Health had raised $300 million.
FreightHub, the European digital freight forwarder, has raised $30 million in Series B financing. Leading the round is Rider Global — a venture fund said to be founded by logistics experts — along with Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of container shipping giant A.P. Moller-Maersk.
Existing investors Northzone, Rocket Internet’s Global Founders Capital (GFC), and Cherry Ventures also participated. I’m told the London-based investment firm Unbound, founded by Shravin Mittal, significantly expanded its stake too.
Operating in the freight industry, an antiquated market that is ripe for digitalisation and as a result has attracted a plethora of well-funded startups, FreightHub is setting out to compete with and replace traditional freight forwarding companies who typically rely on legacy IT systems and cumbersome and manual processes.
Described as a fully-fledged freight forwarder, the Berlin and Hamburg-based startup offers transport services for sea, air and rail freight, built on digitized processes – from booking, communication, data exchange and document management to supply chain optimization.
Last year, off the back of its $20 million Series A, FreightHub says it heavily invested in solutions for digital collaboration between customers, partners and suppliers and expanded the interface functions for its system integration capabilities. The company also expanded its service portfolio, including obtaining an IATA license for air freight services.
“Our forwarding solution offers more transparency, reliability and ultimately time and cost advantages for large and mid-sized organisations,” says FreightHub CCO Michael Wax in a statement. “Today, we serve some of the most well-known German brands and grew our volumes again 3x year over year”.
Claiming more than 1,500 customers – including well-known companies such as Home24, Miele and Viessmann – in addition to existing locations in Berlin and Hamburg, the FreightHub recently opened its first Asian office in Hong Kong and acquired a sea freight forwarder specialised in Asian imports.
“Our recent growth trajectory has confirmed the potential that our digital solutions can realize for both our customers and FreightHub’s internal processes,” adds FreightHub founder and CEO Ferry Heilemann. We will use the fresh capital to further develop our digital service offering and to expand our presence in Asia”.
Plum, the chatbot-based app that helps you manage your money, is disclosing $4.5 million in further funding.
The round, which quietly closed in the summer, was led by venture firm VentureFriends and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD). It brings total funding for the London and Athens-based fintech to $6.3 million.
Founded in 2016 by early TransferWise employee Victor Trokoudes and Alex Michael, Plum is described as an AI-powered online money management tool.
Similar to U.K. competitors Cleo and Chip and a host of other PFM-styled apps, you link the app to your bank accounts and gain access to a range of functionality spanning savings, investments and finding ways of saving money based on analysis of your regular outgoings.
This includes helping you save based on what Plum’s algorithm’s deem you can afford — in the form round-ups and/or regular savings — and other budgeting tools.
You can also open an ISA investment account and invest based on themes, such as only in “ethical companies” or technology.
Launched last month, a related feature dubbed “Splitter” lets you split your automatic savings between Plum savings and investments, selecting the percentage amounts to go into each pot from 0-100 percent.
Lastly, if Plum spots you are overpaying on various household bills it will offer to help you switch supplier.
Meanwhile, the fintech startup is making its chatbot available beyond Facebook Messenger with the launch of Plum for iOS. A version for Android is said to be available “in the coming months”.
Russian President Vladimir Putin. Reuters
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Thursday.
Googlers staged a big "sit-in" because they say the company retaliated against the organizers of November's sexual harassment walkouts. In New York, there were reportedly more than 200 Google employees who took part in the demonstration, reading and listening to instances of retaliation. Facebook could be strong-armed into hiring a federally-approved privacy boss under a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Politico reports. CEO Mark Zuckerberg could also be asked to take on the role of "designated compliance officer." Famous exec Bob Muglia is out as CEO of $3.5 billion Snowflake, just weeks after saying an IPO isn't imminent. Under Muglia, Snowflake shot to unicorn status in just four years. Vladimir Putin signed a law meaning Russia will have a "sovereign internet," separate from the global web. The bill comes into force on November 1, and will force internet service providers to filter traffic through Russia's state internet censor. The family of an Apple engineer is suing Tesla over a deadly autopilot crash. The Model X was in autopilot mode when it crashed into a barrier on the 101 Mountainview highway, causing the car's battery to erupt into flames. Lyft lost its lawsuit against New York City's minimum wage rule for drivers. The company, along with competitor Juno, originally filed a lawsuit against the $17.22 per hour minimum in January. Google is going to let users automatically delete location data after a set amount of time, Venture Beat reports. Users will be able to select one of two timeframes after which data will be deleted â three months or 18 months. Andreessen Horowitz is launching a $2 billion VC fund for later-stage startups. The firm's newest general partner David George will run the fund, which will specialize in providing funding for companies in Series C to Series G range. Hundreds of Facebook employees partied at a luxury hotel after announcing a big new redesign of the social network. The entertainment on offer included casino tables, karaoke, free massages, an open bar, and a magician. Tesla cut the price of the Model 3 in Canada so buyers can get a government tax credit. The cheapest Model 3 in Canada now runs just over $55,000 inclusive of fees.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings. You can also subscribe to this newsletter here â just tick "10 Things in Tech You Need to Know."
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Podcast monetization company Acast is launching a new way for publishers to put their podcasts behind a paywall.
Until now, podcasts have not been well-suited to subscription paywalls, due to the fact that they’re distributed via RSS feeds that can be accessed by any podcast player. So instead we’ve seen workarounds like Substack building a web-based audio player and TechCrunch releasing all our podcasts free while putting transcripts behind the Extra Crunch paywall.
And then there’s Luminary, the subscription podcast app that’s faced serious backlash for including unaffiliated podcasts in a way that some podcasters suspect it was re-hosting their audio files. (The company says it wasn’t doing that.)
With Acast Access, on the other hand, publishers should be able to create versions of their podcasts that are only available to subscribers, but are still accessible from any app.
Chief Product Officer Johan Billgren said that Acast works with a publisher to create two different podcast feeds — the public feed, which is available to everyone for free, and the “accessed-RSS” feed, which should include all the public content but also extra episodes, episodes released early or episodes with additional bonus content inserted.
Billgren demonstrated the listener process for me, showing how a subscriber could log onto a publisher’s site, visit the podcast page and then click a button that will allow them to subscribe to the paid version of the podcast, choosing the podcast app of their choice. Once you’ve subscribed, you should be able to download and play episodes anytime you want, without any additional login.
Behind the scenes, Billgren said Acast is checking anonymized user data against the publisher’s API to confirm that you really do have permission to access the feed. And apparently it can still cut you off after you cancel your subscription.
Initial Acast Access partners include the Financial Times and The Economist. While it makes sense to launch with larger publishers who can incorporate this into their existing subscription paywalls, Billgren said Acast will also be making this available to smaller partners in the comings months — they’ll be able to release podcasts behind Acast’s own subscription paywall. (The company has already been experimenting with paid content through its Acast+ app.)
“Basically, we want to reach the point where it’s a natural thing to say, ‘This is the public version [of a podcast], press the link to get access to the accessed version,'” he said.
Bird and Lime are scooting along, backed by hundreds of millions in venture capital. But there are still plenty of companies hoping to dominate the still-nascent micromobility market, given its promise. Among them: Bond Mobility, a three-year-old Palo Alto, Calif. and Zurich, Switzerland-based startup that says its “high-performance” dockless electric bikes will leave e-scooters in the dust.
Investors think the company might be right — at least, they think it might be right for a certain type of customer who wants to get to where she is going faster. DENSO’s New Mobility Group, which includes Toyota and SoftBank, just provided $20 million in Series A funding to the upstart, whose vehicles can travel at up to 30 miles per hour. That’s twice what electric scooter companies have decided is a safe speed.
Electric mopeds like that of Scoot have a top speed of 30 miles per hour and they only require a bit of in-app instruction. Yet Bond doesn’t see these as direct competitors either, perhaps because they must be parked in legal parking spaces, whereas dockless electric bikes can be parked nearly anywhere (for better or worse).
Whether or not it’s a good idea to travel so fast on a bike in an urban environment is apparently up to the customer to decide. Though Bond’s bikes are only available for now in Zurich and Bern, Switzerland, they are coming to the U.S. soon, says the company, and a loophole in California law may help. To wit, any motor bike that can’t go more than 30 miles per hour can be rented with just a car license in the Golden State. Some states are even more lax when it comes to motorized vehicles.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that Bond’s founder, Kirt McMaster, has shown himself to be a bit of a risk-taker in the past. McMaster previously founded Cyanogen, a now discontinued open-source operating system for mobile devices that was based on the Android mobile platform and which burned through at least $115 million in venture capital, including from Andreessen Horowitz, Tencent and Benchmark, before shutting down in December of 2016.
By then, McMaster — who famously boasted once of Cyanogen, “We’re putting a bullet through Google’s head” — was already gone. He was ousted months earlier and replaced by a new CEO for whom it was apparently too late to turn things around. Soon after, he set his sights on the world of transportation.
Of course, Bond — which operates in Switzerland as Smide and uses hardware from the Swiss e-bike company Stromer — has yet to prove that it can compete on U.S. soil, let alone elsewhere in Europe. But McMaster seemingly hasn’t lost his penchant for talking up his products in the meantime. As he told Business Insider earlier today, in his view, the “speed e-bike is the apex predator” that may just kill better-funded “scooter guys” if all goes as planned.
McMaster is smart to try. According to a recent McKinsey study, more than a quarter of the world’s population lives in cities with more than one million inhabitants, and vehicle speeds in many of these places now average 9 miles per hour, making alternatives highly appealing. In fact, it says, by 2030, the micromobility market in expected to reach $200 billion to $300 billion in the United States, $100 billion to $150 billion in Europe and $30 billion to $50 billion in China.
Certainly, it’s a lot easier to scale up micromobility assets than any kind of car-based sharing business, as notes that same McKinsey study. Besides, Bond’s new backers have plenty of those types of bets already.
Juul Labs, an e-cigarette startup that has raised more than $12 billion in funding, is reportedly nearing a deal to purchase a high-rise building in downtown San Francisco to house its rapidly growing staff.
According to a report in the San Francisco Chronicle on Wednesday, Juul has its sights on 123 Mission Street, a 29-floor building near the city's Transbay area in the Financial District. The company recently purchased a renovated historic building near Pier 70 in the city's developing Dogpatch neighborhood, the report said.
Juul spokesperson Ted Kwong would not confirm the report, but said that the company had grown from 200 employees to 2,000 in the last year, with a a majority of the workers located in the company's San Francisco headquarters.
"As a result, we are currently looking for additional office space in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area, but we have nothing to announce at this time," Kwong told Business Insider via email.
Juul first gained notoriety for its aggressive marketing for its flavored e-cigarettes aimed at teens. The company is now partly owned by Altria, the tobacco giant that makes Marlboro cigarettes, and has come under intense scrutiny from federal and local health officials for its claims that vaping is a healthy alternative to cigarettes.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle report, the building in question is five times the size of the company's current office space, and was last sold in 2018 for $290 million. If Juul purchases the building, the deal will be one of the largest in San Francisco history for a tech company that doesn't specialize in real estate, according to the report.
The company's Dogpatch presence ignited a firestorm among San Francisco politicians and residents, and officials introduced legislation in March that would prohibit e-cigarette companies like Juul from occupying city-owned property, according to a San Francisco Chronicle report.
Motus Ventures announced on Tuesday a $30 million fund in partnership with the Stanford Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities Program to help build companies around Stanford University's renowned artificial intelligence and machine learning research programs.
The Motus Smart World Innovation Fund will also have a membership and advisory role in the Stanford program, which counts global corporations like Amazon, Bechtel, Microsoft, and Visa as partner groups.
Motus Ventures cofounder and Managing Director Jim DiSanto told Business Insider that, while some of the greatest companies have come from college dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg, the firm prefers to deal with those researchers who are continuing to innovate while reamining under Stanford's banner. DiSanto said the Motus Smart World Innovation Fund will focus on researchers who "run their own labs," like professors or lecturers.
"Companies like Yahoo and Facebook started in college dorm rooms and companies like Google started on Stanford's campus," DiSanto said. "Larry Page started Google and dropped out of his Ph.D. program and commercialized that into a company. I don't want to discount the dorm room, could be another Larry Page on campus, but if we have to rely on lucky strikes that are in the dorm rooms here, that's a little too risky."
The surest bet DiSanto sees is with technology that applies artificial intelligence and machine learning applications in robotics, including technical components like cameras that are necessary for building robots with near-human intelligence.
"The ability to replace human, physical tasks is the largest technology opportunity of all time," DiSanto told Business Insider. "As in all technological revolutions, jobs are gained and jobs are lost and jobs are changed. The hope is that pie will get larger but there are no guarantees. We're looking at ways and thinking of ways to make this better for everyone but we are a for-profit institution and this is the best opportunity for growth."
DiSanto explains that larger corporations are starting to realize the potential in automation as well, and says Amazon's cashierless Go stores are a prime example of what this trend could look like over the next five years. He predicts more legacy companies will wade into the world of corporate venture investing to attempt to keep up with smaller upstarts tackling complex issues like autonomous trucking.
"We've seen big changes rolling into Silicon Valley, some of which are quite permanent," DiSanto explained. "One that's unmistakable and that is the role of the corporate investor and they are here to stay and they are here with a vengeance. Every large corporation around the world is here, and you will see thousands more of them setting up shop and starting 'corporate innovation centers' or 'Silicon Valley innovation centers' and that opens up new opportunities for all of us now."
In its capacity as member and advisor, The Motus Smart World Innovation Fund will attend Stanford's annual Digital Cities Summit and advise research teams on how to best monetize their technology during twice annual research reviews.
The enterprise startup tech world was shocked on Wednesday by the news that Bob Muglia suddenly left hot startup Snowflake, replaced as CEO by Frank Slootman, another well-known name in the business.
Muglia was famously known as one of Microsoft's top executives, who served under both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer â the latter of whom fired him twice, Muglia once told Business Insider.
The first time, Ballmer demoted him from a star position to a tiny role. Muglia fought back, he said, and climbed his way back up the ladder.
His hard work in the face of that demotion won Ballmer's admiration so thoroughly that Ballmer put Muglia in charge of one of the company's four major units, the Servers and Tools business, which was doing $15 billion in revenue at the time and had 10,000 employees. Ballmer wound up firing him a second time over strategy disagreements. Ballmer promoted Satya Nadella to take Muglia's place; Nadella later became CEO after Ballmer resigned.
New Snowflake CEO Frank SlootmanSnowflakeMuglia went on to a role at Juniper Networks before landing the CEO job at a tiny, 30-person data storage startup called Snowflake that had yet to bring in its first dollar in sales.
Snowflake offers a cloud data warehouse database, sold via Amazon Web Services, and, more recently, via Microsoft Azure cloud as well.
Over the next four years, Muglia grew the company to a $3.5 billion valuation, after two mega rounds of venture financing in 2018. All told, Snowflake has raised $923 million total.
Snowflake's backers include Sequoia, Red Point, Sutter Hill, and Capital One Growth Ventures. Snowflake also landed about 1,000 customers, it says, including Capital One, which opted to invest in the company after trying the product.
Normally, these are all signs of a healthy company; it's not common for a customer to become a strategic investor unless something is going right.
And Snowflake was doing well, even in a market that forced it to go head-to-head with giants.
It competes with Amazon Redshift, a similar database product that launched a couple of years before Snowflake. Redshift has been a hugely successful database product for Amazon. As of Amazon's last quarter, Redshift now has 10,000 customers who analyze two exabytes of data with it every day. Capital One is also a Redshift customer, notably.
Meanwhile, the second-place cloud provider, Microsoft, also has its own popular database â one that Muglia originally helped to build. About six months ago, Microsoft launched a new version of its cloud data warehouse, a product which it said has drawn more than half the Fortune 1000 onto Microsoft's cloud.
None of this appeared to scare Muglia. Snowflake actually launched its product on AWS two years after Amazon Redshift debuted. And it was growing apace, even in Redshift's shadow.
Things were going so well, that in an interview with the Information that published just two weeks ago, Muglia said the company had plenty of cash in the bank, was going to remain in growth and investment mode, and that he didn't plan to pursue an IPO for another year or two.
But he's not going to get the chance.
On May 1, the company announced that Muglia left the company completely.
His role as both CEO and chairman was handed over to Frank Slootman, who is best known as the hired gun CEO who took ServiceNow public in 2012, in the first big tech IPO after Facebook debut as a publicly-traded stock didn't go so well. Slootman grew ServiceNow from $75 million in revenue to $1.4 billion in six years.
He left the CEO job at ServiceNow in 2017, staying on for a while as chairman. Prior to taking ServiceNow public, Slootman was the hired CEO of DataDomain, taking it public and then selling it EMC for $2.4 billion.
Indeed, it's possible that Slootman's appointment may have something to do with his history of taking companies public.
Snowflake board member Mike Speiser, from investor Sutter Hill Ventures, said that the company's directors were pleased with Muglia's performance but believed Slootman was the "right person" for the company today, he told the Wall Street Journal.
While Slootman told the Journal that he wasn't diving straight into an IPO, insiders believe this is really why he was brought in.
One industry analyst who knows both CEOs explained to Business Insider: "[Bob Muglia] was happy. Investors needed someone to take them to IPO. Bob is a great technical leader and visionary. An IPO-type CEO requires another type of demeanor."
The execs didn't reveal revenue to the Journal, except to say it had tripled in the last year. Slootman also told the WSJ that Snowflake is not profitable, as is common for young, high-growth tech startups.
A big question: Could the board have decided and hired a new CEO in the few weeks between the publication of his interview with the Information and now?
Possibly. The enterprise tech world is a tight-knit one. For instance, Snowflake venture investor Patrick Grady, a partner at Sequoia, has known Slootman for years. Grady was a venture investor and board member for ServiceNow when Slootman was CEO.
And Muglia, for all his unquestionable success at this startup, was burning the candle at both ends. He never fully relocated from his Seattle home to the San Francisco Bay Area, where Snowflake is based. For the past seven years, since he worked at Juniper Networks, he commuted home to Seattle every week on Thursdays, the San Francisco Business Times reported.
Muglia could not be reached for comment, however he told t he WSJ in an email that he was helping the company with a transistion. No doubt, this isn't the last we've heard of him.
BEVERLY HILLSâ If you want to know the value of early stage venture capital in a world where mega-investors like SoftBank regularly write $100 million checks, look no further than a moment of crisis.
One of UpFront Ventures Partner Kara Nortman's biggest exits came after a follow-on round that almost didn't happen, she said Monday at the Milken Institute Global Conference.
"The lead investor got spooked and pulled out," Nortman said, who sat next to SoftBank's Akshay Naheta on the panel.
Ring, the video doorbell company, ultimately got acquired by Amazon for $1 billion in 2018. But just a few months before, the future of the company was in jeopardy due to a skittish late stage investor.
"The final round, they had a big late stage investor who was going to lead the round â they'll remain nameless â and [Ring] had a frivolous lawsuit out there against them," Nortman said. "In a very short period of time, a week or two, we stepped up and we led what became an $80 million round with a $20 million lead check...which ended up becoming a great financial return and success story."
While Nortman didn't disclose on stage which investor pulled out, Recode reported last year that it was Valor Equity Partners.
Ultimately, Nortman argued, early stage venture investors are more likely to have faith in a founding team and its vision, so they'll step up even when other investors have shied away.
So while investors like SoftBank can win deals based on the size of their checks alone, there's still a role for the old-school venture-founder relationship, she said.
"When you talk to [Ring founder] Jamie Siminoff about that now, he will say, 'they were my early stage fund.' But we had seen him execute all the way through, so when the market had a frightened moment, we could step up and catalyze that," Nortman said.
"I think that is the value of a longterm early stage investor. Our job is to help you build the team, help you get capital, and be your sparring partner. I don't think that ever goes away," she added.
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In 2018, 125,000 people congregated in Park City, Utah â a ski town whose population wouldn't top 9,000 in the US Census of the same year â for the largest independent film festival in the United States: Sundance.
Put on by the Sundance Institute, the festival functions as both a showcase and competition of new work from American and international independent filmmakers. Entries range from dramatic and documentary features and short films; series and episodic content; and New Frontier, which the Institute describes as "emerging media in the form of multimedia installations, performances, and films."
But you may be able to skip the flight, crowds, and $300-$4,000 ticket and still get close to the experience.
Sundance Now, founded in 2014, aims to bring Sundance Festival's ethos to the home viewer.
It's a streaming service that carries original and exclusive dramas, comedies, and true-crime series, in addition to award-winning movies from every genre, including foreign-language and documentary features â all streaming commercial-free. Each selection was chosen for its storytelling, unique voice, and/or unexpected global perspective.
It can be streamed using the Apple app store, Google Play, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, and Xbox One. Monthly, it'll cost you between $5 and $7.
Apart from using the Sundance Festival's principles as guides, the service also invites filmmakers who have made an impact at the Festival to create watch-lists of their favorite films as guest curators, sometimes with brief text introductions. As of March 2019, the collections include curations from Lisa Gardner, Danny Glover, and David Lowery, among others.
To help you navigate, there are the typical streaming service curations: Must-watch series, new arrivals, Oscar-nominated films, true crime, indie hits, and a mix of popular genres you can click on like suspense, comedy, foreign, drama, and documentary. There's also a slew of topically curated categories for Women's History Month like leading ladies, women in history, and female filmmakers.
There's also a surprising variety for a service that could, at first blush, just sound like a library of cerebral foreign films. While the streaming service offers gritty indie hits like "Monster" and "Memento", the same user could also find "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" or "Friends with Money" with Jennifer Aniston, Joan Cusack, and Frances McDormand. You can use member reviews to help guide your selections, and save titles to your "list" for later viewing.
If you're looking for a way to watch everything from classic to hard-to-find indie films, and do it on multiple devices â or even a way to discover new ones worth playing at home â Sundance Now may be worth looking into. Either way, you can check out the service for free for a week to see if it has enough to keep you interested. And, if it's worth re-upping, it'll cost you less than a large coffee at Starbucks.
Following is a transcript of the video.
Alex Appolonia: These glasses will cost you $600. They're actually smart glasses called Foc als made by the Canadian startup North. Focals are meant for everyday use, and their main purpose: to make you rely less on having to pull out your phone. But these provide you notifications and other information right in front of your face, just like smartphones, but faster and arguably more convenient. But is it really as good as it seems? I wanted to see if smart glasses really will replace a smartphone or if it's just all hype. Watch out New York, Alex has a pair of smart glasses. So how do they work? There is a holographic display on the right lens that shows notifications and information directly from your phone. This is all controlled by a small ring called the Loop, which allows you to navigate and interact with your display all via Bluetooth.
Adam Ketcheson: The idea was, what can we create that can be part of your everyday life and seamlessly fit it into your life and give you all of those benefits of being connected to the world. Alex: From the home screen alone, I could check the time, weather, messages, calendar notifications, locations, and even my battery life. Pretty much everything I could check on my phone, well, maybe not everything, just the things I wanna know right away. It even has Alexa integrated into the glasses, so you can ask Alexa questions through the built-in mic and speaker. Foc als can even let you call an Uber. You better believe we tried all these features along the way. First stop: getting fitted. At North's showroom in Brooklyn, they custom-fitted me and even gave me a quick demo of what I would experience when wearing them. A pretty unique sizing process, measuring my head size, width between my eyes, and other measurements to make sure the hologram would perfectly align with my eyes. The crazy part is they are just made for me, so no one could see the hologram display while wearing my glasses.
Gene Kim: I hear little beeps in my right ear, but nothing showing up.
Kara Chin: Am I not looking in the right place?
Alex Appolonia: After a few weeks, my glasses were ready to be picked up and sized for my final fitting. I just got them, woo-hoo! It is officially day one of me wearing my Focal smart glasses. I'm heading into the office and mostly going to be sitting at my desk during the day just kind of performing simple daily tasks. I'm going to just try and get used to the look and the feel of these and see how my first day goes.
I wanted to take my Foc als a step further today. I figured it's day one, why not? So I tried out the GPS feature to get me from my apartment to the PATH station. Alexa, how do I get to the Hoboken PATH station? Alexa: Directions to PATH station: Hoboken on Hudson Place in River Road in Hoboken. Turn left onto First Street. Alex: It's kind of neat having each step pop up, and then it will go away in about five seconds, so it's not very distracting if I'm walking or crossing the street. And at one point I intentionally wanted to make a wrong turn to see if it would reroute me, and it didn't, so that was like a little disappointing and kind of shows that their GPS is not so accurate.
I'm used to wearing glasses. I do wearing them on a daily basis, but after wearing these Foc als for a full day, my eyes do seem more tired. Alexa, what's the weather today?
Alexa: In Hoboken, it's 6 degrees Fahrenheit with clear skies.
Alex Appolonia: I just got to the office, and I'm going to put my phone down for the day and just rely on my smart glasses. I was already informed that when I'm sending a voice-to-text message to one of my contacts, a different number will appear when they receive the message. OK, so I did pick up my phone just because I posted an Instagram Story, but no more phone today. I can't help it if my glasses don't let me check social media. Stay warm. My eyes took awhile to get adjusted to the Foc als. At times they felt heavy, slid down my nose, became loose, and I even had to make them refitted. As my week went on, the holographic display was very out of focus and even glitchy at times. I even lost the nose pad, which kind of threw off all the display, and I couldn't really see anything. So I ended going back to the store to get them realigned and tightened to fit my face. Let's just say day four was the true test, when I tried calling an Uber right from my Foc als. Jay Street Subway station. I have the option to walk or Uber, and we are going with Uber. This Uber is six minutes away, and it's $8. Looking for ride! It's a little complicated ordering the Uber from my Foc als. I did have to bring out my phone just to kind of see some of the notifications from when my driver's arriving. It's kind of neat. It is giving me updates throughout my ride, and it's saying I'm three minutes away from my destination.
I tried texting and responding more and even using my calendar with the glasses. Schedule a meeting for tomorrow at 10:30 a.m. I ran some errands and asked Alexa to guide me to the local grocery store.
Alexa: Would you like directions to Organic Basic Food LLC on 204 Washington St. in Hoboken? Alex: Which wasn't an easy experience. Before I knew it, my journey into the future of tech had come to an end.
Alex Appolonia: After a full week of wearing my Foc als, here are my final thoughts. As for the comforting fit of the Foc als, they were really uncomfortable at times. They felt even heavy, and they would slide down my nose, so I had to kind of keep pushing them back up, and just really bulky on the sides. Alexa was not very effective when I was in a loud or noisy environment. She couldn't easily connect and understand the commands that I was asking her. This just became really frustrating sometimes, and I wanted to just pick up my phone. The holographic display wasn't super clear and easy to see in the sun, so I often used my sun clips. As for the Loop, it died a lot faster than the Foc als, and that could've just been because I was navigating most of the time with the Loop. But the good part was I was able to get all my notifications on my Foc als, and I was a lot more hands-free and relied a lot less on my phone. North has a lot of great features so far, and they have a lot more to kind of grow and integrate into these Foc als, but it would be nice if I could play my music on them, maybe even pick up a phone call, and watch some videos. Since trying them out, North has added a few new features like music controls and transit updates to the Foc als. But it's going to take a lot more than telling it to skip to the next song before it's a must-have device. My overall rating for the Foc als would be 3 out of 5. Personally, I did not find them to be an ideal everyday wearable. I'm not really a techy person, but it was a really nice challenge to wear these smart glasses for a week and step into the future.
I also responded to What is this? What is this? Hey!
"Avengers: Endgame" is now the eighth-highest-grossing movie worldwide of all time. After just a week in theaters (it hit China last Wednesday), it's already made $1.5 billion globally. And it's on its way to another huge weekend at the box office in the US.
Movie-ticket service Fandango announced Wednesday that 85% more repeat customers are seeing "Endgame" than they were "Avengers: Infinity War" at the same point last year.
"Endgame" shattered the domestic box-office opening-weekend record with $356 million. How much will it dip in its upcoming second weekend?
"Infinity War" grossed $258 million in its domestic opening weekend and dropped 55% in its second weekend with $114 million. If "Endgame" drops 55%, it will still make over $160 million.
"Star Wars: The Force Awakens" currently holds the record for the biggest second-weekend box office ever with $149 million. It dropped just 40% in its second weekend.
The Hollywood exec Jeffrey Katzenberg's yet-to-be-launched mobile streaming-video service, Quibi, is courting several big-name advertisers in a bid to secure up-front ad deals.
Quibi is seeking commitments from both media agencies and brand marketers, Digiday first reported. The company's executives are in conversations with at least four big brands, including Procter & Gamble and Anheuser-Busch InBev, multiple sources confirmed to Business Insider.
Quibi did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
While Quibi was first asking for an up-front ad commitment of $25 million, that figure has now whittled down to the $8 million to $10 million range, a source said. Business Insider was unable to confirm the CPM â or the cost per thousand ad impressions â that Quibi is quoting, but one source familiar with the CPM said it was "very high," while another one called it "outrageous."
Quibi is gearing up for an April 2020 launch with a focus on subscriptions. It has two different subscription tiers: a $5 ad-supported subscription version and an $8 ad-free version. Tim Connolly, the company's head of partnerships and advertising who was recruited from Hulu, is leading the charge to recruit advertisers on the former, two sources said.
Business Insider does not know of any contracts or deals that have been finalized, and Quibi is still in active negotiations with a number of big-name brands, multiple sources said. According to a deck obtained by Digiday in December 2018, advertising could account for between 24.9 to 30% of Quibi's revenue, depending on the number of subscribers it is able to get.
If P&G does indeed sign on the dotted line, it will not be the first investment it makes toward a streaming platform. Just last week, P&G released two documentaries for Queen Collective in partnership with Queen Latifah, which were made exclusively available on Hulu.
While Katzenberg is an industry veteran with connections and has talent on board Quibi already, some advertisers remain skeptical of its chances of success. They question whether consumers will actually have an appetite for premium mobile-first video content, a source said, and are also concerned about ad formats on such a platform â most advertisers don't readily invest in six-second ads, for instance.
An entertainment exec said he was "skeptical" of whether the platform would be successful, while a media-agency exec said that one of the agency's biggest clients had been approached by Quibi and had "sticker shock."
Oracle CEO Mark Hurd on Wednesday said the tech giant has a "long list of underfunded competitors" in the software-as-a-service market that he predicted "will go away" in a couple of years.
It's a striking statement from a tech behemoth that had been seen as taking a hit from the rise of software applications offered to businesses via the cloud, doing away with the high cost of setting up and maintaining applications on their own servers and data centers.
But in a meeting via telephone with media at Oracle headquarters in Redwood City, California, Hurd touted Oracle's gains in the software-as-a-service industry, or SaaS, which he said will eventually be dominated by the big players.
"The SaaS market will consolidate," he said. "It will be a long tail, but many of the companies will go away."
SaaS makes it possible for businesses to pay for their software via a subscription, usually based on the number of users to whom they want to grant access. This allows companies to cut the costs associated with huge licensing fees for software that gets installed on their own servers, while also granting more flexibility.
Oracle emerged as a dominant tech behemoth based on that original business model. But the Silicon Valley database giant has pivoted to focus more heavily on SaaS in the past few years â a bright spot in its overall cloud business, which is otherwise widely seen as lagging behind the market-leading Amazon Web Services.
Oracle is now considered a major player in the software-as-a-service industry, although it is still lagging Microsoft and Salesforce in the SaaS and cloud-software market. That market totaled $107.5 billion in 2017, according to the analyst firm IDC. In that same year, Microsoft led the SaaS pack with 9.3% market share, followed by Salesforce with 8.7% and Oracle with 4.1%. SAP was in fourth with 3.6%, followed by Google with 3.5%.
But Hurd's prediction about "underfunded competitors" was affirmed by a couple of tech-industry analysts.
"Hurd's analysis is correct," Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies, told Business Insider.
"Smaller SaaS companies are underfunded and will have trouble competing with the big players in this market. If they have unique technology they could become M&A targets. It is expensive to market and serve the SaaS markets and being under-capitalized will hurt their chances to compete for the same businesses big SaaS companies go after today," he said.
Ray Wang, the president of Constellation Research, agreed, saying: "We are still in a market of consolidation."
"Buyers want to reduce the number of vendors they work with and the costs of having a large footprint," he told Business Insider. " There is also a lot of innovation at the edges that is happening so it's important to build ecosystems."
The SaaS and cloud-software market is also expected to grow dramatically in the next few years. IDC is forecasting the market to grow to $259.1 billion in 2022 with a compound annual growth rate of 19.2%, Mike Shirer, a spokesman at the firm, said.
In its quarterly earnings released today, Qualcomm said it would record $4.5-$4.7 billion revenue in the coming quarter as part of its settlement of a long-running intellectual-property quarrel with Apple.
The revenue "includes a cash payment from Apple and the release of related liabilities," Qualcomm said. The two companies had previously declined to specify the economic impact of the settlement, other than to say Apple would make a one time payment to Qualcomm as part of the broader agreement.Go deeper: Apple, Qualcomm settle long-running legal dispute
Streaming movies and TV shows to your mobile device is decadently convenient, but there are times when streaming isn't an option. If you're going somewhere that doesn't have Wi-Fi â like a plane, or a remote cabin in the woods, you might want to plan ahead by downloading video onto your phone or tablet in advance.
Amazon makes it possible to download content so you can watch it offline, but there are caveats. You can't download to a computer, for example â downloads are only permitted to mobile apps. That means you can't store Amazon Prime videos on a laptop. And even on your phone or tablet, not everything can be downloaded.
Amazon warns that "Only selected Prime Video titles are available to download, and the time period you have to view a downloaded title while your device is offline varies by title." You might also find that some content is only available for download in certain geographic regions, and Amazon may impose a limit on the total number of shows you can download at once, so to download more, you may see a notification to delete something you've already seen.
For the most part, though, you don't need to worry about most of that. If you want to download a show, simply open it in your Prime Video app and see if it can be downloaded. If it can, proceed.
1. Open the Prime Video app.
2. Search or browse for the TV show or movie that you want to download. Tap on it to open the video's Details page.
3. If it's available for download, you should see a downward arrow.
To download a movie, tap the Download arrow.Many Prime movies can be downloaded to your mobile device with a single tap. Dave Johnson/Business Insider
To download a TV show, you can often choose to download the entire season with a single tap (look for "Download Season" at the top of the screen), or to download individual episodes. Tap whichever you prefer.You can download episodes of many TV shows on Amazon Prime. Dave Johnson/Business Insider
Once you've downloaded a video, you can watch it the same way that you'd ordinarily view it using streaming.
1. Open the Prime Video app.
2. Search for the show or movie you want to watch. Tap on it to open the video's Details page.
3. You should see a check mark next to any show that is downloaded to your device. Tap the Play button to start watching. Note that if you don't have an internet connection, downloaded video will play fine, but anything that isn't downloaded will display an error message if you try to tap the Play button.
You can see an episode has been downloaded if it has a check mark instead of the download icon. Dave Johnson/Business Insider
After you watch a downloaded video, you might want to remove it from your mobile device to get the storage space back, especially if your phone or tablet is running low on space.
1. Open the Prime Video app.
2. Search or browse for the TV show or movie that you want to delete from your device. Tap on it to open the video's Details page.
If you want to delete a movie, tap the "Options" button to the right of the "Downloaded" message and then tap "Delete Download." If you want to delete a TV show episode, tap the checkmark that indicates it has been downloaded. It should reveal a button marked "Delete" (on tablets) or "Delete download" (on phones). Tap it.Eventually, you will probably want to delete downloaded videos to make space on your phone or tablet. Dave Johnson/Business Insider
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