During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Hemant Mohapatra, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, India. Hemant talked about some of the large open opportunities in the Indian market that...

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Political parties, campaigns and brands can’t get an accurate and cost-effective understanding of opinion in small geographic areas, like the constituencies of lawmakers. This is a big problem in political campaigning. And all political campaigning now has a huge online element, as we know. We also know political turbulence is one of the defining themes of our age.

But one thing is clear: All the players want faster, cheaper, more accurate and a more granular understanding of consumers and voters. In the age of AI, survey predictions are influenced as much as so many other machine-learning technology products.

Focaldata is a U.K. startup that thinks it has some of the answers to these quandaries. Their integrated consumer analytics and survey workflow application claims to give customers a more accurate and granular picture of consumers than traditional polling using machine learning. At the same time, they say their workflow software cuts down on the cost and time that market research takes.

The idea is that they employ a new machine learning-based technique (MRP) to generate survey “results.” This new methodology can use more information (such as old survey data or public statistics) than conventional methods, which lets them get accurate predictions in small geographic areas from the same sample sizes.

Founder Justin Ibbett had done MRP manually on his laptop a few times for some existing market research firms and realized how fiddly it was. “I felt a dedicated software application would reduce the complexity whilst making the results more accessible and useful — our early incarnations just delivered a spreadsheet!” he told me.

Much of Focaldata’s business has been in politics. They have worked with the pro-Remain group Best for Britain and the anti-Racism charity Hope not Hate on combating Far Right sentiment. However, most demand is now from large brand owners, such as ABInBev, a recent client.

They now have more than 10 paying clients, including big brands like M&C Saatchi.

Competitors include YouGov, Survation, Dalia Research (a Balderton-backed company) and standard market research agencies like Kantar and Ipsos Mori.

But against traditional agencies, Ibbett says their ML-based data processing engine sets them apart, allowing them to go very granular and get more accurate over time.

The market research market is £5 billion in the U.K. alone (PwC report, 2016) and global market research is a $40 billion market.

The startup has raised a £1.1 million seed round from notable U.K. angels, including Alex Chesterman, founder of Zoopla and Martin Bolland, founder of Alchemy Partners. Previously they raised a small pre-seed round from three other angels, including Xen Lategan (backer of Magic Pony and ex-Google, former CTO of News International).

CTO and co-founder Calvin Dudek was at Google for five years as a product manager, and ran Data Science Innovation at the DWP. Chief Data Scientist Takao Noguchi is a cognitive scientist.

Nativo has acquired SimpleReach, a move that Nativo CEO Justin Choi said will pair his company’s distribution system for native ads with SimpleReach’s measurement tools.

“If you can’t measure the impact of something, it’s difficult to scale spend in that area,” Choi told me. “When we say measurement we’re actually talking about connecting content to outcomes.”

To be clear, Nativo already offers measurement tools of its own, but apparently they’re limited to content that the brand or marketer is publishing on their own sites. SimpleReach, on the other hand, can measure sponsored content programs published elsewhere on the web, so Choi said it provides a “complementary measurement technology.”

Both Nativo and SimpleReach are long-standing players (and partners) in the native advertising and content marketing industry. Choi said Nativo has succeeded by “focusing on content,” and on the “mid-funnel” of the customer purchase journey.

“Almost all our relationships involve … the actual brands themselves, because we do solve a unique problem for them,” Choi said. “That middle part of: How you get someone to consider something? How do you create intent?”

The companies aren’t disclosing the financial terms of the acquisition. SimpleReach has raised a total of $24 million from investors, including MK Capital, Atlas Ventures, Village Ventures, High Peak Venture Partners and Spring Mountain Capital.

Choi said the company will continue to support SimpleReach as a separate product while also working to integrate its data into Nativo. Apparently “all the core team members” are joining Nativo, as is an off-site engineering team.

He added that the remaining team members have already been hired elsewhere (Update: It’s WeWork-owned Conductor), so “everyone that wanted a home ended up with a home.”

Updated to remove a reference to the number of SimpleReach employees joining Nativo, which a company spokesperson said was not accurate.

If you took the photos and videos out of pornography, could it appeal to a new audience? Caroline Spiegel’s first startup Quinn aims to bring some imagination to adult entertainment. Her older brother, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel, spent years trying to convince people his app wasn’t just for sexy texting. Now Caroline is building a website dedicated to sexy text and audio. The 22-year-old college senior tells TechCrunch that on April 13th she’ll launch Quinn, which she describes as “a much less gross, more fun Pornhub for women.”

TechCrunch checked out Quinn’s private beta site, which is pretty bare bones right now. Caroline tells us she’s already raised less than a million dollars for the project. But given her brother’s success spotting the next generation’s behavior patterns and turning them into beloved products, Caroline might find investors are eager to throw cash at Quinn. That’s especially true given she’s taking a contrarian approach. There will be no imagery on Quinn.

Caroline explains that “There’s no visual content on the site — just audio and written stories. And the whole thing is open source, so people can submit content and fantasies, etc. Everything is vetted by us before it goes on the site.” The computer science major is building Quinn with a three-woman team of her best friends she met while at Stanford, including Greta Meyer, though they plan to relocate to LA after graduation.

“His dream girl was named ‘Quinn’ “

The idea for Quinn sprung from a deeply personal need. “I came up with it because I had to leave Stanford my junior year because I was struggling with anorexia and sexual dysfunction that came along with that,” Caroline tells me. “I started to do a lot of research into sexual dysfunction cures. There are about 30 FDA-approved drugs for sexual dysfunction for men but zero for women, and that’s a big bummer.”

She believes there’s still a stigma around women pleasuring themselves, leading to a lack of products offering assistance. Sure, there are plenty of porn sites, but few are explicitly designed for women, and fewer stray outside of visual content. Caroline says photos and videos can create body image pressure, but with text and audio, anyone can imagine themselves in a scene. “Most visual media perpetuates the male gaze … all mainstream porn tells one story … You don’t have to fit one idea of what a woman should look like.”

That concept fits with the startup’s name “Quinn,” which Caroline says one of her best guy friends thought up. “He said this girl he met — his dream girl — was named ‘Quinn.’ ”

Caroline took to Reddit and Tumblr to find Quinn’s first creators. Reddit stuck to text and links for much of its history, fostering the kinky literature and audio communities. And when Tumblr banned porn in December, it left a legion of adult content makers looking for a new home. “Our audio ranges from guided masturbation to overheard sex, and there’s also narrated stories. It’s literally everything. Different strokes for different for folks, know what I mean?” Caroline says with a cheeky laugh.

To establish its brand, Quinn is running social media influencer campaigns where “The basic idea is to make people feel like it’s okay to experience pleasure. It’s hard to make something like masturbation cool, so that’s a little bit of a lofty goal. We’re just trying to make it feel okay, and even more okay than it is for men.”

As for the business model, Caroline’s research found younger women were embarrassed to pay for porn. Instead, Quinn plans to run ads, though there could be commerce opportunities too. And because the site doesn’t bombard users with nude photos or hardcore videos, it might be able to attract sponsors that most porn sites can’t.

Evan is “very supportive”

Until monetization spins up, Quinn has the sub-$1 million in funding that Caroline won’t reveal the source of, though she confirms it’s not from her brother. “I wouldn’t say that he’s particularly involved other than he’s one of the most important people in my life and I talk to him all the time. He gives me the best advice I can imagine,” the younger sibling says. “He doesn’t have any qualms, he’s very supportive.”

Quinn will need all the morale it can get, as Caroline bluntly admits, “We have a lot of competitors.” There’s the traditional stuff like Pornhub, user-generated content sites like Make Love Not Porn and spontaneous communities like on Reddit. She calls $5 million-funded audio porn startup Dipsea “an exciting competitor,” though she notes that “we sway a little more erotic than they do, but we’re so supportive of their mission.” How friendly.

Quinn’s biggest rival will likely be outdated but institutionalized site Literotica, which SimilarWeb ranks as the 60th most popular adult website, 631st most visited site overall, showing it gets 53 million hits per month. But the fact that Literotica looks like a web 1.0 forum yet has so much traffic signals a massive opportunity for Quinn. With rules prohibiting Quinn from launching native mobile apps, it will have to put all its effort into making its website stand out if it’s going to survive.

But more than competition, Caroline fears that Quinn will have to convince women to give its style of porn a try. “Basically, there’s this idea that for men, masturbation is an innate drive and for women it’s a ‘could do without it, could do with it.’ Quinn is going to have to make a market alongside a product and that terrifies me,” Caroline says, her voice building with enthusiasm. “But that’s what excites me the most about it, because what I’m banking on is if you’ve never had chocolate before, you don’t know. But once you have it, you start craving it. A lot of women haven’t experienced raw, visceral pleasure before, [but once we help them find it] we’ll have momentum.”

Most importantly, Quinn wants all women to feel they have rightful access to whatever they fancy. “It’s not about deserving to feel great. You don’t have to do Pilates to use this. You don’t have to always eat right. There’s no deserving with our product. Our mission is for women to be more in touch with themselves and feel fucking great. It’s all about pleasure and good vibes.”

It’s not uncommon to hear CEOs and business leaders talk about focusing on the consumer. But the only way to build for the consumer is to hear what they want, which can be a resource-intensive thing to retrieve.

User Interviews, an ERA-backed company out of New York, is looking to lighten that load with a fresh $5 million in seed funding from Accomplice, Las Olas, FJ Labs and ERA.

User Interviews actually started out as Mobile Suites, an amenities logistics platform for hotels. It was a dud, and the team — Basel Fakhoury, Dennis Meng and Bob Saris — decided to do far more user research before determining the next product.

In the process of talking to customers to understand their pain points, they realized just how difficult collecting user feedback could be.

That’s how User Interviews was born. The platform’s first product, called Recruit, offers a network of non-users that can be matched with companies to provide feedback. In fact, User Interviews’ first sales were made by simply responding to Craigslist ads posted by companies looking for non-users from which they could collect feedback.But because the majority of user research is based on existing users, the company also built Research Hub, which is essentially a CRM system for user feedback and research. To be clear, User Interviews doesn’t facilitate the actual interviews with users, but tracks the feedback, facilitates sending emails and ensures that no one from the research team is reaching out to a single user too often.

With Recruit, User Interviews charges $30/person that it matches with a company for feedback. Research Hub costs starts at $150/month.

“Right now, our greatest challenge is that our clients are the best product people in the world, and we have a huge pipeline of amazing ideas that are very valuable and no one is doing yet that our clients would love,” said CEO and cofounder Basel Fakhoury. “But we have to build it fast enough.”

No mention of what those forthcoming products might be, but the current iteration sure seems attractive enough. User Interviews clients include Eventbrite, Glassdoor, AT&T, DirecTV, Lola, LogMeIn, Thumbtack, Casper, ClassPass, Fandango, NNG, Pinterest, Pandora, Colgate, Uber and REI, to name a few.

We recently put the spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Arizona. Here, Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel shares another terrific story of bootstrapping success from Arizona. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the...

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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 gang around, with Connie Loizos in the studio with Kate Clark and our guest Barrett Cohn from Scenic Advisement. Alex was on the line from Providence.

Lucky for us, news of Lyft’s IPO pricing broke right before we hit record. That shook things up a bit, but it was far better to have it break as we were getting our notes together rather than after we kicked off. Let’s start there.

Lyft is going out at $72 per share, the top-end of its boosted range. The firm’s fully diluted $24 billion valuation (give or take) will be supported by around $2.4 billion in new capital, giving Lyft fresh runway to continue its expensive growth strategy.

Next, we turned to podcast industry stalwart Casper. Fret not podcast fans, the D2C mattress company has $100 million more in the bank, a fresh $1.1 billion valuation and IPO plans on the horizon. That’s a pretty parcel of news, which means it should be a full-charge ahead for the newly minted unicorn.

We also discuss newly leaked Casper financials. The company, like most unicorns, is still losing money, but its swelling annual revenues point to a profitable future.

From unicorn to unicorn to unicorn, we moved on to WeWork. WeWork, now known by its stage name “The We Company,” reported its 2018 financial performance this week and the results were amazing, twice. Amazing first in terms of growth, with revenue spiking from $886 million in 2017 to $1.8 billion in 2018. And amazing again in terms of cost, as WeWork’s net loss shot from $933 million in 2017 to $1.9 billion in 2018.

We had a chat about precisely what the firm is, with our guest arguing that WeWork isn’t a tech company at all, it’s a real estate business. We aren’t sure what the future holds for WeWork but we’re glad to have a front-row seat to the Adam Neumann show.

Finally, investors are once again in trouble. This time the venture community is taking stripes for landing in the college admissions cheating scandal. As if we still thought this country was a meritocracy.

Regardless, your friends at Equity are glad to see you. And we’ll be back before you miss us!

I’ve never had a meeting quite like the one I had with Built Robotics.

Within about 10 minutes of meeting Built’s co-founder Noah Ready-Campbell, we’re steering an 80,000-pound construction excavator around what is basically his company’s back yard.

He wants me to see what it’s like to drive one; how much skill and finesse it takes to safely and efficiently move mountains of dirt around with this massive machine. The answer? Lots.

That’s why his company wants these machines to drive themselves.

Built is taking the concepts and technology that others are using to build self-driving cars and adapting them for a whole different vertical: construction.

They’ve built a kit that retrofits existing construction equipment with hardware like lidar, GPS and Wi-Fi, giving it the ability to autonomously map and navigate its surroundings. Rather than trying to build its own dozers and excavators and fight its way into an already dominated market, Built is aiming to make a kit that works across the popular equipment already out on job sites. They sell and rent the kits to companies, then charge a usage fee whenever the machine is working in its autonomous mode.

They showed this tech at a smaller scale for the first time in 2017, implementing it into the compact track loader pictured above. Now it’s expanding into bigger equipment, including dozers (pictured below) and excavators (pictured up top). See those black boxes on top of each vehicle? That’s where all of Built’s tech lives.

Back in their office, we look out at the machines in their lot. Noah and the Built team switch the excavator into automated mode, bringing up a map of what’s just outside the window. A red border tells the machine where it’s allowed to go; if it for any reason edges past those borders, the whole machine shuts down.

Cameras on and around the vehicles are constantly checking for anyone who might stray too close. If something goes wrong and the machine starts to tip too much, or if on-board sensors detect that something is in the way underground? Power gets cut. And there’s a big red emergency stop button on the back of each machine (and a wireless button meant to stay on the operator’s desk) for good measure.

They fire up the excavator, and it starts digging away at its task. Every move the machine makes is represented on the screen. A blinking sea of dots surround the on-screen vehicle, indicating the terrain it’s sensing around itself. It’s an absolute trip, watching these machines roll around and push and dig with no humans in their cabs. It reminds me of StarCraft for some reason.

Won’t these machines take jobs from people who want them? The construction industry is in the middle of a severe labor shortage, Noah tells me. The industry seems to agree, with The Associated General Contractors of America having just this month asked Congress to support a temporary work visa program to bring more potential workers in.

But we’re not the only country facing a construction labor shortage, and it’s not one that’s likely to end soon. As BuildZoom chief economist Issi Romem makes clear in this post, there aren’t enough young people entering the field to keep up.

What if instead of one vehicle per operator, each operator could oversee an automated fleet of two, or three, or five? They could give the machines a map of what they needed dug, fire them up and only step in the cab when there’s something the machines can’t do. It won’t solve the shortage, but it might help fill the gaps.

It’s still early days for Built. It’s built a research fleet of seven vehicles, and they’re coming up on their tenth completed construction project; all in all, their fleet has about 6,000 hours of operating time. But they should be good to keep rolling for a whole lot longer, with the company having $100 million dollars in contracts now signed.

This is Noah’s second startup. He sold his first startup, a clothing resale site called Twice, to eBay in 2015.

Earlier this month, Oracle (NYSE: ORCL) announced its third quarter results. The company outpaced market expectations for the quarter but the slowdown in its revenue growth is worrying. Despite the...

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Sramana Mitra: What you just said is very interesting from a computer science point of view. So far, it seems like pharma has been developing drugs with clinical trials that have relatively small...

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David Lambert, Managing Director at Right Side Capital Management, a firm that invests small chunks of capital in capital efficient ventures. The firm is very much in line with the Bootstrapping to...

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Betaworks Studios, the brainchild of New York City seed-stage venture capital fund Betaworks, has amassed the support of WeWork, or The We Company, as they now call themselves.

JLL Spark led a $4.4 million investment in the membership-based co-working club described as a supportive community for builders, with participation from the co-working giant, Betaworks Ventures and BBG Ventures. Betaworks Studios has previously raised a pre-seed round led by BBG.

Launched in 2018, Betaworks Studios offers entrepreneurs, artists, engineers and creatives a place to work on projects and accumulate a network, similar to a WeWork hub.

In separate news, Betaworks Ventures today filed to raise a $75 million sophomore fund.

Founded in 2008 by John Borthwick, Betaworks operates an investment fund, an accelerator and builds companies internally with spin-outs, including Giphy, Digg and Bit.ly. The idea for Betaworks Studios was to expand its resources and network to the greater entrepreneurial community.

Borthwick brought on Daphne Kwon, the former chief financial officer of Goop, to run the studio arm, which charges $2,400 per year or $225 per month.

Betaworks says its studio has hosted some 11,000 people for meetings and speaking events. It currently has only one club location in New York City’s Meatpacking District, but plans to open additional studios with the fresh cash.

DoorDash launched a new initiative today called Kitchens Without Borders, which it says is designed to promote business owners who are immigrants and refugees.

It’s starting out with 10 restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area: Besharam, Z Zoul Cafe, Onigilly, Los Cilantros, Sabores Del Sur, West Park Farm & Sea, Little Green Cyclo, Afghan Village, D’Maize and Sweet Lime Thai Cuisine.

The entrepreneurs behind each of these businesses is profiled on the Kitchens Without Borders site. Their restaurants will also get promoted within the DoorDash app, and they’ll receive $0 delivery fees for up to six weeks.

A DoorDash spokesperson told me the initial 10 participants were selected from 60 applicants, and that the program will be expanding to include other restaurants across the country in the coming months.

This announcement comes a month after DoorDash announced that it had raised another $400 million in funding. The company also drew criticism earlier this year for its driver compensation practices.

In a blog post, CEO Tony Xu said he has a personal connection to the program:

For one, I’m an immigrant. I moved to this country from China when I was five, and my mom ran a Chinese restaurant with the purpose of creating a better life and fulfilling her dream of becoming a doctor. I worked alongside her as a dishwasher and saw firsthand what it takes to make it in this country. Over the course of 12 years, she eventually saved up enough money to become the doctor that she wanted to be and opened up a medical clinic, which she has now been running for the past 20 years.

Lyft raised more than $2 billion Thursday afternoon after pricing its shares at $72 apiece, the top of the expected range of $70 to $72 per share. This gives Lyft a fully diluted market value of $24 billion.

The company will debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange Friday morning, trading under the ticker symbol “LYFT.”

The initial public offering is the first-ever for a ride-hailing business and represents a landmark liquidity event for private market investors, which had invested billions of dollars in the San Francisco-based company. In total, Lyft had raised $5.1 billion in debt and equity funding, reaching a valuation of $15.1 billion last year.

Lyft’s blockbuster IPO is unique for a number of reasons, in addition to being amongst transportation-as-a-service companies to transition from private to public. Lyft has the largest net losses of any pre-IPO business, posting losses of $911 million on revenues of $2.2 billion in 2018. However, the company is also raking in the largest revenues, behind only Google and Facebook, for a pre-IPO company. The latter has made it popular on Wall Street, garnering buy ratings from analysts prior to pricing.

Uber is the next tech unicorn, or company valued north of $1 billion, expected out of the IPO gate. It will trade on the New York Stock Exchange in what is one of the most anticipated IPOs in history. The company, which reported $3 billion in Q4 2018 revenues with net losses of $865 million, is reportedly planning to unveil its IPO prospectus next month.

Next in the pipeline is Pinterest, which dropped its S-1 last week and revealed a path to profitability that is sure to garner support from Wall Street investors. The visual search engine will trade on the NYSE under the symbol “PINS.” It posted revenue of $755.9 million last year, up from $472.8 million in 2017. The company’s net loss, meanwhile, shrank to $62.9 million last year from $130 million in 2017.

Other notable companies planning 2019 stock offerings include Slack, Zoom — a rare, profitable pre-IPO unicorn — and, potentially, Airbnb.

Updating.

Two years ago, former Amazon product manager Xiao Wang stood on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco and made the case for a platform meant to help couples apply for marriage green cards, a complex process made worse by bureaucracy and red tape.

Called Boundless, the startup had spun out of Seattle startup studio Pioneer Square Labs and raised a $3.5 million seed round. Now, Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has led a $7.8 million Series A in the startup, with participation from existing investors Trilogy Equity Partners, PSL, Two Sigma Ventures and Founders’ Co-Op.

“Families have really only had two choices, they could spend weeks or months trying to figure this out on their own, or they can spend thousands and thousands of dollars on an immigration attorney,” Wang, Boundless co-founder and chief executive officer, told TechCrunch. “What we are trying to do is basically give everyone access to the information, the tools and the support that was previously only available to those that could afford high-priced attorneys.”

Boundless charges $750 for its online green card application support services, which includes ensuring families correctly complete applications and have access to an immigration lawyer to review those applications. The fee comes at a major discount to the costs of an immigration lawyer and streamlines a process that can be delayed months when errors are made. The startup also offers a recently launched $395 naturalization product meant to assist eligible green card holders with their U.S. citizenship applications.

Wang founded Boundless in 2017 after helping build Amazon Go, the e-commerce giant’s line of cashierless convenience stores. Wang is an immigrant, having relocated to the U.S. from China when he was a child.

“We spent almost five months of rent money on an immigration attorney because the stakes were so high and we only had one shot,” Wang said. “We wanted to make sure we were doing it right. This is a story that is echoed by millions of families every year; this is such an important part of them starting a new life in a new country.”

Wang, after three years at Amazon, realized he could use his technology background and data prowess to build an information platform supportive of these millions of families.

“This is exactly what tech and data is meant to do,” he said. “I believe there is a moral obligation for tech to be used in meaningfully improving people’s lives.”

Boundless plans to use this investment to expand its team and product offerings, as well as build out its content library, which Wang said is rapidly becoming the go-to place for immigrants navigating the legal labyrinth that is the U.S. green card and citizenship process. Its resources page, which includes straightforward guides, a number of forms and more, counts 300,000 unique visitors per month.

“We hold their hand through the entire process,” Wang said. “We want to be the single source of information and tools for all family-based immigration.”

Wang and his team also hope to shine a brighter light on immigration policy. In late 2018, as part of its effort to be louder advocates for immigrants, Boundless, alongside Warby Parker, Foursquare, Foundation Capital and more, published an open letter to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security opposing its proposed “public charge” immigration regulation, which would allow for non-citizens who are in the country legally to be denied a visa or a green card if they have a medical condition, financial liabilities and other disqualifiers.

“The stakes for making sure your application is correct have never been higher; the government has far more leeway to be able to deny applications,” Wang said. “While we can’t speed up the government processing times, we can make meaningful improvements to helping families gather all the materials they need to send in the right information.”

Building a startup is incredibly tough. There are the constant ups and downs, the moments of sheer ambiguity and terror. And so, few moments in a startup’s life are as triumphant — and crystal clear — as closing a round of funding. Yes, yes, raising venture capital shouldn’t be celebrated as a milestone, and the focus should always be on product and users … but it just feels so damn good sometimes just to feel that sense of euphoria: I built something, and now others are giving me potentially millions of dollars to shoot for the stars.

Unfortunately, that clarity is increasingly vanishing. First, “closing a round” is rarely as sharp a distinction as it used to be. Seed rounds (and even later-stage rounds) are often raised over extended periods of time, with many partial closings conducted as new angels and seed funds come to the (cap) table.

Then there is also the growing disconnect between raising capital and the actual announcement of that fundraise. Founders are trying to remain under stealth for longer periods of time to hide from competitors, and they want to message their news in a careful manner.

All of which means that the Form D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission when closing an exempt fundraise (aka venture rounds) is no longer as simple a process as it once was.

Lawyers will state publicly that startups should always file their legally mandatory paperwork (that’s probably also a good rule for life). The reality, though, is pretty much the opposite when you talk to startup attorneys in private.

Here’s the secret about Form D filings today: the norms in Silicon Valley have changed, and Form D filings are often filed late, not at all, and many startups are advised to lie low in the hopes of avoiding stricter SEC scrutiny. What was once a fait accompli is now a deliberative process, with important decision points for founders.

Extra Crunch contacted about two dozen startup attorneys, from the biggest firms in the industry to the one-person shops with a shingle out front. Getting straight answers here has been tough, if only because no lawyer really wants to say out loud that they actively recommend their clients violate government regulations (there is that whole law license thing, which apparently lawyers care about).

Practically all of these conversations were done off-the-record and not for attribution, since as one lawyer said, “the last thing I need is the damn SEC sending our firm a nastygram.” Other firms wholly swore us off from even discussing their Form D cultures.

Full disclosure: I am not an attorney, and while I had attorneys read over this draft, this does not constitute legal advice, particularly specific legal advice for your specific startup and situation. Get inspiration from this analysis, but always (really, truly, always) consult qualified legal counsel to answer legal questions about your startup.

With that said, here is our guide to the new world of venture capital securities filings.

Drake’s latest collaboration isn’t with Kanye or Kendrick, it’s with Marissa Mayer.

The rap superstar has joined a bevy of Silicon Valley investors, including Strauss Zelnick, Comcast, Macro Ventures, Canaan, RRE, Courtside and Marissa Mayer, to fund Players’ Lounge, an esports startup looking to pit gamers against each other in their favorite titles with some friendly wagers on the line.

The startup has just announced that it closed $3 million in funding.

The company, which has been around for five years, got its start as an esports startup looking to organize real-life matches at bars in New York City to play FIFA. That’s obviously not the most scalable business of all time, but last year after joining Y Combinator, the company really dove into a new model that looked to create an online hub for gamers to battle each other in titles of their choosing, with money on the line.

The company has a heavy emphasis on sports titles, like FIFA 19, NBA 2K19 and Madden 19, but there are also some heavy hitters like Fortnite, Apex Legends and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Gamers can set a match or join one in head-to-head challenges or in massive 500-person tournaments. The wagers are often a buck or two but can swell much higher. Players’ Lounge takes 10 percent of the bets as a fee. Because it’s a game of skill, not chance, there aren’t many issues with gambling regulations, though a few states still don’t allow the service, the company says.

The startup plans to use their new cash to beef up their library of playable games and add to their development team.

Editor’s note: This article is a part of our latest initiative to demystify design and find the best brand designers and agencies in the world who work with early-stage companies — nominate a talented brand designer you’ve worked with.

A brand is far more than logos and colors. A consistent brand identity not only communicates your company’s purpose and values to customers, but it also shapes your product development cycle and corporate culture. A branding project can help you figure out what and how to communicate your company’s story, but how much does it cost?

I’ve been a designer for over a decade (and a marketer before that), working with organizations ranging from tiny startups to the Fortune 500; this piece will give you a general idea of branding costs, with the knowledge that these broad numbers may not be applicable in every single case (in fact, you’re likely to find exceptions).

Bootstrappers and pre-seed startups

For most startups at this stage, your goal is to establish a proof of concept that can show product/market fit and bring investor dollars. You may only need a logo, website, and basic brand positioning. Isla Murray, Creative Director and Cofounder at Lama Six, also recommends investing your money in designing a beautiful deck: “It will set you apart and allow your message to shine through.”

Brand strategy and positioning

Positioning involves understanding who you are as a company, how your product fits the marketplace, and how you communicate your company’s values. This is the most important piece of the branding puzzle and one that’s worthwhile to begin on your own – when you have more funding, your original strategy work will give you a base for conveying your identity to professionals who can take it further. Two suggestions that designers commonly recommend are Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout and Designing Brand Identity by Alina Wheeler, a primer on brand design.

Approximate cost: Your time.

Logo and visual identity

A brand is a relationship with your audience, and you’ll want to make sure that every interaction with them communicates your message. You’ll almost certainly need to hire a designer for this work. Sites like Fiverr and 99designs offer cheap logos, but independent consultants like Pablo Defendini advise that if you can find a small budget, you’ll get far better results by hiring an experienced professional to create a more polished logo and simple usage guide.

Approximate cost: $100-$3000.

Website

As a UX designer and front-end developer, I often recommend that young companies not spend their limited dollars on building a website from scratch – pre-built, templated websites like Squarespace can get you up and running for minimal cost, and you can buy domain names from a registrar like Namecheap. Customizations will be minimal, but you can’t beat the price.

Approximate cost: $10-30/month, plus $20/year per domain.

Early-stage, funded startups

Once you’re paying for experienced help, finding a good fit with a designer is crucial: Trust is the most important factor in a designer-client relationship, and design is ultimately a collaborative process. So take the time to find a contractor or firm that you respect and feel comfortable with.

Another option: If you already have a strong designer in-house, you might consider setting aside time for them to focus on your brand identity — they’ll cost less, and they already have intimate knowledge of your company values and audience.

Pricing comes in a wide range depending on your needs: Defindini says he’s worked on identity projects ranging from $5000 for a standalone logo to $200,000 for a complex identity system with multiple brands. Costs are also driven by scope and time. When you receive proposals from firms, be clear about your needs and transparent about what you can afford. Murray says that if clients don’t have a full budget, she’ll look for ways to scope down projects, which might involve reducing deliverables or going through fewer rounds of feedback and iteration.

Many designers will charge project rates, but if you’re paying by the hour, expect to spend $100-$150/hour for an experienced consultant and $150-$600/hour for a firm depending on their size and location.

Brand strategy and positioning

Brand strategy and positioning should drive most of your business decisions, so it’s worth taking the time to do this right. With a smaller budget, a consultant might spend a few days with your company leadership figuring out your core values and how to articulate them. For a larger budget, expect design teams to do more research and a competitive analysis, resulting in deliverables like a communication strategy and voice/tone guidelines for your marketing team.

More expensive projects may also include things like trainings to make sure your staff correctly and consistently implements your brand. In general, pricing is determined by how many people are working on your branding project and the complexity of your deliverables.

Approximate cost: $5000-$20,000 (freelancers and small firms), $30,000-$80,000 (large firms).

Logo and visual identity

Visual identity is the result of independent research, visual moodboarding, and rounds of feedback and iteration, says Murray. At the end of the process, you’ll typically receive a logo, typeface, color and design elements, and visual brand attributes. Larger-budget projects will typically involve detailed guidance on specific illustration and photography styles, iconography, and more – Murray suggests also including social media visual strategy and Instagram post templates.

Pricing here increases the more logo variations you need, the more brands you have, and the level of detail required in your visual guidance. Rounds of feedback and iteration add cost, as does the size of the team you hire.

Approximate cost: $5000-$15,000 (freelancers and small firms), $15,000-$75,000 (large firms).

Website

This is the branding piece with the greatest variability in cost, with projects getting more expensive as they require more user research, prototyping, content creation, and engineering work. Pricing is largely dependent on the complexity of engineering requirements and the number of iterations you want to go through.

Generally, you have static marketing sites on the lower end, websites built on lightweight content management systems (i.e. a custom visual design built to run on WordPress) in the middle, and web applications managing heavy databases or a more robust CMS like Sitecore or Drupal on the higher end.

Approximate cost: $2000-$20,000 (freelancers and small firms), $30,000-$200,000 (large firms).

Company name development – for more mature startups

Many startups find themselves at a stage where they’re well-funded but have a name that no longer fits – what feels right when your company is a month old and bootstrapped with your savings account may not feel the same two years later. A naming agency will develop names that work with your brand positioning, do a competitive analysis to research the tone, strength, and messaging of these names, and pre-screen them for trademark availability. (Note that you’ll typically need to hire a legal team to register the trademark once this is done.)

Approximate cost: $15,000-$75,000 (naming firm).

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution

You may hire one of the top branding agencies in the world or you may have a family member who’s an experienced designer and willing to give you an incredible deal. But no matter who you choose to work with, branding is a vital part of your business that will help you both understand and communicate who you are.

MoviePass may still be trying to figure out how to make a movie ticket subscription service financially viable, but it can be credited for at least correctly identifying consumer demand for such a thing. There’s now a market for movie tickets by subscription from it as well as rivals like Sinemia, AMC Stubs A-List, Cinemark Movie Club, and — as of yesterday — newcomer Infinity. Now you can add one more: Atom Tickets, which is today announcing a platform that will allow theaters to build their own movie ticket subscription services.

The idea here is that the exhibitors themselves — not startups — should be involved in establishing the business model that’s right for them. Atom Tickets will instead provide the underlying technology and support that makes such a thing possible.

The new platform, called Atom Movie Access, will be offered to exhibitors across North America. It provides a fully digitally booking platform for subscribers through the Atom Tickets app. That means subscribers can also take advantage of Atom Tickets’ other benefits — like reserving seats in advance, inviting friends through their contacts, pre-ordering concessions for quick pickup where available and checking in using a phone instead of paper tickets.

On the back end, Atom Tickets will also handle the payment processing, customer service, fraud detection and anti-abuse measures. The latter is particularly important for movie ticket subscriptions, as MoviePass noted that as much as 20 percent of its customers were abusing the service, which significantly contributed to its financial issues.

In addition, the platform will allow subscribers to be able to make complex transactions in-app, like redeeming a free movie while also buying full-priced tickets for a guest in one sale. It also supports things like being able to choose between an included free screening or saving it for later, the company says, and allows for the creation of differently tiered plans. For example, there can be plans for both individuals or groups and tiers for standard and premium movie formats.

“Atom Tickets is an innovative ticketing platform that enables exhibitors to reach and engage new and incremental audiences,” said Matthew Bakal, chairman and co-founder of Atom Tickets, in a statement about the launch. “We’ve always believed in being a valuable partner to exhibitors, starting with the core functionality of our app, which allows for marketing promotions at specific locations, integrating exhibitor loyalty plans and giving customers the ability to pre-order concessions. Now with Atom Movie Access, we’re thrilled to provide the technology that will enhance the direct-to-consumer relationship of moviegoers with their favorite theaters.”

There are still several unknowns about the new platform — most notably the pricing for exhibitors. In an interview with Variety, Bakal suggested it would not be prohibitive as Atom Tickets would instead take a cut of subscriptions. The report also noted that no theaters have signed up yet, but the pitching will begin in earnest at a trade show next week in Las Vegas.