Axeleo Capital has raised a $51 million fund (€45 million). Axeleo first started with an accelerator focused on enterprise startups. The firm is now all grown up with an acceleration program and a full-fledged VC fund.

The accelerator is now called Axeleo Scale, while the fund is called Axeleo Capital. And it’s important to mention both parts of the business as they work hand in hand.

Axeleo picks up around 10 startups per year and help them reach the Series A stage. If they’re doing well over the 12 to 18 months of the program, Axeleo funds those startups using its VC fund.

Limited partners behind the company’s first fund include Bpifrance through the French Tech Accélération program, the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region, Vinci Energies, Crédit Agricole, BNP Paribas, Caisse d’Épargne Rhône-Alpes as well as various business angels and family offices.

The firm is also partnering with Hi Inov, the holding company of the Dentressangle family. Axeleo will take care of the early stage investments of Hi Inov, which represent $11.3 million (€10 million).

Axeleo is focusing on early stage rounds, from $565,000 to $4.5 million (€500,000 to €4 million) in anything B2B, from artificial intelligence to cybersecurity and SaaS. So far, the team has invested in Alsid, Vectaury, 365Talents, Jenji, Ermeo and others.

Atlassian today announced that it has acquired AgileCraft, a service that aims to help enterprises plan their strategic projects and workstreams. The service provides business leaders with additional insights into the current status of technical projects and gives them insights into the bottlenecks, risks and dependencies of these projects. Indeed, the focus of AgileCraft is less on technical teams than on the business teams that support them and help them manage the digital transformation of their businesses.

The price total of the acquisition is about $166 million, with $154 million in cash and the remainder in restricted shares.

“Many leaders are still making mission-critical decisions using their instincts and best guesses instead of data,” said Scott Farquhar, Atlassian’s co-founder and co-CEO, in today’s announcement. “As Atlassian tools spread through organizations, technology leaders need better visibility into work performed by their teams. With AgileCraft joining Atlassian, we believe we’re the best company to help executives align the work across their organization – providing an all-encompassing view that connects strategy, work, and outcomes.”

As the name implies, AgileCraft focuses on the Agile methodology, though it also offers a bit of flexibility there with support for frameworks like SAFe, LeSS and Spotify. It supports pulling in data from tools like Atlassian’s Jira, but also Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server, IBM’s RTC and other services.

Atlassian will continue to operate AgileCraft, which had raised about $10.1 million before the acquisition as a standalone service. “We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers’ success,” writes AgileCraft’s founder and CEO Steve Elliott. “We remain dedicated to pioneering enterprise agility and are thrilled to team up with the outstanding people at Atlassian to help our customers thrive.”

Over the years, Atlassian started embracing users and use cases for its tools that go beyond its core tools for developers. Jira and Confluence are the prime examples for this. Today’s acquisition continues this trend in that AgileCraft aims to bring to the rest of the company many of the methodologies that tech teams use.

“One of the critical roles we play for lots of organizations is in helping drive this kind of digital transformation where we’re really empowering the teams that are building and developing the kind of technology that moves our customers forward,” Atlassian president Jay Simons told me. “AgileCraft basically complements all of that by extending visibility into what teams are using Atlassian products to do up into key stakeholders and leaders in the business that are trying to manage better visibility at a portfolio or program level.”

Simons also stressed that AgileCraft already has very strong integrations into the existing Atlassian tools — and indeed, that was one of the main drivers of the acquisition. He noted that the company plans to improve those and think about additional patterns. “We’ll continue doing what we’re doing,” he said.

Simons also noted that he expects that a lot of Jira customers will now look at AgileCraft as an additional tool in helping the businesses manage their business’s digital transformation.

Atlassian doesn’t typically make a lot of acquisitions. Its pace is close to about one major buy per year. Last year, the company picked up OpsGenie for $295 million. In 2017, it acquired Trello for $425 million, the company’s biggest acquisition to date. Other major products the company has acquired include StatusPage, BlueJimp, HipChat and Bitbucket (all the way back in 2010).

Homosexuality is illegal in a third of the counties on this planet; in eight countries it is punishable by death. In the febrile atmosphere of today’s politics, hate-crime incidents in the U.S. increased by 17 percent from 2016 to 2017, according to the FBI.

More than 20 of those incidents were crimes against an individual’s sexual orientation — the largest increase since 9/11. Similar hate-crime statistics have increased in the U.K. and several other western countries.

It’s strange and saddening to think that men, women and gender non-conforming people who “travel while gay” are now in a more dangerous — and potentially life-threatening — situation around the world, despite us being well into the 21st century.

The key to the situation is knowing whether the place you’re staying will be welcoming or not. There are many incidents where, at hotels, gay travelers have been rejected or forced to book separate rooms, and had to fall back on third-party, unverified, user-generated reviews.

Now, misterb&b, the short-term rental marketplace aimed at the gay community, has a simple solution. Customers can book an entire home or rent a private room at the home of a gay or gay-friendly host, with many located in gay-friendly neighborhoods. The startup competes with more home-spun sites like “Gay Home Stays,” however, misterb&b has already raised substantial amounts in VC.

The startup graduated from the 500 Startups accelerator and has raised US$13.5 million from institutional investors like Project A and Ventech, and from angels like Joel Simkhai (founder of Grindr, which sold for US$300 million). The marketplace now has 310,000 hosts in more than 135 countries, and claims to have 30 percent revenue growth YoY; with 60 percent of the business done organically by repeat customers.

Indeed, misterb&b has now raised more than half a million dollars inside a week via Wefunder to fund its expansion. This will allow guests, hosts and the public to invest in the company’s push to launch its services into the hotel sector.

Investors are buying into a lucrative market. The niche of global gay tourism is estimated to be a $100 billion market, while gay people travel twice as much as other travelers. Its fundraising may also benefit from the influx of new tech millionaires being created by the upcoming IPOs of Uber, Lyft, Postmates and Airbnb.

CEO and founder Matthieu Jost says he wants to “build equality into the sharing economy and give back to a community that’s been historically economically marginalized,” providing its community “with the power of part ownership of the company.”

The idea for starting misterb&b was first conceived in 2013 after he had a negative experience while traveling with his partner and didn’t feel welcome by his host. “Six years ago, my partner and I traveled to and booked a room in Barcelona through a third-party rental website,” he told me via email.

“Unfortunately, when we arrived there, we were faced with a host who was very much homophobic and asked me if we were seriously going to share a bedroom. This was a very sad thing to have to face. Straight, hetero folks never have to worry about something so humiliating as this while on a lovely vacation; they will never have to think about it or prepare for it.”

“When I returned home I felt dejected, but I felt I had do something to solve this horrific problem — yet common fear — that our community faces. I don’t want my community to be afraid of traveling anymore,” he said.

“We are reaching out to the most passionate people in the community: our hosts and our guests, as well as LGBTQ allies,” said Jost. “We want to provide the opportunity to financially benefit from our successes,” he added.

The crowdfunding is for a new selection of gay-friendly and gay-welcoming hotels that have been selected by the company’s editorial team for their quality, exclusive and verified reviews from LGBTQ travelers. The idea is that travelers will also be able to connect with each other to explore the city together — especially because there’s safety in numbers.

Podcasts are exploding in popularity and Y Combinator, the startup accelerator known for its long list of unicorn graduates, is throwing its support behind a business tackling the podcast monetization problem. Among its latest and largest-ever cohort is Brew, a subscription-based app complete with original content.

Though Brew’s founders, Jijo Sunny, Madhavan Ramakrishnan, Aleesha John and Joseph Sunny, call Brew the “Netflix for podcasts,” the app differs from Luminary, which made headlines with the same tagline and a $100 million round earlier this month. Luminary, which hasn’t yet launched, will similarly operate under a subscription model, charging $8 a month for access to its podcasts. Instead of opening its platform to creators of any stature, the business is striking deals with established voices in the podcast industry, like Guy Raz of “How I Built This,” Adam Davidson of “Planet Money” and celebrities Trevor Noah and Lena Dunham.

Brew, on the other hand, charges listeners $5 per month for access to a different demographic: upstart podcasters and rising stars alike. In other words, if you and your mom wanted to start a podcast — and get paid — you can sign up on Brew and instantly start raking in cash. That is, if you’re garnering an audience of listeners; Brew pays its creators based on their number of unique listens.

“Podcasts, by nature, have a low barrier to entry and that’s the best thing about podcasts, right?,” Brew chief executive officer Jijo Sunny tells TechCrunch. “Anyone anywhere can set up a podcast. To be a Netflix for audio, it has to be for all creators, not celebrities like Trevor Noah.”

The app officially launched in the app store last week with several original ad-free shows, including original content from YouTubers Boogie2988 and Jack Vale, who boast a 4.5 million and 1.5 million following on YouTube, respectively. Next month, Brew will make its platform available for all podcasters to upload shows.

“Our vision is to help millions of creators earn a living doing what they love,” Ramakrishnan tells TechCrunch.

The startup’s long-term vision includes incorporating a tipping feature, much like Himalaya, another podcasting business that recently secured a $100 million check. Himalaya allows listeners to send micro-payments to creators to help subsidize their ad-based income.

Later, Brew plans to allow podcasters to operate online stores within the app, so they can earn additional money through merchandise sales. Live podcasts, publishing and production tools are also on the roadmap.

Podcast startups are taking off thanks to support from venture capitalists, but the people behind the content still struggle to earn a solid paycheck. Justine and Olivia Moore of CRV, an early-stage venture capital firm, say podcasts monetize at only a penny per listener hour, on average. Podcasting, in other words, makes 10x less money per hours consumed than radio, TV, magazines or any other major content medium. Meanwhile, 73 million people are enjoying podcasts every month, per Edison Research, and some 15 billion episodes are downloaded each year.

It’s clear there is an untapped opportunity to help content creators get rich. The Brew team’s experience — they previously built Buymeacoffee.com, a tipping platform for artists that has funded 40,000 people to date — coupled with VCs excitement for the growing medium puts Brew on a solid path for growth.

Brew’s team is originally from Kerala, India but plans to permanently set up shop in San Francisco. They’ve raised a total of $400,000, including Y Combinator’s $150,000 check. CrunchRoll founder Kun Gao and Teachable CEO Ankur Nagpal are amongst its early backers.

Brew, alongside some 200 other startups, will pitch to investors at YC Demo Days later today and tomorrow.

To accurately forecast the weather, you first need lots of data — not just to train your forecasting models but also to generate more precise and granular forecasts. Typically, this has been the domain of government agencies, thanks to their access to this data and the compute power to run the extremely complex models. Anybody can now buy compute power in the cloud, though, and as the Boston and Tel Aviv-based startup ClimaCell is setting out to prove, there are now also plenty of other ways to get climate data thanks to a variety of relatively non-traditional sensors that can help generate more precise local weather predictions.

Now you may say that others, like Dark Sky, for example, are already doing that with their hyperlocal forecasts. But ClimaCell’s approach is very different, and with that has attracted as clients airlines like Delta, JetBlue and United, sports teams like the New England Patriots and agtech companies like Netafim.

“The biggest problem is that to predict the weather, you need to have observations and you need to have models,” ClimaCell CEO Shimon Elkabetz told me. “The entire industry is basically repackaging the data and models of the government [agencies]. And the governments don’t create the relevant infrastructure everywhere in the world. Even in the U.S., there’s room for improvement.”

And that’s where ClimaCell’s main innovation comes in. Instead of relying on government sensors, it’s using the Internet of Things to gather more weather data from far more places than would otherwise be possible. This kind of sensing technology could turn millions of existing connected devices — like cell phones, connected vehicles, street cameras, airplanes and drones — into virtual weather stations. It’s easy enough to see how this would work. If a driver turns on a windshield wiper or fog lights, you know it’s probably raining or foggy. Often, these cars also relay temperature data. If a street camera sees rain, it’s raining.

What’s more complex is that ClimaCell has also developed the technology to gather data from how atmospheric conditions impact the signal propagation between cell phones and their base stations. And to take this one step further — and beyond the ground level — it has also figured out how to gather similar data from satellite-to-ground microwave signals.

“The idea is that everything is sensitive to weather and we can turn everything into a weather sensor,” said Elkabetz. “That’s why we call it the weather of things. It enables us to put in place virtual sensors everywhere.”

Using all this data, ClimaCell is providing its customers, like airlines, ridesharing companies and energy companies, with real-time weather data and forecasts.

Using all of this data the company also recently launched flood alerts for about 500 cities that can provide 24 to 48-hour warnings ahead of major flood events. To do this, the company combined its weather data with its own hydrological model.

For now, most of ClimaCell’s business model focuses on selling its data and predictions to other businesses. The company plans to launch a consumer app in May, though. I got a sneak peek of the app; while I can’t vouch for the forecasts, it’s a very well-designed application that you’ll probably want to look at, no matter whether you’re a weather geek or just want to see if you can get a quick bike ride in before the rain starts.

Why a consumer app? “We want to become the biggest weather technology company in the world,” Elkabetz said. To get to this point, the company has raised a total of $68 million to date from investors that include Clearvision Ventures, JetBlue Technology Ventures, Ford Smart Mobility,  Envision Ventures, Canaan Partners, Fontinalis Partners and Square Peg Capital.

The past few years have been a bit of a dark age for budding social media startups. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snap and messenger apps took up all the time of their users, leaving little room for yet another social media platform.

But the tide is shifting. Privacy scandals have shaken some users’ faith in giants like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, and users have grown fatigued by the constant onslaught of #content.

Basement, a YC-backed startup, is looking to give users a new, simpler social network.

Basement allows users to only add up to 20 friends on the network. Co-founders Fernando Rojo and Jeremy Berman said they waited around for someone to build something like Basement after seeing their own friend groups migrate most of their communication to messenger apps from Facebook and other social networks.

On Basement, there are no filters or influencers. The hope is that users share with the people they actually want to share with.

It uses a feed-based system for sharing, letting users share content to their 20 friends. Users can also share to a smaller group of friends by tagging them, which limits the viewership to only mutual friends of those tagged.

Users who are friends can see one another’s comments on a mutual friend’s post. However, comments left by non-friends will always appear anonymous.

Alongside the main feed, Basement also has a meme feed, letting users choose from the internet’s top trending memes to share to their friend group.

Of course, Basement isn’t the first startup to try out the idea of a close-friends social network. Path was founded by Shawn Fanning, Dustin Mierau, and Dave Morin in 2010, giving users a photo-sharing and messaging platform that maxed out at 50 (and later 150) friends.

The network grew in the face of competition from Facebook, and at peak had around 50 million users. In fact, Path was raising money at a valuation of $500 million and turned down a $100 million offer from Google in its early months.

But it failed to retain talent, users and momentum. (A controversial privacy scandal in 2012 didn’t help.) In 2015, Path sold to Kakao for an undisclosed amount and was shut down for good just last year.

Rojo and Berman believe timing is more in their favor than it was with Path, but are also targeting a different audience. Whereas Path was aimed both at close friends and family, Basement wants to position itself squarely with young people who are already spending their time in meme-laden group chats.

“One of the challenges is that growth isn’t necessarily as inherently explosive in a micro-network as it would be with a broader social network,” said Rojo. “What’s exciting to us is that if anyone tries to spark up something similar to this, they’ll be one or two years behind. It’s harder to grow a micro-network, but once it’s bigger it’s much more robust because it’s the place where people turn when they want to connect with their close friends.”

What’s more: Basement promises to never run ads on the platform.

The company plans to mimic the WhatsApp business model, giving users their first year free and then charging an inexpensive subscription after that.

According to India Brand Equity Foundation, the automotive industry in India is expected to reach INR 16.16-18.18 trillion (US$ 251.4-282.8 billion) by 2026 driven by increasing middle-class income...

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Factory software tools are often out of reach of small manufacturers, forcing them to operate with inefficient manual systems. WorkClout, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, wants to change that by offering a more affordable SaaS alternative to traditional manufacturing software solutions.

Company co-founder and CEO Arjun Patel grew up helping out in his Dad’s factory and saw first-hand how difficult it is for small factory owners to automate. He says that traditional floor-management tools are expensive and challenging to implement.

“What motivated me is when my dad was trying to implement a similar system,” Patel said, noting that his father’s system had cost more than $240,000, took over a year to get going and wasn’t really doing what he wanted it to do. That’s when he decided to help.

He teamed up with Bryan Trang, who became the CPO, and Richard Girges, who became the CTO, to build the system that his dad (and others in a similar situation) needed. Specifically, the company developed a cloud software solution that helps manufacturers increase their operational efficiency. “Two things that we do really well is track every action on the factory floor and use that data to make suggestions on how to increase efficiency. We also determine how much work can be done in a given time period, taking finite resources into consideration,” Patel explained.

He said that one of the main problems that small-to-medium sized manufacturers face is a lack of visibility into their businesses. WorkClout looks at orders, activities, labor and resources to determine the best course of action to complete an order in the most cost-effective way.

“WorkClout gives our customers a better way to allocate resources and greater visibility of what’s actually happening on the factory floor. The more data that they have, the more accurate picture they have of what’s going on,” Patel said.

The company is still working on the pricing model, but today it charges administrative users like plant management, accounting and sales. Machine operators get access to the data for free. The current rate for paid users starts at $99 per user per month. There is an additional one-time charge for implementation and training.

As for the Y Combinator experience, Patel says that it has helped him focus on what’s important. “It really makes you hone in on building the product and getting customers, then making sure those two things are leading to customer happiness,” he said.

While the company does have to help customers get going today, the goal is to make the product more self-serve over time as they begin to understand the different verticals for which they are developing solutions. The startup launched in December and already has 13 customers, generating $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to Patel.

The following was originally written as a post on the internal HubSpot wiki a couple of years ago. At the request of several fellow entrepreneurs (hi, Wade from Zapier!) I've mentioned this to, I'm sharing it publicly for the first time. Hope you find it useful. -Dharmesh

For easy reference, you can access this page using FlashTags.org (it redirects here).

From HubSpot Wiki, July 19, 2017

One of the things I struggle with is clearly conveying to someone how strongly I feel about something. This is sometimes referred to as "Hill Dying Status" (i.e. do I feel so strongly about this that it's a hill I'm willing to die on).  By the way, not sure who originally used that phrase but I think it was Brian Halligan or maybe JD Sherman. Doesn't matter.

Situations like the following happen for me multiple times a day (chances are, they happen to you too):

I come across an interesting article or video (sometimes about a competitor) and send it along to someone at HubSpot.  Without context, they might think that I'm saying we should be doing that or adding that feature or somehow reacting to that news.  But, most of the time, it's just something that I thought was "interesting". Someone asks me a question or opinion on something. Turns out, I have opinions on everything. Sometimes, those opinions are even well informed.  So, I share my opinion.  Might be a hallway conversation or an email or whatever.  Now, based on my history with that person, they may think: "Well, Dharmesh thinks I should do X so I'm going to do that, even though I was going to do Y."  This is a problem because I almost always have much less information/data than the person asking the question – and I haven't really dug into the issue like they have. They're overvaluing my opinion. Every now and then I feel super strongly about something. (Often, these are SFTC related).  I "express" my feelings in a response to a long email thread.  It gets buried in there, and then "dies".  Nobody does anything. Not even a response. That makes me sad – but it's my fault. The person I had expected to at least respond had no idea that I felt strongly or wanted a response.

So, I now share with you my not-so-secret hack to quickly communicate important context (either in a conversation or in an email thread). I've been using this for a while, and thought you mind find it useful as well.

How To Use A #FlashTag To Quickly Communicate Hill Dying Status

It's even easier than Sunday morning (which I've always found to be a poor benchmark):  All you have to do is include one of the flashtags below in an email, Slack or even in a conversation. That's it.

The tags are in ascending order of escalation (starting with the “I don’t feel strongly at all” to the “I really, really feel strongly").

#fyi -- Had this thought/idea/article/video/whatever pass through my brain.  I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it. You can read it or not. Act on it or not. No response needed or expected.

Hill Dying Status (am I willing to die on this hill): I don't even see a hill.

#suggestion -- Here's something I would do if I were you. But, I'm not you -- and you own this, so your call.  Just consider it and weigh it against other things you're considering. I won't be offended if you go another way. A quick reaction/response would be appreciated (so I can learn what kinds of suggestions are useful/valuable), but is not necessary.

Hill Dying Status: I saw the hill, but didn't feel strongly enough to commit the calories to climb it.

#recommendation (or #strongrecommendation)-- I've thought about this a lot. It's kept me up at night. I dug in. I think I understand the tradeoffs.  You can choose not to take the recommendation, and go your own way, but please do it for good reasons.  Please dig in a bit yourself and have a well-reasoned rationale for why you don’t want to take the recommendation. Please don’t ignore or dismiss it out of hand. A response (either way) is politely requested. If it's a #strongrecommendation then a response explaining why you're not taking it is probably a good idea.

Hill Dying Status: I climbed the hill.  I breathed deeply I contemplated my life. I walked back down.

#plea -- We don't like issuing edicts or directives at HubSpot. But...please, please, please just do this. Trust works both ways, and I need you to trust me on this.  If you still feel compelled to resist, something’s not right, let's chat. Maybe even in (gasp!) person.

Hill Dying Status: Dying on a hill is not on my bucket list, but if it were this would be a really good candidate.
---
That's it.  With just a few extra characters in that email or Slack, you can quickly convey how strongly you feel about something. Use it if you find it useful. It's just a #suggestion.

Cheers,
Dharmesh

p.s. Why did I call it a #FlashTag? Because it's about communicating something in a flash (and flash rhymes with hash). And yes, I asked GrowthBot for "words that rhyme with hash".  

Oh, and in case you need to find this article again or tell somebody about it, just use FlashTags.org (it redirects to this page).

 

 

The following was originally written as a post on the internal HubSpot wiki a couple of years ago. At the request of several fellow entrepreneurs (hi, Wade from Zapier!) I've mentioned this to, I'm sharing it publicly for the first time. Hope you find it useful. -Dharmesh

For easy reference, you can access this page using FlashTags.org (it redirects here).

From HubSpot Wiki, July 19, 2017

One of the things I struggle with is clearly conveying to someone how strongly I feel about something. This is sometimes referred to as "Hill Dying Status" (i.e. do I feel so strongly about this that it's a hill I'm willing to die on).  By the way, not sure who originally used that phrase but I think it was Brian Halligan or maybe JD Sherman. Doesn't matter.

Situations like the following happen for me multiple times a day (chances are, they happen to you too):

I come across an interesting article or video (sometimes about a competitor) and send it along to someone at HubSpot.  Without context, they might think that I'm saying we should be doing that or adding that feature or somehow reacting to that news.  But, most of the time, it's just something that I thought was "interesting". Someone asks me a question or opinion on something. Turns out, I have opinions on everything. Sometimes, those opinions are even well informed.  So, I share my opinion.  Might be a hallway conversation or an email or whatever.  Now, based on my history with that person, they may think: "Well, Dharmesh thinks I should do X so I'm going to do that, even though I was going to do Y."  This is a problem because I almost always have much less information/data than the person asking the question – and I haven't really dug into the issue like they have. They're overvaluing my opinion. Every now and then I feel super strongly about something. (Often, these are SFTC related).  I "express" my feelings in a response to a long email thread.  It gets buried in there, and then "dies".  Nobody does anything. Not even a response. That makes me sad – but it's my fault. The person I had expected to at least respond had no idea that I felt strongly or wanted a response.

So, I now share with you my not-so-secret hack to quickly communicate important context (either in a conversation or in an email thread). I've been using this for a while, and thought you mind find it useful as well.

How To Use A #FlashTag To Quickly Communicate Hill Dying Status

It's even easier than Sunday morning (which I've always found to be a poor benchmark):  All you have to do is include one of the flashtags below in an email, Slack or even in a conversation. That's it.

The tags are in ascending order of escalation (starting with the “I don’t feel strongly at all” to the “I really, really feel strongly").

#fyi -- Had this thought/idea/article/video/whatever pass through my brain.  I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it. You can read it or not. Act on it or not. No response needed or expected.

Hill Dying Status (am I willing to die on this hill): I don't even see a hill.

#suggestion -- Here's something I would do if I were you. But, I'm not you -- and you own this, so your call.  Just consider it and weigh it against other things you're considering. I won't be offended if you go another way. A quick reaction/response would be appreciated (so I can learn what kinds of suggestions are useful/valuable), but is not necessary.

Hill Dying Status: I saw the hill, but didn't feel strongly enough to commit the calories to climb it.

#recommendation (or #strongrecommendation)-- I've thought about this a lot. It's kept me up at night. I dug in. I think I understand the tradeoffs.  You can choose not to take the recommendation, and go your own way, but please do it for good reasons.  Please dig in a bit yourself and have a well-reasoned rationale for why you don’t want to take the recommendation. Please don’t ignore or dismiss it out of hand. A response (either way) is politely requested. If it's a #strongrecommendation then a response explaining why you're not taking it is probably a good idea.

Hill Dying Status: I climbed the hill.  I breathed deeply I contemplated my life. I walked back down.

#plea -- We don't like issuing edicts or directives at HubSpot. But...please, please, please just do this. Trust works both ways, and I need you to trust me on this.  If you still feel compelled to resist, something’s not right, let's chat. Maybe even in (gasp!) person.

Hill Dying Status: Dying on a hill is not on my bucket list, but if it were this would be a really good candidate.
---
That's it.  With just a few extra characters in that email or Slack, you can quickly convey how strongly you feel about something. Use it if you find it useful. It's just a #suggestion.

Cheers,
Dharmesh

p.s. Why did I call it a #FlashTag? Because it's about communicating something in a flash (and flash rhymes with hash). And yes, I asked GrowthBot for "words that rhyme with hash".  

Oh, and in case you need to find this article again or tell somebody about it, just use FlashTags.org (it redirects to this page).

 

 

Sramana Mitra: If an entrepreneur takes $6.5 million in seed, how much ownership does he have left in the company? Preeti Rathi: Entrepreneurs have to be careful about making sure that they manage...

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Yuval Ben-Itzhak: Using newer digital channels to reach their audiences indicates that they need to master that specific content ad. They need to have analytics. They need to have measurement to help...

___

European startup studio eFounders has been relentlessly building new startups over the past few years. In 2019, the company plans to launch Bonjour, a demo tool for sales teams; Chilli, a recommendation service to help small and medium companies leverage modern software-as-a-service products; and Swan, a banking API to generate banking services on demand.

If you’re not familiar with eFounders, the team regularly comes up with ideas for new software-as-a-service companies and hires founding teams. In exchange for financial and human resources, eFounders keeps a significant stake in its startups. After a year or so, startups take off on their own, raise their own rounds of funding and leave the eFounders nest.

Many SaaS companies you’ve heard about first started as an eFounders projects, such as Front, Aircall, Forest and a dozen more. Indeed, eFounders says that it wants to “build the future of work,” which means building the tools and services that companies use every day.

According to eFounders, the value of the portfolio is growing quite rapidly. Companies have raised $187 million in total and have a post-money valuation of $541 million. They generate $67 million in annual recurring revenue combined.

But let’s go back to this new batch of startups. I’m sure some of them will pivot and I’m not yet familiar with their visions, but here’s what I understand they plan on doing based on public information.

Bonjour

Bonjour is all about empowering sales teams with an all-in-one service to close a deal. Instead of scheduling a video call in Google Calendar, sharing your screen for a demo in Skype or getting information from your CRM and losing a lead while juggling with all those services, you can do all your work in Bonjour.

It starts with a video call service that works in your browser. Your future client can just click to join a call. Sales reps can see CRM information right from their Bonjour interface. They can also start a screensharing session to show some slides or demo an app.

But Bonjour wants to go further and take care of everything that happens before and after the demo. For instance, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of websites with a button that says “request a demo.” At best, you can fill out a form with your contact information so that the company can contact you later. At worst, you just get a phone number or an email address. Many of your potential leads may give up.

Some companies use services like Calendly so you can pick the right day and time in a calendar view. Bonjour lets you do the same thing and customize your forms. After the demo, you can track conversion rates and improve your sales pitch.

Chilli

Many SaaS companies sell their products to startups, big enterprise clients and everything in between. But the vast majority of companies are still small and medium businesses operating in countless industries. Some of them have been in business for a while and are still using outdated tools.

If you’re reading TechCrunch every day and working for a startup, you might not realize what it’s like to work for an independent movie production company, a small law firm or a traditional knife-making company.

Many companies still rely on an old PC tower hiding in a corner of the office with a shared hard drive. They send Excel documents back and forth, store their to-do lists on a Post-it note and write expense reports on paper forms.

Chilli wants to help small companies change the tools and services they’re using to run their businesses. You can’t give those companies the same sales pitch. And many SaaS companies don’t even try to sell to SMBs because it’s too costly.

That’s why Chilli isn’t just selling one product, but many different SaaS products. They can spend some time with you to understand your needs and recommend some products to increase the productivity of your company. It’s still unclear how Chilli plans to generate revenue, but it’s an interesting idea.

Swan

Details are still thin with Swan . It’s a fintech company that will let you add a banking layer to your service. The company says that you’ll be able to generate accounts, cards and IBANs on the fly.

I’m not sure how they plan to sell the product, but I think it could be particularly useful for marketplace companies and the gig economy in general. If you’re generating revenue because you’re renting your car on Drivy, delivering goods on Glovo or freelancing on Fiverr, you might want to cash out as quickly as possible. You could generate a card and spend your earnings straight from those platforms.

The ability to generate IBANs and accounts is also a great way to collect money and provide an alternative payment method in addition to card payments. But let’s see how the Swan team plans to position the product.

We already knew that serial entrepreneur Duane Jackson, who is best known for founding and exiting cloud accounting software KashFlow, was working on his third venture after recently selling Supdate to Crowdcube. And today Staffology, which Jackson tells me he began developing just over a year ago, is launching publicly.

Dubbed Staffology Payroll, the U.K. company’s first product is cloud payroll software built on top of a “comprehensive” and open API. The idea is that anything the web-based application does can also be achievable programmatically via the API.

“A few companies I advise were in need of a web-based payroll app with an API and it just didn’t exist,” explains Jackson. “Xero had been talking about an API for their U.K. payroll for years but it just didn’t look like it was happening [it is now, although it’s still in beta]. I had the opportunity to move on from Supdate which meant I would have some time on my hands, so I thought I’d give it a go myself.”

Jackson says that development of Staffology Payroll started in March 2018 and after a period of private and public beta testing it has passed the important milestone of gaining recognition for RTI and CIS filing from HMRC, the U.K.’s tax authority. The next stage is to encourage other software vendors and platforms to provide payroll functionality via the startup’s API.

“Automation of business processes is on the increase,” notes Jackson, but with regards to payroll this hasn’t yet happened for a lot of companies. “A real bottleneck is payroll because there simply aren’t the APIs out there to do it well,” he says. “It’s no longer just large employers trying to take advantage of technology and the efficiencies it can bring. Whether you’re a construction company managing payments to thousands of subcontractors or an accountancy firm managing payroll for hundreds of small businesses, integration and automation can save you a small fortune.”

To that end, the Staffology founder says the product has been used by a range of customers while in beta. Typical customers include accountants, payroll bureaus and employers of various sizes. “The white-label option is proving attractive to challenger banks looking at how our product can help them compete in the SME market and to HR SaaS vendors who hope it’ll make their own offerings more attractive,” says Jackson.

Another current customer is a large construction company that is integrating Staffology Payroll into their in-house systems to save them “days of work every month.”

Meanwhile, Staffology has been funded by Jackson’s own cash to date and he sees no reason to raise venture capital. “I made enough from my other exits to not have to worry about taking a salary from the business,” he says. “And as a full-stack developer I’m able to do the majority of the development work myself. So the costs have been minimal and what costs there have been I can comfortably cover. I’ve already had interest from a couple of VCs, but I struggle to see why I need to go down that route.”

With that said, Jackson is under no illusion that a payroll SaaS will only make significant profits with scale. Payroll processing is priced as a commodity and therefore Staffology will be a business that requires high volumes.

“Making money is the bit I still have to prove,” he adds. “The maximum you can get away with charging per payslip is £1, therefore the only way to make good money is to do very high volume. High volume payroll is exactly what APIs are best placed to handle and our product and pricing is designed to work for that market.”

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In the name of getting big quick, it seems like some of the most valuable private tech companies are turning to mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as a way to accelerate business growth. So-called “unicorns”—privately-held technology companies which achieve billion-dollar valuations sometime before (or as a direct result of) going public or exiting via M&A—are chomping at the bit to make their first acquisitions, suggesting a mounting pressure on companies to grow even quicker.

Analysis of Crunchbase data indicates that, on average, recently founded unicorn companies are more likely to make their first M&A transactions sooner after founding than their older counterparts. In other words, younger unicorns buy other companies earlier. Here’s the data.

The narrowing gap between founding and first M&A

Using M&A data for companies in Crunchbase’s unicorn list, we found out when unicorn companies made their first M&A transactions on average. (We detail a bit more of the methodology in a note at the end.) Companies founded in more recent years were quickest to hit the M&A trail.

Eleven unicorn companies founded in 2007 took an average of roughly 8.33 years before making their first acquisitions. At time of writing, 29 unicorns founded in 2012 have made their first startup purchases, averaging just 4.1 years before doing so.

Note that there’s a bit of a sampling bias here. To an extent, it’s expected that unicorn companies founded in more recent years will have a lower average age of first acquisition, because there are many unicorn companies which haven’t yet made their first M&A deals.

The bulk of all M&A transactions by unicorns (not just the first ones) occur within the first seven years after founding.

We should take recent years’ dramatic reduction in average time until first acquisition with a heftier grain of salt (again, there are plenty of unicorns which haven’t yet gone shopping for startups). Even with that caveat made, averages have steadily trended lower between 2007 and 2012, after remaining steady (across an admittedly small sample set) since the start of the unicorn era.

This suggests that younger unicorns are increasingly using M&A transactions as a way to accelerate their path to massive market power.

It’s a big move for a company to buy another one. There’s all the financial particulars to negotiate, the legal and regulatory hurdles to clear, and the inevitable friction of integrating teams and technology from one entity with another. And that’s when the process is amicable and goes smoothly. The amount of time and resources a company commits to carrying out an M&A strategy is nontrivial, so it’s understandable why a company would put this process off to a later date or eschew it entirely. That high-growth tech companies are pursuing such a time and energy-intense strategy earlier on in the venture life-cycle points to the benefits M&A can bring to startups seeking to scale speedily.

Methodology notes

We found this by analyzing the set of acquisitions made by companies in Crunchbase’s list of unicorns, which we used as a proxy for “high-performing private technology companies” as a collective whole. We found the time elapsed between unicorns’ listed founding dates (which, note, have varying levels of precision) and the date of their first-ever acquisitions, regardless of whether the acquirer had achieved unicorn status. We then plotted the resulting data in a couple of ways.

More information about Crunchbase News’s methodology can be found on a dedicated page on this site.

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