Sramana Mitra: How big a company do you think you can build? Obviously, you probably have a sense of the total market that you can access. What is the size of that market? Gene Caballero: The...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
72 Hits
Nov
03
Jun
24
You probably don’t know how much it should cost to get your home’s windows washed, yard landscaped or countertops replaced. But Setter does. The startup pairs you with a home improvement concierge familiar with all the vendors, prices and common screwups that plague these jobs. Setter finds the best contractors across handiwork, plumbing, electrical, carpentry and more. It researches options, negotiates a bulk rate and, with its added markup, you pay a competitive price with none of the hassle.
One of the most reliable startup investing strategies is looking at where people spend a ton of money but hate the experience. That makes home improvement a prime target for disruption, and attracted a $10 million Series A round for Setter co-led by Sequoia Capital and NFX. “The main issue is that contractors and homeowners speak different languages,” Setter co-founder and CEO Guillaume Laliberté tells me, “which results in unclear scopes of work, frustrated homeowners who don’t know enough to set up the contractors for success, and frustrated contractors who have to come back multiple times.”
Setter is now available in Toronto and San Francisco, with seven-plus jobs booked per customer per year costing an average of over $500 each, with 70 percent repeat customers. With the fresh cash, it can grow into a household name in those cities, expand to new markets and hire up to build new products for clients and contractors.
I asked Laliberté why he cared to start Setter, and he told me “because human lives are made better when you can make essential human activities invisible.” Growing up, his mom wouldn’t let him buy video games or watch TV so he taught himself to code his own games and build his own toys. “I’d saved money to fix consoles and resell them, make beautiful foam swords for real live-action games, buy and resell headphones — anything that people around me wanted really!” he recalls, teaching him the value of taking the work out of other people’s lives.
Meanwhile, his co-founder David Steckel was building high-end homes for the wealthy when he discovered they often had ‘home managers’ that everyone would want but couldn’t afford. What if a startup let multiple homeowners share a manager? Laliberté says Steckel describes it as “I kid you not, the clouds parted, rays of sunlight began to shine through and angels started to sing.” Four days after getting the pitch from Steckel, Laliberté was moving to Toronto to co-found Setter.
Users fire up the app, browse a list of common services, get connected to a concierge over chat and tell them about their home maintenance needs while sending photos if necessary. The concierge then scours the best vendors and communicates the job in detail so things get done right the first time, on time. They come back in a few minutes with either a full price quote, or a diagnostic quote that gets refined after an in-home visit. Customers can schedule visits through the app, and stay in touch with their concierge to make sure everything is completed to their specifications.
The follow-through is what sets Setter apart from directory-style services like Yelp or Thumbtack . “Other companies either take your request and assign it to the next available contractor or simply share a list of available contractors and you need to complete everything yourself,” a Setter spokesperson tells me. They might start the job quicker, but you don’t always get exactly what you want. Everyone in the space will have to compete to source the best pros.
Though potentially less scalable than Thumbtack’s leaner approach, Setter is hoping for better retention as customers shift off of the Yellow Pages and random web searches. Thumbtack rocketed to a $1.2 billion valuation and had raised $273 million by 2015, some from Sequoia (presenting a curious potential conflict of interest). That same ascent may have lined up the investors behind Setter’s $2 million seed round from Sequoia, Hustle Fund and Avichal Garg last year. Today’s $10 million Series A also included Hustle Fund and Maple VC.
The toughest challenge for Setter will be changing the status quo for how people shop for home improvement away from ruthless bargain hunting. It will have to educate users about the pitfalls and potential long-term costs of getting slapdash service. If Laliberté wants to fulfill his childhood mission, he’ll have to figure out how to make homeowners value satisfaction over the lowest sticker price.
64 Hits
Feb
15
As an MBA student at the University of Chicago’s Booth school, Kathleen Wilson was struck with an idea while looking at businesses that provided daily housekeeping in one of her classes. Given the density and physical structure of many apartment buildings, she wondered why a housekeeper couldn’t similarly push a cart down the hall and spend an hour or less in each unit.
To test out her theory, Wilson and a classmate started cleaning the apartments of friends, spending 30 minutes to an hour at a time and trying to establish a reasonable price point for the work. Armed with enough data, Wilson then landed at a local real estate tech accelerator, formed her company, and locked down her first property management company client, Waterton — and her efforts have been gaining momentum since.
In fact, her 20-month-old startup, The Minte, which now employs roughly 60 people, is today announcing that it has raised $2.25 million in a round that brings the company’s total seed funding to $4.7 million. Dundee Venture Capital led this newest round; other investors in the company include MATH Venture Partners, Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, Firebrand Ventures, Blue Note Ventures and numerous angel investors. We had a quick chat with Wilson earlier this week to learn more.
TC: Can you tell us a bit more about your customers? Are they all property management companies like Waterton?
KW: We only provide service to apartments and condos, so our clients are currently property management companies such as Greystar, Bozzuto, Lincoln Property Company and CA Ventures. We have just under 70 properties in Chicago, another 20 in D.C. and we’ve been launching six to 10 new properties in each market each month.
TC: The Minte promises to make a housekeeper available to a property full-time, correct?
KW: Yes. A housekeeper is located on site for residents to book cleaning services with them, so that residents are provided with consistency and trust. To be clear, our housekeepers are full-time Minte employees with health benefits and paid time off. We keep our housekeeping cart and supplies at each property, and there’s a place for housekeepers to go if they have a bit of downtime, although that’s rare.
We do have some housekeepers who split their time between properties, either if the property is smaller or if we’re still in the first couple months of service and still building demand.
TC: What makes the company think people would prefer to work with The Minte versus housekeepers they know? These are trust-heavy relationships, a feature that other housecleaning startups have overlooked to their detriment.
KW: Exactly. We bring the personal trust by having the same housekeeper assigned to the property, which allows the housekeeper to get to know the residents, and we bring the corporate side of trust by having insurance, QA by managers and the ability to send a backup housekeeper if someone is out sick. We also have top-notch, live customer service if there is ever an issue.
TC: What does your quality assurance process involve?
KW: It’s a multi-tier process. First, we’ve implemented an eight-day training program for all new housekeepers. Second, housekeepers and housekeeping managers with whom we work almost always have hotel backgrounds, having worked at the Waldorf Astoria, The Conrad and Sofitel, to name a few. Third, housekeeping managers do random spot checks of service. And fourth, users can rate and comment on every service, which we review in real time. It’s company policy to reach out to the resident any time something is less than four stars.
Also worth mentioning: our products are eco-friendly, P&G products, so there’s no compromise on the quality of our supplies.
TC: How do clients pay, and how much do they pay? Is this a subscription model?
KW: They can pay à la carte — paying $30 for a hotel-style service, $90 for a deep clean for a one-bedroom apartment, for example — but over half of our cleans are residents who are on a recurring package. For customers on a package, they can customize how many deep cleans and/or hotel-style cleans they have every four weeks, including which days those cleans occur.
TC: The home services model is more prone to leakage, meaning people form relationships and stop using the platform. Is this a concern?
KW: Our employees are full-time, so this is essentially a non-issue for us. With our housekeepers on our schedule throughout the entire week, it’s not feasible for someone to poach them.
Potentially a resident could do this on a weekend, but in our experience, people want housekeepers to come when they are not home. Furthermore, the property manager would tell us if our housekeeper was getting keys outside of their Minte schedule.
TC: And how are you marketing the company?
KW: Through our partnership with the property managers, primarily.
TC: How will you use your new funding?
KW: We’ll continue to enhance our tech. Our app is out this week, and we’re rolling out our smart home integration in the coming months. We’re making our button — which is physical hardware that goes on the wall inside each unit — more readily available. We’ll also expand more into condos and corporate housing and target our third city in early 2019.
77 Hits
Nov
02
Milos Sochor: What I just said might sound pretty big, but it’s not. By US standards, it’s a small venture fund. We started the first one with only $4 million. We have invested in five companies. We...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
66 Hits
Jun
23
I received a Silicon Flatirons email from Phil Weiser this morning in his role as Silicon Flatirons Founder and Executive Director. My partners and I, especially Jason Mendelson, have been very involved with Silicon Flatirons over the past decade. I have a chapter in Startup Communities that uses CU Boulder â and specifically Silicon Flatirons â as an example of a much better way than the traditional approach (circa 2012) for a university to engage with the startup community.
One of the key leaders in this activity is Brad Bernthal. While BradB has become a close friend over the years, I think that he doesnât get anywhere near the recognition he deserves for his endless and tireless engagement in and across the activities of CU Boulder + the Boulder startup community. It made me extremely happy to see Philâs email and I decided to reblog it because I think it does a great job of highlighting some of the specific things that a professor like BradB can do to impact the startup community from a role in a university.
BradB â thank you for everything you do. You are awesome. Philâs note to the Silicon Flatirons community follows.
Silicon Flatirons continues to support a range of entrepreneurship activity. Just consider what we have done over the past month or so: Crash Courses on GDPR compliance and how startups can sell products to large enterprises; student attorneys helping area startups through the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic; a candid interview by Krista Marks with David Brown and David Cohen of Techstars (recording here); an intellectual feast in the entrepreneurship conference and academic workshop examining the concept of â#GiveFirstâ (recording here); and tonightâs kickoff for our New Venture Challenge Information Technology (IT) track.
Supporting entrepreneurs in our community is a central part of our mission. The person who leads this initiative is Brad Bernthal, our Entrepreneurship Initiative Director. After building up our leadership in this area, we formally established this initiative with Brad at the helm in 2008. It is hard to overstate Bradâs impact on campus and in the community over the last decade. In addition to events that convene entrepreneurs, investors, mentors, students, and academics to learn from one another, as well as Bradâs extraordinary commitment to mentoring, his scholarship merits notice and praise.
After seeing it firsthand, Brad was intrigued by the well-regarded entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boulder. How does it work? Why do people get involved? Why do people contribute without knowing what they might get in return? Bradâs scholarship has focused on this important aspect of our economy. Brad is currently studying finance instruments used in startup investment and has two forthcoming articles on this topic. Just prior to this, his published research focused on generalized exchange within investment accelerators, the first legal scholarship about how accelerators work.
In addition to leading the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic that aids the startup community, Brad co-teaches a venture capital course at Colorado Law, along with Jason Mendelson of Foundry Group. Brad and Jason are now in their tenth year of teaching the VC course, which attracts a cross-campus mix of JD, MBA, and engineering graduate students. The course is so valued that students established an endowed scholarship fund in Bradâs name and created a separate campus entrepreneurship gift in Jasonâs honor.
Brad is one of the leaders of the CU Boulder campus-wide entrepreneurship and innovation effort. He continually strives to connect the university and surrounding startup community. He collaborated with others on campus to launch and drive the New Venture Challenge for nine years. They successfully handed over the reins to campus leadership last year, and Brad continues to support the effort through the IT track, which Silicon Flatirons hosts.
And when heâs not doing all of the above, he is, well, giving first. He averages close to 400 1-on-1 coffee meetings each year with those in their entrepreneurial journeys. He also serves as a Techstars mentor and is on the Colorado Venture Capital Authority Board, which oversees the State of Coloradoâs venture capital fund.
Brad embodies the spirit of collaboration: giving to and supporting others. Itâs a privilege to have him as a core member of the Silicon Flatirons team.
Also published on Medium.
Original author: Brad Feld
107 Hits
Apr
02
Amazon, one of the world’s largest companies, has transformed the face of commerce in part because it has managed at once to be “The Everything Store” but still with a route into its sea of products that, for most users, surfaces what they might most want to see (and importantly buy or consume). That kind of personalisation has become a goal not just for e-commerce companies, but for any organization running a digital business: users are constantly distracted, and when their attention is caught, they do not want to spend time figuring out what they most want.
Not every business is Amazon, though, so we are seeing a crop of startups emerging that are working on ways to help the rest of the digital world be just as optimised and personalised as Amazon. Now one of them, an Israeli startup called Dynamic Yield, has raised more money as it continues to expand its business, both to more platforms and to more geographies.
The startup’s Series D has now closed off at $38 million, with the inclusion of a $5 million strategic investment from Naver, Korea’s “Google” (it’s the country’s top search portal) that is also behind messaging apps Line and Snow. The plan is for Naver to help bring Dynamic Yield to Korea and Japan, by incorporating its tech into its own services and those of others that work with Naver.
(Personalisation and aggregators are strong magnets for users in Asia and thus big magnets for funding: ByteDance, which provides news aggregation among other services, was recently valued at $75 billion.)
Naver is not the only search engine that has caught sight of Dynamic Yield over the years. Previous investors include Baidu (“the Google of China”), and we’ve heard that when the startup was younger — it was founded in 2011 — Google had tried to acquire it (Dynamic Yield rejected the offer, and it’s been approached for acquisitions numerous times since then).
Other strategic investors include The New York Times and Deutsche Telekom, alongside other backers like Innovation Endeavors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Marker Capital and more.
Dynamic Yield has raised $85 million to date and is now valued at “hundreds of millions of dollars,” but less than $500 million, a source at the company said, after seeing a strong expansion of its services.
Dynamic Yield says it works with more than 220 global brands, and its tech reaches 600 million unique users each month, across 10 billion page views and 600 billion “events” on those pages. It claims its AI-based personalisation technology can lift revenues (or other engagement metrics) by 10-15 percent.
“It makes us an effective tool for surviving in a market where customer acquisition cost keeps getting more expensive,” co-founder and CEO Liad Agmon said in an interview.
Dynamic Yield doesn’t talk about many of its customers on the record — most don’t like to reveal to rivals who they work with, Agmon said.
But they include a number of big brands across e-commerce, travel, finance, media and other segments that use its tech not just to show more targeted products to prospective shoppers, but to help power advertising, recommend content and position the same information to different people in different ways depending on who is viewing it (for example with different headlines).
There are a lot of personalisation and A/B analytics companies in the market today — others include Adobe, Marketo (which is becoming a part of Adobe), Optimizely and many more. Indeed, I’d be very surprised if Amazon is not working on ways of productising its own personalisation tech in a way that is not intrinsically linked to its own marketplace (because some will never want to sell there, and because personalisation can be used for so much more than just e-commerce).
Dynamic Yield, however, claims that it has an edge over these because of how it works.
Agmon says that the tech sits on top of whichever CMS or other backend server that a site is using and is activated by way of a small amount of code. It uses machine learning to both “read” what is in a site, and matches that up against specific visitors and its own trove of experience.
Agmon added that when a business already has information about that visitor, that is the primary data that is used; otherwise it also incorporates other data sources like Acxiom and others — much the way that other marketing tech does — to form a stronger picture of your tastes.
It then runs this data through its own machine learning algorithms both to recommend content and to help a marketing manager figure out better customer segmentation overall. There is an “autopilot” version of the product where everything is automated based on Dynamic Yield’s algorithms; or options to use the data sources to set up specific marketing campaigns; or (as is common) a combination of the two.
Going forward, Agmon said the plan is to work across an increasing number of interfaces where customers are going today to discover and buy goods and services. Indeed, we’ve described how some of the newest e-commerce startups have eschewed any website or app of their own and work exclusively in third-party messaging apps to acquire customers and sell goods.
But it’s not just these new digital platforms that are becoming targets for personalisation startups like Dynamic Yield.
Agmon said that his company is also working with a major retailer that is using its tech at its in-person payment points. When — for example — a customer comes to order a latte, instead of generic upselling to the latest seasonal flavour, the person taking the order will now know if the customer ever orders a sweet injection, or if she/he is more of a savoury snack sort of person. The cashier will then know what to recommend to eat with that drink that is more likely to be purchased.
The mom-and-pop shop with its reputation for knowing the regulars and what they like might have found its dystopian (but useful) heir.
110 Hits
Nov
02
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 421st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, November 8, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
40 Hits
Nov
02
Sramana Mitra: One of my observations is, if you’re doing a pure logistics play, it’s getting harder and harder even in niche e-commerce. Amazon is so comprehensive. The big categories are all taken....
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
60 Hits
Nov
02
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
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Original author: Maureen Kelly
36 Hits
Nov
02
Picture it: you have the perfect song for Kelly Clarkson. It’s a mix of genres and styles best described as “Since U Been Gone” meets “911 Is A Joke.” How do you get it in front of Kelly so she can add it to her next album (imagine her singing “My heart is on fire when you’re not there/But the Austin fire department doesn’t care”)? You talk to MyPart.
MyPart lets aspiring creators and musicians submit stuff to their favorite artists. A vetting system separates the hits from the chaff and, by ensuring the artist doesn’t see unsolicited content, reduces lawsuits. MyPart, founded in 2016, has added a number of interesting features to its platform thanks to AI and machine learning.
“MyPart has recently finalized our seed round with $1 million, and were named a MassChallenge 2018 top 10 startup award finalist,” said co-founder Matan Kollnescher. “This followed a $150,000 pre-seed round that enabled us to achieve an MVP, strategic industry partnerships and legal validation.”
Kollnescher was a former member of the Israeli Intelligence Corps and the other co-founder, Ariel Toli Gadilov, spent time inside Intel as a finance and legal advisor. Both are skilled musicians. They’ve also hired Evan Bogart, writer of Beyoncé’s “Halo” and Rihanna’s “SOS.”
The team soft-launched and have 2,030 users and hundreds of uploads. The platform is designed to ensure that good music floats to the top and not so good music doesn’t create false positives. In fact, say the founders, MyPart can even “read” a piece of music to see if it is stylistically relevant.
“Crowdsourcing art by conducting competitions is a problematic approach due to the multiple losers (since everyone are competing over the same project) and the need for active involvement and initiative defining exact projects,” said Kollnescher. “The publishing industry barely utilizes technology at all and most conservative competitors don’t have not will be able to easily develop differentiating technology to solve quality, quantity, and relevance issues — thus continuing to have immense scaling issues.”
The platform lets good musicians get discovered, a product that could truly be useful in today’s saturated media market.
“MyPart’s AI approach to the industry is the first of its kind; our platform sifts through thousands of data points and looks into the ‘soul’ of a song to then sort by relevance to the famous performing artist of our user’s choice,” he said. Luckily, Kelly Clarkson loves songs about reducing state budgets due to the inability of the Austin Police Department to get these squirrels out of my back yard.
161 Hits
Apr
02
According to a recent report by Research and Markets, the global cyber security market is expected to grow from $152.71 billion in 2018 to $248.26 billion by 2023 at a CAGR of 10%. Earlier this week,...
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Original author: MitraSramana
27 Hits
Nov
02
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Evangelos Simoudis, Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners, with whom, we did a deep dive into AI investing. Viima Pitching first, Jesse...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
35 Hits
Nov
02
Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a little bit more about the Facebook outreach? What did you learn? What have you learned about doing the Facebook outreach? Whom do you target? Gene Caballero: We target...
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Original author: Sramana Mitra
103 Hits
Nov
02
Google employees all around the world abandoned their desks in protest on Thursday. Troy Wolverton/Business Insider
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
Google employees all over the world left their desks and walked out in protest over sexual misconduct. The protest followed a bombshell New York Times report last week naming executives who had been accused of sexual misconduct and allegedly protected by Google. The Google Walkout organisers wrote an article in The Cut laying out their demands for management. They made clear the five things they wish to see changed at the company, including a public sexual harassment transparency report. Apple's stock price fell after underwhelming iPhone sales, and the company said its holiday quarter will be on the low end of expectations. Apple shares tumbled 7% after an earnings report which included soft guidance for Apple's all-important holiday quarter. As Google employees walked out of their offices, CEO Sundar Pichai apologized again for how the company handled sexual misconduct allegations. Pichai said that Google "didn't always get it right" and that the company hopes to do better when it comes to dealing with issues of sexual misconduct. Apple will stop announcing exactly how many iPhones, iPads, and Macs it's sold. The surprising news comes after Apple failed to hit Wall Street's expectations for iPhone sales in the most recent quarter. Employees have described to Business Insider how sexual harassment and inappropriate relationships were rife at $1.86 billion software company Apttus. Sources said CEO Kirk Krappe left the firm unexpectedly in July, after the settlement of a sexual harassment claim. Apple, Google, and Amazon joined a list of over 50 companies opposing any Trump administration rollback of transgender rights. On Thursday, more than 50 companies â including tech giants like Apple, Google, Amazon â signed a letter opposing any actions by the administration to legally define sex as binary and determined upon birth. CEOs and founders of tech's biggest names lost a collective $61 billion during the stock market's plunge in October. The tech-heavy Nasdaq index plunged 9.2%, its worst month since the financial crisis. Two of Uber's most popular services are joining forces as the company races toward an IPO. Uber for Business is expanding to include Uber Eats, the company announced on Thursday. Investors worth more than $700 billion are ramping up calls for a Tesla board shakeup â one that goes far beyond what the SEC wants. Tesla has until the end of November to add two independent directors to its board, as per a $40 million settlement with the Securities and Exchange Commission.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.
Original author: Isobel Asher Hamilton
113 Hits
Nov
02
For the past two years, a startup founded by two ex-Facebook employees has been lying low.
Since 2016, the employees at Rockset have been quietly working on a new kind of data platform. But on Thursday, the now startup has formally launched its product, and announced it had raised $21.5 million in seed and Series A funding from top-tier Silicon Valley venture firms Greylock Partners and Sequoia Capital.
Rockset's new cloud-based data platform is targeted at developers building data-driven applications and data scientists managing this data. Right now, software teams using traditional databases â like those from Oracle â have to take extra steps to prepare data to be read by software. Rockset aims to cut the middleman, speeding the process by which data and apps can "talk" to each other.
"There's nothing like this out there," Venkat Venkataramani, Rockset co-founder and CEO, tells Business Insider. "One of the challenges has been how quickly we can build for the market. We've been working very, very hard."
Before leaving to start Rockset, Venkataramani spent eight years at Facebook managing online data and search infrastructure, which supported Facebook's growth from 40 million up to a peak of 1.5 billion users at the time. He credits Facebook with much of the philosophy he learned and applies at Rockset.
For example, he says, Facebook is known for being fast and never going down (well, almost). And from Facebook, he realized that he wanted Rockset to make complex problems as simple as possible.
"I walked away thinking, the world [of data infrastructure] is way too complex," Venkataramani said. "It's not available for everyone. We started thinking, why does it have to be complex? What's the simplest product we can build?"
Leaving Facebook to start something completely new was a risk. Venkataramani left in 2015, but it still "feels like yesterday." Ultimately, he says, he settled into a groove to the point where things were "really comfortable" at Facebook, to the point where he "personally got uncomfortable."
"I didn't feel like I was learning as much as I used to. I wanted to make myself uncomfortable again."
He and co-founder Dhruba Borthakur, another ex-Facebook employee, started talking to other developers about his vision, writing out the problems on a whiteboard. The two would ultimately team up to make Rockset a reality.
With the funding, Rockset plans to hire more employees as it grows its customer base. Rockset now has 16 employees, and they're about to add four more employees who have been hired but have not yet started.
"Product engineers should be bottlenecked by their creativity, not what the data infrastructure can do for me," Venkataramani said. "We value how much we can add to customers' lives. We take complex, hard things and make them as easy as possible."
Original author: Rosalie Chan
89 Hits
Nov
01
Edo, an ad analytics startup founded by Daniel Nadler and actor Edward Norton, announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series A funding.
Nadler and Norton have both had startup success before — Nadler co-founded and led Kensho, which S&P Global acquired for $550 million. Norton invested in Kensho and co-founded CrowdRise, which was acquired by GoFundMe.
Even so, ad analytics might seem like an arcane industry for an actor/filmmaker to want to tackle. However, Norton said he was actually the one to convince Nadler that it was worth starting the company, and he argued that this is an important topic to both of them as creators. (Nadler’s a poet.)
“Movie studios and publishers, they take risks on talent, on creative people like us,” Norton said. “We want them to do well … The better they do with the dollars they spend, the less risk averse they become.”
Nadler and Norton recruited Kevin Krim, the former head of digital at CNBC, to serve as Edo’s CEO.
Krim explained that while linear TV advertising still accounts for the majority of ad budgets, the effectiveness of those ads is still measured using old-fashioned “survey-based methodologies.” There are other measurement companies looking online; Norton said they’re focused on social media sentiment and other “weak proxies” for consumer behavior.
In contrast, Edo pulls data from sources like search engines and content sites where people are doing research before making a purchase. By applying data science, Krim said, “We basically can measure the change in consumer engagement, the behaviors that are indicative of intent. We can measure the change in consumer behavior for every ad.”
In fact, Edo says that since its founding in 2015, it has created a database of 47 million ad airings, so advertisers can see not just their own ad performance, but also that of their competitors. This allows advertisers to adjust their campaigns based on consumer engagement — Krim said that in some cases, advertisers will receive the overnight data and then adjust their ad rotation for that very night.
As for the Series A, it was led by Breyer Capital. (Jim Breyer has backed everything from Facebook to Etsy to Marvel.) Vista Equity co-founders Robert Smith and Brian Sheth participated in the round, as did WGI Group.
“For more than a decade I’ve watched the data science talent arbitrage transform industries from finance to defense, from transportation to commerce,” Breyer said in the funding announcement. “We needed someone to bring these capabilities to bear on the systemic inefficiencies and methodological shortcomings of measurement and analytics in media and advertising.”
On the customer side, Edo is already working with ESPN, Turner, NBCUniversal and Warner Bros. I wondered whether some of the TV networks might have been worried about what Edo would reveal about their ads, but Norton said the opposite was true.
“I don’t sense that they in any way have trepidation that we’re going to pull their pants down — quite the opposite,” he said. “They are absolutely thrilled with our ability to help burnish and validate their assertions about the strength of what they’re offering.”
98 Hits
Jun
24
MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA â For years, Google employees felt the company's executives weren't listening to their complaints about sexual misconduct and gender discrimination at the tech giant.
They've got senior management's attention now.
Google employee Celie O'Neil-Heart helped organize Thursday's walkout.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThousands of Google employees at offices around the globe walked out of their offices on Thursday morning to protest the company's treatment of women and its handling of sexual harassment allegations. Among those who joined in the protest were hundreds of employees at the company's headquarters here.
On a bright and sunny day here, Googlers crowded a main plaza on campus and heard from numerous colleagues who talked about their experiences with sexual harassment and called for change. Many of those present wore teal ribbons in solidarity with those who had experienced sexual harassment. "Time's up," some shouted. "Enough is enough!"
"There are so many of these stories we've heard for so long," said Celie O'Neil-Heart, who helped organize the walkout. "It's time for action and change â real change."
In an appearance at a conference in New York, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he shared protesters anger and frustration and echoed their call for change.
"Words alone aren't enough, you have to follow up with actions," he said.
Revelations about Andy Rubin's severance sparked the protest
Many Googlers brought signs to the Mountain View walkout protesting the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThe protests were sparked by a New York Times article last week that detailed the company's handling of sexual misconduct allegations against three prominent men. The report revealed that Google paid Andy Rubin, who helped invent the Android operating system, a $90 million severance package when he left the company, despite the fact that a sexual misconduct allegation had been made against him that the company found "credible."
The revelation of the payout to Rubin was "the $90 million straw that broke the camel's back," O'Neil-Heart said.
Organizers of the protest have been collecting stories from employees about sexual harassment and other issues they've faced at the company, some of which they shared during the protest here. They've also made a list of demands for company management. Among them: that Google should put together a report on sexual harassment at the company and publicly disclose its findings, and that it should end its policy of requiring employees in disputes over sexual harassment and discrimination to pursue them through binding arbitration rather than through the courts.
The demands aren't just coming from a core group of agitators, O'Neil-Heart said. Instead, they represent longstanding desires by "hundreds" of employees.
"We're all here representing movements that have been at Google for a long time, asking for these demands for a long time," she said.
Employees shared stories about their experiences with harassment
Google employees streamed in by the hundreds to the main plaza on its Mountain View campus to take part in the walkout.Troy Wolverton/Business InsiderThe protest officially got underway at 11:10 a.m., but employees started showing up well before then and continued to stream into the plaza to take part for even 30 minutes after it started. Some carried signs saying things such as, "Hey Google, WTF?" "Stand Tall, Stand Together, Stand For Change" and "Not OK, Google."
Employees generally avoided the press. The company's policy generally requires employees to go through its public relations department before talking to the media. But some did share their thoughts anonymously as they left the protest.
"It was great," said one female Googler. "It was the start of the movement."
The employees who came forward to share their stories touched a chord with many who were there. O'Neil-Heart, for one said she got "very emotional" listening to colleagues tell their stories.
"I'm proud of all the women who got up there to tell their stories," said a another female Googler, who declined to give her name. "It was moving."
Following the main protest in the plaza, several dozen organizers and employees marched from there to the public park area just off the company's campus where members of the press were standing. The protestors chanted slogans such as "Stand up! Fight back!" and "What's Googley? This is Googley!"
Organizers are demanding "urgency"
The walkout is the latest development in the movement to highlight and combat sexual discrimination in the tech industry and elsewhere. Silicon Valley firms have increasingly been called on to take action on allegations of sexual misconduct against executives, employees, and investors.
In the wake of the New York Times article last week, Richard DeVaul, whom the article revealed had also been the subject of a sexual misconduct complaint, resigned from his post at X, the research lab of Google parent company Alphabet.
Organizers and employees felt like management heard their protest Thursday, O'Neil-Heart said. But that's just the start.
"We look forward to seeing action," she said, continuing, "We do expect urgency."
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Original author: Troy Wolverton
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Jun
09
Wall Street was unimpressed with Apple's quarterly earnings results, announced on Thursdayâ so much so, that shares plunged over 7% after the bell, putting Apple in danger of losing its much-vaunted market cap of $1 trillion.
At the time of writing, Apple stock is priced at $206.30 in after-hours trading, and still moving around. Should that price hold through the opening bell on Friday, Apple will have a market cap below that $1 trillion threshold. The threshold is $207.45; any Apple share price less than that will value the company below that line.
Notably, that threshold may actually move higher by the time markets open on Friday. Apple reported that it bought back a hefty number of its own shares in the previous quarter. That means on Friday morning, Apple will update the number of shares it has outstanding, which can and will have an effect on its market cap.
Apple made headlines earlier this year when it became the first-ever American company to reach a $1 trillion market cap.
While Apple's earnings beat Wall Street expectations on both the top and bottom lines, there appear to be two main sources for the investor negativity.
First, Apple whiffed on iPhone sales. In the quarter, Apple sold 46.9 million iPhones, well short of Wall Street expectations of 48.4 million. Apple also announced on Thursday that it will stop breaking out iPhone, Mac, and iPad unit sales entirely.
Second, Apple gave a lower-than-expected revenue forecast for the holiday quarter of this year. Apple projects that it will generate between $89 billion and $93 billion in revenue for the quarter ending in December. Wall Street was expecting Apple to project revenues of about $93 billion, placing the company's estimates on the low end.
Still, for better or for worse, nothing is going to happen to Apple's $1 trillion valuation until Friday morning: A company's market cap isn't affected by after-hour trading, and it all comes down to how investors are feeling by the time the opening bell rings.
Original author: Matt Weinberger
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Jun
09
Apple's sales figures are about to get a lot less transparent.
On Thursday, the company announced on its quarterly earnings call that it will stop breaking out the number of iPhones, iPads, and Macs it sells in each quarter.
The surprising news comes after Apple failed to hit Wall Street's expectations for iPhone sales in the most recent quarter, which sent the stock plummeting about 5%. The announcement from Apple CFO Luca Maestri sent the company's share price plunging even further, and as of writing it now hovers about 7% down from market close.
"As we have stated many times, our objective is to make great products and services that enrich people's lives, and to provide an unparalleled customer experience, so that our users are highly satisfied, loyal, and engaged," Maestri said.
"As we accomplish these objectives, strong financial results follow. As demonstrated by our financial performance in recent years, the number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business."
Apple will still report the revenues brought in from the sales of each device type.
Apple sold 46.9 million iPhones in the quarter, barely growing 0.4% on the year prior, and well below analysts' expectations of 48.4 million. Quarterly revenues ($62.9 billion) and earnings per share ($2.91) both beat expectations, but the iPhone whiff â combined with a revenue forecast for the holiday quarter that was lower than some analyst expectations â seems to have spooked investors.
Meanwhile, iPad sales were down 6% on last year, to 9.6 million, which Mac unit sales were flat, at 5.3 million.
Notably, this move also comes just days after Apple unveiled new gadgets, including a revamped MacBook Air laptop and redesigned iPad Pro tablet.
Here are all the key numbers:
Q4 EPS: $2.91, up 40% year-over-year, versus expectations of $2.78 Q4 Revenue: $62.9 billion, up 19.5% year-over-year, versus expectations of $61.44 billion Gross margin: 38.2%, up 0.7% year-over-year, versus expectations of 38.3% iPhone units sold: 46.9 million, up 0.4% year-over-year, versus expectations of 48.4 million iPhone average sales price: $793, up 28% year-over-year, versus expectations of $729 iPad units sold: 9.6 million, down 6% year-over-year Mac units sold: 5.3 million, flat year-over-year Q1 2018 guidance: Between $89 billion and $93 billion versus consensus expectation of $92.74 billionOriginal author: Rob Price
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