Sramana Mitra: Talk a little bit about your investments. First and foremost, what have been some of your most interesting and satisfying investments so far? Don Hutchinson: If I look at deals that...
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Steve Beck, Managing Partner at Serra Ventures, discusses his firm’s non-Unicorn investment thesis. Refreshing to hear.
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All electric scooters are not created equal. I’ve found ones from Spin, Bird, and Lime to often be broken, shaky, or out of battery. But now the founders of Boosted Boards, which makes the steadiest and safest-feeling electric skateboards, are bringing their rugged hardware expertise to the scooter world. Today, they’re coming out of stealth with a supposedly stronger and longer-lasting dockless electric scooter rental startup called Skip. And the surprise is they’re hoping to only operate where permitted unlike their backlashed competitors [but no guarantees], with a deployment today in partnership with Washington D.C. and plans for San Francisco.
Formerly known by its Y Combinator codename Waybots, the company is exclusively announcing its funding and rebrand to Skip today on TechCrunch. The startup has raised a $6 million seed round led by Initialized Capital via Alexis Ohanian and Ronny Conway’s A Capital, with SV Angel joining in.”High integrity, thoughtful founders with all the relevant experience, demonstrated success, and an eye toward safety make this exactly the kind of investment I love” says Ohanian.
“We think the vehicle matters” Skip and former Boosted co-founder/CEO Sanjay Dastoor tells me. “It’s not the same as rideshare where two or more companies are all using the same car. There’s a big spectrum of quality in the base vehicles. A lot of these companies are buying off the shelf vehicles that are designed for personal ownership. I think these vehicles will need to be designed for a different level of use and upkeep.”
That’s why Skip is modifying bigger pre-made scooters to be more durable, and plans to build its own custom scooters. For the same $1 plus $0.15 per minute price as other services, you get a wider riding platform, full suspension, and head/tail/brake lights. The strategy is that if people feel safe and steady riding Skips, they’ll choose them over the competition. And while low-grade scooters might feel too unstable for the bike lane, leading to complaints about sidewalk riding, Skips are meant to feel secure enough to cruise next to cars.
With so much well-funded competition, Skip will have to hope customers really notice the difference. And its focus on permits could constrain growth. But if riders and cities decide they want a more reliable scooter service, Skip could carve out a solid business while being a better citizen.
My Boosted Board was perhaps my favorite gadget ever. After a decade as an unpowered longboard rider, I tested its electric skateboard in 2012 and loved the smooth rides so much I bought one of the first 10 of the Kickstarter. It felt like being able to effortlessly surf uphill. I tried many others and consistently found them to feel much more jerky, wobbly, and unpredictable. That’s not what you want when you’re riding a handle-less vehicle in traffic, and essentially betting your life on some startup’s hardware.
But then I crashed. The human body is not equipped for a 22mph meeting with the pavement. The board performed perfectly, I just hit a gravel patch at full-speed, shattered my ankle, and couldn’t walk for 5 months. In conclusion, even the safest electric skateboards are risky because at high speeds, the form factor’s small hard wheels are too vulnerable to obstructions, and you’ve got no handle to save you. I haven’t skated the two years since.
Yet that’s why I think Skip has a real opportunity. There’s demand for these vehicles. Skip says it sees seven rides per day per scooter. They’re a natural complement to more expensive Ubers that have to wade through traffic. But the whole industry will fall apart if everyone’s getting injured. You can absolutely feel the lack of stability and smoothness when riding a janky or half-broken scooter. I think consumers will choose the safer device if one’s available.
Skip co-founder and CEO Sanjay Dastoor
“We noticed that small personal portable electric vehicles weren’t only awesome alone” but as an option alongside ridesharing, ridepooling, and car ownership, says Dastoor. “The future of transportation is a combination of these.”
Boosted co-founder Matt Tran left the company two years ago, while Dastoor exited a year ago. They wanted to try an electric vehicle service model, but “Boosted wasn’t really the right place to do that, because the company is still focused on building great hardware for people to buy.” Tran was running marketing and also craved his engineering roots. So together with Mike Wadhera, a founding team member of Involver which sold to Oracle, they formed Waybots.
Last summer, the company tried out a docked scooter sharing model in SF, but didn’t see great results. When they got accepted to YC, like Boosted before it, they started experimenting with a dockless version. Meanwhile, Washington D.C. had opened a pilot program for permitted dockless bikeshare, and Waybots convinced the city to give it the greenlight too. Those scooters now have Skip branding slapped on.
“We’re the first permitted [dockless electric scooter] system operating anywhere” Dastoor believes. “A lot of the story around dockless scooters has come from SF, and from companies that have launched without informing anyone or working with anyone.” That’s led SF to ban unpermitted dockless scooter rentals. “What we saw in DC was the opposite. We’re working with the cities to deploy, share data with them, and engage with the community, and we’ve seen none of the backlash that we’ve seen in SF.” Still, the startup wouldn’t guarantee it won’t go rogue and launch unpermitted in the future.
As for why Ohanian chose to fund Skip amongst the slew of scooter startups, he tells me “I’ve been looking for an answer that is going to be a high-quality, collaborative, and sustainable solution to the urban congestion crisis that is already upon us (and getting worse) — then Sanjay told me about Skip. Here was not only a last-mile solution, but also a company providing it that understands how to work with cities as well as deliver a best-in-class software and hardware experience.”
Skip could get along better with cities because it’s built the scooters to discourage a lot of the most annoying scooter behaviors. The Speedway Mini4 36V 21Ah scooters Skip modifies can get up to 30 miles at 10mph per charge, which means they’re less likely to have dead batteries by the afternoon like the useless vehicles-turned-paperweights from competitors that I commonly stumble across in SF. To keep them charged and off the streets at night, Skip has a crowdsourced charging program where people can get paid to pick up, plug in at home, and drop off scooters.
The durable hardware is meant to need less service so you’re less likely to rent a broken, or worse, half-broken-but-I’m-late-so-I’ll-ride-it-anyway scooter. You can adjust the handlebar height, they go up to 18mph and dual-suspension flattens road bumps.
As for keeping Skips from getting strewn in the sidewalks and obstructing pedestrians, Dastoor claims his company’s vehicles have more precise location tracking than competitors. That could help it tell the edge of a build from the center of the walkway. Combined with requiring users to photograph the scooter standing upright, and hardware in the vehicles, Skip is hoping to force users to park them properly. “They have to have the intelligence in them to give info back to the city or back to the operator to make sure they operating correctly” Dastoor says.
Unfortunately, Skip hasn’t solved the lack of helmets problem. Dastoor tells me “We’ve been looking at a bunch of ways to improve access to helmets” but for now there’s no on-vehicle compartment for them and the company merely encourages users to wear them.
Personally, I think that’s crap. Sure, Citi Bike and other scooter companies don’t offer them either. But if these are meant to be serendipitously rented for short periods, it’s crazy to think anyone other than regular commuters will bring their own helmets. I think cities should demand them. And if they don’t, an inevitable scooter fatality that could have been prevented will make permitters more cautious. At least Skip says you have to be over 18 and plans to add ID verification for that soon.
“I don’t really have a comment about our unit economics” Dastoor sidestepped, but notes how much cheaper a $1.50 or $3 ride is than hailing a car. We’ll have to see if competition spurs a scooter price war. For now, though, the well-equipped Skips have led customers to “want to use it over and over.” Still, with Lime reportedly trying to raise $500 million and Bird recently closing $100 million as they race to invade the world, Skip is starting late with a much smaller piggybank.
Competition aside, Dastoor cites maintaining relationships with cities as the startup’s biggest threat. Luckily, he says it will soon announce some big-name talent with experience here. I expect it’s hired someone like former Uber policy chief David Plouffe who already has connections.
Where the dockless vechicle rental market goes is a mystery. Maybe it turns into a fundraising war, with the most aggressive deployers locking up markets, and the losers vaporizing in giant money bonfires. Maybe the cities get fed up, kick out the unpermitted, and only issue approvals to those with the best glad-handing or the best safety. Maybe users get tons of options on price, quality, and availability to choose from.
But absent the bad behavior spurring backlash, many who try dockless electric scooter and bike rentals love them. With traffic-jammed city streets and scarce parking, we could use ways to get cars off the road.
Eventually, I think we’ll see a ton of short rideshare trips turn into scooter cruises. And at today’s super low price point, walking could turn into a luxury depending on how you value your time. Even at minimum wage, you might save money paying $1.75 for a five-minute, one-mile Skip rather than walking for 20. Dastoor concludes, “It becomes part of their transportation routine and I think anything that does that is around to stay.”
Sramana Mitra: I was actually reading last week’s Economist expose on superstars. Being a history buff, you may have already read this. Every time there is a major technological revolution, there’s...
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Headspace might just be considered an app that plays back a soothing voice to help you meditate, but the company says it is increasingly carries a more difficult technology problem as it continues to grow — and it’s hiring on a few people today to tackle it.
Headspace said it has brought on both a head of data science and a new chief technology officer today as it tries to figure out how to continue scaling across new geographies without any hiccups, in addition to making sure it grows in its core markets. Paddy Hannon and Punnoose Isaac, previously at Edmunds.com as the chief technology officer and head of data and analytics respectively, will be joining Headspace to reprise similar roles for the startup that’s trying to become a daily habit for users.
“You can go through the dot-com bubble of the 90s, over all those years, and look at how many companies built great technologies that were solutions looking for problems,” Hannon said. “I think this is a different opportunity — we’re a product company. Technology and content are there to serve the aims and goals of the company. It’s all focused on that. The tech needs to be focused on that, and the product needs to be focused on that. We think about how to transform this company into one that has a global scale that [co-founders] Andy [Puddicombe] and Rich [Pierson] envision. Their vision isn’t Andy’s voice throughout the world, their vision is building products that help people.”
As startups start to take a deeper look at their products and what kinds of interactions users have, they have to actually think about where they can start tracking what their users are doing in sensitive ways in order to improve the experience. That might mean figuring out how often they are logging in, when they are checking their progress, how long they are listening, and other examples in a non-invasive way. But another big challenge is ensuring all that is wrapped up in a way where statisticians and product people can actually easily query all that data and start doing the math on it to figure out how to improve things, and building that out will be part of Isaac’s main jobs.
The rest of the technology problems are ones that startups will typically face as they start to scale, which includes getting on hardware around the world and making sure that all that content is available when necessary. Headspace has increasingly tried to tailor its services for the time that its users have, and not the other way around, and that means making sure it’s actually working right when a user is looking to check out of reality and into a Headspace meditation — especially if it’s only just for a few minutes. Hannon said the plan, currently, is not to move onto its own proprietary infrastructure.
Hannon stressed that the data that the company would be collecting as it tries to improve its products would not be sold or used in any way other than trying to make Headspace a better experience, as the company monetizes through different ways. “While data is an important aspect of what we do, we’re not incentivized to do things with that data that would violate the trust of our consumers because they’re paying us,” Hannon said.
All this is essentially continuing moves to try to make the service more palatable and easier to use — and actually working — as it faces an increasingly crowded space market of apps looking to help users take a minute to just chill and be a bit more mindful. Calm.com, for example, is reportedly hitting a $250 million valuation in an upcoming financing round, and the company that ends up with both the best experience and content may eventually be the one that wins out. That means bringing on the right talent in order to ensure that everything runs smoothly and keeps getting better.
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
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Startup Studios are becoming more and more prevalent, with big name companies like Giphy and Girlboss coming from the studio model. The premise is strong: use venture on a small, concentrated number of ideas, fostered by experts and internal resources, to create strong businesses.
But a new startup studio is prepping to launch in NYC with a different idea in mind.
FCTRY, led by Jules Ehrhardt, doesn’t necessarily think that money is always the best way to help startups grow. Ehrhardt thinks of FCTRY as more of a Creative Capital Studio, wherein experts from various fields (with a particular focus on creative, design, and engineering) offer their insight and knowledge to help startups grow rather than venture capital. Of course, these startups would still trade equity in exchange for these services.
Ehrhardt comes from UsTwo, the digital product studio that helped develop the wildly popular game Monument Valley.
The focus of FCTRY won’t be the foundry model, where studios come up with their own ideas in conjunction with smart serial entrepreneurs and build them from scratch in house. Rather, FCTRY will help existing early-stage and mid-stage companies with their creative strategy, processes and culture.
“The typical advisory system is broken,” said Ehrhardt. “Usually the advisory structure comes from a one to five percent equity pool and usually ends up in disappointment, where the advisor was supposed to make introductions or provide actionable insight that never comes through.”
Ehrhardt says he wants to bring more charity to that, tapping into the same pool of expert advisors but with the proper structure in place for offering that expertise and delivering on the task.
FCTRY will focus on three pillars of startup success: product, people, and growth.
“Product” might sound a bit obvious and nebulous all at once, but FCTRY is particularly concerned with building a framework for delivering on product, helping set up the processes and organizational structure that allow companies to build great products. Of course, the FCTRY team will also be contributing directly to the products themselves, but with the added goal of ensuring that the startup can continue to iterate and build great brands and products beyond their time with FCTRY.
Ehrhardt also noticed that recruitment and personal development are two big obstacles for companies trying to develop and express their own culture. Founders suddenly go from being chief product officer to hiring people to take over various roles at the company, requiring a totally different set of skills.
FCTRY wants to help startups develop and express their mission and culture so that it can scale from 10 people to 200 without a lot of friction. FCTRY also wants founders to focus on their own personal development, and that of their employees. Ehrhardt noted that Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of one of the fastest scaling companies on the planet, didn’t scale himself up alongside the company.
“Failures often come down to the human part of a company,” said Ehrhardt. “People haven’t been aware of the need for their own personal development.”
As part of that, FCTRY will not only help with recruitment and hiring but with feedback frameworks within companies.
The last part of the puzzle for FCTRY is growth. The company will help with paid, viral and sticky marketing strategies drawing from a pool of talent in the creative agency space. Ehrhardt says that around 20 percent of the FCTRY team will come from creative agencies, with the rest coming from other fields of expertise, such as machine learning, design, engineering, etc.
Ehrhardt stressed that one of the greatest opportunities with the Creative Capital model is offering a new path to wealth creation for some of the leading experts in their respective fields. These experts, though they may not be able to write a big check to a VC firm or even as an angel to a startup, can exchange their own insight for equity through the Creative Capital model.
“Traditionally, LPs are people who can cut a check, who tend to be white men who have benefitted from their privilege,” said Ehrhardt. “We can do a lot to open up the chance for wealth creation to far more people than the usual suspects.”
While FCTRY is in its early days, Ehrhardt envisions gathering around 20 people to join the FCTRY team, with plans to work with around 10 startups over the course of a year, with engagements varying in size and duration.
Market reports suggest that there were more than two billion websites online as of December 2017. The growth in the websites is attributed to the increasing presence of Content Management Systems...
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Sramana Mitra: What data drives the use case you mentioned? William King: In our case, multi-variate analysis is a part and parcel of what we do. In that example, I would want to be looking at those...
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Suresh Shamugham, Managing Partner at Saama Capital, talks about the Indian venture capital eco-system, trends, exits, and his firm’s investment strategy.
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Monzo, the U.K. challenger bank, has finally added Apple Pay to its mobile-only current account. The just over three year-old fintech says it has been one of the most requested features for its banking app, with over 2,000 mentions of Apple Pay on Monzo’s forum, whilst its customer support team have been asked about the functionality more than 13,000 times. In other words, the rollout can’t come soon enough. Noteworthy, Monzo was able to add Google Pay all the way back in October 2017.
Meanwhile, many of its passionate and vocal users will be wondering what took Monzo so long (as an aside, rival challenger Starling was able to add Apple Pay in July 2017). The upstart bank, which usually makes a virtue of its community-driven approach and transparency hasn’t been able to say (or even fully acknowledge that the feature was coming), likely because Apple imposes strict rules on the ways its partners communicate working with the tech giant. And when you sign an NDA with Apple it’s not atypical for it to stipulate that you don’t talk about said NDA.
What we do know is that — similar to Apple’s iOS App Store when submitting an app — the Apple Pay approval process for a new bank partner is not for the faint-hearted. Industry insiders tell me that Google Pay has fewer hurdles to jump in comparison.
Now that the feature is live, Monzo is talking up the security and privacy aspect of using Apple Pay, noting that when you use a credit or debit card with Apple Pay, the actual card numbers are not stored on the device, nor on Apple servers. Instead, “a unique Device Account Number is assigned, encrypted and securely stored in the Secure Element on your device… [and] each transaction is authorised with a one-time unique dynamic security code”.
Of course, most people simply like Apple Pay for its convenience, letting you use your phone to pay rather than fumbling for a debit or credit card, and when shopping online not having to repeatedly enter card details.
Cue Monzo’s Tom Blomfield waxing lyrical in a company statement about Apple’s design and UX. “Apple is famous for building beautiful products with simple, intuitive interfaces. Their design thinking has long been a source of inspiration for us. Monzo’s mission has alway been to make sure everyone can use and manage their money effortlessly, and with Apple Pay we are one step closer to achieving that,” says the challenger bank’s co-founder and CEO.
Bossa Studios, the London gaming startup backed by Atomico and behind popular titles ‘Surgeon Simulator’ and ‘I am Bread’, is embarking on its biggest and most ambitious project yet.
Described as a “Community-Crafted MMO,” where players have literally co-built the game’s environment and will continue to do so, Worlds Adrift sees its wider public outing today via the Steam Early Access program.
The new game, which has been three years in the making and was born out of a Bossa Studios “game jam,” akin to the kinds of internal ‘hackathons’ many startups routinely hold, is attempting to pull off a number of firsts.
For starters (and probably most noteworthy to TechCrunch readers), it was the first game built on top of Improbable’s SpatialOS, the cloud-based platform for creating games and other virtual environments that need to go beyond the limitations of traditional server architectures.
Improbable raised a whopping $502 million last May from Softbank and existing investors at a $1 billion-plus valuation, and so — inadvertently, at least — likely has quite a lot riding on Worlds Adrift.
For the Bossa Studios team, the stakes are even higher. Improbable’s tech isn’t exactly proven and, in comparison, Bossa Studios is a smaller and much less well-funded startup attempting to punch way above its weight, even if the team has a lot of gaming industry pedigree.
In a video call with two of its founders, Roberta Lucca and Henrique Olifiers, they were visibly excited by the launch but conceded a large amount of pre-launch nerves. When the Worlds Adrift concept was first conceived during that soon-to-be infamous game jam several years ago, it was indefinitely put on hold due to being far too ambitious per the size of the company.
A chance meeting with Improbable some time later — where I’m told the two young companies were introduced somewhat serendipitously through having the same PR agency — it became clear that it might just be possible. In the coming weeks and months, Bossa Studios will find out if that bet, which meant redirecting all of the startup’s resources into by far its largest undertaking, has likely paid off.
The other first, explained Lucca and Olifiers, is the sheer open-ended, community-driven and ‘persistent’ scale of the game. Tapping into the ‘makers’ trend, early testers of Worlds Adrift have shaped the game itself via Bossa’s Island Creator tool. This has seen 10,000 designs submitted, and Worlds Adrift is launching with 300 ‘floating islands,’ nearly all of which have been created by the community rather than Bossa Studios staff.
Related to this and enabled by the scalable nature of SpatialOS, every aspect of Worlds Adrift is ‘persistent,’ meaning that an object’s current physical status persists in realtime, relative to how or when it was last interacted with, either by a player or the game’s own persistent physics. If, for example, a ship is blown up and its pieces scattered across the ground, it will remain that way indefinitely unless another player, object or the environment it resides in disturbs it.
In addition, the employment of SpatialOS means that players don’t need to be segregated into cohorts based on region and/or distance to a specific set of servers and instead can all play in the same world and at the same time.
“Every player globally will be able to interact with each other and every action by every player will have a lasting impact and be visible to every other player inside the game forever,” is how Bossa Studios explains it.
At scale, opened-ended, and with player versus player gameplay increasing exponentially as the Worlds Adrift launch ramps up, even its makers aren’t sure how these dynamics will play out.
“Offering an entirely user-generated environment, with a completely unscripted style of play, the sheer scale of its scope, and beauty of its design, is an invitation to experiment. Bound only by the laws of physics, the sky truly is the limit,” reads the game’s blurb.
On that note, I wasn’t able to play the game — yet — namely because it runs on Windows and I only have access to a Mac. However, Bossa have kindly invited me to their next game jam and to spend some time up close with Worlds Adrift and its makers. If I’m to join in on the jam, I’m ready to pitch my idea for an adventure game starring a guy in a wheelchair wearing a hat who has to navigate a dystopian future rife with inaccessibility, bureaucracy and government cuts, all the while holding down a job as a tech journalist-cum-private investigator. I think it could be a hit.
During this week’s roundtable, we celebrated our milestone 400th episode with four entrepreneurs ‘teaching’ their lessons from the trenches. Of these, three are 1Mby1M entrepreneurs, and one is a...
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SC Moatti, Managing Partner at Mighty Capital, discusses Whales, Dolphins and more. A wonderful conversation full of wisdom and pragmatism.
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Cornell researchers have made a little robot that can express its emotions through touch, sending out little spikes when it’s scared or even getting goosebumps to express delight or excitement. The prototype, a cute smiling creature with rubber skin, is designed to test touch as an I/O system for robotic projects.
The robot mimics the skin of octopi which can turn spiky when threatened.
The researchers, Yuhan Hu, Zhengnan Zhao, Abheek Vimal and Guy Hoffman, created the robot to experiment with new methods for robot interaction. They compare the skin to “human goosebumps, cats’ neck fur raising, dogs’ back hair, the needles of a porcupine, spiking of a blowfish, or a bird’s ruffled feathers.”
“Research in human-robot interaction shows that a robot’s ability to use nonverbal behavior to communicate affects their potential to be useful to people, and can also have psychological effects. Other reasons include that having a robot use nonverbal behaviors can help make it be perceived as more familiar and less machine-like,” the researchers told IEEE Spectrum.
The skin has multiple configurations and is powered by a computer-controlled elastomer that can inflate and deflate on demand. The goosebumps pop up to match the expression on the robot’s face, allowing humans to better understand what the robot “means” when it raises its little hackles or gets bumpy. I, for one, welcome our bumpy robotic overlords.
“Travel is expensive, but we are at the cusp of a revolution that will democratize travel and leisure for everyone,” reads the breathless whitepaper for HoweyCoins. “The Internet was the first part of the revolution. The other part is blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies.”
“I’m all about HoweyCoins – this thing is going to pop at the top!” writes @boxingchamp1934, an official celebrity backer of the token. The website is full of beautiful beaches, features a handsome team of international men and women and the technology is nowhere to be seen, buried under a sea of excitement. The whitepaper is complete and well-written, focusing on the upside that is to come. Riches await if you invest in HoweyCoin, the latest ICO opportunity from trusted folks.
Or do they?
They don’t. All that breathless optimism is a site created by US Securities Exchange Commission to warn investors of scams and issues associated with token sales. The site features all the trademarks of a scammy security token, including tiered pre-sale pricing and an urgent countdown clock.
The site features a number of red flags that the SEC encourages users to watch out for, including, most importantly, claims that tokens can only go up in value. They write:
Every investment carries some degree of risk, which is reflected in the rate of return you can expect to receive. High returns entail high risks, possibly including a total loss on the investments. Most fraudsters spend a lot of time trying to convince investors that extremely high returns are “guaranteed” or “can’t miss.”
The SEC also notes that “it is never a good idea to make an investment decision just because someone famous says a product or service is a good investment,” and that it is never a good idea to invest with a credit card.
They also warn against pump and dump language found on many ICO pages. “Our past two pumps have doubled value for the period immediately after the pump for returns of over 225%,” wrote the HoweyCoins “creators,” a giant no-no in the world of investing.
You can read the rest of the red flags here.
While the site is fairly comical, it is sufficiently complete and would fool the casual observer. The SEC also posted a real-looking whitepaper that makes it clear that anyone can string together a few buzzwords and write a passable investment prospectus. That this is now a service available to anyone — for a price — makes things even scarier.
The site is part of the SEC’s outreach efforts to help investors understand ICOs.
“Strong investor protection is part of what makes American markets so strong…and striking the balance, [between innovation and investor protection] is very important,” said Chief of the SEC Cyber Unit Robert Cohen at Consensus this week. During the same panel the SEC claimed its doors were always open for questions.
Ultimately there is little separating the scams from the real token sales. This is a problem. The SEC is framing this problem in their own way based on decades of dealing with pink sheet pump and dumps and bogus get-rich-quick schemes. While HoweyCoins may not be real, there are plenty of scammers out there, and at least something like this bogus website makes it easier to spot the warning signs.
Compound wants to let you borrow cryptocurrency, or lend it and earn an interest rate. Most cryptocurrency is shoved in a wallet or metaphorically hidden under a mattress, failing to generate interest the way traditionally banked assets do. But Compound wants to create liquid money markets for cryptocurrency by algorithmically setting interest rates, and letting you gamble by borrowing and then short-selling coins you think will sink. It plans to launch its first five for Ether, a stable coin, and a few others, by October.
Today, Compound is announcing some ridiculously powerful allies for that quest. It’s just become the first-ever investment by crypto exchange juggernaut Coinbase’s new venture fund. It’s part of an $8.2 million seed round led by top-tier VC Andreessen Horowitz, crypto hedge fund Polychain Capital and Bain Capital Ventures — the startup arm of the big investment firm. [Update: Compound told us it was Coinbase Ventures’ first investment when it closed its round, though Coinbase notes that it’s done 8 rapid-fire investments over the past two months alongside this funding.]
While right now Compound deals in cryptocurrency through the Ethereum blockchain, co-founder and CEO Robert Leshner says that eventually he wants to carry tokenized versions of real-world assets like the dollar, yen, euro or Google stock. That’s because Leshner tells me “My thesis is that almost every crypto asset is bullshit and not worth anything.”
Here’s how Compound tells me it’s going to work. It’s an “overnight” market that permits super-short-term lending. While it’s not a bank, it is centralized, so you loan to and borrow from it directly instead of through peers, alleviating you from negotiation. If you loan, you can earn interest. If you borrow, you have to put up 100 percent of the value of your borrow in an asset Compound supports. If prices fluctuate and your borrow becomes worth more than your collateral, some of your collateral is liquidated through a repo agreement so they’re equal.
To set the interest rate, Compound acts kind of like the Fed. It analyzes supply and demand for a particular crypto asset to set a fluctuating interest rate that adjusts as market conditions change. You’ll earn that on what you lend constantly, and can pull out your assets at any time with just a 15-second lag. You’ll pay that rate when you borrow. And Compound takes a 10 percent cut of what lenders earn in interest. For crypto-haters, it offers a way to short coins you’re convinced are doomed.
“Eventually our goal is to hand-off responsibility [for setting the interest rate] to the community. In the short-term we’re forced to be responsible. Long-term we want the community to elect the Fed,” says Leshner. If it gets the interest rate wrong, an influx of lenders or borrowers will drive it back to where it’s supposed to be. Compound already has a user interface prototyped internally, and it looked slick and solid to me.
“We think it’s a game changer. Ninety percent of assets are sitting in people’s cold storage, or wallets, or exchanges. They aren’t being used or traded,” says Leshner. Compound could let people interact with crypto in a whole new way.
Compound is actually the third company Leshner and his co-founder and CTO Geoff Hayes have started together. They’ve been teamed up for 11 years since going to college at UPenn. One of their last companies, Britches, created an index of CPG inventory at local stores and eventually got acquired by Postmates. But before that Leshner got into the banking and wealth management business, becoming a certified public accountant. A true economics nerd, he’s the chair of the SF bond oversight committee, and got into crypto five years ago.
Compound co-founder and CEO Robert Leshner
Sitting on coins, Leshner wondered, “Why can’t I realize the time value of the cryptocurrency I possess?” Compound was born in mid-2017, and came out of stealth in January.
Now with $8.2 million in funding that also came from Transmedia Capital, Compound Ventures, Abstract Ventures and Danhua Capital, Compound is pushing to build out its product and partnerships, and “hire like crazy” beyond its seven current team members based in San Francisco’s Mission District. Partners will be crucial to solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting its first lenders and borrowers. “We are planning to launch with great partners — token projects, hedge funds and dedicated users,” says Leshner. Having hedge funds like Polychain should help.
“We shunned an ICO. We said, ‘let’s raise venture capital.’ I’m a very skeptical person and I think most ICOs are illegal,” Leshner notes. The round was just about to close when Coinbase announced Coinbase Ventures. So Leshner fired off an email asking if it wanted to join. “In 12 hours they researched us, met our team, diligenced it and evaluated it more than almost any investor had to date,” Leshner recalls. Asked if there’s any conflict of interest given Coinbase’s grand ambitions, he said, “They’re probably our favorite company in the world. I hope they survive for 100 years. It’s too early to tell they overlap.”
There are other crypto lending platforms, but none quite like Compound. Centralized exchanges like Bitfinex and Poloniex let people trade on margin and speculate more aggressively. But they’re off-chain, while Leshner says Compound is on-chain, transparent and can be built on top of. That could make it a more critical piece of the blockchain finance stack. There’s also a risk of these exchanges getting hacked and your coins getting stolen.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of peer-to-peer crypto lending protocols on the Ethereum blockchain, like ETHLend and Dharma. But interest rates, no need for slow matching, flexibility for withdrawing money and dealing with a centralized party could attract users to Compound.
Still, the biggest looming threat for Compound is regulation. But to date, the SEC and regulators have focused on ICOs and how people fundraise, not on what people are building. People aren’t filing lawsuits against actual products. “All the operations have flown beneath the radar and I think that’s going to change in the next 12 months,” Leshner predicts. How exactly they’ll treat Compound is up in the air.
One source in the crypto hedge fund space told me about forthcoming regulation: “You’re either going to get annihilated and have to disgorge profits or dissolve. Or you pay a fine and you’re among the first legal funds in the space. This is the gamble you take before asset classes get baptized.” As Leshner confirmed, “That’s the number one risk, period.”
Money markets are just one piece of the financial infrastructure puzzle that still needs to emerge around blockchain. Custodians, auditors, administrators and banks are still largely missing. When those get hammered out to make the space safer, the big money hedge funds and investment banks could join in. For Compound, getting the logistics right will require some serious legal ballet.
Yet Leshner is happy to dream big despite all of the crypto world’s volatility. He concludes, “We want to be like Black Rock with a trillion under management, and we want to have 25 employees when we do that. They probably have [tens of thousands] of employees. Our goal is to be like them with a skeleton team.”
Sramana Mitra: We see cap notes a lot in Silicon Valley, but if you go outside of Silicon Valley, people are still using equity vary aggressively. We, very often, see terribly diluted deals at very...
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Coinbase has come a long way since its launch in 2012. The company has raised more than $225 million and paved the way for cryptocurrencies to enter the mainstream by providing a digital currency exchange. Which is why we’re absolutely thrilled to have Coinbase co-founder and CEO Brian Armstrong join us on the main stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September.
Armstrong worked as a developer for IBM and consultant at Deloitte before joining Airbnb as a software engineer in 2011. At Airbnb, Armstrong focused on fraud prevention, giving him the opportunity to learn about payment systems across the 190 countries Airbnb serves.
In 2012, Armstrong co-founded Coinbase and gave a budding demographic of cryptocurrency enthusiasts the opportunity to trade in their USD for bitcoins, and later the digital currency of their choice. Coinbase currently serves over 10 million customers across 32 countries, providing custody for more than $10 billion in digital assets.
In fact, Coinbase was valued at $1.6 billion following a $100 million funding round in August 2017.
In April, the company unveiled an early-stage fund for cryptocurrency startups, and acquired Earn.com for $100 million. As part of the acquisition, the company brought on Balaji Srinivasan as its first CTO.
There were also reports that Coinbase approached the SEC to become a licensed brokerage firm and electronic trading venue, which would allow the company to expand beyond the four coins (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin) that trade on the platform now.
Just yesterday, Coinbase announced that it would offer a new suite of services aimed at institutional investors, who are beginning to warm up to cryptocurrencies.
There is plenty to discuss with Armstrong come September, and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him join the stellar Disrupt SF agenda. You can head over here to buy yourself tickets. See you there!
French startup OpenClassrooms is raising $60 million from General Atlantic, with existing investors Citizen Capital, Alven and Bpifrance also participating.
OpenClassrooms is the most popular massive open online course platform in France. But the startup has evolved beyond on-demand courses to provide full-fledged degrees. You can now get a degree certified by the French state by studying full time on OpenClassrooms.
Every month, 3 million users access OpenClassrooms. Many of them just want to learn something and maybe get a certification. But more and more people are following one of the 30 bachelor and master degrees. You can study many things from web and mobile development to data management and marketing.
But OpenClassrooms isn’t just leaving you with a big pile of courses to study. The company has created a community of mentors who will regularly check with you to see how you’re doing. There are 600 mentors working for OpenClassrooms.
These paths aren’t cheap as you’ll need to pay around €300 per month ($350). But it’s still cheaper and more flexible than attending a traditional engineering school right after the baccalauréat. For instance, if you want to work on the side and live in a cheap city, you can do that as you just need a computer and an internet connection.
The company will even guarantee that you’ll find a job after that. If you can’t find a job within six months, OpenClassrooms will pay you back for the degree.
And OpenClassrooms recently unveiled the next step. As OpenClassrooms students easily find a job after getting a degree, the startup started working with companies directly.
IT service company Capgemini is always looking for new people as there’s usually a high turnover in IT service companies. That’s why Capgemini is hiring trainees with OpenClassrooms.
Students learn a new skill and then work part time for Capgemini. OpenClassrooms charges Capgemini directly, students don’t have to pay for their studies and get a job instantly. It’s a win for everyone.
When I first learned about this program, I thought OpenClassrooms had finally found a highly profitable business model. Now, the company has signed deals with Orange and Google.org.
With today’s funding round, the team is going to double in size. “Within a year, OpenClassrooms will provide a hundred digital degrees, including a third of them in English,” co-founder and CEO Pierre Dubuc told me.
Many will focus on digital skills, such as data science, computer science and cybersecurity. But there will also be non-technical degrees around HR, management, accounting, marketing and communication. OpenClassrooms could end up becoming one of the biggest universities in the world.
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