Sramana Mitra: Help me understand one thing here. Marketing automation is a very crowded field. Try to help me pinpoint where in that very crowded space you fit in. There are all kinds of things...
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Sramana Mitra: What denomination do you invest in and what stage? What do you require to see to want to invest? Bryce Roberts: For the first batch of companies we did, we had a pretty broad mandate....
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Sramana Mitra: I’m asking the question a bit more not specific to your particular solution. I’m trying to get you to forget that you are the CEO of your company and just really give me an objective...
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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:
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Munchery, the on-demand food delivery startup, has shut down its operations in Los Angeles, New York and Seattle, the company announced on its blog today. That means the teams from those cities are also being let go. In total, 257 people (about 30 percent of workforce) were let go, according to a Munchery spokesperson.
“We recognize the impact this will have on the members of our team in those regions,” Munchery CEO James Beriker wrote on the company blog. “Our teams in each city have built their businesses from scratch and worked tirelessly to serve our customers and their communities. I am grateful for their unwavering commitment to Munchery’s mission and success. I truly wish that the outcome would have been different.”
With LA, New York and Seattle off the table, Munchery says it’s going to focus more on its business in San Francisco, its first and largest market. This shift in operations will also enable Munchery to “achieve profitability on the near term, and build a long-term, sustainable business.”
The last couple of years for Munchery has not gone very well, between scathing reports of the company wasting an average of 16 percent of the food it makes, laying off 30 employees and burning through most of the money it raised.
During that time, Munchery tried a number of different strategies. Munchery, which began as a ready-to-heat meal delivery service, in 2015 started delivering meal recipes and ingredients for people who want to cook. Then, Munchery launched an $8.95 a month subscription plan for people who order several times a month. In late 2016, Munchery opened up a shop inside a San Francisco BART station to try to bring in new business.
But it’s not just Munchery that has struggled. The on-demand food delivery business is tough in general. Over the last couple of years, a number of companies have shuttered due to the now well-known fact that the on-demand business is tough when it comes to margins. The most recent casualty was Sprig, which shut down last May, after raising $56.7 million in funding. Other casualties include Maple, Spoonrocket and India’s Ola.
Munchery has raised more than $120 million in capital from Menlo Ventures, Sherpa Capital and others. In March, the company was reportedly seeking $15 million in funding to help keep its head above water.
Sramana Mitra: GDPR was a priority for you long before all this because a priority for the rest of the world. Being in Europe, you had to pay attention to privacy much sooner. Samir Addamine:...
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Sramana Mitra: It’s a very particular and very narrow niche. The problem is that every entrepreneur somehow has been told that VC financing is entrepreneurship success. That’s a myth that’s...
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We haven’t written much about Scout Ventures, but the New York City-based firm has built up a big portfolio over nearly a decade of investing, with exits like Olapic (acquired by Monotype for $130 million) and Kanvas (acquired by TechCrunch’s parent company AOL).
And, it’s done all of this with just one full-time partner, Bradley C. Harrison — until recently, when the firm brought on Wes Blackwell as partner.
Blackwell is an advisor to Washington, D.C. startup studio DataTribe and previously led enterprise implementation, account management and tech support at LiveSafe. And like Harrison (who graduated from West Point and served in the Army for five years), Blackwell is a veteran of the U.S. Armed Forces, having spent more than a decade flying helicopters in the Navy.
“If you’d asked me five years ago if I would have partnered with an Annapolis Navy brat, the answer would have been an unequivocal no,” Harrison said. But he said that as he and Blackwell started spending more time together, he realized that their backgrounds were complementary: “It made all the sense in the world.”
And the Armed Forces background isn’t just another line in their bios — Harrison said that about half of the companies that Scout has invested in were founded by veterans.
“We don’t find a lot of competition in this stuff,” he explained. “It’s a pretty tight community.”
Scout typically writes initial checks of between $500,000 and $750,000 and aims to take a stake of around 10 percent. And while Harrison has been the only full-time partner until now, the firm has a team that also includes several venture partners and Principal Brendan Syron.
“Like any good investors, our thesis evolves over time,” Syron told me. He said the firm has become increasingly interested in frontier technology, with investments its “core sectors” of AI, machine learning, autonomy and mobility, and “a big focus” on data and cybersecurity — an area where Blackwell has strong connections.
“Some of folks in this industry, by their nature, they’re not very trusting,” Blackwell said. “So by virtue of Brad and I’s background and character, there’s a trust factor there.”
Blackwell has already made his first investment as part of Scout, leading a $1.5 million round in DeepSig, a startup working to improve wireless technology by applying deep learning to radio signal data.
A Cleveland.com article detailed the lengths the small midwestern city would go to lure Amazon’s in 50,000-person HQ2. In a document obtained by reporter Mark Naymik, we learn that Cleveland was ready to give over $120 million in free services to Amazon including considerably reduced fares on Cleveland-area trains and buses.
The document, available here, focuses on the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA)’s ideas regarding the key component in many of Amazon’s decisions – transportation.
Ohio has a budding but often tendentious connection to public transport. Cities like Columbus have no light rail while Cincinnati just installed a rudimentary system. Cleveland, for its part, has a solid if underused system already in place.
That the city would offer discounts is not surprising. Cities were falling over themselves to gain what many would consider – including Amazon itself – a costly incursion on the city chosen. However, given the perceived importance of having Amazon land in a small city – including growth of the startup and tech ecosystems – you can see why Cleveland would want to give away plenty of goodies.
Ultimately the American Midwest is at a crossroads. It could go either way, with small cities growing into vibrant artistic and creative hubs or those same cities falling into further decline. And the odds are stacked against them.
The biggest city, Chicago, is a transport, finance, and logistics hub and draws talent from smaller cities that orbit it. Further, “smart” cities like Pittsburgh and Ann Arbor steal the brightest students who go on to the coasts after graduation. As Richard Florida noted, the cities with a vibrant Creative Class are often the ones that succeed in this often rigged race and many cities just can’t generate any sort of creative ecosystem – cultural or otherwise – that could support a behemoth like Amazon landing in its midst.
What Cleveland did wasn’t wrong. However, it did work hard to keep the information secret, a consideration that could be dangerous. After all, as Maryland Transportation Secretary Pete K. Rahn told reporters: “Our statement for HQ2 is we’ll provide whatever is necessary to Amazon when they need it. For all practical purposes, it’s a blank check.”
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 400th FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Wednesday, May 16, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Register Here. For the past eight years,...
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Utsav Somani, Angel Investor at AngelList India, talks about the newly launched AngelList India.
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May 11, 2018
Itâs awesome how Startup Week and Weekend have grown from an experiment here in Boulder into a global set of events that are now housed under the Techstars umbrella.
Iâm not doing my usual crazy schedule of running around to panels and events as Iâll be out of town for most of the week but wanted to highlight a few events Iâm especially excited about.
Amy and I supported the Pledge 1% Colorado Nonprofit Pitch contest last year with a $10,000 grant through our Anchor Point Foundation and are happily doing it again this year. This and other Social Impact Track events are working to engage the broader startup community and expand Startup Week beyond just high-tech startups.
You can view the schedule and RSVP for the Social Impact Track events and P1% Nonprofit pitch contest 5/15 here and here. And, if youâre so inclined, you can promote with a click to tweet as well!
If you are around Boulder next week or want to see the Boulder community at itâs finest, check out the BSW schedule and join in on the fun.
Also published on Medium.
Cloud computing software vendor Twilio (NYSE:TWLO) recently reported its first quarter financial results that shattered all expectations. The market is very pleased with Twilio, with some...
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Sramana Mitra: Can you go back and answer my question? Whom do you see in deals even if they’re point products? I understand your positioning. It’s more of an umbrella solution that tackles all of...
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Footage of a prototype under-city tunnel built by Elon Musk's Boring Company.Elon Musk/Instagram
Elon Musk posted footage of a prototype vehicle tunnel bored underneath Los Angeles, and said it will be available for ordinary people to use in a matter of months.
Musk uploaded a brief clip to his Instagram profile on Thursday night showing a chunk of the tunnel.
The camera flies backwards through the tunnel, passes a few workmen, stops at a complicated set of traffic lights, then thrusts forwards again and pans to the logo of The Boring Company, the firm Musk founded to build the tunnels.
In the caption to the post he said the tunnel, a two-mile prototype under western LA, is now "almost done!" He continued: "Pending final regulatory approvals, we will be offering free rides to the public in a few months."
The footage racked up more than 1 million views in five hours.
Musk also revealed some details about his plans for a full-size Hyperloop transit system connecting major US cities.
In a reply to a fan tweet about the tunnels, Musk said work on a link between New York City and Washington, D.C., had "already started," and that he hoped to start work on a link between Los Angeles and San Francisco in 2019.
Musk's final vision for the tunnel network would see cars, cyclists or pedestrians on the surface hitch a ride on electrified "skates," then be whisked through a network of tunnels to where they need to go. Musk has said that the pods will be able to outpace jet planes.
This video explains the concept:
The LA tunnel is the first to be built. Here is a map of the planned routes in California. The red part is a 6.5-mile route which is yet to be constructed, while the blue area is a still-more speculative possible route for the final project.
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel. Snap/YouTube
Snapchat has begun rolling back its controversial redesign, as new research shows how wildly unpopular the new look was with millennials.
Snap announced in April that it would test changes to its redesign with a small group of users, while the company confirmed this month that the test would eventually roll out to everyone.
As of Thursday, iOS users are seeing the changes.
The updated design reunites on the same page your friends' Snapchat Stories with those that come from celebrities. Furthermore, both snaps and chats are once again in chronological order. You can see the changes here:
The redesigned Snapchat. Snapchat
When the firm announced its Q1 earnings earlier this month, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel called the redesign of the redesign an "optimizing" process "based on our ongoing experimentation and learning."
The changes coincided with new research, which underlines how staggeringly unpopular the original redesign was after Snap began rolling it out late last year.
The app's impression score, a YouGov measure that asks consumers whether they have an overall positive or negative impression of a brand, fell off a cliff among 18 to 34 year olds in the US.
YouGov
YouGov, the polling company, said Snapchat wiped out more than two years' worth of positive feelings among millennials in one swoop.
And they voted with their feet too. Snapchat's number of daily active users rose by just 2%, to 191 million, in the first three months of the year â the slowest sequential growth rate since Snap went public last year.
Analysts said the Snapchat redesign was a symptom of "a poorly structured company that is demonstrating a clear pattern of mismanagement."
Snap shares fell to a record low of $11.22 the day after its earnings disaster, below its previous low of $11.28. Shares stood at $11.01 early Friday morning.
LightTag, a newly launched startup from a former NLP researcher at Citi, has built a “text annotation platform” designed to assist data scientists who need to quickly create training data for their AI systems. It’s a classic picks ‘n’ shovels move, in that the bootstrapped Berlin-based company is hoping to take advantage of the current boom in AI development.
Specifically, LightTag aims to solve one of the main bottlenecks of ‘deep learning’-based AI development: what you get out is only as good as the labeled data you put in. The problem, however, is that labelling data is laborious, and since it’s a job carried out by teams of humans it is prone to inaccuracy and inconsistency. LightTag’s team-based workflow, clever UI, and in-built quality controls is an attempt to mitigate this.
“What I’ve taken from [my previous positions] to LightTag is an understanding that labeled data is more important to success in machine learning than clever algorithms,” says founder Tal Perry. “The difference in a successful machine learning project often boiled down to how well the gathering and use of labeled data was executed and managed. There is a huge gap in the tooling to consistently do that well, that’s why I built LightTag”.
Perry says LightTag’s annotation interface is designed to keep labellers “effective and engaged”. It also employs its own “AI” to learn from previous labelling and make annotation suggestions. The platform also automates the work of managing a project, in terms of assigning tasks to labellers and making sure there is enough overlap and duplication to keep accuracy and consistency high.
“We’ve made it dead-simple to annotate with a team (sounds obvious, but nothing else makes it easy),” he says. “To make sure the data is good, LightTag automatically assigns work to team members so that there is overlap between them. This allows project managers to measure agreement and recognise problems in their project early on. For example, if a specific annotator is performing worse than others”.
Meanwhile, Perry says acquiring labeled data is one of the silent growth sectors in the recent AI boom, but for many sector-specific industries, such as medical, legal or financial, outsourcing the job is not an option. That’s because the data is often too sensitive, or too specialist for non-subject experts to process. To address this, LightTag offers an on-premise version in addition to SaaS.
“Every company has huge text datasets that are unstructured (CRM records, call transcripts, emails etc). ‘Deep Learning’ has made it algorithmically feasible to tap that data, but to use Deep Learning we need to train the model with labeled datasets. Most companies can’t outsource labelling on text because the data is too complicated (biology, finance), regulated (CRM records) or both (medical records),” explains the LightTag founder.
Operating in various pilots and in private beta since December 2018, and publicly launched this month, LightTag has already been used by the data science team at a large Silicon Valley tech company that wants its AI to understand free-form text in profiles, as well as by an energy company to analyse logs from oil rigs to predict problems drilling at certain depths. The startup has also done a pilot with a medical imaging company labelling reports associated with MRI scans.
YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki.Mike Blake/ReutersGood morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Friday.
1. Facebook wipes out all of its losses following the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Shares hit an intraday high of $185.99 on Thursday.
2. Cisco said in a blog post that it's yanking online ads from YouTube because the site "doesn't meet its brand safety standards." But after Business Insider's inquiries to YouTube about the post, Cisco quietly deleted it.
3. Dropbox released its first earnings report since going public in March. The company beat Wall Street's expectations on both revenue and earnings per share but didn't give guidance for the upcoming quarters.
4. Apple pulling a $1 billion data centre is 'a major black mark' against Ireland. It has been trying to establish the data centre since 2015 but threw in the towel after two residents objected to the plans on environmental grounds.
5. Klout, the $200 million website that measured how important you are on social media with one number, is shutting down. The company used Twitter and Facebook data to give users a "klout score," a number from 1 to 100 that indicated how popular on social media a user is.
6. In an interview with CNBC, early Theranos investor Tim Draper said the company's founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is the victim of a witch hunt. He also said Wall Street Journal investigative reporter John Carreyrou was "like a hyena going after her."
7. Robinhood, a zero-fee stock-trading app popular among millennials, confirmed its series D funding round of $363 million. That puts the startup's valuation at $5.6 billion.
8. A major iPhone supplier is trying to persuade investors that it's not about to be destroyed by Apple. Analysts are not convinced about Dialog Semiconductor's optimism, however.
9. How a Dallas construction company saves nearly $2 million a year by using hundreds of Apple's iPads. Building plans are now stored in the cloud and everyone works off the same always-updated version.
10. Google has wild new technology that sounds like a real human on the phone, and people already have really strong opinions about it. People are a bit scared.
A neighborhood in Noxapater, Mississippi, where the median household income is $27,917 (left); a neighborhood in Santa Clara County, California, where the median household income is $93,500 (right) Google Earth/Leanna Garfield The typical San Francisco household makes about $96,677 each year. That's nearly double the national median household income of $57,617, according to the US Census Bureau.
A new interactive mapâ which plots average incomes in counties across the US â visualizes the enormous wealth gap between the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of the country.
Developed by the mapping-software company Esri, the project explores patterns of wealth and poverty within American cities and the country as a whole.
Take a look at how the Bay Area compares to other metro areas around the US.
BII
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.
The virtual reality (VR) market is expected to rally in 2018 after seeing slow growth from 2016 to 2017. The uptick will be largely catalyzed by the emergence of the newest headset form factor, stand-alone VR headsets, which address some of the biggest pain points that have prohibited mainstream consumers from adopting VR.
This new form factor is more affordable than cost-prohibitive high-end headsets and more capable than its smartphone-powered counterparts. Additionally, it features in-unit processing that frees the VR headset from wires. The first major stand-alone headset, the Vive Focus from HTC, was launched in January of this year, and more from other major companies like Oculus and Google are expected to follow over the next six months.
In a new report, Business Insider Intelligence lays out where the VR market is and forecasts how it will grow over the next five years. We dissect the various hardware categories and the unique strengths and opportunities of each, and identify how they will gain traction at different points of the market's evolution. Finally, we examine various components impacting consumer adoption.
Here are some of the key takeaways:
Business Insider Intelligence forecasts shipments of all VR headsets to grow 69% year-over-year (YoY) to reach 13.5 million in 2018. Powering that growth is the stand-alone VR headset category, which is expected to account for 30% of total headsets shipped in the year ahead. The VR hardware market is volatile because getting a device right is a balancing act. On one hand, the price point needs to be affordable for most consumers, and on the other, the experience has to be distinctive and immersive enough to convince a consumer to strap a visor to their face on a regular basis. While only a handful of stand-alone VR headsets will hit the market in 2018, they mark the biggest step toward mainstream adoption of consumer-oriented VR headsets by making the technology more accessible for the average consumer. Declining price points, coupled with high-quality headsets and the introduction of a game-changing app, are crucial for the VR industry to achieve before VR can really gain traction on a global scale.In full, the report:
Forecasts the growth projections and shipment expectations of the global VR headset market, and breaks it up by the major headset categories. Explores the four major segments in the current VR hardware market, defined by the hardware needed to power the experience â stand-alone, smartphone-powered, PC-powered, and game console-powered VR. Identifies the key players shaping the burgeoning stand-alone VR headset segment. Discusses the biggest challenges to VR development and adoption.Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
