Paris-based consent and preferences management platform Didomi has raised $40 million in a series B round of funding.Read More

The biggest challenge in managing IT infrastructure in mixed (cloud, multicloud, and hybrid) environments is complexity.Read More

Jett: The Far Shore puts the emphasis on understanding alien flora and fauna instead of destroying it, and that can create its own conflict.Read More

Polyarc unveils Moss: Book II for Sony's PlayStation VR platform, and it will be longer than the first game.Read More

Sony announced during today's State of Play that Death Stranding: Director's Cut will launch for PlayStation 5 on September 23.Read More

Arcadegeddon is a new online shooter from Friday the 13th studio, and it launches in early access today on PlayStation 5.Read More

Raffael Marty's keynote at LogPoint's customer conference describes logging history and related areas such as big data and open source.Read More

During today's PlayStation State of Play, Sony revealed that Sifu is now coming out in early 2022. It was originally set for 2021.Read More

Intel's Huma Abidi talks about her DE&I initiatives both in her private life and as part of Intel's ongoing efforts across the company.Read More

According to a new study, the datasets used to train AI models are often labeled according to drastically different standards.Read More

French startup PowerZ has raised another $8.3 million (€7 million at today’s exchange rate) including $1.2 million (€1 million) in debt — the rest is a traditional equity round. The company is both an edtech startup and a video game studio with an ambitious goal — it wants to build a game that is as engaging as Minecraft or Fortnite, but with a focus on education.

In February, PowerZ launched the first version of its game on computers. It doesn’t have a lot of content, but the company wanted to start iterating as quickly as possible. Aimed at kids who are six years old and over, PowerZ teleports the player into a fantasy world with cute dragons and magic spells.

“The idea is really to build a sort of Harry Potter,” co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Freund told me. “You have this world that is super nice and very interesting. Like with Hogwarts, you want to come back regularly, and the story will progress over a very long time.”

15,000 children tried out the first chapter. On average, they spent four hours in the game. I asked whether Freund was satisfied with those metrics. He told me he thought his company’s vision was “completely validated.”

Bpifrance Digital Venture, RAISE Ventures and Bayard are investing in today’s round. Existing investors Educapital, Hachette Livres, Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet and Michaël Benabou are also investing once again.

Now, it’s time to add content, expand to other platforms and launch new languages. When it comes to content, the company wants to partner with other game studios. They’re going to create new islands and design games that make you learn new stuff. Zero Games, Opal Games and ArkRep are the first third-party studios to contribute to PowerZ.

When those new chapters are available, kids will be able to practice mental calculation, geometry, vocabulary, foreign languages, sign language, but also astronomy, photography, architecture, sculpture, cooking, wildlife, yoga, etc.

“Basically we want to position ourselves as a publisher,” Freund said. “The only thing we want to keep in-house is the main storyline.”

As for new platforms, PowerZ is launching its game on the iPad this week. The company realized that launching on computers was a mistake. Adults are already using computers or don’t want to leave your kid on the computer. That’s why PowerZ is starting with the iPad and the iPhone will follow suite. In 2022, the company expects to release its game on the Nintendo Switch and potentially other game consoles.

While the game is only available in French for now, the startup is also thinking about launching an English version soon.

“The game is completely free right now. We have an idea to monetize it. We’ll copy every other games with in-app purchases for visual items,” Freund said.

When you look further down the roadmap, PowerZ has some radically ambitious goals. Freund believes that educational games will become mainstream really quickly. Many companies don’t want to develop this kind of stuff because screens are bad for kids.

“If we just say that screens are bad, we’ll end up with an Amazon product to learn math. I feel a sense of urgency to develop an educational platform for screens that can scale,” Freund told me.

PowerZ wants to reach hundreds of thousands of children as quickly as possible. And just like Fortnite or Minecraft, the company believes its game can act as a platform for other stuff that can evolve over time.

In the wake of Coinbase’s direct listing earlier this year, other crypto companies may be looking to go public sooner than later. That appears to be the case with Circle, a Boston-based technology company that provides API-delivered financial services and a stablecoin.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Circle will not direct list or pursue a traditional IPO. Instead, the company is combining with Concord Acquisition Corp., a SPAC, or blank-check company. The transaction values the crypto shop at an enterprise value of $4.5 billion and an equity value of around $5.4 billion.

The offering marks an interesting moment for the crypto market. Unlike Coinbase, which operates a trading platform and generates fees in a manner that is widely understood by public-market investors, Circle’s offerings are a bit more exotic.

Circle’s SPAC presentation details a company whose core business deals with a stablecoin — a crypto asset pegged to an external currency, in this case, the U.S. dollar — and a set of APIs that provide crypto-powered financial services to other companies. It also owns SeedInvest, an equity crowdfunding platform, though Circle appears to generate the bulk of its anticipated revenues from its other businesses.

For more on the deal itself, TechCrunch’s Romain Dillet has a piece focused on the transaction. Here, we’ll dig into the company’s investor presentation, talk about its business model, and riff on its historical and anticipated results and valuation multiples.

In short, we get to have a little fun. Let’s begin.

How Circle’s business works

As noted above, Circle has three main business operations. Here’s how it describes them in its deck:

Let’s consider each one, starting with USDC.

Stablecoins have become popular in recent quarters. Because they are pegged to an external currency, they operate as an interesting form of cash inside the crypto world. If you want to have on-chain buying power, but don’t want to have all your value stored in more volatile, and tax-inducing, cryptos that you might have to sell to buy anything else, stablecoins can operate as a more stable sort of liquid currency. They can combine the stability of the U.S. dollar, say, and the crypto world’s interesting financial web.

As companies look for ways to respond to incidents in their complex microservices-driven software stacks, SREs — site reliability engineers — are left to deal with the issues involved in making everything work and keeping the application up and running. Rootly, a new early-stage startup wants to help by building an incident-response solution inside of Slack.

Today the company emerged from stealth with a $3.2 million seed investment. XYZ Venture Capital led the round with participation from 8VC, Y Combinator and several individual tech executives.

Rootly co-founder and CEO Quentin Rousseau says that he cut his SRE teeth working at Instacart. When he joined in 2015, the company was processing hundreds of orders a day, and when he left in 2018 it was processing thousands. It was his job to make sure the app was up and running for shoppers, consumers and stores even as it scaled.

He said that while he was at Instacart, he learned to see patterns in the way people responded to an issue and he had begun working on a side project after he left looking to bring the incident response process under control inside of Slack. He connected with co-founder JJ Tang, who had started at Instacart after Rousseau left in 2018, and the two of them decided to start Rootly to help solve these unique problems that SREs face around incident response.

“Basically we want people to manage and resolve incidents directly in Slack. We don’t want to add another layer of complexity on top of that. We feel like there are already so many tools out there and when things are chaotic and things are on fire, you really want to focus quickly on the resolution part of it. So we’re really trying to be focused on the Slack experience,” Rousseau explained.

The Rootly solution helps SREs connect quickly to their various tools inside Slack, whether that’s Jira or Zendesk or DataDog or PagerDuty, and it compiles an incident report in the background based on the conversation that’s happening inside of Slack around resolving the incident. That will help when the team meets for an incident post-mortem after the issue is resolved.

The company is small at the moment with fewer than 10 employees, but it plans to hire some engineers and sales people over the next year as they put this capital to work.

Tang says that they have built diversity as a core component of the company culture, and it helps that they are working with investor Ross Fubini, managing partner at lead investor XYZ Venture Capital. “That’s also one of the reasons why we picked Ross as our lead investor. [His firm] has probably one of the deepest focuses around [diversity], not only as a fund, but also how they influence their portfolio companies,” he said.

Fubini says there are two main focuses in building diverse companies including building a system to look for diverse pools of talent, and then building an environment to help people from underrepresented groups feel welcome once they are hired.
“One of our early conversations we had with Rootly was how do we both bring a diverse group in and benefit from a diverse set of people, and what’s going to both attract them, and when they come in make them feel like this is a place that they belong,” Fubini explained.

The company is fully remote right now with Rousseau in San Francisco and Tang in Toronto, and the plan is to remain remote whenever offices can fully reopen. It’s worth noting that Rousseau and Tang are members of the current Y Combinator batch.

Lula, a Miami-based insurance infrastructure startup, announced today it has raised $18 million in a Series A round of funding.

Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures co-led the round, which also included participation from SoftBank, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, Shrug Capital, Steve Pagliuca (Bain Capital co-chairman and Boston Celtics owner), Tiny Capital’s Andrew Wilkinson. Existing backers such as Nextview Ventures and Florida Funders also invested, in addition to a number of insurance and logistics groups such as Flexport.

The startup’s self-proclaimed mission is to provide companies of all sizes — from startups to multinational corporations — with insurance infrastructure. Think of it as a “Stripe for insurance,” its founders say.

Founded by 25-year-old twin brothers and Miami natives Michael and Matthew Vega-Sanz, Lula actually emerged from another business the pair had started while in college.

“We couldn’t afford to have a car on campus and wanted pizza one night,” Michael recalls. “So I thought it would be cool if there was an app that let me rent a car from another student, and then I thought ‘Why don’t we build it?’ We then built the ugliest app you’ve ever seen but it allowed us to rent cars from other people on the campus.” It was the first company to allow 18-year-olds to rent cars without restrictions, according to the company.

By September 2018, they formally launched the app beyond the campus of Babson College, which they were attending on scholarships. Within eight days of launching, the brothers say, the app became one of the top apps on Apple’s App Store. The pair dropped out of college, and within 12 months, they had cars available on more than 500 college campuses in the United States.

“As you can imagine we needed to make sure there was insurance coverage on each rental. We pitched it to 47 insurance companies and they all rejected us,” Michael said. “So we developed our own underwriting methodologies or underwriting tools into the operations and had the lowest incident rate in the industry.”

As the company grew, it began partnering with car rental providers (think smaller players, not Enterprise, et al.) to supplement its supply of vehicles. In doing so, the brothers soon realized that the most compelling aspect of their offering was the insurance infrastructure they’d built into it.

“Our rental companies begin to put a significant portion of their business through our platform, and one day one called us and asked if they could start using the software in the insurance infrastructure we’d built out in the rest of our business.”

That was in early 2020, right before the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

“At that moment, we began to realize, ‘Hey maybe the big opportunity here is not a car-sharing app for college students, but maybe the big opportunity here is something with insurance,’” Michael said.

A few weeks later, the duo shut down their core business and by April 2020, they pivoted to building out Lula as it exists today.

“In the same way that Stripe has built a payment API that eliminates the need for companies to build their own payment infrastructure, we decided we could build an insurance API that eliminates the need for companies to build their own insurance infrastructure,” Matthew said. “Companies would no longer need to build out internal insurance systems or tools. No longer would they need to deal with insurance brokers to procure them coverage. No longer would they need to deal with insurance teams. We can integrate on to a platform and handle all things insurance for companies and their customers via our API.”

By August of 2020, the company launched an MVP (minimum viable product) and since then has been growing about 30% month over month after reaching profitability in its first four months.

Today, Lula offers a “fully integrated suite” of technology-enabled tools such as customer vetting, fraud detection, driver history checks, and policy management and claims handling through its insurance partners. It has a waiting list of nearly 2,000 companies and raised its funding to fulfill that demand.

“The main purpose for raising capital was so we can build out the team necessary to fulfill demand and sustain growth moving forward,” Matthew said. “And apart from that, we also just want to further develop the technology — whether it be in the ways that we’re collecting data so we can get more granular and make smarter decisions or just optimizing our vetting system. We’re also just working toward developing a much more robust API.”

Existing clients include ReadyDrive, a car-sharing program for the U.S. military and a “ton of SMBs,” the brothers say. Investor Flexport will be conducting a pilot with the company.

“Every time a trucker picks up a load or delivery, instead of paying monthly policies, they will be able to pay for insurance for the two to three days they are on the road only,” Michael says. “Also, if someone is shipping a container via Flexport, they can add cargo coverage at the point of sale and get an additional layer of protection.”

Ultimately, Lula’s goal is to act as a carrier in some capacity.

Founders Fund’s Delian Asparouhov believes that the way millenials and Gen Zers utilize physical assets is “wildly different” than prior generations.

“We grew up in a shared economy world, where apps like Uber, GetAround, Airbnb have allowed us to episodically utilize assets rather than purchase them outright,” he said.

In his view, though, the insurance industry has not picked up on the massive shift.

“Typical insurance agents both don’t know how to underwrite episodic usage of assets, and they don’t know how to integrate into these typical of digital rental platforms and allow for instantaneous underwriting,” Asparouhov told TechCrunch. “Lulu is combining both of these technologies into an incredibly unique approach that digitizes insurance and gives us flashbacks to how Stripe disrupted the digitization of payments.”

Despite their recent success, the brothers emphasize that the journey to get to this point was not always a glamorous one. Born to Puerto Rican and Cuban parents, they grew up on a small south Florida farm.

“We started our company out of our dorm room and initially emailed 532 investors only to get one response,” Michael said. “Founders just see the headlines but I just want to advise them to stay persistent and really keep at it. I’m not afraid to share that the company started off slow.”

Z1, a Sao Paulo-based digital bank aimed at Latin American GenZers, has raised $2.5 million in a round led by U.S.-based Homebrew.

A number of other investors also participated in the financing including Clocktower Ventures, Mantis – the VC firm owned by The Chainsmokers, Goodwater, Gaingels, Soma Capital and Rebel Fund. Notably, Mantis has also backed Step, a teen-focused fintech based in the U.S., and Goodwater has also invested in Greenlight, which too has a similar offering as Z1.

Z1 participated in Y Combinator’s Winter ‘21 batch earlier this year, and at the time got $125,000 in funding from the accelerator. Maya Capital led its $700,000 seed round in March of 2020.

Put simply, Z1 is a digital bank app built for teenagers and young adults. The company was founded on the notion that by using its app and linked prepaid card, Brazilian and Latin American teenagers can become more financially independent.

João Pedro Thompson and Thiago Achatz started the company in late 2019 and soon after,  Mateus Craveiro and Sophie Secaf joined as co-founders. In its early days, Z1 is focused on Brazil but the startup has plans to expand into other countries in Latin America over time.

“Z1 is what we’re building to be the go to bank of the next generation, and not just be a digital bank for teens,” Achatz told TechCrunch. “We want to grow with him and one day, be the biggest bank in Brazil and LatAm.” 

Thompson agrees. 

“We’re acquiring users really early and creating brand loyalty with the intention of being their bank for life,” he said. “We will still meet their needs as they grow into adulthood.”

While Z1’s offering is not completely unlike that of Greenlight here in the U.S. the founders agree that its products have been adapted more to the Brazil-specific cultural and market situation.

For example, points out Thompson, most teenagers in Brazil use cash because they don’t have access to other financial services, whether they be traditional or digital.

“We offer an account where they can deposit money, cash out money via an instant payment system in Brazil or spend through a prepaid credit card,” he said. “Most sites don’t accept debit cards so this is a big step compared to what teens already have.”

Part of the company’s use for the capital is to make its product more robust so they can do things like save money for big purchases such as an iPhone and earn interest on their accounts.

Another big difference between Brazil and the U.S., the company believes, is that many parents in general in Latin America haven’t had a true financial education that they can pass down to their kids.

“We’re not top down like Greenlight,” Achatz said. “That approach doesn’t make sense in Latin America. Here, many are independent from an early age and already work whether it’s through a microbusiness, a side job or selling things on Instagram. They’re much more self-taught and the income they earn is often outside of their parents.”

Z1 has grown 30% per week and 200% per month since launch, spending “very little” on marketing and relying mostly on word-of-mouth. For example, the company is following the lead of its U.S. counterparts and turning to TikTok to spread the word about its offering. 

“Step has around 200,000 followers on TikTok, and we have a little under half of that,” the company says. “We’re well-positioned in terms of branding.”

For lead investor Homebrew, the opportunity to educate and provide financial services to Gen Z in Latin America is even more exciting than the opportunity in the US., notes partner Satya Patel.

Over one third of LatAm Gen Z’ers have a “side hustle,” generating their own income independent from their parents, he said.

“While millennials grew up during an economic boom, Gen Z grew up during recessions – 3 in Brazil over the last decade – and wants to become financially independent as soon as possible. They’re becoming economically educated and active much earlier than previous generations,” Patel added.

He also believes the desire to transact online, for gaming and entertainment in particular, creates a groundswell of GenZ demand in Brazil for credit card and digital payments products.

Circle has announced that it plans to become a public company. The cryptocurrency company will merge with Concord Acquisition Corp, a SPAC. Circle is better known as one of the founding members of the Centre consortium with Coinbase. Along with other crypto partners, they have issued USD Coin (USDC), a popular stablecoin.

A SPAC is a publicly traded blank-check company. Merging with a SPAC has become a popular way to become a publicly listed company for tech companies.

According to Circle, the deal should value the company at $4.5 billion. Investors involved in the merger have committed $415 million in PIPE financing. The company also recently raised $440 million in capital. In other words, Circle will have plenty of capital on its hands if the merger goes through.

Created in 2013, the company originally wanted to create a mainstream bitcoin payment platform. But the company later pivoted to create a social payments app. Circle became a sort of Venmo clone with some blockchain technology under the hood. At some point, Circle even removed the ability to send and receive bitcoins.

“We never thought of ourselves as a bitcoin startup. The media certainly classified us that way because we were involved with the technology. From the day we founded the company three years ago we’ve focused on trying to build a new consumer finance company. And one that makes money work the way the internet works,” Circle co-founder and CEO Jeremy Allaire told TechCrunch’s Natasha Lomas in 2016.

While that consumer play didn’t take off, it’s interesting to see that Allaire was already thinking about being able to programmatically move money. In 2017 and 2018, the company pivoted once again to focus on cryptocurrencies. It launched an over-the-counter trading desk for big cryptocurrency investors.

It acquired Poloniex, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the U.S. at the time. It also launched Circle Invest, a really simple mobile app that let you buy and sell a handful of crypto assets.

But Circle’s most promising product has been its stablecoin — USD Coin, or USDC for short. As the name suggests, 1 USDC is always worth 1 USD. Unlike traditional cryptocurrencies, you can be sure that the value of USDC isn’t going to fluctuate like crazy. Auditing firms regularly check that issuers always keep as many USD in bank accounts as USDC in circulation.

With USDC, moving money from one wallet to another becomes as easy as using standard API calls. The company has then added various infrastructure products around USDC, such as Circle Accounts. Circle has also built ramps to bridge the gap between fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies.

There are currently $25 billion USDC in circulation and the company believes there will $190 billion USDC in circulation by the end of 2023. And Circle plans to leverage the popularity of USDC to build financial services that take advantage of USDC.

Five months after announcing a $3 million seed round from Spero Ventures, shopping-focused live video host Talkshoplive is back, this time with a $6 million seed extension led by Raine Ventures.

The new round of funding gives Los Angeles-based Talkshoplive $10.5 million raised to date and enables it to scale its product management and technical teams. In addition, the company will double-down on category verticals.

Talkshoplive CEO Bryan Moore said he founded the company with his sister Tina in 2018, after he led social media efforts at Twentieth Television (previously known as Twentieth Century Fox) and CBS Television.

Following the initial seed round, Moore said he found himself talking to even more investors wanting to get involved with the company. Then San Francisco-based Raine came along.

“We were not looking to fundraise, but when Raine reached out, what they had to offer was so strategic to our business,” Moore said in an interview. “Live commerce is today where social media was 15 years ago. Everyone is asking what their brand’s live commerce strategy is, but we had to figure out how to build it for the U.S.”

Initially, the company was focused on books and music, working with famous names, such as Matthew McConaughey, Alicia Keys and Dolly Parton. Now, the company is looking at food, beauty, fashion, and sports.

“We’ve had just about everyone from the Food Network essentially start using Talkshoplive,” Moore said. “A large community around food has been built on the platform, especially after Giada De Laurentiis showed everyone the inside of her pantry. Now other personalities are being asked to show their pantries.”

Though the company launched its embeddable player in 2019, Moore says adoption of it became strongest over the last quarter, due in part due to new partnerships.

Talkshoplive debuted a new version of its embeddable player three weeks ago with publishers Hearst, with Oprah Daily, as well as Condé Nast’s Bon Appétit magazine and now launching across additional publications. In fact, sales so far this year have surpassed all of the company’s 2020 revenue, growing 85 percent month over month, he said.

The global pandemic put a spotlight on live commerce platforms, especially those catering to sports cards and other collectible enthusiasts. Seeing new funding recently were sports trading card platform Alt, raising $31 million in May, while Whatnot, specializing in Pokémon cards and Funko Pop figurines, raised $20 million in Series A funding in March.

Meanwhile, Moore said he is looking forward to working with Raine Ventures, which was joined in the round with a group of entertainment and retail angel investors, including former Showtime chairman and CEO Matt Blank, Genius Sports chairman David Levy and Vivre founder Eva Jeanbart-Lorenzotti.

“We believe that Talkshoplive has a differentiated technology and strategy that will continue to drive adoption of live commerce,” Gordon Rubenstein, managing partner of Raine Ventures, said in a statement. “In the case of TSL, not only is there a clear value proposition that engages, supports and aligns incentives of all key players across the retail landscape, but also a fantastic team.”

French startup Younited Credit has raised a $170 million funding round. Goldman Sachs is leading the round with existing investors Eurazeo, Bpifrance and AG2R La Mondiale also participating. The company offers several credit products to European consumers. It also has a diversified distribution strategy.

Consumer credit in Europe is completely different from consumer credit in the U.S. Many countries don’t rely on a central credit score system to assess your credit worthiness. Similarly, most people don’t have a credit card. Financial institutions that want to offer credit lines have to evaluate the potential risk behind a credit application. It can be a complicated and tedious process.

Younited Credit differentiates itself from legacy players with a data-driven, AI-based approach. Instead of sending a ton of documents to your banker, Younited Credit tries to automate request processes as much as possible.

The company takes advantage of DSP2 regulation and open banking APIs to ingest data. As the startup has facilitated a huge volume of credit offering, it can also leverage past data for machine learning risk models.

So far, Younited Credit has granted more than €2.4 billion in credit ($2.8 billion at today’s exchange rate). It operates in five European countries. France is still the company’s leading market as Italy, Spain, Portugal and Germany represent 40% of Younited Credit’s revenue.

More recently, the company started embedding its product into third-party products. For instance, banks and fintech companies offer credit products in their apps thanks to partnerships with Younited Credit. Examples include N26, Lydia, Orange Bank and Fortuneo. In 2021, the B2B offering represented 30% of Younited Credit’s net banking income.

Right now, Younited Credit has 440 employees. It plans to hire another 200 people over the next 18 months. The company wants to double down on European markets.

Up next, Younited Credit wants to double down on embedded finance with credit products that appear on the checkout page of popular e-commerce websites and apps. The company will compete with ‘buy now, pay later’ companies, such as Klarna, Floa, Oney, Scalapay, etc.

Named Younited Pay, the company plans to offer a wide range of options with payment terms spread over 3 to 48 months. Some companies are already using Younited Pay, such as Free, Micromania and LDLC.

The startup is offering this payment solution online and in brick-and-mortar stores. Once again, Younited Credit tries to find customers where they are already. And it seems like a smart move as physical points of sales represent over 50% of Younited Pay payments this year.

I was recently on The Hustle's "My First Million" podcast with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri. I'm a fan of the show, so it was a lot of fun to be on as a guest.

One quick apology before we jump in: I try not to be too braggy -- but I balance that with transparency and openness. Sam and Shaan asked me several questions about what it's like to be a billionaire, and I answered them openly and truthfully.  (They did warn me beforehand and gave me the option not to answer).

And, The Hustle team decided that having "billionaire" in the title of the episode will attract more viewers -- so here we are.  :)  In any case, it's a fun episode and we cover a lot of different topics that I'm hopeful you'll find useful.

The Hustle My First Million Episode #197

Frameworks To Become A Billionaire 

Full Episode Transcript Below

Sam:        Oh, we're live. Yeah and so -

Shaan:        Okay. And just quick audio check. Are we all good? So we don't have to restart.

Sam:        No.

Shaan:        Is it the right mic?

Sam:        Yeah.

Speaker 1:        That's the right mic. You sound a smidge loud on my end.

Sam:        Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Shaan:        Okay. I might just move it further away, or be quieter.

Speaker 1:        Oh, that sounds better.

Sam:        Your camera's crooked. I don't know if you're stopped using the fancy camera?

Shaan:        It's still the fancy camera, but the tripod is not as fancy.

Sam:        Got it. Okay.

Shaan:        Yeah. It's going to trigger every OCD person that watches this [inaudible 00:00:35]. Goddammit, how is he slanted sideways?

Sam:        Okay.

Shaan:        Okay, cool. Go ahead.

Sam:        I don't remember what I was going to say, but right before you came on, I was asking Dharmesh what he listens to. And he says that he listens to us almost every day for the past 60 days.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Shaan:        Amazing.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Shaan:        Has that changed you? You've probably become a worse person. You seem like a pretty good person. I feel like if you listen to us for 60 straight days, there's going to be a part of your brain that's good, but a part that gets corrupted slightly.

Dharmesh:        I think that's true. That's an astute observation, [crosstalk 00:01:10]. We just have... I won't say like This is not stuff I'm like... You know, looking at retail businesses or... You guys have a wide array of stuff. But I think that kind of thing builds a different muscle group, and I think it's been useful for me. I'll put it to you that way. We're not separated at birth by any stretch, but we have things that the three of us luckily have in common. But there are things that I'm just different... I know it'll come out in the pod. I'm a weird dude.

Sam:        We're we're on now. So -

Dharmesh:        Okay, all right.

Sam:        This is the pod.

Dharmesh:        This is the pod.

Sam:        I have a feeling this might go a little long and I'm okay with that. Shaan, do what you want.

Sam:        But, I, in my world... So I was just hanging out with Hiten Shah yesterday, and your name came up. We were just talking to Nathan Barry the other day, your name came up. Shaan and I are in this text group where people talk about BigClout, your name comes up. Your name comes up everywhere. You got like a spider web. Like you get your hands in all these little things. And I think part of it's because you've been in the game for a while and you're incredibly successful. So this is Dharmesh. Dharmesh is the... You're the co-founder of HubSpot. Is your title CTO?

Dharmesh:        Yes, CTO.

Sam:        Are you active? Like, are you working really hard at HubSpot? How do you have time to have your hands in all this different stuff?

Dharmesh:        So the answer is yes. HubSpot is my obsession and preoccupation. Anything else that you see me doing, there's probably some diabolical thread that connects it back to HubSpot. There is. So yeah, it's my baby. It's the thing that I spend pretty much all of my non-family time, non-personal time on. So it's fine.

Shaan:        And I just want to describe for people who are not watching. So you should go to the YouTube channel. It's youtube.com/hustlecon and you'll see the videos. But, so here's what I see. So Dharmesh is sitting there, he's got a keyboard, like a piano keyboard to his right. He's got a, I think, a Steve Jobs piece of art behind him. Or is that Lennon or something like that? I can't tell exactly who it is, John Lennon maybe. And you're in this room. Is this where you work on a day-to-day basis?

Dharmesh:        Well, yes and no. So this is my -

Sam:        You're getting tricked, Shaan. You're getting tricked. Listen.

Dharmesh:        This is my living room, but it's a, like a capture a moment in time when the living room was somewhat less disorganized than it usually would be. But it's a virtual background. I've got the green screen and things set up so I can...

Shaan:        Oh okay. That's pretty good. Cause you usually when you have a green screen, it's like half your head also turns into the background and this one's actually pretty good. All right, I'm impressed.

Dharmesh:        I've done a multiple green screen. So I'm sort of surrounded with it. So if I need to twist the camera one way or the other, it's still kind of -

Shaan:        So you're kind of doing the oasis thing that we talked about. You have a virtual background, but the virtual background is not just you on a beach, like a fake situation. It's your actual living room when it's clean and perfect, the way you want it. And you're like, that's what I want my background to be, regardless of the reality of whatever your current situation is. I like that.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:04:19] really cool is that the keyboard itself is actually real. That's not part of the background. So if I [inaudible 00:04:22] you'll see that the keypress makes sounds, it's kind of cool, yeah.

Sam:        So let me do like a very brief intro and an overview of what we're going to talk about. So Dharmesh sent us a list of ideas, we're going to get into them, but I need to give a background here so the listeners entirely understand. So HubSpot today is like a 25 or 30, I don't know whatever the market cap is. So $25 billion publicly traded company. You co-founded it 15 years ago, I think.

Dharmesh:        Yip.

Sam:        Prior to that, you had another startup that you sold for a significant amount of money, we can talk about that. Throughout this whole time, you own, I believe, millions of millions of dollars worth of domains. You bought your wife, as a gift, humanism.com, which we got to talk about. That's pretty funny.

Sam:        You're an angel investor in a lot of different startups, including Coinbase and things like that. You've got your hands in all these different things. According to wallmind or wallstreetmind.com you're worth today 850 million dollars. So you do a little bit of everything in the world of business. Is incredibly fascinating. So I wanted to talk about.. Well, you might be the wealthiest person we've ever had on this podcast. I'm going to ask you questions about that.

Sam:        I don't know

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:05:44], but it's okay. It's fine.

Sam:        We're going to ask you questions about it.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:05:47] it doesn't really matter. And that's the one thing I've learned. We can talk about that too.

Sam:        Well, that's that's okay if it doesn't matter, we're going to talk about it. We're also going to talk about your ideas. We're going to about building HubSpot. We're going to talk about why you invest in what you invest. And we're going to talk about, do you ever invest in non startup stuff? We're going to talk about a lot of stuff. Shaan, what do you think?

Shaan:        Yeah, let's do it. Let's jump in.

Sam:        Where do you want to start? You want to start with... What?

Shaan:        Okay, so here's my question. My question's actually not about Dharmesh. It's actually about Sam. So, I've always wondered this. So you acquired The Hustle. And I hope you could be as transparent as you want here. I think Sam will not care. So I would say DNA-wise, The Hustle is kind of a unique company. Sam's a pretty unique dude that brought into your company. Different DNA probably than the vast majority of employees there. Give me kind of like...

Sam:        Well you too.

Shaan:        I don't know.

Sam:        You're part of the deal too, Shaan. So you're in the boat.

Shaan:        Sure, but he doesn't have to deal with me on a day-to-day basis. So doing that deal and bringing these guys in, are there any interesting observations or any entertaining little stories about either pre-acquisition or post that had to do with Sam and The Hustle? I'm just curious. What's your view on that side of the table? Because I've only been on the same side that Sam's on.

Dharmesh:        Yeah. HubSpot has not done a lot of acquisitions in the past. We've done a handful of them. Pretty much most of them have gone well. The one thing that made this different, I think as you observed, is the DNA of The Hustle is different than HubSpot, and that's both a good thing and a bad thing.

Dharmesh:        So the thing that I was worried about is... Until now I don't think Sam and I have actually ever had a one-on-one chat.

Shaan:        That's okay. This is my therapy session therapy for you guys.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:07:32] therapy for two people, Shaan.

Sam:        Dharmesh and I talk a lot on Slack.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:07:37].

Sam:        We're like buddies on slack.

Dharmesh:        We've actually talked. But the thing I was worried about is that... So, Sam is a kind of what I would think of as a kind of type A personality, just like he's out there, he's hustling [inaudible 00:07:47] the name of the company. Which is fine, but it's just not... Most of the makeup of HubSpot is not that. We're a very... I don't know what the right... It's going to overly stereotype us, but we're not type A. We're like a kinder, gentler, humble, quieter kind of company.

Shaan:        Yip.

Dharmesh:        So that's the one thing -

Sam:        So let me explain it this way -

Shaan:        So Sam would be described as brash. I don't think anybody would ever describe HubSpot as brash.

Dharmesh:        No.

Sam:        Well today, Kieran, the guy I work with, technically my boss. He was like, "You should probably hire someone outside of HubSpot for this role, for your growth."

Sam:        And I was like, "Well, why?"

Sam:        He goes, "I think you're too direct for anyone who works at HubSpot." It's like that. That's an example.

Dharmesh:        I think that was good advice. But, it's worked out well. So there've been... The one minor story I can recall. There was a Twitter back and forth that I think Sam had with Rand Fishkin. I don't know if you recall this Sam, that there was something that was said about VCs or investment or something. And Rand's been a good friend. It was like, Oh, okay well... It's fine. And I'm like, okay. This is like [crosstalk 00:08:52]. not like either party was right, wrong or indifferent, but I know them at least now a little bit, both. But it's been fine.

Shaan:        Okay.

Sam:        Well, in my defense, and even our podcast's defence, our goal is... We will disagree with people, but I hope that it never comes from a place of disrespect or -

Dharmesh:        No it didn't. No.

Sam:        Or trying to hurt your feelings.

Shaan:        But I will say, I do put entertainment first sometimes. So sometimes I will poke the bear for the entertainment value of it when the kinder, nicer, simpler thing to do would be to do nothing or just back away. So I do like to have fun, either on Twitter or the podcast.

Dharmesh:        [crosstalk 00:09:30] HubSpot too much. But the one thing I will say, as far as the deal itself, it was one of the better things HubSpot has done. The strategy behind it, I think, is strong in terms of it gets HubSpot into a thing which is where I think the future of SaaS companies is going to be heading. Which is more and more [inaudible 00:09:50] were going to control their own distribution versus renting audiences from other people, and resources.

Dharmesh:        And there's other deals that have been done around the same timeline, but I'm a believer in companies controlling their destiny in terms of distribution versus constantly just buying audiences and renting them from someone else.

Shaan:        See, this is where you should just say, just drop a one line. Be like, "And we got it at a fantastic price." Just to drive Sam crazy for the next seven years. Just leave him constantly questioning himself.

Sam:        Look. Yeah. Could we have sold for more? Definitely maybe. Like that always is a maybe, right? I think that when we sold, HubSpot I felt was undervalued. What was the stock in January? It was worth like $350? Or was it even less? $250?

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Sam:        I don't remember.

Dharmesh:        Yeah.

Sam:        Today it's 600 bucks. My guests was that I think HubSpot is undervalued. And also, I wanted to create a reputation of someone who was a fair deal maker. I think people will know that if I built something, I sold it, that all parties got a good deal.

Dharmesh:        Right.

Sam:        And so -

Shaan:        Okay. All right. Sounds good. We can switch off The Hustle acquisition. So let's do some ideas.

Sam:        Wait. No, wait. I want to talk about one thing really quick. Let's talk about money stuff?

Shaan:        Okay.

Sam:        Because I told Dharmesh I was going to ask him this. So first of all, is it weird that I know what your net worth is today because it's public information?

Dharmesh:        It's not weird for me, honestly. I'm generally transparent. I believe in the openness of the web. In a sense, it's a publicly traded company. Would I want my bank accounts and all my accounts published on the web? No, but the fact that I'm an executive in a publicly traded company and most of my net worth is in the form of shares.

Dharmesh:        Which you can take the number of shares, which is on the public record and multiply it by the current price and get... Which is probably roughly 85, 90% of my overall net worth, because that's where all my money is, is in HubSpot shares. I don't find that weird.

Sam:        Yeah.

Sam:        Has your life changed as this has accumulated and things got different? You had another company before this, how much did you sell that for?

Many teachers and parents in Indonesia rely on WhatsApp to keep in touch, creating “multiple groups that often become messy and highly ineffective, and result in confusion or lost threads,” says Rizky Aniez, the co-founder and chief executive officer of Gredu. The Jakarta-based startup was created to give everyone involved in the educational process—school administrators, teachers, parents, guardians and students—apps that let them keep track of everything and communicate with one another. Today it is announcing a $4 million Series A, led by Intudo Ventures, an Indonesia-focused venture capital firm, with participation from returning investor Vertex Ventures. 

While some teachers use Google Classroom, Gredu was created to work with Indonesia’s K-12 National Curriculum and Islamic Curriculum programs, used in both private and public schools. The startup is also developing new verticals, including software for preschools and university programs. 

Founded in September 2016, Gredu is now used by more than 400 schools, with a total of 400,000 users.  Its Series A will be used to expand in the Greater Jakarta Region and into major cities throughout Indonesia, plus product development and hiring. 

Gredu’s subscription software is centered around a management system that lets administrators and teachers keep on touch of all their their tasks—including syllabuses, teaching schedules and communicating with parents and students. Aniez told TechCrunch that the onboarding process is simple, and “in an ideal solution, it can be done within hours.” Gredu was designed to be modular, so it can be customized to a school or district’s needs. 

The platform currently has four main parts. Gredu School Management System was created for administrators, while Gredu Teacher lets educators track student attendance, create and score exams and arrange class activities. Gredu Parents enables parents and guardians to keep track of their kids’ performance and talk to teachers. Gredu Student, meanwhile, lets students look up their test scores, attendance records and school activities. 

Gredu launched an Online Assignment feature before COVID-19 and during the pandemic, it added Interactive Class to enable remote learning. Aniez said the company plans to add new features and adapt Interactive Class for other uses once in-person schooling becomes the norm again. “We believe that many of the digitization in schools adopted during the pandemic will continue to be used for the future, changing the way administrators manage schools and improving transparency for local education authorities, teachers and parents,” he added.

Gredu is part of a crop of Indonesian edtech startups that have recently raised funding, including tuition platform InfraDigital; homework help and tutoring app CoLearn; and ErudiFi for education financing. 

In a statement, Intudo Ventures founding partner Patrick Yip said, “Working with school districts and administrators, GREDU provide innovative solutions specifically tailored to enhance the quality, transparency and effectiveness of Indonesia’s education system. We are proud to support GREDU at this critical juncture as they help more schools digitize their operations and create positive impact for students throughout Indonesia.”