Sramana Mitra: Now that I understand a bit better of what your technology is capable of doing, can you go back and explain to me what is the usage model of your customers? Let’s say a university buys...

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The coronavirus crisis has done little to hurt big tech players such as Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and now Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL). Recently, Apple announced its second quarter results, and while the...

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Sramana Mitra: We are a completely remote company and we’ve been completely remote since 2010. When you started in 2016 as part of Virgin’s startup program, what were you going to do? Lily Stoyanov:...

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Wunderlist is going away, but fans of the productivity app may find some consolation in founder Christian Reber’s announcement that he is launching a new startup called Superlist.

“Superlist will be more than just a todo app, but never as bloated as the project management software you loathe to use,” he tweeted. “Slick, fast, and hyper-collaborative. Helping individuals or teams of any size get things done in record time.”

Today is a good day for reflection. With @Wunderlist closing down and @Pitch ramping up toward launch, I’m excited to announce a new company: @SuperlistHQ — a fresh new take on supercharged team productivity. https://t.co/YNmddyQxpP

— Christian Reber (@christianreber) May 5, 2020

Wunderlist was acquired in 2015 by Microsoft, which announced two years later it would shut down the app in favor of Microsoft To-Do. It finally said at the end of last year that Wunderlist to-dos will no longer sync after May 6, but users will be able to import all their content into Microsoft To-Do.

Shortly before Microsoft announced Wunderlist’s shut down date, Reber tweeted that he wanted to buy back the company. Obviously that didn’t happen, but Superlist may give him a chance to develop features he originally wanted to add to Wunderlist.

After Wunderlist’s acquisition, Reber launched Pitch, a challenger to PowerPoint that has raised more than $52 million in funding so far.

On his Twitter, Reber said he will continue focusing on Pitch, but will support the Superlist team, which is currently hiring.

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO by Ben Horowitz is one of the most commonly cited management think pieces of the last decade.

And for good reason; Horowitz surfaced a fundamental distinction in operating philosophy that is necessary for companies to survive, reinvent and ultimately win when macroeconomic environments shift. The framework is especially useful given how counterintuitive the advice is — behaviors of a peacetime CEO and wartime CEO are often on diametrically opposite sides of the spectrum; it is rare to find a CEO who can successfully emulate both personas.

While in concept it is easy to understand these principles, as with most things in life, nothing can replace the visceral comprehension that comes via learned experience. We are at the onset of enduring the most challenging startup environment of (at least) the last 15 years. COVID-19 is an indiscriminate event that is systematically wiping out businesses, whether “atoms” or “bits.”

For most startup operators, this is the first taste of true systematic adversity. The undercurrents of frothy valuations, the social milieu of early-stage investing and stores of excess capital are coming to a grinding halt as the bull market of the last 12 years is dramatically disrupted. We have an entire generation of founders/CEOs who may conceptually understand the peacetime CEO/wartime CEO ethos, but now, they’re going to actually live it. At the same time as every other founder/CEO. Brutal.

Since the onset of COVID-19, we have spoken to more than 100 founders and CEOs. Naturally, we are hearing frequent allusions to peacetime CEO/wartime CEO as a framework to help navigate the landscape. We’ve even used it over the last few months. While we believe it is a helpful framework, it is also incomplete. Further, we believe its application can lead to deeply problematic outcomes.

At a micro level, the misplaced application of peacetime CEO/wartime CEO can fundamentally change a company for the worse. A wartime CEO, as Horowitz notes, is “completely intolerant, rarely speaks in a normal tone, sometimes uses profanity purposefully, heightens contradictions, and neither indulges consensus building nor tolerates disagreements.” In the strictest application, we are seeing this align with a common false trope that has plagued the tech industry: “To change the world like Steve Jobs, I need to emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality.” A classic logical fallacy many founders/CEOs have learned the hard way — if you emulate all aspects of Steve Jobs’ personality, it doesn’t mean you will change the world like he did.

Each company is driven by its own unique culture and values — in a crisis situation, while it is important to be adept and agile, it’s equally, if not more important, to triple down on the strongest elements of your culture established pre-crisis. Many of the strongest founders/CEOs we have had the pleasure of coaching and investing in are uniquely world-class in their patience and tolerance, their ability to make the abnormal normal and their commitment to inspire with clarity. It is the adherence to these principles that will help carry their companies through this time.

At a macro level, peacetime CEO/wartime CEO conjures outdated themes that are at best inaccurate, and at worst, counterproductive. War implies “destruction, ruthlessness, blood, death;” there is an innate sense of machismo and bravado in this language reinforcing a homogeneous tech community. This type of vernacular and attitude increases barriers to a more inclusive community excluding women and underrepresented minority participation.

One of the most common takeaways we have heard in reference to the framework is, “now is the time when real founders are made.” If Rent the Runway, ClassPass, Away, the Wing and the countless other women-led/minority-led startups that have been adversely affected by COVID-19 are not able to bounce back, we highly doubt it is because “they weren’t able to cut it as real founders,” a ridiculous assertion to make under any circumstance.

The peacetime CEO/wartime CEO framework is clearly valuable — it forces us to dissect the behavioral shifts necessary to survive in a crisis. That being said, it needs to evolve. Being firm, decisive and staring down an existential crisis is not mutually exclusive with applying empathy, gratitude and generosity. You can be an intense, laser-focused and paranoid CEO without losing yourself or fundamentally changing the culture of your company.

We know dozens of leaders who are leading their companies through these challenging times without leaving a wake of carnage or damage to the foundation they have spent years building. They are leading with their heart and values and will be remembered for how they carried themselves, treated their employees and guided the company through the crisis. COVID-19 presents us with a unique opportunity as an industry. Now is the right time to retire the false dilemma of peacetime CEO or wartime CEO and empower the rise of the human-centric CEO:

The human-centric CEO considers and balances the needs of her organization, employees, customers and other stakeholders in good and bad times;The human-centric CEO recognizes she cannot change the macro environment or competition so she focuses her effort and energy on what she and the team can control and manage;The human-centric CEO internalizes his mission, vision and values in the face of difficult challenges and critical strategic decisions;The human-centric CEO views and manages her company as a complex and dynamic human system with nuanced inputs and interdependencies;The human-centric CEO believes employees are the single most important stakeholder — that is reflected in how the organization hires, coaches, trains, incentivizes and retains;The human-centric CEO orients around decisive and bold decisions that impact employees rather than a series of micro maneuvers that damage culture and trust;The human-centric CEO creates shared meaning and purpose by reiterating the mission and vision over and over and over again;The human-centric CEO fosters an organization that values and cultivates psychological safety;The human-centric CEO develops self-awareness and inner resilience to weather the emotional ups and downs of company building;The human-centric CEO invests the time and energy to go deeper with her employees at strategic junctures and times of crisis;The human-centric CEO distills and simplifies issues, strategies and tactics to help employees reduce noise and increase focus;The human-centric CEO communicates frequently and articulates expectations with humility and confidence to avoid uncertainty, prevent anxiety and achieve alignment;The human-centric CEO recognizes he has a range of communication mediums at his disposal and selects the most appropriate one based on the magnitude of the situation;The human-centric CEO believes in the power of company rituals such as one-on-ones, exec team meetings, all-hands, stand-ups, retrospectives and off-sites;The human-centric CEO expresses empathy, appreciation and gratitude for the work performed by existing, outgoing and former employees;The human-centric CEO listens intensely and empathetically with her full self — ears, eyes and intuition;The human-centric CEO takes out time for self-care because she understands she cannot serve others and be highly effective unless she is mentally and physically healthy.

There’s no way to mince words. COVID-19 is having a devastating impact on the startup community. The inevitable is unfortunately occurring every day — many startups will never come back from this. As eternal optimists, however, we see opportunity in this crisis for the broader industry: the rise of the human-centric CEO. Now is the time for us to propagate community, resourcefulness and generosity. It’s the time to be ever thoughtful about employees, colleagues, stakeholders and fellow founder/CEOs in need. Individual startups may not survive this crisis, but it is our hope that an everlasting mentality does.

By no means is this list exhaustive, but it captures the behaviors and attributes from the top leaders we are working with. We believe CEOs should strive to become human-centric. Not only because it’s the right thing to do, but also because we believe it will lead to healthier organizations and better results over time.

Peanut, an app that began as a tool for finding new mom friends, has evolved into a social network now used by 1.6 million women to discuss a range of topics, from pregnancy and parenthood to marriage and menopause, and everything in between. On the heels of significant growth in online networking fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, the company is today announcing the close of a $12 million Series A round of funding, led by EQT Ventures, a multi-stage VC firm that invests in companies across Europe and the U.S.

Index Ventures and Female Founders Fund also participated, bringing Peanut’s total raise to date to $21.8 million.

The round itself closed just weeks ago — arriving at a time when the coronavirus pandemic is impacting the startup world, often drying up venture capital for emerging companies. Some startups, as a result, have laid off employees to self-sustain, while others have sought exits or even folded.

Peanut, on the other hand, has seen rapid growth for its platform as women looked for a supportive online environment to discuss their own concerns over how COVID-19 was impacting their lives.

Many women participating in Peanut’s newer “Trying to Conceive” group, for example, worried about their canceled IVF rounds and how to plan for the future. Current moms-to-be wanted to hear from others about how COVID-19 would impact their hospital delivery plans. And others stuck working at home with kids looked for advice and coping strategies.

Since the outbreak, Peanut has seen engagement across its app increase by 30% and content consumption increase by 40%. Its total community also grew from 1 million users in December 2019 to now 1.6 million, as of April.

“We’re really lucky in that we’re growing and that we are, for the most part, untouched by what’s happening,” says Peanut founder and CEO Michelle Kennedy. “And actually, if anyone needed community more, it’s now,” she added.

Though the pandemic has sent the app’s usage skyrocketing, it has also readjusted Peanut’s priorities with regard to its roadmap.

Most notably, its friend-finding feature needs a rethink.

Peanut originally worked as a sort of “Tinder for mom friends” — an idea that arose from Kennedy’s personal experience with how difficult it was to forge female friendships after motherhood. As the former deputy CEO at dating app Badoo and an inaugural board member at Bumble, she brought her extensive experience in matchmaking apps to Peanut, which uses a similar swipe-based mechanism.

But COVID-19 has up-ended this side of Peanut’s business. Today, Peanut users are meeting in Zoom chat rooms to hangout or play games, but not in person.

Kennedy says the company will try to meet these users where they are with the development of more video networking features, potentially with technology built in-house. Other plans for the new capital include improvements to the social discovery aspects of its app, the development of a web version of Peanut, and the creation of more groups beyond those focused on fertility and motherhood, which have so far been core to the Peanut experience.

Specifically, the company soon plans to launch a new community focused on women living with menopause, an experience that will reach more than a billion women by 2025. Despite the fact that all women with ovaries will go through menopause, there are relatively few online communities dedicated to it — which Peanut sees as an untapped market.

Peanut’s real strength, however, is not in the types of communities it grows on its platform, but how they’re created.

There has not yet been a social network that focused on “building a platform for women, thinking about women’s needs and built by a women,” explains Kennedy. “So what we end up doing is using things that already exist — trying to twist them and mold them into what we need, and never getting it exactly right,” she says. “We can do better than that.”

One small example of this is the recent launch of Peanut’s “Mute Keywords” feature that allows women to remove certain types of discussions from their feeds and notifications. Some women used this to create a coronavirus-free news feed that focused on other aspects of motherhood. Others who were trying to conceive muted conversations around “pregnancy,” which they found emotionally triggering.

With the Series A’s close, Peanut says Naza Metghalchi from EQT Ventures joins the company’s majority-female board, alongside Hannah Seal from existing investor Index Ventures.

“Peanut’s user engagement metrics are a testament to the app’s ability to act as a true emotional companion throughout women’s journeys,” said Naza Metghalchi, venture lead and investment advisor at EQT Ventures, in a statement. “The EQT Ventures team is excited to partner with Michelle and continue to grow Peanut into a platform that serves all women at different life milestones, exploring topics beyond fertility and motherhood which have already seen such huge traction.”

The additional funding allows London-based Peanut to expand its business and hire more engineers to join its current team of just 16.

“I think having closed a round in this climate is great for the team,” says Kennedy. “It’s also great for the community because it means that we can grow the team, build quicker, build faster and develop the product more quickly,” she adds.

Creatively was supposed to launch this summer, according to CEO Greg Gittrich. And then COVID-19 happened.

“We made the decision to fast-track the launch when the pandemic hit, because we felt like launching as a beta would really help the creative community,” Gittrich told me.

The startup was founded by Stacey Bendet and Joe Indriolo, who also serves as chief product officer. Indriolo told me that Creatively was designed to address a problem that Bendet had as founder and CEO of designer clothing company Alice + Olivia — finding the best freelance creative talent to work with.

“Finding creatives is really, really difficult,” he said. “At the same time, showcasing your work is also really difficult as a creative.”

And those problems are likely to get worse as social distancing forces more creative work and collaboration to happen remotely, and as a troubled economy means that more artists, designers, architects, filmmakers and other creative types are looking for work.

There are places where artists can post their work, but Indriolo argued that none of them allow the creative to control the presentation in the same way — not unless they’re building their own website.

So Creatively says it’s designed to showcase photography, film, fashion design, branding, illustration, animation, CGI, app and web design, product development, interiors and architecture and emerging technologies.

Creative talent can upload their portfolio and arrange it as they choose. They can divide the work into different albums, and even nest albums within other albums in creative ways. (Indriolo showed me an architect’s album that allowed visitors to navigate their work by drilling down into specific regions and locations.)

Artists can also annotate the images and videos to explain their work, as well as listing their past jobs and their specific skills.

Brands and other potential employers can post job listings, which then get tagged with the artist who’s hired for the job, which in turn builds the artist’s résumé and portfolio. Brands can also search the site based on the skills they’re looking for, or based on who’s done work for another company that they admire.

The platform allows users to follow each other, but Indriolo said there’s an equal emphasis creating connections based on the work you’ve done and your past collaborations.

“We believe it’s a social platform, and that creatives will connect with one another … and find opportunities in a world that’s increasingly remote and global,” Gittrich added.

To get started, Creatively is working with schools like Parsons, Pratt, the Savannah College of Art and Design and the Fashion Institute of Technology to help their new graduates find work.

The platform is free for both businesses and individual creatives; the plan is to eventually start charging businesses to post jobs.

Like other accelerators, Techstars, a network of more than 40 corporate and geographically targeted startup bootcamps, has had to bring its marquee demo day events online.

Over the last two weeks of April, industry-focused accelerators working with startups building businesses around mobility technologies (broadly) and the future of the home joined programs in Abu Dhabi, Bangalore, Berlin, Boston, Boulder and Chicago to present their cohorts.

Each group had roughly 10 companies pitching businesses that ran the gamut from early-childhood education to capturing precious metals from the waste streams of mining operations. There were language companies, security companies, marketing companies and even a maker of a modular sous vide product for home chefs.

The ideas were as creative as they were varied, and while all seemed promising, about two concepts from each batch stood out above the rest.

What follows is our completely unscientific picks of the top companies that pitched at each of these virtual Techstars demo days. In late May or early June, expect to see our roundup of the next batch of top picks from the their next round of demo days.

Hub71

Techstars’ inaugural cohort for its accelerator run in conjunction with Abu Dhabi-based technology incubator Hub71 included a number of novel businesses spanning climate, security, retail, healthcare and property tech. Standouts in this batch included Sia Secure and Aumet (with an honorable mention for the novel bio-based plastic processing and reuse technology developer, Poliloop).

A month ago, we asked several venture capitalists if they planned to change the way they invest or lead rounds during COVID-19 — most said no, but they noted that valuations were coming down and founders in their portfolio companies were responding to the crisis.

Northzone’s Paul Murphy predicted fewer FOMO rounds because investors will “take more time to get to know and diligence the business… and it might also take a bit more time to close deals,” adding that he would “continue to lead rounds and back great founders.” But, as other investors call their bluffs, firms are looking for tangible ways to show they are open for business.

First Round Capital 

At least that was the case with First Round Capital. On Thursday, the seed-stage firm announced that when it leads a first round in a company, it will always take pro rata in the next outside-led venture round with a commitment of up to $3 million.

Pro rata is a clause in an investment agreement that gives the investor a right to participate in future financings. If investors don’t invest in a company’s pro rata, that might negatively signal they don’t believe in the company’s future. I asked Brett Berson, a partner at First Round, to offer more context about the announcement.

“The question ‘is your investor taking their pro rata’ is not necessarily a checkbox answer,” Berson said. “And I think in a time of maximum uncertainty, what a given investor was doing 12 months ago might not be what he or she is doing today.”

This afternoon Airbnb, a well-known private company that connects travelers with places to stay, announced that it was laying off around a quarter of its workforce. The company cited revenue declines and a need to curtail costs in a memo that TechCrunch viewed.

In the note, written by Airbnb CEO and co-founder Brian Chesky, the company said that 1,900 employees will be laid off, or 25.3% of its 7,500 workers. The layoffs will impact a number of internal product groups, including Transportation and Airbnb Studios, efforts that will be placed on hold, and its Hotels and Lux work, which will be “scale[d] back.”

The company declined to break down per-country totals for the layoffs in a phone call with TechCrunch, but its memo did note that its staffing cuts are “mapped to a more focused business.” The former startup appears to be narrowing its efforts, targeting core operations and shedding more experimental and costly endeavours.

According to Chesky’s missive, Airbnb anticipates its 2020 revenue coming in under 50% of 2019’s total; Airbnb saw around $4.8 billion in revenue last year, according to reports.

Airbnb had previously admitted that layoffs were a possibility in light of the COVID-19 pandemic impacting tourism and travel. The company has rapidly added capital in recent weeks including two $1 billion tranches of debt, providing extra liquidity as the world came to a standstill, freezing travelers in-place and decimating global travel spend. Airbnb couldn’t dodge a trend that hits its world directly.

In an effort to keep both the demand and supply sides of its marketplace healthy enough to survive hibernation, Airbnb has allowed users to cancel some reservations without penalty, and provided financial succor to its hosts. Presumably part of its new capital went to fund those efforts, along with providing the firm with enough cash to reach 2021 in reasonable shape.

The company had previously promised a 2020 IPO; many expected the previously wealthy and occasionally profitable firm to pursue a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO as it had a sufficiently strong financial footing heading into 2020. While those days are now behind it, the company did state plainly in its note that it expects that its business “will fully recover” in time.

The question now is when. Airbnb was a long-touted example in Silicon Valley of a highly-valued, lavishly-funded unicorn that could make money and go public on its own terms. None of those expectations had a pandemic written into them.

Separated employees will receive 14 weeks of pay, and one more week for each year served at the company (rounding partial years up). The firm is also dropping its one-year equity cliff so that employees who are laid off with under 12 months of tenure can buy their vested options; Airbnb will also provide 12 months of health insurance through COBRA in the United States, and health care coverage through 2020 in the rest of the world.

Why is bootstrapping critical? from Sramana Mitra on Bootstrapping by Sramana Mitra The need to raise venture capital is a myth. Many successful businesses start by using a bootstrap model....

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Daniel Carraway spent his entire career working in paper and bioplastics.

The serial entrepreneur began his career at International Paper working in their research division before founding two previous companies that became cornerstones of the bioplastics industry. His latest venture, RWDC Industries, has raised $133 million in recent financing to build a new sustainable manufacturing juggernaut in the small city of Athens, Ga.

With offices in Athens and Singapore, RWDC is the fruit of a partnership between Carraway and Roland Wee, an engineer with decades of experience in the chemicals and construction business across Asia.

The two men met through mutual connections as Carraway sought new opportunities to pursue his longtime vision of commercializing bioplastics. The serial entrepreneur had just stepped away from his work with  Meredian Holdings Group and its subsidiary, Danimer Scientific — companies that sprung from work Carraway started at his kitchen table with his wife back in 2004, he said.

In 2019, bioplastics represented a $95 million opportunity, according to a report in Market Data Forecast, but the small size of the current market belies how big the opportunity can be, according to Carraway.

RWDC, Danimer and Kaneka are all pursuing an opportunity to replace plastic packaging, which was a $234.14 billion market, according to Grand View Research. It’s that potential market for plastics that has drawn countless companies over the years — including Carraway’s own — to raise hundreds of millions of dollars.

Several of those companies failed. Perhaps the most successful of the early high-flyers was Metabolix, which had a public offering before the financial crisis hit in 2008. That company sold its bioplastics division to CJ CheilJedang for roughly $10 million and pivoted to crop science.

Carraway insists that the market has changed over the last few decades and the time is finally right for biology to supplant chemistry in industrial manufacturing.

“If you look back at the history of new materials development… especially polymers… there has never been a new polymer that had been invented that didn’t take 20 to 30 years for it to make wide-scale adoption,” said Carraway. “When a polymer is first developed it takes a while to get the manufacturing right to get it at wide scale. [And] it takes time for polymer converters to understand how to use a new material… it’s not that technologically is not viable, it’s about figuring out how to use the new material.”

Scale is important too, said Carraway. “You have to reach a certain critical availability in metric tons available in the global market to create a situation where people can use the new material,” he said.

RWDC can already make about 5,000 tons of PHA and expects to grow its capacity to make half a million tons of material, but that barely scratches the surface of available capacity for traditional plastics. “For the next decade we’re going to be in a mad scramble to grow production capacity because we’re going to be behind the demand curve,” said Carraway.

Industry observers have seen this story before. Because the new material Carraway is talking about isn’t actually all that new. For at least the past 20 years companies have been working on ways to cheaply manufacture polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). The material is produced by the fermentation of oil or sugars and serves as a replacement for the chemicals that are made from cracking ethane (a product of oil processing) to make plastic.

However, as concerns continue to mount over the environmental degradation caused by plastic pollutants and the contributions the plastics industry makes to emissions causing global climate change, the push for replacing plastics with more sustainable products has gained momentum.

Regulations in Europe will ban many single-use plastic products next year, forcing companies to build out their supply of bioplastic alternatives or abandon the use of plastics altogether.

Market moves like these have the potential to spur the bioplastics industry and shift production into high gear. Carraway said demand hasn’t been effected by the collapse of oil prices, which has driven down the costs of chemicals and plastics.

“Even though our materials are initially more expensive… the amount that they cost over the commodities in normal circumstances isn’t that much,” Carraway said. “Every customer we’re working with has asked us to speed up and give them more. No one has said we want to slow down or scale back or change our plans.”

And propelling the industry forward could provide a lift to local economies that have been financially ravaged by the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic.

At least, that’s what Carraway is hoping will happen in Athens, Ga.

The company is using some of the money it raised from international and U.S.-based investors — including the Singapore-based venture capital firm Vickers Venture Partners; Ikea’s investment company; a Swiss pension fund; a Northeastern energy provider; and an industrial chemical company owned by Koch Industries — to revive an old factory in the city as its new production plant.

RWDC said the new facility will bring in 200 jobs to northeastern Georgia.

“We are excited to see RWDC expand its operations in Athens and add a substantial number of new well-paying jobs,” said Athens-Clarke County mayor, Kelly Girtz. “Athens is the home of the University of Georgia, and we have a long record of supporting innovation and industry. Like communities across America and the world, we want to see a reduction in plastic pollution, and we have high hopes that RWDC, with the help of the Athens community at their new facility, will be able to solve that problem.”

In the startup world, the more confusing the sector is, the riper the opportunity to make a friendly user interface and rack in millions of dollars of venture capital. There’s Robinhood to make investing more transparent, Vested and Carta to make equity more transparent, and the list goes on. But when it comes to healthcare, a thorny, expensive and ever-changing sector, consumer-friendly options don’t quickly come to mind.

That’s why Jason Bornhorst and Colin Anawaty teamed up to launch First Dollar, a healthcare savings platform with a focus on HSAs (health savings accounts) that targets millennials and Gen Z. 

First Dollar launched out of stealth today with a $5 million seed round, led by Next Coast Ventures with participation from Meridian Street Capital. Other investors include former athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, Everlywell CEO Julia Cheek, Bright Health CTO Brian Gambs and Capital Factory. 

“There’s just enough healthcare-ness that makes it a little hard, that’s why you haven’t seen traditionally fintech companies go at it,” Bornhorst said, of the company’s focus.  

First Dollar is launching on the thesis that it can help consumers get better use out of their healthcare savings accounts, or HSAs. HSAs are non-taxable savings accounts that can be used on medical expenses, doctor visit co-pays or medical prescriptions. Think of it as a 401(k), but for healthcare. Some employers offer HSAs as a benefit, and some consumers choose to open their own. First Dollar works with both.

“I would argue HSA is the worst marketed healthcare benefit in the USA,” said Bornhorst. “This benefit is wholly misunderstood and underutilized by most Americans.”  

First Dollar works on both the front end and back end of HSAs. It charges employers a monthly administration fee to manage payroll contributions and HSA reporting.

From an end-user perspective, First Dollar lets consumers set up a free account through their site and manage their money there. The company also issues a First Dollar debit card, and makes money from a percentage of transactions on the debit card. Using First Dollar, a customer can see where they can get the most savings on certain medical products. The startup is first focusing on drug discounts and has partnered with RxSaver, a national drug discount program. 

Let’s talk through a customer experience to make this more clear. Users can transfer their existing HSA to First Dollar or create and fund a First Dollar HSA. The First Dollar account will show them discounted healthcare products and services. Then a user can receive the discount at a local pharmacy by showing the cashier a code from First Dollar.

First Dollar’s closest venture-backed competitor is Lively, which last raised $27 million back in October for its HSA product. The startup similarly targets millennials with low fees and online management, and focuses on getting users to treat HSAs as an investment account. Per Forbes, four other fintech startups also have HSA capabilities in beta testing. 

Bornhorst said that First Dollar differentiates from Lively by focusing on educational content and creating a marketplace for customers to find healthcare products and services at lower price points. So while Lively would be more on the saving and investment side, First Dollar would be focusing more on the saving and spending side of things. 

Additionally, the co-founders remain optimistic because of their track record: Before First Dollar, Bornhorst and Anawaty launched and sold a company to athenahealth, a massive healthcare company that works with millions of patients. 

Last month, the Extra Crunch Live team hosted conversations with folks from all over the venture community that ranged from the pre-seed world with Charles Hudson to shark territory with Mark Cuban. We’re starting off May with a packed agenda, including talks with Hunter Walk of Homebrew and Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures. 

Kirsten Green is one of the most respected VCs in the country, with investments in Bonobos, BirchBox, Dollar Shave Club, Glossier, Outdoor Voices, Rockets of Awesome, Hims and Modern Fertility. 

TechCrunch’s Jordan Crook and Natasha Mascarenhas will host the chat with Green and talk about how D2C is changing amidst the coronavirus pandemic. We’ll get into the opportunities ahead for consumer brands, advice she’s giving portfolio companies and how to spot a breakout company. Extra Crunch members can also ask their own questions, so come prepared! 

Green founded Forerunner Ventures in 2010 and has already seen a number of high-profile exits. One of the firm’s first checks went to Dollar Shave Club, which sold to Unilever for $1 billion in 2016. We’ll ask if her investment appetite has changed, which sectors she’s newly bullish on and what metrics are now more important than ever when pitching her. Of course, we’ll get the record on if Forerunner is open for business right now — but we have a feeling it is. 

Kirsten is a founding member of the female mentorship collective All Raise, so expect some conversation on how the landscape is changing for underrepresented founders. 

If we have time, we’ll get into influencer culture, misconceptions about D2C and how founders should think about pitching Green. 

During the call, audience members are encouraged to ask questions. We’ll get to as many as we can, but you can only participate if you’re an Extra Crunch member, so please subscribe here. 

Extra Crunch subscribers can find the Zoom Link below (with YouTube to follow) as well as a calendar invite so you won’t miss this conversation.

 

 

We’ve always wanted to make the Disrupt SF (September 14-16) experience available to people who can’t travel to San Francisco. Nothing like a global pandemic to shift priorities and spur innovation. We’ve reserved the Moscone Center for September 14-16, but if you can’t attend in person — for any reason — why not join us online with a Disrupt Digital Pass?

The Digital Pass offers unprecedented, interactive online access to a range of Disrupt SF content. As always, we offer different pricing tiers to keep Disrupt accessible to as many people as possible. You have your choice of two digital ways to play.

Looking for the most immersive, interactive Disrupt experience and the opportunity to engage with the global TechCrunch community? We’ve got you covered — and it won’t break the bank.

The Disrupt Digital Pro Pass is just $245 for a limited time and includes access to content from all stages via live stream and videos-on-demand so you can watch on your own schedule. You’ll have live stream and VOD access to:

The Extra Crunch Stage — where top experts (think growth gurus, investors, legal eagles and leading technologists) join TechCrunch editors to discuss the crucial topics founders need to succeed

The Q&A Stage — submit questions during live Q&A sessions with speakers who have appeared with TechCrunch editors on the Disrupt and Extra Crunch stages

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Sleuth, an early stage startup from three former Atlassian employees, wants to bring some much-needed order to the continuous delivery process. Today, the company announced it has raised a $3 million seed round.

​CRV led the round with participation from angel investors from New Relic, Atlassian and LaunchDarkly.

“Sleuth is a deployment tracker built to solve the confusion that comes when companies have adopted continuous delivery,” says CEO and co-founder Dylan Etkin. The company’s founders recognized that more and more companies were making the move to continuous delivery deployment, and they wanted to make it easier to track those deployments and figure out where the bottle necks were.

He says that typically, on any given DevOps team, there are perhaps two or three people who know how the entire system works, and with more people spread out now, it’s more important than ever that everyone has that capability. Etkin says Sleuth lets everyone on the team understand the underlying complexity of the delivery system with the goal of helping them understand the impact of a given change they made.

“Sleuth is trying to make that better by targeting the developer and really giving them a communications platform, so that they can discuss the [tools] and understand what is changing and who has changed what. And then more importantly, what is the impact of my change,” he explained.

The company was founded by three former Atlassian alumni — Ektin along with Michael Knighten and Don Brown — all of whom were among the first 50 employees at the now tremendously successful development tools company.

That kind of pedigree tends to get the attention of investors like CRV, but it is also telling that three companies including their former employer saw enough potential here to invest in the company, and be using the product.

Etkin recognizes this is a tricky time to launch an early-stage startup. He said that when he first entered the lock down, his inclination was to hunker down, but they concluded that their tool would have even greater utility at the moment. “The founders took stock and we were always building a tool that was great for remote teams and collaboration in general, and that hasn’t changed… if anything, I think it’s becoming more important right now.”

The company plans to spend the next 6-9 months refining the product, adding a few folks to the five person team and finding product-market fit. There is never an ideal time to start a company, but Sleuth believes now is its moment. It may not be easy, but they are taking a shot.

Treasury Prime, a startup that built software tooling to help banks automate and accelerate routine tasks, announced today that it has closed a $9 million Series A. The new capital was sourced from Amias Gerety of QED, Jason Lemkin of SaaStr, and Hans Morris of NYCA Partners.

The capital event is yet another funding round for an API -focused startup. Earlier this week, Daily.co raised $4.6 million for its video-calling API business. Both Daily.co and Treasury Prime announced new venture rounds after fintech API shop Plaid exited to Visa for billions.

Building the connective software tissue that industries need is a valuable business. Twilio is another example of the concept’s success. But what Treasury Prime is building is neat in its own right, and not merely as part of a trend that TechCrunch is watching. So let’s dig into its business.

Suits, backrooms and manual processes

TechCrunch caught up with Treasury Prime CEO Chris Dean in advance of its announcement to better understand what his company does. Condensing sharply, the startup helps banks move some of their business processes out of Victorian-era, while also allowing fintech shops to more easily plug into banks than before.

It accomplishes that with an API that allows banks to convert manual tasks into software-speed results. Dean walked TechCrunch through the modern process for opening a commercial account at a bank. The only word that came to mind during the description was byzantine. Treasury Prime wants to take processes that could require days of work and get it done in minutes.

Dean previously sold a company to Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), where he started the work that would become Treasury Prime. After working to build internal tech to accelerate SVB’s internal processes, he eventually left and built a startup off the idea. Now Treasury Prime is getting banks onto its tech, saving them time and boosting margins where human inputs can be limited.

This does more than simply allow banks to move more quickly. By cutting the costs of select banking tasks, the cohort of customers that are economically attractive grows; smaller accounts may become more viable at a bank if it can open and service that customer for a lower cost. This means that banks may be able to attract more total deposits, allowing them to loan more capital and earn more interest differential.

Even more, fintech companies can communicate with banks more easily if they both plug into Treasury Prime’s APIs. So a bank that uses the startup’s tech may be able to do more business with fintech and finservices companies big and small, possibly boosting deposits or other key banking results.

Economics

Why are API-powered startups raising capital, and why have they generated some huge exits? Economics, at least in part.

Twilio, a provider of telephony APIs that allow companies to execute calls, SMS and the like, reported adjusted gross margins of 57% in 2019, up from 54% in 2018. SaaS-like? Not exactly, but healthy and improving.

Daily.co, the other API-focused startup that raised capital this week, told TechCrunch that its has a number of levers it can pull to improve its own gross margins, but that they are already attractive.

We bring all that up because it’s possible that Treasury Prime will have better gross margins than our two examples; banking API calls cost more per call, according to Dean, though they operate at a slower pace. Still, charging more for less “work” implies a lower cost of revenue-to-revenue ratio—ergo, better gross margins

And as Twilio is trading at a price/sales ratio of 12 today (per YCharts data), Treasury Prime can expect to be valued at a SaaS multiple as well. Even better, Treasury Prime was profitable in January, and it now has years of runway in the bank.

What’s ahead

Treasury Prime has 13 employees today, which Dean told TechCrunch includes 10 engineers if you count him as one (CEOs don’t usually get too much time to code). You can tell from those figures what company needs: a go-to-market (GTM) team.

According to Dean, that’s what it’s going to hire. The startup wants to make more noise, so it intends to hire a marketing team and build out a sales team, doubling its headcount in 2020. Treasury Prime’s revenue grew 40% in April the company told TechCrunch. If it can build a more mature GTM motion, perhaps the startup can keep up that pace for a while yet.

Looking ahead, Treasury Prime expects its revenue to roughly halve between fintech players and banks, though with more total clients on the fintech side. It now has all the money it could need to go and land those customers. Let’s see how fast it can grow.

At the start of the year, it looked like Europe would be in for a “Summer E-Scooters / E-Bike War,” as both regional startups and U.S.-backed unicorns vied for the pockets of city commuters.

Consolidation came when German startup Circ was taken over by U.S. competitor Bird at the start of the year.

Still on the battlefield was U.S. company Lime (which was leading in most markets), Bird, Circ, Swedish startup Voi and German startup Tier. There was also Amsterdam-based Dott and Ford-owned Spin. Voi was in approximately 40 cities in Europe, Tier had expanded to roughly 56.

The approach of city authorities had been key to any growth. Marseille approved only Voi, Bird and Circ as operators. Copenhagen chose 10. So winning these licenses was absolutely the key to success.

City authorities wanted providers to be good partners, offering safety and good management. Parking spaces were also a bugbear.

Then came COVID-19.

E-scooter and e-bike companies have since lain fallow and unused as Europe has gone into lock-down.

But the firing-gun has been cocked for the potential restart of the wars, now that Spain and Italy have loosened-up their lockdowns.

One of the first out of the gate has been Helbiz, which today launches Helbiz Unlimited, a subscription service that allows users worldwide to take unlimited 30-minute trips on its e-bikes and e-scooters every month. The subscription renews every 30 days and will be offered indefinitely.

To boost its initiative, Helbiz has partnered with the Italian government’s COVID-19 Task Force.

Salvatore Palella, founder and CEO of Helbiz, said in a statement today: “More and more cities and municipalities are recognizing the benefits of micro-mobility solutions, and we’re continuing to work closely with these local government institutions to expand our sustainable fleets to meet the increasing demand.”

Helbiz is collaborating directly with Dr. Filomena Maggino, the head of the Control Room for Benessere Italia — the movement for Italy’s post-virus reconstruction — and the head of the Council of Ministers. She also leads the Mobility Delegation in the Task Force, responsible for how the country moves following this pandemic.

At €29.99 a month, Helbiz Unlimited will cost less than €1 a day and allows users to ride Helbiz’s fleet of e-scooters or e-bikes for 30 minutes at a time. In Italy, the company currently operates a fleet of 6,000 e-scooters and e-bicycles in Milan, Turin, Verona and Rome. By next month, the fleet will be increased to more than 8,000 vehicles. In addition to operating across Italy, Helbiz Unlimited will also be offered in all of Helbiz’s markets, which include Milan, Madrid, Belgrade, Washington, DC, Alexandria, Arlington and Miami.

Cities may look on e-mobility more favorably, post-COVID-19. They don’t cram people into public transport and are generally thought to be environmentally friendly.

While Helbiz isn’t about to take over from giants like Lime or Bird at this point, the move is simply a further indicator of how turbulent this market will be, especially in the pandemic era.

Sramana Mitra: Double-click down one more level for me and tell me how. Ann Marie Sastry: So, we do this by selecting articles, ranking, and then training algorithms to select articles that are...

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