Sramana Mitra: What was the insight in terms of customer acquisition for instance? What clicked? Nishant Shah: When you’re growing the business and you’re bootstrapping it, it always depends on how...
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Vestiaire Collective just closed another big round of funding in the middle of an economic crisis — the round closed in early April. The startup raised $64.2 million (€59 million) and the company has raised more than €209 million in total, according to Crunchbase. Vestiaire Collective operates a marketplace of pre-owned fashion items. Users can both sell and buy clothes and accessories on the platform.
There’s a huge list of investors in today’s round — Korelya Capital, Fidelity International-managed funds, Vaultier7, Cuit Invest and existing investors Eurazeo (Eurazeo Growth and Idinvest Venture funds), Bpifrance, Vitruvian Partners, Condé Nast, Luxury Tech Fund and Vestiaire Collective CEO Max Bittner are all participating.
With 9 million members across 90 countries, Vestiaire Collective has become a huge marketplace. And it makes sense that an e-commerce website focused on pre-owned items is working well. There has been a ton of backlash against fast fashion over the past few years.
People now also value circular business models as it becomes more affordable to refresh your wardrobe, especially during an economic crisis, and it is better for the environment.
As always, Vestiaire Collective will use the new influx of cash to expand to more countries. In particular, with Korelya Capital as a new backer, the company will expand to South Korea and Japan this year. While the company started in France, 80% of transactions are now cross-border transactions.
Originally, Vestiaire Collective asked you to send your items to its warehouses to check them before putting them on sale. The startup has been betting on direct shipping from the seller to the buyer in Europe and it has been working well. You can get reimbursed if there’s something wrong with what you ordered though.
Direct shipping has been available in Europe since September 2019 and it now represents over 50% of orders in the region. Up next, Vestiaire Collective will introduce direct shipping in the U.S. this summer and in Asia by the end of 2020.
A lot of startups have answered the call for more personal protective equipment (PPE) and other essentials to support healthcare workers in their efforts to curb the spread and impact of COVID-19. One of those is direct-to-consumer 3D-printed eyewear brand Fitz, which is employing its custom-fit glasses technology to build protective, prescription specs for front-line healthcare workers in need of the best protection they can get.
Fitz Protect is a version of Fitz’s eyewear that uses the same custom measurement tool Fitz created for use via its iOS app, made possible by Apple’s depth-sensing Face ID camera on newer iPhones and all iPad Pro models. The app allows virtual try-on, and provides millimeter-level accurate measurements for a custom fit. Protect is a version of the glasses that still supports a wide range of prescriptions, but that also extends further like safety glasses to provide more coverage and guard against errant entry of any fluids through the eyes.
Healthcare professionals are doing what they can to ensure their face, mouth, nose and eyes are protected from any coughs, sneezes or other droplet-spreading activity from COVID-19 patients that could pass on the infection. These measures have more broadly focused on face shields that feature a single transparent plastic sheet, and N95 masks (and alternatives when not available) to protect the mouth and nose.
Fitz CEO Gabriel Schlumberger explained via email that the design for Fitz Protect came from working front-line doctors and nurses from New York, LA and Texas who were all looking for something to source prescription protective eyewear.
“More than 60% of doctors are glasses wearers, and current guidance is for them to stop wearing contact lenses,” Schlumberger explained, adding that Fitz Protect is also designed to be worn in conjunction with a face shield, when that’s an available option, to provide yet another layer of defense.
“We heard from prescription glasses wearers that their standard glasses didn’t provide anywhere near adequate coverage, especially over the eyebrows, and in some cases they were adding cardboard cut-outs,” he said. “We leveraged our existing system to create something much better. ”
Fitz’s model also helps on the pricing side because it’s already designed to be an aggressively cost-competitive offering when compared to traditional prescription eyewear. Their glasses typically retail for just $95 including frames, lenses and shipping, and are also offered in a $185 per year unlimited frame membership plan. For doctors, nurses and hospital staff, the entire cost of Fitz Protect is being waived, and the company is seeking donations to help offset its own manufacturing costs, which currently stand at around $100 per set, though process improvements should bring that down, according to Schlumberger, as they expand availability.
Already, he said that nearly 3,000 healthcare professionals have signed up to receive a pair in their first week of availability, so they’re working on adding scale to keep up with the unexpected demand.
Building a startup is hard enough. But COVID-19, our generation’s worst plot twist, gives new meaning to uncertainty and stress. No one had “pandemic” on their early-stage startup’s radar, which begs the question: How do you move your business forward in unprecedented times?
It’s a huge challenge, and we’ve worked hard to find a way to help you keep momentum in the face of lockdowns and travel restrictions. Drumroll please — the Digital Startup Alley Package, a virtual exhibition for startups at Disrupt SF (September 14-16).
Accept no virtual substitutes. Disrupt is the OG of startup conferences, and TechCrunch has the resources and industry connections to replicate the Startup Alley experience as a truly world-class virtual event.
The Digital Startup Alley Package lets early-stage, pre-Series A startups disrupt from home for only $445. Digital Startup Alley kicks off early, and it runs through the end of the physical event in September. Place your startup in front of thousands of influential investors, technologists, customers and media — with months to pitch, demo, network and schedule meetings.
The Digital Startup Alley Package covers three people and includes:
CrunchMatch: TechCrunch’s AI-powered founder/investor networking platform. Save time, zero in and connect with the people who can move your business forward. Each startup will create a customizable profile, allowing startups to easily note their value add and business model to potential customers and investors.
Exceptional Pitch Coaching: Grab a brew and join TechCrunch editors for Pitchers and Pitches — an interactive opportunity to learn from the best. Whip your pitch into shape with the team that coaches the Startup Battlefield competitors.
Exposure to Investors: Exhibiting startups will be included in a deck available exclusively to investors attending Disrupt SF.
Exhibitor Guide: The definitive resource to Startup Alley and Disrupt SF — modified to reflect our digital exhibitors. Plus, you get access to the content included with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass.
Exclusive Founder Webinars: All Startup Alley exhibitors will get exclusive access to the brightest industry minds to hear their current thinking on ways startups can adapt and thrive both during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pro Tip: Come September, if you can exhibit at Disrupt SF in person, you can upgrade your package and still enjoy the benefits of Digital Startup Alley.
Remember, founders don’t quit — they adapt and move forward. Buy your Digital Startup Alley Package today.
TechCrunch is mindful of the COVID-19 issue and its impact on live events. You can follow our updates here.
It would be easy to assume that Verizon’s purchase last week of video-conferencing tool BlueJeans was an opportunistic move to capitalize on the sudden shift to remote work, but the ball began rolling last June and has implications far beyond current work-from-home requirements.
The video-chat darling of the moment is Zoom, but BlueJeans is considered by many to be the enterprise tool of choice. The problem, it seems, is that it had grown as far as it could on its own and went looking for a larger partner to help it reach the next level.
BlueJeans started working with Verizon (which owns this publication) as an authorized reseller before the talks turned toward a deeper relationship that culminated in the acquisition. Assuming the deal passes regulatory scrutiny, Verizon will use its emerging 5G technology to produce much more advanced video-conferencing scenarios.
We spoke to the principals involved in this deal and several industry experts to get a sense of where this could lead. As with any large company buying a startup, outcomes are uncertain; sometimes the acquired company gets lost in the larger corporate bureaucracy, and sometimes additional resources will help grow the company much faster than it could have on its own.
After being forced to quickly shift plans and stage a remote demo day last month following the outbreak of COVID-19 stateside, Y Combinator announced today that they will officially be fully moving their next batch to a remote format.
In a post today on Y Combinator’s site, YC CEO Michael Seibel announced the move. “We have decided to run the S20 batch remotely, because amid the COVID-19 crises, the safety of founders and YC staff is our top priority.”
The Summer 2020 group of founders will operate fully online with interviews, office hours, evening talks and meetups taking place over video conferencing. This could assumedly extend to the group’s demo day as well, though that was not explicitly stated. Y Combinator had given startups in the most recent class the option to defer an onstage launch until a later Demo Day; it seems that those YC startups may not get that option for 2020.
As YC shifts online, questions are sure to only grow on whether founders are still getting a good deal from the accelerator in the midst of a crisis.
Founders joining the program give up a 7% slice of their company in exchange for $150K and, more importantly, access to YC’s network and group of advisors.
Y Combinator has already been scaling rapidly with larger class sizes, and this move will force the company to add a radical format change to the mix. Accelerator batches have ballooned in size in recent years, tapping out at 240 startups in this most recent class.
To account for these larger groups, YC has had to experiment with major format changes in how startups are grouped internally and how they present to investors. Losing their Demo Day last session meant founders lost easy access to in-person introductions with the large group of VCs that typically flock to the event.
Last week, TechCrunch reported that YC was changing the terms of its pro rata investment program and would be investing in startups on a case-by-case basis, shifting their years-old policy of investing in every company’s seed and Series A rounds.
Joshua Posamentier is Co-founder and Managing Partner at Congruent Ventures, a firm focused on sustainability oriented technology ventures.
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We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. This is a wonderful one. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and...
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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Late last week a Chinese company called Kingsoft Cloud filed to go public in the United States. The cloud infrastructure business intends to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol “KC,” with J.P. Morgan, UBS and Credit Suisse helping out with running the deal.
Kingsoft Cloud has a $100 million placeholder figure in its F-1 filing, giving us an idea of its expectations for the size of the public offering. According to Crunchbase data, Kingsoft Cloud raised nearly $1 billion while private.
There are a few questions to answer:
Does Kingsoft compete with Alibaba’s cloud projects that the Chinese tech giant just promised to spend $28 billion building out? Is it an economically viable business?What are we supposed to think about an IPO in this economy?
The best founders seek out great mentors and guidance from folks who know best, but during the coronavirus pandemic, asking for help when it’s needed is critical for all entrepreneurs.
Ureeka, a startup founded by Melissa Bradley, David Jakubowski and Rob Gatto, is looking to provide that mentorship and guidance through their platform, which just closed on an $8.6 million funding round from Bullpen Capital, Chicago Ventures and Salesforce Ventures.
“There is an intentionality in our business to go after what we see as the fastest growing, largest and most interesting market opportunity, which is not the Harvard and MIT pedigree, but underrepresented entrepreneurs,” said Bradley. “Small and medium businesses account for 99 percent of all business in this country and there has been a real missed opportunity around serving them.”
The company says that female led venture-backed business performance is 63 percent higher than investments in all male teams, while the same businesses have 12 percent higher revenue and use 33 percent less capital, with a 15-25 percent lower failure rate. Since the recent recessions, businesses owned by people of color are the fastest growing segment, with 38 percent growth between 2008 and 2012, according to Ureeka. Meanwhile, Hispanic-owned businesses have seen 46 percent growth from 2007 to 2012, with $700 billion in sales globally, creating 8 million jobs with a total payroll of $254 billion, the startup says.
Ureeka pairs these entrepreneurs with mentors and coaches to get answers to their most pressing questions. The idea for the startup came when the cofounders were judging a pitch competition in Michigan and got to talking about the challenges associated with starting a company, particularly for underrepresented founders.
The Ureeka founders noted that black, hispanic and women founders begin businesses with approximately half of the capital that white men do, on average, and that loan rejection is three times higher for minority entrepreneurs than their white counterparts.
“In talking with Melissa, I realized that there are some basic things I was taking for granted,” said Jakubowski, formerly Head of Data & Analytics, Emerging Business & Partnerships at Facebook . “For example, I could pick up the phone and have an answer to my question in 30 minutes.”
After testing for months, Jakubowski and Bradley (Managing Director of Project 500, adjunct professor at Georgetown’s Business school and presidential appointee under both President Clinton and President Obama) launched Ureeka to give access to mentorship to underrepresented small and medium business owners, agnostic of sector or region.
These entrepreneurs can hop on the platform with a question and get an answer from a mentor or coach in under two hours. Mentors, experts from just about any sector of business, give their time to the platform for free. Coaches, on the other hand, are paid contractors (many of whom have their own business or operational position at a large company). Ureeka members can also start up conversations with other members, and access on-demand webinar-style content on topics that are common to the whole community, such as adapting to the coronavirus pandemic.
Ureeka has more than 200 mentors on the platform, many of whom hail from companies like Facebook, Snap, Salesforce, Google, and Adobe, among others. Ureeka members can also pay a premium ($3,000/year) to have access to a dedicated coach, who can then follow along with the various questions and issues that arise and ultimately skip over the exposition and context-gathering part of the conversation. Those that opt for a dedicated coach get two hours each month of one-to-one video chat with their coach.
Alongside the funding announcement, Ureeka is also announcing that it will be facilitating the SMB grant programs from Facebook and Salesforce. Facebook’s grant program will provide $100 million to SMBs in the United States, and Salesforce’s Small Business Grants will provide $10,000 individually to SMBs.
According to the company, Ureeka members see 2x revenue growth once they’re connected to mentors and coaches, and the founders noted that many Ureeka members graduate to mentors or coaches and pay it forward to new members.
The for-profit business charges $200/year for members to join, and the company takes less than 15 percent margin. Ureeka is also waiving its fee for all businesses impacted by coronavirus through 2020.
The company also has a vendor partnership program, helping members find the right vendor for their need without being overwhelmed by thousands of Google search results. In fact, many vendors are Ureeka members themselves, creating a virtuous circle within the Ureeka community. Big corporations that would like to be included in the Ureeka vendor program must provide a dedicated line of communication for the Ureeka community.
Twins have long played a role in the world of medical research, specifically in the area of clinical trials, where they can help measure the effectiveness of a therapy by applying a control to one of a genetically-similar pair. Today, a startup founded by a former principal scientist at Pfizer, which has developed a way of digitising this concept through the use of AI, is announcing some funding to further its efforts. Unlearn.AI, which has built a machine learning platform that builds “digital twin” profiles of patients that become the controls in clinical trials — is announcing that it has raised $12 million in a Series A round.
The round is being led by 8VC with previous investors DCVC, DCVC Bio and Mubadala Capital Ventures also participating.
The startup’s DiGenesis platform is first being applied to neurological diseases, specifically Alzheimer’s Disease and Multiple Sclerosis, where effective treatment options remain an elusive goal and it has been hard to build clinical trials around patients with already-impacted health.
Although Unlearn.AI is not working on anything close to medicines related to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s a timely reminder of why improving clinical trials is important. We’re now in an urgent race to find vaccines and treatments for this new virus, and that highlights the need for more efficient approaches to trials, and that is an area where AI could prove to be a boost.
Unlearn does not disclose who its commercial partners are today, nor how far they’ve come with active, live trials. It was in discussions with regulators before the coronavirus outbreak halted everything. The funding will be used to inch closer to commercial rollouts, it seems.
“This new financing marks an important milestone in our growth and will contribute to the significant progress we are making with regulators and with our commercial partners, who are already running studies with Digital Twins and demonstrating their value in generating robust evidence and increasing the potential for trial success,” said Charles K. Fisher, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Unlearn.AI, in a statement.
“Clinical trials are facing a number of persistent challenges that have only been exacerbated in recent weeks. With support from our forward-thinking investors and industry partners, we are excited to continue growing our exceptional team and advancing the science behind our first-of-its-kind Digital Twin approach.”
Fisher’s background is one that falls squarely at the nexus of technology and medical research. In addition to time spent as a principal scientist at pharma giant Pfizer, he has also worked at Leap Motion, and those roles followed years of studying and researching biophysics in academia.
Unlearn approaches the idea of building these so-called digital twins as a classic machine learning problem, using “clinical trial datasets from thousands of patients to build the disease-specific machine learning models used to create Digital Twins and their corresponding virtual medical records.”
These are more than simple medical profiles: they match people according to demographics, lab tests and biomarkers. The idea is that by building AI-based twins, there is less of a need to find similar actual pairs of people — actual twins, even — to run tests and controls.
Unlearn has been working on its platform since 2017, but the use of twins (and the pair’s very close genetic makeups in medical research) to track pathology and treatments goes back decades, and interestingly one of the novel coronavirus tracking apps that has seen some strong traction was borne out of a long-term twins study run out of Kings College Hospital in London working with Stanford and Massachusetts General Hospital in the US.
The growth of using AI to build “people” to run the effects of drugs also follows a much bigger theme of using computers and algorithms to test and create chemical combinations and therapies that would have in the past taken much longer, and cost much more, to run out manually. (Another example of where this is being applied is in the world of product development, where consumer goods companies are using AI platforms to formulate new soaps and other goods.)
“Unlearn’s pioneering use of Digital Twins will limit the number of patients that need to go on placebo while also reducing overall trial enrollment time,” said 8VC Principal, Dr Francisco Gimenez, in a statement. “As investors at the intersection of healthcare and technology, we’re passionate about companies that pair cutting-edge computational techniques and innovative business models to meaningfully improve patient care. 8VC is excited to partner with Unlearn to bring about the biggest change in the drug approval process since the RCT.” Gimenez is joining the board of the startup with this round.
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 481st 1Mby1M Roundtable April 16, 2020: Joshua Posamentier, Congruent Ventures
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Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, and you should check it out.
This morning, however, we had a lot to get through, so let’s go over the show’s rundown:
Changes are afoot in Israel regarding employee comp and startup valuations.The UK is coming to the aid of its startups at a notable cost.Alibaba is dropping serious coin on new cloud infra, reminding us that there’s more to the world than Washington state.Alan, a French insurtech startup, has raised $54.4 million.It’s earnings week, with a number of major tech companies joining other large American companies in reporting results. Q1 2020 is whatever. What everyone wants to know is how bad the rest of the year is going to be.And, finally, Marc’s latest essay. I should probably write about it more broadly, but as we said this morning: “Aspirational construction of the future is a concept that many people associate with America,” and demanding that we harken back to our halcyon days is no sin. That said, we’ll need to do work as a country to set the groundwork needed to make an explosion in entrepreneurship and building possible — like providing healthcare to all citizens so that folks can quit their jobs without losing care, making room for new businesses to rise.
Still, it’s good for Marc to get hyped up and mad at our current state, and he has the money to do something about it. So, let’s see what he does about it.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
Mountain View-based Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK), the largest online marketplace that enables businesses to find and work with highly-skilled freelancers, has been making several changes to revive its...
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In these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very...
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This report from the Nature Journal presents the landscape of Covid-19 vaccine development including the current stage of development of various projects, profiles of vaccine developers, and leading...
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French startup Alan has raised a $54.4 million (€50 million) Series C funding round. Temasek is leading the round with existing investors (such as Index Ventures) also participating. Overall, Alan has raised $136 million (€125 million) over the past four years.
Alan has built a health insurance product for the French market. The company first started with a well-designed insurance product and wants to tackle all things related to your personal health in the future.
The startup isn’t partnering with an existing insurance company. It has obtained an official health insurance license. Compared to legacy products, Alan wants to be as transparent as possible with clear pricing and policies.
Alan has a huge market opportunity in France as every employee is covered by both the national health care system and private insurance companies.
In addition to its health insurance product, the company has been working on multiple products to help you stay on top of your health. For instance, Alan has partnered with Livi so that can easily schedule telemedicine appointments.
Alan has launched a directory of doctors around you. With Alan Map, you can easily find a health practitioner without any surprise — the company tries to predict how much you’re going to pay so that you can check if you’re 100% covered.
You can also use Alan to keep track of your past appointments, get the phone number of a doctor you’ve already interacted with and more.
Just like fintech companies are building apps that act as financial hubs, Alan wants to become a health hub. Whenever you have a question, you need a piece of information or you want to get reimbursed on your health appointments, Alan wants to become the entry point for those use cases.
More recently, Alan has worked on some content about the coronavirus outbreak and COVID-19 symptoms. You can create an account and talk to a doctor through Livi for free. You can also get two months free on a Headspace subscription in case you’re looking for a meditation app.
With today’s funding round, Alan plans to expand to other countries. It has already opened offices in Spain and Belgium and the company wants to be available all around Europe within five years.
Alan currently covers 76,000 people. It represents $63 million (€58 million) in revenue. At the end of 2018, Alan’s insurance covered 27,000 people. As you can see, the company is growing nicely.
After mounting pressure from the U.K. tech startup ecosystem, and much debate, the British government today unveiled plans for a new “Future Fund” designed to ensure high-growth companies — namely, startups — across the U.K. receive enough investment to remain viable during the coronavirus crisis.
Initially, the U.K. government is pledging a total of £250 million of taxpayer’s money to the new fund (delivered via the British Business Bank). To unlock the investment — which looks to be in the form of a convertible loan note — businesses must secure an equal or greater amount of match funding from private investors, and be a U.K. registered private company that has previously raised at least £250,000 in private investment in the last five years.
The Future Fund is pegged to launch in May, and will see the U.K. government invest between £125,000 and £5 million in qualifying startups. It also says the scale of the fund will be kept “under review,” suggesting more taxpayer money could be committed in future. Applications will initially be open until the end of September.
Meanwhile, there’s some confusion with regards to how the Future Fund’s convertible loans will work in practice. Early reports of the U.K. treasury’s plans stated that “the loans will convert to equity if not repaid,” leading some to believe that there would be an option to repay the loan instead of having it convert to equity during a company’s next funding round.
However, critics point out that if a straightforward repayment option did exist, the U.K. taxpayer would be exposed to all of the downside with very little or none of the upside. In practice, the best performing companies would likely choose to repay the loan and the worst performing companies (or at least those that don’t go bust entirely) would opt to convert to equity.
Or, put simply, a convertible loan note system that automatically converts is favourable because the U.K. government needs to hold discounted equity in the startups that don’t go bust to offset against the ones that do.
Thankfully, despite shoddy initial communication and a number of people with the ear of the government arguing for a repayment option, I understand from sources with knowledge of the treasury’s plans that conversion to equity will be mandatory, except in a few specific scenarios and at a significant premium (“100% redemption premium” plus interest i.e. if the loan is paid back instead of being converted, the taxpayer will make more than a 2x return).
I’ve asked the HMT Press Office for formal clarification and will update this post if and when I hear back. (update: a partial term sheet published by HMT offers some further details.)
Separate from the new Future Fund, the U.K. government is also pledging £750 million of targeted support for what it describes as “the most R&D intensive small and medium size firms,” although it looks like a portion is previously committed money. The cash will be made available through Innovate UK’s existing grants and loan scheme.
“Innovate UK (the national innovation agency) will accelerate up to £200m of grant and loan payments for its 2,500 existing Innovate UK customers on an opt-in basis,” says the U.K. treasury.
“An extra £550m will also be made available to increase support for existing customers and £175,000 of support will be offered to around 1,200 firms not currently in receipt of Innovate UK funding”.
The first of these Innovate UK payments will be made by “mid-May”.
Welcome to a look back at the past week in security and what it means for you. Each week we’ll look at the big news of the week and why it matters.
What will the world look like after the coronavirus pandemic subsides?
Some of us are now in our fifth week of sheltering in place, but there’s no fixed end-date in sight. We’ve gone from a period of confusion and concern to testing and mitigation. Now we’re starting to look ahead at the world post-coronavirus. Things still have to get done. But how do we regain a semblance of normality in the middle of a pandemic?
Tech can be the answer but it’s not a panacea; Apple and Google have explained more about their contact tracing efforts to help better understand the spread of the virus seems promising. But privacy concerns and worries that the system could be abused have raised justified concerns. On the other hand, with a U.S. presidential election slated for later this year, many experts want tech out of the picture in favor of a secure solution that uses paper ballots.
Will tech save the day, or will it kick us while we’re down? Let’s dive in.
This year’s U.S. presidential election will still go ahead — it’s in the constitution as an immutable fact — but a pandemic throws a wrench in the works.
But security experts say electronic voting isn’t secure or resilient enough to protect from foreign interference. Even the more established mobile voting offerings have been shown to be deeply flawed.
Forget the calendar invite. Just jump into a conversation. That’s the idea powering a fresh batch of social startups poised to take advantage of our cleared schedules amidst quarantine. But they could also change the way we work and socialize long after COVID-19 by bringing the free-flowing, ad-hoc communication of parties and open office plans online. While “Live” has become synonymous with performative streaming, these new apps instead spread the limelight across several users as well as the task, game, or discussion at hand.
The most buzzy of these startups is Clubhouse, an audio-based social network where people can spontaneously jump into voice chat rooms together. You see the unlabeled rooms of all the people you follow, and you can join to talk or just listen along, milling around to find what interests you. High-energy rooms attract crowds while slower ones see participants slip out to join other chat circles.
Clubhouse blew up this weekend on VC Twitter as people scrambled for exclusive invites, humblebragged about their membership, or made fun of everyone’s FOMO. For now, there’s no public app or access. The name Clubhouse perfectly captures how people long to be part of the in-crowd.
Clubhouse was built by Paul Davison, who previously founded serendipitous offline people-meeting location app Highlight and reveal-your-whole-camera-roll app Shorts before his team was acquired by Pinterest in 2016. This year he debuted his Alpha Exploration Co startup studio and launched Talkshow for instantly broadcasting radio-style call-in shows. Spontaneity is the thread that ties Davison’s work together, whether its for making new friends, sharing your life, transmitting your thoughts, or having a discussion.
It’s very early days for Clubhouse. It doesn’t even have a website. Don’t confuse it with the similarly named Clubhouse.io. There’s no telling exactly what it will be like if or when it officially launches, and Davison and his co-founder Rohan Seth declined to comment. But the positive reception shows a desire for a more immediate, multi-media approach to discussion that updates what Twitter did with text.
What quarantine has revealed is that when you separate everyone, spontaneity is a big thing you miss. In your office, that could be having a random watercooler chat with a co-worker or commenting aloud about something funny you found on the internet. At a party, it could be wandering up to chat with group of people because you know one of them or overhear something interesting. That’s lacking while we’re stuck home since we’ve stigmatized randomly phoning a friend, differing to asynchronous text despite its lack of urgency.
Clubhouse founder Paul Davison. Image Credit: JD Lasica
Scheduled Zoom calls, utilitarian Slack threads, and endless email chains don’t capture the thrill of surprise or the joy of conversation that giddily revs up as people riff off each other’s ideas. But smart app developers are also realizing that spontaneity doesn’t mean constantly interrupting people’s life or workflow. They give people the power to decide when they are or aren’t available or signal that they’re not to be disturbed so they’re only thrust into social connection when they want it.
Houseparty chart ranks via AppAnnie
Houseparty embodies this spontaneity. It’s become the breakout hit of quarantine by letting people on a whim join group video chat rooms with friends the second they open the app. It saw 50 million downloads in a month, up 70X over its pre-COVID levels in some places. It’s become the #1 social app in 82 countries including the US, and #1 overall in 16 countries.
Originally built for gaming, Discord lets communities spontaneously connect through persistent video, voice, and chat rooms. It’s seen a 50% increase in US daily voice users with spikes in shelter-in-place early adopter states like California, New York, New Jersey, and Washington. Bunch, for video chat overlayed on mobile gaming, is also climbing the charts and going mainstream with its user base shifting to become majority female as they talk for 1.5 million minutes per day. Both apps make it easy to join up with pals and pick something to play together.
Enterprise video chat tools are adapting to spontaneity as an alternative to heavy-handed, pre-meditated Zoom calls. There’s been a backlash as people realize they don’t get anything done by scheduling back-to-back video chats all day.
Loom lets you quickly record and send a video clip to co-workers that they can watch at their leisure, with back-and-forth conversation sped up because videos are uploaded as they’re shot. Around overlays small circular video windows atop your screen so you can instantly communicate with colleagues while most of your desktop stays focused on your actual work. Screen exists as a tiny widget that can launch a collaborative screenshare where everyone gets a cursor to control the shared window so they can improvisationally code, design, write, and annotate.Screen
While visual communication has been the breakout feature of our mobile phones by allowing us to show where we are, shelter-in-place means we don’t have much to show. That’s expanded the opportunity for tools that take a less-is-more approach to spontaneous communication. Whether for remote partying or rapid problem solving, new apps beyond Clubhouse are incorporating voice rather than just video. Voice offers a way to rapidly exchange information and feel present together without dominating our workspace or attention, or forcing people into an uncomfortable spotlight.
High Fidelity is Second Life co-founder Philip Rosedale’s $72 million-funded current startup. After recently pivoting away from building a virtual reality co-working tool, High Fidelity has begun testing a voice and headphones-based online event platform and gathering place. The early beta lets users move their dot around a map and hear the voice of anyone close to them with spatial audio so voices get louder as you get closer to someone, and shift between your ears as you move past them. You can spontaneously approach and depart little clusters of dots to explore different conversations within earshot.
An unofficial mockup of High Fidelity’s early tests. Image Credits: DigitalGlobe (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
High Fidelity is currently using a satellite photo of Burning Man as its test map. It allows DJs to set up in different corners, and listeners to stroll between them or walk off with a friend to chat, similar to the real offline event. Since Burning Man was cancelled this year, High Fidelity could potentially be a candidate for holding the scheduled virtual version the organizers have promised.
Houseparty’s former CEO Ben Rubin and Skype GM of engineering Brian Meek are building a spontaneous teamwork tool called Slashtalk. While Rubin left, Houseparty sold to Fortnite-maker Epic in mid-2019, but the gaming giant largely neglected the app until its recent quarantine-driven success.
His new startup’s site explains that “/talk is an anti-meeting tool for fast, decentralized conversations. We believe most meetings can be eliminated if the right people are connected at the right time to discuss the right topics, for just as long as necessary.” It lets people quickly jump into a voice or video chat to get something sorted without delaying until a calendared collab session.
Slashtalk co-founder Ben Rubin at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2015
Whether for work or play, these spontaneous apps can conjure times from our more unstructured youth. Whether sifting through the cafeteria or school yard, seeing who else is at the mall, walking through halls of open doors in college dorms, or hanging at the student union or campus square, the pre-adult years offer many opportunities for impromptu social interation.
As we age and move into our separate homes, we literally erect walls that limit our ability to perceive the social cues that signal that someone’s available for unprompted communication. That’s spawned apps like Down To Lunch and Snapchat acquisition Zenly, and Facebook’s upcoming Messenger status feature designed to break through those barriers and make it feel less desperate to ask someone to hang out offline.
But while socializing or collaborating IRL requires transportation logistics and usually a plan, the new social apps discussed here bring us together instantly, thereby eliminating the need to schedule togetherness ahead of time. Gone too are the geographic limits restraining you to connect only with those within a reasonable commute. Digitally, you can pick from your whole network. And quarantines have further opened our options by emptying parts of our calendars.
Absent those frictions, what shines through is our intention. We can connect with who we want and accomplish what we want. Spontaneous apps open the channel so our impulsive human nature can shine through.
For more of this author Josh Constine’s product analysis, subscribe to his newsletter Moving Product
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