I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I...

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Before the COVID-19 pandemic shook up the world and reshaped the economy, Boston was quietly setting records.

According to new venture data compiled by TechCrunch, the region set what was at least a local maximum in venture capital raised in the space of a single quarter in Q1 2020.

But while Boston’s startup market announced a number of huge rounds that bolstered its total venture dollars raised in the first quarter, there were signs of weakness: Deal volume was its best since Q2 2019, according to a set of data compiled and released by PwC and CB Insights, but was still a little under the pace set in 2018.

So Boston’s startups raised lots of money, but couldn’t match prior highs when it came to the number of checks written. And those results were largely recorded before COVID-19 shuttered the city. Since then, we’ve seen a number of area startups lay off staff, something we explored last week.

Now, with fresh data in hand, we can take a closer look at the city’s first quarter of 2020. To better understand what we’re unpacking, we asked a number of local venture capitalists to weigh in. Let’s look back at Boston’s Q1 as we stride into Q2 with the help of Venture Lane, .406 Ventures, Volition Capital and Flybridge Capital Partners.

The data

Starting with a programming note is counter-flow, but bear with us. TechCrunch is starting a regular, monthly series on Boston and its startup market. This is a second prelude of sorts. Normally we’d hold news and interviews for a later date so that we’d have plenty of material for a column. In the face of relentless change, however, we didn’t want to hold off on reporting and synthesizing new information. When things are more normal, our pace will follow.

Per PwC and CB Insights, here’s the last few quarters of data, along with a few yearly totals to draw you the picture we can now see:

Another startup has turned to downsizing and fund raising to help weather the uncertainty around the economy amid the global coronavirus health pandemic. People.ai, a predictive sales startup backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Iconiq, Lightspeed and other investors and last year valued at around $500 million, has laid off around 30 people, working out to about 18% of staff, TechCrunch has learned and confirmed.

Alongside that, the company has quietly raised a debt round in the “tens of millions of dollars” to make strategic investments in new products and potentially other moves.

Oleg Rogynskyy, the founder and CEO, said the layoffs were made not because business has slowed down, but to help the company shore up for whatever may lie ahead.

“We still have several years of runway with what we’ve raised,” he noted (it has raised just under $100 million in equity to date). “But no one knows the length of the downturn, so we wanted to make sure we could sustain the business through it.”

Specifically, the company is reducing its international footprint — big European customers that it already has on its books will now be handled from its U.S. offices rather than local outposts — and it is narrowing its scope to focus more on the core verticals that make up the majority of its current customer base.

He gave as an example the financial sector. “We create huge value for financial services industry but have moved the functionality for them out to next year so that we can focus on our currently served industries,” he said.

People.ai’s software tracks the full scope of communication touch points between sales teams and customers, supposedly negating the tedious manual process of activity logging for SDRs. The company’s machine learning tech is also meant to generate the average best way to close a deal — educating customer success teams about where salespeople may be deviating from a proven strategy.

People.ai is one of a number of well-funded tech startups that is making hard choices on business strategy, costs and staffing in the current climate.

Layoffs.fyi, which has been tallying those losing their jobs in the tech industry in the wake of the coronavirus (it’s based primarily on public reports with a view to providing lists of people for hire), says that as of today, there have been nearly 25,000 people laid off from 258 tech startups and other companies. With companies like Opendoor laying off some 600 people earlier this week, the numbers are ratcheting up quickly: just seven days ago, the number was just over 16,000.

In that context, People.ai cutting 30 may be a smaller increment in the bigger picture (even if for the individuals impacted, it’s just as harsh of an outcome). But it also underscores one of the key business themes of the moment.

Some businesses are getting directly hit by the pandemic — for example, house sales and transportation have all but halted, leaving companies in those categories scrambling to figure out how to get through the coming weeks and months and prepare for a potentially long haul of life and consumer and business behavior not looking like it did before January.

But other businesses, like People.ai, which provides predictive sales tools to help salespeople do their jobs better, is (for now at least) falling into that category of IT still in demand, perhaps even more than ever in a shrinking economy. In People.ai’s case, software to help salespeople have better sales conversations and ultimately conversions at a time when many customers might not be as quick to buy things is an idea that sells right now (so to speak).

Rogynskyy noted that more than 90% of customers that are up for renewal this quarter have either renewed or expanded their contracts, and it has been adding new large customers in recent weeks and months.

The company has also just closed a round of debt funding in the “tens of millions” of dollars to use for strategic investments.

It’s not disclosing the lender right now, but it opted for debt in part because it still has most of its most recent round — $60 million raised in May 2019 led by Iconiq — in the bank. Although investors would have been willing to invest in another equity round, given that the company is in a healthy position right now, Rogynskyy said he preferred the debt option to have the money without the dilution that equity rounds bring.

The money will be used for strategic purposes and considering how to develop the product in the current climate. For example, with most people now working from home, and that looking to be a new kind of “normal” in office life (if not all the time, at least more of the time), that presents a new opportunity to develop products tailored for these remote workers.

There have been some M&A moves in tech in the last couple of weeks, and from what we understand People.ai has been approached as well as a possible buyer, target and partner. All of that for now is not something the company is considering, Rogynskyy said. “We’re focused on our own future growth and health and making sure we are here for a long time.”

If you have ever attended (or tuned into) one of Monzo’s many community events, you are likely familiar with the work of Simon Balmain. An early employee of the challenger bank, he has played a long-term role in helping to build Monzo’s customer support and community efforts and was often seen emceeing events.

Now TechCrunch has learned that Balmain is departing to join Sphere, the perpetually stealthy startup founded by Nick D’Aloisio, who previously founded news summary app Summly, which he famously sold to Yahoo at the age of 17 for a reported $30 million.

According to sources, former “Monzonaught” Balmain will be tasked with helping bolster Sphere’s community efforts. Sphere began life as a question and answer app that let you find and instantly chat to paid experts on a range of topics but has since pivoted to a chat app built from the ground up for groups.

“Sphere is a chat app for groups to feel closer and achieve more, together,” reads the App Store’s description. Features listed for Sphere Group Chat include the ability to create multiple chats for a single group; send highlighted announcements so no one in a group misses important messages; and send notifications to individuals or everyone who hasn’t read your message “in just one tap”.

Meanwhile, we first reported on London-based Sphere’s existence back in October 2017, after being tipped off by sources and uncovering regulatory filings revealing that D’Aloisio had raised funding from Index Ventures, and LocalGlobe (the early-stage VC firm founded by Robin and Saul Klein). And in March last year, the FT reported that Sphere had raised a total of $30 million, adding Michael Moritz as a backer, and noting that the startup had unusually remained in stealth for a whopping 2.5 years.

That was a whole year ago. With a newly recruited community specialist, a less opaque launch is unlikely to be too far away.

Bradley Tusk has carved a unique path in the VC investment landscape: A longtime political and communications operative, he has built a track record for Tusk Ventures by going after highly regulated industries, rather than shying away from them.

Whether it is ride-hailing, sports betting, cannabis or myriad other regulated sectors, Tusk takes the approach that laws are ultimately malleable, and if a service is popular, its users can mobilize to effect change.

Given his unique perspective, it was great to have him join us this week in an Extra Crunch Live call — our new initiative here at TechCrunch to bring tech-world thought leaders right to your screens.

In our conversation, Tusk talked about edtech, telemedicine, cannabis, mobile voting, biotech, pandemics and the future of regulated industries in this dastardly economic environment. We’ve transcribed a handful of his answers to our and our readers’ questions and have embedded the entire video below the fold.

We’ve edited his written answers for clarity and brevity.

Does working from home have to mean sitting in a chatroom all day or always being available for a video call?

Real-time chat and video platforms are great for building camaraderie and maintaining a sense of connection with remote teams, but when you need to focus for a few hours, it can be tough to tune out the endless GIFs and notifications.

Some of the most successful fully remote companies (like GitLab, or Zapier) have promoted the benefits of asynchronous communication — a fancy way of saying that not every conversation needs to happen in real time. Your server is down? You probably need to have that conversation now. Brainstorming a new feature? That might work best when everyone has a bit more time to think between responses. The key is acknowledging the strengths of both synchronous and asynchronous communications — and finding the right mix.

Doist co-founder Amir Salihefendic has been an async advocate for years. After leading a team spread around the globe to build popular task management tool Todoist, he set out to build Twist, a tool specifically built for conversations that deserve a longer shelf life.

I chatted with Amir last week to hear his thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of both approaches, how he balances the two (and handles emergencies) and why he has focused heavily on making async a part of his company’s culture. Here’s a transcript of our chat, lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: How big is Doist now?

Amir Salihefendic: I think we are about 73 people spread around 30 different countries now. [We’re on] most of the continents around the world.

Why’d you go remote in the first place? What made you make that call?

We are in the midst of an anthropological event. An unprecedented situation. A moment of history that we are living. That posterity will read about. I have received requests from my readers to...

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Stripe raises new funding, Uber acknowledges financial uncertainty and a controversial facial recognition startup accidentally exposes its source code.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 17, 2020.

1. Stripe raises $600M at $36B valuation in Series G extension, says it has $2B on its balance sheet

The economy may be contracting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, but promising startups are still continuing to raise money to shore up finances for whatever may lie ahead.

The latest development: Stripe, a well-known payments unicorn, announced that it had raised another $600 million in new capital, money that it plans to use to continue investing in product development, further global expansion and strategic initiatives.

2. Uber withdraws 2020 guidance

“Given the evolving nature of COVID-19 and the uncertainty it has caused for every industry in every part of the world, it is impossible to predict with precision the pandemic’s cumulative impact on our future financial results,” Uber said in a statement.

3. Security lapse exposed Clearview AI source code

The controversial facial recognition startup allows its law enforcement users to take a picture of a person, upload it and match it against its alleged database of 3 billion images, which the company scraped from public social media profiles. And for a time, a misconfigured server exposed the company’s internal files, apps and source code for anyone on the internet to find.

4. Changing policy, Y Combinator cuts its pro rata stake and makes investments case-by-case

Under its new policy, the accelerator is reducing its pro rata investment size from 7% to 4% and is only investing on a case-by-case basis going forward. Apparently the portfolio has gotten too large for blanket investments, and some of the limited partners who back the accelerator’s operations are balking at making commitments to the pro rata program.

5. Announcing the Extra Crunch Live event series

First up: We’ll be chatting with Aileen Lee (former KPCB partner, founder and managing director at Cowboy.vc and coiner of the term “Unicorn”) and Ted Wang (Cowboy.vc partner, former partner at Fenwick & West, and former outside counsel to Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Square and more) on Monday, April 20. And yes, you’ll need to be an Extra Crunch member to tune in.

6. NASA reveals ambitious multi-spacecraft plan to bring a piece of Mars back to Earth

NASA has said many times that it intends to collect a sample from Mars and return it to Earth. But how will the organization go about scooping up soil from the surface of a distant planet and getting it back here? With a newly-revealed plan that sounds straight out of sci-fi.

7. Facebook’s annual virtual reality conference goes virtual-only

Facebook announced that it will be shelving the in-person component of its virtual reality-focused Oculus Connect 7 conference due to COVID-19 concerns and focusing on a digital format. Although the company hadn’t announced dates for the event, the conference is typically held in late September or early October.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Airbnb has ended its contracts with contingent workers early and postponed summer internships, Protocol reports. Contractors at Airbnb serve as property inspectors, home consultants and more.

Contractors will reportedly receive no less than two weeks’ pay after receiving notice from their temp agencies.

Airbnb will also reportedly delay hiring undergraduate students until next year. TechCrunch has since heard from an incoming intern that he was notified yesterday and that he’s now scrambling to find a new internship.

“I’m devastated about the decision, both because I turned down many competitive offers in favor of Airbnb and because they made the decision so late that it will be incredibly difficult to find new opportunities in such a short time frame,” Ray Iyer, a computer science major at Stanford, told TechCrunch . :I’m relying on social media resources like LinkedIn to directly source opportunities, and this has led to some promising leads. Nonetheless, with the state of the virus and the fact that most internships will have to be remote, very few companies are hiring right now. I am graduating next year, and this summer was an opportunity to get my foot in the door and alleviate the stress of full-time recruiting in these uncertain times. I’m definitely going to put in my best effort to find a suitable replacement opportunity.:

Airbnb is not the only tech company to cancel internships amid the COVID-19 pandemic. In March, Yelp canceled its summer internship and TC’s Natasha Mascarenhas has since learned StubHub, Glassdoor, Funding Circle and Checkr have also canceled their respective internships.

These personnel changes come just one day after Airbnb secured a $1 billion loan. Earlier this month, Airbnb raised an additional $1 billion in debt and equity.

TechCrunch has reached out to Airbnb and will update this story if we hear back.

Additional reporting by Natasha Mascarenhas. 

Vox Media is making a number of cutbacks in response to the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic.

In addition to Vox itself, the digital media company owns properties including Curbed, Eater, Recode, SB Nation and The Verge — and it acquired New York Magazine last year.

In a staff memo obtained by TechCrunch (and others), CEO Jim Bankoff outlined several cost-cutting measures but no outright layoffs.

The measures including furloughing 9% of employees from May 1 to July 31. Bankoff said this will include some employees in sales, sales support, production, events, IT and office operations, along with editorial staff at SB Nation and Curbed. He also said affected employees will retain their company health insurance during this period.

In addition, the company is freezing wages through the end of 2020, pausing its 401K match, reducing hours for 1% of employees and cutting salaries during the same three-month furlough period for employees making more than $130,000 per year — the cuts start at 15%, with Bankoff and Vox Media President Pam Wasserstein taking a 50% salary reduction.

In explaining the layoffs, Bankoff pointed to the broader economic collapse caused by the pandemic, with the dramatic reduction in ad spending, which has led many other media companies to announce layoffs and/or salary reductions.

Bankoff wrote:

We’ve already seen a decline in our business. Weakness in March, driven by the cancellations of SXSW and March Madness, the collapse of travel, sports and fashion-related advertising, and other factors led us to miss our revenue goals by several million dollars in the first quarter; the impact will be significantly greater in the second quarter. While expressing the severity of this decline, it’s also important to know that we will rebound. We don’t know when or to what extent a rebound will occur. I’d be overjoyed if it happened quickly, but we cannot bet our company on these hopes.

Update: The Vox Media Union has been tweeting in response to the news, painting the current plan as the result of negotiation:

While we appreciate Vox Media talking to us in good faith, we don’t agree with the company’s decision to furlough employees — especially after hundreds of us told the company we were willing to take wider pay cuts to save all jobs. So we fought for strong protections. We won a guarantee of no layoffs, no additional furloughs, and no additional pay cuts through July 31, along with enhanced severance for any layoffs that occur in August-December. The company also agreed to reduce the number of furloughs.

Messente CEO Lauri Kinkar takes us into a country that has done amazingly well in developing a technology and startup culture. Fascinating! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your...

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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Joshua Posamentier, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Congruent Ventures, a firm focused on sustainability oriented technology ventures. Mark N...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 482nd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, April 23, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

Yesterday news broke that Robinhood is on the hunt for new capital at a roughly flat valuation, per friend of the blog Katie Roof. If you are a bit confused by the news, I understand. Robinhood went through a gauntlet of bad press and user complaints after it suffered from some embarrassing downtime back in March, and isn’t the capital market for private companies in rough shape?

But the round is more reasonable than you’d think, namely because Robinhood’s revenue has reached real scale, and, like other savings and investing-focused financial applications, it’s enjoying a boom in demand. Showing that there’s buzz in helping people save, let’s talk about Robinhood briefly and dig into some other metrics from its loose cohort of companies (including M1 Finance, more about them in a moment) .

Growth

As per a Market and Market report, the Enterprise Collaboration Market is expected to grow at 9% CAGR to $48.1 billion by 2024. The current socially distanced world will most likely accelerate this...

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Codementor, an online education platform for software developers, is launching Code Against COVID-19 to match volunteers with software projects to fight the pandemic. The initiative, which Codementor is not making money from, wants to connect coders with universities, non-profits, local government agencies and other organizations.

Some of the programs Code Against COVID-19 is currently working with include Safe Paths and Covid Watch, both of which are developing tools to stop the spread of COVID-19 while safeguarding personal privacy. It has also connected developers to grassroots projects like Hospital@home and a UX designer working on a geofencing app to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Codementor’s platform includes hundreds of thousands of developers around the world. After seeing that many organizations and government agencies needed coders to work on COVID-19-related software, Codementor surveyed its community. Founder and CEO Weiting Liu said 98% of respondents said they were willing to donate their skills, and Code Against COVID-19 was created to quickly match coders to projects.

So far, more than 200 developers have signed up to work for free or for longer-term projects at a discount.

Liu is from Taiwan, which despite its close proximity to China has managed to prevent a major outbreak of COVID-19 without lockdowns.

Liu told TechCrunch that Codementor’s team was inspired by the success of software projects lead by the country’s Digital Minister Audrey Tang, including a citywide alert system in Taipei and maps that let users track the real-time inventory of rationed masks at nearby pharmacies to avoid waiting in long lines.

“If you believe software can change the world, this is a perfect example,” Liu said, adding that Codementor’s Taiwan-based team members want to help other countries. “We’re fortunate with the situation in Taiwan, we’re not locked down at home with our kids, we’re relatively safe, so we can just try to help the community.”

Other developer volunteer programs include Coding Dojo’s Tech for America, which is providing web development support to small businesses, and Help with COVID.

Schools have been closed for the past month in France. That’s why French startup Molotov is leveraging its over-the-top TV service to offer content for children of all ages. In particular, the company has partnered with SchoolMouv, a company that offers videos, exercises and more.

Dubbed “Molotov for School”, the new section lets you find videos that are appropriate for your kid. It aggregates all TV content related to education from France 4, Arte, TF1, M6, etc.

In addition to that curation effort, users can browse SchoolMouv videos from the app. There are around 1,000 lessons that cover all grounds in middle school and high school. SchoolMouv usually charges €30 per month for its service (currently on sale at €15).

Molotov is offering SchoolMouv videos for free until May 15. You can’t access interactive exercises but you can still view all of the company’s videos for the next month. You don’t have to enter your credit card information.

Finally, Molotov also offers a selection of documentaries about historical events and science topics. While many parents spend a lot of time interacting with teachers to make sure that their children stay on track, Molotov could be useful when parents are just too busy.

Molotov is using this opportunity to report that it now has 10 million registered users. Last year, when Altice announced that it would acquire a majority stake in Molotov, the startup had 7 million registered users. The deal with Altice fell through and Molotov remains an independent company.

On-demand mobility, when done successfully, strikes a balance between demand and supply while providing reliable service and making a profit. It’s a sweet spot that can be difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Autofleet, a startup that develops fleet optimization software to redirect underused vehicles into ride-hailing and delivery services, wants to solve that mission impossible. Now, the company founded by former Avis and Gett employees, has raised $7.5 million in seed and Series A funding to expand into international markets and grow its research and development team.

The Series A was led by MizMaa Ventures, with participation from Maniv Mobility, Next Gear Ventures and Liil Ventures. Its seed financing was led by Maniv Mobility.

Autofleet developed a fleet management platform that can be used by rental car companies, car sharing operators and automakers to launch or better manage mobility services. The platform includes a booking app and integrations to delivery services, demand prediction, pooling and optimization algorithms as well as a driver app, and control center. The company also has developed a simulator tool that lets operators plan how a fleet will be deployed before a single vehicle hits the road.

For example, a rental company with abundant inventory and little demand for traditional multi-day contracts could use the platform to launch and then manage a car-sharing service. Autofleet already has partnerships with Avis Budget Group, Zipcar, Keolis and Suzuki .

That focus on managing supply side constraints is what attracted Maniv Mobility to invest in the seed and Series A rounds, according the firm’s general partner Olaf Sakkers.

Autofleet’s biggest markets today are in Europe and the U.S., CEO Kobi Eisenberg told TechCrunch. The company is seeing early traction and fast growth in Latin America and Asia-Pacific. Eisenberg said they plan to double down on these markets. The company also expects to announce a partnership in Asia to accelerate growth in that region.

Autofleet is also looking for new opportunities for how vehicle fleets can be used, including ways to help micromobility companies improve their unit economics, according to Eisenberg.

In this age of COVID-19 — when asset-heavy businesses like rental car companies have seen their businesses upended — Autofleet has already discovered new uses for its platform. The platform is being used to help companies shift fleets to meet today’s demand for logistics and medical transportation. Autofleet is also selling its platform to companies looking to leverage their vehicle assets for their delivery services.

“We’re hearing from fleet partners around the globe who are experiencing dramatic drops in demand, and therefore significant portions of their fleet and drivers are un-utilized,” Eisenberg said. “At the same time, we have seen a sharp increase in demand for delivery services from businesses across all verticals: retail and supermarkets, restaurants.”

Whenever a platform breaks out, companies emerge to seize on its reach by building their services or products atop it. It happened with Facebook and Twitter and Slack. Now, it’s happening with Zoom, the video conferencing company that took the world by storm earlier this year as the coronavirus sent people around the globe indoors and into self-imposed isolation.

It’s not a brand-new trend. Plenty of companies are selling their wares through the Zoom App Marketplace, which launched in the fall of 2018 and now features 18 pages of providers. But Grain, founded in 2018 in San Francisco, might be the first to build its entire business around it, at least as a starting point.

What is that business? According to co-founder and CEO Mike Adams, the idea is to capture content in Zoom calls that can be saved and shared across platforms, including Twitter, Discord, Notion, Slack and iMessages.

Say a student wants to take notes; he or she can record part of what a teacher is saying to save or share with classmates, without having to rewatch an entire lecture. The same is true in work settings. By using Grain, a colleague can flag the most important bits of information that was conveyed, then share just those bits via a clip that has its own unique URL.

Grain also transcribes content in clips and allows users to turn on closed captions if they choose.

The video clips can range from 30 seconds up to 10 minutes. They can also be strung together into reels to create summary highlights. (These have no time limit.) Not last, users can trim or adjust the length of the highlight after it has been recorded, as well as control who else can edit the video afterward to prevent nefarious actors from manipulating the snippets.

Adams says he and his brother, Jake — a former software engineer at Branch Metrics with whom he co-founded the company — are even using Grain to save snippets of precious moments on Zoom involving nieces and nephews, though the focus is very much on the companies and schools that will pay on a per-seat basis for the software.

Indeed, Adams says the idea for Grain was really born at the last company he co-founded: MissionU, a Zoom-based one-year alternative to a traditional college whose students weren’t asked for tuition but instead agreed to hand over up to 15% of their incomes for three years once they landed a job that paid $50,000 or more.

MissionU — which was founded in 2016 and raised $11.5 million from investors — sold to WeWork in 2018 in a stock deal before its students earned anything (they were released from their income-sharing agreements). Still, the experiment was long enough that Adams, who left MissionU at the time of the sale, says he saw firsthand the need for better tools to help students capture what’s important in their online content.

The question, of course, is whether Zoom also sees the opportunity. Relying so heavily on another company is always a risk. (See Facebook and Twitter and the long list of third-party developers that have been burned by both companies.)

If Zoom, which is starting to make venture-like bets, were an investor in Grain, it might help inoculate it from potential competition down the road.

Still, that it isn’t didn’t dissuade other investors who are betting that Zoom will prove friend and not foe. In fact, late last year, Grain raised $4 million over two seed rounds from a long list of notable investors, including Acrew Capital, Founder Collective, Peterson Partners, Slack Fund, NextWorld Capital, Kickstart Seed Fund, Scott Belsky, Sriram Krishnan, Andreas Klinger, Scooter Braun and others.

Now its 11-person team is ready to take the wraps off what they’ve been building in beta with some of that capital.

Certainly, Grain — which plans to eventually integrate with numerous other companies — could do worse as springboards go than Zoom, one of the rare new breakout platform companies in memory and a tool that, early this week, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison called an “essential service” that will change how work is done.

Zoom has long been powered by viral end user adoption, enjoying growth internally and externally because of the nature of video conferencing across companies. Now, its pick-up as a consumer company is following a similar trajectory, with a high percentage of new users who are invited to Zoom calls eventually signing up for the service so that they can themselves host a call.

If Grain gets lucky, some percentage of that percentage will also discover Grain.