Sramana Mitra: It sounds like you switched from that open-source based services company to a product company. That product company is SignalWire? Anthony Minessale: Yes. Sramana Mitra: Did you build...

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Sramana Mitra: What happened to the $200,000 worth of pre-orders? Were you able to fulfill it? Zain Jaffer: No. We knew that there was a demand, but we underestimated how long it would take to build...

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Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a bit about how you built the company. You started in 2002. How did you get your first customers? How did you acquire them? Where did you focus? What was the...

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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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Sramana Mitra: What happened with Gokul? Zain Jaffer: Gokul became a very pivotal figure. When we got into Angel Pad, a lot of people didn’t believe in our idea. It was very disheartening. There must...

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HQ Trivia is dead. Today the company laid off its full staff of 25 and will cease operation of its trivia, sports and word guessing games, a source close to the company confirmed. You can watch the insane, drunken final episode here

HQ Trivia had a deal in the works to be acquired, but the buyer pulled out yesterday and investors aren’t willing to fund it any longer, CEO and co-founder Rus Yusupov said in a statement attained by CNN Business’ Kerry Flynn:

“We received an offer from an established business to acquire HQ and continue building our vision, had definitive agreements and legal docs, and a projected closing date of tomorrow, and for reasons we are still investigating, they suddenly changed their position and despite our best efforts, we were unable to reach an agreement,” Yusupov writes. “Unfortunately, our lead investors are no longer willing to fund the company, and so effective today, HQ will cease operations and move to dissolution. All employees and contractors will be terminated as of today.”

Launched in October 2017, TechCrunch wrote the first coverage of the 12-question live video trivia game started by two of the former Vine founders. Users could win real money by answering all the questions and not being eliminated in multiple daily games. HQ Trivia had raised more than $15 million, including a Series A led by Founders Fund. At one point it had more than 2.3 million concurrent players.

But eventually the novelty began to wear off. Cheaters came in, splitting the prize money down to just a few dollars or cents per winner. Copycats emerged internationally. Engineering issues led users to get kicked out of the game.

Then tragedy struck. Co-founder Colin Kroll passed away. That exacerbated internal problems at HQ Trivia. Product development was slow, leading users to grow tired of the game. New game types and viral features materialized too late.

A failed internal mutiny saw staffers prepare to petition the board to remove Yusupov from the CEO position. When he caught wind of the plot, organizers of the revolt were fired. Morale sunk. By July 2019, downloads were just 8% of their previous year’s, and 20% of the staff was laid off. HQ managed about 15 million all-time installs, peaking at 2 million in February 2018, while last month it had just 67,000, according to Sensor Tower.

The demise of HQ Trivia demonstrates the fickle nature of the gaming industry, and the startup scene as a whole. Momentary traction is no guarantee of future success. Products must continually evolve and adapt to their audience to stay relevant. And executives must forge ahead while communicating clearly with their teams, even amongst uncertainty, or find their companies withered by the rapid passing of time.

Want to spice up the bedroom without paying for pills or awkward visits to a sex therapist? A new app called Lover lets you take a sexual personality quiz, explore carnal knowledge tutorials and discretely figure out which turn-ons you share with your partner. Built by board-certified sexual medicine clinical psychologist Dr. Britney Blair, Lover launches today on iOS with $5 million in seed funding from Tinder founder Sean Rad and other investors.

“It is strange that there are such taboos around sex when it is something we all do…whether we enjoy ourselves or not. We think it is time to start the conversation around this important aspect of our health,” says Dr. Blair. “We believe Lover can help build confidence, facilitate communication, improve partner connection and just raise consciousness about sex and sexuality.”

A solid portion of Lover’s content is free for the first seven days, including audio guides to oral sex, video explainers on how to be generous in bed and multi-step “playlists” of content like “Getting Hard, Made Easy.” Lover charges $9.99 per month or $59.99 per year for continued access to themed educational materials like “Coreplay Not Foreplay” and “Fantasy To Reality” that are recommended based on the results of your sexual questionnaire.

“Almost 50% of women and 40% of men have a sexual complaint . . . [but] most people don’t realize how common and treatable their issues are,” Dr. Blair tells me. “In our [pre-launch tests] focused purely on erectile dysfunction, 62% of users reported improvements to their erections within three weeks of using the app. That’s pretty wild when you think Viagra’s efficacy rate is approximately 65% and it lasts only five hours.”

Startups like digital pharmacy Ro have scored $500 million valuations just 18 months after launch by prescribing and selling men’s health drugs like Viagra. Lover sees a market for education-based alternative approaches to sexual wellness.

Dr. Blair got interested in the space a decade ago after a Stanford grad school lecture illuminated how prevalent sexual problems are but how quickly they can be resolved with learning and communication. She teamed up with her CEO Jas Bagniewski, who’d been the manager of Europe’s largest e-commerce business, Zalando in the U.K., and a founder of City Deal that sold to Groupon. Bagniewski and fellow Lover co-founder Nick Pendle started European Casper mattress competitor Eve Sleep and brought it to IPO.

The plan is to combine Dr. Blair’s educational materials with Bagniewski and Pendle’s e-commerce chops to monetize Lover through subscriptions and eventually recommending products like sex toys for purchase. Now they have $5 million in seed funding led by Lerer Hippeau, and joined by Manta Ray Ventures, Oliver Samwer’s Global Founders Capital, Fabrice Grinda and Jose Marin. The cash will go toward building out an Android app and adding games that partners can play together in bed.

There are plenty of random sex tip websites out there. Lover tries to differentiate itself by personalizing content based on the results of a Myers-Briggs-esque quiz. This asks you how adventurous, communicative and assertive you are. You then receive a classification like “The Muse” with a few pages of explanation, for example, revealing how you like to inspire others while being the center of attention.

From there, Lover can suggest guides for mastering your own sexual personality or branching out into new behavior patterns. There’s also a feature copied from another app called XConfessions for figuring out what you and your partner like. You connect your apps and then separately swipe yes or no on questions about whether you’d like “having your partner drip candle wax on you” or “your partner dressing as a strict cop.” If you and they match, the app tells you both so you can try it out.

Overall, Lover’s content is a lot higher quality and more compassionate than where most people learn about sex: pornography. Having a real sexual medicine doctor overseeing the app lends credibility to Lover. And the design and tone throughout make you feel empowered rather than sleazy.

Still, Dr. Blair admits that “it’s hard to motivate people into behavioral change, people already have subscription apps on their phones and we may run into ‘subscription fatigue.’ ” People might feel natural paying for Viagra because the impact is obvious. The value of a subscription to sex tips might seem too vague or redundant to what’s free online.

To get a lot of users opening their wallets, not just their pants, Lover will need to do a better job of previewing what’s behind the paywall, and offering more interactivity that online content lacks. But if it can give users one unforgettable night thanks to its advice, it may be able to seduce them for the long-run.

In case you haven’t heard, VCs are loving on workplace software as of late, and productivity tools that help teams collaborate seem to be a particular frothy area of investment. A smattering of top VC firms and angels, including General Catalyst, First Round Capital, Bloomberg Beta, Biz Stone and Ellen Pao, are throwing their confidence behind a new productivity startup called Range.

The tool is focused around helping small teams collaborate, grow closer and track their work together. There are quite a few startups with this exact pitch, Range’s key advantage seem to sit with their founding team, which is helmed by Medium’s former head of engineering Dan Pupius, Jennifer Dennard (people ops at Medium) and Braden Kowitz, who was a design partner at GV. The company has used their network to build out an early network of customers, including teams at Twitter, Carta and Mozilla, as well as a network of VCs that are bankrolling their efforts.

The SF-based team tells me they have locked down $6 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst as they look to expand their customer base. I chatted with the very nice team of co-founders over a Zoom call and got to see how they used the product internally.

“I left Google to join Medium with [Ev Williams and Biz Stone], and we were experimenting with a bunch of different organizational practices, really trying to answer the question of why do companies get worse as they get bigger and could we deploy different management practices at Medium in order to prevent that issue,” Pupius told TechCrunch. “Through that journey we started building internal tools and we kind of saw this opportunity for software to intentionally encode a lot of the organizational processes or values, and then towards the end of my tenure at Medium, I reconnected with Braden and Jen and we just essentially decided to tackle the problem together.”

The core of the product is a bit of a replacement to stand-ups, prompting each user to note what they’re working on every morning, which they can tag to existing larger projects and which is then all interconnected and viewable by members of the specific Range team. The need for a product like this really highlights one of Slack’s big limitations, where even with threads, there really isn’t a great way for communications to be organized in a digestible manner. Every update in Slack drives a conversation that pushes salient info further up the history into obscurity, something that can especially harm remote teams.

Beyond check-ins, Range is also helping teams keep track of their objectives and meetings as well as team directories. The product has integration support with Google Docs, Google Calendar, Slack, Asana, Jira, GitHub, Trello, Quip, Figma and others to ensure that information isn’t getting further siloed by adding a new piece of productivity software to the mix. The product has a startup-friendly pricing structure; it’s free for teams under 10 and each additional member costs $14 per month. Pricing obviously gets a bit more customized when it comes to larger customers.

Range will likely draw some comparisons with Notion from an organization standpoint, though it also feels much more smoother as a result of being less open-ended. One of the more unique aspects of the product is that the top of the home screen isn’t centered on OKRs or analytics, rather it asks team members a new question every day meant to foster further bonding, and asks them to describe how they’re feeling with an emoji. It’s kind of silly, but the team hopes that short bursts of introspection can push teams closer together in subtle ways that collaboration software doesn’t usually enable.

“We found that people are doing really cool things but they’re not talking to each other about it,” Dennard told TechCrunch. “And so one of the advantages we have as a company is that we can actually help create that community for people.”

“If I was running Clearbanc by myself, it probably would have gone off the cliff eight times at this point,” says Clearbanc co-founder Andrew D’Souza. 

“If I were running the company by myself, it would be half its size,” adds Michele Romanow, Clearbanc’s other co-founder.

In addition to starting the $420 million-backed fintech company together, D’Souza and Romanow are in a relationship.

The two initially met at an event in San Francisco, and followed up with a friendly informational interview at a Mexican restaurant. D’Souza’s fundraising experience was a draw for Romanow, who at the time was looking for information about how to raise cash for her startup. Romanow ended up selling her company to Groupon, but her conversation with D’Souza helped to anchor the valuation. It was also the beginning of a relationship. 

When they started dating in 2014, they swapped war stories about company building. Their connection hinged on this initial commonality — D’Souza had fundraised all his businesses, whereas Romanow had bootstrapped. It was from these conversations that they created Clearbanc, the Canada-based VC firm that specializes in non-dilutive revenue share agreements for startups.

Startups with coupled co-founders at the helm are scoring big funding rounds and exiting companies. Julia and Kevin Hartz co-founded Eventbrite, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2018. Married couple Diane Greene and Mendel Rosenblum were on the co-founding team of VMware, which sold to Dell in 2015. The bond of a relationship may be a secret weapon in company building for new-wave tech startups, but that doesn’t come without risks, like co-founder disharmony, equity supermajority and even divorce.

“Just put the phone down.”

Talk to anyone with a co-founder title at a startup and you’ll find one trend: free time is nearly nonexistent. Couples running a business together say it’s advantageous to be on the same workday cycle. “When you’re working on the same business, you’re on the same cadence of when things are blowing up,” says Romanow. “So I know exactly why Andrew is on his phone. I know that if he doesn’t do this, I will have to do it.” 

NEXT Trucking co-founders Lidia Yan and Elton Chung have raised $125 million total for their logistics startup, including a $97 million Series C from Brookfield and Sequoia. The pair says that the company is a presence that’s fully built into their lives and their relationship at all times. While that may be great for a business, it’s not always great for their marriage. “We got into a momentum of talking about work all the time. Not only at the office but at home,” says Yan. The solution is a simple rule enforced by an iPhone alarm. All work-related talk must cease after 8pm every day after the alarm goes off. They also use free time on the weekends to go to restaurants in LA, one of their shared passions. 

Co-founder couples say that if you’re scaling a company, you’ll have to be okay with putting other life decisions on hold, like going on your honeymoon or having kids. 

Leslie Voorhees and Calley Means were married in 2016, but still haven’t taken their honeymoon. They co-founded Anomalie, a wedding dress customization startup that has raised $18.1 million. Instead of vacationing to Bora Bora the day after their wedding, the newlywed founders hopped on a plane to China, where Leslie stayed for a couple of months to set up the supply chain for Anomalie. The couple admits that even now, they don’t make time for their personal lives.

“We have not spent more than an hour of our entire marriage not talking about wedding dresses. It’s not necessarily the healthiest thing, but we’ve enjoyed obsessing about wedding dresses every day,” says Leslie.

Their skills complement each other: Calley’s superpower is that he can move fast, whereas Leslie is more methodical and good at setting up structure. While they say that being a co-founder couple has strengthened their bond, they’re working on setting boundaries. Being a founder means you have to sacrifice other areas of your life for the company. 

“Once we raise the Series D, we’ll start thinking about having kids,” jokes Calley — in what may not actually be a joke. 

Investors are warming up to married co-founders

Clearbanc wants to make it easier and faster for startups to raise growth capital. Their 20-minute term sheet product is meant to help founders raise money in 20 minutes, rather than the traditional 3 to 6 months the process typically takes. But how did investors react to Clearbanc’s co-founders relationship status? Not well, at first. 

A Clearbanc investor passed on an early round, explaining to D’Souza and Romanow that they would have backed either of them individually, but that they were worried about backing them as a couple, especially since they had only been dating for a year at that point.

“The same investor ended up coming in two rounds later at 100 times the valuation,” says D’Souza. This, they felt, proved that fear of investing in a couple was a false sense of increased risk.

It seems investors today agree. When the married co-founders of Apli, a Mexico-based on-demand recruiting platform, walked into the office of ALLVP, the fund wasn’t entirely sure about what it meant to invest in a company run by a married couple.

Founders Vera and Jose met while studying together at Harvard Business School before working at two separate Rocket Internet companies in Mexico and foundling Apli. The business model, product market fit and potential impact for the company were typical factors the fund mulled over before writing a check, but ALLVP also considered the founders’ married status.

“After some discussion, we decided to analyze the team as any other founding team,” says ALLVP partner Federico Antoni. Besides the obvious personal chemistry, there was a professional chemistry between Vera and Jose. “We weighed the risk of divorce and decided to take it. We gained a team fully invested in the company and one that could balance personal life and startup life.” 

Equity could pose another risk factor. Investors could be wary of founder couples depending on the equity structure. If their finances are combined, a co-founder couple could own a supermajority of a startup. Say two non-married founders owned 20% of a company — a co-founder couple whose finances are tied together would own 40%. Given this logic, VCs would inherently have more negotiating power if the founders aren’t financially linked.

VCs I talked to didn’t necessarily agree with that logic, though.

“The only thing with equity that matters to me is if the founders have enough,” says Andreessen Horowitz General Partner David Ulevitch. “Venture capital investments are inherently minority investments, so it’s really just about ensuring founders are motivated and rewarded for building something enduring.” 

But what happens when the dual identities of co-founder and spouse don’t work?

Divorce won’t necessarily be the demise of a startup

Sara and Josh Margulis founded Honeyfund, a honeymoon registry site, in 2006. The then-married couple appeared on Shark Tank in 2015, winning an investment from Kevin O’Leary. Sara says that Honeyfund is different from popular wedding startups like Zola and The Knot in that the core product is a crowdfunding platform enabling newly engaged couples to organize wedding and honeymoon financing. 

When Sara and Josh divorced in 2019, the first instinct was to sell the company. However, “the more we pulled apart professionally, the more opportunities I saw to organize the team the way I wanted to and push the priorities that I wanted,” Sara says. Ultimately, Sara decided she would buy her ex-husband out of the company and continue on a new trajectory as CEO. 

“If we hadn’t been working together, our separation process would have been different. There were truths that needed to be spoken that were emotionally difficult in a marriage, that I didn’t want to put on Josh in the middle of a big Target partnership launch.”

The genesis of their business was rooted in their own experience as a married couple. They’d won the affection of Sharks, operating in a $72 billion industry hinging on the commoditization of love and lasting marriage. But the honeymoon phase can’t last forever. Up to 50% of married couples in the United States will split, according to the American Psychological Association.  

Now, Margulis’ experience of divorcing her co-founder is informing new products and a marketing strategy as she continues to iterate on her startup.

Post-divorce, Margulis has been working on a content-focused strategy at Honeyfund that will include a book and a podcast centered around the idea of how couples can successfully navigate marriages. She’s sourcing 14 years’ worth of Honeyfund couples to be interviewed, along with research from psychologists and marriage experts to help couples avoid the doom she went through. 

The secret weapon

Co-founder couples are the first to eagerly point out an obvious advantage. Aligned passions, equal motivation, complementary skillsets and industry experience are a baseline for any co-founder relationship, married or non-married. But being married to your co-founder includes unique challenges like time management and setting boundaries in the boardroom and in the bedroom.

“Co-founder disputes are the number one early startup killer, but it doesn’t have to be that way,” writes Garry Tan, managing partner at Initialized Capital and former Y Combinator partner.

Co-founders aren’t always aligned on big decisions at the company. Is remote work allowed? Who do we accept funding from and how do we deploy capital? Who do we hire for a key executive role?

There are plenty of things to fight about when the stakes are high and your employees’ careers are at risk. And co-founder disharmony has been a key reason many startups flounder. But being proactive about conflict management rather than avoiding it is key — as is knowing when to get professional help from an executive coach or a therapist. This could help early-stage companies recalibrate and dodge turmoil. 

If this line of reasoning holds, co-founder couples may be at an advantage because they already have built-in communication tools in their relationship.

Ulevitch says that for him, couples as co-founders is not a turn off.

“Lots of co-founding teams fall apart, and it’s often to not really knowing each other very well, especially when the going gets tough. Couples actually solve for that aspect nicely.” Founders certainly back up this assertion. 

“One of the company values is to disagree and commit,” says NEXT Trucking’s Lidia Yan. In what she describes as a rare occasion when executives are not aligned on a decision, she says that a vote will take place, and then the team will all commit to the final decision. In order to mitigate risk, founders say it’s key to have well-defined job descriptions. Stay in your zone, and because you are partners, you should already trust each other with what each person is specialized at. 

Being married to your co-founder is a secret weapon, according to Helena Price Hambrecht and Woody Hambrecht.

Helena and Woody met during the pre-swipe era on OkCupid in 2012. “I had just joined the online dating space and saw this hot farmer dude. We were a 96% match, so I messaged him,” says Helena of how she first connected with her future husband. 

“I literally thought someone was catfishing me,” thought Woody upon reading Helena’s message. “There’s no way this person is writing me. It took me three or four times to write her back because I wasn’t sure if she was a real person.” 

After some back and forth, the two met at a dive bar in the San Francisco Richmond neighborhood on a date that culminated in drinking 40s and watching rap videos on their phones in the park. “It’s kind of hard to explain, but it was just so easy. We knew we were going to know each other for the rest of our lives. Maybe as friends, maybe more, we didn’t know.” They stayed friends for four years, and were married in 2018. 

Haus’ genesis was a combination of the founders’ backgrounds, and the direct-to-consumer aperitif brand just scored a $4.5 million seed round. Woody owned a wine and aperitif brand but felt that he wasn’t making a big enough impact. Helena, a Silicon Valley branding and production veteran, felt that Gen Z didn’t want to get drunk anymore, and millennials are tired of compulsory, expensive happy hours. In deciding where to put their money, younger consumers are thinking about their bodies, brand image, transparency, sustainability and authenticity.

Helena wondered why the same standards aren’t being applied to as big of an industry as liquor. Why was there not a Glossier or Everlane of alcohol? She felt that while there’s a massive opportunity with all these shifting consumer trends, no one can make a direct-to-consumer alcohol brand. Haus was born from what the founders say was a magic “techie married a wine maker” moment. Woody knew about a legal loophole that could allow the couple to build the Glossier of alcohol. 

“There’s this tiny sliver in the aperitif realm, where if a beverage is made of mostly grapes and is under 24% alcohol, it can be classed as a wine and sold DTC,” explains Helena. They had that idea when they had a three-month-old baby. “We do not have time to do this but we have to do it because it’s the best idea we’ll ever have in our life,” she says. 

“We have a tool kit. We are married. If we have a disagreement about something, we are going to work it out because we’re married. Our skillsets are so clearly defined so there’s not much friction. For us it’s this cool balance where we have two totally separate camps of expertise,” remarks Helena. 

Woody and Helena have another secret weapon. They work with a business coach who has a background in psychotherapy, and believe that all co-founders should go to therapy together, because it’s always deeper than just business. 

Talkspace’s Roni and Oren Frank would agree. Their journey to the mental health world started from a crisis within their own relationship.

“Our marriage was falling apart, and we eventually decided to give it a last chance in couples therapy.” It was the first time either of them had experienced therapy. It taught them how to communicate better, read each other and support each other better. It gave them tools to manage conflict. 

Therapy inspired Roni to leave her career as a software developer and go back to graduate school to study psychology. While studying, she says she was exposed to how broken the mental health system in America is.

Roni says that research showed 25% of Americans suffer from mental health complications, yet an entire two-thirds of that bucket has no access to mental health care. The two founders both felt passionate about fixing this problem based on how instrumental therapy was in rescuing their own marriage. They decided to launch a platform that lets patients and therapists communicate online. 

Talkspace, which wants to open access to mental healthcare, has now raised $110 million, most recently a $50 million Series D. The product ideation for the company was integral to the relationship, and the company now has more than 100 employees. But when Talkspace was a young, 10-person startup, it was a lot harder. Roni notes that the co-founder relationship provoked extreme anxiety.

“I didn’t sleep well, I didn’t eat well and I experienced burnout.” She says she had to force herself to place boundaries when it comes to being consumed with work. However, overall, her experience has been that sharing a mission and a goal empowers the marriage, a healthy inverse.

Co-founder couples rave about the experience of running a business with their spouse. It’s no doubt these companies are developing proprietary products, running winning marketing strategies and generating big rounds and exits.

The married co-founder dynamic appears to be great for business, but time will tell if it works as equally well for marriages.

Seed fundraising is rarely easy, but it certainly used to be a lot less complicated than it is today. In a simpler world, a seed investor (or maybe two) would lead a round, which meant that they would write the terms of the deal in a term sheet and then pass that document to their friends to flesh out the funds and eventually close the round. That universe of investors was small and (unfortunately) often cliquish, but everyone sort of knew each other and founders always knew at least who to start with in these early fundraises.

That world is long since gone, particularly at the seed stage. Now there are thousands of people who write checks into the earliest startup venture rounds, making it increasingly challenging for founders to find the right investors. “Pre-seed,” “seed,” “post-seed,” “seed extension,” “pre-Series A” and more terms get batted about, none of which are all that specific about what kinds of startups these investors actually invest in.

Worse, obvious metrics in the past that helped stack-rank investors — like size of potential check — have come to matter far less. In their place are more nuanced metrics like the ability to accelerate a deal to its closing. Today, your greatest lead investor may be the one who ends up writing the smallest check.

Given how much the landscape has changed, I wanted to do two things for founders thinking through a seed fundraise. First, I want to talk about how to strategize around a seed fundraise today, given the radical changes in the market over the past few years. Second, I want to talk about a couple of the archetypes of startup stages you see in the market today and discuss how to handle each of them.

This article focuses on “conventional” seed fundraising and doesn’t get into a bunch of alternative models of VC that I intend to explore in the coming weeks. If you thought traditional seed investing is complicated, wait until you see what the alternatives look like. The upshot, though, is that founders with the right strategy have more choices than ever, and, ultimately, that means there are more efficient ways to use capital to get the desired outcome for your startup.

Thinking through a seed fundraise strategy

Let’s get some preliminaries out of the way. This discussion assumes that you are a startup, looking to fundraise a seed round of some kind (i.e. you’re not looking to bootstrap your company) and that you are looking to close some sort of conventional venture capital round (i.e. not debt, but equity).

The problem with most seed fundraising advice is that it isn’t tailored to the specific stage of the startup under discussion. As I see it, there are now roughly six stages for startups before they reach scale. Those stages are:

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

As I write to you, SaaS and cloud stocks are busy setting fresh all-time highs and as we’ve seen, venture interest in modern software companies is pushing more money into the sector. But despite it appearing to be an incredibly good time to raise equity funding, venture debt and revenue-based financing appear to be having a moment.

So why are more folks talking about and raising debt to help power their startups, even when valuations are high and there is a lot of venture capital to be raised?

As with all explorations of complex, evolving trends, there’s no one answer. But, some data from a 2019-era survey on venture debt and a conversation I had with equity-free SaaS finance shop Element Finance’s John Gallagher (Element is a Scaleworks spinout) help explain what’s going on. Let’s start with how big the venture debt world is and how fast it is growing and then turn to what’s powering its expansion.

Rising debt

The data we’re going to discuss is directional and probably pretty accurate, which is just fine for what we want to do today: detail a general trend of rising venture debt volume over the past few years to confirm what we’ve presumed to be a trend for some time.

Thanks to a report from last year undertaken by Kruze (a startup accounting and HR consultancy), what the firm described as the “largest survey of the venture debt market” undertaken, including firms that “control well over half of the venture debt dollars in the United States,” here are estimated totals of domestic venture debt volumes for the past half-decade:

ActiveCampaign CEO Jason VandeBoom has built a disciplined, profitable business and scaled it to $40 million in 2017 revenue. The company was first bootstrapped using services, and later raised ~$20...

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Sramana Mitra: What year is this happening? Anthony Minessale: 2002. Sramana Mitra: What was the competitive landscape like? Were RingCentral and Grasshopper around? Anthony Minessale: It was right...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 473rd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, February 20, 2020, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Too often, people are asked to give away their insights and time for free. Jen Horonjeff, founder and CEO of healthcare startup Savvy, knows this first hand and is trying to change that by applying a cooperative model to her business.

As an infant, Horonjeff was diagnosed with juvenile idiopathic arthritis. Since then, she has been diagnosed with a number of autoimmune conditions. Seven years ago this month, she had a brain tumor removed.

“I’ve just always been somebody who’s been a patient,” Horonjeff tells TechCrunch.

Horonjeff’s experience in the health system led her to become a human factors engineer focused on human-centered design, she says. In that area, work centers on trying to fit the world to people with different abilities, rather than the other way around. From there, Horonjeff, who has her doctorate in environmental medicine, has been most interested in patient-centered outcomes.

“So what matters to patients and what affects their health and health behaviors outside of just the traditional things [are what] we’ve been looking at,” she says. “It was being on that side of the professional equation that I heard my colleagues and partners talking about wanting to help patients, but they were never talking with them. And what they were talking about were not the same priorities as the patient communities that I was part of. And because I’m very open about my condition, they kept coming to me to ask me to be that sole patient representative. When they kept coming back to me, that was really a signal of a diversity issue, since I am white with a Ph.D. in New York City.”

Horonjeff’s discomfort with the lack of diversity led her to become a matchmaker between healthcare innovators and patient communities. This is where the idea for Savvy was born.

As our guest this week, we had Deepak Jeevankumar, Managing Director at Dell Technologies Capital. We discussed his fund’s focus and preferences. PhonePass As for entrepreneur pitches, first up we...

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Cloud services security provider Qualys (Nasdaq: QLYS) recently announced its fourth-quarter results that failed to particularly impress the market. But the company is focusing on attracting the...

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

After having a good time with NEA’s Rick Yang last week, we thought we’d bring on another venture capitalist. So this week Danny and I had Elliott Robinson from Bessemer swing over for the show. As it turned out, he was about as correct as guest as possible as not only did the topics of the week line up with where he invests, he’s also friends with some of the folks that we discussed on the show.

So what did we talk about? A whole host of things including two rounds:

Then we turned to two new funds, including Battery’s battery of new capital vehicles that add up to $2 billion. In this part of the discussion we also touched on capital velocity, and why some firms are writing the same number of checks, but still need more capital. On the other end of the capital spectrum, Equal Ventures put together its first fund, and we riffed on the health of the micro-fund ecosystem.

The news run continued, with our trio touching on Airbnb’s recent financial results, and our wonderment about how to price the firm, the closure of Brandless (RIP), and the issues at SoftBank.

All that and we had to leave Lyft’s fascinating earnings and Uber’s profit promises alone as we ran a bit long with just that set of topics. A good week, and we’re back Monday morning!

Venture capital has been flooding the various subverticals under the robotics umbrella in recent years, and the construction space is one of the largest beneficiaries.

Last November, we surveyed 13 of the top robotics-focused VCs to find out which areas of robotics are exciting them most going into 2020. One of the most common areas of attention respondents highlighted were startups focused on construction and manufacturing. In 2019 alone, the robotics space saw roughly 600 venture-backed fundraising rounds, while construction companies successfully raised roughly 200 venture rounds.

With our 2020 Robotics + AI sessions event on the horizon in early March, we’re diving back into the sector to learn about the attributes of construction attracting robotics VCs the most and which types of startups VCs are actually writing checks for in 2020. We asked 16 leading people who actively invest in construction robotics and work at firms spanning early to growth-stage to share what’s exciting them most and where they see opportunity in the sector:

Rohit Sharma, True Ventures

True Ventures has been investing in industrial automation broadly for over 4 years, focusing on founders who bring technology to market that eliminates repetitive manual labor and multiplies human productivity by automating routine tasks.

Zain Jaffer: Just to set the context, Vungle was recently acquired by a private equity group called Blackstone for $780 million all cash. The transactions closed towards the end of 2019. At that...

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