Summer camp for adults and beloved tech-free weekend getaway Camp Grounded ground to a halt in 2017. Its big-hearted founder, Levi Felix, who’d espoused the joys of trading screens for nature walks, was tragically killed by brain cancer at just age 32. Left in his wake was a mourning community that had lost their digital detox rally just as everyone was realizing the importance of looking up from their phones.

As an attendee, I’d been impressed by how the founder (known as Professor Fidget Wigglesworth at camp) used playfulness and presence to transport us back to childhood, before we got hooked on the internet. But he also broke people’s addiction to shame, mandating that anyone who screwed up in a sports game or talent show announce “I’m awesome,” and be met with a cheer from the crowd, “you’re awesome!”

Luckily, one of Felix’s elementary school friends, Forest Bronzan, wants to write a happier ending to this story. Almost three years after it went into hibernation following its creator’s death, Bronzan has acquired Camp Grounded and its parent company Digital Detox .

Camp Grounded will relaunch in May 2020 as two back-to-back weekend retreats at Northern California’s gorgeous Camp Mendocino. Attendees will again leave their devices in Tech Check lockers run by hazmat-suit wearing staffers, assume nicknames and stop the work talk. They’ll get to play in the woods like technology never existed, indulging in Camp Grounded favorites, from archery to arts & crafts to bonfire singalongs about enthusiastic consent. However, to simplify logistics, Camp Grounded will no longer hold sessions in New York, North Carolina or Texas.

The company will also organize more four-hour Unplugged Nights in cities around the country where partiers can switch off their phones and make new friends. The idea is to give a broader range of people a taste of the Grounded lifestyle in smaller doses. Those interested in early access to tickets for all of Digital Detox’s events can sign up here.

Meanwhile, Digital Detox will start a new business of education and certifications for K-12 schools, coaching teachers and parents on how to gently reduce students’ screentime. Schools will pay per student like a Software-as-a-Service model. Through research by a few PhDs, the company will recommend proper rules for using tech in and out of the classroom to minimize distraction, and empathetic penalties for violations.

The obvious question to ask, though, is if Bronzan is just some business guy coming to coin off the anti-tech trend and Felix’s legacy. “I’m not Apple coming in and buying the company. This isn’t a tech acquisition,” Bronzan insists at a coffee shop in San Francisco. “I knew Levi before anyone else knew Levi. We went trick-or-treating and played in school band together. I went to the first Digital Detox summit, and brought my company year after year. I’ve been involved from the beginning, seeing Levi’s passion and inspiration.”

Fidget had an innately soothing camp counselor vibe to him that Bronzan doesn’t quite capture. He’d previously built and sold Email Aptitude, a CRM and email agency, not an event or education business. But he truly seems to mean well, and he’s earned the support of Digital Detox’s team.

“My mission was to find someone that was as excited and ferocious as Levi and I were when we started Digital Detox to further it as a movement,” says Brooke Dean, Felix’s wife and co-founder. “It was imperative that the person running DD and CG had actually experienced the magic. This person had to be more than a lover of camp and nature, they also needed the hard skills and successful track record of running a company. Forest is stable, business-minded and also finds value in that very unique magic.”

Bronzan tells me the acquisition includes a cash component (“We’re not talking eight figures”) and a capital investment in the business, both funded by his email company’s exit. Two other individuals and one company had also expressed interest. Dean and Felix’s brother Zev will retain equity in the company, and she’ll stay on the board of directors. The trio are launching the Levi Felix Foundation that will donate money to brain cancer research.

While moving into education might seem like a left turn for Digital Detox after throwing events since 2012, Dean says, “Levi was planning on going back to school and was deeply interested in being an academic in this field. We always believed that there needed to be evidence in order to convince the masses that being outside and connecting with other human beings ‘IRL’ is critical to our health and longevity.”

Some alarming stats the organization has already uncovered include:

77% of people check or pretend to check their phone to avoid talking to others38% feel less connected to their partner or close friend due to cell phone useNearly 20% check their phone while having sex

“We want to eventually be the central source of tools on how tech is affecting lives and relationships at all age levels,” Bronzan tells me. It’s zeroing in on how compulsive behaviors like endless scrolling increase anxiety and depression, and how parents glued to their devices train children to not be present. The father of two kids under age five, Bronzan knows a weekend at camp in your 20s or 30s is too little too late to seriously address the crisis of fractured attention.

Digital Detox’s new CEO says he’s heartened by the progression of some of Felix’s ideals, as with the Time Well Spent movement. The screentime dashboards launched by tech companies don’t do enough to actually change people’s actions, he says, though, “They’re at least making some effort.” Digital Detox plans to launch a comprehensive quiz to determine how addicted you are to your phone, and Bronzan says he’d happily work with tech giants to integrate his company’s research.

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On the camp for adults front, we’ve seen Burning Man go mainstream but lose some of what made it special, including a lack of cell phone reception. It’s now common to see people on the playa staring at their phones, talking about work, and stressed about the clock — all of which are prohibited at Camp Grounded. Festivals like Coachella seem to get more corporate and less mindful each year. That leaves plenty of open space for Digital Detox to fill with purposeful breaks from the default world.

Bronzan also wants to introduce more surprise and serendipity to the event calendar. Camp Grounded will experiment with a “Mystery Trip” where eight to 10 people sign up to be whisked away, only receiving a confidential briefing package the day before they show up. The point is to extract people from their routines where unhealthy habits manifest. Without connectivity, Camp Grounded hopes people will forge new connections in their minds, and with each other.

I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but here’s the truth: Not all readers are created equal.

At least, that’s how things look from a user acquisition perspective, where publishers running ad campaigns to reach new readers might end up bringing in a whole bunch of random visitors who are unlikely to ever return their site again.

“It’s less about just getting eyeballs on the content,” said Jared Lansky, chief commercial officer at marketing startup Keywee. “Loyalty is just more valuable for publishers.”

Keywee (backed by Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors and The New York Times) is trying to solve this problem with a new feature called the Loyalty Score. Lansky told me that the score does exactly what the name suggests — it measures reader loyalty, based on how many times someone returns to the site and how many pages they view.

This, in turn, can help publishers make smarter decisions about growth. They can see which of the Facebook ad campaigns run through Keywee are actually bringing in loyal readers and which aren’t. And they can tweak the campaigns accordingly, targeting audiences and highlighting articles in a way that’s most likely to attract loyal readers rather than random visitors.

The score can also shape the way that publishers interact with visitors on their own site. For example, if they’re trying to build a subscription business, they can target their subscription offers and paywalls at readers with a higher Loyalty Score.

Lansky also noted that the data used to calculate the score comes from the Keywee pixel and the Facebook pixel, with no additional data collection required.

“Loyalty Score has given us a whole new world of insights into our user acquisition campaigns,” said Kiplinger.com Director of Digital Operations & Advertising Andy Price in a statement. “For example, we’re seeing that promoting content that talks about planning for retirement drives more return visitors than posts about saving money on groceries.”

Software will eat the world, as the saying goes, but in doing so, some developers are likely to get a little indigestion. That is to say, building products requires working with disparate and distributed teams, and while developers may have an ever-growing array of algorithms, APIs and technology at their disposal to do this, ironically the platforms to track it all haven’t evolved with the times. Now three developers have taken their own experience of that disconnect to create a new kind of platform, Linear, which they believe addresses the needs of software developers better by being faster and more intuitive. It’s bug tracking you actually want to use.

Today, Linear is announcing a seed round of $4.2 million led by Sequoia, with participation also from Index Ventures and a number of investors, startup founders and others that will also advise Linear as it grows. They include Dylan Field (Founder and CEO, Figma), Emily Choi (COO, Coinbase), Charlie Cheever (Co-Founder of Expo & Quora), Gustaf Alströmer (Partner, Y Combinator), Tikhon Berstram (Co-Founder, Parse), Larry Gadea (CEO, Envoy), Jude Gomila (CEO, Golden), James Smith (CEO, Bugsnag), Fred Stevens-Smith (CEO, Rainforest), Bobby Goodlatte, Marc McGabe, Julia DeWahl and others.

Cofounders Karri Saarinen, Tuomas Artman, and Jori Lallo — all Finnish but now based in the Bay Area — know something first-hand about software development and the trials and tribulations of working with disparate and distributed teams. Saarinen was previously the principal designer of Airbnb, as well as the first designer of Coinbase; Artman had been staff engineer and architect at Uber; and Lallo also had been at Coinbase as a senior engineer building its API and front end.

“When we worked at many startups and growth companies we felt that the tools weren’t matching the way we’re thinking or operating,” Saarinen said in an email interview. “It also seemed that no-one had took a fresh look at this as a design problem. We believe there is a much better, modern workflow waiting to be discovered. We believe creators should focus on the work they create, not tracking or reporting what they are doing. Managers should spend their time prioritizing and giving direction, not bugging their teams for updates. Running the process shouldn’t sap your team’s energy and come in the way of creating.”

All of that translates to, first and foremost, speed and a platform whose main purpose is to help you work faster. “While some say speed is not really a feature, we believe it’s the core foundation for tools you use daily,” Saarinen noted.

A ⌘K command calls up a menu of shortcuts to edit an issue’s status, assign a task, and more so that everything can be handled with keyboard shortcuts. Pages load quickly and synchronise in real time (and search updates alongside that). Users can work offline if they need to. And of course there is also a dark mode for night owls.

The platform is still very much in its early stages. It currently has three integrations based on some of the most common tools used by developers — GitHub (where you can link Pull Requests and close Linear issues on merge), Figma designs (where you can get image previews and embeds of Figma designs), and Slack (you can create issues from Slack and then get notifications on updates). There are plans to add more over time.

Indeed, speed is not the only aim with Linear. Saarinen also said another area they hope to address is general work practices, with a take that seems to echo a turn away from time spent on manual management and more focus on automating that process.

“Right now at many companies you have to manually move things around, schedule sprints, and all kinds of other minor things,” he said. “We think that next generation tools should have built in automated workflows that help teams and companies operate much more effectively. Teams shouldn’t spend a third or more of their time a week just for running the process.”

The last objective Linear is hoping to tackle is one that we’re often sorely lacking in the wider world, too: context.

“Companies are setting their high-level goals, roadmaps and teams work on projects,” he said. “Often leadership doesn’t have good visibility into what is actually happening and how projects are tracking. Teams and contributors don’t always have the context or understanding of why they are working on the things, since you cannot follow the chain from your task to the company goal. We think that there are ways to build Linear to be a real-time picture of what is happening in the company when it comes to building products, and give the necessary context to everyone.”

Linear is a late entrant in a world filled with collaboration apps, and specifically workflow and collaboration apps targeting the developer community. These include not just Slack and GitHub, but Atlassian’s Trello and Jira, as well as Asana, Basecamp and many more.

Saarinen would not be drawn out on which of these (or others) that it sees as direct competition, noting that none are addressing developer issues of speed, ease of use and context as well as Linear is.

“There are many tools in the market and many companies are talking about making ‘work better,'” he said. “And while there are many issue tracking and project management tools, they are not supporting the workflow of the individual and team. A lot of the value these tools sell is around tracking work that happens, not actually helping people to be more effective. Since our focus is on the individual contributor and intelligent integration with their workflow, we can support them better and as a side effect makes the information in the system more up to date.”

Stephanie Zhan, the partner at Sequoia whose speciality is seed and Series A investments and who has led this round, said that Linear first came on her radar when it first launched its private beta (it’s still in private beta and has been running a waitlist to bring on new users. In that time it’s picked up hundreds of companies, including Pitch, Render, Albert, Curology, Spoke, Compound and YC startups including Middesk, Catch and Visly). The company had also been flagged by one of Sequoia’s Scouts, who invested earlier this year

Although Linear is based out of San Francisco, it’s interesting that the three founders’ roots are in Finland (with Saarinen in Helsinki this week to speak at the Slush event), and brings up an emerging trend of Silicon Valley VCs looking at founders from further afield than just their own back yard.

“The interesting thing about Linear is that as they’re building a software company around the future of work, they’re also building a remote and distributed team themselves,” Zhan said. The company currently has only four employees.

In that vein, we (and others, it seems) had heard that Sequoia — which today invests in several Europe-based startups, including Tessian, Graphcore, Klarna, Tourlane, Evervault  and CEGX — has been considering establishing a more permanent presence in this part of the world, specifically in London.

Sources familiar with the firm, however, tell us that while it has been sounding out VCs at other firms, saying a London office is on the horizon might be premature, as there are as yet no plans to set up shop here. However, with more companies and European founders entering its portfolio, and as more conversations with VCs turn into decisions to make the leap to help Sequoia source more startups, we could see this strategy turning around quickly.

Splice is blowing up like a hit song. The audio sample marketplace has doubled revenue and user count in a year, and now reaches 3 million musicians. Many pay $7.99 for unlimited access, and 70% of subscribers visit weekly to hunt down the freshest and trendiest sounds to give their tracks that special something.

But words can’t always describe music. Searching by genre and subjective tags can take forever and leave artists frustrated when the sounds they find they don’t resonate right. So Splice has taught a machine learning algorithm to draw connections between samples. That allows it for the first time to recommend Similar Sounds to one a musician is currently listening to, based on their pitch, melody, rhythm, and harmonic profile. Sometimes the similarities are surprising — something only a machine could hear.

It’s an express lane down sonic rabbit hole. Splice is seeing a double-digit increase in artists successfully finding and downloading a sample after a search. That means more subscribers, and more creators relying on Splice to power their artistic process. No wonder Splice was able to raise a $57.5 million Series C from Union Square in March.

“Like with Google Reverse Image Search…now you can do that for any sound” says Splice co-founder and CEO Steve Martocci. “Lots of companies do machine learning that might help them on the backend but this is a real user feature that’s providing value.”

Prioritizing where to provide value next is Splice’s biggest challenge amidst hyper growth. The startup launched in 2013 as sort of a Github for music production that saved between every change so artists could revert to old versions and easily coordinate with collaborators. More recently it fought rampant digital instrument piracy by letting users pay a fee per month for access to popular but pricey synthesizers and plug-ins with a rent-to-own model.

Its breakout product has been the Splice Sounds marketplace where musicians preview 60 million audio samples per week from keyboard flourishes to snare drum hits. The snippets are royalty-free to use, leading many sourced from Splice to end up in chart-topping songs like Demi Lovato’s Billboard #1 “Sorry Not Sorry”. The platform charges $7.99 for unlimited access and splits the revenue with artists who create the sounds, to which Splice has paid out $20 million to date.

Yet once musicians narrow their search with keywords and genres based on tagging by Splice’s human staff, they still often have to scan through tons of sounds to find what feels right.

“People tell me their production process changed so much” Martocci says. “I know there’s one sound that’s close enough if I just keep pressing down on Splice.” With AI able to scan sounds to augment human tagging, and find the similarities to suggest related ones, “Now you might have to just press down once.” I hope to see Splice build new ways to browse Sounds beyond search so you can just follow your ears. It could also offer more ways for sound creators to stay in touch with their fans, as DJs are discovering some concert attendees love their samples more than their sets.

“My job is to keep as many people inspired to create as possible” beams Martocci, who famously sold his TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon chat app Group.Me to Skype for $85 million just a year after launching. Others want in to the sample business too, though. Music hardware maker Native Instruments launched a competing Sounds.com marketplace last year, while there’s another called Blend.

But Martocci is differentiating with new label deals like one with Spinnin’ Records that sees its artists specially producing sound packs for Splice. It’s not actually other startups that are the biggest limiting factor for Splice. “My biggest competition is people giving up on themselves or thinking they’re not musical” says Martocci.

A big part of maintaining that momentum for artists is making sure they get paid. Stem, Kobalt, Dubset, and more startups have emerged to clean up the messy royalties distribution process. Martocci admits he’s eyeing the space too. “Full disclosure: I think there’s a long-term future for Splice to play a part in doing it right across the board” he tells me. “The royalty-free ecosystem has been a great start for us to get people opening up the creative process and it’s just the beginning of making sense of the whole space.”

After a decade of musictech being a graveyard, Spotify’s success and its direct listing entrance to the stock market have reinvigorated the industry. Streaming grew to $4.3 billion in the first half of the year to make up 80% of US recorded music business. Payouts from streaming are convincing artists the age of the CD is gone and they need to embrace technology and new revenue streams.

That certainly seems to have emboldened Martocci. “We want to build a multi-generational business here. We want to build the most iconic company in music history!” That passion has attracted tons of part-time DJ / full-time techies to work at Splice, including Ale Koretzky, who previously invented AI music scanning tool tuneSplit, and former Patreon director of product Tim Wood. “We have our in-office studio that’s used every night by an employe. We have DJ equipment team members can rent out and use for their gigs” Martocci notes. “You need to have a team who understands the problems.”

Robotics and AI is one of the hottest scientific mashups in the tech industry today. If you play a role in these world-changing technologies, join us at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. What could be better than spending an entire day focused on melding minds with machines?

Well, how about exhibiting your early-stage startup to 1,500 of the world’s leading robotics and AI technologists, researchers, innovators and investors? It’s easy. Buy an Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package. The price includes four tickets, a 30-inch round highboy table, power, linen and a tabletop sign. Exhibitor space is limited, and we have only 11 tables left. Don’t miss this opportunity to showcase your work to people with the power to change the trajectory of your early-stage startup.

Want even more spotlight opportunity? Of course you do. This year, in addition to interviews, panel discussions, speakers, breakout sessions and Q&As, we’re adding a pitch competition. Founders of any early-stage startup focused on robotics and AI can participate. It’s free, and all you need to do is apply here by February 1.

TechCrunch will review all applications and select 10 startups to pitch at a private event on March 2. You’ll pitch to TechCrunch editors, main-stage speakers and industry experts. We’ll have a panel of VC judges there to narrow the field to five finalists. The following day, those teams will take to the Main Stage at TC Sessions: Robotics + AI and pitch to the attending masses.

Whether you exhibit or pitch — why not do both? — you’ll expose your startup to the top leaders and investors in robotics and AI. Opportunity’s knocking and it’s up to you to kick down the door.

The next TC Sessions: Robotics & AI takes place on March 3, 2020 at UC Berkeley. Get your business in front of the people who can help you achieve your startup dreams. Buy your Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package today.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Robotics & AI 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Sramana Mitra: What else is interesting in your strategy? Charles Miglietti: What we are building right now. We are building a series of ready-to-use applications that will be plugged into existing...

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For enterprises that want to move to the cloud, that actual move is often hard enough, but in the long run, being able to manage the life cycle of their cloud deployments is just as important. MontyCloud, which focuses on these kinds of Day-2 operations, today announced that it has raised a $2.85 million seed round led by Madrona Venture Group, which also included investments from Lytical Ventures and Bob Hammer, former CEO of Commvault.

In addition to the funding, the company today announced the launch of its multi-cloud management platform in the AWS marketplace, which, among other things, uses some AI-smarts to make management and governance for modern cloud infrastructure — and the applications that run on it — easier. Currently, the service focuses on AWS and will soon add support for Azure and other platforms as well.

The company was co-founded by its CEO Venkat Krishnamachari, whose experience includes opening new Azure data center regions for Microsoft, as well as time at AWS and Commvault. Krishnamachari tells me that the co-founders first bootstrapped the service themselves, up to the point where they had their first paying customers. Currently, the company has about 15 employees in India, in addition to a smaller core team in Seattle.

“It’s been a lot of fun understanding how enterprises consume new services — how they can get the outcome that they desire,” Krishnamachari said. With the proliferation of cloud accounts and policies around them, the large cloud platforms are getting harder to operate for many companies, all while they are also trying to move to a DevOps model and move faster. To help them, MontyCloud ties all of the accounts together and exposes them in the context of the applications that run on them. All of this, of course, also generates plenty of telemetry, which the company can then use to help these customers monitor their deployments and automate their routine maintenance, but also to optimize their cloud spend and improve MontyCloud’s own AI automation models.

With the new funding, the team plans to build out its technology and onboard more of the customers that it currently has in its pipeline. It also plans to expand its AI ops stack.

As Madrona venture partner Ted Kummert told me, he decided to invest in the company because of the team, which has some obvious experience in this area, but also because he sees the pain point MontyCloud is trying to address. “We see a lot of opportunity and a lot of customer pain for a standalone company to create value,” he said. “There is a lot of value to have a company that’s just completely focused on this problem and ride above the platform agenda others might have.”

 

Today’s 466th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, November 21, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...

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Today’s 466th FREE online 1Mby1M Roundtable For Entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, November 21 at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join....

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“We’re giving away money to strangers on the internet” is a pretty cavalier pitch for a new startup. But the more I learned about Placement, the smarter it sounded. In exchange for 10% of your income for 18 to 36 months, Placement will find you a much higher paying job, prep you for the interview and help you move to your new city of employment.

Actors, athletes and musicians have talent agents. Why shouldn’t office workers? That’s co-founder and CEO Sean Linehan’s vision for Placement. The former VP of product at Flexport thinks he can consistently get people a 30% raise on their cost of living-adjusted income if they’re willing to relocate from either their sleepy hometown or an overpriced metropolis.

“We think you can transform your life without becoming an engineer. You just have to be in the right place,” says Linehan. Not everyone is going to learn to code, and Placement isn’t a school. “We’re not in the business of training people to do jobs. We’re in training people to get jobs.”

Placement sits at the lucrative center of a slew of megatrends. People switching jobs more often. The desperate need to pay off crushing student loan debt. The rise of mid-size cities as rent gets out of control in San Francisco and New York. Social apps keeping people in touch from afar. The search for deeper fulfillment going mainstream.

Through the normalization of income sharing agreements, Placement has found a way to powerfully monetize these societal shifts. That potential has attracted a $3 million seed round led by Founders Fund and backed by Coatue’s new seed fund, XYZ Ventures, The House Fund, plus angels like Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen, Eventbrite founders Julia and Kevin Hartz, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, 137 Ventures MD Elizabeth Weil and her husband Facebook Calibra VP of Product Kevin.

With the cash to build out its jobseeker’s software toolkit, Placement could grow far beyond the Jerry Maguire-style boutique talent agency into a scalable way to put millions on a better career track. “The number one problem that I see in the American economy right now is the lack of income mobility,” Linehan says. “There are so many services for making rich people get richer, but what about services to help low-income people to get to the middle, or help those in the middle to improve?”

“If I stayed home, there’s just no way”

The CEO’s own rise was “a tried and true American tale,” he tells me. “I grew up in a pretty low-income neighborhood in San Bernardino . . . below the poverty line.” But a chance to attend UC Berkeley brought him to Silicon Valley, and the economic powerhouse city of San Francisco (before the housing crisis made it so expensive). “I don’t think I could have been as successful if I went to another place. If I had stayed in my home town, there’s just no way.”

Yet after college, when friends moved away and he broke up with his girlfriend, Linehan found himself living in a bunkbed by himself with extra space. “I called a friend back home working a minimum wage job, still living at home, and said ‘Your life kinda sucks. Come crash with me!,’ ” Linehan recalls. “He was super smart — smarter than most of the people I went to Berkeley with, but he never got on the train out of town.”

In the following years, Linehan coached his friend through becoming a professional and navigating interviews. “Now he’s tripled his income on a cost of living adjusted basis. He went from minimum wage to $70,000 to $80,000.” That ignited the idea for Placement. “How do you take that process of tapping people who are special and just need economic opportunity, and bring it to more people?” But Linehan needed a co-founder who could execute on getting these up-and-comers jobs.

That’s where Katie Kent came in. Also from the product team at Flexport, Kent had helped start Zipfian Academy as the first data science bootcamp in America. The 12-week crash course had been placing 93% of graduates into full-time roles when Zipfian was acquired by Galvanize, where Kent became director of outcomes with the mandate to get students great jobs. The right idea, experience and the track record of turning Flexport into a $3.2 billion freight forwarding unicorn led investors to jump at the chance to fund Placement.

Share me the money

So how exactly do Placement’s income sharing agreements work? “They only pay us if they make more money on a cost of living adjusted basis” Linehan explains.

First, the startup recruits through targeted advertising and word of mouth referrals, which the company says 100% of clients have provided. Primarily, it’s seeking business professionals with a skill mismatched to their city, such as sales, human resources or operations in a place without companies competing to hire for those roles. They might have never left their hometown or returned after school at a mid-tier college, suppressing their earning potential. But lack of knowledge about jobseeking, fears of leaving their support network or a lack of funds to finance a move keep them stuck there.

“There are two moments when society puts a gentle hand on your shoulder saying its okay to move away: when you go to college and when you graduate college,” says Linehan. “We’re trying to engineer a third moment. We give people the permission and space to have that conversation with their family by providing that forcing function.” Placement serves the same utility the CEO did for his friend, revealing that if they seize the opportunity of moving to a growing but still affordable city like Denver, Austin, Raleigh or Seattle, “people’s lives would be so much better.”

The other demographic Placement seeks is the 10 million-plus workers who’ve gotten in over their heads in some of the country’s priciest cities. “If you’re ambitious and talented but not an engineer in SF, this is a hard life. The costs are exceeding the benefits at this point.” Placement looks for cheaper cities where their skills are still relevant and they might even earn the same or a little less, but they can fetch a huge increase in income on a cost of living-adjusted basis and they have a path to buying a house. Linehan declares that “Our controversial opinion is that more important than reskilling people is getting them to the right place where the work is happening in the first place.”

Placement then evaluates the prospective client in what is currently an extremely selective process to determine if they’re undervalued based on their skills, qualifications, shortfalls and redflags. If they’re already being adequately or overpaid, it won’t accept them. Those eligible are offered access to Placement’s research on all the optimal salary and location/hirer pairs for their role, which most people wouldn’t or couldn’t do themselves. Linehan says, “We run their job search for them. We’re kind of like a concierge.”

Once they’ve selected some targets, Placement quarterbacks their preparation process, helping them to improve their LinkedIn and resume, practice telling their story and offering mock interviews with experts in their field. As they progress through interviews Placement sets up and requires hirers offer remotely, it teaches clients to negotiate to get their best possible compensation.

“If you’re a normal person who didn’t go to an elite institution or are a couple years out of school, there’s no resources,” Linehan laments. While some top coding schools and other bootcamps place graduates, and some startups like Pathrise are also working on interview prep, most seeking a new employer end up relying on mediocre job hunting tips they find online. That’s in part because it was hard to get people to fork over significant cash in exchange for instruction that wasn’t guaranteed to help.

The Placement income sharing agreement is designed to align incentives, though. It’s vested in getting clients not only the best job and salary, but one they’ll want to stick with. As long as the startup nets them a higher adjusted income, clients pay 10% of their earnings. That lasts for 18 months, or 36 months if they receive Placement’s $5,000 relocation stipend and human support. There are also caps on the total Placement can get paid back, and the agreement dissolves after five years so clients aren’t locked in if things don’t work out.

For example, Placement aims to help someone earning $40,000 per year pre-taxes reach $52,000 on a cost of living adjusted basis. They’d end up paying Placement $7,794 over the course of 18 months, or $433 per month. After the bill, they’d still be earning $3,900 per month, or $567 more than they used to. If they take the $5,000 relocation stipend and extra assistance, their ISA extends to 36 months and they’ll end up paying back $15,588 total, including the stipend.

Clients are likely to keep growing their compensation after their Placement ISA ends, so they’ll start reaping all the added proceeds. The startup has worked with fewer than 1,000 clients to date, but is supposedly growing quickly.

Eventually, Placement could move into working with programmers and designers, but it sees a big gap in assistance for business roles. Linehan notes that “We’re providing an option that will be available to a lot more people than a Lambda School or Galvanize coding bootcamp. Not everyone’s going to be software engineers.”

Making America anti-fragile

The biggest hurdle for Placement will be scaling what can be quite a hands-on, relationship-driven process of matching clients with the right hirers. “It’s one thing to get one person a job. It’s another to get 10,000 people a job,” Linehan admits. But he conquered the same problem at Flexport, which was moving 1,000 shipping containers across the ocean but had to figure out “how the hell do you move 1 million?”

That requires Placement to pour product know-how into building tools that equip clients to take more initiative to match themselves with hirers and teach themselves interview skills. It also must automate more of its marketing outreach, client screening and connections to recruiters while retaining a human element worth a four to five-figure price.

Right now, the startup’s team numbers just four, and though it will expand to seven soon, it may need to raise a bunch more to chase this dream. Some investors have been understandably skeptical about the whole “handing out $5,000” model without onerous ISAs.

For comparison, the one-year MissionU school for business and data jobs that was acquired and shut down by WeWork asked for 15% of income for three years without a relocation stipend, or $23,400 on a $52,000 per year job. ISAs for General Assembly’s tech job education cost 10% for 48 months, even if students don’t earn more than in their old job. Pathrise’s slimmer offering costs just 7% for one year. Colleges are jumping on the trend too, with some working with startup Leif to run their ISAs.

Placement has plans to cover prickly edge cases. If someone gets laid off from their new job, the startup will help them find another. “We’re on the hook to make sure they’re successful,” Linehan insists. It only won’t step in if an employee is fired for an ethical problem like sexual harassment or committing fraud. And if someone simply gets lonely in their unfamiliar city, they’re not required to stay, though moving home could hurt their earnings and Placement’s take. That’s why the startup is working to help its clients find community, even amongst each other, so they don’t feel isolated, and prefers sending workers to cities where they know someone.

Meanwhile, Placement must resist the temptation to become a hiring agency paid by employers and instead work fully on behalf of its clients. “When you’re aligned economically with the employer, you’re just chasing dollars from bigger and bigger whales of companies, and at one point you figure out you’re a recruiting firm for the Gap,” Linehan says with a shudder. The complexity of dealing with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service is enough hassle, so Placement doesn’t intend to work with jobseekers abroad or those that need visas, as “it’s not good for startups if you’re at the mercy of the government.”

Luckily, U.S. salaries total $8.6 trillion per year, Linehan claims, so it’s got enough of a domestic market. “The American economy is so huge that I don’t see other people tackling problems like that being competitive.” Placement does have potential to use its data to recommend and teach specific skills. “If you just make this change, if you learn Excel, you could totally get this job in a different industry that pays more and that you’ll like more,” Linehan says. He also dreams of one day improving urban planning by suggesting cities build music venues or parks that jobseekers say would soften the landing of moving there.

Zooming out, there’s also chance for Placement make the country more stable and resistant to strong-man populism promising financial security. “A two-tier society is fragile. I don’t want to live in a democracy where there’s a bunch of hay waiting for a matchstick to set it on fire,” Linehan concludes. “There doesn’t have to be a have and a have-not class, and you don’t need the government to do forced redistribution to make everything fair. You just need people that care about getting on the right track, and that to me is a worthy cause to dedicate a life to.”

The global internet domain name provider GoDaddy (NYSE: GDDY) recently reported its third quarter results that surpassed market expectations. The market was pleased with its performance, and the...

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More than $1 trillion is spent by enterprises annually on “digital transformation” — the investments that organizations make to update their IT systems to get more out of them and reduce costs — and today one of the bigger startups that’s built a platform to help get the ball rolling is announcing a huge round of funding.

Celonis, a leader in the area of process mining — which tracks data produced by a company’s software, as well as how the software works, in order to provide guidance on what a company could and should do to improve it — has raised $290 million in a Series C round of funding, giving the startup a post-money valuation of $2.5 billion.

Celonis was founded in 2011 in Munich — an industrial and economic center in Germany that you could say is a veritable Petri dish when it comes to large business in need of digital transformation — and has been cash-flow positive from the start. In fact, Celonis waited until it was nearly six years old to take its first outside funding (prior to this Series C it had picked up less than $80 million, see here and here).

The size and timing of this latest equity injection is due to seizing the moment, and tapping networks of people to do so. It has already been growing at a triple-digit rate, with customers like Siemens, Cisco, L’Oréal, Deutsche Telekom and Vodafone among them. 

“Our tech has become its own category with a lot of successful customers,” Bastian Nominacher, the co-CEO who co-founded the company with Alexander Rinke and Martin Klenk, said in an interview. “It’s a key driver for sustainable business operations, and we felt that we needed to have the right network of people to keep momentum in this market.”

To that end, this latest round’s participants lines up with the company’s strategic goals. It is being led by Arena Holdings — an investment firm led by Feroz Dewan — with Ryan Smith, co-founder and CEO of Qualtrics; and Tooey Courtemanche, founder and CEO of Procore, also included, alongside previous investors 83North and Accel.

Celonis said Smith will be a special advisor, working alongside another strategic board member, Hybris founder Carsten Thoma. Dewan, meanwhile, used to run hedge funds for Tiger Global (among other roles) and currently sits on the board of directors of Kraft Heinz.

“Celonis is the clear market leader in a category with open-ended potential. It has demonstrated an enviable record of growth and value creation for its customers and partners,” said Dewan in a statement. “Celonis helps companies capitalise on two inexorable trends that cut across geography and industry: the use of data to enable faster, better decision-making and the desire for all businesses to operate at their full potential.”

The core of Celonis’ offering is to provide process mining around an organizations’ IT systems. Nominacher said that this could include anything from 5 to over 100 different pieces of software, with the main idea being that Celonis’s platform monitors a company’s whole solar system of apps, so to speak, in order to produce its insights — providing and “X-ray” view of the situation, in the words of Rinke.

Those insights, in turn, are used either by the company itself, or by consultants engaged by the organization, to make further suggestions, whether that’s to implement something like robotic process automation (RPA) to speed up a specific process, or use a different piece of software to crunch data better, or reconfigure how staff is deployed, and so on. This is not a one-off thing: the idea is continuous monitoring to pick up new patterns or problems.

In recent times, the company has started to expand the system into a wider set of use cases, by providing tools to monitor operations and customer experience, and to apply its process mining engine to a wider set of company sizes beyond large enterprises, and by bringing in more AI to its basic techniques.

Interestingly, Nominacher said that there are currently no plans to, say, extend into RPA or other “fixing” tools itself, pointing to a kind of laser strategy that is likely part of what has helped it grow so well up to now.

“It’s important to focus on the relevant parts of what you provide,” he said. “We one layer, one that can give the right guidance.”

Between Amazon, FedEx, UPS and indie merchants, it’s easy to lose track of when your online purchases will be delivered. And if you’re buying something pricey or important, a lack of shipping insurance can leave you anxious and constantly checking your porch.

But a fresh startup has found unprecedented growth by letting you monitor all your e-commerce orders in one app thanks to a Gmail extension. Plus, you can buy insurance for just 1% of an item’s cost. Meet Route, emerging from stealth today to become the Find My Friends for packages. By helping merchants handle post-purchase satisfaction while charging consumers for insurance, this year Route has grown to $8.85 million in revenue run rate and from 5 to 100 employees.

Now Route is announcing it has raised $12 million in total through a quiet $500,00 January pre-seed round from Peak Venture Capital and a new seed round with the rest from Album VC and strategic partner in direct-to-consumer brands, Pattern. The cash will help Route keep up with demand and add new features to its app. Route co-founder and CEO Evan Walker tells me consumers “no longer accept the unsatisfying status quo of not knowing exactly where their order is.”

Pizza tracker but for everything

Domino’s saw sales skyrocket thanks to its highly visual pizza tracker app that shows live updates as your pie goes in the oven, hits the road and reaches your door. Route wants to bring that reassuring experience to all of e-commerce.

Walker asks, “How could I NOT build this company?” The 25-year e-commerce entrepreneur got his start selling video games online in 1994, and has founded seven companies since. The communications gap between customers and merchants always plagued his businesses.

“The big lightbulb moment happened when I was traveling in Italy a few years back,” Walker recalls. Talking to a furniture shop owner, he heard about their troubles of shipping vintage trunks. “He mentioned he was having a lot of issues with these items breaking in transit and wished he had a solution for it.” Now there is one.

The Route iOS app for visually tracking orders officially launches today. Purchases from partnered merchants instantly show up in the app and its website via API, but all your other buys from Amazon etc. can be automatically ingested by authorizing the Route Bot Gmail extension that scans for shipping updates. Route lays out all the orders on a map with immediate access to their latest status changes, like when shipping info is received, an item goes out for last-mile delivery or there’s a problem. There’s no need to copy and paste tracking numbers across multiple websites.

The Route+ insurance program that lets customers pay for peace of mind is launching today too. Customers get the option to add it from partnered merchants, file claims for lost / damaged / stolen packages in one tap and get reimbursement from respected Lloyd’s of London.

Walker claims that merchants that offer Route+ (which is free for them) “have seen an increase in conversion, decreased spend on customer support teams and an improved post-purchase customer experience due to Route’s ability to quickly handle customer claims.” Merchants can also opt to pay themselves for Route+ on every order.

Route now works with 1,600 merchants and 600 carriers and has overseen shipments to 1.3 million customers in 187 countries. John Mayfield from Peak Venture Capital says, “Their phenomenal growth of acquiring over 600 clients in the first three months makes them one of the fastest growing companies we have ever seen.”

The brown box wars

The biggest challenge for Route is overcoming the thick, thick crowd of competitors in the market. Rakuten’s Slice can pull orders from your email and also grabs you refunds if an item goes on sale after you buy it. 17Track lets you paste in big lists of tracking numbers in case they’re registered to someone else’s email. Parcel offers a barcode scanner. ‘Deliveries’ will set up calendar appointments for arrivals, and works on Mac and Apple Watch. ParcelTrack lets you forward it emails of purchases to monitor, and a $2.99 premium version offers live locations of your packages plus customizable push notifications.

Route’s strength is that it’s totally free for consumers unless they want to buy insurance, and does email tracking automatically, though it will lack manual tracking number input for a few more weeks. It has managed a 90% customer satisfaction score. Still, the startup could be vulnerable to a major player in e-commerce like Amazon or Shopify barging into the space. There are also platform risks, such as if Gmail blocked its scanning for tracking numbers, though Google is currently partnered with Route to facilitate email scanning.

“The better that Amazon gets at providing similar services, the more other merchants need those tools in order to compete outside of Amazon,” says Walker. “From the insurance side, we are pretty good at detecting risk before it becomes a major issue and we are insuring on an individual order basis so catastrophic incidences are minimized.” The company also has to keep a watchful eye out for fraudulent insurance claims.

The growing megatrend of purchase behavior shifting online means the once occasional activity of receiving a package has become a constant chore in need of streamlining. Plenty of merchants are meanwhile looking to offload the complexity of keeping impatient buyers happy. If Route conquers its first market, it could move into adjacent spaces, ranging from merchant services like freight forwarding and financing to consumer features like physical mail scanning for electronic delivery.

“E-commerce is in my blood. I feel like I’ve taken 25 years of experience and started to craft a really interesting product in this space,” Walker concludes. “With commerce going more digital everyday, there is an opportunity to create a big dent.” Or in Route‘s case, an opportunity to insure your packages against big dents.

Wonderbly, the personalised book publisher backed by Google Ventures and best known for the breakout hit “Lost My Name,” is unveiling Wonderbly Studios in a bid to make it easier for other brands to offer personalised and bespoke printed books on-demand.

Initially, Wonderfully Studios will work with select partners to provide access to its personalisation API and help create new books using its technology and expertise in the space. However, longer term, Wonderbly co-founder and CEO Asi Sharabi tells me the plan is to continue developing the platform and eventually open up the whole thing so that anybody can offer high-quality and data-infused personalised books via its API.

“Selling high-quality personalised products — products that extend beyond the trivial ‘put my name on a mug’ — is no easy task,” he says. “Meaningfully personalised products and businesses are still quite complex to operate at scale. You need a rendering stack, integration with a local print house, couriers, customer support and more. These technical and operational hurdles are a barrier to entry.”

Sharabi adds that although Wonderbly is aware of some “cool” personalised book ideas already on the market, he says that very few are reaching meaningful scale. “We hope to change all that with our personalisation platform and provide a fast, seamless experience with responsive previews and high-fidelity physical products for multiple and complex personalisation logics,” he says.

The first project to come out of Wonderbly Studios is an interactive journal from Wizarding World (the Official Harry Potter Fan Club), which is a joint venture between Pottermore Ltd. and Warner Bros.

The “Keys and Curios” journal is described as full of interactive surprises and secrets that can be unlocked using the Wizarding World app. It incorporates a fan’s name, house traits and more to take them on a unique journey through the wizarding year.

The book’s contents were written and designed by the Wizarding World Digital team, and feature images from across the Wizarding World, artwork by illustrator Jim Kay and specially designed Hogwarts house covers by MinaLima (the graphic designer design team behind some of the visuals from the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts films).

Meanwhile, the personalisation technology, e-commerce integration and on-demand printing/logistics is powered by Wonderbly.

“The end customers interact via the partner’s e-commerce stack,” explains Sharabi. “These stacks (e.g Shopify or Magento) were not built for personalised products and customisation. Adding this functionality is hard — we know, we’ve been doing it for five years. This is why we developed the Wonderbly Personalisation API.”

Products created on the Wonderbly platform can deliver a “limitless amount of creativity, constrained only by imagination,” says the Wonderbly CEO. That’s because Wonderbly takes cares of a lot of the remaining heavy-lifting.

“Products are rendered in real time at scale for customers as part of the shopping experience,” explains Sharabi. “The platform handles the complexities of integrating with e-commerce systems in a developer-friendly way, making it a simple task to add a personalised product to a cart. When an order is completed a simple web hook ensures that the products are rendered, printed and shipped to the customer, while feeding into our partner’s systems for progress notification and customer support.”

The breadth of personalised books we might see come to market as Wonderbly Studios opens up further is impossible to predict. That’s because the full range of potential experiences is something that no single person or team could ever imagine, which, of course is the whole point.

As Sharabi previously told TechCrunch, you can’t scale creativity in the same way as tech — you have to allow creativity to come from anywhere.

“What if you can create a customised art, poetry or recipes book at the same ease you make a Spotify playlist?” he asks rhetorically. “What would gaming printed yearbooks look like? What if travel guides and language acquisition become more personalised? What if you can order an ‘I was there’ personalised keepsake for live gigs and festivals? These and more are questions that get us very excited.”

We’re excited to announce a new Extra Crunch community perk from Aircall. Starting today, annual and two-year Extra Crunch members that are new to Aircall and located within the U.S. or Canada can receive two months of free service on an annual Aircall contract.

Aircall is a cloud-based phone system that can help satisfy the needs of your customer support and sales teams. It’s easy to set up and scale, intuitive for users, has proven high-quality calls and can connect to your existing CRM in a few clicks. You can learn more about Aircall here. 

You must meet the following criteria to qualify for the Aircall community perk from Extra Crunch:

Must be an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member. You can sign up here.Must be located within the U.S. or Canada.Cannot have existing account or past account with Aircall.

The two months free from Aircall is inclusive of subscription fees, but not inclusive of minutes on annual contracts.

Extra Crunch is a membership program from TechCrunch that features how-tos and interviews on company building, intelligence on the most disruptive opportunities for startups, an experience on TechCrunch.com that’s free of banner ads, discounts on TechCrunch events and several community perks like the one mentioned in this article. Our goal is to democratize information about startups, and we’d love to have you join our community.

You can sign up for Extra Crunch here.

After signing up for an annual or two-year Extra Crunch membership, you’ll receive a welcome email with a link to sign up for Aircall and special code to enter to claim the discount. Aircall offers a free seven-day trial, and if you are interested in purchasing an annual plan after the trial you can enter the code to get two months free. 

If you are already an annual or two-year Extra Crunch member, you will receive an email with the offer at some point today. If you are currently a monthly Extra Crunch subscriber and want to upgrade to annual in order to claim this deal, head over to the “my account” section on TechCrunch.com and click the “upgrade” button.

This is one of several community perks we’ve recently launched for Extra Crunch members. Other community perks include a 20% discount on TechCrunch events, 100,000 Brex rewards points upon credit card sign up and an opportunity to claim $1,000 in AWS credits.

If there are other community perks you want to see us add, please let us know by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Sign up for an annual Extra Crunch membership today to claim this community perk. You can purchase an annual Extra Crunch membership here.

Sramana Mitra: How big was that deal with Marriott? Kevin Groome: At that time, not that big. It was less than $100,000 a year. They are now our largest client. They spent probably $30 million with...

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When you think about artificial intelligence, chances are you think about anthropomorphic robots that can make decisions on their own. But artificial intelligence already has huge impacts in the insurance space. That’s why I’m excited to announce that omni:us founder and CEO Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss is joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin.

omni:us is an AI-driven service that can process a ton of documents (including documents with handwriting), classify them and extract relevant data. This way, omni:us customers can use the platform for automated claims handling.

The startup doesn’t want to disrupt existing insurance companies. Instead, it is working with some of the biggest insurance companies out there, such as Allianz, Baloise, AmTrust and Wefox.

Last year, omni:us raised a $22.5 million Series A funding round (€19.7 million) led by Berlin-headquartered VC firm Target Global, followed by MMC Ventures and Talis Capital. Existing investors Unbound and Anthemis, also participated. Up next, omni:us wants to expand to the U.S.

omni:us is well aware that relying more heavily on artificial intelligence can create some issues. Many AI-driven platform act as a sort of black box — you input data and get a result without really knowing why. omni:us says front and center that it wants to make fast, transparent and empathetic claims decisions.

Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on December 11-12.

In addition to panels and fireside chats, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield to compete for the highly coveted Battlefield Cup.

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Sofie Quidenus-Wahlforss is an experienced managing director with a strong entrepreneurial spirit. Her strategic skills coupled with a passion for AI led her to create omni:us with the goal of redefining the way people work and how companies are handling their business operations. omni:us is as an MI-based, SaaS solution to massively optimize workflows, and empower businesses to make comprehensive data-driven decisions.

Prior to omni:us, Sofie founded Qidenus Technologies which quickly became the leader in the market of robotics and digitization. Sofie is also the patent owner of the Vshape scanner Technology and winner of several awards including the Woman Technology. omni:us is an Artificial Intelligence as a Service (AIaaS) provider for cognitive claims management. Built on a fully data-driven approach, omni:us is transforming the way insurers interact with their insured parties. It provides all the necessary tools and information to make fast, transparent and empathetic claims decisions, whilst improving operational efficiency and reducing loss adjustment expenses. The company is headquartered in Berlin, with research partners in Barcelona and representations in the UK, France and the United States. For further information visit omnius.com.

If you wander into the Bandit coffee shop in Midtown New York, you won’t be able to just walk up to the counter and order something. Instead, you’ll need to download a mobile app.

I experienced it for myself yesterday afternoon, when I — along with several other customers — pulled out my phone, downloaded the Bandit app, then used the app to create a profile, order and pay. A couple of minutes later, a barista called me up to the counter and handed me a pretty good cup of coffee.

In other words, while Starbucks has been experimenting with mobile ordering and payment, Bandit is betting entirely on what co-founder and CEO Max Crowley called a “mobile-only” store.

Obviously, this model can lead to some initial awkwardness, particularly if random passersby don’t understand it. But there are friendly Bandit staff members on-hand to help, and Crowley (who was previously the general manager of Uber for Business) said that this model offers an opportunity to create “a whole new type of experience.”

He pointed to the rapid growth of China’s Luckin Coffee as an inspiration, and suggested that, ultimately, Bandit should offer customers the most convenient way to satisfy their coffee cravings: Wherever they are, they open the app and order the drink they want. Then they’ll be told when it will be ready, and where to pick it up.

Bandit can’t deliver that level of convenience for most customers quite yet, as it only has a single location. But Crowley said he’s rethought other aspects of the coffee shop model.

For one thing, this first Bandit store is located in what’s essentially a raw retail space. Crowley said his team has developed an 11’x11′ countertop where all the coffee is prepared — it’s assembled elsewhere and just needs to be plugged in, eliminating the need for an extensive buildout.

“We can launch [a new location] in a few hours, and we can do it at about a tenth the cost of a traditional store,” he said.

So the plan is to launch four or five more New York stores in the coming months, and to expand beyond New York by the end of the first quarter of 2020.

Crowley added that by keeping costs down, Bandit can also keep its coffee affordable: “I don’t think an iced latte needs to be $6 or $7. Our goal is to be less expensive than Starbucks.” (My coffee yesterday, for example, cost me $2.) It’s also experimenting with other pricing models, starting with a $20 subscription that gets you an unlimited number of $1 drinks for a month.

And if this phone and pop up-focused mentality sounds a little transactional — maybe even a little soulless — I will note that the actual coffee shop didn’t feel that way at all. While the space was a bit bare, it was eye-catching, with several large games like cornhole set up for customers. Most importantly, people weren’t just rushing in to pick up their coffee — they were actually hanging out.

“When we did some rudimentary scouting of coffee shop locations, we saw that about 80% of customers are grabbing their coffee and leaving,” Crowley said. “That is definitely core to us, making it super easy to grab it and leave, fulfilling drink orders in less than a minute. All of that said, in the future, we’re going to have this portfolio of different kinds of spaces, different kinds of experiences.”

After a year of testing out environmental technologies for a private company, co-founder Patricia Ayma developed a process for bioplastic production using bacteria. The system turns organic matter, such as food waste, into a product that can be used as a biodegradable alternative to single-use plastics. “I realized that it was a simple technology for taking to society, that will benefit everyone,” she tells us.

The biotech startup began its pilot phase near Barcelona, at a BonArea supermarket plant, where they were able to develop and test the technology on an industrial scale with a potential customer. Ayma plans to push the innovation toward two sectors: Organic waste producers that want to shrink waste management costs and companies interested in purchasing the bioplastics for various applications.

The team recently closed an investment round of more than €2 million, which will allow them to open a 33,000-square-foot plant to start production on the VE-box: A portable waste management container that will transform organic waste into biodegradable plastics. 

 

TechCrunch covers a lot of bases in the tech startup world, but none is more important than supporting founders — especially early-stage founders. That’s what our new event series, TechCrunch Early Stage, is all about.

These single-day events debuting next year will be highly interactive opportunities for founders to tap experts in the core startup disciplines, starting with early-stage investors (lots of investors), legal whizzes, growth gurus, product-market fit wallahs, tech stack experts, recruiting aces and much more, including workshops on pitch breakdowns.

TechCrunch’s goal is to provide founders with insights and new relationships on par with what an accelerator experience provides, only in a single day, and with a much greater variety of experts and investors.

TC Early Stage is an outgrowth of Extra Crunch, TechCrunch’s subscription-based editorial offering that focuses on deep analysis and advice around the big topics facing founders. In October this year at Disrupt SF, we brought Extra Crunch to life on its own stage and featured experts on dozens of topics, including:

How to Raise My First Dollars (Russ Heddleston, DocSend, Charles Hudson, Precursor Ventures and Annie Kadavy, Redpoint Ventures)How to Hire at Breakneck Speed (Scott Cutler, StockX, Harjeet Taggar, TripleByte and Liz Wessel, WayUp)How to Evaluate Talent and Make Decisions (Ray Dalio, Bridgewater Capital)How to Get into Y Combinator (Michael Siebel, Y Combinator)How to Decide Between Bootstrapping and Raising Venture (Ben Chestnut, Mailchimp and Kathryn Petralia, Kabbage)

The sessions were mobbed. The TechCrunch team knows a winner when they see one, and the result is this new event series. The first of three TC Early Stage events next year will be in San Francisco on April 28, with one in Paris on October 28 and another in New York City (date TBA).

TC Early Stage is designed for founders who are in their early innings, anywhere from pre-seed through Series A, when entrepreneurs need all the guidance they can get. With that in mind, the event’s heart is dozens of breakout sessions run by experts and curated by TechCrunch editors. The breakouts will be long on attendee questions and conversation, and the event is structured so that attendees can easily get to six to eight different breakouts over the course of the day. In addition, TechCrunch editors will hold a handful of interviews on a main stage with notable founders and investors in time slots that will not conflict with the breakouts.

Here is a sampling of the types of breakout sessions TechCrunch Early Stage will feature:

Raising a first seed roundLanding a Series ARaising early-stage investment for a SaaS company (also consumer and other major categories)Considering your first term sheetGrowing users fastRecruiting a fabulous teamBuilding a tech stack (you won’t regret)

Between sessions, attendees also can meet the experts running the breakout sessions, as well as each other, via CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s event networking platform that connects like-minded attendees and arranges a meeting time and place.

The TechCrunch team is already busy building an all-star lineup for experts for the breakout sessions and memorable interviews for the main stage. The response from the expert community around TechCrunch has been resoundingly clear. Everyone sees the need — the deeper education of early-stage founders — and they love the TC Early Stage format — a single day, highly interactive event that brings together early-stage founders with an unprecedented collection of experts from across the startup ecosystem.

Tickets for the San Francisco event are available now, so jump in and grab yours to secure your seat while they last.

Not an early-stage founder? That’s okay, too. Later-stage founders, investors or just general startup enthusiasts are welcome to attend. A limited number of “Innovator passes” are available for folks who are not early-stage founders.

Partners are also very welcome! The event has many sponsorship opportunities, including breakout sessions. Contact the sales team to learn more by filling out this form.

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