Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

My employer sponsored me and my family for green cards. We’re expecting to get a green card interview scheduled soon. What should we expect and how should we prepare for our interview?

— Nervous in Newark

Dear Nervous,

Thanks for reaching out. Great to hear that you’re in the final stretch of the green card process! Fortunately USCIS is starting up in-person interviews again now that they have COVID-precautions in place. For more info, check out what to expect and how to prepare for a green card interview.

Before 2017, USCIS waived interviews for most employment-based green card candidates. But an executive order directing federal agencies to implement screening and vetting processes prompted USCIS to institute a green card interview for all candidates, including dependents.

USCIS offices just reopened to the public on June 4, after being closed for nearly two months due to COVID-19, so scheduling — or rescheduling — a green card interview may require a bit of a wait. Be aware that USCIS tries to schedule families together for their interview at the same time and location; however, this is not guaranteed. USCIS may waive the interview requirement for children 14 years old and younger.

Always inform your immigration attorney of any changes to your employment prior to or immediately after the interview, such as:

When big platforms have carved out large swaths of the delivery market, the best thing for an upstart company to do is specialize.

For Chowbus, that meant building a food-delivery business that finds restaurants whose cuisines specialize in regional cuisines from Northern and Southern China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam.

It’s a strategy that has now netted the company $33 million in financing led by the Silicon Valley-based investment firm Altos Ventures and New York’s Left Lane Capital. Hyde Park Angels, Fika Ventures, FJ Labs and Silicon Valley Bank also participated in the round.

Founded four years ago in Chicago by Suyu Zhang and Linxin Wen, the company said that its goal was to connect people with authentic Asian food that’s not easy to find on delivery apps. Over the past year, the company touted significant growth in its business, a traction that can be reflected in its decision to bring on the former chief operating officer of Jump Bikes, Kenny Tsai, as its chief operating officer, and Jieying Zheng, a former Groupon product leader as its head of product.

“When we say we’re true partners to the restaurants we work with, we mean it. By eliminating hidden fees, helping them showcase their best dishes, and other efforts we make on their behalf, we really go the extra mile to help our restaurant partners succeed,” said Wen, Chowbus’ chief executive, in a statement. “We only succeed if they do.”

And seemingly, Chowbus is succeeding. The company raised $4 million in its first round of institutional funding just last year and its rise has been rapid ever since.

The Chicago-based company said it would use its new funding to expand to more cities across the U.S. and add new products like a “dine-in” feature allowing diners to order and pay for their meals on their phone for a contactless experience at restaurants in cities that have flattened the curve of COVID-19 infections and are now reopening. 

Chowbus pitches its lack of hidden fees, and its footprint across 20 cities in North America, including New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Seattle, and many others. In Los Angeles, the company offers menus in Mandarin and Cantonese and allows its users to bundle in a single delivery dishes from multiple restaurants.

Other companies are experimenting with specialization as a way to differentiate from the major delivery services that are on the market. Black and Mobile, which launched in Philadelphia but is in the process of expanding across the country, is a delivery service focused on Black-owned restaurants and food stores.

Founded by David Cabello, Black and Mobile was started in 2017 by the 22-year-old college dropout. The company launched its first operations outside of Atlanta earlier this month and is available on iOS.

“The market is experiencing a permanent shift from offline to online ordering, a trend that Chowbus is actively driving,” said Harley Miller, managing partner at Left Lane Capital . “Focusing on this large and loyal constituency with a vertical-approach to supporting Asian restaurants and food purveyors has allowed Chowbus to differentiate itself on both sides of the marketplace. The capital efficiency with which they have operated, relative to the scale achieved, is extraordinarily impressive, and not something we often see.”

As the pandemic has shut down in-person meetings, and pushed us online, products like Zoom, Cisco WebEx, Google Meet and Microsoft Teams have become part of our daily lives. Into the fray jumps huddl.ai, a 3.5-year-old startup from a serial entrepreneur who wants to bring a dose of artificial intelligence to meeting technology.

Company co-founder and CEO Krishna Yarlagadda says while these companies have introduced the video meeting concept, his startup has a vision of taking it further. “As we move forward. I think the next [era] is going to be about intelligence,” Yarlagadda told TechCrunch.

That involves using AI tools to transcribe the meeting, pull out the salient points and help users understand what happened without poring over notes to find the key information in a long session. “Primarily there’s a purpose for every meeting, or essentially we’re meeting for outcomes, and that’s where Huddl comes in,” he said.

Yarlagadda said that current solutions simply give you a link to a cloud room and everyone involved clicks and enters. Huddl wants to bring some more structure to that whole process. “We’ve developed a very user-centric architecture and also added a layer called meeting memory, which essentially captures the core aspects of the meeting — the agenda, action items and moments and then added search,” he explained.

They call these meeting elements moments, and they involve capturing three key aspects of the meeting: the agenda and collaborative notes participants take during the meeting, screen captures the user takes using a built-in tool and, finally, audio, which captures a recording of the meeting. Users can search across these elements to find the parts of the meeting that are most relevant to them.

Further, it integrates with other enterprise applications like Slack or Salesforce to move to applicable tools items discussed during these meetings when it makes sense. “Essentially what we’re trying to do is create a five-minute version of your 60-minute meeting that is stored in your memory and that becomes part of your search. Post-meeting this content has a life, and through APIs and integrations, we can [share it with the right programs],” he said.

For instance, if it’s an action item in a sales meeting, it would go to Salesforce, and if it is a software bug in an engineering meeting, it could be shared with Jira.

The company was started in 2017, and has raised $8.7 million in seed money to date. It has 50 employees, with 10 in the U.S. and the others in India, and has plans to hire 15-20 additional people this year between the U.S. and India offices.

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Consolidation continues apace in the world of e-commerce, and today it was the turn of the classified ads market. Today, eBay announced that it had reached a deal to sell off its Classifieds business unit to Adevinta, a Norway-based classified ads publisher majority owned by Danish publisher Schibsted. The deal is valued at $9.2 billion, which includes eBay getting $2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares. The deal makes eBay a 44% owner of Adevinta, with a 33.3% voting stake.

Adevinta’s interest in eBay was reported earlier in the week, but with the deal coming at a much lower valuation, of $8 billion.

More generally, it caps off months of speculation about the future for the classifieds business, which has come out of long-term pressure spurred by activist investors for eBay to rationalise what had once been a sprawling e-commerce business empire (advocating for a reverse Amazon, I guess you could say). That included not just its marketplace, but classified ads, payment services (PayPal, which got spun out as a separate company), and ticketing (Viagogo acquired its Stubhub business in a $4 billion deal last year, although that is now facing some regulatory scrutiny.).

Now, all three of those business units are no longer a part of eBay.

Adevinta is in 15 countries and today 35 digital products and websites. eBay meanwhile owns 12 brands in 13 countries around the world, but the business has been hard-hit by the coronavirus crisis. In the last quarter, eBay said that it brought in revenues of just $248 million, down 3% on an as-reported basis and remaining flat on a FX-Neutral basis. For some context, the marketplace brought in revenues of $1.9 billion in the same period.

The overlap will mean a classified ad footprint of  20 countries, and the companies believe that some $150 million – $185 million in synergies will be reached through the combination.

“We are pleased we reached an agreement with Adevinta that brings together two great companies,” said Jamie Iannone, CEO of eBay, in a statement. “eBay believes strongly in the power of community and connections between people, which has been essential to our Classifieds businesses globally. This sale creates short-term and long-term value for shareholders and customers, while allowing us to participate in the future potential of the Classifieds business.”

With little needed but text and a search facility to create a very basic classifieds list, classifieds were one of the first early “hits” of the internet, disrupting newspapers and one of their traditionally most consistent revenue streams (not so anymore, of course).

Over the years, the tech behind what constitutes a “classified ad” has changed, but those in the market are now competing with a wide plethora of alternatives that leverage social and geographical networks to connect people to things or services they might like to buy or rent, including the likes of Facebook’s Marketplace but also a lot of mobile apps and more. And some of these completely undercut the business model of the original disruptors.

That has meant that those who have established themselves in the space have played on consolidation to grow and improve their economies of scale.

“With the acquisition of eBay Classifieds Group, Adevinta becomes the largest online classifieds company globally, with a unique portfolio of leading marketplace brands. We believe the combination of the two companies, with their complementary businesses, creates one of the most exciting and compelling equity stories in the online classifieds sector,” said Rolv Erik Ryssdal, CEO of Adevinta, in a statement.

“We have been impressed with eBay Classifieds Group’s achievements in recent years, leading across markets with nationally recognized brands including Mobile.de, Gumtree, Marktplaats, dba, Bilbasen, Kijiji, 2dehands, 2ememain, Vivanuncios, Automobile.it, Motors.co.uk, Autotrader (Australia), Carsguide (Australia), and eBay Kleinanzeigen, and innovating consistently across its product portfolio and advertising technology platform.”

For now there are no announcements of layoffs or other moves, with eBay’s classifieds executive team coming over with the deal.

“This deal is a testament to the growth and potential of the eBay Classifieds business,” said Alessandro Coppo, SVP and GM, eBay Classifieds Group. “We are excited for our local classifieds brands to join Adevinta and shape a global leader in an industry full of potential.”

The deal is expected to be completed in the first quarter of 2021, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals.

As part of, Schibsted will acquire eBay Classifieds’ Danish business once the deal closes.

“Schibsted’s Board of Directors and management strongly supports the agreement between Adevinta and eBay, as we are confident that it will further strengthen the value creation potential for Schibsted and the rest of Adevinta’s shareholders. Schibsted intends to continue to contribute to the value creation for all Adevinta shareholders as a significant long-term anchor shareholder,” said Kristin Skogen Lund, CEO of Schibsted in s a statement.

 

A number of ride-sharing companies are feeling the strain from reduced business, with many consumers still reluctant to travel, and especially to travel in surroundings that might increase the risk of spreading or catching the novel coronavirus. But today, one of the startups in the space is announcing a significant round of funding to continue growing in its target sector of corporate travel, underscoring where there may still be some existing and growing opportunities.

Gett, the London and Israel-based ride-sharing company that competes with the likes of Uber and many others to provide private car rides on-demand, has raised $100 million. Gett’s CEO and founder Dave Waiser told TechCrunch that it is all primary equity capital, and the company says it plans to use it to continue investing in its B2B business, which has been growing — not shrinking or staying flat — in the midst of the global health pandemic.

“The way people move around in cities is changing dramatically as a result of COVID-19 and businesses are seeking to optimise costs and to put in place efficient and safe ground travel solutions for their employees,” said Waiser, in a statement. “Our mobility software is helping businesses thrive by empowering people to be their best on the go. Being fully funded and reaching a key milestone in our profitability journey is an important step for the Company. The proceeds will help us grow our unique corporate SaaS platform internationally, while we consider an IPO in the future, to further accelerate our expansion.”

The company turned operationally profitable in December 2019 and had said it planned to go public in 2020, but it sounds like that timeline, if it happens, has now been pushed back to 2021. Gett says it has met its “original financial targets that were set pre-COVID-19.” It also reached profitability in each of its core markets in June, and is on target now to be cashflow positive in 2021, ahead of a “potential” IPO.

“It’s a luxury, enabling flexibility for the company to go public when it’s best, rather than from the cash needs reasoning as many (money losing) companies have to do nowadays,” Waiser said.

Gett is not disclosing the names of any of its investors in this round except to note that it’s a mix of new and existing backers, nor is it disclosing its valuation.

Waiser said the reason for that is that the round is still open and oversubscribed, so it plans to announce a list of investors after it closes.

For some context, though, Gett has now raised $750 million with investors including VW, Access and its founder Len Blavatnik, Kreos, MCI and more, and its last valuation was $1.5 billion, pegged to a $200 million fundraise in May 2019.

Gett started operations years ago serving both consumers and corporate users but in recent years has honed its focus specifically on business accounts. No surprise, when you think about it, considering the capital intensiveness, competitiveness, and subsequent poor unit economics of scaling a consumer-focused ridesharing business (a confluence of factors we’ve seen played out at Uber, Lyft, Grab and many others).

Gett’s turn to B2B has seen it pick up some 15,000 corporate customers, including one-third of the Fortune 500. What has been interesting too is the approach Gett has taken to scale: today, it provides rides in some 1,500 cities, but a part of that footprint is served not directly by Gett but in a partnership with Lyft — the result of a deal Gett inked with the company in November 2019 after the former shut down its Juno operations in New York City. It’s been expanding that list to include other third-party partnerships in the mix.

While partnerships may not yield margins as strong as those Gett has in direct operations, it provides a plethora of analytics and invoicing services around the actual ride, and secures the corporate accounts, which provides other revenue streams to offset that. It claims that its services ultimately undercut other ground transportation options for corporates by about 25%.

While a lot of consumers may have curtailed their Uber rides in recent months, the business market has had seen a turn to ensuring that the travel that its users are taking is well-controlled when it has to be done, specifically to meet specific safety standards. That has been the sweet spot for Gett, with its very specific B2B approach.

“The completion of the fundraising during the pandemic is a clear expression of confidence by our shareholders and new investors in Gett’s vision to focus on the corporate market and its plan to expand globally, as well as in the Company’s strong operational and financial performance,” said Amos Genish, Gett chairman, in a statement.

Founded by former Apple engineers, a new app called Struck wants to be the Tinder for the Co-Star crowd. In other words, it’s an astrology-based matchmaker. But it took close to 10 attempts over several months for the startup to get its app approved by Apple for inclusion in the App Store. In nearly every rejection, app reviewers flagged the app as “spam” either due to its use of astrology or, once, simply because it was designed for online dating.

Apple continually cited section 4.3 of its App Store Review Guidelines in the majority of Struck’s rejections, with the exception of two that were unrelated to the app’s purpose. (Once, it was rejected for use of a broken API. Another rejection was over text that needed correction. It had still called itself a “beta.”)

The 4.3 guideline is something Apple wields to keep the App Store free from what it considers to be clutter and spam. In spirit, the guideline makes sense, as it gives Apple permission to make more subjective calls over low-quality apps.

Today, the guideline states that developers should “avoid piling on to a category that is already saturated,” and reminds developers that the App Store has “enough fart, burp, flashlight, fortune telling, dating, and Kama Sutra apps, etc. already.”

In the document, Apple promises to reject anything that “doesn’t offer a high-quality experience.”

This guideline was also updated in March to further raise the bar on dating apps and create stricter rules around “fortune-telling” apps, among other things.

Struck, unfortunately, found itself in the crosshairs of this new enforcement. But while its app may use astrology in a matchmaking process, its overall design and business model is nowhere close to resembling that of a shady “fortune-telling” app.

In fact, Struck hasn’t even implemented its monetization model, which may involve subscriptions and à la carte features at a later date.

Rather, Struck has been carefully and thoughtfully designed to provide an alternative to market leaders like Tinder. Built by a team of mostly women, including two people of color and one LGBTQ+ team member, the app is everything mainstream dating apps are not.

Struck doesn’t, for example, turn online dating into a Hot-or-Not style game. It works by first recommending matches by way of its understanding of users’ detailed birth charts and aspects. But you don’t have to be a true believer in astrology to enjoy the experience. You can use the app just for fun if you’re open-minded, the company website says. “Skeptics welcome,” it advertises.

And while Tinder and others tend to leverage psychological tricks to make their apps more addictive, Struck aims to slow things down in order to allow users to once again focus on romance and conversations. There are no endless catalogs of head shots to swipe upon in Struck. Instead, it sends you no more than four matches per day and you can message only one of the four.

The app’s overall goal is to give users time to analyze their matches’ priorities and values, not just how they appear in photos.

If anything, this is precisely the kind of unique, thoughtfully crafted app the App Store should cater to, not the kind it should ban.

“We come from an Apple background. We come from a tech background. We were very insistent on having a good, quality user interface and user experience,” explains Struck co-founder and CEO Rachel Lo. “That was a big focus for us in our beta testing. We honestly didn’t expect any pushback when we submitted to the App Store,” she says.

But Apple did push back. After first submitting the app in May, Struck went through around nine rounds of rejections where reviewers continued to claim it was spam simply for being an astrology-based dating application. The team would then pull out astrology features hoping to get the app approved… with no luck. Finally, one reviewer told them Struck was being rejected for being a dating app.

“I remember thinking, we’re going to have to shut down this project. There’s not really a way through,” recounts Lo. The Struck team, in a last resort, posted to their Instagram page about their struggles and how they felt Apple’s rejections were unfair given the app’s quality. Plus, as Lo points out, the rejection had a tinge of sexism associated with it.

“Obviously, astrology is a heavily female-dominated category,” she says. “I took issue with the guideline that says ‘burps, farts and fortune-telling apps.’ I made a fuss about that verbiage and how offensive it is for people in most of the world who actually observe astrology.”

Despite the founders’ connections within the technology industry, thanks to their ex-Apple status and relationships with journalists who would go on to plead their case, Struck was not getting approved.

Finally, after several supporters left comments on Apple VP Lisa Jackson’s Instagram where she had posted about WWDC, the app was — for unknown reasons — suddenly given the green light. It’s unclear if the Instagram posts made a difference. Even the app reviewer couldn’t explain why the app was now approved, when asked.

The whole debacle has soured the founders on the way Apple today runs its App Store, and sees them supportive of the government’s antitrust investigations into Apple’s business, which could result in new regulations.

“We had no course of action. And it felt really, really wrong for this giant company to basically be squashing small developers, says Lo. “I don’t know what’s going to become of our app — we hope it’s successful and we hope we can build a good, diverse business from it,” she continues. “But the point was that we weren’t even being given the opportunity to distribute our app that we had spent nine months building.”

Though Apple is turning its nose up at astrology apps, apparently, you don’t have to take astrology to heart to have fun with apps like Struck or those that inspired it, such as Co-Star. These newer Zodiac apps aren’t as obsessed with predicting your future as they are with offering a framework to examine your emotions, your place in the world and your interpersonal relationships. That led Co-Star to snag a $5 million seed round in 2019, one of many astrology apps investors were chasing last year as consumer spend among the top 10 in this space jumped 65% over 2018.

Struck, ultimately, wants to give the market something different from Tinder, and that has value.

“We want to challenge straight men since it is — quote unquote — a traditionally feminine-looking app,” says Lo. “For us, it’s 2020. It’s shocking to us that every dating app looks like a slot machine. We want to make something that has a voice and makes women feel comfortable. And I think our usership split between the genders kind of proved that.”

Struck is live today on the App Store — well, for who knows how long.

It initially caters to users in the Bay Area and LA and will arrive in New York on Friday. Based on user feedback, it will slowly roll out to more markets where it sees demand.

Chris Cowart, the longtime IDEO product designer, Singularity University faculty member and consultant to a variety of venture firms and tech projects, is joining the food preservation technology developer Treasure8 as its new chief innovation and strategy officer, according to a post on LinkedIn.

“In the last three years food has come to the fore as a theme,” said Cowart in an interview with TechCrunch. Cowart, who previously spent the majority of his time consulting on healthcare companies, became interested in food through a year spent as an advisor to X, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops technologies and companies focused on sustainability, connectivity and new computing paradigms.

At X, Cowart was looking at projects that would use artificial intelligence to accelerate circular economy projects and it was there that he began to focus on food waste. The gravity of the situation around America’s food waste and food insecurity in the country was driven home through Cowart’s research, he said. “We overproduce by double and we throw away 30% of our food,” said Cowart. “And in Santa Clara county one-in-six families are food insecure.”

After completing his project at X, Cowart went to Treasure8 and was immediately pulled into strategy conversations, which led to him coming on board in June.

Unlike Apeel Sciences or Hazel Technologies, which have developed new preservative technologies to keep food fresh on store shelves (and raised several hundred million dollars), Treasure8’s technology is a new spin on freeze-drying, which lets perishable foods hold their nutritional value while they’re used as ingredients, supplements or powders.

Brands can reform it with rehydration, or put it into their products or reuse pieces of the vegetables and fruits in their products. “There are byproducts that you can break down and start to use to pull out their nutrients into probiotics and nutraceuticals,” said Cowart.

He also thinks that Treasure8 could use its process to become a provider of biochar that can be applied in more sustainable agriculture techniques.

Treasure8 initially launched with a focus on food preservation, but quickly pivoted into working with hemp companies that wanted to work with the company to use more parts of the hemp plant in products. For now, Treasure8 is operating off of its pilot facility on Treasure Island, the man-made island in the San Francisco Bay which is currently the site of a multi-billion-dollar development project.

With its new innovation officer in tow, Treasure8 is now heading to market to raise a new round of financing, Cowart said. Targeting less than $50 million, the new round could help the company as Cowart starts to think longer term about ways that Treasure8’s treatment process could contribute to the development of more functional foods.

“Taking food waste streams to make products and ingredients and letting it be something useful rather than something that harms the environment, that’s the interesting part,” Cowart said of his role at the company. “[And] if you’re able to go from food security to nutritional security… If you can powder vegetables, and make them into bits and food that are stable and affordable… All of this nutrition feeds into the food as medicine and functional food. We’re going to want to fight immunity and recover from viruses and we’re going to have to rebuild our food supply.”

 

In the blink of an eye, millennials, moms and grandparents alike have abandoned the decades-old practice of wandering dusty grocery aisles for the convenient and novel use of online grocery. While Instacart, Amazon Fresh and others have been offering an alternative to brick-and-mortar grocery for years, it is the pandemic that has classified them as essential businesses and more than ever afforded them a clear competitive advantage.

But these past couple months have seen not only drastic changes in consumer behavior, but also fundamental shifts in the business models adopted by grocers worldwide. These shifts are not temporary — indeed, they are here to stay, corona-catalyzed and permanent.

Fulfillment innovation can drive efficiency and cost savings

For the consumer, online grocery generally starts and ends the same way: They place their order on an app or website, and hours later it shows up at their door. But the ways those orders are being fulfilled run the gamut.

The most widely known approach comes from Instacart, which relies on hundreds of thousands of human shoppers fulfilling customers’ online grocery orders by shopping side-by-side with regular brick-and-mortar customers. The model clearly works for Instacart, which is valued at nearly $14 billion after its latest raise.

However, this model is far from ideal. Even pre-COVID, shoppers were known to crowd out regular customers, not to mention introduce high delivery costs and the element of human error to the fulfillment process.

One obvious solution has become the central fulfillment center, or CFC. CFCs are large, standalone warehouses — often serving distinct geographies — that can supply both brick-and-mortar stores and online grocery deliveries. As order volumes rise and consumers demand faster and faster delivery times, innovation has already been infused into the CFC model.

Some grocers, notably Kroger, believe that introducing robotic automation into CFCs via solutions such as Ocado can create economies of scale for fulfillment. These CFCs deploy fulfillment robots, controlled by air-traffic control tech, that run along a grid system and move goods via categorized crates. Kroger is continuing its investment in the model, recently announcing three new Ocado-automated CFCs in the West, Pacific Northwest and Great Lakes regions of the United States. The smallest location is over 150,000 square feet.

While Kroger remains uniquely attached to the CFC model, Albertsons/Safeway, Walmart and many others prefer the microfulfillment center (MFC). MFCs, typically far smaller in size (think ~10,000 square feet), are automated warehouses carved out of the back of existing stores that drive faster fulfillment times in a smaller geographic area, allowing chain stores to use their numerous geographic locations to act as effective fulfillment/delivery hubs for e-grocery coverage.

Companies like Uber, Lyft, Beyond Meat, Peloton, Slack, Zoom and Pinterest all made public market debuts in 2019, creating wealth and liquidity for many of the 2019 IPO class of founders.

This year, stockholders have seen anxiety-inducing volatility in their holdings, leading many to realize that they need to rethink their approach to their concentrated post-IPO stock position.

In this guide, I’ll walk through a framework of how to think about post-IPO or concentrated stock holdings objectively. While this is written specific to public company stock, many of the same fundamental concepts apply to private stock and the decision whether or not to sell. Some risks should be understood if you are relying on one stock to achieve all of your financial goals since that subjects you to having “too many eggs in one basket.” Many shareholders in the 2019 IPO class have experienced this risk over the last few months and are reevaluating their situations.

Nevertheless, following my advice may be challenging since we all have heard of someone who made it big by swinging for the fences. The key is understanding the true success rate and risks involved with this approach; it is all too common to hear others share their standout victories, while more common failures are rarely mentioned.

What do I do now?

Usually, I advocate for reducing concentrated positions in IPO stock upon lockup expiration, or via scheduled selling for more significant positions; however, for those that have not sold, it is clear that the unexpected macroeconomic downturn has materially increased the volatility of some high-valuation company share prices. If you find yourself in this position here are a few items to consider:

What is your time horizon? Are your investments intended for the long term or the short term?What are your liquidity needs? Do you need to raise cash to pay for taxes or upcoming expenses? Do you need cash in the upcoming 1-2 years?What other assets do you have?How does this impact your financial plan? Can you tolerate possible further declines?

It is not comfortable to be in this position, and decisions at this juncture can be critical in achieving long-term goals. I suggest you find an advisor to talk to if you are unsure what the best choice is. Below we review some considerations that can help build more confidence in your decision.

What’s the plan?

The decision of what to do with your stock should start at a higher level. Where does this stock fit into your investment strategy, and where does your investment strategy fit into achieving your long-term goals?

Your goals should drive your investment strategy, and your investment strategy should drive the decisions regarding your stock, not the other way around. With the proper goals set, you can use the investment portfolio, and the company stock(s) within it, as tools to achieve your goals.

For example, a goal could be to work ten more years, then partially retire and do some consulting. Defining goals helps you make objective decisions on how to best manage concentrated stock positions. There is a trade-off between maximizing the potential return in your investment portfolio, by maximizing risk with concentrated portfolios, and minimizing the risk of a catastrophic loss, by having a well-diversified portfolio. This decision is unique to each individual. The best way to maximize the odds of achieving your goals is different from the best route to maximizing your portfolio’s return possibilities.

FOMO

In these discussions, there is always an immense fear of missing out. What if this stock becomes a multibagger over time? It’s easy to look to the Zuckerbergs and Bezos of the world, who have amassed great wealth through holding concentrated stock, and think that holding a concentrated stock for the long term is the way to go.

There is also no doubt some public stocks have been runaway financial home runs, like investing in Apple or Amazon. If you had invested in those stocks since the beginning, you could have earned a 40,000% or 100,000% return. However, a rational, evidence-based decision process presents a very different picture. A statistical analysis on how IPOs and concentrated portfolios have fared in the past is covered in part two of this three-part series.

Concentration involves risks you may not have considered. In part two, I will walk you through critical considerations when maintaining a high concentration of company stock and things to consider from a big-picture perspective. I also dive into the benefits of diversification, taking it beyond the basics to show you the advantages of having a more balanced portfolio.

One reason some venture capitalists and founders don’t enter edtech is because the space has a sluggish stereotype, thanks to red tape, slow sales cycles, and, in America, a fragmented customer base.

But data suggests that edtech’s reputation is not entirely earned. Byju’s is India’s second-most-valuable company. Since 2013, there have been 300 acquisitions in the space. And if you only understand success in terms of unicorns, two edtech businesses, Quizlet and ApplyBoard, were recently added to the $1 billion valuation club.

The tension between edtech’s stereotype and its potential for return, plus the surge in remote learning due to coronavirus-related shutdowns, poses an interesting challenge for the market.

In the beginning of the pandemic, TechCrunch talked to a group of edtech investors to get their knee-jerk reaction to the remote learning boom. Unsurprisingly, many commented that the heat-up of the sector will materially impact K-12 and higher education and unlock new opportunities. Others warned early-stage edtech startups about how newfound competition could hurt content, quality and effectiveness of their end product. Overall, the general message was that the boom is here, everyone is excited and waiting to see what happens next.

Fast forward a few months, mistakes and extended school closures later, edtech now has a better inkling on what the next billion-dollar business needs to get right. Last week, we got into trends that have promise in a post-pandemic world. Today, we’ll step out of sub-sector specific dialogue and get into the macro-impact of rapid change on edtech as a whole. You’ll get an eagle-eye view of what rapid change, adaptation, and for lack of better phrasing, popularity does for the market.

Today you’ll hear from the following investors:

Ian Chiu, Owl VenturesShauntel Garvey and Jennifer Carolan, Reach CapitalJan Lynn-Matern, Emerge EducationDavid Eichler, TCVJomayra Hererra, Cowboy Ventures

Today Jamf, a software company that helps other firms manage their Apple devices, raised its IPO price range.

The company had previously targeted a $17 to $19 per-share range. A new SEC filing from the firm today details a far higher $21 to $23 per-share IPO price interval.

Jamf still intends to sell up to 18.4 million shares in its debut, including 13.5 million in primary stock, 2.5 million shares from existing shareholders and an underwriter option worth 2.4 million shares. The whole whack at $21 to $23 per share would tally between $386.4 million and $423.2 million, though not all those funds would flow to the company.

At the low and high-end of its new IPO range, Jamf is worth between $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion, steep upgrades from its prior valuation range of $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion.

Jamf follows in the footsteps of recent IPOs like nCino, Vroom and others in seeing demand for its public offering allow its pricing to track higher the closer it gets to its public offering. Such demand from public-market investors indicates there is ample demand for debut shares in mid-2020, a fact that could spur other companies to the exit market.

Coinbase, Airbnb and DoorDash are three such companies that are expected to debut in the next year’s time, give or take a quarter or two.

Results, multiples

In anticipation of the Jamf debut that should come this week, let’s chat about the company’s recent performance.

Observe the following table from the most-recent Jamf S-1/A:

From even a quick glance we can learn much from this data. We can see that Jamf is growing, has improving gross margins and has managed to swing from an operating loss to operating profit in Q2 2020, compared to Q2 2019. And, for you fans out there of adjusted metrics, that Jamf managed to generate more non-GAAP operating income in its most recent period than the year-ago quarter.

In more precise terms:

Jamf grew from 26.5% to 29.0% on a year-over-year basis in Q2 2020Its gross margin grew by 6% in gross terms, and 8.3% in relative termsIts non-GAAP operating income grew 123.4%, to 150.9% in Q2 2020 compared to the year-ago quarter

Profits! Growth! Software! Improving margins! It’s not a huge surprise that Jamf managed to bolster its IPO price range.

Finally, for the SaaS-heads out there, the following:

This data lets us have a little fun. Recall that we have seen possible valuations for Jamf at IPO that started at $1.98 billion to $2.21 billion, and now include $2.44 billion and $2.68 billion? With our two ARR ranges for the end of Q2, we can now come up with eight ARR multiples for Jamf, from the low-end of its initial IPO price estimate, to the top-end of its new range.

Here they are:

Multiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 8.3xMultiple at $1.98 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 8.2xMultiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 9.3xMultiple at $2.21 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 9.2xMultiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 10.3xMultiple at $2.44 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 10.1xMultiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $238 million ARR: 11.3xMultiple at $2.68 billion valuation and $241 million ARR: 11.2x

From that perspective, the pricing changes feel a bit more modest, even if they work out to a huge spread on a valuation basis.

Regardless, this is the current state of the Jamf IPO. Rackspace also filed a new S-1/A today, but we can’t find anything useful in it. A bit like the Jamf S-1/A from Friday. Perhaps we’ll get a new Rackspace document soon with pricing notes.

And, of course, like the rest of the world we await the Palantir S-1 with bated breath. Consider that our white whale.