Entrepreneurs are invited to the 417th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 4, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...
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Ryan Fyfe: The biggest learning there was, if you’re going to scale to new channels, be mindful of how you view your metrics. For a long time, we blended all of our metrics. This sounds silly in...
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Urban-X, the urban-tech startup accelerator backed by MINI and early-stage urban-tech fund Urban.Us, hosted at its Brooklyn HQ a demo day today for its fourth cohort of companies. The seven presenting companies offered solutions to issues plaguing modern cities, including toll-road pricing, energy and construction management and even the inefficiencies of modern cycling helmets.
In a day that offered an impressive display of entrepreneurial talent, here are three of the companies that really stood out to us.
In hopes of improving landlord transparency, Rentlogic uses years of city government data to create objective algorithmic letter ratings for apartment buildings. As CEO Yale Fox pointed out, despite city-dwellers spending half our paychecks on rent, urban housing hasn’t seen the same rating systems that we use to guide decisions on where we eat, what car we buy or what shows we binge. Rentlogic allows apartment hunters to screen buildings before signing a lease and avoid committing to unhealthy conditions or an absentee landlord.
Rentlogic partners with landlords looking to obtain a stamp of quality for potential renters, offering an added inspection feature that allows them to hang a letter rating outside their building. The company’s roster of customers already includes Blackstone and Phipps Houses, the largest for-profit and nonprofit landlords in the world, respectively.
What stands out with Rentlogic is its ability to scale. Though currently only in New York City, the same data used in New York presumably exists across all major U.S. markets, and Rentlogic has minimized the cost of entering new cities by building out the back-end infrastructure required to ingest and analyze the data. From a demand perspective, as renters defer to Rentlogic for quality assurance and more competitors hang “A” ratings outside their buildings, landlords will face more pressure to maintain the same offering.
The idea hit home for a born-and-bred New Yorker with my own set of landlord horror stories, and the first thing I did when I left was look up my building on Rentlogic.
Most companies wish they had mega-campuses or “motherships” where they could offer employees access to sprawling outdoor working areas. For companies based in urban areas, offering outdoor space can be tough, with many parks often privatized, far from city centers or void of the amenities needed to be productive.
Campsyte transforms underutilized urban outdoor spaces into productive and fun spaces that customers can book for co-working purposes, corporate off-sites or events. Similar to WeWork’s approach with buildings, Campsyte takes a parking lot and adds value by filling it with greenery, furniture, electricity, Wi-Fi and other services. With its services driving nearly 10x the annual revenue per square foot seen by traditional parking lots, the value proposition for lot owners is convincing.
Given the competition companies are facing when it comes to attracting and retaining talent, providing the same amenities as competitors based outside city centers seems invaluable, with Campsyte boasting an extremely impressive roster of partner companies, including LinkedIn, PayPal, Salesforce and Airbnb.
As anyone who has driven in a city knows, car crashes or accidents can often be caused by the built environment around you. Yet insurers, which focus on personal characteristics like credit scores when underwriting a policy, lack the measurement tools to assess the risk of someone’s external environment.
Founded by an MIT-trained city planner, ODN builds risk models using machine learning and public data records to help insurers evaluate risk and mitigate accidents. The resulting analytics eases the selection process for insurers, allowing them to drive more sales with less cost and risk. ODN is already partnered up with some of the world’s largest insurers, including Zurich, Travelers and Hanover Insurance.
The potential use cases for ODN’s technology go far beyond the massive existing insurance market, with the eventual rollout of autonomous cars forcing insurers to ask how they construct policies when human behavior plays no role in accidents. ODN is working with carriers to help answer this question while helping create a more efficient and fair underwriting process today.
Avvir: “Avvir automates quality assurance for the construction industry, providing real-time insights into the progress and potential defects on a project.”
ClearRoad: “ClearRoad helps government agencies automate toll road pricing for any section of road without the need for traditional proprietary hardware infrastructure.”
Park & Diamond: “Park & Diamond makes biking better by reinventing the bike helmet, using next-generation materials to build a safer, more portable helmet that can roll up into the shape of a water bottle for easier carrying, while looking like a regular hat, cap, or beanie.”
Sapient Industries: “Sapient Industries has developed an autonomous energy management system that senses and learns human behavior in order to eliminate wasted energy in buildings.”
During this week’s roundtable, we had a lot of attendees from Oracle. The Fall 2018 Oracle-1Mby1M Intrapreneurship Challenge launched this week. To all those getting excited about applying, please...
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This December a set of autonomous vehicles will start roaming the streets of Columbus, Ohio, in an effort to turn this bustling Midwestern community into the first smart city. The project, which is part of the Smart Columbus and DriveOhio initiatives, is the first step in launching a fully autonomous shuttle route in the city.
“We’re proud to have the first self-driving shuttle in Ohio being tested on the streets of Columbus,” said Mayor Andrew J. Ginther. “This pilot will shape future uses of this emerging technology in Columbus and the nation. Residents win when we add more mobility options to our transportation ecosystem – making it easier to get to work, school or local attractions.”
Michigan-based May Mobility provided the shuttles and the team is training the autonomous vehicles to navigate Columbus streets. May Mobility already launched their vehicles in Detroit and this is the second full implementation of the tech.
The six-seater electric shuttles will follow a 3 mile route through downtown Columbus and the vehicles will start picking up passengers on December 1. Rides are free. May Mobility has already performed over 10,000 successful trips in Detroit. In Columbus the shuttles will drive the Scioto Mile loop, a scenic route through the city and by the Ohio River. A large digital display will show system information and there will be a single operator to oversee the trip and take control in case of emergency.
Founder Edwin Olson is a robotics professor at the University of Michigan and his team won the MAGIC competition in 2010.
“Cities are seeking cost-effective transportation services that will improve congestion in urban cores, and self-driving shuttles can offer a huge relief,” he said. “As we work toward a future where people can drive less and live more, we’re thrilled to be working with partners from Columbus to provide a new transportation experience that will make traveling through Columbus safe, reliable and personal.”
Columbus won the $40 million Smart City Challenge in June 2016 to test and implement smart city tech.
Think Ethereum and other crypto coins are overvalued? Now you can make money when their prices fall via Compound, which is launching its money market protocol for shorting cryptocurrencies today. The Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz-funded startup today opens its simple web interface allowing users to borrow and short Ethereum, 0x’s ZRX, Brave’s BAT, and Augur’s REP token, or lend them through Compound to earn interest.
Compound’s protocol isn’t just useful for crypto haters, or HODLers who want to generate interest instead of just having their coins gathering dust in a wallet. “If/when Compound scales, this will lead to some really interesting improvements in market structure, namely, fairer prices” Compound CEO Robert Leshner tells me.
The startup spent the summer completing a security audit by Trail Of Bits and adding 26 hedge fund partners who will trade with Compound, offering liquidity to independent investors looking to be matched with borrowers or lenders. Next, the startup wants to offer a stablecoin on its protocol, bring in big financial institutions to add even more liquidity, and partner with a wallet provider to make signup faster.
Compound users visit its site through a Web3 browser such as MetaMask or Coinbase Wallet and enter their Ethereum price. They can then view the interest rates for borrowing and shorting or lending and earning interest for each of the supported tokens. Compound’s secret sauce is that those interest rates are set algorithmically based on demand, though eventually it wants a community governance body to oversee this process. “It ranges from 5 percent to 45 percent APR depending on how scarce liquidity is . . . in general, we expect supply to outnumber borrowing about 5-1, and borrowing rates to be about 10 percent”.
To make sure no one thinks they’re getting scammed, Compound is also releasing a transparency dashboard users can view to check up on all the assets moving through the protocol and see what Compound is earning. It charges 10 percent of what borrowers pay in interest, with the rest going to the lender. That margin is what attracted the $8.2 seed round for Compound that also included Polychain Capital and Bain Capital Ventures.
It could also make crypto exchanges like Coinbase or Robinhood less attractive to users because leaving their coins there comes with the opportunity cost of not lending them for profit. Meanwhile, shorts could pop the volatile crypto bubble and push prices to more sensible and stable levels. That’s market health is a critical precursor to big banks and traditional investors diving into crypto.
[Disclosure: The author owns small positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but has no financial motive for writing this article, did not make trades in the week prior to this article, and doesn not plan to make trades in the 72 hours following publication.]
WndrCo, the consumer tech investment and holding company founded by longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg, has invested $30 million in The Infatuation, a restaurant discovery platform.
The Infatuation made waves earlier this year when it purchased Zagat from Google, which had paid $151 million for the 40-year-old company in 2011. Despite efforts to makeover the Zagat app, the search giant ultimately decided to unload the perennial restaurant review and recommendation service and focus on expanding its database of restaurant recommendations organically.
New York-based The Infatuation was founded by music industry vets Chris Stang and Andrew Steinthal in 2009. It has previously raised $3.5 million for its mobile app, events, newsletter and personalized SMS-based recommendation tool.
Stang told TechCrunch this morning that they plan to use a good chunk of the funds to develop the new Zagat platform, which will be kept separate from The Infatuation.
“The first thing we want to do before we build anything is spend a lot of time researching how people have used Zagat in the past, how they want to use it in the future, what a community-driven platform could look like and how to apply community reviews and ratings to the brand,” said Stang, The Infatuation’s chief executive officer. “Zagat’s roots are in user-generated content. … What we are doing now is thinking through what that looks like with new tech applied to it. What it looks like in the digital age. How [we can] take our domain expertise and that legendary brand and make something new with it.”
The Infatuation will also expand to new cities beginning this fall with launches in Boston and Philadelphia. It’s already active in a dozen or so U.S. cities including Los Angeles, Seattle and San Francisco. The startup’s first and only international location is London.
Katzenberg, who began his Hollywood career at Paramount Pictures, began raising up to $2 billion for WndrCo about a year ago. Since then, he’s unveiled WndrCo’s new mobile video startup NewTV, which has raised $1 billion and hired Meg Whitman, the former president and CEO of Hewlett Packard, as CEO.
On top of that, WndrCo has invested in Mixcloud, Axios, Node, Flowspace, Whistle Sports, TYT Network and others.
Given The Infatuation founders’ experience in the entertainment industry, a partnership with Katzenberg was natural.
“We really felt like between content and technology they had … expertise on both sides,” Stang said. “The Infatuation is at its best when great content intersects with great technology, to find a fund that was perfectly suited to that was exciting.”
This year’s rush of IPOs from Chinese tech companies has dominated headlines, but what’s more interesting is how quickly they got there.
Traditionally, “going public” represented the gratifying culmination of sleepless nights and missed birthdays that went into building a company. The peak of a lengthy climb, where founders and VCs would finally see the fruits of their labor.
However, Chinese companies appear to be reaching that peak much quicker than their American peers, heading to the public markets only a few years after initial venture investments, and often with little operating history.
Analyzing twenty of the most high profile Chinese tech IPOs this year, the average time from first venture investment to IPO was only around three to five years. Take e-commerce platform Pinduoduo, which pulled in $1.6 billion less than three years after its Series A. Or the recent IPO of EV-manufacturer NIO, which raised a billion dollars just three-and-a-half years after its Series A and having just delivered its first car in June.
China IPO data for 2018 compiled from NASDAQ, Pitchbook, and Crunchbase
That’s less than half the average 10-year timeline for venture-backed US tech companies that went public in 2018, including Dropbox, Eventbrite, and DocuSign, which all IPO’d more than a decade after their initial investments.
Differences in market maturity, government involvement, and support from large tech incumbents all undoubtedly play a factor, but the speed to liquidity for the Chinese companies is still astounding.
Speed to liquidity is a critical metric for the health of a startup ecosystem. It creates a positive cycle where faster liquidity can drive faster fundraising, faster reinvestment, faster startup building, and faster public liquidity again. An accelerated cycle could be especially appealing for funds with LPs that require faster returns due to cash commitments or otherwise.
It’s important to note that venture returns are a function of capital and time, so quicker exits will also drive higher returns for the same amount invested. For example, a $1 million investment with a $5 million exit after ten years would generate an Internal Rate of Return (a commonly used metric to evaluate VC performance) of 20%. If the same exit occurred after five years, the IRR would be 50%.
Liquidity is a key consideration as China’s influence on the flow of global venture capital intensifies. As China’s tech ecosystem sees more of its darlings mature and more consistently deliver smashing exits, investments in China will have to be a more serious consideration for VCs, even if only to minimize the sheer amount of time, resources, and painstaking energy needed to build a company in the U.S.
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Steve Beck was recorded in May 2018. Steve Beck,...
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Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about how you view TAM? I’ll give you the context of where I’m coming from in asking this question. We are in April 2018. Lots of stuff have already been...
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Entrepreneur First (EF), the company builder and “talent first” investor, held its tenth London Demo Day this afternoon. This time around the even had a decidedly more international bent as it combined pitches from the London and recently launched Berlin programs.
Once again, the pitches took place in front of a nearly overcapacity crowd at King’s Place in London’s King Cross area, and saw a 24 startups pitch their wares to investors, press and other actors in the European tech scene.
EF stands out from the many other demo days that the U.K. capital city hosts because of the way the investor backs individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” — meaning that the companies pitching only came into existence over the last 6 months and perhaps may never have done so without the founders bashing heads during the program.
Unusually, aside from the upstarts presenting on stage, there were no other EF announcements today, which is in stark contrast to most previous demo days. However, I’m hearing there could be some big EF news coming quite shortly and this is likely a case of EF lining up its PR ducks in a row and choosing to shoot them down one news opportunity at a time. Besides, the company builder has had more than its fair share of announcements over the last twelve months.
In addition to existing programs in London and Singapore, this year saw EF expand to Hong Kong and Paris, as well as Berlin. And almost exactly a year ago, EF announced a $12.4 million funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Greylock Partners, and that Greylock’s Reid Hoffman had joined the company builder’s board. The capital — to be used for operational purposes and separate from EF’s multiple investment funds — was raised to enable EF to scale its program in multiple tech startup/academic hubs around the world, and where it deemed the EF “secret sauce” can bring the most value.
Meanwhile, the themes for EF’s tenth London Demo Day continued to reflect the company builder’s focus on recruiting the best technical and domain expert talent — both recent graduates and also people already working at tech companies. They spanned AR headsets, “massive simulations,” genome sequencing, machine intelligence, and cryptocurrencies.
After tuning in to the live stream and enduring 24 rounds of ‘pitchlash’, my cursory 3 picks this time around are as follows:
With a mission to “empower people to build a new relationship with food, myLevels uses data from Continuous Glucose Monitors combined with its own Bayesian-based machine learning models to measure the impact that food has on an individual’s body and metabolism. This is because the effect different food has on a person’s blood sugar levels — and the sometimes horrible spike followed by craving — varies person by person, and until now it has been difficult to build a personalised understanding of this. Once you have that understanding it becomes easier to lose weight and increase higher energy levels and even concentration.
There’s gold in those microbiome, apparently. Juno Bio is “unlocking the potential of the microbiome” (bacteria that lives in our guts and other places, such as animals and soil), which the startup says has unprecedented potential to disrupt various industries such as the $195 billion fertiliser industry. More broadly, Juno Bio says there is an arms race for understanding and harnessing the information that microbiome hold. To that end, Juno Bio uses machine learning and state of the art bioinformatics to analyse and predict how best to manipulate microbiomes, significantly reducing the time and resources needed to improve their functionality.
Circuit Mind wants to use AI to automate the design of electronic circuits. The startup reckons that every year £40bn and 1.5bn hours are spent globally in “tedious and repetitive circuit board design” work, making building hardware even harder than it needs to be. To fix this, the company is building artificial intelligence that takes in the requirements for a circuit board and outputs the circuit board final design, ready for manufacture. “This means better circuits, designed orders of magnitude faster, at a fraction of the cost,” says Circuit Mind. Chalk this one up as another industry 4.0 play, of which EF already has a promising track record.
● Nodes & Links is taming the complexity of modern projects.
● CodeREG makes regulatory change in finance as simple as a software update.
● QFlow enables construction teams to track, analyse and respond to environmental
risks.
● Moonsift is the first platform for shoppers to create their own digital twin for product
discovery.
● Homewards is the next generation of home ownership.
● Popsure gives personalised insurance advice.
● Metomic is data privacy made simple.
● Teamflow unlocks the power of human intelligence in organisations to improve
productivity
● myLevels empowers people to build a new relationship with food.
● Phantasma Labs is helping self-driving cars understand humans better.
● Juno Bio is unlocking the potential of the microbiome.
● Magic Sandbox produces world class software engineers at scale.
● Faultless AI eliminates human error in manufacturing.
● Janus Genomics builds AI tools to enable biomedical data sharing while preserving
data privacy.
● Lumenora is the world’s first compact, high field-of-view Augmented Reality
headset.
● Donut enables increased crypto adoption through personalised portfolios. Fully
regulated.
● Juniper uses hybrid deep learning to empower oncologists.
● WILD AI empowers humans to reach their personal best through datalogy.
● Holotron unleashes the true potential of VR & humanoid robots.
● Data Hygge helps companies spot, prioritise and solve experience issues.
● Yo-Da is the personal data management platform making consumer data protection
quick, easy, and profitable.
● Insurami is removing friction in office space onboarding.
● Atlas ML is a development platform for machine learning.
● Circuit Mind is using AI to completely automate the design of electronic circuits.
Today’s 416th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 27, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...
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Cargo, the startup that helps ridesharing drivers earn money by bringing the convenience store into their vehicles, has raised $22 million in a Series A round led by Founders Fund.
Additional investment came from Coatue Management, Aquiline Technology Growth and a number of high-profile entertainment, gaming and technology executives that include Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Twitch’s former CSO Colin Carrier, media investor Vivi Nevo, former NBA commissioner David Stern, Def Jam Records CEO Paul Rosenberg, Steve Aoki, Maria Shriver and Patrick and Christina Schwarzenegger.
To date, Cargo has raised $30 million in venture funding. As part of this latest round, Founders Fund partner Cyan Banister is joining the board.
Cargo provides qualified ridesharing drivers with free boxes filled with the kinds of goods you might find in a convenience store, including snacks and phone chargers. Riders can use Cargo’s mobile web menu on their smartphones (without downloading an app) to buy what they need. Cargo has previously partnered with Kellogg’s, Starbucks and Mars Wrigley Confectionery — companies looking for ways to market their goods to consumers.
“In just a few years, ridesharing has evolved from a niche service to an indispensable element of our global transportation system,” Banister said in a statement. “Founders Fund is excited to support Cargo in driving the next evolution: a better on-trip experience for riders and new revenue generating opportunities for drivers.”
The round follows Cargo’s partnership with Uber and an international licensing deal with Grab. The company, which was founded in 2017, has activated more than 12,000 drivers across 10 cities.
Cargo says it will use the capital to scale its business in the U.S. and internationally. It’s also working on new digital services — a development Banister eludes to — that will improve users on-trip experience. The strategic investments from gaming and entertainment executives is designed to help Cargo develop those digital services for riders.
“Our default behavior in an Uber is to shop, play games and listen to music on our phone. Riders have ordered more than two million products and today transact with us every five seconds,” Cargo founder and CEO Jeff Cripe said in a statement. “We brought riders instant commerce, now we’ll help them discover and enjoy games, music, and entertainment on one in-car platform.”
Existing Cargo investors participating in the round include CRCM Ventures, Rosecliff Ventures, Kellogg’s eighteen94 capital, RiverPark Ventures, and former Uber executives including Chief Business Officer Emil Michael, New York City General Manager Josh Mohrer and former West Coast General Manager William Barnes.
A new messaging app is looking to give folks a way to communicate in situations with poor or no cellular connectivity.
Berkanan, founded by Zsombor Szabó, is a group messaging app that uses Bluetooth to send and receive messages. This means that Berkanan works in a plane, at a festival, camping, or anywhere else where cellular coverage is disappointing.
Imagine people on a plane asking each other for top movie recommendations from the in-flight entertainment system, or folks at a festival figuring out a rally point to meet up between sets. Public messages auto-delete after 24 hours.
Alongside group messaging, Berkanan also allows private one-to-one messaging, as well as audio calls placed over Bluetooth. The range for these calls and messages is about 50 meters, but if there are people between you and your intended recipient with the app installed, Berkanan can send messages further by going through other users devices.
Berkanan will also show users if they are getting closer or further away from the user they’re messaging with, without ever showing either person’s exact location.
Group chatting with strangers in your location might seem a bit icky at first glance, but group chatting with strangers is essentially the basis of Twitter. With Berkanan, however, a common location replaces the #topic.
Berkanan is entirely bootstrapped, but Szabo has implemented a somewhat unconventional method of generating revenue.
Inspired by games like Fortnite, which make money off of custom skins, dances, and other virtual items, Berkanan will charge users to edit their profile. When a user logs on, their profile will consist of the name they assigned to their iPhone and their profile picture will be their initials, similar to the iOS Contacts interface.
Users can pay to add their own profile picture and add a short bio to their profile.
To be clear, it’s already possible to send SMS via Bluetooth. But Berkanan offers a way to broadcast that message to everyone (with the app) in your location. Of course, user acquisition is critical for the app, which is why Szabó is considering ways for the enterprise to take advantage of the app.
What happens when you bring together an entrepreneur, a product designer and an investment banker who all really love collector vehicles? You get Rally Rd., an app for buying and selling equity shares in classic cars.
Launched in 2016, the company’s SEC-compliant platform lets users purchase shares in Ferraris, Porsches, Lamborghinis and other classic models for as little as $50 per share. The company says it has 50,000 members that have invested millions. Currently, there are just 10 cars available to purchase stakes in, though Rally Rd. expects to have 100 available on the app by the end of 2019.
The New York-based startup has just closed its second round of funding, a $7 million Series A led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Anthemis Group, Social Leverage, WndrCo, Nas, Betterment co-founder Eli Broverman and Acorns co-founder Jeff Cruttenden. Earlier this year, it announced a $3 million seed round led by Columbus Nova.
Rally Rd.’s co-founders Chris Bruno and Rob Petrozzo told TechCrunch the crypto boom and bust really put digital asset investing in the mainstream, helping to bolster business that would have seemed pretty odd just a few years ago.
The pair plan to use the investment to open what they call a “live investing ecosystem,” a vehicle showroom where users can go to participate in initial car offerings in-person. The first will be in New York’s SoHo neighborhood, with other locations to follow in Los Angeles, South Florida and possibly Texas, where they have a strong user base.
“We want to create that Apple Store atmosphere where anyone can come in and learn about equity investing on the spot,” said Petrozzo, Rally Rd.’s chief product officer.
Through a subsidiary company, Rally Rd. purchases collector vehicles and holds the cars’ titles. The startup then hosts SEC-registered offerings, essentially an IPO for a car, where investors can buy one or more of 2,000 equity shares. The vehicles are registered for sale through a registered broker-dealer available in 32 states; the company is still working on obtaining licenses for the remaining 18 states.
Just like the regular stock market, after the initial offering, Rally Rd. holds regular trading windows for each vehicle where users can buy or sell their shares in an app-based secondary marketplace.
“They’ve literally recreated the NASDAQ or NYSE experience for these assets on the Rally Rd. platform,” Upfront partner Greg Bettinelli, who has joined Rally Rd.’s board of directors, told TechCrunch.
Bettinelli added that the reaction he has seen from Rally Rd. customers is similar to what he saw in the early days of the Amazon-acquired smart doorbell company Ring, mobile sneaker marketplace GOAT and ThredUp, an online consignment store that’s raised more than $125 million to date.
For now, Rally Rd. isn’t making money. They don’t take any management fees or share of the offering. Bruno says their plan to generate revenue is to adopt the Robinhood model and are building out a subscription service for those interested in premium access.
In early 2019, Rally Rd. expects to announce expansions into other verticals, including art and sports memorabilia. At some point, they plan to make the app available around the globe, beginning with Australia, Europe and Canada.
French startup Doctolib will take advantage of recent legal changes that will make telemedicine legal in France. Starting on January 1st, you’ll be able to book face-to-face appointments on Doctolib as well as remote appointments.
Doctolib is a marketplace with 60,000 practitioners using the platform to manage their calendars and let people book appointments through Doctolib’s website. Millions of people then browse Doctolib’s website and app to find practitioners and book appointments. Doctors pay a monthly fee to access Doctolib’s service.
While it’s still unclear how it’s going to work, Doctolib plans to tap its existing community of doctors to let them accept remote appointments too.
Doctolib is already testing the service with 500 practitioners. According to the legal framework, you won’t be able to hop on Doctolib, find an available doctor and start a video call with them.
The idea is that you don’t have to show up in person every time you need to see your doctor. Once in a while, a remote appointment is enough. That’s why you’ll only be able to book remote appointments with practitioners who know you already.
But the good news is that remote appointments will be reimbursed by the national healthcare system, just like any appointment. Details are still thin when it comes to the payment system and the communication platform.
In order to work on that new service, Doctolib plans to hire 150 engineers and open up a big office — the Health Tech Center. It’s not going to be limited to the Doctolib team as the company plans to invite officials, practitioners and more.
Cryptocurrency speculation is over. That’s why I’m excited to announce that Vinay Gupta will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to talk about cool use cases that could make blockchain projects useful, beyond financial services.
Gupta worked on the initial release of Ethereum back in 2015. He contributed when it comes to project management. He then worked with the Consensys team on other cryptocurrency projects.
But he’s now 100 percent focused on his own project — Mattereum. As the name suggests, it’s all about bringing physical objects to the blockchain.
For instance, if you buy an expensive painting, you want to make sure that you sign a contract with the previous owner that says that you now own this painting.
Mattereum helps you set up self-executing smart contracts to transfer digital assets (including tokens that could prove the ownership of a painting).
But if you want to combine smart contracts with good old legal contracts, Mattereum has also worked on Ricardian contracts so that those contracts have a legal value. Finally, Mattereum also worked on a decentralized dispute resolution platform that can be enforced in a national court.
If you want to listen to Gupta talk about Mattereum himself, then you should come to Disrupt Berlin.
Buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.
In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.
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Vinay Gupta is a technologist and policy analyst with a particular interest in how specific technologies can close or create new avenues for decision makers. This interest has taken him through cryptography, energy policy, defence, security, resilience and disaster management arenas.
He is the founder of Hexayurt.Capital, a fund which invests in creating the Internet of Agreements. Mattereum is the first Internet of Agreements infrastructure project, bringing legally-enforceable smart contracts, and enabling the sale, lease, and transfer of physical property and legal rights.
He is known for his work on the hexayurt, a public domain disaster relief shelter designed to be build from commonly-available materials, and with Ethereum, a distributed network designed to handle smart contracts.
Six months after completing Y Combinator’s 12-week accelerator program, The Lobby is announcing a $1.2 million investment.
The startup connects job seekers to Wall Street bankers, venture capitalists and other finance “insiders” for advice and personalized career coaching. Founder and former investment banker Deepak Chhugani wants to help people who don’t come from elite backgrounds or have the network of an Ivy League graduate land high-profile finance roles.
“There’s a huge chunk of people that never get noticed,” Chhugani told TechCrunch. “The best opportunities are usually only privy to people that are from those wealthy networks.”
Chhugani, a Bentley University graduate who began his career at Merrill Lynch, believes he was only able to break into Wall Street because the firm had a hole in its Latin America M&A group and he’d grown up in Ecuador.
He and his other non-Ivy League friends who are or have been employed on Wall Street, in venture capital or private equity, are lucky, he says. Despite being perfectly able to succeed, many people of similar backgrounds have had no such luck navigating the finance job market.
“The Lobby is creating the real meritocracy that we tell ourselves the job market is –– or at least should be,” said Matt Mireles in a statement. Mireles, a scout investor at Social Capital, invested personally in the seed round alongside Y Combinator, Ataria Ventures, 37 Angels, former Travelocity CEO Carl Sparks and Columbia Business School’s chief innovation officer Angela Lee.
Using The Lobby, job seekers can connect with professionals over anonymous 30-minute phone calls, where they can conduct mock interviews or fix-up their resumes. Insiders, who are paid by The Lobby’s customers, can give the honest truth about what it’s like to work in finance, a sort-of real-life Glassdoor .
As for the name, Chhugani says he can’t promise any of the startup’s customers a job, but he can promise to get them in the lobby.
“The ones who work really hard and deserve it will get up the stairs.”
Who should you sell your startup to? Facebook and the founders of its former acquisitions are making a strong case against getting bought by Mark Zuckerberg and Co. After a half-decade of being seen as one of the most respectful and desired acquirers, a series of scandals has destroyed the image of Facebook’s M&A division. That could make it tougher to convince entrepreneurs to sell to Facebook, or force it to pay higher prices and put contractual guarantees of autonomy into the deals.
WhatsApp’s founders left amidst aggressive pushes to monetize. Instagram’s founders left as their independence was threatened. Oculus’ founders were demoted. And over the past few years, Facebook has also shut down acquisitions, including viral teen Q&A app TBH (though its founder says he recommended shutting it down), fitness tracker Moves, video advertising system LiveRail, and still-popular mobile app developer platform Parse. [Correction: Voice control developer tool Wit.ai has not shut down, just its Bot Engine.]
Facebook’s users might not know or care about much of this. But it could be a sticking point the next time Facebook tries to buy out a burgeoning competitor or complementary service.
The real trouble started with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton’s departure from Facebook a year ago before he was fully vested from the $22 billion acquisition in 2014. He’d been adamant that Facebook not stick the targeted ads he hated inside WhatsApp, and Zuckerberg conceded not to. Acton even got a clause added to the deal that the co-founders’ remaining stock would vest instantly if Facebook implemented monetization schemes without their consent. Google was also interested in buying WhatsApp, but Facebook’s assurances of independence sealed the deal.
WhatsApp’s other co-founder, Jan Koum, left Facebook in April following tension about how Facebook would monetize his app and the impact of that on privacy. Acton’s departure saw him leave $850 million on the table. Captivity must have been pretty rough for freedom to be worth that much. Today in an interview with Forbes’s Parmy Olson, he detailed how Facebook got him to promise it wouldn’t integrate WhatsApp’s user data to get the deal approved by EU regulators. Facebook then broke that promise, paid the $122 million fine that amounted to a tiny speed bump for the money-printing corporation, and kept on hacking.
When Acton tried to enact the instant-vesting clause upon his departure, Facebook claimed it was still exploring, not “implementing,” monetization. Acton declined a legal fight and walked away, eventually tweeting “Delete Facebook.” Koum stayed to vest a little longer. But soon after they departed, WhatsApp started charging businesses for slow replies, and it will inject ads into the WhatsApp’s Stories product Status next year. With user growth slowing, users shifting to Stories, and News Feed out of ad space, Facebook’s revenue problem became WhatsApp’s monetization mandate.
The message was that Facebook would eventually break its agreements with acquired founders to prioritize its own needs.
Instagram’s co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger announced they were resigning this week, which sources tell TechCrunch was because of mounting tensions with Zuckerberg over product direction. Zuckerberg himself negotiated the 2012 acquisition for $1 billion ($715 million when the deal closed with Facebook’s share price down, but later $4 billion as it massively climbed). That price was stipulated on Instagram remaining independent in both brand and product roadmap.
Zuckerberg upheld his end of the bargain for five years, and the Instagram co-founders stayed on past their original vesting dates — uncommon in Silicon Valley. Facebook pointed to Instagram’s autonomy when it was trying to secure the WhatsApp acquisition. And with the help of Facebook’s engineering, sales, recruiting, internationalization and anti-spam teams, Instagram grew into a 1 billion-user juggernaut.
But again, Facebook’s growth and financial woes led to a change of heart for Zuckerberg. Facebook’s popularity amongst teens was plummeting while Instagram remained cool. Facebook pushed to show its alerts and links back to the parent company inside of Instagram’s notifications and settings tabs. Meanwhile, it stripped out the Instagram attribution from cross-posted photos and deleted a shortcut to Instagram from the Facebook bookmarks menu.
Zuckerberg then installed a loyalist, his close friend and former News Feed VP Adam Mosseri, as Instagram’s new VP of Product mid-way through this year. The reorganization also saw Systrom start reporting to Facebook CPO Chris Cox. Previously the Instagram CEO had more direct contact with Zuckerberg despite technically reporting to CTO Mike Schroepfer, and the insertion of a layer of management between them frayed their connection. Six years after being acquired, Facebook started breaking its promises, Instagram felt less autonomous and the founders exited.
The message again was that Facebook expected to be able to exploit its acquisitions regardless of their previous agreements.
Zuckerberg declared Oculus was the next great computing platform when Facebook acquired the virtual reality company in 2014. Adoption ended up slower than many expected, forcing Oculus to fund VR content creators since it’s still an unsustainable business. Oculus has likely been a major cash sink for Facebook it will have to hope pays off later.
But in the meantime, the co-founders of Oculus have faded into the background. Brendan Iribe and Nate Mitchell have gone from leading the company to focusing on the nerdiest part of its growing product lineup as VPs running the PC VR and Rift hardware teams, respectively. Former Xiaomi hardware leader Hugo Barra was brought in as VP of VR to oversee Oculus, and he reports to former Facebook VP of Ads Andrew “Boz” Bosworth — a longtime Zuckerberg confidant who TA’d one of his classes at Harvard who now runs all of Facebook’s hardware efforts.
Oculus’ original visionary inventor Palmer Luckey left Facebook last year following a schism with the company over him funding anti-Hillary Clinton memes and “sh*tposters.” He was pressed to apologize, saying “I am deeply sorry that my actions are negatively impacting the perception of Oculus and its partners.”
Lesser-known co-founder Jack McCauley left Facebook just a year after the acquisition to start his own VR lab. Sadly, Oculus co-founder Andrew Reisse died in 2013 when he was struck by a vehicle in a police chase just two months after the acquisition was announced. The final co-founder Michael Antonov was the chief software architect, but Facebook just confirmed to me he recently left the division to work on artificial intelligence infrastructure at Facebook.
Today for the first time, none of the Oculus co-founders appeared onstage at its annual Connect conference. Obviously the skills needed to scale and monetize a product are different from those needed to create. Still, going from running the company to being stuck in the audience doesn’t send a great signal about how Facebook treats acquired founders.
Facebook needs to take action if it wants to reassure prospective acquisitions that it can be a good home for their startups. I think Zuckerberg or Mosseri (likely to be named Instagram’s new leader) should issue a statement that they understand people’s fears about what will happen to Instagram and WhatsApp since they’re such important parts of users’ lives, and establishing core tenets of the product’s identity they don’t want to change. Again, 15-year-old Instagrammers and WhatsAppers probably won’t care, but potential acquisitions would.
So far, Facebook has only managed to further inflame the founders versus Facebook divide. Today former VP of Messenger and now head of Facebook’s blockchain team David Marcus wrote a scathing note criticizing Acton for his Forbes interview and claiming that Zuckerberg tried to protect WhatsApp’s autonomy. “Call me old fashioned. But I find attacking the people and company that made you a billionaire, and went to an unprecedented extent to shield and accommodate you for years, low-class. It’s actually a whole new standard of low-class,” he wrote.
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Posted by David Marcus on Wednesday, September 26, 2018
But this was a wasted opportunity for Facebook to discuss all the advantages it brings to its acquisitions. Marcus wrote, “As far as I’m concerned, and as a former lifelong entrepreneur and founder, there’s no other large company I’d work at, and no other leader I’d work for,” and noted the opportunity for impact and the relatively long amount of time acquired founders have stayed in the past. Still, it would have been more productive to focus on why’s it’s where he wants to work, how founders actually get to touch the lives of billions and how other acquirers like Twitter and Google frequently dissolve the companies they buy and often see their founders leave even sooner.
Acquisitions have protected Facebook from disruption. Now that strategy is in danger if it can’t change this narrative. Lots of zeros on a check might not be enough to convince the next great entrepreneur to sell Facebook their startup if they suspect they or their project will be steamrolled.
Fast, healthy food is one of those concepts that just seems too good to be true. But Farmer’s Fridge, a Chicago-based startup that recently closed a $30 million Series C round led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors, aims to make that a reality.
Farmer’s Fridge retrofits vending machines to serve up healthy foods — salads, sandwiches, granola, etc. — for people on the go, for anywhere from $5 to about $8. In order to ensure restaurant-quality food, Farmer’s Fridge has a chef on board who receives feedback from customers to constantly tweak the menu and the food. There’s also a large workforce in place to restock the food, which is prepared daily in Farmer’s Fridge’s kitchen, every morning. I tried the food while I was in Chicago, and I must admit that it was good. And this is coming from someone who generally dislikes salad.
While the amount of waste is low (about 5 percent left over) — thanks to its allocation algorithm that determines how much of each type of food to stock in each vending machine location — Farmer’s Fridge has a system in place to deliver leftover food to the Greater Chicago Food Depository, a food bank that works in partnership with 700 agencies, including soup kitchens, shelters and pantries.
“The hypothesis for the business is that it’s been done for ATMs, it’s been done for movies, and those things have nothing to do with each other. So the only connection would be that consumers generally want things that are faster and cheaper and more convenient, as long as they don’t have to sacrifice any quality from the experience,” Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders told me at the startup’s headquarters in Chicago.
Farmer’s Fridge founder and CEO Luke Saunders at the startup’s Chicago-based HQ
“So, renting a movie from a kiosk — there’s no difference,” he added. “It’s the same movie when you get home. With food, though, it was interesting because there’s a lot of businesses where the experience is supposedly the most important part, so ‘if you have really good service at a restaurant, could technology actually replace that experience’ was the core question of the business. Or is that an important sustained advantage for a restaurant versus our business model?”
So far, it’s been working. Since launching in 2013, Farmer’s Fridge has deployed 200 vending machines throughout Chicago and Milwaukee. Farmer’s Fridge vending machines can be found in airports, hospitals and in traditional retailers, like pharmacies, convenience stores and even the Amazon Go store in Chicago. Each location gets stocked at least five days a week, while the airport gets stocked seven days a week. Depending on the business partner, Farmer’s Fridge has a revenue model that ranges from subsidized accounts to revenue shares.
“Each vertical behaves really differently,” Saunders said. “In a hospital, they care more about having an amenity overnight for employees who don’t have access to a cafeteria than they do about profitability. At O’Hare International Airport, it’s a revenue share because of the traffic generated. For some retailers, it’s about the traffic Farmer’s Fridge brings to those places.”
The app is probably the least technologically interesting part about Farmer’s Fridge, but what it offers is an easy way to see where you can find a fridge, the inventory of said fridge and the ability to reserve food from that fridge ahead of time. The fridge itself is the real technological achievement. It’s an internet-connected device that runs firmware and features a graphical user interface and cloud infrastructure.
Next year, the plan is to expand regionally and launch in an additional region. In the nearer term, Farmer’s Fridge is expecting to grow from 130 employees today to about 200 by the end of next year.
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