This feature from The Washington Post looks at the Jobs report published early this month and analyses the health of the Trump economy over the past year. For this week’s posts, click on the...

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Sramana Mitra: There are a few issues with what you said. At a 30,000 foot level, what you said is true. When you start peeling the onion and poking in the guts of that statement, there are lots of...

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America’s mayors have spent the past nine months tripping over each other to curry favor with Amazon.com in its high-profile search for a second headquarters.

More quietly, however, a similar story has been playing out in startup-land. Many of the most valuable venture-backed companies are venturing outside their high-cost headquarters and setting up secondary hubs in smaller cities.

Where are they going? Nashville is pretty popular. So is Phoenix. Portland and Raleigh also are seeing some jobs. A number of companies also have a high number of remote offerings, seeking candidates with coveted skills who don’t want to relocate.

Those are some of the findings from a Crunchbase News analysis of the geographic hiring practices of U.S. unicorns. Since most of these companies are based in high-cost locations, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and New York, we were looking to see if there is a pattern of setting up offices in smaller, cheaper cities. (For more on survey technique, see Methodology section below.)

Here is a look at some of the hotspots.

Nashville

One surprise finding was the prominence of Nashville among secondary locations for startup offices.

We found at least four unicorns scaling up Nashville offices, plus another three with growing operations in or around other Tennessee cities. Here are some of the Tennessee-loving startups:

When we referred to Nashville’s popularity with unicorns as surprising, that was largely because the city isn’t known as a major hub for tech startups or venture funding. That said, it has a lot of attributes that make for a practical and desirable location for a secondary office.

Nashville’s attractions include high quality of life ratings, a growing population and economy, mild climate and lots of live music. Home prices and overall cost of living are also still far below Silicon Valley and New York, even though the Nashville real estate market has been on a tear for the past several years. An added perk for workers: Tennessee has no income tax on wages.

Phoenix

Phoenix is another popular pick for startup offices, particularly West Coast companies seeking a lower-cost hub for customer service and other operations that require a large staff.

In the chart below, we look at five unicorns with significant staffing in the desert city:

Affordability, ease of expansion and a large employable population look like big factors in Phoenix’s appeal. Homes and overall cost of living are a lot cheaper than the big coastal cities. And there’s plenty of room to sprawl.

One article about a new office opening also cited low job turnover rates as an attractive Phoenix-area attribute, which is an interesting notion. Startup hubs like San Francisco and New York see a lot of job-hopping, particularly for people with in-demand skill sets. Scaling companies may be looking for people who measure their job tenure in years rather than months.

Those aren’t the only places

Nashville and Phoenix aren’t the only hotspots for unicorns setting up secondary offices. Many other cities are also seeing some scaling startup activity.

Let’s start with North Carolina. The Research Triangle region is known for having a lot of STEM grads, so it makes sense that deep tech companies headquartered elsewhere might still want a local base. One such company is cybersecurity unicorn Tanium, which has a lot of technical job openings in the area. Another is Docker, developer of software containerization technology, which has open positions in Raleigh.

The Orlando metro area stood out mostly due to Robinhood, the zero-fee stock and crypto trading platform that recently hit the $5 billion valuation mark. The Silicon Valley-based company has a significant number of open positions in Lake Mary, an Orlando suburb, including HR and compliance jobs.

Portland, meanwhile, just drew another crypto-loving unicorn, digital currency transaction platform Coinbase. The San Francisco-based company recently opened an office in the Oregon city and is currently in hiring mode.

Anywhere with a screen

But you don’t have to be anywhere in particular to score jobs at many fast-growing startups. A lot of unicorns have a high number of remote positions, including specialized technical roles that may be hard to fill locally.

GitHub, which makes tools developers can use to collaborate remotely on projects, does a particularly good job of practicing what it codes. A notable number of engineering jobs open at the San Francisco-based company are available to remote workers, and other departments also have some openings for telecommuters.

Others with a smattering of remote openings include Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike, enterprise software developer Apttus and also Docker.

Not everyone is doing it

Of course, not every unicorn is opening large secondary offices. Many prefer to keep staff closer to home base, seeking to lure employees with chic workplaces and lavish perks. Other companies find that when they do expand, it makes strategic sense to go to another high-cost location.

Still, the secondary hub phenomenon may offer a partial antidote to complaints that a few regions are hogging too much of the venture capital pie. While unicorns still overwhelmingly headquarter in a handful of cities, at least they’re spreading their wings and providing more jobs in other places, too.

Methodology

For this analysis, we were looking at U.S. unicorns with secondary offices in other North American cities. We began with a list of 125 U.S.-based companies and looked at open positions advertised on their websites, focusing on job location.

We excluded job offerings related to representing a local market. For instance, a San Francisco company seeking a sales rep in Chicago to sell to Chicago customers doesn’t count. Instead, we looked for openings for team members handling core operations, including engineering, finances and company-wide customer support. We also excluded secondary offices outside of North America.

Additionally, we were looking principally for companies expanding into lower-cost areas. In many cases, we did see companies strategically adding staff in other high-cost locations, such as New York and Silicon Valley.

A final note pertains to Austin, Texas. We did see several unicorns based elsewhere with job openings in Austin. However, we did not include the city in the sections above because Austin, although a lower-cost location than Silicon Valley, may also be characterized as a large, mature technology and startup hub in its own right.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is counter to the trend of the venture capital industry right now. It has become the age of lean startups at the early stages these days where entrepreneurs are...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 401st FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 7, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to...

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Sramana Mitra: What does UI Path do? Cem Sertoglu: They are the leading robotics process automation software company. They help large enterprises with complex legacy backend systems to automate a lot...

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The Trump administration just moved to kill a key tool to support immigrant entrepreneurs, and the startup community must make our voice heard to save it.

Supported by Republicans and Democrats, the International Entrepreneur Rule (IER) operates like a startup visa and allows foreign-born founders to launch new businesses in the U.S., rather than overseas. IER is in place after the National Venture Capital Association (which I lead) successfully sued the Department of Homeland Security when it unlawfully delayed the program last year. But now, the administration is taking new steps to end the rule before it has a chance to bring new companies and innovation to our country.

Why would the administration do something so obviously counter-productive? That’s the question those of us who understand the importance of immigrant entrepreneurship keep asking. The track-record of foreign-born founders is staggering.

Studies show that immigrants have started more than half of America’s privately-held startups valued at $1 billion or more, and 43 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded or co-founded by an immigrant or the child of an immigrant. A 2013 NVCA study found that one-third of all venture-backed companies that went public from 2006 to 2012 had at least one immigrant founder.

Specific to IER, one study found that the rule will create more than 300,000 jobs over 10 years, although I believe this is on the low end because a single entrepreneur could create a startup with tremendous growth or even an entirely new industry. IER is tailored to attract founders who are positioned to launch the next generation of great American companies and would unleash fresh entrepreneurial energy and dynamism that we desperately need in the economy.

The Trump administration’s hostility toward IER is also puzzling considering President Trump’s previous statements on immigration. During the State of the Union address, the president emphasized the need for a “merit-based immigration system — one that admits people who are skilled, who want to work, who will contribute to our society, and who will love and respect our country.”

It’s almost like he was describing IER without naming it. After all, we are talking about a program where a successful applicant must create a new high-growth enterprise that will in turn employ Americans and contribute to our nation’s technological and scientific advancement.

Furthermore, the applicant’s status in the United States is completely tied to the startup company and would be unable to remain in our country if the enterprise fails. There is nothing more merit-based than that, and yet the administration is saying no to the new jobs that come when young companies scale and grow.

The administration’s rejection of IER comes at a particularly troubling time for American entrepreneurial standing. Twenty years ago, U.S. startups received 90 percent of global venture capital, but that number has precipitously dropped to 54 percent last year.

Policymakers must understand that U.S. startup dominance is being challenged every day, and the top entrepreneurs now have a world of choices when it comes to where to launch their high-growth company. Other countries are copying the American blueprint for startup activity and making their countries more attractive for new company creation.

One way they’re doing this is by taking advantage of our intransigence on immigration policy and then welcoming foreign-born founders to their shores. The idea of a startup visa was first proposed in the U.S., and while we still don’t have one, countries like Canada, France and Singapore have copied the idea and are reaping the benefits.

Rejection of IER is also incongruent with the Trump administration’s goal of American leadership on critical technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, machine-learning and new drug discovery.

If we are to lead in these areas, the world’s top entrepreneurs must be here in the U.S., rather than overseas where they will compete with us. Rather than pushing entrepreneurs away, the administration should be fighting to attract top talent. That’s the only way the U.S. will be the innovation leader going forward.

Despite the overwhelming arguments in favor of IER, the Department of Homeland Security is moving forward to rescind the program before it truly gets off the ground. This is a setback to be sure, but so was the first DHS delay, and we beat the administration that go around. We’re going to keep fighting, but we can’t do it alone.

How can you help? The best way to do your part is by engaging in the public comment period that is open now and closes on June 28. Visit fwd.us/ier and share your perspective on why the International Entrepreneur Rule is needed. Everyone’s voice is valued in the process.

Tell your personal stories of immigrant entrepreneurs who have impacted our country, how IER will help maintain U.S. competitiveness or how IER will create American jobs. Together, we can win, and by doing so help our country remain the best place on the planet to launch a new company that provides a better way of life.

There is nothing that appears to slow down Alibaba’s (NYSE: BABA) growth rates. It recently reported results for the March ended quarter, and the company delivered its eighth consecutive quarter of...

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Until now, Rebel has been known as a platform allowing marketers to incorporate interactive elements into their emails. Today, it’s launching a new version of its API that will allow developers to build entire emails, interactive or not.

Co-founder Joe Teplow explained that the new Rebel Lite API was created in response to developers who were already using the company’s API.

“Our customers loved being able to build these actionable modules in bite-sized chunks with our API,” Teplow said. In fact, they loved it enough that they started asking, “Could we build the entire email with your API?”

So with the Rebel Lite API, Teplow said they can create emails using JSON, “without writing one line of HTML.”

And yes, this is a tool built specifically for developers, not a drag-and-drop email editor for marketers. Teplow said that as the industry has become more complex, “Email as a channel requires a really tight integration between marketers and developers.”

But what’s so hard about sending an email? Kevin Dutra, who leads Rebel’s product team, explained, “The main problem is email market fragmentation on the rendering side.”

In other words, Dutra said it takes extensive testing to make sure your email shows up properly on every device and email client, turning the creation of email into a full-time job. Rebel, on the other hand, is constantly keeping track of changes in email rendering, so if you build an email using the API you can take advantage of all that work to know that your code is up-to-date and that your emails will render properly.

In addition, Rebel has created a number of reusable components to enable the creation of complex layouts.

Teplow added that the new API could also help Rebel reach a new audience — not just large enterprises, but also “regular developers at a smaller company.”

“They weren’t a fit for Rebel before, but we’re slowly starting to let those people in,” he said.

In a delightful bit of irony BitBay, a Central European exchange, has shut down operations in Poland even as it received an invitation by the Polish government to participate in a national blockchain working group. The news, which appeared in a Tweet, states that the group will assess regulations for cryptocurrencies, blockchain, and ICOs.

“Our exchange has received an invitation from the PFSA to participate in the Blockchain Working Group. As we have recently said, we do not want to abandon crypto activity in the Polish community,” wrote BitBay.

Poland has had an odd relationship with Bitcoin. First, some of the central banks funded a YouTube propaganda video that showed a person losing plenty of cash in crypto. Further, the community is fighting back but releasing counter-propaganda to the central bank’s policies.

After being shut out by Polish banks, BitBay moved its headquarters to Malta and stopped serving Polish customers.

Photo by freestocks.org on Unsplash

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Asheem Chandna, Greylock Ventures was recorded in...

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Walmart’s tech incubator is out with its first experiment. The incubator, known as Store No. 8, just launched Jetblack, a concierge-style service for requesting stuff and getting it really quickly. During its pilot period, the project was known as Code Eight.

To shop with Jetblack, first you need an invite. Right now the service is limited to some customers in Manhattan and Brooklyn who are part of an eight-month pilot program restricted to buildings with a doorman, though that will soon expand and a waitlist is available now. The service is $50 a month — considerably less than some adjacent competitors, while considerably more than Amazon Prime — and promises same-day delivery.

While concierge services like Hello Alfred position themselves as high-end options for people wishing to live more serene lives, Jetblack is focusing on “time-strapped urban parents” seeking “more efficient ways to shop for themselves and their families.” To request something, Jetblack members send a text message and will receive product recommendations sent back in text. Those recommendations are culled from Walmart and Jet.com but also from specialty retailers locally.

That means any product request is fair game and “sourcing a specific beauty cream from a member’s favorite local boutique, curating custom Easter baskets and delivering them once the kids are asleep and rushing beach essentials to a family on vacation” are all within the realm of Jetblack fulfillments.

“Consumers are looking for more efficient ways to shop for themselves and their families without having to compromise on product quality,” said Jetblack co-founder and CEO Jenny Fleiss, formerly of Rent the Runway.

“With Jetblack, we have created an entirely new concept that enables consumers to get exactly what they need through the convenience of text messaging and the freedom of a nearly unlimited product catalogue.”

It’ll be interesting to see if these kind of personal shopping services can differentiate themselves in markets already well-acquainted with same-day shipping. While what makes Jetblack’s proposition unique isn’t that clear, it’s worth noting thanks to its roots in the biggest brick-and-mortar retailer around.

Machine learning is one of those buzzwords that nearly every tech company likes to throw around nowadays — but according to Lukas Biewald, it represents a genuinely new approach to programming.

“Software has eaten a lot of the world, and machine learning is eating software,” Biewald said.

In his view, there are “fundamental” differences between the two approaches: “One important difference is if all you have is the code you used to train the program, you don’t really know what happened … If I had all the code that was used to train a self-driving car algorithm but I don’t have the data, I don’t know what went down.”

Along with Chris Van Pelt, Biewald previously founded CrowdFlower (now known as Figure Eight), which launched nearly a decade ago at the TechCrunch 50 conference, and which has created tools for training artificial intelligence.

Biewald (whom I’ve known since college) and Van Pelt, plus former Google engineer Shawn Lewis, have now started a new company called Weights & Biases to build new tools for machine learning developers. They’ve also raised $5 million in Series A funding from Trinity Ventures and Bloomberg Beta.

“Artificial Intelligence has so much potential, but few companies are implementing it yet because the development process is too complicated for all but a small number of highly trained engineers,” said Trinity’s Dan Scholnick, who’s joining the startup’s board of directors. (Scholnick previously backed CrowdFlower.) “W&B aims to dramatically streamline the machine learning software development process so that AI benefits can be unlocked across industries and no longer restricted to the few firms able to hire extremely skilled and extraordinarily expensive AI developers today.”

The eventual goal is to create a whole suite of development tools, but Weights & Biases’ first product records and visualizes the process of training a machine learning algorithm. Biewald explained that this makes it possible for developers to go back and see what they were doing, say, a month ago and to share that information with teammates. And it’s already being used by the nonprofit research company OpenAI.

Biewald added that when he talked to his friends in the field about their biggest problems, this was the first thing that came up. That’s how he hopes to approach future products as well — working with developers to figure out what they really need.

“I don’t want to help with the hype,” he said. “I want to help with the real problems that really get in the way … to make this stuff actually work.”

Biewald also offered more details about his vision for the company in a blog post:

You can’t paint well with a crappy paintbrush, you can’t write code well in a crappy IDE, and you can’t build and deploy great deep learning models with the tools we have now. I can’t think of any more important goal than changing that.

After their long post-financial-crisis slump, European tech IPOs are starting to rebound. Tech companies raised more money on European public markets between 2015-17 (€5.3 billion) than in the previous seven years combined. With venture capital having boomed in that time, that trend is set to continue: There is a generation of well-funded, fast-growing technology companies now eyeing the public markets as the platform for continued rapid growth. The pipeline is healthy. But what needs to be done to get ready for an IPO and, crucially, what comes next?

Money raised and market opportunity alone do not make for a public-company-in-waiting. You do not transform from a scrappy growth business into a tightly governed, transparent public company overnight. It has to be a gradual evolution, one which requires the right people, structures and mindset to be in place. Companies need to ask themselves not just if they want to pursue an IPO, but how exactly they plan to go about it, and how they will prepare for the realities of life as a public company.

Having advised three companies on their journey to an IPO, across three different geographies, I think there should be at least two years of careful planning between deciding to seek a listing and hearing the bell ring on your market open.

You have to start with bringing in the right people. A business can grow a long way on the back of an inspirational founding team, but as an aspiring public company, you need an experienced and high-performing management team as well. Do you have a CFO who has credibility with public market investors? Does the board have enough members with independent authority; will it meet the requirements of those institutional investors who now require a minimum quota of female directors?

Your board will have to grow, not least to fulfill necessary governance functions, from audit to compensation and nomination committees. These are important and often complex hires, which can take anything from six months to a year to put in place. It also takes a while for new board members to start working well together and gain a detailed understanding of the company.

The composition of the board is just one area where a private company has to start asking itself new questions as it prepares for a listing. Another is the financial profile of the business and the trade-off between growth and profitability. Will investors give us credit for growing, say, 80 percent year over year? Should we front-load investments and associated losses, or incur them over time when required? The CEO also must think about how she is going to communicate with the market, and whether she needs others around her to give investors the full package. A very visionary and product-focused CEO, for example, will need to be complemented by a brilliant CFO who can handle detailed questions about the company’s finances.

A company thinking about going public also needs to evolve its mindset. After an IPO, you will no longer be a tight-knit group of founders, early hires and investors who know the business intimately. The relationship you have known with your private backers is going to bear no relation to the one you will experience with public market investors. As a public company, you are no longer being supportively cheered on, but independently scrutinized by investors who understand the business in less detail and are liable to react strongly to indicators whose significance they can easily misinterpret. In this environment, if you set an ambitious target, you can’t achieve only 95 percent of it and expect to be consoled and encouraged. Institutional investors are going to want to know why you didn’t exceed that target, let alone failed to meet it.

Ultimately it comes down to one question: Can you start operating like a public company before you become one? The companies that succeed post-IPO are those that have laid the foundation to make the transition from private to public as seamless as possible. There are rich rewards to be enjoyed on the public markets, but only for those who do the hard work in advance to ease into life as a public company. Europe’s fast-growing tech companies should consider not just whether an IPO is the right option for them, but if they are willing to put in the work that is necessary to make it a success.

This is a must-read for understanding the tech industry. We’ve distilled famous investor Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report down from its massive 294 slides of stats and charts to just the most important insights. Click or scroll through to learn what’s up with internet growth, screen addiction, e-commerce, Amazon versus Alibaba, tech investment and artificial intelligence.

We’re excited to announce Steve Case and JD Vance will sit down for a fireside chat at Disrupt SF this September. There’s plenty to talk about, too, including the pair’s latest venture: A massive $150 million seed fund backed by an impressive group of investors that are targeted at startups outside of Silicon Valley.

As The New York Times put it after the fund’s announcement, the complete list of investors in the Rise of the Rest fund “may be the greatest concentration of American wealth and power in one investment fund.” It includes among others Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, John Doerr, Jim Breyer, Dan Gilbert and members of the Walton, Koch and Pritzker families.

This fund is core to what Case and Vance are championing at Revolution . The Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm primarily backs companies outside of major tech hubs. At Disrupt New York in May, Case told the audience that many regions are overlooked simply because investors can’t “get in their cars and drive to those companies” and he wants to convince other VCs to look outside of their comfort zones.

In August of 2017 Steve Case, founder of AOL and Revolution, tapped JD Vance to run Revolution as its Managing Partner.

“I don’t know if I’m ever going to be comfortable with being the media-dubbed spokesperson,” Vance told TechCrunch at the time. “But I do think you can talk about the issues and try to raise awareness or you can do something about the issues — my goal here is to try to do both. There’s an opportunity I’ve been given here with the platform the book has afforded.”

Vance is seemingly of the same mind as Case. In his book, which is a must read by the way, Hillbilly Elegy, he lays out his upbringing in Appalachia’s working class and explains the importance of striving to overcome obstacles — and startups outside the Valley have different obstacles to overcome than those located around San Francisco. As the managing partner of Revolution, we hear he has a keen focus that resonates with founders. Vance served in the Golf War, eventually graduating from The Ohio State and Yale and went on to serve as a law clerk and a principle at Peter Thiel’s  VC firm, Mithril Capital Management LLC.

Steve Case spoke at Disrupt NY last year about his current passion in shining a light on startups outside traditional tech hubs.

“It’s worth remembering that Detroit 75 years ago was like the Silicon Valley,” said Case at Disrupt NY in 2017. “At the time, it was the hottest innovation city in the country, because the automobile was the hot new technology at the time. Silicon Valley was like fruit orchards. These things change. But they lost their way. Detroit lost 60 percent of its population in the last 50 years and they went bankrupt because they lost their entrepreneur mojo.”

Case’s fireside chat was fascinating and we’re thrilled to have him back with Revolution’s managing partner, JD Vance. While Disrupt SF happens in the heart of Silicon Valley, there are plenty of founders, developers and investors who are constantly looking for opportunities in new regions — just like Steve Case and JD Vance.

If you’re looking to purchase tickets to Disrupt, you can grab those right here.

If you’ve ever been in a pointless meeting at work, odds are you’ve spent part of the time responding to messages or just putzing around on the Internet — but Klaxoon hopes to convert that into something a bit more productive with more interactive meetings.

The French startup today said it’s raised $50 million in a new financing round led by Idinvest Partners, with early round investors BPI, Sofiouest, Arkea and White Star Capital Fund also participating. The company offers a suite of tools designed to make those meetings more engaging and generally just cut down on useless meetings with a room of bored and generally unengaged people that might be better off working away at their desk or even taking other meetings. The company has raised about $55.6 million in total.

The whole point of Klaxoon is to make meetings more engaging, and there are a couple ways to do that. The obvious point is to translate what some classrooms are doing in the form of making the whole session more engaging with the use of connected devices. You might actually remember those annoying clickers in classrooms used to answer multiple choice questions throughout a session, but it is at least one way to engage people in a room — and offering a more robust way of doing that may be something that helps making the session as a whole more productive.

Klaxoon also offers other tools like an interactive whiteboard (remember Smartboards, also in classrooms?) as well as a closed networks for meeting participants that aims to be air-gapped from a broader network so those employees can conduct a meeting in private or if the room isn’t available. All this is wrapped together with a set of analytics to help employees — or managers — better conduct meetings and generally be more productive. All this is going to be more important going forward as workplaces become more distributed, and it may be tempting to just have a virtual meeting on one screen while either working on a different one — or just messing around on the Internet.

Of course, lame meetings are a known issue — especially within larger companies. So there are multiple interpretations of ways to try to fix that problem, including Worklytics — a company that came out of Y Combinator earlier this year — that are trying to make teams more efficient in general. The idea is that if you are able to reduce the time spent in meetings that aren’t really productive, that’ll increase the output of a team in general. The goal is not to monitor teams closely, but just find ways to encourage them to spend their time more wisely. Creating a better set of productivity tools inside those meetings is one approach, and one Klaxoon seems to hope plays out.

It’s often the case that women don’t think much about their reproductive health until they have to. Sometimes it begins with an aside from a well-meaning gynecologist — or one’s impatient parents. Sometimes, it’s because a couple is ready to try conceiving and it’s proving harder than they imagined it would be.

A San Francisco-based startup called Modern Fertility wants to educate women about their reproductive health much earlier in their lives, enabling them to become more “proactive” instead of reactive, says co-founder and CEO Afton Vechery, who worked formerly as a product manager at the genetic testing company 23andMe and, before that, at a healthcare-focused private equity firm in Greenwich, Conn.

At both places, she learned a lot about the growing number of companies that are empowering customers with information about their own bodies. She also learned, particularly at 23andMe, about the importance of making that information affordable. Indeed, after shelling out $1,500 for tests run by a reproductive endocrinologist to get a better picture of her own reproductive health, Vechery set out to create similar tests that one needn’t be a Rockefeller to order. Toward that end, an at-home finger-prick hormone test that Modern Fertility began selling today for $199.

The vast difference in price owes to economies of scale, says Vechery. Because there are just 500 infertility clinics in the U.S. and roughly 6,000 endocrinologists — just 2,000 of which are focused on reproductive health — the cost of individual testing has been prohibitively high. Modern Fertility, meanwhile, has “systems and tech and integrations that support a high volume of tests” conducted at the same time, she says, explaining that with volume comes discounted pricing.

Modern Fertility is not analyzing its customers’ hormones. It is using all CLIA-certified labs, including Quest Diagnostics, the 50-year-old, publicly traded clinical laboratory company. “We’re not making new instruments,” says Vechery. “Our differentiation is in access and the information that we provide to women.”

In fact, Modern Fertility is billing itself as more of an educational company than anything else. While it will tell consumers about nine hormone levels related to ovarian reserves and overall reproductive health — which can be important, especially when it comes to considerations around egg freezing — much of what it offers is related to content based on peer-reviewed studies about menopause and when women typically start to lose their fertility.

Customers also receive one optional one-on-one phone consultation with a fertility nurse who won’t give out medical advice but can share more information about which hormones are being tracked and why.

For the price, that may be enough for many women. It was enough for investors. Modern Fertility just closed on $6 million in funding led by Maveron and Union Square Ventures, which were joined by Sound Ventures, #Angels, SV Angel and additional individual investors.

No doubt these backers see a future where an offering like that from Modern Fertility is a perk offered by employers, more of which are offering fertility benefits to keep their employees happy and in place. Already, Vechery says that a “handful of companies” are interested in layering Modern Fertility’s tests into their other wellness benefits.

Modern Fertility is also counting on repeat customers, suggesting to them that re-taking its test every now and then will give a woman a better idea of how her “fertility curve” is changing over time.

Most immediately, says Vechery, Modern Fertility — co-founded by Carly Leahy, a creative strategist who moved to California from Boston in 2014 after Google recruited her, and who most recently logged two years at Uber — will be adding to its current, eight-person team.

It also will be “trying to understand the best way it can get this information” to potential customers, says Vechery. “We want to meet women where they are and educate them that this type of testing is important.”

Pictured above: Modern Fertility co-founders Afton Vechery, left, and Carly Leahy

Scout.fm wants to change the way people listen to podcasts. Instead of scouring through the over 500,000 shows in your current podcast app, this startup’s new curated podcast service will just ask you a few questions to find out what you like, then create a podcast station customized to you. The experience is primarily designed for use on smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, but is also available as iOS and Android applications.

The company was founded just over a year ago by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously of Google, Twitter, Indiegogo, and Medium; along with Saul Carlin (president and COO), previously head of publisher development at Medium, and before that, Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium.

At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.

But unlike on Medium, which helps to guide readers to topics they like, people today have to seek out new podcasts for themselves. Scout.fm wants to offer a better system, and hopefully bring more listeners to podcasts as a result.

“We want to take podcast listening mainstream,” she says. “We think the key to that is making podcasts as easy to listen to as the radio – and we think that’s even more critically important, as we enter the smart speaker era.” 

The Scout.fm service began as a series of experiments on Alexa.

The company launched over 30 Alexa skills, including a “Game of Thones”-themed podcast radio that was popular while the show was airing on HBO. The goal was to test what worked, what topics and formats drew listeners, and gain feedback through calls-to-action to participate in user surveys.

The result is Scout.fm, a curated podcast service that’s personalized to your listening preferences – and one that improves over time.

Here’s how it works on the Alexa platform. You first launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Scout fm.” The app will respond (using a human voice actor’s voice, not Alexa’s) by explaining briefly what Scout.fm does then asks you to choose one of three types of talk radio stations: “Daily news, brain food, or true stories.”

The first is a news station, similar to Alexa’s “Flash Briefing;” the second, “brain food,” focuses on other interesting and informative content, that’s not day-to-day news; and the last is a true crime podcast station.

The voice app will then ask you a few more questions as part of this setup process to find out what other subjects appeal to you by having you respond, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a history buff you are, or how much you’re interested in culture, like art, film and literature, for example.

On subsequent launches, the app will simply ask if you want to return to your “Brain Food” (or other selected) station. If you say no, you can try one of the other options.

However, once the setup process is over, the experience becomes very much like listening to talk radio.

A podcast will begin playing – Scout.fm favors those without ads at the very beginning – allowing you to listen as long as you’d like, or say “next” to move to the next one. Each new podcast episodes has a brief, spoken introduction that Scout.fm handwrites, so you know what’s coming up. Your listening can go on for hours, offering you a hands-free means of switching podcasts and discovering new favorites.

The app will also adjust to your preferences over time, removing those you tend to skip – much like how the thumbs down works on Pandora.

Scout.fm doesn’t include every podcast that’s out there. Instead, it’s a curated selection of a few hundred with high production values, narrative storytelling and tight editing.

“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”

For example, some of the podcasts Scout.fm includes come from The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, ESPN, and podcast networks like Gimlet, Wondery, Parcast and others.

The same curated selection of podcasts is also available in Scout.fm’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, which work with the voice assistant on the phone. (For example, you can tap your AirPods to wake Siri then say “Next” to move between podcasts.)

“If you’re jogging, our apps are an excellent companion because you don’t have to go back to your phone and try to find a new thing to listen to,” notes Meverden.

Since Scout.fm’s launch, it has accrued 1.5 million minutes listened across its network of experimental apps ahead of today’s public debut. The Alexa user base listened for twice as long as mobile users.

Currently, the service is not generating revenue, but, in the future, the team envisions call-to-action ads that could work with the Alexa app to share more information about the products, as well as ways it could utilize the newer in-app purchase mechanisms for Alexa skills.

The company is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.

“The Scout team’s unique insight is that podcasts, no matter how good, won’t go mainstream until it is much simpler for consumers to find and listen to the content that’s right for them,” said Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, in a statement about the investment. “The fast adoption of smart speakers changes this. We can open up podcasts to an entirely new audience,” he said.

Scout.fm is available on Alexa, iOS and Android.

Sramana Mitra: I know you read some of my writings. I’m a huge proponent of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Having worked in this ecosystem for all these years, I’ve observed the development of...

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