Extra Crunch publishes a variety of article types, but how-tos are my favorite category.

For many entrepreneurs, the startup they are trying to get off the ground might be only the second entry on their resume. As a result, they don’t have much experience to draw from when it comes to basics like hiring, fundraising and growth marketing.

Last week, Natasha Mascarenhas interviewed experts who had some strategic advice for finding the right time to bring a product manager on board. This afternoon, we published a guest post by growth marketer Jessica Li with tips for “how nontechnical talent can build relationships with deep tech companies.”

We’ve also received great feedback on a recent guest post about bootstrapping options for SaaS founders written by a founder who’s actually done it.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

If you have some startup-related “how” and “why” questions, please browse our Extra Crunch How To stories. They’re aimed squarely at early-stage founders and workers trying to solve long-term problems.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! I hope you have a relaxing weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Welcome to Bloxburg, public investors

As Roblox began to trade Wednesday, the company’s shares shot above its reference price of $45 per share. Roblox, a gaming company aimed at children, has had a tumultuous if exciting path to the public markets.

Seeing Roblox trade so very far above its direct listing reference price and final private valuation appears to undercut the argument that this sort of debut can sort out pricing issues inherent in more traditional IPOs.

4 ways startups will drive GPT-3 adoption in 2021

Trained on trillions of words, GPT-3 is a 175-billion parameter transformer model — the third of such models released by OpenAI.

GPT-3 is remarkable in its ability to generate human-like text and responses, able to return coherent and topical emails, tweets, trivia and much more. In 2021, this technology will power the launch of a thousand new startups and applications.

There have never been more $100M+ fintech rounds than right now

We are in a period of all-time record investment for so-called mega-rounds, or investments of $100 million or more inside the fintech realm.

To date, Q1 2021 is ahead and is thus guaranteed to set a new record, having already bested the preceding all-time high. What’s going on?

Global-e files to go public as e-commerce startups enjoy a renaissance

Global-e, an e-commerce platform that helps online sellers reach global consumers, filed to go public on Tuesday. Global-e’s business exploded amid the pandemic in 2020, and the company expects that the COVID-fueled shift to e-commerce will only lead to future growth.

 

Passive collaboration is essential to remote work’s long-term success

Have you ever popped into a meeting because you overheard a snippet of a conversation and wanted to share your perspective?

That’s passive collaboration — low-friction ways to invite new ideas. But it’s only when we’re able to fully realize passive collaboration virtually that we’ll have unlocked the full potential of remote and hybrid work situations.

 

Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the H-1B, O-1A and EB-1A?

Dear Sophie:

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?

The ones I’ve heard the most about are the H-1B, O-1 and EB-1A.

— Intelligent in India

 

Proactive CEOs should prioritize European expansion

Many investors will encourage CEOs to remain U.S.-centric this year and perhaps expand their product offering or move into new market segments. But 95% of the world’s population lives outside the U.S., making an expansion into Europe your best growth lever.

 

Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading

After Roblox debuted on Wednesday, Coupang followed, with shares shooting above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Quick math shows Coupang is worth around $92 billion at the moment, a huge number that nearly zero companies will ever reach.

 

How and when to hire your first product manager

Because product managers and founders often have overlapping skill sets, it can be tricky to find the right candidate.

While it’s different for every company, hiring a PM ensures companies aren’t “chasing the shiny object” but rather building the things that create enduring value for customers.

 

Deep Science: AI adventures in arts and letters

AI isn’t confined to the tech sphere; machine learning is applicable across disciplines, from music and the “computational unfolding” of ancient letters to figuring out where EV charging stations need to be built.

 

A first look at Coursera’s S-1 filing

The SEC filing offers a glimpse into the finances of how an edtech company, accelerated by the pandemic, performed over the past year.

It paints a picture of growth, albeit one that came at steep expense.

 

Olo’s IPO could value the company north of $3B as Toast waits in the wings

Olo has a history of growth and profitability, making its impending pricing all the more interesting.

But are investors willing to pay more for profits? And, if so, how much?

 

From electric charging to supply chain management, InMotion Ventures preps Jaguar for a sustainable future

InMotion’s investment in Circulor, a company that monitors supply chains from raw material inputs to finished outputs with an eye toward sustainable sourcing, shows the firm’s dedication to backing companies across the mobility space broadly.

 

White-label voice assistants will win the battle for podcast discovery

Americans are bored, housebound and screened out, driving roughly 128 million Americans to use a voice assistant at least once a month.

This has created a golden opportunity for audio as consumers turn to podcasts, voice assistants and smart speakers.

 

Why I’m hitting pause on ARR-focused coverage

One of the first recurring features Alex Wilhelm established at Extra Crunch was the “$100M ARR Club,” ongoing coverage of startups that have reached scale.

“Forget a $1 billion valuation — $100 million in annual recurring revenue is the cool kids’ club,” he wrote in December 2019. Since then, he expanded it to cover companies that attained $50M ARR.

The concept is a useful lens for studying the market. I can say this with confidence because it’s been widely copied by other tech news outlets. But this morning, Alex surprised me — he’s shelving the ARR Club, at least for now.

“In the end it became a pre-IPO list that was fun but not entirely educational, by my reckoning,” he told me. “The $50M ARR club evolution was supposed to help shake loose more interesting operational details, but just didn’t.”

Before putting the format on hiatus, Alex’s last ARR Club roundup looks at in-office display and kiosk startup AppSpace, data backup unicorn Druva, and Synack, which makes security software.

TC Early Stage: The premier how-to event for startup entrepreneurs and investors

From April 1-2, some of the most successful founders and VCs will explain how they build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios.

At TC Early Stage, we’ll cover topics like recruiting, sales, legal, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session includes ample time for audience questions and discussion.

Use discount code ECNEWSLETTER to take 20% off the cost of your TC Early Stage ticket!

Immune intelligence startup Serimmune hopes to better understand the relationship between antibody epitopes (the parts of antigen molecules that bind to antibodies) and the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The company’s proprietary technology, originally developed at UC Santa Barbara, provides a new and specific way of mapping the entire array of an individual’s antibodies through a small blood sample. They do this through the use of a bacterial peptide display — a sort of screening mechanism that can isolate plasmid DNA from antibody-bound bacteria in the sample. This DNA can then be sequenced to identify epitopes, which provide information about which antigens someone may have been exposed to, as well as how their immune system responded to them.

“It’s a very highly multiplexed and exquisitely specific way of looking at the epitopes found by antibodies in a specimen,” said Serimmune CEO Noah Nasser, who has a degree in molecular biology from UC San Diego and has previously worked for several diagnostics companies.

This week, Serimmune announced the launch of a new application of their core technology to help understand the disease states of and immune responses to SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19.

“So what we do is we take these antibody profiles we build, and we’re able to then map those back with about a 12 amino acid specificity to the SARS-CoV-2 proteome,” said Nasser. “And what we find is that antibody expression is highly correlated to disease state, so we can distinguish mild, moderate, severe and asymptomatic disease on the basis of antibodies that are present in the specimen.”

The more patient data Serimmune can collect, the better its core technology becomes at finding patterns across different antigen exposure and disease severity. Noticing those patterns sooner won’t only help physicians and researchers to better understand how the SARS-CoV-2 virus operates, but can also inform new approaches to diagnostics, treatments and vaccines for any antigen.

Serimmune’s launch of its new COVID antibody epitope mapping service is a way of making this data more accessible to customers like vaccine companies, government agencies and academic labs that have shown interest in better understanding the immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

“The key was to zero in on the information that researchers wanted to know and standardize that,” said Nasser. “We can actually now provide these results back in as few as two days from sample receipt.”

Beyond this new service, Serimmune also has plans to launch a longitudinal clinical study on immunity to SARS-CoV-2. Using a painless at-home collection kit, study participants send in small blood samples to Serimmune, which then uses its core technology to outline an individual immunity map.

“We provide their results back to them in the form of a personal immune landscape to COVID,” said Nasser. “And what we’re trying to do is to understand over time how that immune response changes, and what happens to that immune response on repeated exposure to COVID.”

The mapping technology is now so specific that it can tell whether a patient has antibodies from natural exposure to the SARS-CoV-2 virus or from a vaccine, he added.

While the primary focus for Serimmune remains these applications to the COVID-19 pandemic for now, Nasser also mentioned that the company has plans to move into personalized medicine, potentially offering their mapping service directly to interested patients.

“We believe that this has value to individual patients in understanding their immune status and what antigens they’ve been exposed to,” he said. Until then, Serimmune plans to continue growing its database with more patient samples.

Spring may be just around the corner (in the U.S., anyway), but it’s never too early to start planning for TechCrunch Disrupt 2021, which takes place on September 21-23. This all-virtual conference allows makers, innovators, entrepreneurs and investors from around the world to connect, collaborate and grow.

Startup Alley is a huge part of every Disrupt — it’s where hundreds of innovative, ground-breaking early-stage startups showcase their tech talent, products, platforms and services. This year, we’re shaking things up a bit to help exhibiting founders make the most of a virtual environment.

What’s new and different about exhibiting in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021? Plenty. When you apply for a Startup Alley Pass, you stand in a giant spotlight of opportunity:

Pitch it. Pitch it real good. Bring the heat, because every exhibiting startup gets a guaranteed spot to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of Disrupt attendees around the world.The Startup Alley Crawl. Every startup category will have an hour-long crawl in the agenda, where we’ll go live from the Disrupt Stage to interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from that category.Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.Startup Alley+. Every Startup Alley exhibitor is eligible, but only up to 50 companies will make the final cut to participate in Startup Alley+. These founders receive, at no additional cost, a curated experience to set them up for additional opportunities, learnings, exposure and success before Disrupt even starts. They’ll receive access to a series of founder masterclasses, take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live, and get introductions to elite investors in the TechCrunch community. Get your Startup Alley Pass soon because StartupAlley+ shifts into high gear at TC Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising in July, where all Startup Alley+ companies get to attend this virtual event for free.

Pro Tip: Early-bird pricing to apply for Startup Alley ($199) ends May 13 at 11:59 pm (PST). The sooner you apply, the more you save.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23. Don’t miss an opportunity to exhibit in all-new Startup Alley and apply now! Snag extra exposure, build your network and make connections that can alter the trajectory of your startup in the best possible way.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Madrid-based TaxDown, which automates income tax filing by calculating regional deductions due to users so they don’t have to navigate complex tax rules themselves, has raised €2.4 million (~$3M) in seed funding.

US-based FJ Labs has joined TaxDown’s investment board as it closes the seed round. It says all its previous investors participated in the round, including James Argalas (Presidio Union); Abac Nest, Abac’s venture capital business; Baldomero Falcones, the former Chairman at Mastercard; and the founders of Jobandtalent, Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navío (another Madrid-based startup).

For the past three years TaxDown been offering a service in Spain but is now eyeing international expansion, as well as further growth in its home market.

Last year, it says it managed more than €29M in taxes for users — delivering savings of €4M+ to users.

Its target is to hit 500,000 users in Spain this year. While international expansion is planned for the second half of 2021, with TaxDown saying it’s focused on other European and Latin American markets.

“From the beginning, our ambition has been to help people fill in their taxes all over the world. That is why we developed our proprietary software/tax language that allows a tax expert with no coding capabilities to translate the tax law into calculation and logic that can be interpreted by our backend seamlessly,” says Enrique García, CEO and co-founder. “This tax language allowed us to launch in Spain in 4 months with only one tax consultant. We are confident that we can launch a new country in only 6 months.”

“The tax filing process is far from being simple,” he goes on, explaining how its tech simplifies income tax filing in Spain. “Currently, when using the Spanish Tax Agency tax-filling tool, taxpayers need to manually apply deductions on their tax forms. The problem is, with national regional deductions being different in each region in Spain, taxpayers often do not even know they’re entitled to those deductions. Thus, by not applying them to their tax form, they lose money. What TaxDown does is leverage the advanced Spanish Tax Agency technology, which offers an API to request the financial data related to a taxpayer — always with prior authorization from the user — with 2.000+ datapoints.

“Once we have that, our algorithm ‘RITA’ is capable of understanding the user’s personal and financial data, select the optimum questions that the user needs to answer — an average of 9 over a database of 3.000+ – and precisely calculate the tax return, with no errors.”

“Technology is the heart of TaxDown,” he adds. “Besides our algorithm RITA that has been trained with over 40.000+ tax returns, today we also use AI to help our ‘taxers’ with tips on how to lower future tax bills, and we have started working on live income tax simulation for our users throughout the entire year.”

García says TaxDown calculated more than 42,000 tax returns last year with a team of just two in-house tax experts — thanks to proprietary internal tools which allow them to handle this scale (by being “80x more efficient than the Spanish average”, as he puts it). He adds that further efficiency gains are expected.

“We have developed a machine-learning tool that flags the tax returns that need to be reviewed before filing based on historical data. Thus, we continuously increase the percentage of tax returns that are automatically submitted with no manual intervention,” he tells TechCrunch, adding: “Thanks to this feature, we expect to improve our efficiency at least 5x versus last year.”

According to García, TaxDown has never had any filings rejected for inaccuracies because he says its algorithms continually run tests and validate the information with the authorities. “Furthermore, our technology can flag errors in real time in case that there is a discrepancy, so our tax experts can manually check the tax return form if needed,” he adds.

Its business model — currently — is a sort of twist on freemium, in that it will only charge users if the income tax savings it calculates for them exceed €35.

García says that so far an average of three out of 10 users see financial savings from using its tool — but he suggests it’s not only savings that motivate users; he says they also want reassurance that they are taking “the best approach with their taxes: doing them effortlessly, correctly, with all the guarantees, tapping for experts’ live help at any time, ensuring the best result they can get, and of course knowing that we have their backs in case of an audit”.

Given that wider relationship it’s building with users, TaxDown sees potential to evolve its business model by expanding to offer additional fintech services, such as financial advice, in the future.

“Our vision goes far beyond income tax return preparation, we believe that tax data is becoming one of the most valuable data assets for people (take Trump’s tax returns for example), and we want to assess our ’taxers’ based on the best and more qualitative information that we can get,” says García. “Therefore, in the future we want to be a trusted financial advisor not just for taxes, but for personal finances as well. We believe we are well positioned to be an intermediary between our users and financial institutions.”

 

As 2021 kicked off, I reformulated a series of posts we published last year focused on startups that had reached the $100 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark. In our refreshed effort, we cut the target in half and dug up companies around the $50 million ARR threshold. The goal was to figure out what those firms were going through as they reached material scale, not after they had achieved effective pre-IPO status.

And the results were a bit medium.

While it was fun to chat with OwnBackup, Assembly, SimpleNexus and PicsArt, ultimately we were getting similar notes from each company: Hiring is incredibly important as a company scales, founders have to cede decision-making, and as startups grow from $30 million ARR to $50 million or more, they must harden internal systems and build business infrastructure.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

All that made sense, but it wasn’t entirely scintillating. I meant to keep the project going; I had publicly made noise about the effort and had a few interviews in the bag that were collecting dust (and emails from various PR folks).

But they wound up in the Google Docs graveyard as the news cycle somehow managed to keep accelerating, meaning that the time required to execute the somewhat effort-intensive series dried up as I held on for dear life as the early, middle, late and IPO-stage startup market stormed.

And so after some reflection, it’s time to admit defeat.

For now, I’m hitting pause on the $50 million ARR series and whatever might have come from the $100 million ARR legacy effort. I may bring it back at some point, but for now, there are just more pressing and interesting things to work on.

What follows is what I believe to be the remainder of my notes from interviews that never saw the light of day. So, one last time, let’s discuss some big startups that are scaling quickly: Appspace, Synack and Druva. We’ll proceed in alphabetical order.

Appspace

The Exchange caught up with Appspace a bit ago, chatting with a few of its executives, including CMO Scott Chao and CEO Brandon Miles. It’s an interesting company that sells a software platform that powers in-office displays and kiosks. You’ve seen office sign-in screens at a welcome desk, screens outside conference rooms showing how booked they are, or company messaging and the like on various large screens? That’s what Appspace’s software does.

And the company has an interesting vibe. Unlike nearly every other startup I’ve met, Appspace doesn’t think it is saving the world. In our chat, the company joked that its culture is to move quickly, but with the cognizance that they aren’t curing cancer.

Such modesty might feel odd, but it was actually refreshing. Appspace’s job is to white-label itself, let its customers speak to their workers through its various apps (including mobile) and services, and simply feature rock-solid uptime.

St. Louis-based voice assistant startup Disruptel is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.

The money comes from an impressive group of investors who seem well-aligned with what the startup is aiming to do — namely, build a voice assistant that can provide detailed information about what’s happening on your TV screen. Those investors include PJC and Progress Ventures (which led the round), along with DataXu co-founder and former CEO Mike Baker, Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, Sky executive Andrew Olson and DataXu co-founder Bill Simmons.

Disruptel CEO Alex Quinn told me that he began to pursue the idea in high school — the initial idea was more focused on TV gesture controls, but he decided that there was a bigger opportunity in the fact that “smart TVs don’t know what’s going on on their own screen.”

So he said Disruptel has built technology that has “a contextual understanding of everything that’s happening on the screen — every product, all of that data.” So for example, you could use the technology to ask your TV, “Who is the person in the brown shirt?”

Quinn’s description reminded me of Amazon’s X-Ray technology, which can tell you about the actors on-screen, as well as additional trivia about whatever movie or TV you’re watching on Amazon Prime. But he said that Amazon’s solution (as well as a similar one from Google) involves “static data — the videos have all been pre-processed.” With Disruptel, on the other hand, “everything is happening in real time,” which means it could theoretically work with any piece of content.

Disruptel’s flagship product Context is a voice assistant designed to work with smart TVs and their remotes. Quinn said he’s hoping to partner with smart TV manufacturers and streaming services and get this into the hands of viewers in the second half of this year.

In the meantime, the company has already created a Smart Screen extension for Google Chrome that you can try right now (using the extension, I successfully identified the actors on-screen during multiple scenes of an episode of “The Flash”). Quinn said the company is using the extension as way to test the product and gather engagement data.

Baker (who sold his adtech company dataxu to Roku in 2019)  said that he was convinced to back the company after seeing a demo of the product: “It was interesting to see the power, the fluidity of the experience.”

He also suggested that Disruptel’s tech creates new opportunities to improve on the smart TV advertising experience, which he described as largely consisting of “crap” — though he also pointed to Hulu as an example of a service that can be successful with “non-intrusive advertising and interstitial ads.”

Asked how a high school student could create this kind of technology, Quinn (who is now 21) said, “We had to learn. Our team is very focused on machine learning, and our machine learning engineers were reading research paper after research paper. We think that we have found the best research solutions.”

He added that if Disruptel had followed the leads of the big players and focused on pre-processing content, “We would never even have begun that journey.”

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Like every week, we had to leave a lot of great stuff on the cutting-room floor. But, we did get to touch on a bunch of news that we feel really matters.

Also we do wind up talking about a few Extra Crunch pieces, which is where our deeper analysis on news items lives. If the paywall is a bother, you can get access while saving 50% with the code “EQUITY.”

Here’s what we got into:

Crypto-art and the NFT boom continue. Check out what Beeple just did. Danny has an opinion on the matter.The Roblox direct-listing does very little actually solve the IPO pricing issue. That said, well done Bloxburg.We talked about the Coursera S-1, which gave us the first financial peek into an education company revitalized by the pandemic.The numbers needed context, so our follow up coverage gives readers 5 takeaways from the Coursera IPO.Language learning has a market, and it’s big. We talked about Preply’s $35 million raise and why tutoring marketplaces make sense.Dropbox is buying DocSend, which makes pretty good sense. Even if the exit price won’t matter much for bigger funds. We’re still witnessing Dropbox and Box add more features to their product via acquisitions. Let’s see how it impacts their revenue growth.Zapier buys Makerpad. We struggled to pronounce Zapier, but did have some notes on the deal and what it might mean for the no-code space.Sticking the acquisition theme, PayPal bought Curv. If you were looking for more evidence that big companies are taking crypto seriously, well, here it is.And to close we nerded out about Neeva. Can a Google-competitor take on Google if it was founded by ex-Googlers?

The show is back Monday morning. Stay cool!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

 

Another day brings another public debut of a multibillion-dollar company that performed well out of the gate.

This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising one’s range and then pricing above it only to see the public markets take the new equity higher is somewhat par for the course when it comes to the most successful recent debuts, to which we can add Coupang.

The company’s mix of rapid growth and slimming deficits appear to have found an audience among public money types, so let’s quickly explore the price they paid. What was the company worth at its IPO price, and what is worth now? And, of course, we’ll want to calculate revenue run rates for each figure.

Oh — we’ll also need to calculate how much money SoftBank made. Inverted J-Curve indeed!

Coupang’s IPO and current value

As Renaissance Capital notes, Coupang boosted its share allocation to 130 million shares from 120 million. This made the value of both primary and secondary shares in its public offering worth a total of $4.55 billion. That’s a lot of damn money.

At its IPO price of $35, the same source pegged the company’s fully diluted IPO valuation at $62.9 billion. By our accounting, the company’s simple valuation at its IPO price came to $60.4 billion. Those numbers are close enough that we’ll just stick with the diluted number out of kindness to the company’s fans.

Doing some quick math, Coupang is worth around $92 billion at the moment. That’s a huge number that nearly zero companies will ever reach. Some do, of course, but as a percentage of startups that start, it’s an outlier figure.

Venture capitalists love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading.

OpenVC is a new, open-source initiative to collect and analyze all publicly available VC theses to help founders more efficiently find the right investors — and vice-versa. For the first time, we are sharing here our initial conclusions. We hope you’ll upload your own thesis to benchmark yourself. We’ve identified six common patterns of how VCs articulate their theses and some best practices in doing so.

Our analysis is based on two complementary datasets:

125 theses so far submitted by investors into the OpenVC database.36 theses pulled directly from U.S. VC websites by David Teten and Sam Sabin, co-founder of Hireblue.

Our four primary conclusions:

Public theses are often inconsistent with how firms actually deploy capital. VC theses are often so vague that they’re meaningless. We found seven categories of VC theses, plus an eighth: the non-thesis. Investment theses are just hypotheses; the portfolio shows how accurate the hypothesis was.

For the sake of simplicity, we will consider “investment thesis” and “investment criteria” as equivalent terms moving forward, although we argue that the thesis leads to the investment criteria. We summarize how they interrelate in the table below.

1. Public theses are often inconsistent with how firms actually deploy capital

A typical VC thesis: “We invest in tech startups in Europe at an early stage.” However, our experience shows that in many cases “Europe” means a handful of countries, for instance, France, U.K. and Germany; and “tech” means B2B SaaS/fintech or consumer apps.

Thirty-four VC firms in OpenVC call themselves “early stage.” Yet 30% of those don’t actually invest in pre-revenue startups. The phrase is quite ambiguous; we suggest quantifying check size so that your investment preference is clearer.

Almost every VC says that they invest in the “best” founders. However, according to PitchBook Data, since the beginning of 2016, companies with women founders have received only 4.4% of venture capital deals. Those companies have garnered only about 2% of all capital invested. This is despite the fact that the data show you’re better off investing in women.

This lack of transparency results in confused founders who chase the wrong investors. In turn, investors are overwhelmed with poorly qualified opportunities.

2. VC theses are often so vague that they’re meaningless

Christoph Janz from Point Nine Capital wrote on Twitter:

The modal VC thesis is: “We invest in great teams addressing large markets with disruptive solutions.” Who invests in lousy teams addressing tiny markets with outdated solutions? Theses also tend to use the same words across many firms, e.g., “daring” and “bold.”

In particular, in our second dataset, we found a disproportionate number of theses focused on “technical” companies (vaguely defined) and focused on companies attacking “problems of the future rather than the present,” in various permutations of that language.

Top Visible Heuristics (in dataset of 36 U.S. VCs)	Occurrences
“Technical” companies (i.e., any mention of a focus on tech companies)	26
Local affinity or bias	10
Attack problems of the future rather than the present (or some variant)	9
Technical founders	7

Why are the investment criteria so imprecise on the VC websites? We have three theories, in descending order of importance:

Option value. Investors don’t want to be too restrictive and miss out on a deal. However, we’d argue that for most smaller managers who are not brand names, it’s better to be highly identified in your niche than being a generalist. Most limited partners we speak with agree.A desire to look “sexy” and politically correct as opposed to being honest. This is probably a major reason. For example, saying publicly, “We invest mostly in white/Asian men who went to Stanford like us” accurately describes numerous VCs, but doesn’t sound very politically correct.VCs are afraid to give out their secret sauce. We think this doesn’t make much sense; you can share your criteria without telling the whole logic behind them. Many top-tier VCs share detailed public theses.

3. We found seven categories of VC theses, plus an eighth: the non-thesis

Database firm Couchbase has registered for a stock market debut that could value it at as much as $3 billion.Read More

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Primary care startup Forward Health is looking to expand its tech-powered, personalized healthcare model across the U.S., and will use a new $225 million Series D raise to help make it happen. The new capital comes from Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank, Mark Benioff – and recording artist The Weeknd – among others. I spoke to Forward Health co-founder and CEO Adrian Aoun about his company’s plans for this fresh capital, and we also chatted briefly about how The Weeknd got involved.

Forward, which currently operates clinics in select U.S. markets including LA, New York, Chicago, SF and Washington, D.C., has a number of distinguishing features, but most notable are likely its tech-first approach that includes a full biometric assessment upon first visit, and its business model, which eschews insurance providers altogether and instead works based on a single flat membership fee.

Aoun and his co-founders created Forward Health with the idea of building a healthcare business that’s aligned with its customers in terms of incentives, which is why they sidestepped insurance altogether. That’s led to a focus on customer service and long-term patient relationships and outcomes, which Aoun says are stronger because they’re not bound by an individual’s relationship with their employer, for instance, which is often the case when an employer foots the bill for healthcare via company-provided insurance.

“The average person in the Bay Area is with their employer for about two and a quarter years,” Aoun told me. “So your employer is kind of sitting there thinking, if you get the flu, you’re missing three days of work – I’m out some money.” That means they’ll do things like institute programs to remind employees constantly to get their annual flu vaccine, and do other things to make that happen like provide on-premise shots. But Aoun says they’re optimizing for short-term outcomes, not long-term health – because that’s where their incentives tell them to optimize.

But when long-term healthcare programs, like lifestyle shifts that can lessen the potential of truly dangerous outcomes like heart disease and cancer, come into play, an employer who expects you to stick around for a few years at most is far less incentivized to want to fund that. Forward Health, which aims to attract subscribers and, for lack of a better term, minimize churn, actually is incentivized to make those long-term outcomes positive for everyone who comes through the door.

That’s part of why one focus with this new funding is to debut new doctor-led programs tailored to treating conditions that individual patients might be predisposed to – like heart health, if heart disease runs in your family, or specific types of cancer, if there’s a history of that, for instance.

“We’ve got our [in-clinic] body scanners, our blood tests, our gene sequencing – we basically collect on the order of about 500 biometric data points,” Aoun said. “The idea is you and your doctor then figure out which which kind of programs make sense for you based upon those.”

For example, Aoun says he’s actually at fairly high risk for developing heart disease, so there’s a Forward program that includes doing a heart risk analysis, blood tests, and regular at-home monitoring of key risk factors like blood pressure and weight. Another program for cancer prevention includes measures designed to help lessen the risk of contracting the top five cancers in terms of prevalence — so Forward created a dermatoscope for that, which is essentially a skin scanner to map out an individual’s moles and skin features and alert them of any changes.

This builds on work that Forward began at the outset of COVID-19 — its ‘Forward at Home’ program, which includes sending patients home with specialized sensors for remote care. Another specialized program tailored to COVID-19 actually offers monitoring specific to the disease in order to track a patient’s progress safely.

“We’re now launching programs for all the top diseases to help you get ahead of them,” Aoun said. “And whatever kind of programs you’re using, you walk away with plans that are tailored to you, again, to counsel you not only on the potential risks for the things like the cancer and heart disease, but also to be proactive, with guidance from diet, to exercise, to stress, and to sleep, etc.”

The programs are supported by Forward’s 24/7 worldwide care support team, which subscribers can access via their mobile app. It’s also complemented by the check-ins with your physician via the ‘Forward at Home’ in-home virtual visits.

While Forward is already rolling these out, it has plans to continue to develop new ones, and it’s also monitoring results in order to understand how they’re working for users, and will be sharing that data once it has collected a significant sample. I asked Aoun how Forward can scale this kind of personalized care – especially now that the startup plans to open additional locations in other parts of the country.

Basically, Aoun said that Forward approached it as an engineering problem. He argues that most solutions in healthcare see the fundamental issue as a labor problem — but trying to scale that, with the salaries that medical professionals command, and the limited availability of skilled talent, makes no sense. Especially because consumers are naturally looking for improvements in their standard of care over time, in the same way they expect improvements in the products they buy or services they use.

Rather than relying on a chain of increasingly specific medical professionals to address individual health risks and needs, Aoun said Forward identified that there’s a massive amount of overlap in preventative care courses of action. The Forward team focused on breaking the fundamental elements down into what equate roughly to reusable Lego blocks, which can be recombined with relative speed and repeatability to produce a program that’s nonetheless tailored to an individual’s needs.

Combined with Forward Health’s longitudinal approach to care, these programs and their recombinant nature should prove a good dataset from which to assess how a direct, client-focused primary care model affects overall health.

And, because I promised, I’ll leave you with how Aoun says The Weeknd got involved in the Series D.

“He literally just walked by one of our locations, and walked in and was like, ‘This is awesome,’ and then asked a friend, who asked a friend, who asked a friend to get connected,” he told me.