Nate Faust has spent years in the e-commerce business — he was a vice president at Quidsi (which ran Diapers.com and Soap.com), co-founder and COO at Jet (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and then a vice president at Walmart.

Over time, he said it slowly dawned on him that it’s “crazy” that 25 years after the industry started, it’s still relying on “single-use, one-way packaging.” That’s annoying for consumers to deal with and has a real environmental impact, but Faust said, “If any single retailer were to try to tackle this problem right now on their own, they would run up into a huge cost increase to pay for this more expensive packaging and this two-way shipping.”

So he’s looking to change that with his new startup Olive, which consolidates a shopper’s purchases into a single weekly delivery in a reusable package.

Olive works with hundreds of different apparel brands and retailers, including Adidas, Anthropologie, Everlane, Hugo Boss, Outdoor Voices and Saks Fifth Avenue. After consumers sign up, they can install the Olive iOS app and/or Chrome browser extension, then Faust said, “You shop on the directly on the retailer and brand sites you normally would, and Olive assists you in that checkout process and automatically enters your Olive details.”

The products are sent to an Olive consolidation facility, where they’re held for you and combined into a weekly shipment. Because the retailers are still shipping products out like normal, all that packaging is still being used — but at least the consumer doesn’t have to dispose of it. And Faust said that eventually, Olive could work more closely with retailers to reduce or eliminate it.

Until then, he said the real environmental impact comes from “the consolidation of deliveries into fewer last mile stops” — the startup estimates that doubling the number of items in a delivery reduces the per-item carbon footprint by 30%.

The weekly shipments are delivered by regular mail carriers in most parts of the United States, and by local couriers in dense urban areas. They arrive in reusable shippers made from recyclable materials, and you can return any products by just selecting them in the Olive app, then putting them back in the shipper and flipping the label over.

In fact, Faust argued that the convenience of the return process (no labels to print out, no visits to the local FedEx or UPS store) should make Olive appealing to shoppers who aren’t drawn in by the environmental impact.

“In order to have the largest environmental impact, the selling point can’t be the environmental impact,” he said.

Olive delivery is available at no extra cost to the consumer, who just pays whatever they normally would for shipping.

Faust acknowledged that Olive runs counter to the “arm’s race” between Amazon and other e-commerce services working to deliver purchases as quickly as possible. But he said that the startup’s consumer surveys found that shoppers were willing to wait a little longer in order to get the other benefits.

Plus, Olive is starting with apparel because “there’s not that same expectation of speed” that you get in other categories, and because the items cost enough that the delivery economics still work out, even if you only order one product in a week.

Tens of thousands of students and professionals move out of India each year to pursue higher education and for work. Even after spending months in a new country, they struggle to get a credit card from local banks, and end up paying a premium to access a range of other financial services.

Banks in the U.S., or in most other countries for that matter, rely on local credit scores to determine the worthiness of potential applicants. Even if an individual had a great credit score in India, for instance, that wouldn’t hold any water for banks in a foreign land.

That was the takeaway Raghunandan G, the founder of ride-hailing firm TaxiForSure (sold to local giant Ola), returned to India with after a trip. After months of research and assembling a team, Raghunandan believes he has a solution.

Krisp, a startup that uses machine learning to remove background noise from audio in real time, has raised $9M as an extension of its $5M A round announced last summer. The extra money followed big traction in 2020 for the Armenian company, which grew its customers and revenue by more than an order of magnitude.

TechCrunch first covered Krisp when it was just emerging from UC Berkeley’s Skydeck accelerator, and co-founder Davit Baghdasaryan was relatively freshly out of his previous role at Twilio. The company’s pitch when I chatted with them in the shared office back then was simple and remains the core of what they offer: isolation of the human voice from any background noise (including other voices) so that audio contains only the former.

It probably comes as no surprise, then, that the company appears to have benefited immensely from the shift to virtual meetings and other trends accelerated by the pandemic. To be specific, Baghdasaryan told me that 2020 brought the company a 20x increase in active users, a 23x increase in enterprise accounts and 13x improvement of annual recurring revenue.

The rise in virtual meetings — often in noisy places like, you know, homes — has led to significant uptake across multiple industries. Krisp now has more than 1,200 enterprise customers, Baghdasaryan said: banks, HR platforms, law firms, call centers — anyone who benefits from having a clear voice on the line (“I guess any company qualifies,” he added). Enterprise-oriented controls like provisioning and central administration have been added to make it easier to integrate.

B2B revenue recently eclipsed B2C; the latter was likely popularized by Krisp’s inclusion as an option in popular gaming (and increasingly beyond) chat app Discord, though of course users of a free app being given a bonus product for free aren’t always big converters to “pro” tiers of a product.

But the company hasn’t been standing still, either. While it began with a simple feature set (turning background noise on and off, basically) Krisp has made many upgrades to both its product and infrastructure.

Noise cancellation for high-fidelity voice channels makes the software useful for podcasters and streamers, and acoustic correction (removing room echos) simplifies those setups quite a bit as well. Considering the amount of people doing this and the fact that they’re often willing to pay, this could be a significant source of income.

The company plans to add cross-service call recording and analysis; since it sits between the system’s sound drivers and the application, Krisp can easily save the audio and other useful metadata (How often did person A talk versus person B? What office locations are noisiest?). And the addition of voice cancellation — other people’s voices, that is — could be a huge benefit for people who work, or anticipate returning to work, in crowded offices and call centers.

Part of Krisp’s allure is the ability to run locally and securely on many platforms with very low overhead. But companies with machine learning-based products can stagnate quickly if they don’t improve their infrastructure or build more efficient training flows — Lengoo, for instance, is taking on giants in the translation industry with better training as more or less its main advantage.

Krisp has been optimizing and reoptimizing its algorithms to run efficiently on both Intel and ARM architectures, and decided to roll out its own servers for training its models instead of renting from the usual suspects.

“AWS, Azure and Google Cloud turned out to be too expensive,” Baghdasaryan said. “We have invested in building a data center with Nvidia’s latest A100s in them. This will make our experimentation faster, which is crucial for ML companies.”

Baghdasaryan was also emphatic in his satisfaction with the team in Armenia, where he and his co-founder Arto Minasyan are from, and where the company has focused its hiring, including the 25-strong research team. “By the end of 2021 it will be a 45-member team, all in Armenia,” he said. “We are super happy with the math, physics and engineering talent pool there.”

The funding amounts to $14 million if you combine the two disparate parts of the A round, the latter of which was agreed to just three months after the first. That’s a lot of money, of course, but may seem relatively modest for a company with a thousand enterprise customers and revenue growing by more than 2,000% year over year.

Baghdasaryan said they just weren’t ready to take on a whole B round, with all that involves. They do plan a new fundraise later this year when they’ve reached $15 million ARR, a goal that seems perfectly reasonable given their current charts.

Of course startups with this kind of growth tend to get snapped up by larger concerns, but despite a few offers Baghdasaryan says he’s in it for the long haul — and a multibillion dollar market.

The rush to embrace the new virtual work economy may have spurred Krisp’s growth spurt, but it’s clear that neither the company nor the environment that let it thrive are going anywhere.

Efficient and cost-effective vaccine distribution remains one of the biggest challenges of 2021, so it’s no surprise that startup Notable Health wants to use their automation platform to help. Initially started to address the nearly $250 billion annual administrative costs in healthcare, Notable Health launched in 2017 to use automation to replace time-consuming and repetitive simple tasks in health industry admin. In early January of this year, they announced plans to use that technology as a way to help manage vaccine distribution.

“As a physician, I saw firsthand that with any patient encounter, there are 90 steps or touch points that need to occur,” said Notable Health Medical Director Muthu Alagappan in an interview. “It’s our hypothesis that the vast majority of those points can be automated.”

Notable Health’s core technology is a platform that uses robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to find eligible patients for the COVID-19 vaccine. Combined with data provided by hospital systems’ electronic health records, the platform helps those qualified to receive the vaccine set up appointments and guides them to other relevant educational resources.

“By leveraging intelligent automation to identify, outreach, educate and triage patients, health systems can develop efficient and equitable vaccine distribution workflows,” said Notable Health strategic advisor and Biden Transition COVID-19 Advisory Board Member Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, in a press release.

Making vaccine appointments has been especially difficult for older Americans, many of whom have reportedly struggled with navigating scheduling websites. Alagappan sees that as a design problem. “Technology often gets a bad reputation, because it’s hampered by the many bad technology experiences that are out there,” he said.

Instead, he thinks Notable Health has kept the user in mind through a more simplified approach, asking users only for basic and easy-to-remember information through a text message link. “It’s that emphasis on user-centric design that I think has allowed us to still have really good engagement rates even with older populations,” he said.

While the startup’s platform will likely help hospitals and health systems develop a more efficient approach to vaccinations, its use of RPA and NLP holds promise for future optimization in healthcare. Leaders of similar technology in other industries have already gone on to have multibillion dollar valuations and continue to attract investors’ interest.

Artificial intelligence is expected to grow in healthcare over the next several years, but Alagappan argues that combining that with other, more readily available intelligent technologies is also an important step toward improved care. “When we say intelligent automation, we’re really referring to the marriage of two concepts: artificial intelligence — which is knowing what to do — and robotic process automation — which is knowing how to do it,” he said. That dual approach is what he says allows Notable Health to bypass administrative bottlenecks in healthcare, instructing bots to carry out those tasks in an efficient and adaptable way.

So far, Notable Health has worked with several hospital systems across multiple states in using their platform for vaccine distribution and scheduling, and are now using the platform to reach out to tens of thousands of patients per day.

TechCrunch is excited to announce that Zoom chief revenue officer (CRO) Ryan Azus is joining us at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 1.

Azus has worked at Cisco, RingCentral and most recently Zoom. In his previous roles he held a number of sales titles, including his final role at RingCentral where he was its executive vice president of global sales and services.

Zoom needs little introduction, having crossed over from enterprise software success story to consumer phenomenon during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which time companies, groups, individuals and families leaned on the video chat provider to stay in touch.

Azus has been at the helm of Zoom’s money engine since mid-2019, which means that he has sat atop it during one of the most impressive periods of sales growth at any software company — ever.

So we’re glad that he’ll be at TC Early Stage this year, where we’ll pepper him with questions. Bring your own, of course, as we’ll be reserving around half our time for audience Q&A.

But the TechCrunch crew has a plethora of things we want to chat about too, including the importance of bottom-up sales during the pandemic, especially in contrast to the more traditional sales bullpen model that many startups have historically used; how to balance self-service sales and human-powered sales at a tech company that presents both options to customers, and their relative strength in 2021; changes to sales incentive metrics at Zoom over time from which startups might be able to learn; and how to maintain order and culture in a quickly scaling, remote sales organization.

We’re also curious how Zoom managed to adapt to the pandemic itself, like how long it took the company to reach full-strength from a sales perspective as it moved to remote work and customers that were also out of the office. The simple answer is that his company simply used more of its own product, but there’s more to the story that we want to hear.

Often at TechCrunch events we round up a cadre of executives from well-known technology companies and then hammer them for news. Early Stage is a bit different, focusing instead on extracting knowledge, tips and what-pitfalls-to-avoid from tech folks interested in helping startups do more, more quickly.

Azus won’t be coming alone. Bucky Moore from Kleiner will be in the house, along with Neal Sales-Griffin (a managing director at Techstars) and Eghosa Omoigui (a managing general partner at EchoVC Partners). The list goes on, as you can see here. (We’re also having a big pitch-off, so make sure to come to both days of the event.)

TC Early Stage continues TechCrunch’s recent spate of virtual events, so no matter where you are, you can tune in and learn. Register today to take advantage of early-bird pricing, don’t forget to bring your best questions, and we’ll see you in early April!

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If we are not careful, every entry of this column could consist of SPAC news.

Special purpose acquisition companies, or blank-check companies, whatever you prefer to call them, are enormous business today. But they aren’t the only thing going on, and we’ll get to other things shortly. Consider this an apology for having written about SPACs twice in two days.

Yesterday, we considered the rise of the VC-led SPAC and whether venture capital groups that offer seed-through-SPAC money will wind up with advantage in the market over firms that specialize on any particular startup stage. Sticking to the blank-check theme, this morning we’re looking into two SPAC-led deals, namely those involving Rover and MoneyLion.

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

We’re doubling up to prevent more SPAC-related posts. And we’ve selected Rover because Chewy, another pet-themed entity, is an already-public company. As both were venture-backed, we may be able to contrast their trading performance post-debut. Sadly, Chewy is focused on pet e-commerce while Rover is more centered around pet services, but they may prove close enough for some loose comparisons.

And why chat about MoneyLion? Because it’s a heavily venture-backed fintech startup, one that TechCrunch has covered extensively. If its SPAC-assisted vault into the public markets goes well, it could smooth the same path forward for myriad other yet-private fintechs sitting atop a mountain of raised capital.

So this is a SPAC post, but as we’ll largely be looking at the financial health of two companies that we’ve heard about for ages and never got to see inside of, I hope you join me all the same.

We’re starting with the Rover investor presentation, before zipping over to MoneyLion’s own.

Rover

Rover is merging with Nebula Caravel Acquisition Corp., which is affiliated with True Wind Capital. The deal gives Rover an anticipated market cap of around $1.6 billion, with around $300 million in cash on its books.

So, how attractive is this new unicorn? You can find its investor deck here, if you want to read along as we peek.

First up, the company stresses rising use of digital services in the last year thanks to the pandemic and the fact that pet ownership is growing. Both of which are true. We’ve seen the accelerating digital transformation for both companies and consumers. And if you’ve tried to adopt a pet lately, you’ve seen how few are left waiting for forever homes.

With those things behind it, you might be wondering why Rover is pursuing a SPAC-led debut as well. If its market is hot and it has previously raised venture capital, why not just go public via an IPO? Because 2020 was tough on the company.

Revenue dipped from $95 million in 2019 to just $48 million last year. Bookings fell from 4.2 million to 2.4 million over the same time frame, leading to gross booking value falling from $436 million in 2019 to $233 million in 2020. Why? Because everyone was stuck at home. With their pets. A situation that limited demand for Rover-delivered pet services.

Talkshoplive is a startup that’s worked with stars like Paul McCartney and Garth Brooks, as well as small businesses, to host shopping-focused live videos. Today, it’s announcing that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from Spero Ventures.

CEO Bryan Moore founded the company with his sister Tina in 2018. Moore previously led social media efforts at Twentieth Television (previously known as Twentieth Century Fox) and CBS Television, and he said he was inspired to launch Talkshoplive by the rise of livestreamed shopping experiences in China.

At the same time, Moore said it wasn’t enough to just copy what worked in China: “Small businesses are different here, talent is different, the needs are different.” One of the keys, in his view, is to focus on helping creators and businesses meet their customers where those customers already are — which he also suggested differentiates Talkshoplive from competing services as well.

For one thing, the startup does not require consumers to download any additional apps in order to watch its videos. Instead, it’s created a video player that works on the Talkshoplive website, on the websites of its partners and anywhere else that videos can be embedded. And wherever those videos are played, they also include a one-click buy button.

Moore said Talkshoplive started out with a focus in books and music, working with famous names like Matthew McConaughey, Alicia Keys and Dolly Parton, as well as the aforementioned Brooks and McCartney. For example, Brooks used Talkshoplive to exceed more than 1 million vinyl pre-sales for his “Legacy Collection” box set in 2019.

On the book side, Talkshoplive has worked with publishers including Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster and Macmillan. Moore claimed the platform is driving three to nine times the sales an author would see on other e-commerce sites.

At the same time, he emphasized that the startup is also working with more than 3,500 small businesses, and he said that when a small business owner is broadcasting on Talkshoplive, “You’re creating your own microfandom by being able to tell the story … You’re making yourself a brand story, even as a small business.”

He added, “When you’re able to help people move $25,000 in a show — for a small business, that’s a huge deal.”

In this sense, Moore said he sees Talkshoplive as a continuation of his previous work in social media, all connected by the question, “How are you creating human connection in a digital landscape?” The “ultimate goal,” he added, is to turn the platform into a “digital Main Street” for businesses everywhere.

More recently, Talkshoplive has been moving into other categories like food and beauty, and Moore said he’s excited to work with Spero founding partner Shripriya Mahesh (previously an executive at eBay and First Look Media) to “continually evolve our product and create these tools that help us scale faster — and also help benefit these businesses.”

“From the moment we met the Talkshoplive team, we were impressed with their focus on enabling SMB’s with a new, creative, innovative way to build their businesses,” Mahesh said in a statement. “Talkshoplive also innovates on the marketplace model with a way for buyers to truly engage with the sellers, get to know them, and experience shopping in a whole new way. We are incredibly excited by the community that is taking shape at Talkshoplive and are thrilled to be working with Bryan, Tina, and the TSL team as they grow their community and the marketplace.”

I’m a Black man in America — that’s hard. Black founders, and uniquely Black founders in tech, are facing insurmountable odds.

As the recipients of less than 1% of venture capital raise, institutionalized systems are visibly at play. Within almost 10 years of my entrepreneurial journey, I have encountered just as many setbacks and failures as I have successes.

However, I have pressed forward despite the disparities that often plague the Black entrepreneurial community. From imbalances in fundraising to minimal capital and access, Black brilliance and its cloak of resilience continues to rise.

Now, as a CEO who has ambitiously raised nearly $13 million for my current venture, against the odds, I posit that it is not the Black founders who are missing out the most — it is the investors who are at a loss, not comprehending that they have underestimated the power of these founders’ Black brilliance.

When you think about the intersection of venture capital and technology, and specifically how it works — it is being led from an engineering perspective. Developers and coders historically go to specific schools and colleges, entering a funnel that guides them to success.

Historically, many Black students (more so Black male students), are influenced by sports as a vehicle to higher education and not necessarily the institutions recognized for technological prowess.

Their parents and community encourage athleticism because that is the only thing they know — as an institutionalized mindset reinforced over time. Unless they are guided into the accepted foundations for technology, or get into a Cal Berkeley, Stanford or Harvard, where many of the technology companies are built, they are immediately funneled outside of the “circle,” which sets the first of many ongoing obstacles for a Black tech founder.

I offer, however, that these “obstacles” are not in fact barriers but the crucial catalyst for these founders’ superpowers.

Admittedly, there were no entrepreneurs in my family. I did not have access to information about the best colleges. Despite having great grades and graduating with honors, I was completely unaware of how valuable an Ivy League education could be.

As a star basketball player, with my skills and grades, I could have played and graduated from somewhere like Yale, Brown, Columbia or even a school like Southern Methodist University where I was offered a full scholarship. But because of the lack of knowledge that I could actually do so and benefit from being inside the Ivy League “circle,” I didn’t.

I was in college from 2000 to 2004. A lot of great companies were started at elite schools during that period. It is this institutional blocking of information from myself and many other Black students that molded our overall perspective and created our glass ceilings.

Breaking through that glass ceiling, overcoming these odds to press forward relentlessly, with unyielding focus, and to hold conversations with the types of investors I have had to sit in front of, with the type of company that I have built, takes a different level of brilliance that only the Black experience can provide. For 2021 and beyond, Black founders need to not only recognize, but unlock that power as they look to fundraise and catapult their tech companies to success. It would be smart, and incredibly beneficial for investors, venture capitalists and the entire entrepreneurial ecosystem to take heed.

For Black founders, a paradigm shift is evident, but it can only manifest if implemented in these five ways.

Black founders: Forget what you think works in fundraising

Black founders and specifically Black tech founders are fed a monotonous script of how to raise money “the right way,” in light of disparaging statistics highlighting a lack of funding — so much that there is a robotic approach to the process. They try to become this cookie-cutter entrepreneur that is designed to raise money from investors, with their playbook and by their rules.

Black founders capitulate and conform to what society has dictated as appropriate fundraising, often glorifying the investor with the fate of their startup in their hands, without realizing that they hold the negotiating power. Their playbook hasn’t won us any games. As of today, own your power.

Become an irresistible force: Leverage your expertise

Set the playbook aside and lean more into your expertise and uniqueness.

Years ago, Mark Cuban delivered a keynote address at Dallas Startup Week that chronicled his road to success. One of his main points was to “Know your business, and know your business cold.” It was so simple, yet so impactful.

Early on in my career, I learned about venture capital from my experiences working for a startup. While I did not know the area in depth, I referenced what little knowledge I had as I raised for my own company years later. Although I was limited in my dealings with venture capitalists, I was confident in my background and expertise (at that time as a payroll technology sales professional) to truly stake my claim and seat at the table.

So while they may have sold a company for $7 billion or have $35 billion AUM (assets under management), I knew that they were not as well-versed in payroll or payroll technology than I was. It was this tenacious mindset that made me look at investors, rather than up to them, thereby positioning us on equal footing.

Connect in the common goal of brilliance

As a Black founder in tech, I have encountered many injustices — from networking to fundraising to the game of business as a whole. Even among those sitting at the table, there is a plethora of worldviews, political preferences, religious propensities and more that create a melting pot of divisiveness. However, recognizing that the common thread between all of the players in the game is the desire to be part of the brilliant business opportunity at hand is what will ultimately prevail.

It served me well not to overindex whether the venture capitalists liked me or on our differences. Locking in on the ambition of my entrepreneurial spirit and focusing on my brilliance — my Black brilliance — made them want to invest in me. Simplistically, investors want to give their money to founders who will make them money — passionately and ambitiously. Be you and find the investor that appreciates you.

Get in front of as many investors as you can

Black founders are not getting in front of enough investors. Systemically, the venture capital landscape has marginalized this community and has failed to expand their network for inclusiveness. Currently, ethnic minorities are severely underrepresented in the venture capital industry. Eighty percent of investment partners are white, with only a staggering 3% being Black or African-American.

Regardless, Black entrepreneurs must press forward and still show up. The sheer number of people that entrepreneurs must face during the fundraising process is astronomical, so one must not be swayed by the disillusionment of opportunity.

Realistically speaking, it takes a long time to raise money. Period. I have talked to thousands of potential investors to raise nearly $13 million for my current company. If you are a Black founder, it is going to take you longer to fundraise and you are going to have to get in front of more people. So I ask, “Do you have enough oxygen in the tank to withstand the obstacles, for a long enough period of time, to attract the venture capital that you need?” The wealth gap says no.

When I first started Gig Wage, the number one question I received from investors is, “How much runway do you have?” I would answer, “Until I get to where I need to get.” They would then rephrase, “How much money do you have in the bank? How long is your wife going to let you do this?” I would reply, “It does not matter how much money I have in the bank because I’m going to keep going until this happens.”

Discriminatively, there was this unspoken expectation that I lacked the financial wherewithal and stamina to withstand the fundraising process, and at times it was extremely discouraging — because to be honest, when I looked in the bank account, I realistically had about nine to 12 months of runway.

The reason Black people raise less than 1% of venture capital is because the racism weaved into the fabric of American society bleeds over into the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Despite it all, I took thousands of meetings. I was willing to endure with an ambitious conviction that I was going to win. Again, this is Black brilliance.

Own your resiliency, own your power 

As a Black man, I have personally endured challenges to build resiliency — mirroring similar realities of other Black men in America. Whether it was dealing with the police or witnessing men in my family struggle with drugs, violence, poverty or the like — I often think, “Why would I be intimidated by an investor meeting or a term sheet?” The construct of America has dealt me much worse.

Black founders need to own their resiliency and leverage the power that has resulted from their unique experiences. The victory mentality that ensues thereafter is the type of mindset that venture capitalists should want to invest in, and if they do not, they are undoubtedly missing out.

The unyielding focus of “The world is stacked against me but I’m not going to quit. I’m going to pivot. I’m going to be resourceful. I’m going to figure it out — even if I’m scared,” is a person you need to invest in. It is not necessarily that they have a groundbreaking business idea, but culturally, Black people have a passion and a perspective that is unmatched, with limitless possibilities that venture capitalists are overlooking.

So for 2021 and well beyond, Black founders, and those especially in tech, need to shift their respective paradigms, own their place within the entrepreneurial space, take back their power and continue to operate at the utmost in Black brilliance. It is the investors, not the founders, that are missing out. Be bold. Be courageous. Be audacious.

As for me, the best thing that I can do right now is to continue to drive the conversation, illuminate the disparities and be as successful for Black entrepreneurs, Black professionals and the world at large as possible. I am owning my power and I’m committed to epitomizing and evangelizing Black brilliance.

Tackling the learning curve that comes with building a startup is not for the faint of heart. So many questions, so little time to search out reliable, actionable advice. Enter TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 — two distinct, virtual bootcamps designed specifically for early-stage founders and open to entrepreneurs and startup enthusiasts.

Budget-friendly tips: TC Early Stage part one takes place April 1-2, and you have two weeks left to score the early-bird price and save up to $100. Founder passes cost $199 and Innovator passes (for investors and other startup fans) cost $299. The early-bird deadline ends at 11:59 p.m. (PST) on February 27. Buy a dual-event pass to learn and save even more (TC Early Stage — Marketing and Fundraising runs July 8-9). The TC Early Stage April and July bootcamps feature different speakers, topics and content.

At TC Early Stage, you’ll take part in interactive sessions and learn from the leading experts and investors who span the range of the startup ecosystem — operations, product lifecycle, fundraising and recruiting for starters. Here are just two examples of the people ready to help you move your startup dreams forward.

Learn from folks like Alexa von Tobel as she leads a discussion on Finance for Founders. Got questions about raising Series A funding? Don’t miss Bucky Moore of Kleiner Perkins as he breaks down that complicated topic.

Ready for an awesome plot twist? We’re adding an exciting opportunity on day two of both TC Early Stage bootcamps — the TC Early Stage Pitch-Off. Ten early-stage startups will get to pitch live to a global audience of investors, press and tech industry leaders. That kind of exposure can change a startup’s trajectory in the best possible way.

You’ll find all the Pitch-off details here — how it works, who qualifies to compete, what competitors receive and the prizes in store for the ultimate winner. Or cut to the chase and apply for the April 2 pitch-off here before the clock hits 11:59 p.m. PST on February 21.

Whether you’re competing or watching, Katia Paramonova, founder and CEO of Centrly (who attended Early Stage 2020), says a pitch critique shows you ways to strengthen your pitch deck:

The pitch deck teardown session was great. VCs reviewed my deck and gave specific, actionable advice. Watching them provide comments on other decks was helpful, too. We’re incorporating the feedback and when we start fundraising, the improved slides will make it easier for VCs to understand our value proposition.

TC Early Stage Operations & Fundraising takes place on April 1-2. Don’t miss this opportunity to learn the essentials of building a stronger startup. And don’t miss out on early-bird savings. Buy your pass (remember, you’ll save more and learn twice as much with a dual-event pass) before 11:59 p.m. PST on February 27.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 — Operations & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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The only people who truly understand a relationship are the ones who are in it. Luckily for us, we’re going to have a candid conversation with both parties in the relationship between Ironclad CEO and cofounder Jason Boehmig and his investor and board member Accel partner Steve Loughlin.

Loughlin led Ironclad’s Series A deal back in 2017, making it one of his first Series A deals after returning to Accel.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down on Wednesday at 3pm ET/12pm PT, just like usual.

We’ll talk to the duo about how they met, what made them ‘choose’ each other, and how they’ve operated as a duo since. How they built trust, maintain honesty, and talk strategy are also on the table as part of the discussion.

Loughlin was an entrepreneur before he was an investor, founding RelateIQ (an Accel-backed company) in 2011. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million and later became Salesforce IQ. Loughlin then “came back home” to Accel in 2016, and has led investments in companies like Airkit, Ascend.io, Clockwise, Ironclad, Monte Carlo, Nines, Productiv, Split.io, and Vivun.

Not entirely unsurprising for a man who has dominated the legal tech sphere, Jason Boehmig is a California barred attorney who practiced law at Fenwick & West and was also an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Ironclad launched in 2014 and today the company has raised more than $180 million and, according to reports, is valued just under $1 billion.

Not only will we peel back the curtain on how this investor/founder relationship works, but we’ll also hear from these two tech leaders on their thoughts around bigger enterprise trends in the ecosystem.

Then, it’s time for the Pitch Deck Teardown. On each episode of Extra Crunch Live, we take a look at pitch decks submitted by the audience and our experienced guests give their live feedback. If you want to throw your hat pitch deck in the ring, you can hit this link to submit your deck for a future episode.

As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions to our guests.

Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!

As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. If you’re not an Extra Crunch member yet, what are you waiting for?

Loughlin and Boehmig join a stellar cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, as well as Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque. Extra Crunch members can catch every episode of Extra Crunch Live on demand right here.

You can find details for this episode (and upcoming episodes) after the jump below.

See you on Wednesday!