Larry Page, co-founder of Google and CEO of Alphabet Inc. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

Sramana Mitra: It also gives you a flavor of how good a product it is. Is the product really meeting the needs of the customers? I think churn is a very good indicator of that. Mackey Craven: Coming...

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Juul Labs, the company behind the ever-popular Juul e-cig, has today announced a new policy around social media.

This comes in the midst of Juul’s effort to get FDA approval, which has been made more arduous by the fact that the FDA has cracked down on Juul after learning how popular the device is with underage users.

As part of the new policy, Juul will no longer feature models in pictures posted on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. FWIW, Juul doesn’t even have a Snapchat. Instead of using models to market the e-cig, Juul Labs will now use real former smokers who switched from combustible cigarette to Juul.

Juul has always said that its product was meant to serve as an alternative to combustible cigarettes, which are considered far more harmful to your health.

Juul has also initiated an internal team focused on flagging and reporting social media content that is inappropriate or targeted to underage users.

The company mentioned that it has worked to report and remove more than 10,000 illegal online sales since February from various online marketplaces.

We reached out to Juul to see if any changes have been made to the way that Juul targets ads on social media and elsewhere. We’ll update the post if/when we hear back.

Here’s what Juul Labs CEO Kevin Burns had to say in a prepared statement:

While JUUL already has a strict marketing code, we want to take it one step further by implementing an industry-leading policy eliminating all social media posts featuring models and instead focus our social media on sharing stories about adult smokers who have successfully switched to JUUL. We also are having success in proactively working with social media platforms to remove posts, pages and unauthorized offers to sell product targeted at underage accounts. We believe we can both serve the 38 million smokers in the U.S. and work together to combat underage use – these are not mutually exclusive missions.

In April, the FDA sent a request for information to Juul Labs as part of a new Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan, which is aimed at keeping tobacco products of any kind out of the hands of minors. The information request was meant to help the FDA understand why teens are so interested in e-cigs (particularly Juul) and whether or not Juul Labs was marketing the product intentionally to minors.

In response, Juul announced a new strategy to combat underage use, with an investment of $30 million over the next three years going towards independent research, youth and parent education and community engagement efforts.

Since August 2017, Juul has required that people be 21+ to purchase products on its own website, but online and offline third-party retailers have not been so diligent.

Step aside, Allbirds. Atoms come in quarter-sizes you can mix-and-match. Emerging from stealth today in a TechCrunch exclusive, this shoe startup’s obsession with satisfaction allowed it to replace my Nikes. I’ve spent the last two months wearing Atoms every day. They’re the first sneaker classy-looking enough for semi-formal occasions, but that I can comfortably walk or even hike in for hours.

Here’s how Atoms is modernizing the footwear experience:

At $179, Atoms are pricier than $100 lifestyle Nikes or $79 Allbirds. But the basketball shoe giant just sells in half sizes, while Allbirds offers only whole sizes that fit few perfectly. The right quarter-size Atoms for each foot makes them feel molded to your body.

“To make shoes better, you need to know why people wear shoes,” Atoms co-founder Waqas Ali tells me. People buy fancy dress shoes they never wear, yet feel embarrassed by the childish designs and branding on most sneakers. “We perfected Atoms for your everyday routine — walking, standing and commuting,” he explains. “You are a person not a billboard, so there’s no logo.”

That hasn’t stopped the shoes from going viral during their beta-testing phase. Everyone who tries them on seems to rave about them. That’s driven 4,000 people to sign up on the Atoms waitlist, which you can join to be first in line. Atoms launch this summer in the U.S., with the first wave of customers getting their shoes in late June/early July.

The big bang

Husband and wife duo Waqas and Sidra Ali started their first shoe company Markhor in Okara, Pakistan back in 2012. They attacked the market with one of the best qualities you can find in an entrepreneur: curiosity. Instead of coming in with preconceived notions, they traveled the world to research how people actually wear shoes. “You might assume that ‘Oh in Italy, everyone wears leather shoes,’ but the young people there were all wearing sneakers,” Waqas recalls.

After launching a Kickstarter, the Alis came to Silicon Valley to go through the prestigious Y Combinator startup accelerator in Summer 2015. There, they drilled into more customer research and product design.

Comfort and style were the big deciding factors in most sneaker purchases, so that’s where the couple wanted to differentiate. They discovered that more than 70 percent of people have at least a quarter-size difference in their two feet, and more than 7 percent have a half-size discrepancy. So why don’t other shoe companies offer quarter-sizes? “They make tons of different shoes,” Waqas says.

Suddenly, the two guiding principles of Atoms aligned. By designing just a single unisex model in a limited set of colors, it could make quarter-sizing scalable while stripping away all the goofy extra fabrics and patterns. Indeed, 35 percent of customers already take two different sizes. That breakthrough attracted $560,000 in seed funding from LinkedIn’s ex-head of growth Aatif Awan and Shrug Capital.

But Atoms is determined to avoid being labeled a Silicon Valley shoe. Rather than coders, the company wants creative types like painters and graphic designers to be its early adopters. The vision is to create a sneaker a head chef could wear all night in the kitchen without hurting, but that look elegant enough that they could stride into the chic dining room with confidence.

The future of footwear

“Most shoes in the market that claim they’re comfortable are only comfortable when you try them on,” Waqas laments. Take that other shoe startup Allbirds. They’re super-soft and made of wool, and the first steps feel like you’re wearing cloud slippers. But walk 10 blocks and you’ll find the bendy bottoms don’t protect you much.

That’s why Atoms hired 18-year-veteran of the shoe business Sangmin Lee, who’s worked with Adidas and Puma out of Portland and South Korea. He prototyped tons of different versions for Atoms. The result is a strong but light outsole on the bottom with indents cut out for anti-slip traction and to reduce weight. Meanwhile, the upper’s tough mesh material breathes but holds its shape, and refuses stains.

“Shoe companies say they use sustainable materials but you go to the factories and everything is falling apart,” Sidra tells me. Organic materials sound nice but can break down too quickly. “The way we make our shoes environmentally friendly is that they last long,” Waqas says with a laugh.

Two months of tough wear later, my Atoms are holding up great. The foamy mid-sole has frayed a tiny bit in the front like many shoes. And the knit materials ingrained some dust when I went camping in them that needed some brushing to get out. But they’ve succeeded in becoming my go-to shoe I can chill, work and play in.

Now Atoms is trying to build more commerce innovation to turn buyers into lifetime wearers. It’s working on a special pattern for the insole that will rub off based on where you put your weight. The idea is that when people send their old pairs in for a discount on the next, it can analyze that insole pattern to improve the shape of future models.

One day, Atoms hopes to create a completely personalized shoe shopping experience. It hopes to actually give you slightly different insoles with more or less arch support depending on how you wore the last ones. And it’s planning early access to new color combinations and laces for repeat buyers.

Atoms will need loyalty in case the shoe giants come out with their own minimalist, quarter-sized sneakers. Such a limited set of colors and single style mean plenty of people will simply find them ugly or outside their taste. And no, they’re not a great fit for the gym or with a suit. But if you want understated, durable shoes you don’t have to think about, Atoms excel.

The startup must rely on its nimbleness and a flawless customer experience if it’s going to gain a foothold in a business dominated by brands with huge ad campaigns and brick-and-mortar distribution. One thing it’s thankful to its shoe startup competitor for is that “Allbirds has shown the world is not just ruled by Nike and Adidas.”

Luckily Atoms has strong differentiation in a world of interchangeable sneakers. One customer “thought quarter-sizing was a joke or gimmick until I tried the 10.25s,” Airbnb designer Bryce Daniel tweeted. “How will I go back to a 10.5 when 10.25 fits so well?” Personally, there hasn’t been another tech or startup product in the past 10 years beyond Apple’s AirPods that has cemented itself so deeply into my daily life.

“There’s no way to hack shoes” Waqas concludes. “You just have to make a good shoe.”

Everyone from Elon Musk to AdBlock Plus wants to tell you which news sources are worth trusting. Now news aggregator Nuzzel is joining in.

Specifically, it’s launching NuzzelRank, which founder and CEO Jonathan Abrams described as “our new authority ranking of thousands of top news sources, using signals from top business influencers.” He said it replaces a more “simplistic” ranking system that it was using for its news monitoring and research product Nuzzel Media Intelligence.

You may also see NuzzelRank outside the company’s Media Intelligence reports. For one thing, there’s a new page with rankings of Nuzzel’s top sources. For another, Abrams said publishers will be able to add badges with their NuzzelRank scores to their websites, and he also plans to make this data available through an API.

At this point, you’re probably wondering how Nuzzel does this ranking. You’re definitely wondering that if you looked at the top sources ranking and saw that TechCrunch is comes in at number four overall. That’s right: We score below The New York Times and The Washington Post, but above The New Yorker and Wired — which is both flattering and a little nuts.

Abrams said there are three main ways that Nuzzel calculates the score. First, there’s data within Nuzzel itself, including the reading behavior of its users. Second, it’s looking at “external signals about the engagement and authority of news sources.”

Third, it’s working with a whole bunch of outside organizations that have developed different approaches to scoring news sources and sorting out which ones are and aren’t trustworthy — so Nuzzel is joining the Trust Project and the Credibility Coalition, and it’s also partnering with NewsGuard and Deepnews.ai.

In the announcement, Abrams emphasized that the company isn’t relying on human editors or making these judgments on its own: “Nuzzel has always focused on building scalable solutions that use software to aggregate existing valuable signals to provide useful results, rather than human approaches that are not scalable and subject to bias.”

Influential announced today that it has raised $12 million in Series B funding.

The funding came from existing investors Capital Zed, ECA Ventures, Paradigm Talent Agency, ROAR and Tech Coast Angels, as well as from Hollywood agency WME .

Just a couple weeks ago, Influential said it was working with (and had raised money from) WME. The agency is the first to try out a new Influential product called Talent Pro, which gives agents access to social data around a broader pool of talent.

Influential founder and CEO Ryan Detert said the product will allow WME — and, in the future, other agencies — to sweeten endorsement and promotional deals with more data and to “take an A-list celebrity… and now surround that person with 10 lookalike influencers who are not celebrities themselves.”

One of Influential’s big selling points is its use of artificial intelligence (it’s a developer partner with IBM Watson) to help brands and marketers find influencers who would be a good fit for their campaigns. However, Detert acknowledged that selling access to social media influencers is starting to feel overhyped — as he put it, “People think of influencer marketing sometimes as a four-letter word.”

But in Detert’s view, influencer marketing is just one “tactic” that Influential supports: “We consider ourselves more of social intelligence and activation company.”

And in fact, Influential already offers a social intelligence product that helps customers get a broader understanding of things like the broader competitive landscape.

Detert also said Influential is working to measure the impact of brands’ social media campaigns, so that when they pay an influencer to make a promotional post, they “can actually map back that not only [the consumer] saw it, but that they engaged with it to make a real-world decision — walking into a location, buying a product in a grocery store.”

The company has now raised a total of $26.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: What have you invested in? Give us an example or two and tell us why you chose to invest in those. Laurel Touby: We are about to close the first close of our fund. We’re now looking at...

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Ethos, the company that bills itself as making life insurance accessible, affordable and simple, has officially come out of stealth with an $11.5 million investment led by one of the world’s top venture firms, Sequoia Capital, and additional participation from the family offices of Hollywood’s biggest stars and an NBA all-star.

Jay Z’s Roc Nation, and the family funds of Kevin Durant, Robert Downey Jr. and Will Smith, all participated in the new round for Ethos, and Sequoia Partner Roelof Botha is taking a seat on the company’s board. Because nothing says star power like a life insurance startup.

The life insurance market is one that’s been attracting interest from venture investors for a little over a year now. Companies like England’s Anorak, HealthIQ, Ladder, Mira Financial, and France’s Alan, which is backed by Partech Investments (among others), Fabric and Quilt, are all pitching life insurance products as well.

Ethos is licensed in 49 states, which is pretty comparable to the offering from providers like Haven Life, the Mass Mutual-backed life insurance product.

What has made the life insurance market interesting for investors is the fact that consumers’ interest in it continues to decline. Whether it’s because no one trusts insurers to actually pay out, or because Americans are putting their faith in the anti-aging technologies from funds like the Longevity Fund, folks just aren’t buying insurance products the way they used to.

So when investors see the numbers of users of a formerly ubiquitous product decline from 77 percent in 1989 to below 60 percent in 2018, the assumption is that there’s room for new companies to come in and provide better service.

Scads of investors have taken the same bet, which makes Ethos a marketing play as much as anything else. In the company’s press release it touts the fast, easy and inexpensive process for getting a quote.

The initial process requires only four questions to get a quote and a 10 minute survey to get a policy (in most cases). The company says 99 percent of its applicants don’t need a medical exam or blood test to get a policy.

What may have been most interesting to investors is the pedigree of the company’s co-founders. Peter Colis and Lingke Wang have both worked in the insurance industry before. They previously co-founded a life insurance marketplace called, Ovid Life.

“Life insurance is critical for families, but the process is broken for those who want and need it,” said Peter Colis. “We are consumer advocates, intensely focused on expanding life insurance accessibility to the millions of U.S. families who have college debt, mortgages​, spouses and children​ to care for, and who want to be financially empowered to live their lives without worry.”

Email and a smarter notebook might be enough for handling communication for projects or experiments inside a team in a lab in some university basement. But when you have around 200 scientists working on discovering something new — say, a new drug — that communication process is going to quickly break down, and Sajith Wickramasekara says that sits somewhere between science and software.

That’s the goal for Benchling, which Wickramasekara hopes will make life easier for researchers and help simplify and speed up the process of scientific discovery. Specializing in life sciences, Benchling aims to create a comprehensive suite of tools that help researchers thoroughly log their processes and collaborate among other scientists. Benchling looks to provide a rigorous platform that can take a lot of the work away from researchers, who instead might be documenting everything in email, Excel sheets, or just in a notebook somewhere. Benchling said it has raised a $14.5 million round of financing led by Benchmark Capital, with participation from F-Prime Capital and Thrive Capital. Benchmark’s Eric Vishria is joining the company’s board of directors.

“I was always planning to go to grad school to become a scientist,” Wickramasekara said. “Obviously since I’m working here I took a kind of left turn. As someone who was doing both science and software, on the software side of things I felt like i had really great tools for working with other people, and on the science side I felt like there were really great scientific tools but not great tools for working with other people.”

At its core, Benchling is a suite of applications and tools that include ways to design experiments as well as document them during that process. Researchers can track materials they are producing, manage their physical inventory — like even tubes or containers — and helps scientists standardize and easily query information from existing or previous runs. The service seeks to capture all of this in some unified platform that a company can deploy across a whole fleet of researchers and teams. Wickramasekara says more than 100,000 scientists are using the platform.

Benchling was initially born as a sort of smart notebook for scientists and academics. While that’s where it got started — and where a lot of the learning happened — eventually the team ended up creating something a little more formalized that it could sell as an actual product. That step proved a little more challenging as academics tend to be either alone or in small teams, so they don’t necessarily need the robust tools that a product like Benchling might have when commercialized.

“The freeform nature of a lab notebook is actually sufficient [for academia],” Wickramasekara said. “In the industry, that’s where all the structure comes in. We have a team as part of our customer success and implementation, we help customers come up with the right model and complexity and adjust their business processes. At the end fo the day, all these customers do something slightly differently. But we work with probably more than 80 customers and 25 do antibody research, so we figure out all the best practices over time. We help customers think about the tradeoffs vs one data model for another.”

Benchling also offers those same employees a suite of auditing tools, which Wickramasekara would be critical as it looked to move into larger companies that are dealing with more sensitive IP. For a company looking to discover new drugs, keeping that process under tight control is important — especially when they are working with organizations like the FDA. Benchling admins get a comprehensive view of who is doing what within the system, as well as guidelines around documentation.

Part of the challenge will be catering to all the niches and needs these individual companies might have throughout their own unique experimentation processes. Each lab is different, with its own quirks, and Benchling aims to be a unified platform that covers as many scenarios as possible, even with help tuning and adjustable models. That means there is room for other tools that could tap other niches and become the one-size-fits-all. But over time and with enough data, a tool like Benchling could figure out not only the best practices for specific labs, but also ones they should use — and then cover all those bases.

Researchers at the University of Maryland have found that people remember information better if it is presented in VR vs. on a two-dimensional personal computer. This means VR education could be an improvement on tablet or device-based learning.

“This data is exciting in that it suggests that immersive environments could offer new pathways for improved outcomes in education and high-proficiency training,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences at UMD.

The study was quite complex and looked at recall in forty subjects who were comfortable with computers and VR.

To test the system they created a “memory palace” where they placed various images. This sort of “spatial mnemonic encoding” is a common memory trick that allows for better recall.

“Humans have always used visual-based methods to help them remember information, whether it’s cave drawings, clay tablets, printed text and images, or video,” said lead researcher Eric Krokos. “We wanted to see if virtual reality might be the next logical step in this progression.”

From the study:

Both groups received printouts of well-known faces–including Abraham Lincoln, the Dalai Lama, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Marilyn Monroe–and familiarized themselves with the images. Next, the researchers showed the participants the faces using the memory palace format with two imaginary locations: an interior room of an ornate palace and an external view of a medieval town. Both of the study groups navigated each memory palace for five minutes. Desktop participants used a mouse to change their viewpoint, while VR users turned their heads from side to side and looked up and down.

Next, Krokos asked the users to memorize the location of each of the faces shown. Half the faces were positioned in different locations within the interior setting–Oprah Winfrey appeared at the top of a grand staircase; Stephen Hawking was a few steps down, followed by Shrek. On the ground floor, Napoleon Bonaparte’s face sat above majestic wooden table, while The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was positioned in the center of the room.

Similarly, for the medieval town setting, users viewed images that included Hillary Clinton’s face on the left side of a building, with Mickey Mouse and Batman placed at varying heights on nearby structures.

Then, the scene went blank, and after a two-minute break, each memory palace reappeared with numbered boxes where the faces had been. The research participants were then asked to recall which face had been in each location where a number was now displayed.

The key, say the researchers, was for participants to identify each face by its physical location and its relation to surrounding structures and faces–and also the location of the image relative to the user’s own body.

Desktop users could perform the feat but VR users performed it statistically better, a fascinating twist on the traditional role of VR in education. The researchers believe that VR adds a layer of reality to the experience that lets the brain build a true “memory palace” in 3D space.

“Many of the participants said the immersive ‘presence’ while using VR allowed them to focus better. This was reflected in the research results: 40 percent of the participants scored at least 10 percent higher in recall ability using VR over the desktop display,” wrote the researchers.

“This leads to the possibility that a spatial virtual memory palace–experienced in an immersive virtual environment–could enhance learning and recall by leveraging a person’s overall sense of body position, movement and acceleration,” said researcher Catherine Plaisant.

Farmdrop, the farmer-friendly online grocery platform based in the U.K., has picked up £10 million in new funding. New investors in this Series B round include LGT Impact Ventures (described as a growth equity investor that invests in businesses making a positive contribution to society), and Belltown Ventures, a renewable energy investment specialist with an interest in agricultural technology. Previous backer Atomico also followed on.

Founded by ex-city broker Ben Pugh in 2014, Farmdrop originally launched as a ‘click and collect’ service that let you order groceries online from farmer-producers to pick up at a local collection point. However, the company has since pivoted to door-to-door delivery but with the same basic idea of a marketplace that bypasses the mass supermarkets. It claims to give consumers much fresher produce, and farmer-producers a more generous share of the retail price. Large supermarkets are known for squeezing suppliers in a bid to lower prices whilst maintaining their own profits, after all.

“The fundamental problem is that the supermarket’s dominance over the last fifty years has put huge amounts of downward pressure on farmgate prices,” Pugh told me when Farmdrop raised its Series A. “In this environment, the only option for producers has been to focus on yields and durability which has led to a big depreciation in the taste and nutritional quality of homegrown foods”.

To that end, Farmdrop says it now sells over 2,000 products ranging from high-welfare meat, dairy, fish, organic fruit and veg, plus household supplies and larder items. It says that 80 percent of its fresh produce is sourced directly from 208 “sustainable farmers and independent food makers” and that since 2014 the startup has generated over £5 million in revenue for small-scale British farmers.

The new capital will be used to fund further U.K. expansion after the successful launch of a second hub in Bristol and Bath in September 2017, in addition to London. “Over the next six months Farmdrop will double the total number of households it can deliver to, initially growing in the South East but with plans for a northern hub in Manchester by end of 2019,” says the company.

More broadly, Farmdrop is tapping the rise of online grocery — even if the offline to online switch is still happening quite slowly — coupled with a growing demand for high-quality produce that comes from a more ethical/sustainable supply chain (Farmdrop also uses electric vans for the last few miles of delivery). It seems to be working, too: the startup says it is now on track to achieve £10 million in annualised revenues before the end of 2018.

Adds Niklass Zennström, Skype founder and CEO of Atomico: “What we find so compelling about Farmdrop is the way they’re using technology for good. By creating a direct route to market for farmers, Farmdrop is helping to create a healthier and more efficient supply chain. We’re proud to invest in such a fantastic team and are excited about helping them scale their innovative e-grocery platform.”

This year has been a rough one for Sphero. The Colorado-based toy robotics startup kicked off the year with dozens of layoffs, a result of tepid interest in its line of Disney-branded consumer products.

Here’s a little good news, however. The company has raised another $12 million, bringing its total up to around $119 million, according to Crunchbase. The latest round will go into helping shape the BB-8 maker into an education-first company.

“The recent round of funding has currently raised $12 million, and we anticipate at the time of final closing up to $20 million may be raised in total,” Sphero said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. Funding has/will come from existing and new investors and will be used for working capital as we engage in a larger strategy that focuses on the intersection of play and learning.”

It’s a tricky play, given how overcrowded the world of coding toys is at the moment, but Sphero has long been building out its play in the space, in tandem with its more consumer-focused offerings.

Following the success of its The Force Awakens BB-8 tie in, the company quadrupled down on its involvement with Disney’s accelerator, releasing high-tech toys based on Spider-Man and Lightning McQueen from Cars.

“[Education] is something we can actually own,” the company told me after the layoffs were revealed. “Where we do well are those experiences we can 100 percent own, from inception to go-to-market.”

Indiecade always offers a nice respite from the wall of undulating human flesh and heat that is the rest of the E3 show floor. The loose confederation of independent developers often produces compelling and bizarre gaming experiences outside of the big studio system.

TendAR is the most compelling example of this out of this year’s batch. It is, simply put, a pet fish that feeds on human emotions through augmented reality. I can’t really explain why this is a thing, but it is. It’s a video game, so just accept it and move on.

The app is produced by Tender Claws, a small studio out of Los Angeles best known for Virtual Virtual Reality, an Oculus title that boasts among its “key features”: 50-plus unique virtual virtual realities and an artichoke screams at you.

TendAR fits comfortably within that manner of absurdist framework, though the title has more in common with virtual pets like Tamagotchi and the belovedly bizarre Dreamcast cult hit, Seaman. There’s also a bit of Douglas Adams wrapped up in there, in that your pet guppy feeds on human emotions detected through face detection.

The app is designed for two players, both holding onto the same phone, feigning different emotions when prompted by a chatty talking fish. If you fail to give it what it wants, your fish will suffer. I tried the game and my guppy died almost immediately. Apparently my ability to approximate sadness is severely lacking. Tell it to my therapist, am I right?

The app is due out this year for Android.

I’m a huge proponent of bootstrapped entrepreneurship. Having worked within the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem for all these years, I’ve observed with interest the development of different...

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Creating a salad-making robot is pretty good, as far as tech company hooks go, but Chowbotics is looking to expand. The Bay Area company just raised $11 million in a “Series A-1” led by the Foundry Group and Techstars.

The big plan for the money largely involves extending the company’s selection of foodstuffs beyond leafy greens, where Sally the Salad Robot has made its mint. At the top of the list are grain bowls, breakfast bowls, poke bowls, açai bowls and yogurt bowls. If it’s food served in a bowl, Chowbotics seems interested.

Seems pretty straightforward, really. After all, at its core, Sally is a kind of vending machine, dropping different ingredients into the same bowl. Apparently it’s a bit more complicated than that, especially when you start mixing in things like yogurts and berry purees. “The major challenges are finding special technical solutions for dispensing different shapes and sizes of ingredients,” founder/CEO Deepak Sekar told TechCrunch.

The company is also using the funding to add a whole bunch of senior roles. Per the press release:

Warren Manzer, who was President of Foodservice at Clipper and Senior Vice President at Crown Brands, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of Foodservice Sales. Rory Bevins, who was Senior Vice President at La Bottega Americas and Global Vice President at Molton Brown, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of Hospitality. Lee Greer, who was Chief Marketing Officer at Jason’s Deli, joined Chowbotics as Vice President of its Off-Premise Kitchen Business Unit. Shelley Janes, who was Head of Partnerships at CarDash and CEO of SideDoor, joined Chowbotics as Director of Sales, responsible for the western region of the United States. Nolan Schachter, who was Director of Sales and Marketing at TeaBot, joined Chowbotics as Director of Sales, responsible for Canada.

The funding follows a $5 million Series A in March of last year.

While many celebrities try to invest in the world of tech, very few do so successfully. And no one has proved their worth as celebrity-turned-VC more than Ashton Kutcher .

That’s why we’re absolutely thrilled to host Ashton Kutcher and Sound Ventures partner Effie Epstein at TC Disrupt SF in September.

Kutcher first got into investing in 2011 with the launch of A-Grade Investments. The firm invested in big-name companies like DuoLingo, FlexPort, ProductHunt, Airbnb, and Uber. In 2014, Kutcher, alongside his longtime friend and partner Guy Oseary, started a new VC firm called Sound Ventures.

Since launch, Sound Ventures has made 53 investments and led six rounds of financing, with portfolio companies including Gusto, Vicarious, Robinhood, Lemonade, and Acorns.

And in 2017, Sound made another investment in the form of Effie Epstein. The firm brought on Epstein as managing partner, with Kutcher telling TechCrunch: “Effie has a deep understanding of business and fiduciary responsibilities. She also has a multidisciplinary background which makes her a home run for venture. The bottom line is she is someone I want to work for.”

Before joining Sound, Epstein led global strategy at Marsh & McLennan subsidiary Marsh. Prior to Marsh, she served as SVP of planning and head of Investor Relations at iHeartMedia, and before that she worked in business development at Clear. Epstein also worked in investment banking in the energy sector and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

In other words, Epstein brings a multi-disciplinary approach to Sound, which is venturing beyond consumer tech into financial services, insurance tech, enterprise, govtech and medtech sectors.

This won’t be Kutcher’s first go-around at Disrupt. He spoke at Disrupt NY in 2013, right as the world was first hearing about Bitcoin. We’re excited to revisit the topic of cryptocurrencies and so much more with Kutcher and Epstein, and discuss their investment thesis moving forward.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available here.

Fintech startup N26 is updating its N26 Metal product and launching it tomorrow. You might remember that the company first announced its premium card at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin in December 2017. Shortly after the conference, the card was available in early access for existing N26 Black customers.

But the company had to go back to the drawing board and update the card design. N26 Metal customers had some complaints about the design of the card in particular.

While the original metal card was primarily made of a sheet of tungsten, the metallic part was still surrounded by plastic. Customers complained about scratches and the overall feel of the card.

It didn’t really feel like a metal card. It was more or less a heavy plastic card with a metal core. You could easily get scratches and the MasterCard logo was just a sticker.

Even more surprising, some customers had some issues going through airport security because tungsten was an uncommon material.

At an event in Berlin, the company announced a revised version of N26 Metal. The front of the card is going to be made out of actual metal. The MasterCard logo will be engraved. And the name of the customer is moving to the back of the card.

You can join the waiting list now and customers will start getting the new metal card tomorrow. Everybody will be able to sign up next Tuesday.

But N26 Metal isn’t just a fancy card. For around €15 per month, you get all the advantages of N26 Black as well as partner offerings.

These offerings include the basic $45 per month WeWork subscription so that you can access a WeWork office for free for one day per month and pay for extra days. You also get 10 percent off hotel bookings on Hotels.com, promo codes for Drivy, Babbel and other services. The company says that there will be new offerings in the coming months.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Mackey Craven of OpenView Venture Partners was...

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Index Ventures — a firm with investments in companies like recent IPO Dropbox, a series of successful gaming companies like King, and others including Slack and coming IPO Zuora — has seen a lot of moves in the past few months.

There was the departure of partner Ilya Fushman earlier this year, but the firm also brought on Sarah Cannon from CapitalG as one of their recent big hires. Index has also promoted former Dropboxer Mark Goldberg to partner. Prior to joining Index, Cannon led investments in companies like Looker, MultiPlan, Oscar and Care.com. Cannon will primarily be focusing on growth stage, and is also now a board observer for Slack. Goldberg has been at the firm for around three years and worked on deals like Nova Credit and CoverWallet.

We sat down with the two new partners to discuss some of their plans, as well as some broader parts of the venture ecosystem. Here’s the interview, which has been lightly edited for clarity.

TC: What does the investment committee decision process look like these days?

Mark Goldberg: In the last stage, we have a partner presentation, where the entrepreneur presents and we debrief. Then it’s a vote at the partner level. Everyone votes 1-10, and if it’s over 7 it’s approved. If it’s between 5 and 7, it’s the sponsor discretion. On average it’s around in the seven range. Some partners always rank lower, their most enthusiastic is at 8. It ends up being a pretty intellectually honest discussion, every vote is the same. I’ve worked at other funds before, and it seems like  it becomes more of horse trading. This feels like a constructive debate, we operate as one team. It’s also 6:30 a.m. pacific on Mondays, so there’s that.

TC: When working with entrepreneurs, how do you keep them moving forward — especially when some seem allergic to product changes?

Goldberg: I speak more to my background to being an early business hire at Dropbox, but it’s staying focused don the end user and building something people actually want to use. Regardless the paradigm, [we ask], are you building a product where at the end of the day is the end customer happy user.

Sarah Cannon: In the board room so much of where we can help is focus. My role is not making decisions but helping the management team align on priorities and sharing an example from a company they respect. It is often most helpful to connect them to another portfolio company. At CapitalG, we were investors in Lyft and Stripe, and a lot of learning would be between those companies. We would say, let me connect you to the head of product at Lyft. After that coffee, the priorities have been reduced to just a few.

TC: What’s the filter for companies?

Goldberg: First off, the [series] A is where we’re really focused. I think historically Index had really built a brand in Europe. King, SuperCell, Skype, and others. When we set up the team in the U.S., we ended up getting pushed into more series B. We would have loved to see the Series A on many of these companies, but we were new it was harder to proactively get to these great deals at the earlier stage. So we’re pushing earlier into that Series A. Maybe 7 of the last 10 deals have been [series] A for us. The challenge is, how do we find these great founding teams and category winners at that stage. Despite the valuations, we want you to hit those check boxes.

Cannon: As you move later stage, it’s much more on the unit economics. That’s part one — really understanding the unit economics, how big of a business can this actually be. The market could be really large, but what’s the size of the prize. Those are the two things I focus on. It’s easy to look at the unit economics. There are exceptions to the rule, like Amazon, where the margins didn’t look good along the way… Traditionally these companies haven’t made money, and that’s how you miss really exceptional businesses. They are transformative businesses. That’s really how I’ve shifted my way of thinking.

For consumer companies, I think of that has to be massive user traction and if you’re seeing wild adoption or a differentiated technology.

TC: How do you think about the state of how we talk about mental health in Silicon Valley right now? How do you help your founders in this respect?

Goldberg: I think being a founder is an extremely lonely job. I think one of the things that a strong venture partner can do is be a really good sounding board. The emotional fluctuations in these businesses are extreme. A founder has to be, even if they’re resilient and have a lot of grit, they’re absolutely going to feel the highs and lows. If you talk about what makes a venture fund and partner valuable, it’s the ability to damper some of that volatility by being available. If someone calls me on a Saturday night, i’m picking up the phone and being present and having that perspective. If you’re doing this job well, you can help the entrepreneur feel less lonely.

Cannon: [Part of it is] regulating on both the highs and the lows. You’ve had the benefit of working with a lot of companies. You can say, this is a great moment, celebrate, but it’s not like we’re going public tomorrow. In the lows, you remind them of the good times, you’re modulating to the middle and giving some perspective.. It’s important to step in as an investor, and to say, ‘ok, this was a scary moment but this is why I have conviction in your business.’

It’s a topic that’s a lot of shame. It’s very much like an artist, there’s an individual genius creator but there’s a dark side. There’s a very known perspective in the founder world. I hope we have a few brave founders who come out and say, look, I really struggled, here’s how I managed to deal with it.

TC: How have things changed given the shift in the venture landscape, such as with mega-funds like Softbank?

Goldberg: We see it as a good thing, for us it’s additional optionality for a lot of our portfolio companies. Before SoftBank a lot of times your option is [just going public]. Softbank is not the only one, there’s Sequoia growth, there’s a lot of money sloshing around the late stage. It’s been a boon for our companies — we’re generally playing at a stage before we’d be competitive [with that].

Cannon: For the later stage, it’s absolutely changing the return profile. To Softbank’s credit, it’s a brilliant strategy, it’s like an index on the private markets.

TC: How do you differentiate between founders for companies you invest in?

Cannon: For me, the adjustment [to earlier stage] has been a couple things, like adjusting your risk reward. You’re taking a lot greater risk. It’s easier to rely on cohort data, thinking that I’ve seen this for three years. [At earlier stages] it’s less data, and you’re taking more risk, you need to spend more time about thinking about the team. You need to believe that founder is capable of bringing on that high quality team. To move earlier stage, you have to have a lot more conviction. In later stages you have a bunch of investors already at the cap table.

Goldberg: I think it’s absolutely critical that the market is multistage. We’re stage agnostic and expertise driven. We’ll see a company at the series A or series B, and we get to know the founding team. We don’t wait for the round to form, we preempt it, and if we don’t do the deal we have a relationship going forward.

Cannon: [I also think it’s] very specific to the business. If it’s an IT infrastructure startup, the person needs to be highly technical people. It maps to the business. Do they know their own strengths and weaknesses, do they know the strengths and weaknesses of their existing members.

TC: How do you think about diversity going forward?

Cannon: The major focus is how do I address this challenge. The numbers speak for themselves in terms of diversity of all types. A lot of founders aren’t happy with where they are, we think about what specifically can we do about it. That’s where we’ve been having a lot of discussions — how are you giving fair reviews, how do you make sure your compensation is the same. There’s always the question about funnel and how do I see different candidates. My view on that is we should do a much better job in venture and companies in screening for the specific attributes you need in the job. We want to push people, rather than going to pools that are easy, such as just to banking, and say the attributes important to an investor is high emotional intelligence, analytical thinking, and such. They don’t necessarily come from the same people.

Goldberg: What’s changed is it is now a board-level conversation. At the last 4-5 meetings, this is now a topic on par with the KPIs of the business. That didn’t used to exist. I agree with the tactical points, we can do a better job with diversity, we’re having those conversations..

TC: What about applications of ideas like the Rooney Rule?

Cannon: I think that’s exactly the tactical thing. People are just begging for an idea, something I can commit to changing my funnel. Changing my process to be more fair, founders I think are very more open to it.

TC: How do you manage expectations with your base of LPs, especially as the time threshold between an IPO and the founding stretches? 

Goldberg: I think we’re fortunate that as a fund culture and with the LP base, we’re afforded the ability to make a long term view. While the timeline is stretching, we don’t feel pressure. To the extent the companies continue to build value, the returns are gonna look good enough. We have not felt the urgency to try and realize gains faster, and part of that is our broader philosophy and ethos around investing. We’re here to support the entrepreneurs, and I don’t want to be prescriptive in an exit.

I think we need to be thoughtful when we take a secondary investment. Doing large secondaries in early companies can be detrimental. When we’re looking at rounds where secondaries are available we ask about proceeds being distributed, we want to know [if it’s just certain executives or for the whole team].

Cannon: You do want to think about the employees who have made significant contributions. In a market where companies are staying private much longer, for the employees, I do want us to find a way to have some liquidity. The key is how you structure it. You could buy a house, but you don’t need a mansion.

Goldberg: What I don’t like is when founders or a select set of executives are able to take money. As long as it’s equitably done in a way, like 10% to 15% liquidity being offered for employees.

TC: What are some learnings you’ve picked up from what’s happening in China?

Cannon: We are not currently investing in China, but I want to learn form China and see what insights we can get from businesses there and how they will be different in the US. If you look at live video, a lot fo companies have taken off there. The social e-commerce business, mid-messaging, how does that change with transactions.

Goldberg: On the fintech side, it’s almost like the world has inverted, I used to do a lot of cleantech where we were worried China would copy the IP. In fintech, the most innovative companies are coming out of China. If you look at digital payments in China versus the west, they were already way ahead of the curve, and now it’s even more so. It really is, for us, about learning what’s around the future. We’re pushing ourselves.

TC: The majority of that is owned by a few platforms like WeChat or Alipay. Is that a good thing?

Goldberg: Some of these platforms are becoming monolithic conglomerates at this point. My broader thesis in this point is, we’re gonna see a new set of companies and winners from the last few years that are gonna re-bundle the rest of the feature rich companies into larger platforms. They’re building massive user bases with extreme engagements. You imagine what else can you cross-sell once you have that engagement and brand affinity. We’re gonna see massive category winners of the next digital bank in the US.

TC: How are you thinking about ICOs?

Goldberg: We’re watching them opportunistically. I think crypto and blockchain have gotten a huge amount of airtime in the press, to me it’s distracting for financial services. The incumbents are absolutely vulnerable in a way they’ve never been before. We’re seeing huge success..

Cannon: We’re very expertise driven. The two areas are really around blockchain and AI. We just had a presentation we call Monday musings — we’ve had them on gaming, bitcoin, and crypto in general — that’s an area where we’re actively trying to build our knowledge set. I think there’s a lot of interest and the timing is of vigorous debate.

One of the challenges is to be an effective unit of economic transaction without the regulatory infrastructure like know your customer. As long as we have nation states we certainly will not see all transactions on blockchain. Regulators will have a way to regulate these transactions since at some point you are going to have to transfer your bitcoin into dollars or some other currency at some point.

Goldberg: I have had a challenge to find a [high-potential] Dapp. (Dapp is short for decentralized app)

TC: Where are you finding these new areas of talent?

Goldberg: I haven’t found a magic bullet. It’s an aggressive push to reach a diverse set of channels of sourcing.

Cannon: [Companies have big pools of strong candidates], the challenge early stage is it’s harder to find out about those companies. At the beginning it’s hard for people that aren’t as well networked. What’s a role that a large company has a big pool, how can they help them connect. I think about how to do that in a scalable way. The innovation that Google really did have is doing interviews. Rather than saying we’re gonna get people from top schools, we’re gonna have a test that tests for the engineering skills for this job. If you can prove you have these specific skills, I think that’s a great way. You get people who have the skillsets.

TC: What are you looking for in startups that say they specifically focus on machine learning?

Sarah: The way I thought about investing in AI is three buckets. One was on the generalized AI, and what would replace a human. That’s a lot of science and a lot of risk in the very early stage.The second bucket is vertical AI where I think health care and financial services are most interesting. The third bucket is what I call machine learning for everybody else or democratizing access to ML. Google and Facebook can afford to hire data scientists of incredible caliber, but most companies can’t. There’s an interesting company to be built sharing standard ‘algorithms as a service’ with those companies.

On the vertical side, a lot of is is tech constraints. I’d love to get into contracts, but [you have to] think about what’s possible — what you can do with a camera, where we are with machine vision and the applications of that with an immediate business context. [We look at] how many engineers and data scientists you have, what are the top 5 applications of your technology. You’ll very quickly find they’re doing something that could be automated quickly.

Goldberg: 99% of the pitches that I hear across industries talk about machine lerning. It’s become so ubiquitous as it’s almost meaningless, or it’s as horizontal as big data. What I look for is proprietary data. What is really critical is it’s not just algorithms but your ability to train a model faster than anyone else and in a way that’s more unique. You have access to some data pool, and the data is ultimately what sets it apart. For the vast majority, it’s a buzzword that they think will increase the valuation. A way to test that is to look at the technical DNA in the team. To me that’s a lot of suss out is this really machine learning, or is this empty words on a page.

TC: What are the verticals you focus on right now?

Goldberg: There are massive segments of the economy coming online right now. Agriculture, construction, logistics, we look at where the data has been locked up in offline form like on paper or excel. As software brings it online, a lot of those industries are ripe for machine learning.

Cannon: I am focused on consumer and the consumerization of the enterprise. On the consumer side I cover marketplaces, millennial purchasing behaviors and what we can learn from China. On the consumerization of enterprise side I’m focused on productivity, particularly tools used across business units.

TC: What signals are you looking for in consumer startups?

Cannon: I always think chance favors the prepared mind. I do want to do thesis work in consumer, and think about areas where I see patterns. When I see the monthly active users data, [I ask], does it conform to the world. Millenials have contrarian thinking, one thing that stood out when the Robinhood founders talk, was that millenials didn’t want to pay an upfront fee. I wonder if there are other models they’re resistant to. Maybe they don’t want to be monetized by ads, and are there businesses that could evolve based on that view.

Update: Cannon reached out to clarify a few things from the interview, which we’ve sprinkled some updates throughout.