Tesla started selling solar panels and home battery packs at Home Depot earlier this year. Tesla

In 2014, it seemed like pretty much anyone with a pulse and pitch deck was capable of raising huge amounts of capital from prestigious venture capital firms at sky-high valuations. Here we are four years later and times have changed. VCs inked a little more than 3,100 deals in the last quarter of 2017, according to Crunchbase — about 500 fewer than the previous quarter.

For aspiring startup founders, it’s a “confusing time in the so-called Unicorn story,” as Erin Griffith put it in a column last May — an asset bubble that never really popped, but which at the very least is deflating. In the confirmation hearing for new SEC Chairman Jay Clayton, lawmakers lamented the dearth of initial public offerings as companies that thrived in private markets — from Snap to Blue Apron — have struggled to deliver meaningful returns to investors.

This all creates a number of dilemmas for founders looking to raise capital and scale businesses in 2018. VCs remain an integral part of the innovation ecosystem. But what happens when the changing dynamics of financial markets collide with VCs’ expectations regarding growth? VCs may not always be aligned with founders and companies in this new environment. A recent study commissioned by Eric Paley at Founder Collective found that by pressuring companies to scale prematurely, venture capitalists are indirectly responsible for more startup deaths than founder infighting, technical debt and slow customer adoption — combined.

The new landscape requires that founders in particular be judicious in the way they seek out new sources of capital, structure cap tables and ownership and the types of concessions made to their new backers in exchange for that much-needed cash. Here are three ways founders can ensure they’re looking out for what’s best for their companies — and themselves — in the long run.

Take time to backchannel

Venture capitalists are arguably in the business of due diligence. Before they sign the dotted line, they can be expected to call your competitors, your customers, your former employers, your business school classmates — they will ask everyone and their mother about you.

A first-time founder is also new to the pressures of entrepreneurship, of having employees rely on you for their livelihoods. Whether you are desperate for cash because you need to make payroll, or you’re anxious for the validation of a headline-worthy investment, few founders take the time to properly backchannel their investors. Until you can say you’ve done due diligence of your own, your opinion of your VCs is going to be based on the size of their fund, the deals they’ve done or the press they’ve gotten. In short, it will likely be based on what they’ve done right.

On the other hand, you likely don’t know anything about the actual partner that will join your board. Are they intelligent in your space? Do they have a meaningful network? Or do they just know a few headhunters? Are they value creators? What is their political standing in their firm? Before you sign a term sheet, you need to take the time to contextualize the profile of the person who is taking a board seat. It gives you foresight on the actions your investment partner will likely take down the road.

Think beyond your first raise

If you do decide to raise capital, make sure you are in alignment with your board regarding your business plan, the pursuit of profit at the expense of revenue growth, or vice versa, and how it will steer your decision making as the market changes. It goes without saying that differences of opinion regarding your business strategy can lead to big conflict down the road.

As you think about these trade-offs, remember that as an entrepreneur, your obligation is to the existing shareholders: the employees and you. As the pack of potential unicorns has thinned, VCs in particular have turned to unconventional deal structures, like the use of common and preferred shares. For the founder who needs to raise cash, a dual ownership structure seems like a fair compromise to make, but remember that it may be at the expense of your employees’ option pool. The interests of preferred and common shareholders are not perfectly aligned, particularly when it comes time to make difficult decisions in the future.

Is VC money right for you?

VCs frequently share information, board decks and investor presentations with members of the press and the tech community, sometimes in support of their own personal agendas or to get perspective on whether to invest or not. That’s why it’s particularly important to backchannel, and more importantly, that you have allies that you can call on and people who can ensure some measure of goodwill. A good company board cannot be made up of just the investors and you: You need advocates that are balanced and on your side.

These prescriptions can sound paranoid, particularly to the founder whose business is growing nicely. But anything can cause a sea change and put you at odds with the people funding your company — who now own a piece of the company that you’re trying to build. When disagreements arise, it can get tense. They might say that you are a first-time founder, and therefore a novice. They will make your weaknesses known and say you’ll never be able to raise again if you ignore their invaluable advice. It’s important that you don’t fall into the fear trap. If you create a product or service that solves an undeniable problem, the money will come — and you will get funded again.

The term founder-friendly VC was always perhaps a bit of a misnomer. The people building the business and the people planning on cashing in on your efforts are imperfect allies. As a founder and business owner, your primary responsibilities are to your clients, to the company you’re building and, most importantly, to the employees who are helping you do it. As founders we like to think that we have all the answers, especially in bad times. Making sure you have alignment with your investors in challenging and unpredictable situations is critical. It’s important to anticipate how your investors will problem-solve before you give up control.

Venture capital is far from the only way to finance an early-stage business. Founders looking to jump-start their business have a number of alternatives, from debt financing and bootstrapping to crowdfunding, angel investors and ICOs. There are indeed still many advantages to having experienced investors on your side, not simply the cash but also the access to hiring and industry knowledge. But the relationship can only benefit both parties when founders go in eyes wide open.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s flip to the consumer side where the mobile penetration has been tremendous. Everybody believes that India is going the the next big e-commerce market. Even Amazon believes that....

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French startup Exotec Solutions raised a $17.7 million funding round (€15 million) from Iris Capital with existing investors 360 Capital Partners and Breega also participating.

The startup has built an automated robot called the Skypods to optimize e-commerce warehouses. It’s easy to forget about it when you click on “buy now”, but there are a ton of people walking through endless aisles of products every day to pick up your next order.

Exotec is selling a complete solution to replace part of your warehouse with a robot-managed area. France’s second biggest e-commerce website Cdiscount has been experimenting with Exotec and now plans to buy more robots, racks and stations in the coming months.

Skypods are low-profile robots that can carry a standardized box and bring it back to a human operator. But the Skypods don’t just move on flat grounds. They can move up and down a rack and grab a box from the shelves.

This is the most visual part of Exotec, but designing efficient logistics software for automated warehouse solutions is arguably even harder. The startup promises few errors and the ability to add more racks and robots without having to stop your fulfillment center.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to build and sell a thousand robots by 2019. It’s clear that e-commerce companies won’t switch to Exotec overnight. Many companies face huge spikes of demand during the holiday season for instance. So they need to make sure that it can handle a lot of pickups during the most demanding times.

Other companies, such as CommonSense Robotics focus on smaller warehouses and groceries with a warehouse-as-a-service approach. Overall, automated fulfillment centers seem like the future. Warehouses are constrained and predictable environments. And this is perfect for automated systems. Now let’s see who is going to grab more market share in this space.

When it comes to scaling startups, few people are as accomplished or consistently successful as Reid Hoffman .

While the rest of us consider scaling a startup to market domination a daunting task, Hoffman has continued to make it look easy.

In September, Hoffman will join us at TC Disrupt SF to share his strategies on “blitzscaling,” which also happens to be the title of his forthcoming book.

Hoffman started out his Silicon Valley career at PayPal, serving as EVP and a founding board member. In 2003, Hoffman founded LinkedIn from his living room. LinkedIn now has more than 500 million members across 200 countries and territories across the world, effectively becoming a necessity to the professional marketplace.

Hoffman left LinkedIn in 2007, but his contributions to the company certainly helped turn it into the behemoth it is today, going public in 2011 and selling to Microsoft for a whopping $26.2 billion in 2016.

At Disrupt, he’ll outline some of the methodology behind going from startup to scale up that is outlined in his new book, Blitzscaling, co-authored with Chris Yeh:

Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup’s life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from “startup” to “scaleup” at a furious pace that captures the market.

Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.

Today, Hoffman leads Greylock Partners’ Discovery Fund, where he invests in seed-stage entrepreneurs and companies. He currently serves on the boards of Airbnb, Convoy, Edmodo and Microsoft. Hoffman’s place in the VC world is a natural continuation of his angel investing. His angel portfolio includes companies like Facebook, Flickr, Last.fm, and Zynga.

Hoffman has also invested in tech that affects positive change, serving on the non-profit boards of Biohub, Kiva, Endeavor, and DoSomething.org.

Blitzscaling marks Hoffman’s third book (others include The Startup of You and The Alliance) and we’re absolutely thrilled to have him teach us a thing or two at Disrupt SF.

Tickets to Disrupt SF are available now right here.

More financing is coming in for Bird, this time potentially valuing the company at $2 billion, according to a new report by Axios.

There’s not a ton to add here compared to the last round (which happened just weeks ago), as the same dynamics are probably in play here. While Uber was a bet on car rides and generally getting around, Bird is that but at a dramatically more granular level — thinking short hops of a few miles in congested areas. Startups that are exceedingly hot can sometimes pull off these rolling rounds where investors are coming in at various points, especially as the model further proves out over time.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, you’ve probably seen Bird (and Lime) scooters hanging out on the sidewalks — potentially knocked over in a spot where someone might trip over them while checking his or her phone. That’s been a point of tension in areas like San Francisco, where Bird has had to temporarily come off the sidewalks as a permit system rolls out. Bird isn’t the first mobility-focused service that has faced regulatory challenges before, but it is one that’s become very popular very quickly.

This too, as Axios notes, could be an easy play to get into a hot market that a major ridesharing company could want to buy its way into. Uber acquired Jump, an on-demand bike service, in the midst of its own financing round. While bikes don’t seem to be getting quite the hype that scooters are, Lyft is also planning to acquire Motivate, an on-demand biking network.

Bird just weeks ago raised $150 million at a $1 billion valuation, while Lime raised an additional $250 million. Bird was valued at $300 million in a financing round earlier this year.

Amino has raised a big Series C round of funding — $45 million from GV, Venrock, Union Square Ventures, Goodwater Capital and Time Warner Investments, with Hearst Ventures joining as a new investor.

Co-founder and CEO Ben Anderson has described Amino as a way to help people who have “passionate niche interests” find others who feel the same way, via smartphone apps.

The company started out with apps focused on a handful of topics like K-pop, anime and Doctor Who, but it later added the ability for anyone to launch new communities in the main Amino app, and there are now more than 2.5 million communities.

Of course, some of these communities are more active than others, and there’s some overlap between them. But Max Sebela, who is general manager for Amino’s English-language apps, said there’s less overlap than you might think, because “each interest is actually a universe of micro interest.” For example, there might be one community focused on sharing strategy and tactics around the video game Overwatch, while another might revolve around sharing Overwatch fan art.

Ultimately, Sebela said it’s up to the founders and leaders of each community to decide what the community wants to focus on, and which product features they want to use to enable that. Meanwhile, Anderson said Amino is constantly tweaking its algorithms to make sure it’s surfacing the best communities for each user.

“Instead of one big, blue ocean, we provide a million lakes and help you find the exact right one,” he added.

Perhaps even more impressive than the number of communities is the amount of time the average user spends in Amino — more than 70 minutes per day.

One of the initial inspirations for the startup was a real-world anime convention, and Amino getting closer to that experience with the addition of features like live voice and video chat, as well as the screening room, where you can watch videos with other users.

During our conversation, Sebela opened up one of the K-Pop communities on his phone and was quickly able to listen in on a chat room where multiple users were singing along together. (Sadly, we didn’t join the singing.)

“The technology is not super unique,” Anderson acknowledged. “What makes it really special is, I can voice chat with my friends on a lot of different networks, but here I can hop in and join a voice chat with 10 Harry Potter fans who I may not know in my real life.”

While these features are already live, Anderson said they’ve been “downplayed” while Amino tests them out and works out the kinks. Now it’s ready to put them “front-and-center” in the app.

Amino has now raised more than $70 million in total funding.

It’s also been testing out ways to make money, which Anderson said will occur primarily through a subscription service — though apparently it’s too early for him to offer more details.

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 402nd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, June 14, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...

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Sramana Mitra: How do you parse the unicorn mania that’s going on in the industry now? If you do get a hot company that goes through multiple rounds of financing, you could get buried under...

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Ravi Mohan is Managing Director at Shasta Ventures, a firm that has invested in three SaaS Unicorns. Ravi discussed these investments: Apptio, Anaplan, and Zuora.

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Primary Venture Partners, a seed firm that invests exclusively in New York City startups, has raised a second fund of $100 million.

That focus is unusual — even Lerer Hippeau, a firm that’s closely associated with New York, makes some investments outside the region.

Primary’s Ben Sun (pictured above with his co-founder Brad Svrluga) said he’s betting, in part, on the New York workforce, particularly “the talent that came into the tech ecosystem post-financial crisis” — a shift that gave the city more talented entrepreneurs, plus a talent pool that they could draw from to build their companies.

After all, Sun noted that employment in New York’s tech sector grew by 57 percent between 2010 and 2016.

He also said that Primary (formerly known as High Peaks Venture Partners) offers more support and services than many seed firms — for example, Cat Hernandez, Primary’s partner focused on “human capital,” has been directly involved in hiring nearly 200 employees at the firm’s portfolio companies. Primary is able to offer that level of support with a team of 13 people, Sun said, by leveraging local connections and expertise.

The investment team has also grown, with the addition of Steve Schlafman as venture partner last month — Sun described him as “a super highly networked guy who has a really good nose for talent.” (When we talked to Schlafman prior to today’s announcement, he managed to dodge a question about the firm’s fundraising.)

“With a singular focus on this market, we were able to build an operating and portfolio impact model that provides concentrated, on-site support to our portfolio companies in a way that wouldn’t be possible across geographies,” Svrluga said in an emailed statement. “Raising this second fund not only gives us the capital to continue to be a high-conviction seed round leader, but to continue to expand our Portfolio Impact team so that we can be an even better partner to our founders on their journey from Seed to Series A.”

Primary’s approach has resulted in some big successes already, like Jet.com (acquired by Walmart for $3.3 billion) and Coupang (valued at $5 billion). Even beyond the most attention-grabbing deals, Sun pointed to the fact that of the 15 companies in the Primary portfolio that have tried to raise Series A rounds, 13 of them have succeeded.

As part of this announcement, VCs that Primary has worked with in the past also offered their praise, with Spark Capital’s Kevin Thau describing the firm as a team that “knows the New York Seed market better than anyone,” and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Eric Feng saying it’s “one of the top partners to startups in the city, providing true value guiding their portfolio companies from seed to Series A.”

While the firm raised significantly more this time around (Primary’s first fund was $60 million), Sun said it will remain focused on seed deals — with the occasional incubated startup, like dog food company Ollie. It will, however, be able to write slightly larger checks, say in the $1.5 million to $2 million range, with additional funding reserved for follow-on rounds.

“What we’re going to do with this $100 million is follow the same strategy,” Sun said.

Squarespace is launching its first email marketing product today.

CEO Anthony Casalena and Director of Product Natalie Gibralter both told me that the Squarespace platform has been gradually expanding beyond a simple website builder by adding things like e-commerce and analytics.

Gibralter said the goal is to turn Squarespace into an “all-in-one platform” for businesses, with email as “the first segue into a broader suite of marketing tools.”

There’s no shortage of email marketing products out there — not just standalone tools, but also email marketing options added to competing website builders like Weebly. But for Casalena and Gibralter, one of the main advantages is how Squarespace has integrated email marketing into the larger platform.

“We already have a lot of information about who’s been buying things from your site, we know if you have a blog … we can build all those touchpoints substantially better,” Casalena said. “It can be both simpler to use, easier to use and, you know, more on-point.”

It also seems that Squarespace has used what it learned on the website side to create a straightforward email builder that nonetheless results in a slick, professional-looking message — which is what Gibralter ended up with after a few minutes of demoing the product for me.

The email builder includes customizable templates to start from, the ability to import content from your website or blog, and responsive layouts so that the emails will look good on desktop or mobile (not to mention a responsive design that allows you to compose or edit messages from your phone). It’s all managed from a central dashboard where you can see all your past campaigns, check their performance and reuse old layouts.

Plus, it’s integrated with the broader Squarespace analytics product, which means that you don’t just see which emails got opened, but which ones actually drove traffic and purchases on your site.

Gibralter said Squarespace is also helping businesses in less obvious — but still important —ways like dropping in reminders about needed disclosures and options to ensure the emails are legally compliant, and saving colors for future use so that your emails reflect a consistent brand. (In fact, Gibralter said this feature is so useful that it will be added it to the website builder, too.)

At the same time, Gibralter described this as “really the beginning,” with additional features like customer segmentation and drip campaigns on the roadmap.

Squarespace says it’s starting to roll out email marketing to its existing customers at no cost. Starting in the fall, the company plans to begin selling this as an add-on to any subscription, with pricing starting at an additional $8 per month.

Earlier this year, Billion Dollar Unicorn Dropbox (Nasdaq: DBX) finally went public. The company was expected to list last year, but the disappointing IPO performance for the technology industry...

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MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has created a system that can see your body through walls, recreating your poses when you walk, sit, or simply stand still. It uses RF waves to sense where you are and then recreates your body as a simple stick figure. It’s called RF-Pose.

From the release:

The researchers use a neural network to analyze radio signals that bounce off people’s bodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions.

The team says that the system could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis (MS), providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

The team is primarily interested in using this system for healthcare, allowing for passive monitoring of a subject inside a room without cameras or other intrusions. “All data the team collected has subjects’ consent and is anonymized and encrypted to protect user privacy,” wrote the researchers. “For future real-world applications, the team plans to implement a ‘consent mechanism’ in which the person who installs the device is cued to do a specific set of movements in order for it to begin to monitor the environment.”

The researchers trained the neural network by showing a machine a video of a person walking next to the RF interference they made as they moved. They then overlaid stick figures on the movement and trained the network to do the same automatically. Because RF signals are ubiquitous, it was easier to use than other sensing technologies.

Interestingly the researchers never trained the system to see through walls but it was able to “generalize its knowledge to be able to handle through-wall movement.”

“If you think of the computer vision system as the teacher, this is a truly fascinating example of the student outperforming the teacher,” said researcher Antonio Torralba. There is no word if the system will be used for other commercial purposes.

Sramana Mitra: What is your business model? Are you acquiring customers on behalf of banks or are you acquiring customers on behalf of yourselves? Luvleen Sidhu: We are acquiring customers on behalf...

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