The American IPO market is hot for many companies, but surprisingly cool for others. The gap between the two cohorts of private companies looking to list is becoming notable.

When Chinese ride-hailing giant Didi first set an IPO price range, The Exchange was curious about why the company felt so inexpensive. Compared to its American comps, shares in Didi simply felt underpriced at its proposed valuation interval. Recently, Didi stuck to its initial expectations by pricing at $14 per share, the upper end of its range, but no higher.

This week also brought a lackluster float for Chinese grocery-delivery company DingDong, which cut its IPO raise but only managed a flat American debut. Another China-based online grocery delivery service that went public domestically last week, Missfresh, is doing even worse.

With just those few data points, you’d be hard-pressed to be particularly bullish about U.S.-listed IPOs. Why go public in the United States if you are going to be underpriced and then trade poorly? The answer is that while many Chinese companies are seemingly struggling to find the demand that they expect for their shares on American exchanges, domestic companies are seeing some opposite results.

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We’re talking tech companies here, I should add; The Exchange doesn’t track IPO results for commodities diggers and biotech labs. It’s a big world. We have to focus.

There are contrary data points to our general thesis. Nio’s recent share price appreciation could be construed as such. But if we parse recent IPO news from SentinelOne and Xometry in contrast to what we’ve seen from Chinese tech companies’ own paths to the American public markets, there really does seem to be a gap forming.

Uneven ground

Didi’s IPO price of $14 per share values the company at around $67 billion on a nondiluted basis, and as high as $70 billion if we counted more shares in its market cap calculations. As we previously calculated, with around $6.5 billion in total Q1 2021 revenue and positive net income, the company is trading at a stiff multiples discount to Uber.

Indeed, Uber’s trailing price/sales ratio is north of 8x. If we valued Didi’s revenues from the last twelve months at the same price, it would be worth nearly $179 billion. It’s not. And that’s the gap that we want to stress.

That a few other Chinese tech IPOs listed in the United States underperformed in the last week is contrasted by a blizzard of positive IPO results from domestic companies from just this week:

It used to be a heavily traveled two-way street in corporate America: CEOs joined other companies’ boards to broaden their experiences, expand their influence, or simply because it felt good. Boards sought out CEOs because of the knowledge they bring and their unique ability to interact with the company CEO as an equal.

But the number of sitting CEOs on outside boards keeps shrinking. As the CEO role has become more difficult and demanding, greater numbers of chief executives are shying away from external board roles and many boards now limit their own CEOs’ board assignments as well.

The pandemic accelerated the trend, according to a report by management consulting firm Korn Ferry, citing “evidence that the unprecedented demands posed by the pandemic led many CEO directors to resign from outside boards to focus on their own organizations.” Fewer than half of CEOs now serve on an outside board, the report said.

At the same time, many corporations are feeling pressure to bring more gender and racial diversity to their boards and are making membership available to a broader array of candidates than in the past.

Is the decrease in CEO board participation a positive or negative? Interestingly, it’s both.

Here are four benefits of CEOs serving on boards:

Advising another company can make for a better CEO. CEOs who opt out of corporate board directorships out of fear of overextending themselves — and boards who restrict their own CEOs’ board assignments for the same reason — miss a key point: Time on a board usually makes them a better leader.

I’m on two outside boards. An inside view of another company’s challenges and opportunities, its peaks and valleys, what strategies worked and didn’t, has revealed insights I’ve ended up applying at my own company. Being on the other side of the table has even helped me better understand how to communicate with my company’s board.

Serving on a board can prevent myopia. Because of digital disruption, businesses must move at an unprecedented pace to stay competitive. Job No. 1 for all CEOs is to act on this reality every day inside their companies. But drawing exclusively from their own company’s experience can blind a leader to broader perspectives in the outside world. A board stint is a great way to ensure they’re getting those.

Board memberships can make CEOs more empathetic. There’s a lot of talk these days about the need for heightened empathy in the C-suite, and with good reason: The global health crisis, racial injustice and other extraordinary stressors demand that senior executives possess what McKinsey described as four qualities “to manage in crisis and shepherd their organization into a post-crisis next normal” — awareness, vulnerability, empathy and compassion.

In these times, it’s critically important for a CEO to cultivate as wide a frame of reference as possible, and involvement with another company through a board directorship accomplishes that.

Helping another company does broader good. If a CEO has the wherewithal beyond their own company responsibilities to bring value to another firm’s board, that’s a positive for the world at large. A rising tide lifts all boats, after all.

For example, I’m a board member at a company that once was strictly a manufacturer of home standby generators. It’s now digital savvy, with Wi-Fi-equipped generators providing a number of services on users’ smartphones. This means they also needs a strong cybersecurity strategy, my area of expertise. I take satisfaction in believing my guidance is benefiting the company, its shareholders and its customers.

So what’s good about the drop in CEO board assignments? That’s easy: more opportunity for non-CEOs and other traditionally underrepresented groups, including women and people of color, to join corporate boards.

“In a little-noticed but remarkable shift, many firms are skipping the corner suite and looking elsewhere for directors,” Korn Ferry reported. “Recent data shows that nearly two-thirds of the more than 400 director seats filled last year were taken by someone other than a CEO. Experts say since both the pandemic and the racial-equality protests of last year, companies are determined to create boards with more diverse faces and more specific skill sets.”

Equilar’s most recent Gender Diversity Index found that at the end of Q1 2021, 24.3% of all board seats in the Russell 3000 were occupied by women, up from 15% at the end of 2016. “The path toward equal representation of men and women in public company boardrooms seemed to go nowhere for decades, but there has been a significant clearing in recent years,” the report said. (Nevertheless, Equilar cautions that boards won’t hit gender parity until 2032.)

And many of these non-CEO board members are doing an excellent job. According to a survey by Stanford University’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, 79% of board members feel that, in practice, active CEOs are no better than non-CEO board members. A CEO may bring cachet to the board, but many non-CEOs contribute real work as a director, the study said.

Increased diversity on boards isn’t just an excellent development by itself; board experience positions members well for future leadership roles and thus can act as a proxy to get more women and people of color into corner offices.

Making board membership accessible to a wider range of candidates beyond typically white male CEOs — they still account for almost 90% of Fortune 500 CEOs — offers hope that diversity in the business leader ranks will keep rising.

All things considered, I think this potential outweighs the negatives of more CEOs staying out of outside companies’ board rooms.

Drone delivery startup Zipline, a company that got its start delivering medical supplies across Africa, has raised $250 million in new funding. This latest round has vaulted the company’s valuation to $2.75 billion and will fuel further expansion of its logistics networks in Africa and the United States.

Zipline made a name for itself first in Rwanda and then in Ghana, where it delivered blood, vaccines, life-saving medications and other essential supplies using autonomous electric drones. The company, which launched in 2014, is vertically integrated – meaning it designs and manufactures the unmanned drones, the logistics software, and the accompanying launch and landing system. Zipline CEO Keller Rinaudo told TechCrunch that this was more by necessity than design, noting that when the company first started developing its drone tech, it quickly realized that off-the-shelf components weren’t reliable or didn’t integrate well.

“Over time Zipline has had to basically rip every single thing out of the system, whether it was the flight computer [. . .] or the battery pack, or the aircraft itself. And we’ve had to build every single one of those things completely from scratch.”

Rinaudo stressed that Zipline doesn’t think of itself as a drone company, but rather an instant logistics provider. And while the company iteratively improves its autonomous drone model, much of its successes over the past five years have been related to building out its logistics network. After what Rinaudo described as a challenging first year of operations in Rwanda in 2016, the company has since partnered with logistics company UPS in that East African country, the Toyota Group in Japan, and it’s started working with Nigeria’s Kaduna and Cross River States. Here in the United States, the company has partnered with Novant Health to deliver medical equipment and personal protective gear in North Carolina and, notably, with retail giant Walmart delivering health and wellness products.

Unlike many companies that suffered during the pandemic, for Zipline there was an obvious opportunity to further accelerate its operations – not only delivering personal protective equipment but also COVID-19 vaccines. The company said it is planning to deliver 2.4 million doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of the year.

Zipline sees an additional opportunity in delivering healthcare items, such as pharmaceutical prescriptions, directly to people’s homes. “[Hospitals] really see instant logistics as the other half of telepresence,” Rinaudo said. “If you can have someone quickly pull out their phone and talk to a doctor, then the other half of the equation is, can we get you what you need?”

The company’s currently working with the Federal Aviation Administration to move from operating under an emergency waiver – granted by regulators during the pandemic – to a full commercial operating certification. One advantage Zipline may have over competitors in the FAA’s certification process is that it has many thousands of hours of safe flight data to show that it’s system is sound. It would be one of the first drone delivery companies to receive such a certification.

In the long run, Zipline may start to focus on other industries, but for now it’s laser focused on healthcare, Rinaudo said. He noted that in the last few months alone the company has signed service contracts for five new distribution centers in Nigeria and four in Ghana, as well as “multiple new service contracts” with hospital systems in the United States. This latest funding round, led by Baillie Gifford and with support from returning investors Temasek and Katalyst Ventures, and new investors Fidelity, Intercorp, Emerging Capital Partners and Reinvest Capital, will be used to build out the infrastructure for these new contracts.

Rinaudo said the aim is for Zipline to serve the majority of single-family detached homes across the United States over the coming three years or so.

“The fact that so many big companies like Toyota and Walmart are starting to make big bets in this instant logistics space, I think is a pretty clear sign that people realize this is coming,” Rinaudo said. “There’s a tidal wave of transformation coming. The exciting thing about it is that it’s going to totally transform the way that healthcare systems work, it’s going to totally transform the way that economic systems work, and it’s going to make it possible for logistics to serve people equally.”

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Family offices have existed since the 1800s, but they’ve never been so manifold as in recent years. According to a 2019 Global Family Office Report by UBS and Campden Wealth, 68% of the 360 family offices surveyed were founded in 2000 or later.

Their rise owes to numerous factors, including the tech startups that mint new centi-millionaires and billionaires each year, along with the increasingly complex choices that people with so much moolah encounter. Think household administration, legal matters, trust and estate management, personal investments, charitable ventures.

Still, family offices tend to cater to people with investable assets of $1 billion or more, according to KPMG. Even multi-family offices, where resources are shared with other families, are more typically targeting people with at least $20 million to invest. That high bar means there are still a lot of people with a lot of resources who need hand-holding.

Enter Harness Wealth, a three-year-old, New York-based outfit that was founded by David Snider and Katie Prentke English to cater to individuals with increasingly complex financial pictures, including following liquidity events. The two understand as well as anyone how one’s vested interests can abruptly change — and how hard these can be to manage when working full-time.

Snider got his start out of school as an associate with Bain & Company and later as an associate with Bain Capital before becoming the first business hire at Compass and getting promoted to COO and CFO after the real estate company’s $25 million Series A raise in 2013. Compass grew, of course, and now, less than four months after its late-March IPO, it boasts a market cap of nearly $27 billion.

Indeed, over the years, Snider, who rejoined Bain as an executive-in-residence after 4.5 years with Compass, spied an opportunity to bring together often siloed businesses like tax and estate and investment planning, including it because “it resonated with me personally. Despite all these great things on my resume, every six months I found something I could or should have been doing differently with my equity.”

Prentke English also has much in common with the clients Harness Wealth is targeting. After spending more than six years at American Express, she spent two years as the CMO of London-based online investment manager Nutmeg. She left the role to start Harness after being introduced to Snider through a mutual friend; in the meantime, Nutmeg was just acquired by JPMorgan Chase.

While there is no shortage of wealth managers to whom such individuals can turn, Harness says it does far more than pair people with the right independent registered investment advisors — which is a key part of its business. It also helps its customers, depending on their needs, connect with a team of pros across an array of verticals — not unlike the access an individual might have if they were to have a family office.

As for how Harness makes money, it collects part of the fee that advisers on the platform charge for their services. Snider says the percentage varies, though it’s an “ongoing revenue share to ensure alignment with our clients.” In other words, he adds, “We only do well if they find long-term success with the advisers on our platform,” versus if Harness merely collected a lead generation fee at the outset.

Ultimately, the company thinks it can replace a lot of the do-it-yourself services available in the market, like Personal Capital and Mint, and it suggests it is making headway, with a ballooning base of customers that include employees of Coinbase, UiPath, Paypal, Snowflake, Doordash, and Amazon, as well as partners at venture firms.

That confidence is rooted in part in Snider’s experience with Compass, which, in its earlier days, thought it could navigate around real estate agents but “found that while people wanted better data insights and a better UX, they also wanted that coupled with someone who’d had many clients who looked like them,” says Snider. Prentke English joined forces with him after discovering that Nutmeg, too, was “running into the limitations of a non-human-powered solution,” he says.

Investors think the thesis makes sense, evidently. Harness just closed on $15 million in Series A funding led by Jackson Square Ventures, a round that brings the company’s total funding to $19 million.

As for what Harness Wealth does with that fresh capital, part of it, interestingly, will be used to develop its own captive business line called Harness Tax. As Snider explains it, more of its clients are finding that tax planning is among their biggest concerns, given all that is happening on the IPO front, with SPACs, with remote work, and also with cryptocurrencies, into which more people are pouring money but around which the tax code has been playing catch-up.

It makes sense, given that tax planning can be time-sensitive and often dictate the overall financial planning strategy. At the same time, it’s fair to wonder whether some of Harness Wealth’s adviser partners will be turned off from working with the outfit if it thinks its partner is evolving into a rival.

Snider insists that Harness Wealth — which currently employs 22 people and is not-yet profitable — has no such designs. “Our goal is only to help people where we can add value, and we saw an opportunity to lean in on tax side.” Harness has a “a very large population of people who may not understand their tax liabilities” because of the crypto boom in particular, he explains, adding, “We want to make sure we’re front and center” and ready to help as needed.

Others of Harness Wealth’s new and existing investors include Bain Capital; Torch Capital; Activant; GingerBread Capital; FJ Labs; i2BF Ventures; First Minute Capital; Liquid2 Ventures; Alleycorp, Marc Benioff; Compass founder Ori Allon; and Paul Edgerley, who is the former co-head of Bain Capital Private Equity.

Email has the highest return on investment of any other marketing channel. On average, email earns you $40 for every $1 spent. And the best part is that email is an owned channel, which means you can reach your subscriber directly instead of relying on social media algorithms to surface your content.

At Demand Curve, we’ve worked with over 500 startups, meticulously documenting growth tactics for all growth channels. We also incorporate what we’ve learned from our agency, Bell Curve, which works with Outschool, Imperfect Produce and Microsoft to name a few.

To understand how to use email marketing effectively, we interviewed email marketers at this year’s fastest-growing startups. This post covers the most profitable tactics they use that capture 80% of the value using 20% of the effort.

If people don’t open it, nothing else matters

The subject line of your email is the most important, yet most marketers neglect it until after crafting the body of the email.

Increase the open-rate of your subject lines by making them self-evident. You don’t want people guessing why you want them to pay attention to your email. If the subject line is unclear or vague, your subscribers will ignore it.

One trick is to write like you speak. Try using subject lines that use informal language and contractions (it’s, they’re, you’ll). Not only will this save character count, it will also make your copy more friendly and quick to read.

Subject lines should be relevant to your subaudiences. Marketers generate 760% more revenue from segmented email campaigns than from untargeted emails.

If you’re collecting emails from multiple areas on your website, chances are the context will be slightly different for each. For example, people who subscribe after reading an article on ketogenic diets should receive emails that further educate them on keto and seeds products relevant to that lifestyle. Sending them information and product recommendations for vegetarians would not be relevant and could lead to them unsubscribing.

To ensure you’re sending relevant emails to the right audiences, segment your audience using tags and filters within your email marketing platform. Each platform will do this slightly differently, but all modern platforms should allow you to do this. When crafting your email subject line, ask yourself: “Would this email make sense to receive for this segment of subscriber?”

Your subject lines should be short and concise. About 46% of all emails are opened on mobile devices, which means the subject line must be short enough to fit on a smaller screen while getting your point across. Fifty characters is approximately the maximum length a subject line can be before it gets cut off on a mobile screen.

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Keeping your subject lines short also makes them easier to scan when your subscriber is looking through their inbox. Including emojis in your subject line can cut down your character count and emulates how friends send text messages to each other. Including emojis in your subject lines will make your email feel less corporate and more friendly.

Designing emails that get read

Once your subscriber opens your email, there are three outcomes that can follow: read, skim or bounce.

Subscribers that read your emails are the most valuable, because they will consume the full contents of your email. Skimmers will only read the headlines and look at the images you include. Subscribers who bounce will open your email, but if nothing catches their attention right away, they will simply delete or close your email.

You’re going to want to design your emails to minimize the number of bouncers, satisfy readers and provide enough high-level information that skimmers still understand your message.

To minimize the number of bounces, choose an email design that catches the eye and is relevant to your brand. Take the Casper email below for example. The starry night background and moon illustration is directly relevant to the mattresses they sell. Visually branded email designs will help elevate your brand perception.

To optimize for skimmers, write action-focused headlines. Use designs that draw the eye of your reader to key elements. As you can see in the Headspace example, the image of the rising sun pushes your gaze upward to the headline and the call-to-action button. Skimmers should be able to understand the context of the entire email and take action without needing to read the body.

To convert more readers, fulfill the expectation set by the subject line. Readers will be looking for any promises or hints you gave them in your subject line. Be sure to deliver on this promise in the body. Do so in an aggressively concise way — just because they’re reading doesn’t mean they don’t value their time.

Call to actions that convert

The goal of your body copy is to drive people to your call-to-action button (CTA). Your CTA is crucial, because it’s how you convert an email subscriber into a paying customer. To increase the conversion of your CTA, make a valuable promise in your body copy and headers that’s only delivered through your CTA.

Good CTA copy typically begins with a verb that teases what the reader will encounter next:

Low-converting CTA copy is vague or nonactive:

Your email should only have one CTA. Any more and your conversion will decrease due to unnecessary decision-making. Ensure that the page on your site that your CTA leads to fulfills the promise you made in your body and CTA button.

Recap

Once the focus of the subject line is clear and the desired outcome is chosen, everything else should be crafted to carry the reader step by step through the email, eventually taking them to the desired action.

It’s a good idea to work backward from the desired outcome you want the reader to perform. If the desired outcome is for them to click on a CTA button, frame your subject line, headers and body copy as a valuable promise that can only be achieved by clicking the button.

Consider the experience of your email through the eyes of all three types of subscribers: readers, skimmers and bouncers. Use visual and written prompts that make the purpose of your email clear to all three categories. Failing to do so could lead to unsubscribes and lost revenue.

Email has the highest return on investment than any other marketing channel because you have a captive audience who has opted-in to you communicating with them. Email can drive six times more conversions that a Twitter post and is 40 times more likely to get noticed than a Facebook post.

One of the biggest factors in the success of a startup is its ability to quickly and confidently deliver software. As more consumers interact with businesses through a digital interface and more products embrace those interfaces as the opportunity to differentiate, speed and agility are paramount. It’s what makes or breaks a company.

As your startup grows, it’s important that your software delivery strategy evolves with you. Your software processes and tool choices will naturally change as you scale, but optimizing too early or letting them grow without a clear vision of where you’re going can cost you precious time and agility. I’ve seen how the right choices can pay huge dividends — and how the wrong choices can lead to time-consuming problems that could have been avoided.

As we know from Conway’s law, your software architecture and your organizational structure are deeply linked. It turns out that how you deliver is greatly impacted by both organizational structure and architecture. This is true at every stage of a startup but even more important in relation to how startups go through rapid growth. Software delivery on a team of two people is vastly different from software delivery on a team of 200.

Decisions you make at key growth inflection points can set you up for either turbocharged growth or mounting roadblocks.

Founding stage: Keep it simple

The founding phase is the exciting exploratory phase. You have an idea and a few engineers.

The key during this phase is to keep the architecture and tooling as simple and flexible as possible. Building a company is all about execution, so get the tools you need to execute consistently and put the rest on hold.

One place you can invest without overdoing it is in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). CI/CD enables developer teams to get feedback fast, learn from it, and deliver code changes quickly and reliably. While you’re trying to find product-market fit, learning fast is the name of the game. When systems start to become more complex, you’ll have the practices and tooling in place to handle them easily. By not having the ability to learn and adapt quickly, you give your competitors a massive edge.

One other place where early, simple investments really pay off is in operability. You want the simplest possible codebase: probably a monolith and a basic deploy. But if you don’t have some basic tools for observability, each user issue is going to take orders of magnitude longer than necessary to track down. That’s time you could be using to advance your feature set.

Your implementation here may be some placeholders with simple approaches. But those placeholders will force you to design effectively so that you can enhance later without massive rewrites.

Very early stage: Maintain efficiency and productivity

At 10 to 20 engineers, you likely don’t have a person dedicated to developer efficiency or tooling. Company priorities are still shifting, and although it may feel cumbersome for your team to be working as a single team, keep at it. Look for more fluid ways of creating independent workstreams without concrete team definitions or deep specialization. Your team will benefit from having everyone responsible for creating tools, processes and code rather than relying on a single person. In the long run, it will help foster efficiency and productivity.

Young startups need to be great at design, not just for their products, but for their brands. The pandemic made that all harder — but lessons are being learned. We caught up with Scott Tong, a startup design expert who advises early-stage companies, to learn more.

The office may still be the best place to hash out big multiteam decisions, he says, but new best practices and modern tools are making remote collaboration easier and easier.

Brand design seems to only be getting trickier, however. “To users,” he explains, “brand and product are lumped together and they each represent the other.”

Today, many users have spent lots of time at home online, often thinking harder about world events and how they are living their lives. They’re scrutinizing what they can observe about a startup to see if its values line up with theirs before they make a decision to sign up (or quit).

The solution, in Tong’s view, is to create a unifying plan where design decisions can address problems before they emerge.

More details are in the interview below. For a full conversation, check out Tong’s talk about design strategy coming up at our TC Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising conference on July 8.

The pandemic affected us all. How has it affected user-focused brand design?

The pandemic drove people to consume even more media than before. News about science, politics, race and the economy were unavoidable. Brands have had to navigate a very complex landscape of topics that can be divisive. People increasingly identify with brands that are aligned with their values. But in order to understand a brand’s values, someone has to sift through competing signals — some from the brand itself, and others from vocal supporters and critics. Say the wrong thing and a brand can risk alienating large portions of their audience (including their own employees). If a brand says nothing, their silence can be interpreted as complicity. And if brand messaging comes across as unauthentic, it could spell disaster. It’s a difficult needle to thread. It’s not uncommon for companies to run surveys to gather signals about how their brand is perceived by customers and noncustomers alike.

What new things about users should startups consider when working on designing their identities? What are you advising startups now about designing their brands, versus what you said circa December 2020?

Identities are only one part of a much larger constellation of touch points that make up a user’s perception of a brand. User expectations are extremely high and will continue to rise. Even with their free products, users have gotten accustomed to highly polished experiences. While “high quality” is table stakes for users, the challenge for a company is to pinpoint the handful of dimensions that matter most. That’s why constantly seeking to understand users is so important. Deeply understanding what they care about will help isolate those critical dimensions so teams can focus on areas that will drive the most meaningful impact.

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What do startups continue to get wrong?

One recurring observation is that brand teams and product teams often sit in different parts of a company’s org structure. While there are reasons for this, it’s important to remember that users don’t care about your org structure. To users, brand and product are lumped together and they each represent the other.

Internally, how are companies handling internal challenges like collaborative designing in a more remote world? In-person communication has been vital historically to get all parts of a company thinking in the same way. What is helping those who have gone remote-first succeed (tools, approaches to meeting and documentation, etc.)?

Collaboration tools have never been more abundant. But while tools are plenty, norms around their usage can vary significantly from group to group, even within the same company. Where can I find the project brief? How many back-to-back meetings is too many? How are brainstorms run in a virtual environment? When do I use Slack versus email? Establishing those norms requires conversation and experimentation.

Along with norms around tools, it’s helpful to establish a cadence/rhythm that allows team members to get and stay in sync. Depending on the team, that cadence may be daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly or quarterly, etc., but find the appropriate cadence for each audience.

Alternatively, do you think the demands of good design work will motivate more early-stage startups back into in-person office work?

There are varying opinions on whether being in-person spurs innovation or productivity. The pandemic has forced us all to adapt, and design is no exception. It’s been encouraging to see good design happen in remote work environments, and a lot of that has been enabled by tools and the norms around their usage. While I personally would prefer being in-person, especially at the early stages of company building, I think it’s entirely possible to establish a high-functioning team in a remote environment. Of course there are cases — like hardware or soft goods — where tactile feedback is important and hard to replicate remotely. But even then I’ve seen some successful workarounds (for example, sending the same material sample to every team member). Given that this is all still very new, there will inevitably be hiccups along the way. But a team of willing participants with the right mix of tools and norms can make it work.

Overall, with more teams remote and distributed, it may be even more natural than before to work with a third-party brand design expert. When do you advise startups to bring in an outside consultant today, and how should they work with them?

This depends largely on how design is valued within an organization — as a service or as a partner.

If design is viewed as a partner, then the relationship is ongoing and iterative. This means design is a function that builds, measures and learns alongside their product and engineering counterparts and the benefits of institutional knowledge compound over time.

If design is viewed as a service, third parties make sense, because in a service relationship there is usually a defined beginning and end to an engagement. Clear scope, timeline and deliverables will set this kind of service relationship up for success.

Ahead of our TechCrunch City Spotlight: Pittsburgh event tomorrow, I spoke to current Mayor Bill Peduto and Dave Mawhinney, the executive director of Carnegie Mellon University’s Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship. Like many in the Steel City startup community, both share a focus on the historically difficult task of keeping startups in town.

For more on investing in Pittsburgh, be sure to tune in to our City Spotlight on Tuesday, June 29, where we will be joined by Peduto, Duolingo director of engineering Karin Tsai and Carnegie Mellon University President Farnam Jahanian. Register for the free event here.

I asked Peduto and Mawhinney what the single biggest obstacle has been in building out Pittsburgh’s startup ecosystem. Both responded the same way: venture capital. Raising funding is, of course, a hurdle regardless of location, but many VCs have been reluctant to invest in startups outside of traditional hubs like San Francisco and New York.

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“But one of the challenges is getting that capital to come into the community,” said Mawhinney, who leads CMU’s startup efforts. “If you look at how much Uber ATG brought in, how much Argo AI and Aurora — collectively, those three companies, which have all licensed CMU technologies, they’ve all got over $7 billion in collective capital. Not all of it will be spent here, but a lot of it will be spent here. But that doesn’t necessarily trickle down to the next AI startup raising their first $3 million.”

Peduto said growing the VC pipeline has been a focus during his time as mayor.

“I think we’ve been able to convince investors from the coast that the companies don’t need to leave Pittsburgh in order to be highly successful and see their investment pay off,” he told TechCrunch. “However, I believe if we had more venture capital arriving here to help take early-stage companies into that critical next stage of expansion, it would build off itself and it would excel growth in all of the industry cluster, significantly.”

Side, a real estate technology company that works to turn agents and independent brokerages into boutique brands and businesses, has raised “$50 million-plus” in a funding round that more than doubles its valuation to $2.5 billion.

The latest financing comes just three months after the San Francisco-based startup raised $150 million in a Series D funding round led by Coatue Management at a $1 billion valuation. Tiger Global Management led the latest investment, which also included participation from ICONIQ Capital and D1 Capital Partners. With the latest capital infusion, Side’s total raised since its 2017 inception now totals over $250 million. Matrix Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Trinity Ventures and 8VC led its earlier rounds.

Side says that it is now “backed by the three top technology initial public offering (IPO) underwriters” and that the latest funding “sets the stage for a future IPO.”

The startup pulled in between “$30 million and $50 million in revenue” in 2020 (a wide range, we know), and expects to double revenue this year. In 2019, Side represented over $5 billion in annual home sales across all of its partners. Today, the company’s community of agent partners represents over $15 billion in annual production volume. And it’s predicting that by the end of 2021, it will have closed over $20 billion in home sales, positioning the company “as a top 10 national brokerage by volume.”

Today, Side supports more than 1,800 partner agents across California, Texas and Florida. It says it’s seen a 200% year-over-year increase in agent-represented home sales across its three operating markets of California, Texas and Florida. The company plans to enter 15 new states by year’s end.

Guy Gal, Edward Wu and Hilary Saunders founded Side on the premise that most real estate agents are “underserved and under-appreciated” by traditional brokerage models.

CEO Gal said existing brokerages are designed to support “average” agents and, as such, the top-producing agents end up having to do “all of the heavy lifting.”

Side’s white label model works with agents and teams by exclusively marketing their boutique brand, while also providing the required technology and support needed on the back end. The goal is to help partner agents “predictably grow” their businesses and improve their productivity.

“The way to think about Side is the way you think about what Shopify does for e-commerce […] When partnering with Side, top-producing agents, teams and independent brokerages, for the first time in history, gain full ownership of their own brand and business without having to operate a brokerage,” Gal told me at the time of the company’s last raise. “When you spend years solving the problems of this very specific community of agents, you are able to use software to drive enormous efficiency for them in a way that has never been done before.”

Existing brokerages, he argues, actively discourage agents from becoming top producers and teams, because agents who serve fewer clients can be forced into paying much higher commission fees on every transaction, which means the incentives between brokerages and top agents and teams are misaligned.

“Top producers want to grow and differentiate, and brokerages want them to do less business at higher fees and be one more of the same under the same brand,” Gal said. “Side, rather than discouraging and competing with top-producing agents and teams, enables them to grow and scale their own business and brand.”

This story was updated post-publication with an updated valuation figure.

Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley has announced that he is stepping back from his full-time role at the company. During the first seven years of the company, he was the startup’s Chief Executive Officer. In 2016, Crowley moved to an executive chairman position. He’s also been running the Foursquare Labs R&D group since then.

Going forward, Crowley won’t be working full-time at the company. He’ll remain on the board of directors as co-chair with Factual founder Gil Elbaz.

In 2009, Foursquare was better known for its location-based social network. People would check in to locations to share what they’ve been up to with their friends. Users would earn badges and mayorships.

Over the years, the most active users had amassed thousands of checkins. Foursquare became a great app to keep track of places you like. You could also use it to discover your friends’ favorite places.

That’s why the company decided to split its main app into two separate apps — the Foursquare City Guide and Swarm. At the same time, the company started working on developer APIs and SDKs so that other companies could take advantage of Foursquare’s location data.

That business in particular has been quite lucrative. With the company’s Pilgrim SDK, developers can build location-aware apps. For instance, an advertiser can send a personalized notification based on where you are. Foursquare tries to be as accurate as possible and can sometimes even figure out when you enter or exit a venue.

That SDK enables many different possibilities. It’s easy to track the impact of an advertising campaign on online sales, but what about offline interest?

Foursquare’s SDK can help advertisers and brands see whether an advertising campaign has an impact on foot traffic. Of course, you can also combine that data with other customer data.

The company has become an important advertising and marketing platform focused on location. Overall, the company has generated more than $100 million in revenue in 2020. And it plans to grow in 2021 and beat that number.

Crowley mentions two reasons why he’s leaving now. According to him, the company is doing well, and he’s been working on the same thing for 12 years already.

“Foursquare hasn’t just found its way … it leads the way. I used to say that my goal was to make the name ‘Foursquare’ synonymous with ‘innovation in contextual aware computing’ … And, here in 2021, we’ve built the tools and frameworks that can make that so,” Crowley writes in a blog post.

“Also, 12 years is a lot of time. I have lots of things I still want to build — many of which don’t fit neatly into the Foursquare of 2021 (and, hey fellow founder, it’s fine to feel this way!),” he adds. He’s also going to spend some well-deserved time with his family.

Crowley has been an iconic startup founder during the Web 2.0 era. He managed to attract tens of millions of users. It’s clear that he’s been a great product CEO during the early years of the company. And now, the company is also generating revenue. So it’s going to be interesting to see what he builds next.