New York mayoral candidate Andrew Yang dressed up as a metaverse avatar at one of his events to reach tech-savvy voters.Read More

“Who should my first marketing hire be?”

This is (by far) the most common question I’ve received since starting as Fuel’s CMO, and for good reason. Your first marketer will have an outsized impact on team dynamics as well as the overall strategic direction of the brand, product and company.

The nature of the marketing function has expanded significantly over the past two decades. So much so that when founders ask this question, it immediately prompts multiple new ones: Should I hire a brand or growth marketer? An offline or an online marketer? A scientific or a creative marketer?

Once upon a time, the number of marketing channels was fairly limited, which meant the function itself fit into a neater, tighter box. The number of ways to reach customers has since grown exponentially, as has the scope of the marketing role. Today’s startups require at least four broad functions under the umbrella of “marketing,” each with its own array of subfunctions.

Here’s a sample of the marketing functions at a typical early-stage startup:

Brand marketing: Brand strategy, positioning, naming, messaging, visual identity, experiential, events, community.

Product marketing: UX copy, website, email marketing, customer research and segmentation, pricing.

Communications: PR and media relations, content marketing, social media, thought leadership, influencer.

Growth marketing: Direct response paid acquisition, funnel optimization, retention, lifecycle, engagement, reporting and attribution, word of mouth, referral, SEO, partnerships.

Have you worked with a talented individual or agency who helped you find and keep more users?
Respond to our survey and help us find the best startup growth marketers!

As you can imagine, that’s a lot for one person to manage, let alone be an expert in. What’s more, the skill set and experience required to excel in growth marketing is quite different from the skill set required to succeed in brand marketing. The reality is that anyone who excels across all marketing functions is a unicorn and nearly impossible to find.

So who do you hire first?

Unless you’re lucky enough to nab that unicorn, your first hire should be a generalist who can tend to the full stack of the marketing function, learn what they don’t know, and roll up their sleeves to get things done. Someone smart, savvy and super scrappy who understands how to experiment across marketing channels until they find the right mix.

But this utility player should also bring deeper expertise in one of the big marketing functions: brand, product, communications or growth. Before making this key hire, you need to figure out which marketing priorities are most urgent and, consequently, which marketing “persona” is most appropriate for your business at the earliest stages.

To figure out which skill set you need most in-house, consider these five questions:

Which marketing channels have proven successful to date?

If you’ve done some marketing experimentation previously, have there been any bright spots? Which channels are proving the most efficient from a customer acquisition, conversion, retention, engagement, whatever your key KPI is, perspective? If you find a promising area, find a candidate that has expertise in it. For example, if you are seeing good results with Instagram ads, hiring a candidate who has expertise in growth marketing makes sense.

Where are the target customers?

If you don’t have much data from channel testing, consider how your target customers are currently finding competitive products or services. At TaskRabbit, we knew from early customer research that clients were finding help with home services either through recommendations from friends or by asking Google (i.e., SEO and SEM).

So, that was a natural place for us to start. Our focus from a resource and staffing perspective in the early days was on growth marketing — driving more word of mouth, plus optimizing our SEO and SEM.

How competitive is the market?

How competitive is the category you’re playing in? Are there dominant players with strong brands? Do these brands have endless marketing budgets? Are CACs exorbitant because well-capitalized competitors are outbidding each other? If so, you might want to focus on building an exceptional brand and product/customer experience.

That means disseminating a unique story through organic channels (word of mouth, PR, influencers and organic social media). A brand marketer or someone with deep PR and communications experience makes sense in this scenario.

Where do the founder’s skills lie?

Another aspect to consider is the skills the founder(s) — or other members of the founding/early team — bring to the table. If a founder has a strong vision for the brand and extensive experience building brands, then focus less on a brand marketing hire and rather supplement the branding skill set with another marketing priority (i.e., product marketing). Likewise, if a founder has a strong vision for the brand but no one on the team knows how to build one, that’s a skill gap that your first marketing hire should fill.

How important is trust building?

Trust building has become an increasingly important aspect for brands as customers become more and more discerning. But trust building tends to be more critical in certain areas than others: New, nascent industries or markets, sectors with a lot of human interaction (services businesses, dating platforms, etc.), industries that are fundamentally changing consumer behavior (ride-sharing in its earliest days), or industries where the stakes or cost is relatively high (luxury goods).

If trust building is critical, consider a branding expert who understands how to build trust and credibility, and build an experience that consumers are passionate about. This person will likely have deep expertise in PR and brand building, as these channels tend to inspire the most trust among consumers.

What level of experience is necessary?

Once you’ve answered these five questions, you should have a pretty good idea of the type of marketing experience you want. But just how much experience should that person have? I typically recommend that seed-stage founders look for senior manager or director-level candidates at midsized companies.

At this experience level (six to 10 years), these candidates’ salaries tend to be more in line with a young company’s budget. Moreover, at this stage of their career, they tend to be both strategic and tactical. This means they can level up and think strategically about the business and the marketing function, but they are also happy to get their hands dirty and execute — actually dive into the Facebook platform and create ads, plan and host an event, or pitch a journalist.

The UNESCO Science Report 2021 discusses AI, robotics, Industry 4.0, and a spike in scientific research, patents, and spending.Read More

Kena: Bridge of Spirits stood out to me when Sony showed this independent action-adventure title ahead of the PlayStation 5's launch.Read More

Elevate your enterprise data technology and strategy at Transform 2021. VB EVENT: VentureBeat is proud to bring back the Women in AI Breakfast and Awards online for Transform 2021. In the male-dominated tech industry, women are constantly faced with the gender equity gap. There is so much work in the tech industry to become more inclusive of bridgi…Read More

Since releasing my newest book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors I’ve been continually getting the questions “Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?” and “Why Nietzsche?”

Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows.

Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs?

It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock.

Dave walked into Brad’s office after calculating preliminary financial results for January. Up to this point, we had mostly broken even, but the news was grim: we had lost $10,000 in one month. We had not seen it coming, and it took some effort for us to untangle what had gone wrong. Dave had been spending most of his time managing the part-time developers, who were primarily working on future products, instead of billing hours to clients. Brad had been selling computer equipment, which had low gross profit margins, instead of billing hours to clients. Much of our revenue for the month had come from one highly productive though erratic undergraduate developer, Mike, who was working on a billable client project.

Before we had a chance to figure out what to do, Mike quit, citing a need to focus on his studies. Now we had no choice: we fired everyone, shut down our month-to-month office, sold all the office furnishings, and moved the business to our apartments in downtown Boston. It was gut-wrenching. Brad wondered whether we had failed just as we got started. Dave worried about paying rent. We had long discussions about the future of the business, including whether or not to continue.

But we did have billable projects. We no longer had to spend our time managing people and had figured out where our bread was buttered. Results were good enough in February to calm our nerves and even better in March. Just as important, we had learned some crucial lessons and settled on a very different idea about how we would move forward with the business. The experience of hitting bottom and the lessons we learned became deeply ingrained in our brains and our company culture as we more methodically and progressively built the firm.

Fast-forward thirty years, when we were in the midst of writing this book, and Dave was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra. He encountered a passage that said the highest mountains rise from the sea, and that fact is “inscribed…on the walls of their summits.” Because of our experience at Feld Technologies—and many times since—we knew immediately that this had to be a chapter in the book. We imagined the solace and instruction it might have offered us to have seen (and understood) this quote, to have read a short essay like the one in our chapter Hitting Bottom, where the starkness and promise of the situation are presented in black and white, or to have heard Walter Knapp’s story of the crash and rebirth of Sovrn, a genuinely disruptive company.

That is how we wrote most of the chapters and how this project began. In reading Nietzsche, we noticed ideas that reminded us of situations, questions, and concerns that frequently arose in our entrepreneurial and venture investment experience. Nietzsche had a way with words, and we found that some ideas were nicely encapsulated and phrased. We started playing with expanding upon his pithy aphorisms and gathering stories from entrepreneurs, and it clicked.

Feld Technologies never became a disruptive company, despite our ambitions. It plateaued at around $2 million in revenue before we sold it in 1993. Because we had built a solid foundation for a certain kind of success, we never again hit a deep low point, and consequently never again had the painful opportunity to rethink our premises. This point, too, is covered in Hitting Bottom and illustrates why we did not just skip Nietzsche, write some essays, and assemble some entrepreneur stories. Nietzsche—sitting or walking alone, in pain, almost blind—thought deeply and managed to share these thoughts with the world. We tried to follow his lead, thinking hard and pondering additional angles and situations to which the quote might apply. We want you to do the same, as you keep in mind that Nietzsche’s works have been highly influential throughout the 20th century and into the 21st.

In business and entrepreneurship literature, inspiration is sometimes more helpful than instruction. Though there is plenty of how-to information in this book, we aim to give you food for thought from a different perspective. We address issues of leadership, motivation, morals, creativity, culture, strategy, conflict, and knowledge. We push you to think about what you and your enterprise are made of. We expect you to question and ponder these ideas, not just put them into action. If we are successful, you will sometimes get angry and at other times feel pride. At times you will wonder what you really know, and at other times you will charge forward. We hope that the combination of Nietzsche’s colorful language, our elaborations, and some stories from entrepreneurs will offer you intellectual, emotional, and entrepreneurial inspiration.

Nietzsche was not a fan of commercial activity or businesspeople. He saw the former as crass and the latter as lacking nobility. However, we suspect that if Nietzsche were alive today, he would view entrepreneurs differently. He adored intensity and fervor, deeply valued those who create things, and wrote at length about “free spirits” who do not feel bound to tradition or cultural norms. Nietzsche viewed his mission as the “revaluation of all values,” and he intended to disrupt the entire moral tradition of Europe in the late 19th century.

The post Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship? appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Facebook's TextStyleBrush is an AI system that can replicate the style of fonts and handwriting to replace arbitrary text in images.Read More

Didi filed to go public in the United States last night, providing a look into the Chinese ride-hailing company’s business. This morning, we’re extending our earlier reporting on the company to dive into its numerical performance, economic health and possible valuation.

Didi is approaching the American public markets at a fortuitous moment. While the late-2020 IPO fervor, which sent offerings from DoorDash and others skyrocketing after their debuts, has cooled, valuations for public companies remain high compared to historical norms. And Uber and Lyft, two American ride-hailing companies, have been posting numbers that point to at least a modest recovery in the ride-hailing industry as COVID-19 abates in many parts of the world.

As further grounding, recall that Didi has raised tens of billions worth of private capital from venture capitalists, private equity firms, corporations and other sources. The size of the bet riding on Didi is simply massive. As we explore the company’s finances, then, we’re more than vetting a single company’s performance; we’re examining what sort of returns an ocean of capital may be able to derive from its exit.

In that vein, we’ll consider GMV results, revenue growth, historical profitability, present-day profitability and what Didi may be worth on the American markets, given current comps. Sound good? Into the breach!

Inside Didi’s IPO filing

Starting at the highest level, how quickly has gross transaction volume (GTV) scaled at the company?

GTV

Didi is historically a business that operates in China but has operations today in more than a dozen countries. The impact and recovery of China’s bout with COVID-19 is therefore not the whole picture of the company’s GTV results.

COVID-19 began to affect the company starting in the first quarter of 2020. From the Didi F-1 filing:

Core Platform GTV fell by 32.8% in the first quarter of 2020 as compared to the first quarter of 2019, and then by 16.0% in the second quarter of 2020 as compared to the second quarter of 2019.

The dips were short-lived, however, with Didi quickly returning to growth in the second half of the year:

Our businesses resumed growth in the second half of 2020, which moderated the impact on a year-on-year basis. Our Core Platform GTV for the full year 2020 decreased by 4.8% as compared to the full year 2019. Both our China Mobility and International segments were impacted, but whereas the GTV for our China Mobility segment decreased by 6.6% from 2019 to 2020, the GTV for our International segment increased by 11.4% from 2019 to 2020.

Holding to just the Chinese market, we can see how rapidly Didi managed to pick itself up over the last year. Chinese GTV at Didi grew from 25.7 billion RMB to 54.6 billion RMB from the first quarter of 2020 to the first quarter of 2021; naturally, we’re comparing a more pandemic-impacted quarter at the company to a less-affected period, but the comparison is still useful for showing how the company recovered from early-2020 lows.

The number of transactions that Didi recorded in China during the first quarter of this year was also up more than 2x year over year.

On a whole-company basis, Didi’s “core platform GTV,” or the “sum of GTV for our China Mobility and International segments,” posted numbers that are less impressive in growth terms:

You can see how quickly and painfully COVID-19 blunted Didi’s global operations. But seeing the company settle back to late-2019 GTV numbers in 2021 is not super bullish.

Takeaway: While Didi managed an impressive GTV recovery in China, its aggregate numbers are flatter, and recent quarterly trends are not incredibly attractive.

Revenue growth

French startup Lydia is better known as the dominant app for peer-to-peer payments. But the company has been adding more features, such as a debit card, account aggregation, donations, money pots and more. This week, the company is adding savings accounts thanks to a partnership with French fintech startup Cashbee.

If you aren’t familiar with Cashbee, the company lets you open savings accounts through a mobile app. After connecting your bank account with Cashbee, you can transfer money back and forth between your bank account and a savings account.

Right now, Cashbee partners with My Money Bank for the savings accounts. Cashbee doesn’t keep your money, it just acts as a middle person between your bank account and My Money Bank. With those savings accounts, users can expect an interest rate of 0.6% after an introductory rate of 2% for a few months.

Lydia basically offers the same terms and conditions with a few differences. Instead of earning 2% interest for the first three months, Lydia users only earn more interest during the first two months.

The other big difference is that Lydia asks you to put at least €1,000 on your savings account when you open it. If you go through Cashbee’s app, you only have to put €10 or more. But users can do whatever they want after that when it comes to putting some money aside and withdrawing money from the savings account.

But the fact that Cashbee is seamlessly integrated in Lydia is interesting. It’s going to expose Cashbee to a lot more users as Lydia has more than 5 million users. It’s also an important feature if Lydia wants to become a financial super app.

This savings feature competes with Livret A, the most prevailing savings account in France. Everybody can open a Livret A in a retail bank. You get an interest rate of 0.5% net of taxes. On paper, 0.6% is better than 0.5%. But Cashbee’s savings accounts aren’t net of taxes.

If you’re a student and don’t pay any taxes, that’s a better deal. But many people pay 30% in taxes on accrued interests, which means that you end up earning 0.42% in interests net of taxes with a Cashbee account.

But it’s hard to beat the simplicity of Lydia’s solution here. For instance, you can save up to €1,000,000 on your savings account while the Livret A is limited to €22,950. In other words, if you’re already using Lydia to send, receive and spend money, you might want to check out those savings accounts.

 

Now that we have your attention, know this: Prices go up tonight on passes to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising. If you’re an early-stage founder (pre-seed through Series A), don’t miss this chance to save $100 on our two-day virtual event dedicated to helping you build a stronger startup. It’s one of the best investments you’ll ever make.

It’s Now O’clock: Buy your pass here before the sale expires tonight at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Why should you attend TC Early Stage 2021? Chloe Leaaetoa, the founder of Socicraft and an Early Stage 2020 attendee, explains:

What you learn at Early Stage is so much better than the random information you find on YouTube. You get to interact with industry experts and ask them specific questions. It’s like a mini bootcamp, and you’re going to walk away with a lot of knowledge.

What can you expect at Early Stage 2021? The first day is packed with presentations designed to help you learn (or deepen your knowledge of) essential startup skills — product fit, growth marketing, fundraising and a whole bunch more. We’ve tapped some of the best startup ecosystem experts who will not only impart their wisdom, but they’ll also take and answer your questions.

Check out the event agenda and our roster of speakers.

We’re talking an interactive experience — from which you’ll take away tips and advice that you can implement in your business now when you need it most. Case in point, again from Chloe Leaaetoa:

Sequoia Capital’s session, Start with Your Customer, looked at the benefits of storytelling and creating customer personas. I took the idea to my team, and we identified seven different user types for our product, and we’ve implemented storytelling to help onboard new customers. That one session alone has transformed my business.

Day two is all about the TC Early-Stage Pitch-Off. Tune in and watch as 10 early-stage founders bring the heat. Each team will deliver a five-minute pitch in front of TC editors, global investors, press and hundreds of attendees. After each team pitches, they’ll engage in a five-minute Q&A with our panel of top VC judges.

You’ll learn so much by watching those pitches and hearing the VC’s questions. It’s a great way to improve your own pitch deck. And if notetaking is not your forte, don’t stress. All sessions, including the pitch-off, will be available courtesy of video-on-demand.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing & Fundraising takes place July 8-9, but you have just hours left before the early bird flies south and the prices head north. It’s now o’clock — beat the deadline and register here before 11:59 p.m. (PT) tonight.

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

( function() { var func = function() { var iframe = document.getElementById('wpcom-iframe-5411631f4bb18bf52c73b95079bc13e0') if ( iframe ) { iframe.onload = function() { iframe.contentWindow.postMessage( { 'msg_type': 'poll_size', 'frame_id': 'wpcom-iframe-5411631f4bb18bf52c73b95079bc13e0' }, "https:\/\/tcprotectedembed.com" ); } } // Autosize iframe var funcSizeResponse = function( e ) { var origin = document.createElement( 'a' ); origin.href = e.origin; // Verify message origin if ( 'tcprotectedembed.com' !== origin.host ) return; // Verify message is in a format we expect if ( 'object' !== typeof e.data || undefined === e.data.msg_type ) return; switch ( e.data.msg_type ) { case 'poll_size:response': var iframe = document.getElementById( e.data._request.frame_id ); if ( iframe && '' === iframe.width ) iframe.width = '100%'; if ( iframe && '' === iframe.height ) iframe.height = parseInt( e.data.height ); return; default: return; } } if ( 'function' === typeof window.addEventListener ) { window.addEventListener( 'message', funcSizeResponse, false ); } else if ( 'function' === typeof window.attachEvent ) { window.attachEvent( 'onmessage', funcSizeResponse ); } } if (document.readyState === 'complete') { func.apply(); /* compat for infinite scroll */ } else if ( document.addEventListener ) { document.addEventListener( 'DOMContentLoaded', func, false ); } else if ( document.attachEvent ) { document.attachEvent( 'onreadystatechange', func ); } } )();

The U.S. insurance technology market is hot and has been for years now. Back in early 2020, to pick an example, TechCrunch reported on a wave of funding events among domestic insurtech marketplaces. Those companies have since gone on to raise hundreds of millions of dollars more.

And after a long period of incubation, we’ve seen neoinsurance players from the U.S. like Root and Metromile go public. Hippo is working to join the cohort.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

So from the perspective of venture capital activity, startup growth and exits, insurtech is proving itself in the States. Even if growth remains the name of the game in insurance tech and profits are often scarce.

What about other markets? The recent Wefox round caught The Exchange’s eye. A $650 million insurtech round would have commanded our attention regardless of its location. But to see a European insurance technology startup raise that amount of cash made us wonder if there’s as much money present for the EU market’s insurtech startups as we’ve seen here in the U.S.

After all, with business-focused neoinsurance provider Embroker raising a big round this week in the United States, to pick an example, it seems that attacking the massive and antiquated insurance market is good startup sport. Why wouldn’t that concept apply to Europe?

To find out more, we got in touch with a number of VCs from Europe to hear their perspectives on what’s happening on the ground, including folks from Accel, Astorya.vc and Insurtech Gateway. To ground us, we collated the biggest recent rounds from the EU insurance technology market. Let’s go!

A quick note on insurtech exits

Venture capitalists and startup founders get paid when they generate an exit. Lately, exits in the space have featured a number of IPOs.

The older a startup gets, the more it has to deal with public-market investors. Crossover funds and the like make their appearance before unicorns go public. And then former startups have to pitch not the venture capital market, but the public markets. It’s a different game.

That’s the impression that The Exchange got chatting with the CEO of Root, Alex Timm, this earnings cycle. He noted that public tech-focused investors don’t always grok the insurance elements of his business, while insurance investors don’t always grok the tech side of Root.

The war for talent in the tech world can be brutal — and so, it turns out, can the war between platforms that help companies source it. In the latest developement, Toptal — a marketplace for filling engineering and other tech roles with freelance, remote workers — has filed a lawsuit against direct competitor Andela and several of its employees, alleging the theft of trade secrets in pursuit of “a perfect clone of its business”, according to the complaint. All of the Andela employees previously worked at Toptal.

Toptal’s lawsuit, filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York and embedded below, alleges that the employees reneged on confidentiality, non-solicitation and non-compete agreements with Toptal. Toptal also alleges interference with contract, unfair competition and misappropriation of trade secrets.

While both Toptal and Andela have built businesses around the idea of remote freelancers filling tech jobs — a concept that has increased in profile and acceptance as people shifted to remote work during the pandemic — the pair only emerged as very direct competitors in the last year or so.

Toptal was co-founded by CEO Taso Du Val in 2010, and since then it has grown to become one of the world’s most popular on-demand talent networks. The company matches skilled tech personnel like engineers, software developers, designers, finance experts and product managers to clients across the globe. According to company data, it currently serves over 1,000 clients in more than 10 countries.

Andela, on the other hand, only recently turned to using a similar approach. Founded in 2014 in Lagos, Andela’s original business model was based on building physical hubs to source, vet, train and house talent across the continent. It did this in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda.

However, Andela struggled with scaling and operating that business model, and in 2019 it laid off 400 developers. Early last year as the pandemic took hold, it laid off a further 135 employees. However this time around it did so with a strategy pivot in mind: after testing satellite models in Egypt and Ghana, the talent company decided to go forego physical hubs completely and go remote, first across Africa in 2020 and globally this year.

“We thought, ‘What if we accelerated [the African remote network] and just enabled applicants from anywhere?’ Because it was always the plan to become a global company. That was clear, but the timing was the question,” Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson told TechCrunch in April.

Yet Toptal believes Andela’s choice to scrap its hubs and source remote talent from everywhere was specifically to replicate Toptal’s business model — and success.

“Until recently, Andela operated an outsourcing operation focused on in-person, on-site hubs in Africa,” Toptal notes in the complaint. “Over the course of the past year, Andela has moved away from its prior focus on in-person hubs situated in Africa and is engaging in a barely disguised attempt to become a clone of Toptal.”

Toptal claims that for Andela to pull off a “perfect clone of its business,” it poached key Toptal employees to exploit their knowledge, and that the ex-employees knowingly breached their confidentiality and non-solicitation obligations to Toptal.

Companies often try to uncover each other’s trade secrets by poaching, and many blatantly copy a competitor and do so without repercussions. On top of this, these two are hardly the only two places to for tech talent to connect with remote freelance job opportunities. Others include Fiverr, Malt, Freelancer.com, LinkedIn, Turing, Upwork and many more.

In a global economy with an estimated 1 billion so-called knowledge workers, and with freelancers accounting for some 35% of the world’s workforce, it’s a pretty gigantic market, which you could alternately look at as a major opportunity, but also a ripe field for many players with multiple permutations of the marketplace concept.

So why is Toptal crying foul play? The company says its ex-employees have not only revealed Toptal’s trade secrets and confidential information to compete unfairly but are also poaching additional Toptal personnel, clients and the talent that Toptal matches and sources to clients.

The ex-employees cited by Toptal include Sachin Bhagwata, vice president of enterprise; Martin Chikilian, head of talent operations; Courtney Machi, vice president of product; and Alvaro Oliveira, executive vice president of talent operations. Toptal says three additional former employees in non-executive roles breached express covenants not to compete in their agreements with Toptal.

While some of the allegations focus on the expertise of the employees, one of the trade secret allegations more directly references Toptal’s technology.

Toptal claims Machi tapped into her extensive knowledge of Toptal’s “proprietary software platform” and used that to help transform Andela “from a group of outsourcing hubs situated in various African locations into a fully remote, global company like Toptal.”

Asked to comment on the suit, Johnson at Andela said he believes Toptal is suing Andela for being competitive.

“With regards to the situation overall, I can say that frivolous lawsuits are the price of doing anything that matters,” he told TechCrunch in an email. “And this is the kind of baseless bullying and fear tactics that make employees want to leave in the first place. We will defend ourselves and our colleagues vigorously.”

Toptal has an unconventional story for a company that started only a decade ago. It is one of the few companies in the Valley that doesn’t issue stock options to its investors or employees. Even Du Val’s co-founder, Breanden Beneschott, was ousted from the company without any shares, according to an article from The Information.

How did it pull this off? In 2012, Toptal raised a $1.4 million seed via convertible notes and investors were entitled to 15% of the company, according to The Information article.

But there was one condition: Toptal had to raise more money.

However, the company hasn’t needed to secure additional capital because of its profitability and growing revenue ($200 million annually as of 2018, per The Information). So investors are stuck in limbo — as are employees who joined hoping that the company would raise money down the line so their stock options would convert.

The Information story strikes a distinct note of resentment, noting that some employees felt “tricked out of stock in a company that Du Val has said publicly is worth more than $1 billion.”

Given that situation, TechCrunch asked Du Val if he thought it played any role in employee departures, and ex-employee relations.

“The issuance of stock options does not excuse theft of trade secrets,” he replied. “Also, there are more than 800 full-time people at Toptal [but] the complaint names seven individual defendants.”

The full complaint is embedded below.

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

We’re closing our survey soon, so this is your last chance (probably) to get your voice heard!

Despite it being a short week, as always, it was a busy, busy time. We had Grace on the dials today, and Danny, Natasha and Alex making chit-chat about the tech world. As with every week this year, we had to cut and cut and cut to get the show down to size. Here’s what made it in in the end:

Medium saw more employees depart the company after CEO Ev Williams published a “culture memo.” While the Medium memo doesn’t wholly ban politics, some allege that the undertone of the statement, timed weeks after a failed unionization attempt, created an unsafe environment. A week later, Natasha covered another controversy, this time at Y Combinator. We riff on the takeaway, and what this story looks like three months from now.The issue of company culture is attracting companies. Or more precisely startups, with Blendoor dropping a new report this week that TechCrunch covered, and Vault raising $8.2 million to provide a software solution to aid employees in reporting misconduct.On the funding round beat, we explored ChartHop’s new $35 million round that Danny had many thoughts about, fake-chicken nuggets startup Nuggs raising $50 million and Faculty’s latest deal that will help power its vision for the future of male grooming. We also got into Lifted’s elder-care focused round, a startup in the larger health tech beat that Natasha is giving some of her attention to.And we wrapped with the ExtraHop exit. We spent a minute trying to figure out why the company was valued at $900 million in its exit. The number, while large, felt light based on what we knew about the company.

Thanks for hopping along with us this week and every week. Quick programming note: Natasha will take Alex’s spot on the Monday show for next week since he’s out, so be nice, and send her stuff to mention.

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

Beauty and wellness businesses have come roaring back to life with the decline of COVID-19 restrictions, and a startup that’s built a platform that caters to the many needs of small enterprises in the industry today is announcing a big round of funding to grow with them.

Fresha — a multipurpose commerce tool for independent wellness and beauty businesses such as hair, nail and skin salons, yoga instructors and more, based first and foremost around a completely free subscription platform for those businesses to schedule bookings from customers — has picked up $100 million.

Fresha plans to use the funds to expand the list of countries where it operates, to grow the categories of companies that use its services (mental health practitioners is one example; fitness is another) and to build more services complementing what it already provides, helping customers do their work by providing them with more insights and data about what they do already. It will also be making acquisitions to expand its customer base.

General Atlantic is leading this Series C, with Huda Kattan, Michael Zeisser of FMZ Ventures and Jonathan Green of Lugard Road Capital also participating, along with past investors Partech, Target Global and FJ Labs.

Fresha has raised $132 million to date, and it’s not disclosing its valuation. But as a point of reference, when it closed its Series B (as Shedul; the company rebranded in February 2020), it was valued at $105 million.

Chances are that figure is significantly higher now.

Fresha’s current range of services include a free-to-use platform for booking appointments; free software for managing accounts; a payments service that includes both a physical point of sale and digital interface; and a wider marketplace both to provide goods to the businesses (B2B); and for the businesses to sell goods to customers (B2C).

The London-based company has 50,000 business customers and 150,000 stylists and professionals in 120+ countries (mostly in the U.K., the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe), with some 250 million appointments booked to date.

And while many businesses did have to curtail how they operated (and in some countries had to stop operating altogether), Fresha found that it was attracting a lot of new business in part because of its “free” model that meant customers didn’t have to pay to maintain a booking platform at a time when they weren’t taking bookings, but could use Fresha to generate revenues in other ways (such as through the sale of goods, vouchers for future services and more.)

So in a year when you might have thought that a company based around providing services to industries that were hard hit by COVID would have also been hard-hit, in fact Fresha saw a 30x increase in card payment transactions versus the year before, and more than $12 billion worth of booking appointments made on its platform.

In a market that is very crowded with tech companies building platforms to book beauty (and other) services and to manage the business of independent retailers — they include giants like Lightspeed POS, as well as smaller players like Booksy (which also recently raised) and StyleSeat, but also players like Square and PayPal, and many others — the core of Fresha’s offering is a booking platform built as a totally free product.

Why free? To attract more users to its other services (such as payments, which do come at a price), and because co-founders William Zeqiri (CEO) and Nick Miller (product chief) — pictured above, respectively left and right — think this the only way to build a business like this in a crowded market.

“We believe that software is a commodity,” said Zeqiri in an interview. “A lot of our competitors are beating each other on price to the bottom. We wanted to consolidate the supply side of the software, gather data about the businesses, how they use what they use.”

That data led, first, to identifying the need for and building out software and launching its B2B and B2C marketplaces, and the idea is that it will likely lead to more products as it continues to mature, whether it’s better analytics for its current customers so that they can better price or develop their services accordingly, or entirely new tools for new categories of users.

Meanwhile, the services that it already provides, like payments, have taken off like a shot, not least because they’ve served a need for any virtual transactions, like selling vouchers or items.

Miller noted that while a lot of its customers actually interface with tech with a lot of reluctance — they are the essence of “physical” retailers when you think about it — they also found themselves having to use more digital services simply because of circumstances. “Looking back at what happened, tech adoption accelerated for our customers,” said Miller. He said that current customers usage for the point-of-sale systems and online payments is roughly equal.

Looking ahead, Fresha’s investor list is notable for its strategic mix and might shed some light on how it grows. Kattan, a “beauty influencer” and the founder of Huda Beauty, is investing by way of HB Investments, a strategic venture arm; while Zeisser’s FMZ focuses on “experience economy” investments today, but he himself has a long history working at tech companies building marketplaces, including years with Alibaba as head of its U.S. investment practice. These speak to areas where Fresha is likely interested in expanding its reach — more marketplace activity; and perhaps more social media angles and exposure for its customers at a time when social media really has become a key way for beauty and wellness businesses to market themselves.

“Fresha has emerged as a leader powering the beauty and wellness industry,” said Aaron Goldman, Global co-head of financial services and managing director at General Atlantic, in a statement. “William, Nick and the Fresha team have built a product that is resonating with the market and creating long-term value through the intersection of its payments, software and marketplace offerings. We are thrilled to be partnering with the company and believe Fresha has significant opportunity to further scale its innovative platform.”

“I’ve witnessed firsthand the positive impact Fresha has for beauty entrepreneurs,” added Kattan. “The company is a force for good in the growing community of beauty professionals around the globe, who are increasingly adopting a self-employed approach. By making top business software accessible without any subscription fees, Fresha lets professionals focus on what they do best — offering great experiences for their customers.”

When I was at Open Market in the 1990s, our CEO gave out the recently published book “Crossing the Chasm” to the executive team and told us to read it to gain insight into why we had hit a speed bump in our scaling. We had gone from zero to $60 million in revenue in four years, went public at a billion-dollar market cap, and then stalled.

We found ourselves stuck in what author Geoffrey Moore called “the chasm,” a difficult transition from visionary early adopters who are willing to put up with an incomplete product and mainstream customers who demand a more complete product. This framework for marketing technology products has been one of the canonical foundational concepts to product-market fit for the three decades since it was first published in 1991.

I have been reflecting on why it is that we venture capitalists and founders keep making the same mistake over and over again — a mistake that has become even more glaring in recent years. Despite our exuberant optimism, we keep getting the potential market size wrong. Market sizes have proven to be much, much larger than any of us had ever dreamed. The reason? Today, everyone aspires to be an early adopter. Peter Drucker’s mantra — innovate or die — has finally come to pass.

A glaring example in our investment portfolio is database software company MongoDB. Looking back at our Series A investment memo for this disruptive open-source, NoSQL database startup, I was struck that we boldly predicted the company had the opportunity to disrupt a subsegment of the industry and successfully take a piece of a market that could grow as large as $8 billion in annual revenue in future years.

Today, we realize that the company’s product appeals to the vast majority of the market, one that is forecast to be $68 billion in 2020 and approximately $106 billion in 2024. The company is projected to hit a $1 billion revenue run rate next year and, with that expanded market, likely has continued room to grow for many years to come.

Another example is Veeva, a vertical software company initially focused on the pharmaceutical industry. When we met the company for their Series A round, they showed us the classic hockey stick slide, claiming they would reach $50 million in revenue in five years.

We got over our concerns about market size when we and the founders concluded they could at least achieve a few hundred million in revenue on the backs of pharma and then expand to other vertical industries from there. Boy, were we wrong! The company filed their S-1 after that fifth year showing $130 million in revenue, and today the company is projected to hit $2 billion in revenue run rate next year, all while still remaining focused on just the pharma industry.

Veeva was a pioneer in “vertical SaaS” — software platforms that serve niche industries — which in recent years has become a popular category. Another vertical SaaS example is Squire, a company my partner Jesse Middleton angel invested in as part of a pre-seed round before he joined Flybridge.

We’re getting closer to putting our spotlight on Pittsburgh, and there’s quite a bit going on behind the scenes. We’ve been spending a ton of time chatting with folks who are on the ground in the city, and we’ve had a great time learning and listening, which we think will make this installment of our Spotlight series the most dynamic yet.

As we share more details on who will be participating, such as CMU’s President Farnam Jahanian, we still want to hear from those of you building companies in the ‘Burgh.

We’ve heard from nearly 50 companies focusing on things like digital health, small business loans, patent development, robotics and clean tech, and we’ll be picking three companies to pitch live during the event on June 29th.

Because we expect all types of attendees, including investors, this could be an opportunity to take things to the next level, be it through recruiting new employees or finding a new advisor. After all, anything can happen at a TechCrunch event.

Simply fill out this form and your company could be chosen to pitch during the event.

Additionally, and to learn more about who’s who and what’s what in Pittsburgh, we’re going to be hosting a conversation on Twitter Spaces tomorrow (Friday) at 4 p.m. ET. Co-hosting will be one of our favorite Yinzers, Kit Mueller. Expect a bit of trivia, updates on news and happenings in the city and more.

Register for the event today, come chat with us tomorrow and submit your company or pass the word along to someone who should!

Agenda

June 29, 2021

2:00 p.m. EDT
Building Pittsburgh. Speaker to be announced!

2:20 p.m. EDT
Developing Duolingo. Karin Tsai, head of engineering, is set to speak on the trade-offs between engagement and edtech, scale and satisfaction, and how a simple A/B test can help.

2:40 p.m. EDT
From Student to Startup. CMU President Farnam Jahanian will speak on the school’s cutting-edge robotics and automation research and how it’s keeping innovative startups in Pittsburgh.

3:10 p.m. EDT
Pittsburgh Pitch-off. Startups will have two minutes to deliver their pitch, and our speakers will have four minutes to give their feedback. Pittsburgh startups should apply here

 

 

French startup Ledger has raised a $380 million Series C funding round led by 10T Holdings. Following today’s funding round, the company has reached a valuation of $1.5 billion.

Other investors in the funding round include existing investors Cathay Innovation, Draper Associates, Draper Dragon, Draper Esprit, DCG, Korelya Capital and Wicklow Capital. Some new investors are joining the round, such as Tekne Capital, Uphold Ventures, Felix Capital, Inherent, Financière Agache and iAngels Technologies.

Ledger’s main product is a hardware wallet to manage your crypto assets. They are shaped like USB keys and feature a tiny screen to confirm transactions on the device. The reason why that screen is important is that your private keys never leave your Ledger device.

In other words, if you want to store a large amount of cryptocurrencies, you don’t want to leave them on an exchange account. If someone manages to sign in, they could withdraw all your crypto assets. With a hardware wallet, you remain in control of your crypto assets.

The company first launched the Ledger Nano S. You have to connect the device to a computer using a USB cable. More recently, with the Ledger Nano X, you can send and receive assets from your phone as the Nano X works over Bluetooth. Ledger also provides an enterprise solution for companies that want to add cryptocurrencies to their balance sheet.

Overall, Ledger has sold over 3 million hardware wallets. Every month, 1.5 million people use Ledger Live, the company’s software solution to manage your crypto assets. The company even says that it currently secures around 15% of all cryptocurrency assets globally.

It hasn’t been a smooth ride as the company has been around for seven years. After the crypto boom of 2018, interest for hardware wallets faded away. Moreover, as the company secures expensive assets, it has also suffered from a serious data breach — 272,000 customers have been affected.

With today’s funding round, the company plans to launch new products, add more DeFi features to Ledger Live and support the growth of the crypto ecosystem in general.

Productivity analytics startup Time is Ltd. wants to be the Google Analytics for company time. Or perhaps a sort of “Apple Screen Time” for companies. Whatever the case, the founders reckon that if you can map how time is spent in a company, enormous productivity gains can be unlocked and money better spent.

It’s now raised a $5.6 million late-seed funding round led by Mike Chalfen, of London-based Chalfen Ventures, with participation from Illuminate Financial Management and existing investor Accel. Acequia Capital and former Seal Software chairman Paul Sallaberry are also contributing to the new round, as is former Seal board member Clark Golestani. Furthermore, Ulf Zetterberg, founder and former CEO of contract discovery and analytics company Seal Software, is joining as president and co-founder.

The venture is the latest from serial entrepreneur Jan Rezab, better known for founding SocialBakers, which was acquired last year.

We are all familiar with inefficient meetings, pestering notifications chat, video conferencing tools and the deluge of emails. Time is Ltd. says it plans to address this by acquiring insights and data platforms such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Zoom, Webex, MS Teams, Slack and more. The data and insights gathered would then help managers to understand and take a new approach to measure productivity, engagement and collaboration, the startup says.

The startup says it has now gathered 400 indicators that companies can choose from. For example, a task set by The Wall Street Journal for Time is Ltd. found the average response time for Slack users versus email was 16.3 minutes, comparing to emails which was 72 minutes.

Chalfen commented: “Measuring hybrid and distributed work patterns is critical for every business. Time Is Ltd.’s platform makes such measurement easily available and actionable for so many different types of organizations that I believe it could make work better for every business in the world.”

Rezab said: “The opportunity to analyze these kinds of collaboration and communication data in a privacy-compliant way alongside existing business metrics is the future of understanding the heartbeat of every company — I believe in 10 years time we will be looking at how we could have ignored insights from these platforms.”

Tomas Cupr, founder and Group CEO of Rohlik Group, the European leader of e-grocery, said: “Alongside our traditional BI approaches using performance data, we use Time is Ltd. to help improve the way we collaborate in our teams and improve the way we work both internally and with our vendors — data that Time is Ltd. provides is a must-have for business leaders.”

Amid a recent tear in residential real estate investment, venture capitalists are looking to get a piece of homebuying startup Flyhomes.

The five-year-old startup announced today that they’ve closed a $150 million Series C round co-led by Norwest Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. Fifth Wall, Camber Creek, Balyasny Asset Management, Zillow’s Spencer Rascoff and existing investors Andreessen Horowitz and Canvas Partners also participated in the round. Norwest’s Lisa Wu and Battery’s Roger Lee are joining Flyhomes’ board as part of the deal.

The end-to-end residential real estate startup says they handle “every step of the homebuying process, from brokerage to mortgage,” building financial tools that customers need throughout the process. The company has now raised some $310 million in total.

The startup is well-positioned during a historic run-up of home prices in the U.S. that has made deals more competitive than ever for prospective buyers. A recent report by Redfin notes that more than half of U.S. homes are selling above their asking price right now, up from one in four a year ago. A Zillow report notes that nearly half of U.S. homes are selling within one week of going on the market.

Flyhomes’s Cash Offer lending product allows consumers purchasing homes to make more attractive all-cash offers to sellers, with the company noting that even if a buyer ends up backing out of the deal, Flyhomes will still buy the home themselves. Central to the startup’s business is sellers being more amenable to all-cash offers, allowing consumers making them to win deals even when they aren’t the highest bidders.

The company says it has bought and sold more than $2.6 billion worth of homes since launching in 2016.

On Earth Day, April 22, SOSV published the SOSV Climate Tech 100, a list of the best startups that we’ve supported from their earliest stages to address climate change. There are always valuable insights embedded in a list like the 100. A TechCrunch story captured the investment perspective, and an SOSV post went deeper into the companies’ category breakdown and founder profiles.

But what can founders learn from the list about climate tech investors? In other words, who invested in the Climate Tech 100? We dug into the “who’s who” of the list, which had more than 500 investors, and here’s what we found.

An active but fragmented landscape

If you think 500 investors in 100 companies is a lot of investors, you’re right. There are clearly a lot of investors interested in climate tech, and most are generalists just testing the waters. For the Climate Tech 100, about 10% of investors put their money in more than one startup and only seven (less than 2%) wrote a check to four or more. These included Blue Horizon, CPT Capital, EF, Fifty Years, Hemisphere Ventures and Horizons Ventures.

That pattern tracks well with data from PwC, which found that 2,700 unique investors had backed 1,200 startups in its State of Climate Tech 2020 report covering the 2013-2019 period. The report found that only 10 firms out of 2,700 made four or more climate tech deals per year, on average, over the 2013-2019 period. The most active firms are listed in the table below.

There is reason to believe that the fragmentation will diminish with the launch of more funds focused on climate tech. Four funds worth more than a billion dollars each have launched since 2020 that fit the description (see chart below).

It’s also encouraging to see that capital deployed in climate tech grew at five times the venture capital overall growth rate over the 2013-2019 period.

Even so, climate tech still only represented 6% of total venture capital deployed in 2019, so there is plenty of room to grow.