GamesBeat Decides tackles a review of Super Mario 3D World + Bowser's Fury as well as the latest NPD game-sales reports.Read More

I’m very proud of the work we’re doing here at Extra Crunch, so it gives me great pleasure to announce that today is our second anniversary.

Thanks to hard work from the entire TechCrunch team, authoritative guest contributors and a very engaged reader base, we’ve tripled our membership in the last 12 months.

As Extra Crunch enters its third year, we’re putting our foot on the gas in 2021 so we can bring you more:

Fresh analysis about today’s most dynamic tech industries.Surveys of top investors about trends in your sector.In-depth profiles of top companies from their earliest days.Expanded live programming.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

To be completely honest: Eric and I wavered about posting this announcement. Both of us would prefer to show the results of our work than make a list of future-looking statements, so I’ll sum up:

I’m proud of the work we’re doing because people around the world use the information they find on Extra Crunch to build and grow companies. That’s big!

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Will ride-hailing profits ever come?

Before the pandemic began, I took about seven or eight hailed rides each month. Since I began physically distancing from others to stem the spread of the coronavirus in March 2020, I’ve taken exactly 10 hailed rides.

Your mileage may vary, but last year, Uber and Lyft both reported steep revenue losses as travelers hunkered down at home. Today, Alex Wilhelm says both transportation platforms plan to reach adjusted profitability by Q4 2021.

He unpacked the numbers “to see if what the two companies are dangling in front of investors is worth desiring.” Since he usually doesn’t focus on publicly traded stocks, I asked Alex why he focused on Uber and Lyft today.

“Utter confusion,” he replied.

“Investors have bid up their stocks like the two companies are crushing the game, instead of playing a game with their numbers to reach some sort of profit in the future,” Alex explained. “The stock market makes no sense, but this is one of the weirder things.”

TechCrunch’s favorites from Techstars’ Boston, Chicago and workforce accelerators

In the theater, a “four-hander” is a play that was written for four actors.

Today, I’m appropriating the term to describe this roundup by Greg Kumparak, Natasha Mascarenhas, Alex Wilhelm and Jonathan Shieber that recaps their favorite startups from Techstars accelerators.

The quartet selected four startups each from Chicago, Boston and Techstars Workplace Development.

“As always, these are just our favorites, but don’t just take our word for it. Dig into the pitches yourself, as there’s never a bad time to check out some super-early-stage startups.”

As more insurtech offerings loom, CEO Dan Preston discusses Metromile’s SPAC-led debut

Neoinsurance company Metromile began trading publicly this week after it combined with a special purpose acquisition company.

Metromile will likely be one of 2021’s many SPAC-led debuts, so Alex interviewed CEO Dan Preston to learn more about the process and what he learned along the way.

A notable takeaway: “Preston said SPACs are designed for a specific class of company; namely those that want or need to share a bit more story when they go public.”

Adtech and martech VCs see big opportunities in privacy and compliance

Senior Writer Anthony Ha and Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon surveyed three investors who back adtech and martech startups to learn more about what they’re looking for and whether deal flow has recovered at this point in the pandemic:

Eric Franchi, partner, MathCapitalScott Friend, partner, Bain Capital VenturesChristine Tsai, CEO and founding partner, 500 Startups

Commercializing deep tech startups: A practical guide for founders and investors

I have a hard time envisioning all of the hurdles deep tech founders must overcome before they can land their first paying customer.

How do you sustainably scale a company that probably doesn’t have revenue and isn’t likely to for the foreseeable future? How big is the TAM for an unproven product in a marketplace that’s still taking shape?

Vin Lingathoti, a partner at Cambridge Innovation Capital, says entrepreneurs operating in this space face a unique set of challenges when it comes to managing growth and risk.

“Often these founders with Ph.D.s and postdocs find it hard to accept their weaknesses, especially in nontechnical areas such as marketing, sales, HR, etc.,” says Lingathoti.

How will investors value Metromile and Oscar Health?

This week, auto insurance startup Metromile completed its combination with SPAC INSU Acquisition Corp. II.

Last Friday, health insurance company Oscar Health announced its plans to launch an initial public offering.

As the saying goes: Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but using 2020 debuts by neoinsurance firms Lemonade and Root as a reference point, Alex says the IPO window is wide open for other players in the space.

“All the companies in our group are pretty good at adding customers to their businesses,” he found.

Dear Sophie: How can I improve our startup’s international recruiting?

Dear Sophie:

We’ve been having a tough time filling vacant engineering and other positions at our company and are planning to make a more concerted effort to recruit internationally.

Do you have suggestions for attracting workers from abroad?

— Proactive in Pacifica

5 creator economy VCs see startup opportunities in monetization, discovery and much more

The people who produce viral TikTok duets, in-demand Substack newsletters and popular YouTube channels are doing what they love. And the money is following them.

Many of these emerging stars have become media personalities with full-fledged production and distribution teams, giving rise to what one investor described as “the enterprise layer of the creator economy.”

More VCs are backing startups that help these digital creators monetize, produce, analyze and distribute content.

Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm interviewed five of them to learn more about the opportunities they’re tracking in 2021:

Benjamin Grubbs, founder, Next10 VenturesLi Jin, founder, Atelier VenturesBrian O’Malley, general partner, Forerunner VenturesEze Vidra, managing partner, Remagine VenturesJosh Constine, principal, SignalFire

Are SAFEs obscuring today’s seed volume?

Simple agreements for future equity are an increasingly popular way for startups to raise funds quickly, but “they don’t generate the same paperwork exhaust,” Alex Wilhelm noted this week.

This creates cognitive dissonance: Investors see a hot market, while people who rely on public data (like journalists) get a different picture.

“SAFEs have effectively pushed a lot of public signal regarding seed deals, and even smaller rounds, underground,” says Alex.

Container security acquisitions increase as companies accelerate shift to cloud

Many enterprise companies were snapping up container security startups before the pandemic began, but the pace has picked up, reports Ron Miller.

The growing number of companies going cloud-native is creating security challenges; the containers that package microservices must be correctly configured and secured, which can get complicated quickly.

“The acquisitions we are seeing now are filling gaps in the portfolio of security capabilities offered by the larger companies,” says Yoav Leitersdorf, managing partner at YL Ventures.

Two $50M-ish ARR companies talk growth and plans for the coming quarters

In December 2019, Alex Wilhelm began reporting on startups that had reached the $100M ARR mark. A year later, he decided to reframe his focus.

“Mostly what we managed was to collect a bucket of companies that were about to go public,” he said.

Since then, he has recalibrated his sights. In the latest entry of a new series focusing on “$50M-ish” companies, he studies SimpleNexus, which offers digital mortgage software, and photo-editing service PicsArt.

Alex has more interviews and data dives coming on other companies in this cohort, so stay tuned.

With a higher IPO valuation, is Bumble aiming for Match.com’s revenue multiple?

Dating platform Bumble initially set a price of $28 to $30 for its upcoming IPO, but at its new range of $37 to $39, Alex calculated that it could reach a max valuation of $7.4 billion to $7.8 billion.

Extrapolating revenue from its Q3 2020 numbers, he attempted to find the company’s run rate to see if it’s overpriced — and how well it stacks up against rival Match.

Oscar Health’s IPO filing will test the venture-backed insurance model

Jon Shieber and Alex Wilhelm co-bylined a story about Oscar Health, which filed to go public last week.

Although the health insurance company claims 529,000 members and a compound annual growth rate of 59%, “it’s a deeply unprofitable enterprise,” they found.

Jon and Alex parsed Oscar Health’s 2019 comps and its 2020 metrics to take a closer look at the company’s performance.

“Both Oscar and the high-profile SPAC for Clover Medical will prove to be a test for the venture capital industry’s faith in their ability to disrupt traditional healthcare companies,” they write.

SoftBank and the late-stage venture capital J-curve

Managing Editor Danny Crichton filed a column about Softbank’s Vision Fund that tried to answer a question he asked in 2017: “What does a return profile look like at such a late stage of investment?”

Softbank’s recent earnings report shows that its $680 million bet on DoorDash paid off handsomely, bringing back $9 billion. Compared to its competition, “the fund is actually doing quite decent right now,” he wrote. But Softbank has invested $66 billion in 74 unexited 74 companies that are worth $65.2 billion today.

“SoftBank quietly chopped half of the performance fees for its VC managers, from $5B to $2.5B, which led us to ask: are the best investments in the fund already in SoftBank’s rearview mirror? One upshot: WeWork seems to have turned something of a corner, with some improvements in its debt profile portending more positive news post-COVID-19.”

Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation is a JRPG for people who love classic JRPGs.Read More

Even though Kevin Busque is a co-founder of TaskRabbit, he didn’t get the response he was hoping for the first time he pitched his new venture to Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut. Nonetheless, he said the outcome was one of the best things that could have happened.

“I’m kind of glad that he didn’t invest at the time because it really forced me to take a hard look at what we were doing and really enabled us to become Guideline,” said Busque. “That seed round was an absolute slog. I think I spent seven or eight months trying to raise a round for a product that didn’t exist, going purely on vision.”

Eventually, that idea evolved into Guideline, which describes itself as “a full-service, full-stack 401(k) plan” for small businesses. Eventually, Senkut did write a check — Felicis led Guideline’s $15 million Series B round. Today, Guideline has more than 16,000 businesses across 60+ cities, with more than $3.2 billion in assets under management. The company has raised nearly $140 million.

This week on Extra Crunch Live, Busque and Senkut discussed Guideline’s Series B pitch deck — which Senkut described as a “role model” — and how they built trust over time.

The duo also offered candid, actionable feedback on pitch decks that were submitted by Extra Crunch Live audience members. (By the way, you can submit your pitch deck to be featured on a future episode using this link right here.)

We’ve included highlights below as well as the full video of our conversation.

We record new episodes of Extra Crunch Live each Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST/8 p.m. GMT. Check out the February schedule here.

Episode breakdown:

How they met: 1:30Building trust: 11:30Inside Guideline’s Series B deck: 16:00Pitch deck teardown: 33:00

How they met

Senkut and Busque met nearly a decade ago, when Busque was still at TaskRabbit. Several years later, Busque launched out on his own and went fundraising for his original idea. Even though he got a no from Senkut, it wasn’t an easy decision.

Looking back, Senkut said he had much more freedom to follow his instincts while angel investing.

“As an institutional fund with LPs, we were feeling the pressure of checking all the checkmarks,” explained Senkut. “It’s amazing how, sometimes, being more structured or analytical actually does not always lead you to make better decisions.”

When Busque came back around after the pivot, looking to raise a Series B, Senkut called it a “no-brainer,” particularly because of the type of CEO Busque is.

“My opinion of Kevin as a person is that he’s an excellent wartime CEO, but also he’s a product visionary,” said Senkut. “We call them ‘missionary CEOs.’ There are mercenary CEOs who can extract every ounce of dollar from a rock, but we are gravitating much more toward CEOs like Kevin who are focused on product first. People who have a really acute vision of what the problem is, and. a very specific vision for how to solve that problem and ultimately turn it into a long-term scalable and successful company.”

Busque said he was drawn to Senkut based on his level of conviction, explaining that Senkut doesn’t always have to go by the book.

“If he wants to write a check because the founder is great or the product is great, he does it,” said Busque. “It’s not necessarily that he has to see a certain metric or growth pattern.”

Building trust

Obviously, years of staying connected and communicating (and not just about Guideline) laid the foundation for building a relationship. Busque said the honesty in their conversations, including Senkut’s initial rejection, lended itself greatly to the trust they have.

Arguments in favor of shared prosperity and in opposition to excessive robots, AI, and automation in the workplace.Read More

Remote-first startups were still controversial in Silicon Valley when we launched Extra Crunch two years ago today. Back then, if you can recall, the rest of the world was not even sure how all those unicorns were going to do on the public markets.

Today, Silicon Valley resides on the cloud and is publicly traded. We’ve covered the stunning changes, and as we help founders navigate the path from idea to first check to IPO, we also tripled the number of Extra Crunch members.

Take 20% off the price of a 2-year Extra Crunch membership
Offer expires Monday, February 15, 2021

Now, as the world glimpses a brighter, post-pandemic future, we are doubling down on the news and analysis that’s helped many early-stage companies make better decisions.

As Extra Crunch enters its third year, we’re putting our foot on the gas so we can bring you more:

Fresh analysis about today’s most dynamic tech industries.Surveys of top investors about trends in your sector.In-depth profiles of top companies from their earliest days.Expanded live programming.

We’ll also publish more articles with inside tips from industry experts to help you solve nonsoftware problems that face every company, like fundraising, growth and hiring, as well as deep dives into different industry sectors and pre-public companies.

We’re tying all of these efforts back in with the editorial coverage and event plans at TechCrunch. And to make this holistic approach truly successful, we’re ramping up efforts to engage and expand the Extra Crunch community.

In recent weeks, reporters and editors have appeared on Clubhouse and Discord to discuss their work with readers. We’re planning to expand this outreach, so stay tuned!

To show our appreciation for your support, we’re offering a 20% discount on two-year subscriptions through Monday, February 15 to celebrate our second anniversary. If you’re already a member, you can renew at a discount.

If you’re not a Extra Crunch member yet, we hope you’ll join us.

A new BuzzFeed quiz is the first in what Director of Product for Quizzes Chris Johanesen said he’s hoping will be a series of “stunt-y experiments” that the publisher launches this year.

The quiz, timed for Valentine’s Day weekend, promises to “create your perfect boyfriend (or girlfriend) using AI technology.” Johanesen said it’s designed to “poke fun at the situation we’re all in” (quarantine, obviously), as well as the “weird world of online dating.”

To take the quiz, you answer a series of multiple-choices questions about what you’re looking for in your ideal romantic partner.

The questions will probably feel familiar to anyone who’s taken a quiz on BuzzFeed or elsewhere online, but the answer should be a lot more unique: Johanesen noted that in a normal online quiz, there might be “12 or 20 different results that are written, and that’s pretty much it.” With this one, “you could retake it dozens of times and never get the same results.”

Johanesen explained that the BuzzFeed team generated an enormous variety of different profile images using StyleGAN technology. For the text, BuzzFeed staff contributed personality traits, text messages quotes, hobbies and “weird, dark stuff” that the quiz combines algorithmically.

“I think we’re mostly trying to embrace the absurdity of it,” he added. (I saw this myself when I tried out a demo earlier this week and was assigned a girlfriend who wanted to show off her “collection of scabs.”) “We try to match it a little bit to some of your inputs so that it’s not totally random. … An early version was more realistic, but it wasn’t as fun.”

Looking ahead, Johanesen said he’s hoping to create more quizzes that are “more generative,” where a writer might come up with a concept but they don’t have to “handwrite every single option.” Still, it sounds like this approach requires significant editorial work, which Johanesen doesn’t expect to change.

“We could definitely use machine learning models to write a quiz, but it probably wouldn’t be very good,” he said. Instead, the team is interested in “that intersection of what technology can do that humans can’t, and what humans can do that technology can’t.”

More broadly, he noted that BuzzFeed is experimenting to find new ways to refresh the quiz format, for example with the Quiz Party feature and Quiz Streaks.

We are running the Venture Deals Online Course from March 7, 2021 – April 30, 2021.

We’ve moved the Venture Deals Community from Slack to Mighty Networks where we have much more functionality and flexibility.

Once again, we’ll do a weekly AMA with a variety of people participating.

For now, registration is open. Please sign up if you want to take the Spring 2021 Venture Deals Online Course.

The post Venture Deals Online Course – Spring 2021 Edition appeared first on Feld Thoughts.

Earlier today, South Korean e-commerce and delivery giant Coupang filed to go public in the United States. As a private company, Coupang has raised billions, including capital from American venture capital firm Sequoia and Japanese telecom giant SoftBank and its Vision Fund.

Coupang’s offering, coming amidst the public debut of a number of well-known technology brands, will be a massive affair. Its first S-1 filing indicates that its IPO will raise capital in the range of $1 billion, far larger than the $100 million placeholder that is more common.

But the company’s scale makes its lofty IPO fundraising goals reasonable. Coupang is huge, with revenues north of $10 billion in 2020 and in improving financial health as it scales. And its revenue growth has accelerated.

Perhaps that explains why the company is reportedly targeting a valuation of $50 billion.

This afternoon, let’s dig into the company’s historical growth, its improving cash flow and its narrowing losses. Coupang’s debut will create a splash when it lands, so we owe it to ourselves to grok its numbers.

And as there are other e-commerce brands with a delivery function waiting in the wings to go public — Instacart comes to mind — how Coupang fares in its IPO matters for a good number of domestic startups and unicorns.

Coupang’s surging scale

The company’s growth across the last half-decade is impressive. Observe its yearly revenue totals from 2016 through 2020:

2016: $1.67 billion.2017: $2.4 billion (+43.7%).2018: $4.05 billion (+68.8%).2019: $6.27 billion (+54.8%).2020: $11.97 billion (+90.9%).

Sure, some of that 2020 growth is COVID-19 related, but even taking that into account, Coupang’s revenue growth is nothing short of fantastic. And what’s better is that the company has cut its losses in recent years:

The All-22 tape is perhaps one of the most valued tools for professional football coaches because it allows the viewer to see all 22 players on the field at the same time. It improves a coach’s line of sight and, most importantly, helps avoid missing a critical motion or player.

The upshot: It removes the blind spot. The concept of this tool can — and should — be applied in the startup world as well. Successful founders and investors understand the playbook on both sides of the ball. For founders, that means being able to zoom out and see each of their employees’ points of view and being inclusive. Without an All-22 tape, founders can mistakenly spend too much on engineering while ignoring the product rollout strategy, or forget to communicate with employees outside of their bubble of interest. A company can become fragmented as more blind spots emerge, which can ultimately lead to oversights that damage its reputation, operations or even its ability to raise money from investors.

It’s a skillset that is developed through practice. Luckily, Eghosa Omoigui, the founder and managing general partner of EchoVC Partners, a seed and early-stage technology venture capital firm serving underrepresented founders and underserved markets, is coming to Early Stage 2021 to give early-stage founders the tools they need to develop their own All-22 tape.

TC Early Stage – Operations & Fundraising is a virtual event focused on early-stage founders happening on April 1 & 2. The event will include breakout sessions led by investors and experts that break down the most difficult parts of building a business.

Here’s a look of Omoigui’s talk:

The All-22 View

Improving line of sight and dynamic field of play aperture is rarely discussed but hugely important. Great founders, operators and investors have an understanding of playbooks on both sides of the ball. We’ll talk through learnings and some ideas on how to build muscle memory and skillsets.

Omoigui, who was previously director of consumer internet and semantic technologies at Intel Capital, will share his experiences and tips to help founders see every aspect of their company. Register for TC Early Stage 2021 today and catch his All-22 Tape talk.

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Kenny Williams of the L.A. Thieves talks to Dean Takahashi of GamesBeat about the opening tournament for the Call of Duty League.Read More

Uber and Lyft lost a lot of money in 2020. That’s not a surprise, as COVID-19 caused many ride-hailing markets to freeze, limiting demand for folks moving around. To combat the declines in their traditional businesses, Uber continued its push into consumer delivery, while Lyft announced a push into business-to-business logistics.

But the decline in demand harmed both companies. We can see that in their full-year numbers. Uber’s revenue fell from $13 billion in 2019 to $11.1 billion in 2020. Lyft’s fell from $3.6 billion in 2019 to a far-smaller $2.4 billion in 2020.

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

But Uber and Lyft are excited that they will reach adjusted profitability, measured as earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization and even more stuff stripped out, by the fourth quarter of this year.

Ride-hailing profits have long felt similar to self-driving revenues: just a bit over the horizon. But after the year from hell, Uber and Lyft are pretty damn certain that their highly adjusted profit dreams are going to come through.

This morning, let’s unpack their latest numbers to see if what the two companies are dangling in front of investors is worth desiring. Along the way we’ll talk BS metrics and how firing a lot of people can cut your cost base.

Uber

Using normal accounting rules, Uber lost $6.77 billion in 2020, an improvement from its 2019 loss of $8.51 billion. However, if you lean on Uber’s definition of adjusted EBITDA, its 2019 and 2020 losses fall to $2.73 billion and $2.53 billion, respectively.

So what is this magic wand Uber is waving to make billions of dollars worth of red ink go away? Let’s hear from the company itself:

We define Adjusted EBITDA as net income (loss), excluding (i) income (loss) from discontinued operations, net of income taxes, (ii) net income (loss) attributable to non-controlling interests, net of tax, (iii) provision for (benefit from) income taxes, (iv) income (loss) from equity method investments, (v) interest expense, (vi) other income (expense), net, (vii) depreciation and amortization, (viii) stock-based compensation expense, (ix) certain legal, tax, and regulatory reserve changes and settlements, (x) goodwill and asset impairments/loss on sale of assets, (xi) acquisition and financing related expenses, (xii) restructuring and related charges and (xiii) other items not indicative of our ongoing operating performance, including COVID-19 response initiative related payments for financial assistance to Drivers personally impacted by COVID-19, the cost of personal protective equipment distributed to Drivers, Driver reimbursement for their cost of purchasing personal protective equipment, the costs related to free rides and food deliveries to healthcare workers, seniors, and others in need as well as charitable donations.

Er, hot damn. I can’t recall ever seeing an adjusted EBITDA definition with 12 different categories of exclusion. But, it’s what Uber is focused on as reaching positive adjusted EBITDA is key to its current pitch to investors.

Indeed, here’s the company’s CFO in its most recent earnings call, discussing its recent performance:

We remain on track to turn the EBITDA profitable in 2021, and we are confident that Uber can deliver sustained strong top-line growth as we move past the pandemic.

So, if investors get what Uber promises, they will get an unprofitable company at the end of 2021, albeit one that, if you strip out a dozen categories of expense, is no longer running in the red. This, from a company worth north of $112 billion, feels like a very small promise.

And yet Uber shares have quadrupled from their pandemic lows, during which they fell under the $15 mark. Today Uber is worth more than $60 per share, despite shrinking last year and projecting years of losses (real), and possibly some (fake) profits later in the year.

Dean Takahashi debates himself and others about whether the game industry has hit a hype peak or it's just getting started.Read More

Cloud monitoring platform Datadog has announced that it plans to acquire Sqreen, a software-as-a-service security platform. Originally founded in France, Sqreen participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield in 2016.

Sqreen is a cloud-based security product to protect your application directly. Once you install the sandboxed Sqreen agent, it analyzes your application in real time to find vulnerabilities in your code or your configuration. There’s a small CPU overhead with Sqreen enabled, but there are some upsides.

It can surface threats and you can set up your own threat detection rules. You can see the status of your application from the Sqreen dashboard, receive notifications when there’s an incident and get information about incidents.

For instance, you can see blocked SQL injections, see where the injection attempts came from and act to prevent further attempts. Sqreen also detects common attacks, such as credential stuffing attacks, cross-site scripting, etc. As your product evolves, you can enable different modules from the plugin marketplace.

Combining Datadog and Sqreen makes a lot of sense, as many companies already rely on Datadog to monitor their apps. Sqreen has a good product, Datadog has a good customer base. So you can expect some improvements on the security front for Datadog.

Sqreen raised a $2.3 million round from Alven Capital, Point Nine Capital, Kima Ventures, 50 Partners and business angels. It then participated in TechCrunch’s Startup Battlefield — it made it to the finals but didn’t win the competition. The startup attended Y Combinator a bit later.

In 2019, Sqreen raised a $14 million Series A round led by Greylock Partners with existing investors Y Combinator, Alven and Point Nine participating once again.

Datadog and Sqreen have signed a definitive acquisition agreement. Terms of the deal remain undisclosed and the acquisition should close in Q2 2021.

Notion, the online workspace startup that was last year valued at over $2 billion, was knocked offline after a DNS outage.

The collaborative online office and document service was not loading as of around 9 a.m. ET on Friday, preventing anyone who relies on the service from accessing their cloud-stored data.

In a since-deleted tweet, Notion asked if “any users have a contact at Name.com,” the web host that Notion relies on for its domain name. In a reply, Name.com said it was “working with the owners of this domain to address this issue as quickly as possible.” Notion replied: “Could you let us know where you’re messaging us to address this?”

In a statement shortly after its first tweet went out, Notion told TechCrunch: “We’re experiencing a DNS issue, causing the site to not resolve for many users. We are actively looking into this issue, and will update you with more information as we receive it via our status page on Twitter.”

Notion didn’t say specifically what the DNS issue is. Domain name servers, or DNS, is an important part of how the internet works. Every time you go to visit a website, your browser uses a DNS server to convert web addresses to machine-readable IP addresses to locate where a web page is located on the internet. But if a website or its DNS server is not configured correctly, it can cause the website not to load.

It’s not clear exactly who is responsible for this particular DNS issue. When reached, a spokesperson for Name.com did not immediately comment, and Sonic.so, the Somali-based registrar that oversees the .so country-code top level domain on which Notion relies, did not return a request for comment.

We’ll update once we know more.

Read more on TechCrunch:

TikTok emerges as a political battleground in Navalny-stirred RussiaFacebook Oversight Board says other social networks ‘welcome to join’ if project succeedsA security researcher commandeered a country’s expired top-level domain to save it from hackersSweden’s data watchdog slaps police for unlawful use of Clearview AITechCrunch’s favorites from Techstars’ Boston, Chicago and workforce accelerators

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Datadog has announced plans to acquire app securit startup Sqreen and observability data startup Timber Technologies.Read More

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This week felt oddly comforting from a tech news perspective: Facebook is copying something, early-stage startup data is flawed enough to talk about and sweet DoorDash is buying robots for undisclosed sums.

So, here’s a rundown of the tech news we got into (as always, jokes aren’t previewed so you’ll have to listen to the actual show to get our critique and Award Winning Analysis*):

Ethena raising $2 million more for corporate training that is not awful, and Zeta raising $1.5 million for couples’ banking. Natasha has been killing the early-stage beat lately.How seed data could be getting harder and harder to parse from Alex’s desk, and why VC data in general is dicey, from Danny’s. We discuss if directional data is useful, and why the limited numbers could have a cultural impact on signal.Reddit raises $250 million, but doesn’t tell us who the investors are and what the money is precisely going to. Still, the company has had quite a year so far, so the capital comes at an interesting time.Justo, an online grocery based in Mexico, raises $65 million as the pandemic continues to shake up the way we live and shop.DoorDash buys a salad robot, which brings Natasha nostalgia and Danny anger.The inverted SoftBank J-Curve thesis is a must-listen and read.And from the world of dating, a big M&A deal that caught our attention, and the latest from the Bumble IPO.

In good news, long-time Equity producer Chris Gates is back starting next week, which means we’ll have our biggest crew ever helping get the show put together. And, in other good news, there’s going to be more Equity than ever for you to hear. Coming soon.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

*OK, so not award-winning yet. But soon enough, because manifestation works.

The world has spent most of 2020 adapting to ever-changing guidelines and restrictions (with no end in sight, even as the vaccines start to roll out). Board meetings are quickly increasing in their significance to foster consistent and vital interactions as an organization. It’s essential for companies to capitalize on the essential time together during these uncertain times.

While we might look like the Brady Bunch while sharing a Zoom window, are you actually communicating more like the family from “Succession?”

Are your meetings organized? Do people talk over one another? Do you usually run over time? Are you giving people time to digest information?

As we move into 2021 and Q1 meetings are being put onto calendars, take some time to modernize how you conduct your board meetings.

Having served on public company boards, growth-stage businesses and Series A startups, an observation I have made in boards that are later stage are more about financial analysis and governance. Whereas earlier-stage board discussions hinge more on product strategy, key partnerships, sharing best practices to help develop founders as executives and important hiring decisions.

Since the nature of the discussions is more, let’s call it … creative in earlier-stage businesses, where the focus is on where they’ve been particularly impacted by reduced bandwidth for collaboration while meeting remotely.

As said best by Mike Maples and paraphrased by Jeff Bonforte — there are only four things a board really needs to consider:

Has the market changed since we last met? If so, did it affect us negatively or positively?Has the team changed? For better or worse?Has our position in the market changed?Can we do what we said we would?

Collecting data around those points is the job. In the meeting, the team can add color.

Remember the board works for you, so be sure to put them to work. Sharing materials with participants about three days ahead of time tends to be the best. Any later and they may not get enough time to digest, send earlier and the information might be out of date by the time you meet. It’s most common to format as a deck, but lately I’m seeing more written format and even magazine-style.

The number one request I get from early-stage companies is “help find me more customers.”

Other common requests are “help me find or land this type of talent, help me with industry benchmarks for this type of business deal or compensation structure, connect me to people that have experience with X so I can learn ways we could structure our process.” It’s helpful to put these asks in the materials you send ahead because sometimes board members might not be able to react quickly and now “homework” comes up spontaneously in the discussions.

Another purpose of these meetings is to build working relationships so when strategic decisions need to be made, board members are used to working together. Sometimes it is a forum for executives to gain exposure to board members and for board members to have the opportunity to evaluate and provide input on executives. For that reason execs are often invited to participate in certain discussions.

Like the product person who presents a roadmap or a market analysis, the head of sales should give color on pipeline and competitive deals, the marketing person may lead a discussion on ABM or channel marketing tactics, the engineering lead might ask for feedback on their metrics versus other companies, etc. Generally, CEOs also bring forth an interesting topic to have a discussion, such as channel strategy, market mapping/sizing, hiring plan and related issues.

Logistics

As far as logistics, we reserve two hours in calendars but we try to hit 90 minutes. I suggest something like this for a 90-minute session: