Chris Lynch, a founder and former general partner at Boston-based seed-stage fund Accomplice, remembers “VC Mountain in Waltham.”

Back then, entrepreneurs on funding quests would visit a building overlooking the Waltham Reservoir near Boston where they pitched to a few investors: Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

“And if they didn’t invest in you, you weren’t getting money to start your company,” Lynch said.

Since then, Lynch has watched the area’s startup ecosystem reach the point where seed-stage firms are ubiquitous, but in a city populated with firms waiting to make first bets, the scene is unsurprisingly undergoing a funding drought. Crunchbase data indicates that the city’s Q2 venture capital pace slowed dramatically, with April seeing far fewer rounds and dollars invested in 2020 than in 2019.

Boston saw just seven known equity funding rounds in April, investments worth a hair under $60 million. In the year-ago April, Boston recorded 24 equity funding rounds worth more than $500 million.

Yet, while the numbers are slow, some Boston tech leaders think seed startups will continue to thrive thanks to accelerators and a healthy base of local early-stage investors. And Lynch, who left Accomplice in 2017, says the venture slowdown might help firms recalibrate their appetite for new deals to a more healthy pace.

“The advantage of more access to capital without a proportional increase in great ideas really waters down the fort,” he said, referring to upmarkets. “A lot of money has been invested in companies before they even proved their ideas were right, and I think even I fell into a trap of competing so hard for deals that I lost sight of a good deal.” He estimates that in our COVID-19 world, investors will start to again take three months for due diligence on a deal, versus three weeks to a signed term sheet.

If Boston’s seed investors becomes more conservative, that means that accelerators — homes of the brightest founders, often before they even have their first customer — will be pressed to react.

Accelerators

Venture Lane, a co-working space and startup incubator for early-stage companies, was nearing its one-year anniversary in the heart of Boston when COVID-19 hit the city.

The incubator, which traditionally hosts 10 startups at a time, made its whole program virtual and reworked existing content to help navigate the climate. Plus, per founder Christian Magel, its tips and workshops were opened up to any early-stage founder, not just the ones enrolled with Venture Lane. Hundreds have signed up, he said.

Four years ago, Adnan Asar, the founder of the new dependence prevention service Lucid Lane, was enjoying a successful career working as the founding chief technology officer at Livongo Health. It was the serial senior tech executive’s most recent job after a long stint at Shutterfly and he was shepherding the company through the development of its suite of hardware and software for the management of chronic conditions.

But when Asar’s wife was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he stepped away from the technology world to be with his family while she underwent treatment.

He did not know at the time that the decision would set him on the path to founding Lucid Lane. The company’s mission is to help give patients who have been prescribed medications to address pain and anxiety ways to wean themselves off those drugs and avoid dependence — and its purpose is born from the struggle Asar witnessed as his wife wrestled with how to stop taking the medication she was prescribed during her illness.

Asar’s wife isn’t alone. In 2018, there were roughly 168.2 million prescriptions for opioids written in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lucid Lane estimates that 50 million people are prescribed opioids and another 13 million are prescribed benzodiazepines each year either after surgery or in conjunction with cancer treatments — all without a plan for how to manage or taper the use of these highly addictive medications.

For Asar’s wife, it was the benzodiazepine prescribed as part of her cancer treatment that became an issue. “She was hit by very severe withdrawal symptoms and we didn’t know what was going on,” Asar said. When they consulted her physician he gave the couple two options — quitting cold turkey or remaining on the medication.

“My wife decided to go cold turkey,” Asar said. “It was really debilitating for the whole family.”

It took nine months of therapy and regular consultations with psychiatrists to help with tailoring medication dosages and tapering to get her off of the medication, said Asar. And that experience led to the launch of Lucid Lane.

“Our goal is to prevent and control medication and substance dependence,” Asar said.

The company’s telehealth solution is built on a proprietary treatment protocol meant to provide continuous daily support and interventions, along with proactive monitoring of a personalized treatment plan — all on an ongoing basis, said Asar. 

And the COVID-19 pandemic is only accelerating the need for telehealth services. “COVID-19 has made telehealth a mandatory service instead of a discretionary service,” said Asar. “There’s a surge in anxiety, depression, substance use and medication use. We’re seeing a surge of patients who are reaching out to us.”

Asar sees Lucid Lane’s competitors as companies like Lyra Health and Ginger, or point solutions building digital diagnostics to detect anxiety and depression. But unlike some companies that are launching to treat dependence or addictive behaviors, Asar sees his startup as preventing dependency and addiction.

“A lot of people are sliding into these addictions through something that happens at the doctor’s office,” said Asar. ” Our solution does not prescribe any of these medications.”

The company is working on clinical studies that are set to start at the Palo Alto VA hospital, and has raised $4 million in seed funding from investors including Battery Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures, the investment firm founded by Jerry Yang.

“We see great potential for Lucid Lane, as it has developed a scalable solution to one of the biggest problems facing society today,” said Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker, in a statement. “Telehealth solutions have emerged as highly capable of addressing complex problems, and Lucid Lane has embraced remote care from its beginning. Its design enables care anytime, anywhere for patients in their moment of need. This can make a tremendous difference in the battle between recovery and relapse. We believe that it will help millions of people lead better lives.”

Joining Asar in the development of the company and its healthcare protocols are a seasoned team of health professionals, including Dr. Ahmed Zaafran, a board certified anesthesiologist at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and assistant professor of anesthesiology (affiliated) at Stanford University School of Medicine; and advisors like Dr. Vanila Singh, who was also previously chairperson of the HHS Task Force in conjunction with the DOD and the VA to address the opioid drug crisis; Dr. Carin Hagberg, the chair of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine of MD Anderson Cancer Center; and Sherif Zaafran, the president of the Texas Medical Board and chair of multiple national committees on pain management, including the subcommittee Taskforce on Pain Management Services for HHS, as well as the department’s Pain Clinical Pathways Committee.

“Lucid Lane provides a patient-centered solution that allows for the best clinical outcomes for patients after surgery and those bravely finishing chemotherapy,” said Dr. Singh, in a statement. “For the many patients who require short-term opioids and benzodiazepine medications, Lucid Lane’s treatment can limit the risk of prolonged dependence of these medications while also ensuring effective pain control with a resulting improved quality of life and functioning.”

We’re not letting this pandemic disrupt Disrupt SF 2020. Like any determined early-stage startup founder, we’re adapting and moving forward. Can’t join us in person on September 14-16? No problem. Take advantage of Digital Startup Alley, a completely new way to disrupt. Place your startup in front of influential movers and shakers and keep your business rolling.

For just $445, the Digital Startup Alley Package lets you exhibit your early-stage, pre-Series A company to thousands of potential investors, customers, journalists and technologists — from your home office. Even better, the Digital Startup Alley pass gives you months to pitch, demo, network and schedule meetings. You can rely on TechCrunch, with its extensive resources and industry connections, to translate the benefits of the live Startup Alley exhibit hall into a world-class virtual experience.

We packed a ton of value into the Digital Startup Alley Package. The price — which covers three people — includes everything in the Digital Pass Pro pass plus these features:

Leading Voices Webinars: How can you adapt and thrive during and after this pandemic? No one owns a crystal ball, but we’ve tapped the brightest industry minds to share their current thoughts and strategies to keep moving forward. Startup Alley exhibitors get exclusive access to this webinar series.

Pitch Coaching Par Excellence: Pour yourself a cold pitcher of something tasty and take your elevator pitch to the top floor. Join us for Pitchers and Pitches, an interactive opportunity to learn from the best — the TechCrunch editorial team that coaches the Startup Battlefield competitors.

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Bonus: Disrupt SF 2020 is still on track, and if it turns out that you can join us at the Moscone Center and exhibit in person, you can upgrade your package and still enjoy the benefits of Digital Startup Alley.

Unprecedented challenges require unprecedented thinking and action. Buy your Digital Startup Alley Package today and keep your startup dreams moving forward.

TechCrunch is mindful of the COVID-19 issue and its impact on live events. You can follow our updates here.

Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass.

His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment themes focused on the next generation of games: those built for VR, those built on top of Twitch and those built for video chat environments as a socializing tool.

TechCrunch: We’ve been in a “VR winter,” as it’s been called in the industry, following the 2014-2017 wave of VC funding into VR drying up as the market failed to gain massive consumer adoption. You think VR could soon be hot again. Why?

Saar Gur: If you track revenues of third-party games on Oculus, the numbers are getting interesting. And we think the Quest is not quite the Xbox moment for Facebook, but the device and market response to the Quest have been great. So we are more engaged in looking at VR gaming startups than ever before.

What do you mean by “the Xbox moment,” and what will that look like for VR? Facebook hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for Oculus Quest headsets, and most VR headsets seem to have sold out during this pandemic as people seek entertainment at home. This seems like progress. When will we cross the threshold?

As the infrastructure for developing games becomes more advanced, studios have turned to buying best-in-class technology from others instead of building everything from scratch (often with inferior quality).

This shift underpinned Unity’s rise as the most popular game engine. The current focus on games as ever-evolving social hubs that can remain popular for a decade requires investment in “live ops” to keep updating the game with new features and experiences, only adding to a game studio’s responsibilities.

There are big movements in gaming right now to make games cross-platform (not just restricted to mobile or PC or one console), incorporate new types of chat (in-game or outside of it) and to automatically remove bullies and bots among other things. Optimizing games’ virtual economies is only getting more complex as trade of virtual goods becomes increasingly popular.

All this means more opportunity for startups (and large incumbents) that provide new tools and platforms to game developers and gamers. To gauge which opportunities are prime for entrepreneurs, I asked four leading early-stage investors who focus on the gaming sector to share their analysis:

Sam Englebardt, Galaxy Interactive

Which areas within gaming infrastructure seem firmly dominated by large incumbents, versus open for new startups to rise up?

I’m always rooting for the startup, but some of the really big and expensive infrastructure challenges seem unlikely to be solved by a startup, especially where the incumbents have a lead in time, money and the personnel they’re throwing at the problem. I’m thinking here, for example, about something like cloud computing, storage solutions, etc.

In these unusual times, many who once dreamed of funding are forced to bootstrap. Well, bootstrapping is good during good times, and necessary during bad times. Here, BannerBuzz CEO Nishant Shah...

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Don’t “Dream” – Establish Traction If you have dreams of getting to millions of users, you need to think pragmatically about how you will meet this goal. Learn a series of questions Sramana...

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Some audience questions answered by Sramana: – Which segments of the economy should be opened up / kept open during the Covid-19 lockdown? – Has COVID-19 changed your opinion on Universal...

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In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: 484th 1Mby1M Roundtable May 7, 2020: With Dr. Bhramar Mukherjee, University of Michigan

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Sramana Mitra: Can you answer the question from the point of view of artificial intelligence in online education? Ann Marie Sastry: In terms of AI in education, there’s a tension right now. It’s...

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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 485th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 14, 2020, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/5 p.m. CEST/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...

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Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

This week shares of SaaS and cloud companies reached new record highs as investors bid their equities higher following an earnings cycle that came in better than some expected.

SaaS stocks, as measured by the Bessemer-Nasdaq cloud index, closed at a 1,484.93 yesterday, a record, and just a hair under its intraday high of 1,491.59.

The raw numbers matter less than the index’s movement. From highs of around 1,400 in March, the index dropped to 892.60 during the early-year market selloff. Since then, SaaS and cloud companies have come roaring back. This is reflected in the new, higher valuation multiple that the companies are priced at by investors today, namley an enterprise value/revenue multiple of 14.7x.

So let’s take a look at why the SaaS cohort is the apple of Wall Street’s eye. There isn’t a single reason, but we have two that are worth considering. (Also up ahead: Notes on a chat with Alteryx’s CEO and a working definition of socialism. It’s Friday, let’s have some fun.)

A reminder

Briefly, we observe movements in the value of public SaaS and cloud stocks because they inform private market investors about possible exit values for startups. This helps VCs price venture rounds. So, in a somewhat slow mechanism, public values of a stocks help price startups. Given the portion of venture capital dollars and the amount of startup effort that goes into the SaaS space (AI companies are often built using SaaS models, lots of consumer apps are SaaS, and business software is lucrative), we care a lot about the value of SaaS and cloud stocks.

So is the run-up in SaaS stocks, therefore, good for startups? Yep. Now let’s get into why clouds shares are going up.

A meditation of the morality on capitalism

Bootstrapping vs. venture capital from Sramana Mitra on Bootstrapping by Sramana Mitra Some business ideas are not financeable. This is where bootstrapping comes in. Learn how bootstrapping is...

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The current coronavirus conditions have done little to hurt the tech giants. Under the leadership of its new CEO Bill McDermott, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) continued to report a stellar quarter. The...

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“Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite?” Google that phrase and you will get thousands of results. It just goes to show that, to a large extent, the “Q&A” model is broken on the internet. Where once Yahoo Answers and Quora were considered the bright young things of Web 2.0’s “Read/Write Web,” today there is only the chaos of myriad search results. Let’s face it, many have tried to really crack Q&A (remember “Mahalo”?), but few ever got very far — and most became zombie sites.

But look again and you will notice something. A site called Parlia sits at No. 3 on that search result for “Is Greta Thunberg a hypocrite.” But Parlia only launched (in stealth mode) in October last year.

So how can this be?

Well, this upstart in the Q&A space has now closed a pre-seed round of funding from Bloomberg Beta, Tiny VC and others (amount undisclosed).

And as founder, and former journalist, Turi Munthe tells me, the idea here is Parlia will become an “encyclopedia of opinion.”

“We’re a wiki: mapping out all the perspectives on both the breaking stories and controversies of the day, as well as the big evergreen questions: does God exist? Is Messi really better than Ronaldo? The way we’re building is to also help fix today’s polarisation, outrage and information silo-ing,” he tells me.

While most Q&A sites are geared around X versus Y, and focused on rational debate, Parlia is trying to map ALL the opinions out there: flat earthers’ included. It’s aiming to be descriptive not prescriptive, and is closer to a wiki, unlike Quora, where the authors are often selling “something” as well as themselves as experts.

The site is already on a tear. And also highly appropriate for this era.

Right now top subjects include “How to stay healthy during quarantine at home?” or “What are the effects of spending long periods in coronavirus isolation?” or “Will the coronavirus crisis bring society together?” The list goes on. Users see the arguments calmly, dispassionately laid out, alongside counter-arguments and all the other arguments and positions.

Says Munthe: “In 2016, I realized the age of political consensus was over. I watched as Britain spilt maybe a trillion words of argument in the build-up to the Brexit Referendum and thought: there are no more than a half-dozen reasons why people will vote either way.”

He realized that if there’s a finite number of arguments around something as huge and divisive as Brexit, then this would be true for everything. Thus, you could theoretically map the arguments around gun control, abortion, responses to the coronavirus, the threat of AI and pretty much everything.

So why would anyone want to do that? It’s, of course, a good thing in itself and would help people understand what they think as well as help them understand how the rest of the world thinks.

Luckily, there is also a business model. It will potentially carry ads, sponsorships, membership and user donations. Another is data. If they get it right, they will have surfaced foundational information about the very ways we think.

Munthe thinks all the users will come through Search. “The media opportunity, we think, is 100 million-plus pageviews/month,” he says.

Munthe’s co-founder is J. Paul Neeley, former professor of the Royal College of Art, and a service designer who’s worked with Unilever and the U.K.’s Cabinet Office. Munthe himself has been exploring the systemic issues of the media ecosystem for some time. From founding a small magazine in Lebanon, reporting in Iraq in 2003, then starting and exiting Demotix, to launching North Base Media (a media-focused VC).

The temptation, of course, is to allow bias to creep in return for commercial deals. But, says Menthe: “We will never work with political parties, and we will set up our own ethics advisory board. But that understanding should be of value to market researchers and institutions everywhere.”

So now you can find out how coronavirus will change the world.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics can you provide about how you’ve built your business from 2016 to 2020? How has your business grown? Lily Stoyanov: Exponentially. Our business grew through very strong...

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Acast, a podcast monetization and distribution platform, announced a new partnership with JioSaavn, one of the largest streaming audio services in India. The agreement mean JioSaavn will distribute content from Acast and have access to its technology for podcasters.

JioSaavn, which claims 104 million monthly active users, is the second-largest streaming audio service in India after Gaana, and holds about 24% market share, according to an OTT Audience Measurement Insights report.

Podcasts from Acast’s network will be added to JioSaavn’s streaming app over the next two months. Based in Sweden, Acast focuses on developing ways to help podcasters monetize, including subscription paywalls and dynamic ads. Publishers on Acast’s network include the Guardian, BBC, the Financial Times and PBS NewsHour.

JioSaavn launched original programming in 2016, including JioSaavn podcasts, which it says now has more than 200 hours of original content.

In a press statement, Ishani Dasgupta, JioSaavn’s lead of podcast partnerships, said, “Podcasting is still largely nascent to consumers in the Indian market, with momentum growing quickly. The ability to grow and build new audiences, new shows and establish pathways for brands to access both is really just beginning for our 1.3 billion potential consumer market.”