We’re big fans of bootstrapping to exit case studies. Imagine Easy Solutions CEO Neal Taparia’s journey is a wonderful one. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey....

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Mark Cuban isn’t impressed that you’ve raised money.

“If you think the accomplishment is raising money first, we’re probably not gonna get along,” said Cuban in an Extra Crunch Live interview. “If your orientation is ‘I got to raise the money first,’ you don’t really have a company yet, and you really haven’t accomplished anything yet. […] Sweat equity is the best equity.”

We also got his take on today’s economy, the nation’s direction and his notes on what startups should do to survive in the new world. Happily, as we had an hour to chat, we managed to cover a lot of ground. The full conversation (YouTube) is after the jump, and we’ve excerpted a number of quotes for your perusal.

But up top we wanted to share Cuban’s notes regarding which companies should accept Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) funds from the Small Business Administration. The matter became a hot-button issue in and around Silicon Valley, where initial debate centered around which startups could access the money. After it became clear the first installment of PPP funds wasn’t going to last, whether startups should access to the capital at all became a question. Some venture-backed companies even decided to return their PPP check.

According to Cuban, when PPP was first put together, the market’s “perspective was that there’d be plenty of money for everybody. You know, people didn’t really want to do the math.” Cuban said that if there was $350 billion in the pot and one million small businesses, the fund would have worked out to $350,000 apiece. “Well guess what,” he said, “there are 30 million companies, [and] like 20 of them are independent contractors.”

Once you did the calculations again with that many companies eligible for PPP funds, you could tell that the money wasn’t going to last. So Cuban told firms that he’s invested in where he has sway to “either not apply or just pay it back immediately.” Why? “For the betterment of the country and the economy,” he said, adding that “if you do have access to capital” or “your business isn’t dramatically impacted [then] let’s leave [the PPP money] for the people who need it the most.”

As noted, the full video is below (you can join Extra Crunch here!), along with Cuban’s notes on startup advice during the pandemic, American 2.0 (and Marc Andreessen’s essay), AI, pre-seed companies, his future in politics and how to pitch him.

Mark Cuban on the record

How he’s advising portfolio companies during the pandemic:

So first and foremost, communicate. Second is be honest. Third is be transparent. And fourth is be authentic. Because everybody is nervous. Everybody is terrified at a certain level. So you just have to recognize that. People are going to need that honesty from you and people are going to want communications from you. That’s been the primary thing around what these companies should do.

Regarding cutting costs: Every business is different. On the smallest ones, they’re already grinding, and it’s typically dependent on the founder. I’ve really tried to encourage people to keep all their employees on if at all possible. That there’s gonna be a lot of change and that’s going to create a lot of opportunity. So, if you can hold on to your employees and push forward in any way, shape, or form, you may have an opportunity.

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

What a week it’s been. I’m exhausted. Not only are we another cycle deeper into the COVID-19 quarantine, but there seems to be more news than ever to sift through. I’ve fallen behind. So, today, this little column is taking look back at things that it missed but wanted to cover. (There may come a day when we run out of stuff to talk about, but it’s not coming any time soon.)

So let’s talk about a16z’s new crypto fund, recent economic data, the Ebang F-1, Lime’s layoffs, Procore’s IPO delay and fresh valuation, stocks, Luckin, and, if we have time, Twitter’s changing jobs data. Let’s get this all out of our heads and into the world.

Odds, ends

To annoy my editors, we’re using bullet points this morning. Bullet points are great way to convey a bloc of information in a neat format. Let the haters hate, we have a lot of ground to cover:

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 484th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, May 7, 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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Even amid the recent global turmoil, tech giant Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) appears unfazed. The company recently reported its third quarter results that continued to outpace market expectations. Its...

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More personnel changes are afoot at Monzo, as the U.K. challenger bank continues to bolster its leadership team.

Specifically, TechCrunch has learned that Sujata Bhatia, a former American Express executive in Europe, has been recruited as Monzo’s new Chief Operating Officer, replacing previous COO Tom Foster-Carter (who left the bank rather suddenly in November to found a startup of his own). Monzo confirmed Bhatia’s appointment, which is still subject to regulator approval, and I understand she is due to start the COO role in late June.

Prior to Monzo, Bhatia spent almost 16 years at American Express. Her most recent position at Amex was Senior Vice President for Global Merchant Services Europe. Before that she was Senior Vice President of Global Strategy and Capabilities, where, according to her LinkedIn profile, she lead a team of 400 people across 23 global markets.

Bhatia’s appointment follows the recruitment of Mike Hudack, the former CTO of Deliveroo and most recently a founding partner at London venture capital firm Blossom Capital. He joined Monzo in March as the challenger bank’s new Chief Product Officer. Going in the opposite direction was Meri Williams, Monzo’s Chief Technical Officer, who parted ways with the bank a few weeks later citing her wish to voluntarily help with “cost-cutting measures.”

Meanwhile, Bhatia joins Monzo at a somewhat turbulent time for the challenger bank, as it, along with many other fintech companies, attempts to insulate itself from the coronavirus crisis and resulting economic downturn, meaning that the new COO will likely need to hit the ground running.

Last month, I reported that Monzo was shuttering its customer support office in Las Vegas, seeing 165 customer support staff in the U.S. lose their jobs. And just a few weeks earlier, we reported that the bank was furloughing up to 295 staff under the U.K.’s Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. In addition, the senior management team and the board has volunteered to take a 25% cut in salary, and co-founder and CEO Tom Blomfield has decided not to take a salary for the next twelve months.

Like other banks and fintechs, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in Monzo seeing customer card spend reduce at home and (of course) abroad, meaning it is generating significantly less revenue from interchange fees. The bank has also postponed the launch of premium paid-for consumer accounts, one of only a handful of known planned revenue streams, alongside lending, of course.

With that said, Monzo recently launched business accounts, many of which are revenue generating, with both free and paid tiers. I understand from sources that the number of business accounts opened to date already stands at approaching 20,000.

Related to this, having originally missed out on state aid via the capability and innovation fund designed to introduce more competition in SME banking, Monzo now has a second potential bite of the apple after previous grant winners Metro and Nationwide are returning the money.

As always, watch this space.

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Nick Adams, Managing Partner and Co-founder at Differential Ventures, an enterprise focused firm. We discussed counter-cyclical ventures in this...

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By the summer of 2016, Marie Outtier had spent eight years as a consultant advising media agencies and martech companies on marketing growth strategy.

Pierre-Jean “PJ” Camillieri started as a music software engineer before joining one of Apple’s consumer electronics divisions. Inspired by Siri, he left to start Timista, a smart lifestyle assistant.

When the two joined forces to co-found Aiden.ai, the combination was potent — one was a consummate marketer, the other, a specialist in machine learning. Their goal: create an AI-driven marketing analyst that offered actionable advice in real time.

Humans who manage ad campaigns must analyze vast amounts of numbers, but Outtier and Camillieri envisioned a tool that could make optimization recommendations in real time. Analytics are vast and unwieldy, so theirs was a no-brainer proposition with a market crying out for solutions.

The company’s first office was at Bloom Space in Gower Street, London. It was just a handful of hot desks and a nearby sofa shared with four other startups. That summer, they began in earnest to build the company. A few months later, they had a huge opportunity when the still 100% bootstrapped company was selected for Techcrunch Disrupt’s Startup Battlefield competition.

Interviewed by TechCrunch, they explained their proposition: Marketers wanted to know where a digital marketing campaign was getting the most traction: Twitter or Facebook. You might need to check several dashboards across multiple accounts, plus Google analytics to compile the data — and even if you conclude that one platform is outperforming the other, that might change next week as users shift attention to Instagram, potentially wasting 60% of ad spend.

Aiden was intended to feel like just another co-worker, relying on natural language processing to make the exchange feel chatty and comfortable. It queried data from multiple dashboards and quickly compiled it into flash charts, making it easy to find and digest.

Eventually, instead of managing 10 clients, marketing analysts would be able to manage 50 using dynamic predictions as well as visualizations. Aiden incorporated Outtier’s expertise into its algorithms so it could suggest how to tweak a Facebook campaign and anticipate what was going to happen.

Was appearing at Disrupt a significant moment? “It was a big deal for us,” says Outtier. “The exposure gave us ammunition to raise our first round. And being part of the Disrupt Battlefield alumni gave us many meaningful networking and PR opportunities.”

A few weeks later the company had raised a seed round of $750,000. But not without difficulty. By this time Outtier was in the latter stages of pregnancy. Raising money under these circumstances was difficult, but, she says, “it can be done. It’s tougher than ‘normal circumstances.’ It’s a bit like running a marathon, but with a fridge on your back.”

Directly taking on Google and Amazon generally seems to be an ill-advised strategy for a young startup. It’s even more complicated when you’re competing on the home assistants front, a technically complex, capital-intensive future platform into which both tech giants have dumped substantial sums.

Over the past few years, the small smart home startup Josh.ai has attempted to do just that, capitalizing on public distrust of the big voice platforms to sell an intelligent assistant to users weary of sticking a Google or Amazon-owned microphone in their homes. The company has built its business catering to customers seeking professionally installed pricey outfits in their home, costing upwards of $10,000 on the high end.

The company just secured its largest funding round to date, an $11 million Series A round, which brings the startup’s total funding to $22 million. A spokesperson for Josh.ai said their investors have asked not to be named, though he confirmed the round was led by corporate investors.

For people with an Echo Dot or Google Mini in their home, Josh.ai’s approach feels familiar. The platform boasts a number of third-party integrations, so you can use the platform to switch off lights, turn on devices, play music and answer some simple commands. Basically, the bulk of home-centric commands popular on Google Assistant and Alexa.

The startup recently introduced Josh Micro, its own take on the Echo Dot. It has a futuristic vibe and, because it’s installed by professionals, users are privy to a sleek look with wires neatly tucked away inside walls. CEO Alex Capecelatro says their competitors in the professionally installed space have been pushing wall-mounted screens with UIs that often aren’t updated and don’t age well. He hopes their more low-key display-free devices can keep less focus on the hardware and more attention on their software.

“Our philosophy is that you shouldn’t be talking to a puck, it should feel fully immersive,” he says.

Capecelatro had originally seen the best path to existing alongside Google and Amazon as working with them and leveraging their platforms, but he soon found that not working with them proved to be the startup’s biggest asset.

“In terms of direction, what became really clear in the past three years was the importance of privacy,” Capecelatro told TechCrunch. “A lot of our clients are just people who care about their privacy; it’s part of every conversation.”

On the tech side, Capecelatro says the startup’s platform is designed around its own natural language processing stack, so most voice requests can be processed locally, though the startup does leverage tech built by Google and Microsoft to handle speech-to-text processes. While the company uses anonymized data to improve its services, the startup has also introduced specific software features to keep privacy-focused users satisfied including their own take on a smart home incognito mode.

There are few silver bullets in smart home tech, and robust third-party support often leaves room for uncertainty, which in Josh’s case can mean the difference between lights turning on or staying off. Capecelatro says ensuring smooth compatibility with supported devices has been a pretty big focus for their engineering team.

“The more things we work with, the more things we have to QA and the more things that could be impacted,” he says.

While Capecelatro says that around 80-85% of their business goes to single-family homes, he says the startup is starting to find business in commercial sectors, outfitting hotels and condo buildings.

“The reality is we’ve found that the professional installed space is a really big market that the consumer companies don’t really think about,” Capecelatro says. “I think for us the likely future is that we’ll focus on areas where you have a professional installer in a non-residential arena.”

The company says the pandemic has actually given their business a bump, with April being their best month of sales to date as homeowners stuck in their houses look to finally act on long-considered home improvement projects.

According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, 70% of media buyers are planning to change their advertising spending plans due to the coronavirus. Advertising giants like Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)...

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When California announced a statewide lockdown, Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven decided to stay put instead of heading home to Amsterdam.

So, the co-founders of Plantible bought two trailers and started living at their HQ: a two-acre duckweed farm in San Diego.

Plantible uses duckweed, a tiny aquatic leaf, to extract a plant-based protein ingredient that will eventually allow food companies to make animal-based products into plant-based products. The offering would be attractive to companies that make baked goods or protein powder, and thus use lots of egg whites as part of their creation process.

The startup is selling a whey or dairy protein replacement, and is still working on FDA approval.

“We are firm believers that whatever is in nature should be sufficient to provide humanity the ingredients they need,” said Martens from the office trailer.

The startup recently did a series of trials with companies, and Martens says that Plantible validated it can be a replacement with baking ingredient companies and plant-based meat sellers. But the startup is not limited to current use cases.

“If the sector we had our eyes on is taking a while, but sports nutrition is taking off really fast, we’ll go there,” said Martens. “We need to prove the feasibility of our company.”

Plantible is entering a crowded space. Recently, aquafaba, the liquid made from a can of chickpeas, has regained popularity amid other quarantine cooking hacks. Martens says that aquafaba might recreate foaminess, but it doesn’t recreate gelation (or the sizzle and fry look that comes when you pour a real egg white into a hot pan). Plantible claims to offer an egg-white replacement with no compromises on texture or nutrition.

The startup also has some increasingly well-funded alternative protein competitors. Plantible’s closest venture-backed competitors are Clara Foods and FUMI Ingredients, as both try to create egg-white replacements. Clara Foods uses yeast, instead of chickens, to make egg whites, and similarly sells to businesses that use egg whites in large quantities for items like macaroons, angel food cake and protein powders. It has the backing of Ingredion, a global ingredients solution company.

Plantible needs to have a faster, cheaper and more scalable operation to beat its competitors. From a supply perspective, Plantible is in a good place. Duckweed doubles in mass every 48 hours and grows year-round. Plus, it is more digestible than pea, soy or algae, the company claims.

The real expense comes from the extraction process.

Right now, Martens admits, Plantible is “lab scale, and lab scale is really expensive.”

To bring costs down, the company just raised a $4.6 million seed round, co-led by Vectr Ventures and Lerer Hippeau. Other participants include eighteen94 Capital (Kellogg Company’s venture capital fund) and FTW Ventures.

Through the new capital, Plantible claims it will be cost-competitive with egg whites. Currently, two pounds of liquid egg whites cost $8 to $10 dollars to make and sell for $15 to $20 dollars.

“In the end it is about developing a scalable and cost-competitive supply chain that produces a desired ingredient. Since it is very hard to compete with nature, we have decided to embrace it as much as possible by identifying a highly functional and nutritional enzyme,” he said.

“The more you can leverage nature, the more scalable you become,” he said.

As with any seed-stage alternative-protein company, the proof that Plantible has legs to succeed will be in sales and capacity to produce. And it’s not quite there yet.

Figma, the design platform that lets folks work collaboratively and in the cloud, has today announced the close of a $50 million Series D financing. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, with partner Peter Levine and cofounding partner Marc Andreessen managing the deal for the firm. New angel investors, including Henry Ellenbogen from Durable Capital, also participated in the round alongside existing investors Index, Greylock, KPCB, Sequoia and Founders Fund.

Forbes reports that the latest funding round values Figma at $2 billion.

Dylan Field, Figma founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that discussions between a16z and Figma actually began towards the end of the fundraising cycle for the company’s Series C, which closed in February of 2019.

“It felt a bit like a shotgun wedding,” said Field, explaining that both parties instead opted to get to know each other better. They’ve been building their relationship over the past year, leading to today’s Series D close. Field also added that he has not met other investors in this round in person, and the vast majority of the deal was done over Zoom.

“When you think about the future of Silicon Valley, there is an interesting question around capital infrastructure being here and people not being able to access that if they’re not here, too,” said Field. “I got to see firsthand how a deal done online can work and I think more and more investors aren’t going to worry about whether you’re in Silicon Valley or not.”

Figma launched in 2015 after nearly six years of development in stealth. The premise was to create a collaborative, cloud-based design tool that would be the Google Docs of design.

Since, Figma has built out the platform to expand access and usability for individual designers, small firms and giant enterprise companies alike. For example, the company launched plug-ins in 2019, allowing developers to build in their own tools to the app, such as a plug-in for designers to automatically rename and organize their layers as they work (Rename.it) and one that gives users the ability to add placeholder text that they can automatically find and replace later (Content Buddy).

The company also launched an educational platform called Community, which gives designers the ability to share their work and let other users ‘remix’ that design, or simply check out how it was built, layer by layer.

A spokesperson told TechCrunch that this deal was “opportunistic,” and that the company was in a strong cash position pre-financing. The new funding expands Figma’s runway during these uncertain times, with coronavirus halting a lot of enterprise purchasing and ultimately slowing growth of some rising enterprise players.

Field explained that Figma’s data is counter to the expected narrative around enterprise purchasing because Figma is specifically built to let teams collaborate in the cloud.

“We’re actually seeing a lot of acceleration for bigger deals on the sales side,” said Field. “Figma is a tool that can help right now.”

The company says that one interesting change they’ve seen in the COVID era is a significant jump in user engagement from teams to collaborate more in Figma. The firm has also seen an uptick in whiteboarding, note taking, slide deck creation and diagramming, as companies start using Figma as a collaborative tool across an entire organization rather than just within a team of designers.

This latest deal brings Figma’s total funding to $132.9 million. Field added that, though the company is not yet profitable, this latest financing gives the company three to four years of runway, even with aggressive scaling and hiring efforts moving forward.

When I first thought of the idea for what would become Jobber, I never could have imagined that I would one day be the CEO of a tech company with nearly 100,000 active customers in more than 45 countries. And that I would do this alongside a complete stranger who I met during a chance encounter at a coffee shop.

When you’re first thinking about starting a company, most people would either go at it alone or partner with someone they know, like a friend, family member, or former colleague. Few would consider pursuing their entrepreneurial dream with a stranger. Without proper due diligence, co-founding a company with a stranger can feel like putting a down payment on a new house without opening the front door. While this might not be the right path for everyone, it was absolutely the best move for me.

Jobber is proof that starting a company with a stranger isn’t just doable, it can even be an advantage.

Pursuing a business partnership without a prior relationship has allowed my co-founder Forrest Zeisler and I to be more honest and forthcoming with each other as we worked toward a clear, common objective from the start. The ability to arrive at big decisions and have productive debate without the baggage and bias of a preexisting relationship helped to establish Jobber’s feedback-oriented culture, which is ingrained in the DNA of the company. I attribute our company’s early success to our focus on building a strong and honest business partnership first.

For aspiring entrepreneurs looking to launch a company, I’ve identified five tips that really helped me build trust, camaraderie and mutual understanding with my co-founding partner — a partnership that can withstand intense competition and the test of time.

Start small and aim big

I didn’t know that Forrest would become my co-founder when we first met. As a self-taught developer, I was looking for more sophisticated development help on the project I was working on. During the early stages of our relationship, I would present a problem, such as technical aspects with code, and he would help me with it. Through these initial interactions, it became clear how Forrest’s mind works, and we learned that we worked really well together. At the time, I wasn’t thinking of these tasks as “tests” on compatibility, but in retrospect, they were. If you can’t overcome the small hurdles amicably and efficiently, then how do you expect to take on the big stuff? It’s not a good sign for a long-term business relationship.

Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post their work and look for work, is acquiring Creative Market, a marketplace for ready-to-use fonts, icons, illustrations, photos and other design assets.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Dribbble’s CEO Zack Onisko said in an interview. Prior to this, bootstrapped Dribbble was profitable — revenues come from its job boards, advertising and member subscriptions, kind of like a LinkedIn aimed at the design community — and it had 6 million monthly active users, with 3.5 million registered users. Adding Creative Market will bring the total number of monthly active users across the two sites to 12 million.

The acquisition is happening at a time when we’re seeing some big growth among startups that speaks to how the balance of power is shifting in the world of software aimed at designers.

Just today, Figma announced a $50 million raise at a $2 billion valuation, money that it plans to use for its own spate of acquisitions and investments in more design tools. Canva last year raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Smaller, younger startups like Frontify (which helps companies manage their design assets) have also been raising, and Dyndrite has also been raising. Meanwhile, Adobe continues to work on ways to keep its legacy products, like the 30-year-old Photoshop (look, it’s a millennial!) relevant.

Indeed, even the concept of who the target audience even is has shifted.

“We talk about designers, but really it’s creatives,” Onisko said. “A lot of creatives are multi-skilled and they work in all sorts of different mediums. The historic focus is product and web design but we’ve seen it slide into motion graphics or 3D or photography.”

This is actually the second time Creative Market has been acquired. The startup was first purchased by Autodesk in 2014, at a time when the latter was looking to widen its range of products both to take on Adobe more squarely and target more casual and prosumer users, as well as to address the wider needs of its core designer community.

That ultimately didn’t work out, and Creative Market was spun out as a startup again in 2017, with $7 million in funding led by Accomplice.

More than two years on from that, it seems that Creative Market saw the logic in coming together with another company for better economies of scale.

And perhaps this time, the acquirer is a better cultural fit. Both companies are pretty distributed and decentralised (making for a very easy transition to working under stay-at-home orders in recent weeks). And it might have helped, too, that Onisko had once previously been Creative Market’s chief growth officer before taking on the role as Dribbble’s CEO.

The plan will be to keep both companies’ brands and teams separate, with Chris Winn continuing to lead Creative Market as its CEO. Creative Market will continue to build out its marketplace of design assets, and Dribbble will continue to position itself as a place for those designers to set out their profiles and connect with those looking to hire them, as well as each other.

“We’re able to do our own thing and beat our own drums,” said Onisko, with the plan being to keep “marching on our own roadmaps.”

Over time, when the time is right, Onisko said there might be an opportunity to integrate the businesses, but that will be in the future.

One area where the two will be coming together right away is in cross-pollinating membership. Up to now, people joined Dribbble by invitation from previous members, which Onisko said was a good way of keeping growth in check and applying a kind of peer-reviewed quality control layer. Now, the idea will be that Dribbble will open up to all new users, and those who are already registered on Creative Market can automatically become members on the sister site.

“The big opportunity is that we can do in 2-3 years what we would have done in 3-5 years as separate companies,” Onisko added.

“We’re so excited to bring together two fully-distributed teams who work everyday to serve the design community,” said Winn, in a statement. “The opportunity for both companies is that much larger thanks to this partnership and I’m so excited to join forces.”

For its part, Onisko said that Dribbble has no intention of changing from its growth course when it comes to finances. The company has always been bootstrapped — that is, surviving with no outside investors — and is profitable. And there are no plans to use this moment to seek outside funding, he added. The company has been approached by interested parties — “all the usual suspects,” he said — for acquisition, Onisko said, but for now that’s also not been something the company has wanted to explore.

“We feel that we’re very much in our infancy,” Onisko said. “We have pretty big ambitions and want to march forward. We’ve talked to all the usual suspects, and we are on friendly terms and keep all the conversations going, but we will continue to stay independent and operate in our contrarian way.”

The Fund, an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund.

Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve already backed 52 New York City startups.

“The seed funds in New York have all gone upstream,” Fielding argued, making it harder for founders to get the smaller checks they need when they’re getting started. So The Fund is aiming to participate in those “first check” rounds of between $500,000 and $1.2 million.

To find those investments, Fielding and Hartley rely on a “crowdsourced” approach, taking recommendations from the startup founders they’ve recruited as limited partners in The Fund — a group that includes names like General Assembly founder Matthew Brimer, One Medical founder Tom Lee, Handy co-founder Oisin Hanrahan, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung and ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi.

At the same time, rather than relying on a “voting and consensus” process, the decisions are ultimately made by the investment committee, a smaller group that initially included Brimer, Fielding, Hartley and Katie Hunt.

The firm is targeting $9 million for the second fund, with one-third deployed in New York, another third in Los Angeles and the final third in London.

Hartley said The Fund is taking a “modular approach” to this expansion, with an independent investment committee in each city: In New York, it will be Josh Hix, Katie Shea and Becky Yang, along with Fielding and Hartley; in Los Angeles, the committee includes Raina Kumra, Josh Jones, Anna Barber and Austin Murray; and in London, it’s Carmen Alfonso Rico, Eamonn Carey and Marina Gorey.

“The big vision is, we’ve literally written the playbook,” Fielding said. “Fund one was an experiment, and now fund two is an experiment: Does this scale? After we have about a year’s worth of data about deals under our belt, we want to take it to the next level. Why shouldn’t The Funds be popping up in every city?”

And even though COVID-19 has brought a halt to large sectors of the global and domestic economy, Hartley said the firm has continued to write checks at the same pace.

“We had such conviction in the [founding] teams that it hasn’t really slowed down the cadence of our investing,” he said. “We take a long-term approach with pre-seed investing. We see this as a multi-year journey.”

Fielding added that it’s been “inspiring” and “phenomenal” to see how their existing portfolio companies have adapted to this new reality. As an example, she pointed to how rowing class startup CityRow has shifted to virtual classes.

And if you’re wondering about that name, Fielding said they were perfectly aware that calling themselves The Fund could prompt some “Who’s on first?”-style confusion.

“We wanted to make fun of ourselves a little bit,” she said. And besides, most of the good tree names were taken.

The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor.

“What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this week. “It’s not just the dot-com bust or its not just financial services. It is much more widespread. But again, as you point out, tech is in a much better position because tech is related to the things that are thriving.”

Kapor, formerly a partner at a Sand Hill Road VC firm during the dot-com bust, said it’s similar in that it’s an “enormous disruption with great uncertainty about what will be on the other side of it.”

The details, however, are very different. Assuming there will eventually be a vaccine, Kapor said he believes things will be able to get back to some sort of normal, “notwithstanding the irrecoverable disruptions of permanently-closed small businesses.”

In the two previous downturns, there was something inherently wrong with the economy, but that’s not the case right now, he added.

“The good news is that, to the extent to which the pandemic gets under control, the economy should restart,” said Kapor. “The question, though, is on what basis and do we use this as an opportunity to rethink some fundamentals. Are we actually serious about treating essential workers better, really having a safety net and paid sick leave and universal health benefits and childcare — where we can see and feel now the absence of that is hurting the people we depend on four our lives. But it is not a certainty. This is the other thing about these great disruptions. We have some agency about what happens next. And so it’s almost a cliché now, but it’s terrible to waste, you know, a crisis. Our hope is that coming out of this, as a society, we make some different decisions about how we allocate resources and what we think the baseline is that everybody is entitled to.”

But while we’re all still knee-deep in the pandemic, there are ways to ensure employers treat workers fairly and VC firms treat founders with respect and don’t take advantage of them during these vulnerable times.

Below you’ll find some more stellar insights from the duo that touch on making tough decisions to layoff or furlough employees and how to do it in an equitable way, as well as the rise of what Kapor Klein refers to as “vulture capitalists.”

Equitable layoffs

Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and partner at The Raine Group.

Existing investors Raine Ventures and Starwood Capital Group cofounder, Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht also participated in the round.

Material Bank launched in January 2019, founded by Adam I. Sandow. Its platform is meant to serve designers, architects and others who source and purchase the very building blocks of our physical world: materials.

Most architectural firms and designers have their own physical library of materials in their office, like carpet swatches, wall covering samples, tiles, and hardwoods for flooring. These libraries are nearly impossible to keep up to date — not only do styles change over time (just like clothes or anything else) but architects pull this or that binder of wall coverings or carpets and there’s no telling if or when that binder returns to the library, or if the binder will still be complete when it does return.

The other big obstacle for designers and architects is that there’s no real aggregation across the many, many manufacturers of these materials.

Sandow likens it to searching for a flight in the old days.

“We all used to book airline travel through an agent, and then the airlines offered websites,” said Sandow. “We thought ‘this is great! I can just go to AA.com or Delta.com to book my flights.’ Until we wanted to price shop. Then you had to search four or five different websites and write down all the prices and by the time you found the price you wanted, it may be gone.”

Then came Expedia and Hotwire.

That’s how Sandow thinks of Material Bank for the architectural industry.

Material Bank aggregates materials across hundreds of vendors, giving users the ability to filter around multiple parameters to find a selection of materials in minutes instead of hours.

But aggregation and powerful search are only half the battle. Designers and architects are also burdened by the time it takes to get their samples. One package may arrive tomorrow, with two others in the next three days, and still more coming in one week.

This leads to a confusing experience of getting all these samples together to show a client, and is a huge environmental waste with dozens of boxes arriving at the same exact location over several days.

To combat this waste, Material Bank built a facility in Memphis directly next door to FedEx’s sorting center. This facility is the very last stop that FedEx makes each night before sorting and sending off its overnight packages by plane.

That means that Material Bank users can place an order by midnight EST and get their samples, from any vendor on Material Bank, by 10am ET the next morning. These samples come in a single box with a tray that can be repurposed into a return package to send back unneeded samples.

Obviously, Material Bank’s facility would require hundreds of workers to turn around orders that come in late to be picked up by FedEx if it weren’t for advancements in robotics. Material Bank partners with Locus Robotics in its facility, and is thus able to pay $17.50 an hour to its human workers in the building.

Sandow says that coronavirus has not hampered the business at all, with the company seeing record revenues in March and with expectations to beat that record in April. That is partially due to the fact that those physical sample libraries in architectural and design firms are no longer accessible to employees who have had to shift to working from home.

Material Bank doesn’t charge architects or designers for the service, but does have a hybrid SaaS model in place for manufacturers and vendors on the platform. Manufacturers pay a monthly fee to access and use the platform, listing their SKUs, as well as a transactional fee to get access to the architects and designers placing orders for samples of their materials. Essentially, the manufacturers pay for the lead generation and hand-off to potential customers.

Sandow spent the last two decades growing a media network of architectural and design-focused magazines and knew early on that a reliance on advertising wouldn’t cut it as media moved online, with plans to build tools and services instead.

Material Bank was born out of that effort, and spun out of Sandow group relatively early on in its life.

The company has raised a total of $55 million since inception.

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy of the diagnostic product? Ritesh Agarwal: They’re mostly in B2C. They’re selling the kit on Amazon or through their website. They want to go into...

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Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some big fundraises, but esports wasn’t the hot new thing in the tech world anymore.

This unexpected, compulsory work-from-home era may drive renewed interest in the space, however, as a larger market of consumers discover esports and more potential entrepreneurs identify pain points in their experience.

To track where new startups could arise this year, I asked seven VCs who pay close attention to the esports market where they see opportunities at the moment:

Their responses are below.

This is the second investor survey I’ve conducted to better understand VCs’ views on gaming startups amid the pandemic; they complement my broader gaming survey from October 2019 and an eight-article series on virtual worlds I wrote last month. If you missed it, read the previous survey, which investigated the trend of “games as the new social networks”.

Peter Levin, Griffin Gaming Partners

Which specific areas within esports are most interesting to you right now as a VC looking for deals? Which areas are the least interesting territory for new deals?

Everything around competitive gaming is of interest to us. With Twitch streaming north of two BILLION hours of game play thus far during the pandemic, this continues to be an area of great interest to us. Fantasy, real-time wagering, match-making, backend infrastructure and other areas of ‘picks and shovels’-like plays remain front burner for us relative to competitive gaming.

What challenges does the esports ecosystem now need solutions to that didn’t exist (or weren’t a focus) 2 years ago?

As competitive gaming is still so very new with respect to the greater competitive landscape of content, teams and events, the Industry should be nimble enough to better respond to dramatic market shifts relative to its analog, linear brethren. A native digital industry, getting back “online’”will be orders of magnitude more straightforward than in so many other areas.

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

Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in Q1 was pretty good, though there was weakness in certain startup stages. Exit data was weak, however, and some Q1 numbers were juiced by a single deal.

AI-focused startups have grown past their history as the hot new thing (remember when every new tech company was doing AI for 45 minutes?) into a more mature niche; TechCrunch has spent a reasonable amount of time digging into their economics, and just this week a new, $180 million AI-focused fund caught our attention.

In the post-hype days, then, let’s check in on what global AI startups got done with investors in Q1. We’re leaning on this report from CB Insights, which breaks down the quarter’s numbers for us. Let’s pick them apart and see what we can divine concerning the future.

AI Q1 2020

To set the stage, venture capital investment into AI-focused startups has generally risen on a global basis for years. Indeed, deal and dollar totals have risen year-over-year from 2015 through 2019. Indeed, 2019’s Q2 and Q3 saw record AI startup venture dollar volume ($8.45 and $8.47 billion, respectively), per CB Insights .