Year: 2018

Ford will spend the next four years transforming at least 1.2 million square feet of space in Corktown—Detroit’s oldest neighborhood—into a hub for its electric and autonomous vehicles businesses.

But the automaker’s ultimate aim goes beyond just building a new campus. The goal is to create a “mobility corridor,”—Ford’s version of its own Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley—that ties hubs of research, testing, and development in the academic hub of Ann Arbor to Ford’s Dearborn headquarters, and finally to Detroit.

Ford, which is celebrating its 115th anniversary this week, announced plans to house 2,500 Ford employees, most from its emerging mobility team, in its new Corktown campus by 2022. The new campus will have space to a accommodate 2,500 additional employees of partners and other businesses. The remaining 300,000 square feet will serve as a mix of community and retail space, and residential housing.

The Corktown campus is where Ford will develop autonomous and electric vehicle businesses as well as what CEO Jim Hackett describes as a new transportation operating system designed to make moving from Point A to Point B easier and accessible. The idea is for this transportation operating system to tie all forms of mobility together, including smart, connected vehicles, roads, parking and public transit will be tied together.

You might remember that Ford announced in January plans to develop an open cloud-based platform for cities to use to manage all the disparate transportation modes (as well as data) happening at any given time. The idea is for the platform to help cities optimize their various modes of transit and provide a way for everything in the city such as stoplights, signs, and even bikes to speak to each other and share information.

The centerpiece of the new Corktown campus will be the long-abandoned Michigan Central Station, which Ford acquired.

Ford hasn’t forgotten about its main campus in Dearborn, Hackett emphasized during an event Tuesday in front of the Michigan Central Station.

“Our plans for Corktown won’t compete or won’t replace our campus in Dearborn,” Hackett said. “It’s actually one whole system.”

And while Hackett noted that Corktown and the acquisition of the Michigan Central Station is “great real estate” and a “great investment,” it’s not what drove Ford to make the investment.

“It helps us fast track our transformation,” Hackett explained.

The company says it’s still working on the redesign of its Dearborn campus that started in 2016. This will continue in parallel with the Corktown campus development. This summer the 150,000-square-foot Wagner Place development in West Dearborn is on track to open, as is a new driving dynamics lab located on Ford’s Product Development Campus.

The acquisition of Michigan Central Station follows the automaker’s purchase of the former Detroit Public Schools Book Depository, two acres of vacant land, the site of an old brass factory and the recent purchase of a refurbished former factory in Corktown.

The Ford Motor Company now owns one of Detroit’s iconic buildings in the Michigan Central Station. The monumental building looms over Detroit’s oldest neighborhood. It’s long been a symbol of Detroit’s decay, and now it could become the symbol of Detroit’s revival, and Ford’s along with it. The building is set to become the anchor of Ford’s 1.2 million-square-foot campus in the Detroit neighborhood.

The Michigan Central Station will house more than just Ford employees, though. The auto company says it will be a mixed-use facility with facilities for up to 5,000 office workers and space for shops, restaurants and maybe even residential housing.

Ford has a substantial undertaking before employees and businesses move into the building. The Michigan Central Station is nearly literally a shell of its former self.

The station was built in 1913 by the same firm responsible for New York’s Grand Central Terminal. In its day, the 21-story building stood proudly with marble floors under an arched 65-foot ceiling. It was the tallest train station in the world when its colossal bronze doors first opened to the public.

Since its closure in the ’80s the building sat empty, eventually losing nearly everything to looters and nature. The windows disappeared, graffiti covers much of the brickwork, and the ornamental ceiling is crumbling. Barbed-wire fence eventually encircled the structure, attempting to keep people out. But they don’t. The lure of the station is too strong.

Detroit, The Mobility City

The Michigan Central Station is set to be the center of a large Ford campus centered around forward-looking automotive technology research and design. Ford sees 2,500 employees occupying the buildings by 2022. The focus is on the future of mobility including electric and autonomous vehicles, and everything from connected vehicles to roads and parking.

Ford held a large event today announcing its intentions for the campus and Michigan Central Station. CEO Jim Hackett points to the advancing revolution where, as he says, artificial intelligence and big data that will be even more disruptive than the industrial revolution.

“What Rouge was to Ford in the industrial age, Corktown can be for Ford in the information age,” said Ford President and CEO Jim Hackett said in a released statement. “It will be the proving ground where Ford and our partners design and test the services and solutions for the way people are going to live and get around tomorrow, creating a Southeast Michigan mobility corridor that spans west from Dearborn to Ann Arbor, and east to Detroit.”

The plan calls for Ford to occupy at least three buildings in the area as part of a mobility corridor Ford intends to build spanning Detroit to Ann Arbor to Ford’s home in Dearborn, Michigan. Ford says it will redesign its Dearborn campus alongside Corktown campus.

Hackett was clear on this point: The plans for the Corktown campus will not compete or replace Ford’s Dearborn campus. He stressed that it’s part of the same system.

“It’s actually one whole system,” Hackett said. “In fact, if anything it guarantees the future of Dearborn. Our Dearborn redesign [and] our Corktown revitalization are just steps in the strategy to keep moving forward.”

Ford largely operates outside the city of Detroit. The company’s headquarters, main development operations and Ford River Rouge Complex are located in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn. This move into Corktown is more than symbolic; it’s significant.

The big three automakers, along with countless automotive suppliers located in Michigan, are increasingly fighting with Silicon Valley for talent. Rightfully so, prospective employees are looking for employers that can offer a compelling work/life balance, with that, comes the place of employment. I’ve been through Ford’s Dearborn’s facilities. From an outsider’s perspective, some of these facilities feel like an aging office complex that could crush your soul at any moment.

Silicon Valley offers engineering talent a unique opportunity previously largely unavailable for such jobs. It’s likely why GM let its self-driving startup, Cruise, continue to operate in the Bay Area.

Moving engineering teams into a Corktown campus will place these employees in the middle of a historic city on the upswing. By the time Ford moves employees into the facility by 2022, Corktown should be packed with upstart restaurants, bars and shops, ready to take the money of Ford engineers.

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From Trains to Self-Driving Cars

The Detroit News explains how the deal unfolded. Along the way, the structure was inspected and deemed sound enough for redevelopment. Apparently since concrete encases the steel girders, the structure of the building has fared better than its ornamental adornments.

The station was in a state of decay before the last Amtrak train left the station in 1988 and was never an overwhelming success on its own. The station is located outside of the downtown core and relied on Detroit’s trolleys to bring riders to the station. The station also lacked a large parking facility, which became problematic after the rise of the automobile caused the trolley system to age and shut down.

The station’s interior is stunning even in its decayed state. The general waiting room reminds of a Roman bathhouse with soaring arched ceilings covered in Guastavino tile that speak to Detroit’s glorious past. Light pours through the tall windows and glass ceiling. Pillars are throughout the lobby. The arches continue in a lovely arcade that once housed shops and service stalls.

Space for 500 offices occupied the floors above the station, though the top floor of the station remained unfinished and unused through the building’s history.

The station lacked windows for years and nature did its best to reclaim the station. Water damage is visible everywhere. Tiles are falling off the arches, revealing the terra cotta backing. Stagnant water is found throughout the lower levels.

Historic Detroit states ridership peaked following World War 1 with 200 trains leaving the station daily but started to dwindle quickly in the 1950s. Amtrak took over the station from the bankrupt Penn Central in 1971, the year it was founded. The corporation spent $1 million updating the station but couldn’t save it, and the last train departed the station in 1988 heading to Chicago.

The year Amtrak unveiled the updated station, the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places. This designation didn’t increase riders, but it did save the building from being demolished after Amtrak moved out.

Since its closure, the building has traded hands several times with each owner unveiling grand plans for the building: a casino and hotel, a rail yard, an international trade center, even a police station.

The Moroun family purchased the building in 1992 and left it untouched until just a few years ago when it started landscaping the park in front of the station. The family then installed windows throughout the building. It’s unclear if this was to prepare the building for sale or other purposes.

The station sits just blocks from the former Tiger Stadium that was built in 1911 and torn down in 2008. It’s a mostly residential neighborhood, sitting just outside the downtown area. Corktown has yet to see the redevelopment boom found elsewhere in Detroit.

Though not ideal when the Michigan Central Station was built, its location is likely what brought Ford to the table. The area has easy access to major highways and is just far enough away from downtown Detroit to mostly avoid the traffic congestion. Real estate opportunities seem ample, too.

Amazon turned down Detroit

Last year Detroit enlisted the help of real estate mogul Dan Gilbert to help win Amazon’s bid for a second headquarters. It didn’t work out. The city of Detroit and State of Michigan reportedly offered Amazon a massive tax incentive but Amazon didn’t take the bait. The deal would have changed Detroit, but not necessarily for the better. Had Amazon picked Detroit, the city would have had to adjust physically and mentally to handle the supposed increase of 30,000 workers within the city limit.

Ford seems like a good fit for today’s Detroit. The company is restoring an eyesore and essentially extending the border of the downtown area. Instead of adding tens of thousands of workers like Amazon would, Ford is adding thousands of workers. The streets will get a bit more crowded, but not overwhelmed.

The area lacks a lot of the infrastructure needed for an Amazon-sized workforce. Public transportation is limited to a couple of short lines, and some suburban leaders are fighting their expansion. Parking is hard to come by and there’s a housing crunch in the downtown core. The roads are a mess and traffic congestion is getting worse. Ford’s campus, located outside the downtown areas, should avoid some of those challenges — besides the terrible roads.

This deal puts Ford back in Detroit 22 years after it sold the Renaissance Center to General Motors. Even though it’s early, Ford’s return to Detroit could prove to be as pivotal to Detroit’s future as when Dan Gilbert moved Quicken Loans downtown in 2010. Gilbert largely kickstarted Detroit’s revitalization by filling unused office space with Quicken Loans employees, but also buying up blocks of the city and convincing retailers and corporations to move downtown. It worked, and downtown Detroit in 2018 is a much different place than it was in 2008.

Questions still remain about the purchase of the Michigan Central Station. How much did Ford purchase the building for and what sort of tax incentives were offered to the auto maker and Moroun family? Will I ever be able to get a table at Slow’s BBQ again?

PAX Labs, makers of the popular PAX 3 and PAX Era vaporizers, have today updated their app to offer a new feature called Session Control.

The idea here is based around the fact that people can sometimes overindulge when using a vaporizer for the first time, as the effects of cannabis oil can take a minute or two to kick in, leading people to continue puffing.

With Session Control, users can control their intake by selecting micro, small or medium puffs. Once the user has maxed out their session by puffing, the PAX Era will lock for 30 seconds, stopping users from overdoing it.

PAX launched an app called PAX Mobile in 2017 to give vape users even more control over their experience. From temperature control to different color schemes, the PAX Mobile app lets users fiddle with the PAX 3 or PAX Era on the fly.

While temperature control makes sense for more experienced users, Session Control lets newer users control their intake without making the process overly complicated.

“We want the tech to get out of the way,” said PAX Labs CEO Bharat Vassan. “A big part of what we want to do is to not have people staring at their phone. That’s why we use firmware so that the device updates itself. This way, users can set it and forget it.”

Session Control is available for the PAX Era, which vaporizes oil, and Vassan said they’re thinking of ways to introduce something similar with the PAX 3, which is a floral vaporizer.

Paperless Post, the design-first invitations service, has today announced the launch of a new product called Flyer.

Flyer is meant to be a more lightweight invitation, for events like a BBQ or a casual birthday as opposed to a formal event.

The idea started when Paperless Post founder and CEO James Hirschfeld realized there were certain events in his life where he still wasn’t using Paperless Post, despite the fact that he founded the company.

“Even though Paperless is my baby and I love it, there were still moments in the year or in life or as a business or as a consumer where it doesn’t make sense to send something formal,” said Hirschfeld. “You don’t want to pay or you don’t want to labor over an invite.”

That’s where Flyer comes in.

Flyer is designed around Vibes, which are curated sets of images, GIFs, colors, layouts and text animations that aim to capture the vibe of your shindig. These pieces can be mixed and matched to convey exactly what the user is intending and no more.

Flyer was also built mobile first. Remember, Paperless Post launched in a desktop world back in 2009, and has worked to make the more formal Cards product a mobile friendly experience. With Flyer, the company started with mobile given the lightweight nature of the product itself.

One other key feature of Flyer is that it’s not necessarily an email product. While Paperless Post Cards require an email address to send and receive, Flyer simply opts for a web address, letting users send via text, post on social media, send via email, or send through another messaging client.

Flyer launches with six different vibes, and will be offered as a free product. That said, Hirschfeld sees the opportunity to layer in premium features and Vibes to the Flyer product in the future.

Paperless Post has raised just under $50 million with lead investors including RRE and August Capital.

Since Google Hire launched last year it has been trying to make it easier for hiring managers to manage the data and tasks associated with the hiring process, while maybe tweaking LinkedIn while they’re at it. Today the company announced some AI-infused enhancements that they say will help save time and energy spent on manual processes.

“By incorporating Google AI, Hire now reduces repetitive, time-consuming tasks, like scheduling interviews into one-click interactions. This means hiring teams can spend less time with logistics and more time connecting with people,” Google’s Berit Hoffmann, Hire product manager wrote in a blog post announcing the new features.

The first piece involves making it easier and faster to schedule interviews with candidates. This is a multi-step activity that involves scheduling appropriate interviewers, choosing a time and date that works for all parties involved in the interview and scheduling a room in which to conduct the interview. Organizing these kind of logistics tend to eat up a lot of time.

“To streamline this process, Hire now uses AI to automatically suggest interviewers and ideal time slots, reducing interview scheduling to a few clicks,” Hoffmann wrote.

Another common hiring chore is finding keywords in a resume. Hire’s AI now finds these words for a recruiter automatically by analysing terms in a job description or search query and highlighting relevant words including synonyms and acronyms in a resume to save time spent manually searching for them.

Finally, another standard part of the hiring process is making phone calls, lots of phone calls. To make this easier, the latest version of Google Hire has a new click-to-call function. Simply click the phone number and it dials automatically and registers the call in call a log for easy recall or auditing.

While Microsoft has LinkedIn and Office 365, Google has G Suite and Google Hire. The strategy behind Hire is to allow hiring personnel to work in the G Suite tools they are immersed in every day and incorporate Hire functionality within those tools.

It’s not unlike CRM tools that integrate with Outlook or GMail because that’s where sales people spend a good deal of their time anyway. The idea is to reduce the time spent switching between tools and make the process a more integrated experience.

While none of these features individually will necessarily wow you, they are making use of Google AI to simplify common tasks to reduce some of the tedium associated with every-day hiring tasks.

Beauty startup Memebox is relaunching its United States e-commerce business, about one year after putting it on hold to focus on building a review and community platform. Beginning today, the company will sell its in-house brands, I Dew care and Nooni, through the site before adding makeup line Pony Effect next month. Memebox, which is based in San Francisco and has raised about $160 million in funding so far, also announced a partnership with beauty retail giant Sephora to launch a new cosmetic line this fall.

The Y Combinator alum’s online retail business has continued operating in Asian markets including South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Founder and CEO Dino Ha told TechCrunch they decided that increased consumer awareness about Asian beauty brands in the United States meant it was the right time to relaunch there. Memebox’s last round of funding was its Series C in 2016, which included participation from Goodwater Capital, Cowboy Ventures and Formation Group.

One of Memebox’s advantages over other beauty brands is its short development cycle, which product manager Danielle Zhu says is about six months, compared to the 18 months or so that it typically takes to create a new cosmetic or skincare product. Memebox is able to do this because of data about skin types, preferences and trends generated by its five million monthly active users.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Zhu and Ha said the company will continue building the U.S. site’s community feature with an affiliate program called Insider Access. Called ambassadors, affiliates create a customized profile with reviews, videos and recommended products, and receive a percentage of sales made through their page. Memebox has had a close relationship with social media influencers since its inception: Pony Effects is a collaboration with Hye-Min Park, one of Korea’s most popular beauty vloggers.

Founded in 2012 as a subscription box service, Memebox began expanding into the U.S. two years later. At that time, it was one of a handful of stores selling Asian skincare and beauty products to American consumers and gained a following among people who didn’t want to order directly from Asian sites, but were wary of third-party vendors on Amazon and eBay. In 2017, however, Memebox halted its U.S. e-commerce platform and instead began directing users to other e-commerce sites through affiliate links (the company will continue its affiliate partnerships for products from non-Memebox brands).

Ha says one of the reasons Memebox decided to focus on building a community was because the company had to do a lot of consumer education when it first expanded outside of Asia. Korean brands like Laneige, CosRX and Dr. Jart are now sold in Sephora, Ulta and Target, but back when Memebox originally launched its U.S. e-commerce business, Asian beauty was still a relatively niche market driven in large part by Asian American bloggers and YouTubers.

The company realized that building a community where members shared product information dramatically increased Memebox’s user engagement to 25 minutes, up from about just three minutes when it was an e-commerce site. (The site also allows users to add items from any brand to its database of reviews, which already includes 8,000 products).

The beauty industry has also changed a lot over the last couple of years. While smaller than Memebox, e-commerce sites like Soko Glam and Glow Recipe have become successful selling Asian beauty products to American consumers. Meanwhile, beauty startups like Glossier, The Ordinary and Drunk Elephant have built loyal followings thanks to social media marketing, but also because they promise more transparency about ingredients and sourcing than many of their longer-established competitors.

While luxury beauty brands like Estee Lauder and Lancome produce splashy marketing campaigns to sell toners and moisturizers, many younger consumers turn to communities like the Asian Beauty subreddit to research ingredients and create multi-step skincare routines (Asian skincare users tend to eschew brand loyalty in favor of combining products from several companies).

One of the ways in which Memebox differentiates from other beauty companies is its focus on data, which is collected from its site to forecast trends and shorten development cycles for brands created in-house and by its partners. For example, the site’s data inspired the launch of Memebox’s clay and peel-off masks, even though sheet masks are much more ubiquitous in Asian skincare. The site also used to include a discovery engine that let people search by ingredient. Ha says it will relaunch soon, with added education features, since many Asian beauty fans are also obsessed with learning about the science behind actives like Vitamin C and retinoids.

While the growing popularity of Asian skincare brands have helped many users feel empowered to fight acne and other dermatological issues, it’s also raised questions about inclusion. Many makeup brands from Korea and other Asian countries have a limited range of foundation shades, while their skin products emphasize “brightening” and other euphemisms for paleness. In other words, much of the marketing is targeted to very light-skinned women, which obviously excludes many potential users, especially black and Latinx people. Zhu says Memebox wants to help fix that by finding a diverse group of ambassadors to reach new customers.

“We really look to diversity in our influencer network,” she says. “We have females, males, different ethnic backgrounds.” She points to one of Memebox’s ambassadors, Tristian Kho, as an example of the people they want to sign up. “He’s obviously male, he’s doing makeup and I think that’s why it’s important for him to show it,” Zhu says, adding that “he definitely isn’t one of the majority in the U.S. market. It’s powerful to represent diversity and we want to foster that.”

When Redpoint’s partners handed hims CEO Andrew Dudum the term sheet for the company’s early financing round, one of the most surprising part of that whole process was that the investment partners had actually figured out the font that the company used — and printed out the term sheet with that font.

“I have no idea how they even found it,” Dudum said. “I’ve obviously known these guys a long time. There’s this foundation of trust there, they were able to motivate the entire Redpoint partnership in 18 hours from a meeting at 6 p.m. at night on, like, a Thursday. We got a call that night an hour later saying, ‘are you free at 11 a.m. tomorrow morning,’ and the entire partnership showed up at our office, and they did what I’ve never seen done before which was present the term sheet right there on the spot that was printed on the Hims branded peach color with the Hims branded font.”

That’s because Redpoint today, Dudum says, is staffed up with operators that just better understand those ins-and-outs because they have the actual experience. The firm brought in former Uber Freight operator and former CRV partner Annie Kadavy in April. Alex Bard joined last year after running email marketing startup Campaign Monitor and previously serving as an EVP and GM at Salesforce. It’s that fresh blood and team of partners that come from a history of running strategic elements of companies that will be responsible for Redpoint’s seventh fund, a new $400 million fund the firm has wrapped up as it looks to continue hunting down early-stage investments like the ones it has in Hims, Looker, Zuora and others. Redpoint says this is all part of a generational hand-off — a process each firm has to go through at some point — and hand off the fund to a new set of faces.

In the past decade, venture firms have found themselves looking for new younger partners — especially more diverse ones (the percentage of women partners hovers at around 8%) — as a way to not only widen the scope of the areas they understand, but also just have a more diverse set of partners that founders can relate to. That’s especially true as consumer trends rapidly shift and become considerably more arcane, especially with partners that have a lot of experience working with the Twitters and Facebooks of the world but might have missed out on next-generation consumer applications like Snap. But it’s also true for even enterprise products as consumer behavior and usage rapidly shifts over time.

“There’s speed, there’s conviction, and there’s relationships,” Redpoint partner Satish Dharmaraj said. “You want the younger partners who can feel the market and build relationships before the deal is done and be able to relate to those founders. That’s what younger partners bring — building those relationships early, hustling before everyone else. For Redpoint [fund] 7, none of the founders are involved in the fund, but they’re always there to support us and give us advice and help us think through issues.”

The whole process of running Redpoint, too, sometimes feels like a quasi-operating role, Brandless CEO Tina Sharkey said. Redpoint now has monthly all-hands stand-ups, a common feature of many startups to discuss what’s happening and where the business is going. Redpoint partners will often hop in and out of roles that a company might need at a time before they’re able to hire the right spot. Redpoint’s partners are expected to be ready to step in with their own experience where necessary, or help connect them with the right people who have that experience, or help hunt down the talent that they need.

“It’s just a very different sort of environment [today] when talking to other founders and operators,” Bard said. “A big part of the attraction was they’d been there and done that, versus just having academic experience. There’s more capital than there’s ever been, but founders are looking for people who can build businesses who have been there and done that.”

That doesn’t just end with talking about the ins and outs of a company. Investors, who are talking a little more publicly about it these days, also seek to serve as sounding boards for founders when crap hits the fan. Kadavy, Bard, and others have to serve as a kind of voice of reason when they get a call late on a Saturday night from a founder freaking out after some huge deal fell through or a business came to a complete halt, and talk them through that whole process based on their experiences — just be there to listen. At a time when mental health becomes a critical focus in the tech world, that’s essentially turned into a part of the job for any venture partner. Dharmaraj said the job is to stress to founders that it’s a marathon, not a sprint, and to not quickly get burnt out.

“I have a text me any time, call me any time policy,” Kadavy said. “It is wildly tumultuous and can be very quickly becoming very lonely. I know having been one myself, and having lots my friends who are founders. You’re completely captured by your company and employees, or product market fit, or investors, and your aperture isn’t necessarily wide enough to have an idea of what you’re doing. The problems are almost always solvable problems, which therein makes people feel better. We might not know the answer, but you have an inkling that you can do something. I like to go on walks with founders that are outside of South Park (where Redpoint is located), to get out and see what else is out there.”

For Dudum and Sharkley, the backstory is pretty similar — they both got to know Redpoint partners very early on before they ended up as investors in Hims and Brandless. Sharkley met Redpoint partner Jeff Brody through the process of becoming a board member at HomeAway, while Dudum met Tomasz Tunguz at around age 20 because he liked his writing. They both got to know both founders over the course of many years and kept in constant communication with the firm. Dudum said when Redpoint turned down an investment in one of his companies, partner Ryan Sarver personally went to his office, printed out a memo with all the reasons they didn’t invest, and walked through every point with him. Bard, one of Redpoint’s new partners, handled Redpoint’s later investment in Hims.

“It comes back to a hunger and willingness to roll up their sleeves and move fast and help,” Dudum said. “This is kind of something I’ve thought about a lot in the last few years. Often, help as a VC isn’t super glamorous. It’s not some crazy strategic introduction, or one of those once-a-year type things. It’s actually doing things like energizing the founder when it’s been a tough week. Or it’s getting into the dirty of helping source candidates for a specific role that we’re really trying to fill. It’s things like these that are actually really tedious [but the most important]. These guys that I worked with are willing to do that and make an extra effort to do that.”

In the end, that generational transition will still probably be a tough one. Redpoint has to differentiate itself as a firm that can provide something that gives startups an edge over just going to another firm, especially as the size of funds — and valuations in even early financing rounds — explode. More and more money is flowing into fewer and fewer deals, and founders have gotten considerably more savvy in figuring out where to look for those investments. Kadavy, Bard, and the rest of the team are tasked with sourcing those best deals and ensuring that they can at least get the attention of founders early on even if they aren’t going to invest in them right away. But getting there in the middle of that transition is one of the things that got Kadavy excited to join Redpoint in the first place.

“I think most venture firms are talking about being in a generational transition and in our different stages, they’re actually taking action or just talking about it,” Kadavy said. “Generational transitions take at least two funds, so that’s conservatively six years or longer. It’s easy for people to talk about it for a long time but not actually happen. When I was at CRV, a fund that’s been around for 45 years, I learned a lot about how generation transitions can go quite well. They’ve been successful over many decades. I honestly believe having talked to many other firms and many friends, Redpoint is at the most unique point in time based on where they truly are in their generational transition.”

Alexa’s slow but steady march across the glob continues, as Amazon gets ready to bring the smart assistant to Italy and Spain later this year. The AI will be joined by the company’s own Echo devices, along with with third-party hardware from Bose and Sonos.

In the meantime, the Amazon’s opening the Alexa Skills Kit to developers in those countries. It’s also making the Alexa Voice Service developer preview available to hardware developers looking to build third-party devices using the assistant and throwing in an Echo device to the first 100 devs for good measure.

Just this month, the company added nearby France to the list of Alexa/Echo markets, joining the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Australia, India, New Zealand, Germany, Japan and Ireland. That manner of roll out takes time. In addition to priming the pump for developers, Alexa needs to be tweaked to learn not only a new language, but also accents, subtle linguistic nuances and local customs.

No word yet on the specific timeframe for launch, or which devices are coming to the aforementioned countries. France, for its part, got the Echo, Echo Dot and Echo Spot. Google meanwhile, has already added Italian support for Assistant and announced Home availability for Spain at I/O, along with Denmark, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden.

GOAT, the secondary marketplace for sneakers that recently merged with Flight Club, is announcing a new hire. Lizzie Francis will join the company as Chief Operating Officer, coming from Brilliant Ventures where she will remain a managing partner.

Francis formerly acted as CMO at Gilt Group and CMO at JustFab.com. She’s been running Brilliant for a couple of years after founding it with Kara Weber. She also serves on the board of Shoes of Prey, a custom shoe company currently aimed at the women’s market. Now she’s taking an ops position at one of the biggest players in the sneaker market.

Along with StockX, GOAT has brought a huge amount of access and pricing transparency to resale sneakers, a billion-plus market. GOAT currently has over 7 million members, 300 employees, 100,000 combined sellers and 400,000 sneaker listings. After merging with the powerhouse retailer, it now has the two Flight Club retail stores in Los Angeles and New York.

GOAT CEO Eddy Liu says Francis had the cross-section of experience they needed in the days ahead.

“As we see the future of GOAT…we’re going international, we want to focus on more on women, we want to do a bunch of stuff, including innovation on the technology side, we wanted to bring in a great senior leader that has seen a lot of this stuff especially as we’ve done the Flight Club merger. We’re looking into more retail as well so we wanted someone that had great e-commerce experience but also understood retail that could really help us think through how to create model stores how to expand physical retail, and omni channel retail, in general. So, yeah, we talked to a bunch of people and Lizzie was the one who just kind of all of us just really gravitated towards.”

As a sneaker marketplace, GOAT already has an incredible opportunity to flip the script on the traditional attitude of that culture towards women shoppers. Sneakerheads who also happen to be women have been massively underserved to this point. GOAT’s female user base is growing at twice the rate of its male users. 

“There are so many things that are going so well here [at GOAT],” Francis says, “but in terms of immediate opportunity, obviously expanding into women is important for the company, and we’re seeing some really favorable tailwinds and data points that indicate that it’s a great time for us to be doing that. And also, our current customer bases, primarily male said, I’m sure you know, 85% of consumer spending is controlled by women. So it feels like now that we have a great platform in place it’s actually a great time for us to focus on that female customer that’s both a buyer and a seller.”

This year, GOAT will introduce sizing conversion tools for women on the platform, allowing them to easily figure out what men’s size will fit them. This is important because a huge amount of sneaker styles that are made for men are not produced at all for women, so both parties are shopping the same styles and pools of stock. They’ll also introduce more women’s styles to the mix.

GOAT and Flightclub as a combined entity has some interesting roads ahead of it figuring out the role of traditional retail in supporting and augmenting online sales. Liu says that both pop-up and traditional retail are in the plans.

“We’re open to whatever the customer tells us they want to need. Right now, the Flight Club stores have some of the highest sales per square foot comps in the country. People come to Flight Club because they’re cultural institutions and so we definitely see a need and an opportunity to create more kind of brick and mortar, long term lease store and keep market.”

Francis says that the biggest opportunity that she sees with the brand currently is to lean into storytelling. Between the launch of a shoe directly with Versace and Greatest, GOAT’s new periodical, there’s a chance to enhance the story side of the company – and storytelling does sell shoes, just ask Jordan Brand.

“I see that there’s still so much more opportunity for us to amplify storytelling across the platforms and in store in a way that really connects the consumer with the product,” says Francis. “Because whenever we buy product — I’m sure you feel this way too — when we buy style, it’s a reflection of who we are. Right? And it says a little bit about us before the [other] person even knows who we are, right? I mean, I bet a fun trick would be what we all wearing today, right, what shoes do we have on now, what’s our Monday morning shoe, what’s our Monday night shoe – they are telling the world this is who I am. And so I think that the thing that I think I can help on right away is how do we continue to amplify the storytelling that we’re doing and do in a way where the consumer field we don’t leave any of the the great up frictionless experience of the technology that’s already there, but just make it additive in a way that’s fun and exciting and addictive for both the consumer and the seller.”