Year: 2018

Walgreens is gearing up for a battle with Amazon. The country’s second-largest pharmacy chain announced this week that it’s teaming up with FedEx to offer quick drug delivery.

Through Walgreens Express, patients will be able to get prescriptions delivered to their home as quickly as the next day. Customers will get a text notification when prescriptions are filled and can opt to get them sent to their home or pick them in one of the company’s locations via an Express pickup line.

Walgreens also offers some same-day deliver in a handful of cities, including New York, Chicago, Dallas, Miami, Gainesville, Tampa and Fort Lauderdale. It will expand that selection in the coming year.

The features find Walgreens stepping up its services to compete with both established pharmacies and newcomers in the space. Walgreens’ chief competitor (and top U.S. chain) CVS struck a partnership with the U.S. Postal Service early this year. Like Walgreens Express, CVS’ offering runs $4.99 for a delivery, with a one- to two-day turnaround time.

Amazon, meanwhile, acquired pharmacy startup PillPack over the summer, with plans to disrupt the drugstore business with online prescription shipping.

A problem with the software in Ericsson equipment is causing outages across the world, including O2 users in Great Britain and SoftBank users in Japan, according to a report in the Financial Times earlier today.

Ericsson took blame for the outage in a press release. It apparently involves faulty software on certain Ericsson equipment used on the affected company’s mobile networks. While Ericsson indicated it involved multiple countries, it appeared to try to minimize the impact by stating it involved “network disturbances for a limited number of customers.” The FT report indicated that it was actually affecting millions of mobile customers worldwide.

Regardless, the company said that an initial analysis attributed the problem to an expired software certificate on the affected equipment. Börje Ekholm, Ericsson president and CEO, said they were working to restore the service as soon as possible, which probably isn’t soon enough for people who don’t have a working cell phone at the moment.

“The faulty software that has caused these issues is being decommissioned and we apologize not only to our customers but also to their customers. We work hard to ensure that our customers can limit the impact and restore their services as soon as possible,” Ekholm said in a statement.

While the press release went on to say they are working to restore the service throughout the day, as of publishing this article, the O2 outage maps still showed problems in the London area and throughout Great Britain.

The AT&T and Verizon outage pages are also currently showing outages in the U.S. We reached out to Ericsson by phone and email to confirm if this was part of their software problems, but had not heard back by the time we published. If we do, we will update this story.

(Note that Verizon owns this publication.)

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.

It’s only been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formeraly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”

The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”

In its early days, Contentful also focuses only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.

Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80% of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.

Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.

What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.

Want to run your own home shopping network? Facebook is now testing a Live video feature for merchants that lets them demo and describe their items for viewers. Customers can screenshot something they want to buy and use Messenger to send it to the seller, who can then request payment right through the chat app.

Facebook confirms the new shopping feature is currently in testing with a limited set of Pages in Thailand, which has been a testbed for shopping features. The option was first spotted by social media and reputation manager Jeff Higgins, and re-shared by Matt Navarra and Social Media Today. But now Facebook is confirming the test’s existence and providing additional details.

The company tells me it had heard feedback from the community in Thailand that Live video helped sellers demonstrate how items could be used or worn, and provided richer understanding than just using photos. Users also told Facebook that Live’s interactivity let customers instantly ask questions and get answers about product specifications and details. Facebook has looked to Thailand to test new commerce experiences like home rentals in Marketplace, as the country’s citizens were quick to prove how Facebook Groups could be used for peer-to-peer shopping. “Thailand is one of our most active Marketplace communities” says Mayank Yadav, Facebook Product Manager for Marketplace.

Now it’s running the Live shopping test, which allows Pages to notify fans that they’re going broadcasting to “showcase products and connect with your customers”. Merchants can take reservations and request payments through Messenger.  Facebook tells me it doesn’t currently have plans to add new partners or expand the feature. But some sellers without access are being invited to join a waitlist for the feature. It also says it’s working closely with its test partners to gather feedback and iterate on the live video shopping experience, which would seem to indicate it’s interested in opening the feature more widely if it performs well.

Facebook doesn’t take a cut of payments through Messenger, but the feature could still help earn the company money at a time when it’s seeking revenue streams beyond News Feed ads as it runs out of space their, Stories take over as the top media form, and user growth plateaus. Hooking people on video viewing helps Facebook show lucrative video ads. The more that Facebook can train users to buy and sell things on its app, the better the conversion rates will be for businesses, and the more they’ll be willing to spend on ads. Facebook could also convince sellers who broadcast Live to buy its new Marketplace ad units to promote their wares. And Facebook is happy to snatch any use case from the rest of the internet, whether it’s long-form video viewing or job applications or shopping to boost time on site and subsequent ad views.

Increasingly, Facebook is setting its sights on Craigslist, Etsy, and eBay. Those commerce platforms have failed to keep up with new technologies like video and lack the trust generated by Facebook’s real name policy and social graph. A few years ago, selling something online meant typing up a generic description and maybe uploading a photo. Soon it could mean starring in your own infomercial.

[Postcript: And a Facebook home shopping network could work perfectly on its new countertop smart display Portal.]

After last year’s stellar turn out of almost 1,000 Silicon Valley shakers and movers at our inaugural Winter Party, TechCrunch is returning with the 2nd Annual Winter Party in San Francisco on February 8.

The party will feature tasty cocktails and canapés, party games and activities, plenty of photo ops, giveaways and some fun surprises. As you network your way across the sea of attendees, you’ll also get to check-out a handful of promising early-stage startups just waiting for their big break.

The shindig will be held in the multi-level facility at Galvanize in San Francisco on Friday, February 8. While the venue is large, it won’t be able to hold all of Silicon Valley, so tickets are very limited and will be released on a rolling basis for $85 each. If you’re a startup and want to demo your product at this event, demo tables are available for purchase at $1,500 each. Demo tickets are limited too, so get yours before we sell out!

More about the Winter Party:

When? Friday, February 8, 6:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.

Where? Galvanize, 44 Tehama St., San Francisco, CA 94105

How? Get tickets here for just $85 each. There are only a limited number of tickets for this event. Tickets will be released in batches, so if you don’t see any availability, stay tuned to TechCrunch for our next release (following us on Facebook or Twitter works great), as they sell out quickly. TechCrunch parties have a history of being the place you want to meet your future investor, acquirer or co-founder. And to top it all off, we’re going to give away some really great door prizes, like TC swag and tickets to Disrupt SF, our flagship event this October.

Hope to see you all there!

Our sponsors help make TechCrunch events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team by filling out this form.

Firefly, a startup that allows rideshare drivers to make money through digital advertising, is officially launching today. It’s also announced that it has raised $21.5 million in seed funding.

The idea of sticking advertising on a cab isn’t new, but Firefly offers drivers what it calls a “digital smart screen,” allowing advertisers to run targeted, geofenced campaigns. The company has apparently run more than 50 ad campaigns already, during a beta testing period in San Francisco and Los Angeles, with hundreds of cars on the road.

“Being the first at building out the IP is going to be the main differentiator,” said co-founder and CEO Kaan Gunay. “Over half our team are engineers, and we have been extremely focused on developing core IP to make sure it’s scalable.”

In addition, Gunay said that thanks to the combination of Firefly’s targeting capabilities with its “strict” advertising policies (it won’t accept ads for strip clubs, tobacco and cannabis companies, among others), “We’re working with a lot of advertisers who might not even have advertised outdoors before. We believe we are expanding the market.”

One of the main goals is to allow drivers for Uber, Lyft and other ride-hailing services to make more money. In fact, Firefly says the average driver in its network makes an additional $300 per month.

Gunay explained that if the driver meets a certain threshold for hours on the road, the company will pay them a flat fee to carry its advertising — but he also said the company is exploring different ways to “maximize the revenue that we share with the drivers and give the maximum benefit to the drivers.”

It’s an issue on regulators’ minds as well, with New York recently approving new rules around driver compensation.

Earlier this year, Uber partnered with a startup called Cargo to allow drivers to make additional income by selling goods like gum, snacks and phone chargers. Firefly doesn’t have an official relationship with the ride-hailing companies, but Gunay said, “In our conversations with these large companies … they’ve said the drivers are free to do what they want to do. This is why it’s a win for everyone.”

Gunay also said these displays will become the foundation for a “smart city data network.” In other words, they will collect data that Firefly plans to share with local governments and nonprofit groups. For example, he said the company has already been sharing air quality data with the Coalition for Clean Air, and it’s also looking to include temperature sensors and accelerometers.

Apparently Gunay doesn’t plan to make money from this side of the business. He told me, “We want to be able to add value to how cities operate … We’re not planning to monetize that.”

Getting back to the funding, $21.5 million is a huge seed round, but Gunay said the company’s success thus far was able to”justify a larger raise and a higher valuation.” The round was led by NfX, Pelion Venture Partners, Decent Capital (founded by Tencent’s Jason Zeng) and Jeffrey Housenbold of SoftBank Vision Fund (yes, that SoftBank Vision Fund).

The rumors were true: Microsoft Edge is moving to the open-source Chromium platform, the same platform that powers Google’s Chrome browser. And once that is done, Microsoft is bringing Edge to macOS, too. In addition, Microsoft is decoupling Edge from the Windows update process to offer a faster update cadence — and with that, it’ll bring the new Edge to Windows 7 and 8 users, too.

It’ll be a while before any of this happens, though. There’s no code to test today and the first previews are still months away. But at some point in 2019, Microsoft’s EdgeHTML and Chakra will go away and Blink and V8 will take its place. The company expects to release a first developer preview early next year.

Obviously, there is a lot to unpack here. What’s clear, though, is that Microsoft is acknowledging that Chrome and Chromium are the de facto standard today, both for users and for developers.

Over the years, especially after Microsoft left the Internet Explorer brand behind, Edge had, for the most part, become a perfectly usable browser, but Microsoft acknowledges that there were always compatibility issues. While it was investing heavily in fixing those, what we’re hearing from Microsoft is a very pragmatic message: it simply wasn’t worth the investment in engineering resources anymore. What Microsoft had to do, after all, was reverse engineer its way around problems on certain sites.

In part, that’s because Edge never quite gained the market share where developers cared enough to test their code on the platform. And with the web as big as it is, the long tail of incompatible sites remains massive.

Because many web developers work on Macs, where they don’t have access to Edge, testing for it became even more of an afterthought. Hence Microsoft’s efforts to bring Edge to the Mac, 15 years after it abandoned Internet Explorer for Mac. The company doesn’t expect that Edge on Mac will gain any significant market share, but it believes that having it available on every platform will mean that more developers will test their web apps with Edge, too.

Microsoft also admits that it didn’t help that Edge only worked on Windows 10 — and that Edge updates were bound to Windows updates. I was never quite sure why that was the case, but as Microsoft will now happily acknowledge, that meant that millions of users on older Windows versions were left behind, and even those on Windows 10 often didn’t get the latest, most compatible version of Edge because their companies remained a few updates behind.

For better or worse, Chrome has become the default and Microsoft is going with the flow. The company could have opted to open source EdgeHTML and all of its JavaScript engine (some parts already are open source). That option was on the table, but in the end, it opted not to. The company says that’s due to the fact that the current version of Edge has so many hooks into Windows 10 that it simply wouldn’t make much sense to do this if Microsoft wants to take the new Edge to Windows 7 and the Mac. To be fair, this probably would’ve been a fool’s errand anyway, since it’s hard to imagine that an open-source community around Edge would’ve made much of a difference in solving the practical problems anyway.

With this move, Microsoft also plans to increase its involvement in the Chromium community. That means it’ll bring to Chromium some of the work it did to make Edge work really well with touchscreens, for example. But also, as previously reported, the company now publicly notes that it is working with Google and Qualcomm to bring a native implementation of the Chrome browser to Windows 10 on ARM, making it snappier and more battery friendly than the current version that heavily relies on emulation.

Microsoft hopes that if it can make the compatibility issues a thing of the past, users will still gravitate to its browser because of what differentiates it. Maybe that’s its Cortana integration or new integrations with Windows and Office. Or maybe those are new consumer services or, for the enterprise users, specific features that make the lives of IT managers a bit easier.

When the rumors of this change first appeared a few days ago, a number of pundits argued that this isn’t great for the web because it gives even more power over web standards to the Chromium project.

I share some of those concerns, but Microsoft is making a very pragmatic argument for this move and notes that Edge’s small market share didn’t allow it to make a dent in this process anyway. By becoming more active in the Chromium community, it’ll have more of a voice — or so it hopes — and be able to advocate for web standards and bring its own innovations to Chromium.

You’re browser is probably the most complex piece of software running on your computer right now. That means switching out engines is anything but trivial. The company isn’t detailing what its development process will look like and how it’ll go about this, but we’re being told that the company is looking at which parts of the Edge experience to keep and then will work with the Chromium community to bring those to the Chromium engine, too.

Microsoft stresses that it isn’t giving up on Edge, by the way. The browser isn’t going anywhere. If you’re a happy Edge user today, chances are this move will make you an even happier Edge user in the long run. If you aren’t, Microsoft hopes you’ll give it a fresh look when the new Chromium-based version launches. It’s on Microsoft now to build a browser that is differentiated enough to get people to give it another shot.

 

 

Last month, Pandora announced it would soon be bringing its “Genome” technology to a new space outside of music: it would leverage a similar classification system to make podcast recommendations, too. Initially, the feature was only available to select users on mobile devices, ahead of a broader public launch. Today, Pandora says its Podcast Genome Project has gone live for all users.

Like Pandora’s Music Genome is its music information database capable of classifying songs across 450 different attributes — Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project is a cataloging system designed to evaluate content. But its focus is on audio programs instead of music.

The Podcast Genome Project can currently evaluate content across more than 1,500 attributes, including MPAA ratings, production style, content type, host profile and more, alongside other listener signals, like thumbs, skips, replays and others. It uses a combination of machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and collaborative filtering methods to help determine listener preferences, the company says.

Pandora then combines this data with human curation to make its podcast recommendations.

These recommendations are live now in the Pandora app’s “Browse” section, under the banner “Recommended Podcasts For You.” Podcasts will also be discoverable throughout the app in the Now Playing screen, search bar, in the podcast backstage passes and in the episode backstage passes.

At launch, the app is aggregating more than 100,000 podcast episodes in genres like News, True Crime, Sports, Comedy, Music, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Kids, Health and Science, the company adds.

Podcasters can also now ask to be included in Pandora’s app by filling out a form here.

Longer-term, a better recommendation system for podcasts could help Pandora as it becomes more integrated with its acquirer SiriusXM. The deal will likely bring SiriusXM’s exclusive programming to Pandora’s subscribers, which would greatly increase the number of audio programs available on its service. Putting the right programs in front of the most interested customers could then drive more people to upgrade to a paid subscription, impacting Pandora’s bottom line.

Mogu, a Tencent-backed service that offers fashion content and products to young women, has joined a string of Chinese tech companies pressing ahead to sell their shares through initial public offerings in the US before the year-end.

Mogu priced its sale at $14 per share on Wednesday, toward the lower end of a marketed range. That values the unprofitable company at $1.3 billion, a drop from the estimated valuation of $3 billion after Mogujie acquired its chief competitor Meili to form Mogu in 2016.

The firm is poised to raise $66.5 million from the IPO, which will help it fund content and technological development to vie for a piece of China’s $390 billion online fashion market.

While Alibaba has long dominated how people buy clothes online, a few smaller players including Pinduoduo and Mogu have managed to carve out a niche.

According to a September report by mobile analytics firm QuestMobile, Mogu controlled an 8.1 percent penetration rate among ecommerce apps targeting women under 24 years old. Alibaba led the game at 98 percent.

Now a formidable rival, Alibaba has played a key role in Mogu’s early day growth.

Under the giant’s shadow

In 2009, Chen Qi, a former engineer and designer at Alibaba, founded Mogujie — which means “mushroom street” in Chinese — with the aim to create a digital magazine for young women.

The firm’s initial incarnation was a Pinterest -type pinboard that let users share fashion items with links to third-party ecommerce platforms. Back then, a majority of the products on display came from Taobao, Alibaba’s marketplace for small and medium-sized merchants.

“We have to recognize Taobao’s dominance in the retail space. It was inevitable that most of our products came from there,” Chen told TechCrunch.

As such, Mogujie generated a big chunk of its revenues from Taobao’s referral commissions early on.

In return, Alibaba also benefited from the traffic that the social ecommerce startup sent over to Taobao. It came as no surprise when the titan made an investment offer to Mogujie in hope of adding a community component to its ecommerce busienss. But Mogujie rejected the advances.

“Our visions were very different. We wanted to be a fashion destination,” Chen said of Mogujie, which allowed all kinds of retailers to promote as a magazine does.

Alibaba, on the other hand, wanted Mogujie to be a vertical ecommerce service that would focus on attracting merchants, touting things, and locking users in instead of sending them to third-party platforms.

“If our content creators wanted to share something that happened to be from [Alibaba’s] rivals, we would need to stop them. That clearly ran against our value proposition of a fashion destination,” said Chen.

A new ally

The rejection soon followed by a ban from Taobao as Alibaba wanted full control of where its traffic came from. Meili, which made money by directing shoppers to Taobao as Mogujie did, also lost the ability to link to Alibaba. Both firms started building their own ecommerce platforms soon after breaking up with their main revenue driver.

Before long, Mogujie got a new partner from its acquisition of Meili, which counted Tencent as an investor. Tencent does not directly manage any ecommerce businesses but has scooped up shares in a few prominent players, including Pinduoduo and JD.com, arming them with tools to take on Alibaba.

Pinduoduo, for instance, has taken off on Tencent’s popular WeChat messenger by letting shoppers arrange group bargains among each other.

Similarly, WeChat has fueled growth for Mogu in recent months. WeChat mini programs — a type of stripped down apps that run within larger platforms — contributed 31.1 percent of Mogu’s total sales for the six months ended September 30, up from 14.4 percent a year ago, according to a regulatory filing.

Like Alibaba, Tencent strategically chooses what allies it lets into its turf. Links to its rival Alibaba have long been inaccessible on WeChat, which had more than 1 billion monthly active users as of September.

The caveat of having a powerful teammate like Tencent is that an eroding relationship may do harm to the smaller player, as Mogu experienced with Alibaba. But Mogu isn’t worried about its reliance on the gaming and social behemoth.

“Customers who like us will end up downloading our native app, which delivers a much better user experience. As most WeChat partners would agree, mini programs are an effective way to attract new users, rather than a threat,” argued Chen.

By the numbers

Mogu lost $81 million for the year ended March 31, down from $136 million year-over-year. Revenues, however, slipped from $161 million to $142 million. Chen ascribed the drop to the firm’s “particularly strong performance” in 2017 following the merger, which compelled competition between merchants on Meili and Mogujie to double down on marketing expenses.

Meanwhile, total sales for the fashion ecommerce firm grew by 24.6 percent from $1.71 billion to $2.14 billion.

Marketing services, which consist of display advertisements, accounted for nearly half of Mogu’s revenues but are fading in favor of ecommerce commissions, which stood at 43 percent of revenues compared to 30 percent a year ago.

The new development signifies Mogu’s shift to growing a community of influencers selling clothes to followers via live streams. This segment brought in 11.8 percent of Mogu’s total sales, compared to only 1.4 percent in 2017.

The appeal of live broadcasting, according to Chen, is that it improves efficiency in apparel manufacturing. A traditional procedural goes like this: Make clothes, sell them, and items that don’t sell get discounted, eating into margins and jacking up retail prices.

Selling through live streams, on the other hand, help merchants determine how popular a design is in real time.

“The manufacturers won’t even have to make the clothes up front. Our live broadcast host will show a sample to her audience, aggregate orders, and tell the factory of how many to make and in what sizes,” said Chen. “This significantly speeds up the production process and lowers prices for consumers.”

Vive la France — that was the dominant message of the day during a tour of the French tech ecosystem. But is it time to invest in French startups?

Around 40 partners of venture capital firms as well as limited partners came to Paris to talk about tech in France, from Andreessen Horowitz to Greylock Partners, Khosla Ventures and more. The two-day roadshow took place at Station F, the Vision Institute, iBionext and the Elysée Palace.

I grew up in France and it always surprises me that the same clichés come up again and again. When Symphony founder and CEO David Gurle answered questions about what it’s like to build an engineering team in France, it could have been easy to predict the questions — labor law is not flexible enough, French people are lazy, they go on strike all the time…

According to Gurle, who is great at storytelling, Symphony has been looking at around 15 countries for their next office. They first selected Singapore but couldn’t put a team together.

“We went to the board and said the next step is to invest in France,” Gurle said. At first, the board was really reluctant, citing the same concerns.

Chairman of Business France and Ambassador for International Investments Pascal Cagni has been dealing with those concerns for years. For instance, when it comes to labor law, he says the regulatory framework is now predictable and limited — unlike in the U.K. or Germany for instance. You can fire people whenever you want. It means that you’ll have to pay a severance package, but everything is laid out.

Silicon Valley is overheating right now. It’s become increasingly expensive and challenging to build a company — the tech industry is getting bigger and the biggest tech companies now dominate the talent market. That’s also part of the reason why Silicon Valley veterans are looking outside of their comfort zone.

Speeding things up

The question wasn’t about whether startups in France are a thing or not. The tone of the conversation was about pace and intensity. Is it time to invest now or should we wait?

“We've noticed that we started investing more in European startups without even thinking about it — not just French startups but all over Europe,” Battery Ventures General Partner Chelsea Stoner told me.

Depending on the study, France and the U.K. are battling to be the first European country when it comes to the number of VC deals and the total amount of money raised.

But even more important than hard facts, the momentum has been pretty stunning. A few years ago, I could cover every single deal over $1 million. Now there are so many startups valued at hundreds of millions of dollars that it’s hard to keep track of all funding rounds above $20 or $30 million.

France has some of the best engineering schools in the world. And now, most students want to work for a startup. So if France has a lot of capital and a big pool of talent, what’s missing? Should French startups get more support from the French government?

“Five or six years ago, I would have said keep the government as far away as possible and I was wrong,” former Cisco CEO John Chambers told me. Chambers is now ambassador for La French Tech and doesn’t invest in French startups in order to avoid conflicts of interest. “When I said three and a half years ago that France would be the tech leader in Europe, nobody believed that — and it’s happening,” he said.

OpenClassrooms co-founder and CEO Pierre Dubuc said during a panel that one piece of regulation that has helped his startup quite a lot is the French Tech Visa. Thanks to this program, the company can get visas for future employees in just a matter of weeks.

Chambers says that it works both ways. American employees apply to the French Tech Visa, work for French startups for a while and then come back to the U.S. It moves the needle when it comes to changing mindsets in the U.S.

The French tech ecosystem also needs time. While there are a ton of good engineers, multiple people told me sales people and marketing talent are nowhere near the level of American tech companies.

Some employees will need to go through 3 or 4 different companies and experience many different situations to become better. At this point, they can reinvest back their knowledge into startups.

Big, late stage VC funds can also help speed things up. “Many people misunderstand the value of venture capital,” Chambers told me. Well-established funds have strong processes and know how to hire top management. That’s why bringing those VCs and LPs to Paris could help change things.

Macron’s macroeconomics

Without turning this article into a political piece, it’s hard to talk about foreign investors coming to Paris without mentioning the yellow vests movement.

LVMH Chief Digital Officer Ian Rogers had a nuanced take on the changes in the tech ecosystem. “It's clear that they are [changing the mindset] and it's clear that there's opposition,” he said. "This is an exciting moment, it's also probably a bubble. Let's see what's on the other side.”

In other words, tech can be a destructive industry. Nobody wanted to state that so directly, but everybody had that in mind.

Ron Conway even told me that Airbnb could be the solution to address inequalities. “This whole yellow coats issue, that’s about income inequality,” he told me. There are 500,000 hosts in France generating $3 billion in revenue — and there should be more according to him. But I don’t think startups can solve everything, unfortunately.

“There are going to be a few setbacks along the way and we’re seeing that with the social movement, but we shouldn’t lose the end goal,” Chambers told me.

Of course, seeing France implode is in no one’s interest. VC firms are also looking at different opportunities because Donald Trump and Brexit make the future unpredictable.

But it’s unclear if minimizing social movements is wishful thinking or long-term thinking.

Moving as a group

What was interesting about today’s visit is that some people are already investing quite a lot in French startups while others are completely new to the French tech ecosystem. When you hear Tony Fadell say that he’s invested in French startups with Xavier Niel for a few years, it creates a fear of missing out.

“You see how the valley goes, it moves as a group,” Chambers told me.

Bringing dozens of investors to Paris created some form of emulation. Nobody wants to be the first one to invest in something new, but nobody wants to be the last one either.

List of investors:

• Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners
• Martin Casado, Andreessen Horowitz
• Bernard Liautaud, Balderton
• Chelsea Stoner, Battery Ventures
• Philippe Lafont, Coatue
• Matt Turck, FirstMark Capital
• Hany Nada, GGV Capital
• Dana Settle, Greycroft
• Sarah Guo, Greylock Partners
• Irena Goldenberg, Highland Europe
• Erel Margalit, Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP)
• Samir Kaul, Khosla Ventures
• Philipp Freise, KKR
• Klaus Hommels, Lakestar
• Scott Sandell, New Enterprise Associates
• Isaac Hillel, Pitango Venture Capital
• Boaz Dinte, Qumra
• Ron Conway, SV Angel
• Mark Suster, Upfront Ventures
• Talbot Heppenstall, UPMC
• Paul Graham, Y Combinator
• Jessica Livingston, Y Combinator

+ 17 limited partners