Year: 2018

No, it’s not a “regram” option. Sorry!  But today, Instagram is officially launching a new feature that will allow users to re-share someone’s Instagram post with their friends via Instagram Stories – something it confirmed was in testing earlier this year. The idea with the new re-sharing option is to give users a way to add their own commentary or react to a post, without repurposing it as their own – the way a regram (reposting to feed) feature would have permitted.

For example, you can now re-share something you saw posted by a brand or influencer on Instagram that you like, or add your own comments on top of a funny meme, or even tag a friend on a post you want them to see.

In fact, tagging friends through Instagram comments had become so common on the social network over the years, that it rolled out a way to send posts via Direct Messaging as an alternative. The new re-sharing option now gives users a third way to get their friends’ attention.

Re-sharing can only be done from public Instagram accounts, Instagram says. If you want to run a public account, but don’t want people re-sharing your posts, you can opt to turn off the new feature in the app’s settings.

To share an Instagram feed post to your Story, you first tap the paper airplane icon – the same as you tap today to send a post through direct messaging. However, you’ll now see a new option to create a Story as well. Tap this to see the feed post appear as a sticker of sorts with a customized background, reading for re-sharing.

You can also rotate, scale or move the sticker around, and tap on it to explore other styles. Of course, you can add your own commentary, scribbles and other decorations on top of this “sticker,” as you can today when sharing a photo to an Instagram Story.

When posted, the Story will display the original poster’s username, which others can tap on to head back to the original post.

That potential source of traffic may encourage some Instagram users to create posts specifically designed for this new sharing format, given it could increase their account’s exposure to a wider audience.

The company may not be done rolling out new features for Stories yet – continual improvement of this popular product is one way Instagram (and parent Facebook) is able to challenge Snapchat, which first popularized the Story format.

As Twitter users Jane Manchun Wong spotted, Instagram is also testing a floating Story Tray that will minimize when you scroll. That would give Stories more prominence on the network – though not everyone is thrilled with their takeover.

Instagram says the feature is live today on Android and will roll out to iOS in the coming week.

* Yes, I’m confused about this example image Instagram sent, too. 

 

Facebook’s work around accessibility took center stage in 2016 when it launched something called automatic alt-text for people using screen readers to identify what’s displayed. AAT uses object recognition technology to generate descriptions of photos on Facebook. But what Facebook deployed in 2016 represented the mere beginning of its efforts, Facebook Accessibility Specialist Matt King told me ahead of Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

“It was about as simple as you could get and still be valuable,” King said about version one of AAT, which initially launched for News Feed, profiles and groups. It later became available in 28 other languages before adding 17 different activities to the descriptions, like walking, running and so on.

“So we’re getting closer to being able to do a sentence, which is a long-run goal, instead of just having, you know, a list of words or concepts that describe a photo,” he said.

Then, last December, Facebook started taking advantage of facial recognition capabilities. That ensured that, even if a friend wasn’t tagged, someone using a screen reader would be able to know if their friend was in the photo.

“So, it’s bit by bit getting richer and of course there’s a lot of potential on the horizon,” King said.

Today, however, the product is still in its infancy — a toddler, at most, he said.

“It has a long way to go to even become like an adolescent-level product, but I think that’s going to happen in the next couple of years,” King said.

As a grown-up, this product would be more integrated with the photo viewer — the enlarged, full-screen version of the photo that lets you see photo tags and whatnot. With that integration, King envisions people being able to move their fingers around the photo and then be told about specific objects in the photo.

“You would be able to possibly hold your finger there and then ask a question about that object or tap the photo,” King said.

Or, maybe the description said the photo includes three people sitting at a table in a room. Based on that description, King said, you could maybe ask about the color of the person’s hair. From there, you could even ask if there are any decorations on the wall, and if so, what’s on the poster or the decoration.

“We might even be able to get to the point where it could potentially highlight unusual features of a photo,” King said. “So that can include something ironic or humorous that it would be able to potentially detect those kinds of circumstances and call them to your attention. So that’s what a grown-up would look like.“

As it stands today, AAT’s descriptions are more like “image may contain three people, smiling, outdoors.”

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The AAT product falls into the category of what King calls the “plumbing of web accessibility,” he said. It’s not as “sexy and hot and cool as AI stuff,” he said, but it’s what makes it possible for things to actually work from an accessibility standpoint.

King helps ensure that what visually appears for sighted people gets translated well into something that’s non-visual. His work is about making all of that super friendly to screen-reader users, which is, he said, “not a technically straightforward thing to do.”

He added that his energy often goes toward making sure interactions on Facebook “are as rich and enjoyable for people with disabilities as they are for other people.”

Facebook is not the only tech company working on accessibility. In April, Pinterest made its app a lot more accessible for people with visual impairments. Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up with Facebook to launch a program that brings together students, teachers and industry partners to explore accessibility.

In addition to its work with other companies, Facebook is actively researching how to better support people with cognitive disabilities, such as dyslexia. The work is around figuring out how to help those with dyslexia feel more comfortable sharing on Facebook, King said, because “there’s some emotional insecurity associated with like, ‘wow, what if I mess up'”?

Facebook’s accessibility team is also looking at an alt-text tool for video that could describe what’s happening in the video for those who are visually impaired. It’s early days, but King says at some point, “we want to have the ability to describe at least certain kinds of video.”

Five years ago, we told you about a venture capital auction wherein dozens of VCs donated their time toward a greater good — helping fund research at the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, one of the world’s largest voluntary health organizations dedicated to funding research and access to treatments for blood cancer patients. The auction was centered around then five-year-old Rhett Krawitt, a pink-cheeked, bright-spirited boy who’d been diagnosed with leukemia in 2010 and “fought a really hard battle,” recalls his father, Carl Krawitt, who works in the Bay Area for Tata, the enterprise information management consultancy.

“For three-and-a-half years, he was undergoing chemotherapy, and his doctors would say, ‘Here are the 20 complications you can have, though most kids have three or four.’ But Rhett had all 20 of them. He was between a rock and a hard place. I had to tell my daughter that her little brother was probably going to die.”

Rhett was still actively battling his blood disease back in 2013, when longtime VC David Lee — who himself fought Stage IV lymphoma when he was just 24 years old — helped organize what was then the annual “Venture Capital Master’s Lunch Series,” an auction program that benefits the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society.

Keith Rabois, Megan Quinn and Tim Draper were among many who donated their time, helping raise more than $200,000 for LLS in the process.

Today, thank goodness, Rhett is nearing his fifth year of remission, thanks largely to treatments funded in part by LLS, says his father. To show thanks for all of the organization’s support, and to help it continue on its mission, Rhett and Lee banded together again this year with founder Pete Quinzio of the drug testing service Notable Labs to sign up a host of new VCs who are donating their time. (Quinzio became involved after LLS approached him about supporting its fundraising efforts. When he reached out to Lee for a little moolah — Lee’s venture firm, Refactor Capital, is an investor in Notable — Lee told him about Rhett and the 2013 auction, and Quinzio thought it would be a great idea to involve both in a broader fundraising campaign.) 

Lee and Rhett were brought together for the first time in years just last week, in fact. Asked afterward how he was feeling about the meeting, Lee said it was “amazing. Five years is a significant milestone for cancer patients; for some cancer patients, that is when you are effectively ‘cured.'” Rhett is “so mentally and emotionally tough,” continued Lee. “He looks and sounds like any other 10-year-old — loves playing with his friends, loves to be active. He and his parents are so courageous.”

You can read more from Lee about his own health scare and the importance of this auction to him here. If you’re interested in helping with the effort (and we hope you will!), you can head over here to bid on time with a long (and, we’re seeing in real time, growing) list of VCs, including: Lee himself, Emily Melton of DFJ, Hunter Walk and Satya Patel of Homebrew, Mark Suster and Kara Nortman of Upfront Ventures, Alex Rampell of Andreessen Horowitz, Paul Buchheit of Y Combinator, Kim-Mai Cutler  of Initialized Capital, and Bill Trenchard of First Round Capital.

Photo: Rhett Krawitt in 2016 with former Vice President Joe Biden, who lost his son Beau to cancer in 2015.

Pluralsight is having a pretty good day in its debut as a public company, with its shares popping more than 30% after its first trade following its IPO.

There’ll be a little bit of debate as to whether Pluralsight might have left some money on the table in its IPO after raising its price last night above its original target range. After looking at a range between $12 and $14 per share, the company settled on $15 in an IPO that would raise as much as $357 including additional shares offered to underwriters. But the significant pop this morning suggests that there is both a lot of demand for the company, and also that it could have potentially captured more capital in its IPO.

Still, Pluralsight will be considered a pretty successful one this morning, much like zScalar and Dropbox before it. Pluralsight, like many other enterprise-focused companies, offers investors an opportunity to tap a business model that can grow more consistently and methodically than a consumer company subject to the whims of fickle consumers. While Dropbox has more of a hybrid model, it was considered a substantially successful enterprise IPO, as was zScalar and others earlier this year.

Pluralsight offers companies a way to run courses that help their employees pick up new software engineering skills. That’s important for larger companies that can have a sprawling employee base, offering them an opportunity to find talent in their own workforces that might be missing a few skills instead of having to look out in a very competitive landscape. That minted another successful unicorn startup in the Utah tech scene, and now the company is going to potentially offer a nice return for its investors and an opportunity for investors with some appetite for risky early IPOs .

The company launched in 2004 and was largely bootstrapped until its first financing round in 2013, and raised nearly $200 million total prior to going public. Having a successful IPO like this one is also going to have the ancillary effect of keeping up morale at the company, as well as attracting talent with generous compensation packages. Pluralsight can point to the pop in its IPO and ongoing performance as a public barometer of its success, and the interest Wall Street has in it going forward as a good investment.

Last year, Facebook was reportedly scouting for office space in San Francisco in order to find a space suitable to house some 100 Instagram employees. Today, the company is officially confirming its San Francisco plans with an announcement that it has leased four floors at 181 Fremont in San Francisco. It will initially house its under-200 person Creation & Communication team, which builds for Stories, Direct, Live and more, but plans to expand its San Francisco headcount in time.

TechCrunch had reported last summer that the Fremont location was being considered, among others. At the time, the 70-story tower wasn’t yet open, and no lease had been signed.

Today, Instagram confirms its lobby will be on the 7th floor of the Fremont building and will be connected to the TransBay Transit Center City Park.

 

Employees started moving in on May 7th, but that transition remains in progress. It’s also still putting the finishing touches on the space, but shared a few photos (see above and below) of what the space looks like today.

Instagram notes it has just under 200 employees in the Fremont office at present, but it expects that number to grow over the course of the year. It also has around 200 in New York, and 400 at its main office in Menlo Park.

Having a space in the city will likely help Instagram with its recruiting efforts – the new office may attract those who prefer to live in the city, for all its advantages, including the fact that they would no longer have to endure the hour-plus shuttle ride to Instagram’s Menlo Park headquarters, near the main Facebook campus.

“We have space to grow the team and plan to do so considerably this year,” an Instagram spokesperson said.

The company declined to share details like square footage or the cost of the lease at this time.

However, real estate data firm the CoStar Group told the San Francisco Chronicle that Facebook signed a lease for 432,000 square feet of office space in the tower, which could house around 2,000 employees. So this is clearly an investment in the future.

“This is not a pilot,” the spokesperson acknowledged, referencing the claims that it’s a way for the company to “test” out having San Francisco office space.

“Instagram is officially establishing a presence in San Francisco and growing the team on-the-ground here,” they said.

Apple this morning announced another expansion of Everyone Can Code, bringing its Swift coding curricula to a number of US schools focused on students who are blind and deaf. The current list includes eight schools in California, New York, Florida, Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas.

“Apple’s mission is to make products as accessible as possible,” Tim Cook says in the announcement. “We created Everyone Can Code because we believe all students deserve an opportunity to learn the language of technology. We hope to bring Everyone Can Code to even more schools around the world serving students with disabilities.”

According to a release issued around the news, the lessons will be augmented for students using Apple’s accessibility, and tailored to individual needs with help from teachers. VoiceOver will play a key role here, reading step by step on-screen instructions for students with visual impairments. For students with hearing impairments, the Swift curricula will utilize captions, LED flash alerts and iPhone compatible hearing aids.

The company is also marking today’s Global Accessibility Awareness Day with events in its retail and corporate locations.

All electric scooters are not created equal. I’ve found ones from Spin, Bird, and Lime to often be broken, shaky, or out of battery. But now the founders of Boosted Boards, which makes the steadiest and safest-feeling electric skateboards, are bringing their rugged hardware expertise to the scooter world. Today, they’re coming out of stealth with a supposedly stronger and longer-lasting dockless electric scooter rental startup called Skip. And the surprise is they’re hoping to only operate where permitted unlike their backlashed competitors [but no guarantees], with a deployment today in partnership with Washington D.C. and plans for San Francisco.

Formerly known by its Y Combinator codename Waybots, the company is exclusively announcing its funding and rebrand to Skip today on TechCrunch. The startup has raised a $6 million seed round led by Initialized Capital via Alexis Ohanian and Ronny Conway’s A Capital, with SV Angel joining in.

“We think the vehicle matters” Skip and former Boosted co-founder/CEO Sanjay Dastoor tells me. “It’s not the same as rideshare where two or more companies are all using the same car. There’s a big spectrum of quality in the base vehicles. A lot of these companies are buying off the shelf vehicles that are designed for personal ownership. I think these vehicles will need to be designed for a different level of use and upkeep.”

That’s why Skip is modifying bigger pre-made scooters to be more durable, and plans to build its own custom scooters. For the same $1 plus $0.15 per minute price as other services, you get a wider riding platform, full suspension, and head/tail/brake lights. The strategy is that if people feel safe and steady riding Skips, they’ll choose them over the competition. And while low-grade scooters might feel too unstable for the bike lane, leading to complaints about sidewalk riding, Skips are meant to feel secure enough to cruise next to cars.

With so much well-funded competition, Skip will have to hope customers really notice the difference. And its focus on permits could constrain growth. But if riders and cities decide they want a more reliable scooter service, Skip could carve out a solid business while being a better citizen.

Trusting Your Life To A Startup

My Boosted Board was perhaps my favorite gadget ever. After a decade as an unpowered longboard rider, I tested its electric skateboard in 2012 and loved the smooth rides so much I bought onet of the first 10 of the Kickstarter. It felt like being able to effortlessly surf uphill. I tried many others and consistently found them to feel much more jerky, wobbly, and unpredictable. That’s not what you want when you’re riding a handle-less vehicle in traffic, and essentially betting your life on some startup’s hardware.

But then I crashed. The human body is not equipped for a 22mph meeting with the pavement. The board performed perfectly, I just hit a gravel patch at full-speed, shattered my ankle, and couldn’t walk for 5 months. In conclusion, even the safest electric skateboards are risky because at high speeds, the form factor’s small hard wheels are too vulnerable to obstructions, and you’ve got no handle to save you. I haven’t skated the two years since.

Yet that’s why I think Skip has a real opportunity. There’s demand for these vehicles. Skip says it sees seven rides per day per scooter. They’re a natural complement to more expensive Ubers that have to wade through traffic. But the whole industry will fall apart if everyone’s getting injured. You can absolutely feel the lack of stability and smoothness when riding a janky or half-broken scooter. I think consumers will choose the safer device if one’s available.

Skip To A New Startup

“We noticed that small personal portable electric vehicles weren’t only awesome alone” but as an option alongside ridesharing, ridepooling, and car ownership, says Dastoor. “The future of transportation is a combination of these.”

Boosted co-founder Matt Tran left the company two years ago, while Dastoor exited a year ago. They wanted to try an electric vehicle service model, but “Boosted wasn’t really the right place to do that, because the company is still focused on building great hardware for people to buy.” Tran was running marketing and also craved his engineering roots. So together with Mike Wadhera, a founding team member of Involver which sold to Oracle, they formed Waybots.

Last summer, the company tried out a docked scooter sharing model in SF, but didn’t see great results. When they got accepted to YC, like Boosted before it, they started experimenting with a dockless version. Meanwhile, Washington D.C. had opened a pilot program for permitted dockless bikeshare, and Waybots convinced the city to give it the greenlight too. Those scooters now have Skip branding slapped on.

“We’re the first permitted [dockless electric scooter] system operating anywhere” Dastoor believes. “A lot of the story around dockless scooters has come from SF, and from companies that have launched without informing anyone or working with anyone.” That’s led SF to ban unpermitted dockless scooter rentals. “What we saw in DC was the opposite. We’re working with the cities to deploy, share data with them, and engage with the community, and we’ve seen none of the backlash that we’ve seen in SF.” Still, the startup wouldn’t guarantee it won’t go rogue and launch unpermitted in the future.

Designed To Deter Complaints

Skip could get along better with cities because it’s built the scooters to discourage a lot of the most annoying scooter behaviors. The Speedway Mini4 36V 21Ah scooters Skip modifies can get up to 30 miles at 10mph per charge, which means they’re less likely to have dead batteries by the afternoon like the useless vehicles-turned-paperweights from competitors that I commonly stumble across in SF. To keep them charged and off the streets at night, Skip has a crowdsourced charging program where people can get paid to pick up, plug in at home, and drop off scooters.

The durable hardware is meant to need less service so you’re less likely to rent a broken, or worse, half-broken-but-I’m-late-so-I’ll-ride-it-anyway scooter. You can adjust the handlebar height, they go up to 18mph and dual-suspension flattens road bumps.

As for keeping Skips from getting strewn in the sidewalks and obstructing pedestrians, Dastoor claims his company’s vehicles have more precise location tracking than competitors. That could help it tell the edge of a build from the center of the walkway. Combined with requiring users to photograph the scooter standing upright, and hardware in the vechiles, Skip is hoping to force users to park them properly. “They have to have the intelligence in them to give info back to the city or back to the operator to make sure they operating correctly” Dastoor says.

Unfortunately, Skip hasn’t solved the lack of helmets problem. Dastoor tells me “We’ve been looking at a bunch of ways to improve access to helmets” but for now there’s no on-vehicle compartment for them and the company merely encourages users to wear them.

Personally, I think that’s crap. Sure, Citi Bike and other scooter companies don’t offer them either. But if these are meant to be serendipitously rented for short periods, it’s crazy to think anyone other than regular commuters will bring their own helmets. I think cities should demand them. And if they don’t, an inevitable scooter fatality that could have been prevented will make permitters more cautious. At least Skip says you have to be over 18 and plans to add ID verification for that soon.

“I don’t really have a comment about our unit economics” Dastoor sidestepped, but notes how much cheaper a $1.50 or $3 ride is than hailing a car. We’ll have to see if competition spurs a scooter price war. For now, though, the well-equipped Skips have led customers to “want to use it over and over.” Still, with Lime reportedly trying to raise $500 million and Bird recently closing $100 million as they race to invade the world, Skip is starting late with a much smaller piggybank.

Competition aside, Dastoor cites maintaining relationships with cities as the startup’s biggest threat. Luckily, he says it will soon announce some big-name talent with experience here. I expect it’s hired someone like former Uber policy chief David Plouffe who already has connections.

Scoot To The Future

Where the dockless vechicle rental market goes is a mystery. Maybe it turns into a fundraising war, with the most aggressive deployers locking up markets, and the losers vaporizing in giant money bonfires. Maybe the cities get fed up, kick out the unpermitted, and only issue approvals to those with the best glad-handing or the best safety. Maybe users get tons of options on price, quality, and availability to choose from.

But absent the bad behavior spurring backlash, many who try dockless electric scooter and bike rentals love them. With traffic-jammed city streets and scarce parking, we could use ways to get cars off the road.

Eventually, I think we’ll see a ton of short rideshare trips turn into scooter cruises. And at today’s super low price point, walking could turn into a luxury depending on how you value your time. Even at minimum wage, you might save money paying $1.75 for a five-minute, one-mile Skip rather than walking for 20. Dastoor concludes, “It becomes part of their transportation routine and I think anything that does that is around to stay.”

Headspace might just be considered an app that plays back a soothing voice to help you meditate, but the company says it is increasingly carries a more difficult technology problem as it continues to grow — and it’s hiring on a few people today to tackle it.

Headspace said it has brought on both a head of data science and a new chief technology officer today as it tries to figure out how to continue scaling across new geographies without any hiccups, in addition to making sure it grows in its core markets. Paddy Hannon and Punnoose Isaac, previously at Edmunds.com as the chief technology officer and head of data and analytics respectively, will be joining Headspace to reprise similar roles for the startup that’s trying to become a daily habit for users.

“You can go through the dot-com bubble of the 90s, over all those years, and look at how many companies built great technologies that were solutions looking for problems,” Hannon said. “I think this is a different opportunity — we’re a product company. Technology and content are there to serve the aims and goals of the company. It’s all focused on that. The tech needs to be focused on that, and the product needs to be focused on that. We think about how to transform this company into one that has a global scale that [co-founders] Andy [Puddicombe] and Rich [Pierson] envision. Their vision isn’t Andy’s voice throughout the world, their vision is building products that help people.”

As startups start to take a deeper look at their products and what kinds of interactions users have, they have to actually think about where they can start tracking what their users are doing in sensitive ways in order to improve the experience. That might mean figuring out how often they are logging in, when they are checking their progress, how long they are listening, and other examples in a non-invasive way. But another big challenge is ensuring all that is wrapped up in a way where statisticians and product people can actually easily query all that data and start doing the math on it to figure out how to improve things, and building that out will be part of Isaac’s main jobs.

The rest of the technology problems are ones that startups will typically face as they start to scale, which includes getting on hardware around the world and making sure that all that content is available when necessary. Headspace has increasingly tried to tailor its services for the time that its users have, and not the other way around, and that means making sure it’s actually working right when a user is looking to check out of reality and into a Headspace meditation — especially if it’s only just for a few minutes. Hannon said the plan, currently, is not to move onto its own proprietary infrastructure.

Hannon stressed that the data that the company would be collecting as it tries to improve its products would not be sold or used in any way other than trying to make Headspace a better experience, as the company monetizes through different ways. “While data is an important aspect of what we do, we’re not incentivized to do things with that data that would violate the trust of our consumers because they’re paying us,” Hannon said.

All this is essentially continuing moves to try to make the service more palatable and easier to use — and actually working — as it faces an increasingly crowded space market of apps looking to help users take a minute to just chill and be a bit more mindful. Calm.com, for example, is reportedly hitting a $250 million valuation in an upcoming financing round, and the company that ends up with both the best experience and content may eventually be the one that wins out. That means bringing on the right talent in order to ensure that everything runs smoothly and keeps getting better.

Remember when eBay bought Hunch in 2011 to improve its personalization technology and attract shoppers based on their interests? Or when  it launched a Pinterest-like tool called Setify in 2012 for creating personalized collections and wishlists? Or when it revamped its mobile apps in 2014 to focus on discovery and interests? Well guess what? Ebay is at it again today, as it’s launching a new shopping experience that – yep, you guessed it – lets online consumers focus on their interests, and experience a more personalized version of eBay.

I feel like I’ve heard this before!

The issue at hand is that eBay is still trying to shake its old reputation of being an auction site – even though bidding only comprised 19 percent of its sales in 2017. People continue to think of it at best as a secondhand goods marketplace – a place to find collectibles, antiques, or hard-to-find items; not the massive online store connecting buyers and sellers worldwide – though that’s what it has evolved to become.

One could even argue eBay has had a bit of Pinterest envy, as do many other online retailers who can’t figure out why they can’t just lets their customers surf curated inventory and put them into collections, too, in order to make shoppers think their site is the place to “discover new things.” (Hi, ahem, Amazon Interesting Finds.)

eBay Interests

This time around, eBay’s personalization efforts involve a new “Interests” feature.

The new tactic is to walk consumers through a customization experience in its mobile app where you manually tap on what sort of things you’re interested in, like “biking” or “boho chic” fashion, for example. This sort of demand for explicit input implies that, despite how much shopping you may or may not have done over the years on eBay, it just doesn’t have enough data on its shoppers to create the ideal personalized storefront.

It’s the equivalent of eBay going, “okay, fine, why don’t you just tell me what your interests are then?”

There’s nothing wrong with that, to be clear.

And it’s not like recommendations are working that well elsewhere either. (Walmart and Amazon still lean heavily on “customers also viewed” and “related to this item” suggestions. And, of course, Amazon continues to think that buying an item once means you’re just really into that thing, even when it’s a toilet seat. So it shows you more of them.)

With eBay’s Interests, you tell it your particular tastes, it then curates items from its 171 million buyers to create a personalized version of its store, where you can browse collections of a sort related to those interests you indicated across areas like “passions, hobbies and style,” the company says.

Assuming you return to the site regularly, these suggestions will get better in time. But this at least gives eBay a head start on showing you things you may like.

Ebay touts its marketplace advantage as to why shoppers should turn to its site for discovery, instead of major retailers who have their own agendas.

“When it comes to personalization at scale, most retailers merchandise the items that they are trying to sell,” an eBay spokesperson said. “As an agnostic platform, eBay Interests helps sort through the 1 billion items available from sellers on eBay to find the items that are most relevant and interesting to you.”

The “interests” feature is live now in the U.S. on iOS and Android. It will roll out to the rest of the world, and to the web and mobile web in the months ahead.

 

 

Startup Studios are becoming more and more prevalent, with big name companies like Giphy and Girlboss coming from the studio model. The premise is strong: use venture on a small, concentrated number of ideas, fostered by experts and internal resources, to create strong businesses.

But a new startup studio is prepping to launch in NYC with a different idea in mind.

FCTRY, led by Jules Ehrhardt, doesn’t necessarily think that money is always the best way to help startups grow. Ehrhardt thinks of FCTRY as more of a Creative Capital Studio, wherein experts from various fields (with a particular focus on creative, design, and engineering) offer their insight and knowledge to help startups grow rather than venture capital. Of course, these startups would still trade equity in exchange for these services.

Ehrhardt comes from UsTwo, the digital product studio that helped develop the wildly popular game Monument Valley.

The focus of FCTRY won’t be the foundry model, where studios come up with their own ideas in conjunction with smart serial entrepreneurs and build them from scratch in house. Rather, FCTRY will help existing early-stage and mid-stage companies with their creative strategy, processes and culture.

“The typical advisory system is broken,” said Ehrhardt. “Usually the advisory structure comes from a one to five percent equity pool and usually ends up in disappointment, where the advisor was supposed to make introductions or provide actionable insight that never comes through.”

Ehrhardt says he wants to bring more charity to that, tapping into the same pool of expert advisors but with the proper structure in place for offering that expertise and delivering on the task.

FCTRY will focus on three pillars of startup success: product, people, and growth.

“Product” might sound a bit obvious and nebulous all at once, but FCTRY is particularly concerned with building a framework for delivering on product, helping set up the processes and organizational structure that allow companies to build great products. Of course, the FCTRY team will also be contributing directly to the products themselves, but with the added goal of ensuring that the startup can continue to iterate and build great brands and products beyond their time with FCTRY.

Ehrhardt also noticed that recruitment and personal development are two big obstacles for companies trying to develop and express their own culture. Founders suddenly go from being chief product officer to hiring people to take over various roles at the company, requiring a totally different set of skills.

FCTRY wants to help startups develop and express their mission and culture so that it can scale from 10 people to 200 without a lot of friction. FCTRY also wants founders to focus on their own personal development, and that of their employees. Ehrhardt noted that Travis Kalanick, founder and CEO of one of the fastest scaling companies on the planet, didn’t scale himself up alongside the company.

“Failures often come down to the human part of a company,” said Ehrhardt. “People haven’t been aware of the need for their own personal development.”

As part of that, FCTRY will not only help with recruitment and hiring but with feedback frameworks within companies.

The last part of the puzzle for FCTRY is growth. The company will help with paid, viral and sticky marketing strategies drawing from a pool of talent in the creative agency space. Ehrhardt says that around 20 percent of the FCTRY team will come from creative agencies, with the rest coming from other fields of expertise, such as machine learning, design, engineering, etc.

Ehrhardt stressed that one of the greatest opportunities with the Creative Capital model is offering a new path to wealth creation for some of the leading experts in their respective fields. These experts, though they may not be able to write a big check to a VC firm or even as an angel to a startup, can exchange their own insight for equity through the Creative Capital model.

“Traditionally, LPs are people who can cut a check, who tend to be white men who have benefitted from their privelege,” said Ehrhardt. “We can do a lot to open up the chance for wealth creation to far more people than the usual suspects.”

While FCTRY is in its early days, Ehrhardt envisions gathering around 20 people to join the FCTRY team, with plans to work with around 10 startups over the course of a year, with engagements varying in size and duration.