Month: June 2019

Electric cars are better for the environment than fossil fuel-burning vehicles, but they still rely on the grid, which can be variously dirty or clean depending on what sources it uses for its energy. The new Lightyear One is a prototype vehicle that would improve that by collecting the power it needs to run from the sun.

Lightyear, a startup from the Netherlands born as Stella, has come a long way since it won a Crunchie award in 2015, with a vehicle that now looks ready for the road. The Lightyear One prototype vehicle unveiled today has a sleek, driver-friendly design and also boasts a range of 450 miles on a single charge – definitely a first for a car powered by solar and intended for the actual consumer market.

© Twycer / www.twycer.nl

The startup says that it has already sold “over a hundred vehicles” even though this isn’t yet ready to hit the road, but Lightyear is aiming to begin production by 2021, with reservations available for 500 additional units for the initial release. You do have to pay €119,000 up front (around $136,000 USD) to secure a reservation, however.

Lightyear One isn’t just a plug-in electric with some solar sells on the roof: Instead it’s designed from the ground up to maximize performance from a smaller-than-typical battery that can directly grab sun from a roof and hood covered with 16 square feet of solar cells, embedded in safety glass designed with passenger wellbeing in mind. The car can also take power directly from regular outlets and existing charging stations for a quick top-up, and again because it’s optimized to be lightweight and power efficient, you can actually get around 250 miles on just one night of charging from a standard (European) 230V outlet.

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The car should supplement existing electric cars for buyers who are more conscious of range anxiety and nervous about having enough charge, the company says. It still have to actually enter production, however, and even when it does it’ll be a fairly expensive and small batch product, at least at first. But it’s an impressive feat nonetheless, and a potential new direction for EVs of the future.

The march of globalization continues unabated, and with it comes a growing demand for companies of all sizes to communicate with and sell to each other, regardless of the distance or any other barrier. Now, a startup that has built a platform to help them do that better and more cheaply is announcing a round of funding to capitalize on the opportunity. Orderful, which aims to modernize supply chain management through an API-based cloud service, has raised $10 million in a Series A from Andreessen Horowitz.

The new funding comes on the back of a previous seed round from Initialized Capital and a period of time mostly bootstrapping the business. It will be used to continue building out more functionality on the platform and to continue to expand the network of partners using it. Today there are 1,000 retailers, 10,000 vendors and 5,000 carriers on Orderful’s platform, but even that still only represents a small part of the wider industry of businesses that buy, sell and transport components and full products from A to B.

To understand the problem that Orderful is trying to fix, a little rundown on how supply chain management works today is helpful. In the old, pre-computer days, all information exchange happened by way of phone, fax, post, and documents that often were delivered along with goods, which all required manual assessment and recording.

The rise of computers and the internet did push that system into the digital world, but only just: electronic data interchange (EDI), as this general area is known, is a loosely organised set of technical standards to use computers to communicate this data between businesses to enable purchases, make accounting reconciliations, and transfer shipping details. It’s a business that has boomed with the growth of globalization and companies trading with each other at an increasing pace. Supply chain management software is a market that boomed to $14 billion in value in 2018, according to Gartner. Incumbent leaders include the likes of SAP, Oracle and JDA.

The problem is that EDI is actually not as easy as it ought to be. It’s a hodge-podge of standards, you usually need a team of specialists to integrate the services at each end point, and it doesn’t allow for a wider network effect that you might get from being “online” with one supplier already. All of that translates to it being actually quite slow and expensive.

Erik Kiser, the founder and CEO of Orderful, found and identified this inefficiency while he was working as one of those specialists, realizing that with the rise of APIs, large database technology and cloud-based software-as-a-service, there was an opportunity to build a new kind of platform that could do everything that EDI did, but on a supercharged basis.

Marc Andreessen (co-founder of A16Z) coined the phrase ‘software will eat the world,’ Kiser noted to me, “But actually software eats software sometimes, too.”

The idea behind Orderful is that it has created a series of APIs that can adapt to whatever systems a business is already using, in turn “translating” that business’s product and other data into information that can be imported into the Orderful platform to in turn be picked up by buyers, sellers, and shippers. (In other words, there is no expectation of ripping out legacy systems, but simply creating bridges to migrate what is already there to newer and better platforms.) This also brings down the operational costs of hiring teams to build and potentially run EDI integrations.

“EDI predates the internet, and there are not many digital protocols that we use today that are pre-internet,” David Ulevitch, the partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led the investment and joined the board, said in an interview. “Orderful, and Erik, recognised that as more commerce was becoming digital, there needed to be a better way to do all this. There is currently no SaaS company out there addressing this and removing the friction. It provides velocity between distributors and producers because when you connect once you can then trade with a number of partners. Time is up for EDI.”

While there may be no direct competitor to Orderful at the moment, there are a lot of potential players that I can see posing a challenge down the line (or potentially working with or even buying Orderful if not). They include the incumbents in supply-chain management like Oracle, SAP and the rest. But also companies like Amazon, which has built its own EDI alternative (or version, you might say) that is used for its own management of suppliers. The company is very well known for building for itself, and then productizing, but for now Kizer says that it’s a partner, and customers can interface and sell to Amazon on Orderful using its APIs.

One thing that Amazon is instructive about, though, is when considering how Orderful’s data trove could be used for more analytics and business intelligence down the line.

“I don’t think companies not doing business with Amazon will be inclined to use its platform for trading,” Kiser said. “But they do have a lot of information about their network.”

Indeed, he pointed out that it’s been said there are some 30 economists at the company looking at its B2B supply chain data, and considering how it can be parsed for example to predict inflation. “They are already using the data. With Orderful we have the opportunity to be the most influential software company if we can be the plumbing that connects companies. There are a ton of services that we can add on the platform and that’s where we are going even if right now we are focused on the plumbing and simply making it easy to trade data.”

Yelp is announcing two new ad products for business owners — portfolios and “business highlights.”

Those highlights are basically a way for businesses to point out their most distinctive and attractive characteristics, using short phrases like “vegetarian-friendly,” “locally-owned & operated” and “X years in operation.”

Director of Product Management Alon Shiran emphasized that this is an ad product, rather than editorial or user-generated content. Businesses can pay $2 per day to choose from more than 30 possible highlights — they can show two badges in their search results, and six on their profiles.

At the same time, he acknowledged that Yelp doesn’t want business to falsely advertise themselves, so users can point out in their reviews when a label seems inaccurate, or they can report those inaccuracies to Yelp.

Portfolios, meanwhile, are exactly what they sound like — a way for certain types of businesses (say a house painter or home remodeler) to highlight actual projects they’ve completed, accompanied by photos, descriptions and pricing. Like business highlights, they cost $2 per day.

Shiran said these new products are in the same vein as the verified licenses that Yelp announced in March, where businesses can get a blue check mark indicating that they’ve actually received a license in categories like medical care, childcare and home services.

In Shiran’s view, it’s all about helping businesses with “building a reputation” and “building credibility” with new customers. For example, Lemon Remodeling & Services in San Jose, Calif. said that after signing up for all three products, it saw a 200 percent increase in activity on its profile, which led in turn to an increase in customer leads.

Yelp says it will making all of these features available through a new Yelp for Business interface.

Instead of emailing a term sheet, Ilya Fushman paid $150 to have ‘Deep Blue Sea’ actor Michael Rapaport send the Cameo founders Steven Galanis, Martin Blencowe and Devon Townsend a video message congratulating them on their $50 million Series B. A general partner at Kleiner Perkins, Fushman tapped Cameo’s own service, which sells personalized video messages from celebrities, influencers, athletes and thought leaders, to win over the startup amid what he says was a “highly competitive deal.”

Fushman and Galanis, Cameo’s chief executive officer, declined to disclose the startup’s valuation with the new funds, but Delaware stock authorization filings uncovered by PitchBook, as well as previous reporting from Axios’ Dan Primack indicate a valuation of $300 million. The Chernin Group, Spark Ventures, Bain Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated in the round.

Chicago-based Cameo emerged in 2017 and quickly popularized a new type of thank you note, at least among the Gen Z crowd. For a low price of $5 to a whopping fee of $3,000, customers pay Cameo for lightly-scripted messages from some of their favorite personalities. On the high end, messages from Snoop Dogg, a Cameo investor and member of its talent line-up, have sold for $3,000. A few words from the former basketball star and author Kareem Abdul-Jabbar run for $500. And for the low price of $55, YouTube star Joe Santagato will tell your best friend happy birthday.

At about 2-years-old, Cameo’s growth is exploding. In December, the company had recorded roughly 100,000 transactions. By the end of this month, they’ll have done over 300,000, fulfilling an average of 2,000 video requests per day.

“People use Cameo as often as they used to go to Hallmark to buy a card,” Galanis tells TechCrunch. “We have power users that have literally bought hundreds of these and we have these interesting use cases. A lot of enterprise sales teams are buying these to get in front of a contact that maybe went cold. We are seeing customers using these as job offers.”

Cameo takes a 25% cut out of every transaction made on its website. The team prefers to sell a higher volume of videos rather than make big sells, like that of Snoop Dogg, because the more videos delivered, the more are shared on social media and the more shared on social media, the more free advertising for Cameo. Because they’ve prioritized volume, they’ve increased revenue 5x year-over-year, Galanis explained, without detailing specific revenue figures.

With its latest infusion of capital, which brings its total to $65 million, Cameo plans to revamp its mobile app and implement purchasing features (currently, one can only buy Cameos on the company’s website). The real focus, however, will be on the international market.

Cameo has a roster of 15,000 celebrities that they believe could expand to 5 million. For now, the roster is majority American icons of sorts. To hire talent acquisition teams abroad, Cameo, which already has offices in London and Australia, is sending co-founder Martin Blencowe to London. He will focus on developing the London team, as well as identifying additional talent in Europe, South America and Asia. 

In addition to grand global ambitions, Cameo is looking to expand its range of talent. There is no shortage of B-list celebrities available for booking, but when it comes to CEOs, investors and business influencers, for example, Cameo is lacking. Kleiner Perkins’ Fushman recently became available for booking and to his surprise, an engineering team paid to have him give a shout out to one of their lead engineers almost immediately.

“Everybody’s got role models and this is a way for you to be more directly impacted,” Fushman tells TechCrunch. 

What emerged as a friendly way to treat friends has become an avenue for wedding proposals, “promposals,” baby gender reveals, teens coming out to their parents, sports fans roasting their nemeses and more. 

“It’s a new way for people to connect and the delight generated from this platform is unparalleled,” Galanis said.

Fueled by its $300 million Series D round led by Softbank last August, Getaround is making its second-ever acquisition this year with a $12 million purchase of Norwegian car rental startup Nabobil. This acquisition brings Getaround into seven European countries, as opposed to just six.

In April, Getaround made its first-ever acquisition of European car rental startup Drivy for $300 million. That marked Getaround’s first expansion beyond the U.S. and into France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium and the U.K.

For now, Nabobil will keep its name and the startup’s full team will remain in place in its Oslo, Norway-based headquarters. Nabobil, which first launched in 2015, has 180,000 registered users and reached 130,000 bookings in May 2019. 

Getaround, on the other hand, has more than five million registered users and is active in 300 cities. Getaround CEO San Zaid recognizes that Nabobil is not at the same scale, but ultimately sees a big opportunity in Norway, he told TechCrunch.

Nabobil board members and co-founders Christian Persson Hager, Karl Alveng Munthe-Kaas and Jacob Tveraabak, Getaround CEO Sam Zaid and Nabobil CEO Even Tangen Heggernes

“The market opportunity in Norway and in general, in the Nordic region, is actually a very good one,” Zaid said. “It’s not the first place people think of when they think of expanding to Europe. But it’s the third most expensive place in the world to own a car. Singapore is obviously number one but it’s up there in terms of how heavily cars are taxed and how expensive it is to own a car. There’s also a very progressive regulatory environment.”

For Nabobil, the company is excited about the potential growth opportunities that come with the acquisition, as well as the keyless technology Getaround has pioneered.

“This is an exciting moment for our company, made possible by the incredible work of our founders and team,” Nabobil CEO Even Heggernes said in a statement. “Joining Getaround, the world’s leading carsharing platform, gives us the power to invest in keyless, connected car hardware and grow the Nordic organization.”

The acquisition also aligns with Getaround’s vision of creating a world where all cars are shared. With the team from Nabobil on board, Getaround plans to expand the Nabobil service beyond Norway and “help accelerate their already existing growth.”

Tundra, a new zero-commission wholesale marketplace, has today announced the close of $12 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Redpoint’s Annie Kadavy, with participation from investors such as Initialized Capital, Peterson Ventures, FJ Labs, Switch Ventures, and Background Capital.

Tundra was founded by married couple Arnold and Katie Engel, who previously ran a global supply chain company called Vox Supply Chain. In that world, they quickly realized just how much inefficiency is built into the wholesale market, from disorganized trade shows to transaction fees from the incumbents to a business that’s largely done on phone with pen and paper.

That’s where Tundra comes in.

Tundra allows suppliers to list their product on the platform, which is built to look and feel like a B2C marketplace. Buyers can come on the platform and shop for products, complete with ratings and reviews, supplier performance metrics, and free shipping with easy tracking.

“The wholesale market is set up to benefit big businesses, with other platforms and distributors charging anywhere from 5 percent to 30 percent commission,” said Engel. “That can be particularly pronounced for small businesses.”

Plus, it can be perilous for small players to depend on big platforms like Amazon. Just a few weeks ago, there were rumors that Amazon would focus its attention on big brands like P&G and purge smaller suppliers from the platforms. Amazon denied the rumors, saying it evaluates suppliers on an individual basis.

For Tundra, the hope is to eliminate both the time-consuming and tedious process of negotiating deals at trade shows as well as the cost of simply buying and selling wholesale products online. And, importantly, Tundra has a zero-fee model, which means that buyers and suppliers can operate on the platform without spending a penny, if they so choose.

Of course, the company has to generate revenue in some way, which is why Tundra offers premium options at checkout, such as faster shipping, order insurance, and additional custom clearance and logistics services for international orders.

Having spent a year serving as Head of Strategic Operations growing Uber Freight, Redpoint Managing Director Annie Kadavy saw first-hand just how gargantuan the whole sale market is. During a phone interview, she reminded me that almost every item within view at any given moment was shipped on a truck and purchased at a whole sale price before it was purchased by a consumer in a store.

“Tundra’s greatest challenge ahead id execution because the market opportunity here is very obvious,” said Kadavy. “It’s a huge business that is currently transacted by fax, phone call, and pen and paper, so the opportunity is very clear.”

There is clearly movement in the space. Just last month, Shopify acquired Handshake to handle B2B ecommerce directly for customers. That followed its acquisition of Oberlo, a dropshipping platform, in 2017, signaling that existing platforms realize the opportunity of wholesale ecommerce, as well.

And a recent report stated that B2B ecommerce passed the $1 trillion mark for the first time in 2018.

The opportunity is there, as is the competition, but Tundra comes to the table armed with fresh capital

Kopi Kenangan, a startup that wants to make quality, fresh coffee affordable to Indonesian consumers, has raised $20 million as it begins to consider overseas expansion in Southeast Asia.

The round comes courtesy of Sequoia India and Southeast Asia, via the $695 million investment fund it closed last year. Kopi Kenangan previously raised $8 million from Alpha JWC Ventures.

Started in 2017 by Edward Tirtanata and James Prananto, the company aims to bridge the gap between cheap street vendor coffee and drinks priced at the higher end of the spectrum from international chains such as Starbucks — the ‘sweet spot,’ you might say. That delta is a major reason why Indonesia, which is the world’s fourth-largest coffee exporter, has Southeast Asia’s lowest coffee consumption per person, Tirtanata argued.

Kopi Kenangan is also unashamedly local. Rather than lattes, mochas or flat whites, its top-selling drink is ‘Es Kopi Kenangan Mantan,’ a sweet Indonesian coffee that uses palm sugar, among other local Southeast Asian beverages. Ingredients are sourced locally, including four different coffee blends from across the country and organic palm sugar. Tirtanata told TechCrunch that the raw materials aren’t cheap, but they are essential for a “customer-first” company.

Already, Kopi Kenangan has an impressive retail footprint, including 80 stores across eight cities. The company makes use on-demand services like Go-Jek (GoFood) and Grab (GrabFood) which account for one-third of all orders, according to Tirtanata, rather than running its out fleet as some competitors.

Impressively, the business is profitable thanks to a managed inventory and a focus on waste that sees neighboring branches share resources. Tirtanata said that keeping the business sustainable is a key focus even though it is now flush with new capital.

With this new funding under its belt, the company is eying significant expansion both nationally and internationally. Tirtanata said the plan is to reach 500 stores by next year, which, he claimed, will include locations in two overseas markets. He declined to name them, but did reveal that hiring is already underway in both countries.

As well as growing its commercial footprint, Kopi Kenangan will use the capital to build out its logistics to support the projected rise in business. (It claims to sell “close to” one million cups of coffee per month, up from 175,000 cups in October.)

Chief on the list is logistics to track coffee supplies and shipments — Tirtanata admitted it’s natural that there will occasionally be some beans that are sub-standard, and this will help root them out — using RFID and other tech. The startup’s development team is also poised to work on a new internet-of-things feature, details of which will come later, and improvements to the Kopi Kenangan apps and digital service.

Unlike newer competitors like Fore Coffee, which takes its cues from China’s Luckin by placing emphasis on digital delivery, Kopi Kenangan is content to use third-party on-demand apps and its own ‘new retail’ experience. Its app enables customers to pre-order coffee for collection at their nearest branch. If they are in an unfamiliar location, it will guide them to the store.

SpaceX has managed to do another thing which seemed audacious and highly unlikely after a few early botched attempts – it used a ship at sea to catch the falling nosecone that shielded the cargo aboard its Falcon Heavy rocket during launch.

The maneuver saw a SpaceX -owned barge called Ms. Tree rigged with a giant net slung across four large protruding beams navigate to a point off the Florida coast in the Atlantic Ocean to await the SpaceX fairing’s return once it separated from the rocket. Falcon Heavy launched from Kennedy Space Center last night for its STP-2 mission.

Ms. Tree (née Mr. Steven) had made a long trip to make the catch, relocating from the West Coast to the East via the Panama Canal earlier in the year to put it in place to make some attempts at catching SpaceX rockets launched from Florida, after beginning its career serving the launches that take place from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The boat was put into service during a SpaceX launch from Vandenberg for the first time in February 2017, but the fairing missed the net and the boat, and the same is true for three subsequent attempts in 2018, during which SpaceX also decked the boat out with larger nets to give it a better chance of success.

This is a big deal for SpaceX because it likely makes re-using the fairings much more feasible. CEO Elon Musk has said that the company is basically throwing away $6 million every time it loses one of these fairings to a hard ocean landing, and so SpaceX has been working on a way to recover the parts – just like it recovers boosters via controlled descent.

The nosecone parts (each launch has two, one fairing for each half of the payload capsule) have been able to control their descent using small thrusters and a parachute which SpaceX can steer to a degree from the ground since the company’s 2017 SES-10 mission, but until now they’ve dropped in the ocean, which makes recovery more challenging and difficult to refurbish.

During this launch, Ms. Tree caught one half of the fairing as planned, and the other half landed in the water nearby. The big test now will be examining the returned caught fairing to determine if it’s suitable for refurbishment and re-flight, which could help a lot in trimming SpaceX launch costs further still.

Messaging platform Telegram has added a new bunch of location-based features via an update.

Users of the latest version of the app will find an ‘Add People Nearby’ setting which they can use to quickly exchange contact details without the need to type in digits.

Coupled with a prior update, which lets Telegram users control who can see their phone number, it looks like it’ll make it possible to open a chat channel with a new contact without having to hand over your actual phone number.

Also via the ‘Add People Nearby’ contacts setting, the update lets users surface nearby public chat groups — by displaying any open chat channels in their proximity.

The setting also includes an option to ‘Create a Local Group’ — which does what it says on the tin, allowing users to set up a chat in their locality.

“This update opens up a new world of location-based group chats for anything from conferences, to festivals, to stadiums, to campuses, to chatting with people hanging out in the same cafe,” Telegram suggests, re-upping an idea that’s clocked up more than its fair share of startup tech cycles over the years. As a feature within a fully fledged messaging platform it’s more likely to find a niche groove, say for hosting ephemeral stuff like conference scuttlebutt or party chatter.

Other features added in the update include the ability to transfer admin rights of any group chat to another user with two taps.

“Telegram apps now support transferring ownership rights from any groups and channels to other users,” it writes. “Grant full admin rights to your Chosen One to see the Transfer Ownership button.”

It’s not quite a self-destruct button but the ‘pass the ownership baton’ feature could come in handy for users living in repressive states with restrictions on freedom of expression — if, for example, it allows group chat/channel admins to stay one step ahead of state forces which may target them in a bid to close conversations down.

In such a scenario, there’s the added risk that a channel admin could be personally targeted by police to extract data on group messages and other members. So enabler quicker transfers of ownership may enable comms to be maintained despite state attempts to disrupt and interfere — even if the original admin needs to temporarily delete their Telegram account to protect its data from being accessed via their device.

However, like any tech tool there’s also the opposite risk; i.e. that police could force a channel admin to transfer ownership to a group member of their choosing and then take it over and close it down.

Other features landing in the latest Telegram app update include more controls over notifications; Siri shortcuts for users of the iOS app; and tweaks to the theme picker and icon options, also on iOS.

More in Telegram’s blog.

Sales teams have long turned to tech solutions to help improve how they source leads, develop relationships and close deals. Now, one of the startups that helps out at a key point in that trajectory is announcing a round of growth funding to help fuel its own rapid growth. Showpad, a sales enablement platform that lets salespeople source and organise relevant content and other collateral that they use in their deals, has raised a Series D of $70 million.

The funding, which brings the total raised by Showpad to $160 million, is coming in the form of debt and equity. The equity part is co-led by Dawn Capital and Insight Partners, with existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, and Korelya Capital also participating. Silicon Valley Bank is providing debt financing. This is one of the first big investments out of Dawn’s Opportunities Fund that we wrote about last week.

The company is not disclosing its valuation but Pieterjan Bouten, the CEO who co-founded the company with Louis Jonckheere (currently CPO), confirmed that it has doubled since the $50 million Series C that it raised in 2016, with the company growing 90% year-on-year at the moment in terms of revenues.

And as a point of reference, another sales enablement player, Seismic, last December raised a Series E of $100 million at a $1 billion valuation.

Founded in Ghent, Belgium, Showpad today operates across two main headquarters, its original European base and Chicago. The latter was the homebase of LearnCore, a company that Showpad acquired last year that focuses on sales coaching and training, which has been used as a strategic acquisition to expand Showpad’s primary product, a platform that acts as a kind of content management system for sales collateral. (Today, while Chicago is where Showpad builds its go-to market efforts and professional services, Ghent focuses on engineering and product, he said.) As it happens, Chicago is also the headquarters of Seismic.

As Bouten sees it, Showpad is part of what he considers to be the fourth pillar of the technology marketing stack: storage (the cloud services where you keep all your data), CRM, marketing automation and sales enablement, where Showpad sits.

While the first three are key to helping to manage a salesperson’s activities and work, the fourth is a crucial one for helping to make sure a salesperson can do his or her job more effectively. Traditionally a lot of the content that salespeople used — presentations, white papers, other materials — to help make their cases and close their deals would be managed offline and directly by individual salespeople. Showpad has taken some of that process and made it digital, which means that now teams of salespeople can more effectively share materials amongst each other; and interestingly the material and its link to successful sales becomes part of how Showpad “learns” what works and what doesn’t.

That, in turn, helps build its own artificial intelligence algorithms, to help suggest the best materials for a particular sales effort either to someone else in that team, or to other salespeople using the platform.

“To date there has been enormous innovation in automating the marketing and sales workflow. However, in the end, sales comes down to one person selling to another,” said Norman Fiore, General Partner at Dawn Capital and member of the Showpad Board, in a statement. “Historically, this has been an offline process that has been wildly inconsistent and opaque. Showpad’s suite of products succeeds in bringing this process online for the first time with data-rich feedback loops on the effectiveness of teams, managers, salespeople and even individual pieces of sales content.”

This is a crowded area of the market with a number of standalone companies building sales enablement solutions, but also other companies within the sales stack also adding on enablement as a value-added service. For now, though, Bouten notes that these are more strategic partners than competitors. Salesforce is a partner, he says, and “We integrate with Salesloft to make sure sure emails that are sent out are using the right content. We become the single source of truth but also are being used for outreach.”

Today, the company has around 1,200 enterprise customers, including Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell, and Merck, and the plan going forward will be to continue building out the services that it offers around its sales enablement software.

“You can equip sales people with the best content, but if they are not trained and coached in the right way, it goes nowhere,” he said.