Year: 2019

Spotify doubled down on podcasts last week with a double deal to buy podcast networks Gimlet and Anchor. Those acquisitions were initially undisclosed, but Spotify has quietly confirmed that it spent €300 million, just shy of $340 million, to capture the companies.

That’s according to an SEC filing — hat tip Recode’s Peter Kafka — which deals the transactions which were “primarily in cash,” Spotify said. Kafka previously reported that Spotify paid around $200 million for Gimlet, which, if correct, would mean Anchor fetched the remaining $140 million.

Those numbers represent an impressive return for the investors involved, particularly those who backed the companies at seed stage.

Gimlet raised $28.5 million from investors that included Stripes Group, WPP, Betaworks and Lowercase Capital, according to Crunchbase.

Anchor, meanwhile, raised $14.4 million. Crunchbase data shows its backers included Accel, GV, Homebrew and (again) Betaworks.

Those deals represent a good chunk of change, but Spotify still has more fuel in the tanks.

As we reported last week, it plans to spend a total of up to $500 million this year “on multiple acquisitions” as it seeks to further its position on podcasting which, to date, has been an after-thought to its focus on music. Less these deals, Spotify has around $160 million left in its spending budget for 2019.

In a blog post announcing the deals published last week, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek admitted that he didn’t originally release that “audio — not just music — would be the future of Spotify” when he founded the business in 2006.

“This opportunity starts with the next phase of growth in audio — podcasting. There are endless ways to tell stories that serve to entertain, to educate, to challenge, to inspire, or to bring us together and break down cultural barriers. The format is really evolving and while podcasting is still a relatively small business today, I see incredible growth potential for the space and for Spotify in particular,” Ek explained.

Late last month, the venture firm Kleiner Perkins began an official reboot, with a new, $600 million fund, as well as some new faces blazing the trail for the outfit going forward, including Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman, investors who joined Kleiner from Social Capital and Index Ventures, respectively.

Their roles at the 47-year-old firm are being watched closely. Kleiner was long considered part of a very small circle of top venture funds, but a series of missteps in recent years had yanked it in another direction, with a seemingly endless string of departures further tarnishing its brand. Now, Hamid and Fushman, friends whose paths crossed as children in Frankfurt, Germany, have an opportunity to restore KIeiner to its former glory.

Last week, at a small event hosted in San Francisco by this editor, Hamid and Fushman talked about Kleiner, touching on people who’ve left the firm, how its decision-making process now works, why there are no senior women in its ranks, and what they make of SoftBank’s Vision Fund. (Hint: Hamid doesn’t entirely get it.) They also talked about why they are putting their necks on the line to turn Kleiner back into a powerhouse. Much of our conversation, edited lightly for length, follows.

TC: Mamoon, you left Social Capital, a firm that you’d cofounded, to join Kleiner Perkins in late 2017. Why?

MH: I’d left [my previous venture role with U.S. Venture Partners] n 2011 to start Social Capital with a couple of friends. And it was right around when Steve Jobs had passed away And it seemed like the foolish thing to do. But we were able to raise our first fund and get off the ground and raised a number of funds after that and made some really great investments. Then I had a chance to join Kleiner. There was a point when Kleiner and Social Capital were talking about merging, but it’s hard to do mergers, of private companies, venture capital firms. It’s hard to do, and I think it was the right decision on both parts not to do it. But I got to know the Kleiner folks through that process and it was too compelling to pass up [when they reached out].

TC: How would you characterize your experience at Social Capital, and how does it inform your work at Kleiner?

MH: I’d say venture capital is a very boutique asset class. It doesn’t scale all that well as it comes to both people inside of a firm and the capital you deploy into companies. All you do is create more clones of those companies . . . because the world is finite in terms of what should be out there and what should be used. There shouldn’t be seven versions of Slack; there should be one or two maybe.

The same is true of venture firms. I think what works is a small, nimble, group of dedicated domain experts in certain areas. You can’t have armies running around with your business card [reading] Social Capital. And I think how we look at ourselves at Kleiner Perkins, that’s precisely who we are and who we used to be. If you look at [Kleiner’s] best days, it was a group of five to seven partners, making some really great decisions.

TC: Were you concerned about trading one dramatic situation for another? You knew what was happening inside Social Capital; meanwhile, everyone knew that Kleiner was going through some kind of transition, with a lot of people leaving.

MH: I think part of [my focus] was to be this small group of people, in consumer, enterprise, and I could foresee that happening. Because that was the right strategy, it wasn’t a surprise to me. It wasn’t like I got there and was surprised and thought, Oh my God, this is happening. It was supposed to happen. This is where we driving it to.

TC: Ilya, what made you think this was the right move when Mamoon then asked you to leave Index Ventures to join Kleiner?

IF: Index is a top European venture capital firm. I knew Danny Rimer from Dropbox. Mike Volpi is a partner, and he helped me a lot. And I helped [the firm] get established here in San Francisco, and I did that for about three years, which was frankly an amazing time. And like Mamoon deciding to leave a firm that he started, for me, the decision to leave Index and this part of Index that I helped establish was really difficult — one of the most difficult career decisions of my life, not just because of the firm but the people and the companies they are a part of. So I took a long time to think about this.

But Mamoon and I had chatted on and off for about three years, and a lot of what we talked about as we worked on [shared portfolio companies including] Slack and Intercom and a few other things was what would an ideal venture firm look like if we built it from the ground up. What would be the principles, how would we structure it, how big would it be, how would we think about people who come into it and progress to different levels. And what we envisioned is what we’re building now at Kleiner Perkins. For me, the opportunity to build that atop 47 years of investing history was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

TC: Before we move on, why the split with Mary Meeker and the growth stage business? My understanding was the firm’s best returns in recent years have come from that later-stage side.

IF: Certainly, there were some great logos in the growth-stage fund. But I think returns from [earlier-stage] venture were pretty great as well.

I think where we came down as we were thinking about strategy was this notion of how do you compete. There’s a lot more capital at the seed stage; there’s a lot more capital in growth stage. When we think about ecosystem and landscape of venture, when you look where we’re focused predominately today — which is Series A — the type of work we do and the kind of skills required is mentally quite different from late-stage investing. There’s basically no data. We’re helping founders hire their first sales leader and figure out their product strategy and helping them navigate partnerships. And when you look at the late-stage growth side, a lot of it is financial engineering, and you have to be really good at it, because you have to price things really well. For us, if we’re off 20 to 30 percent on price, it’s probably okay as long as we pick the right company.

And mutually, as we thought about our individual fundraising strategies and our futures, we came to the conclusion that it made complete and total sense for the folks on the early stage and for Mary and other folks to go off and do late-stage investment.

TC: What about Beth Seidenberg and Lynne Chou O’Keefe, two life sciences investors who also left last year? Is health care not interesting to Kleiner? It seems like it’s suddenly interesting to other firms.

MH: Beth is one of the world’s best life sciences investors. She actually retired from Kleiner Perkins. That was her intent with the latest fund, and she has always lived in L.A. and she started her own fund down there and that was part of her plan. So that was not a surprise.

We still do health investing. I think all of us have done digital health investing . . .though they’re more like consumer or enterprise companies. They just happen to sell into the healthcare vertical.

TC: Tell us about the decision-making process and whether that has changed since the two of you joined.

IF: Given that we’re small, we can make decisions very quickly. Sometimes you have to make a decision in a matter of hours or days, and we want to be able to do that, and you can only achieve that with a small, tight-knit group.

So our process is pretty simple. We get together. And you kind of read the room. And if I look at Mamoon and he’s looking at me really skeptically when I’m excited about an opportunity I’m bringing in, I’ll think about it and vice versa. We want the process to be organic and as sort of non-structured as possible to [surface] those decisions that aren’t always unanimous.

If you look at data in venture, the deals where everybody thinks they are bad are probably pretty bad. The deals that everybody thinks are good, they do okay. But it’s really the ones where there is disagreement, where’s there’s controversy, those are the outliers. And it makes intuitive sense, because if it was obviously correct, someone would have build it before.

TC: I hear you have some [junior] investors who are rockstars, including Monica Desai. Will she be a partner some day? Does Kleiner have an apprenticeship model on your watch?

IF: There are various ways to think about a generational transformation or evolution. Our view is we want folks who are thinking long term in their career as investors, who are thinking about and curious about technology, otherwise, you’re pretty bored. And we absolutely think of it as an apprenticeship, learning model where these folks get to work with not just one particular partner or domain but really across the partnership. The goal is to have them invest as quickly as possible and then help companies grow. So it is for us, hopefully Monica and Annie [Case] will be partners very soon.

MH: All five people who are partners today at KP grew up in the business. We were all associates at some point in our career and all of us wanted to be venture capitalists. So there really has to be this mindset of, I really want to do this job, I want to do it really well, and to help great founders build great companies. And we want people to really internalize that aspect of what we do.

TC: Kleiner isn’t the only firm to have five male partners. But given the firm’s history and the press attention paid to it, I wonder: did LPs push back on [your gender makeup]?

MH: LPs don’t push on it. They ask about it. But they also want to make sure that we hire the right people. You’re making a 10-year hire. I’d known Ilya for three years plus before we consummated this relationship. And the KP folks had known me for 10, 15 years before I came to KP. And [longtime partners] Ted [Schlein] and Wen [Hsieh] had already been at KP, Ted for 22 years and Wen for 13 years. So these are really long-term decisions that you’re making, and it’s really important to get it right.

If you spend a year grooming someone, the worst thing that can happen is six months to a year later they’re gone because there’s organ rejection. And that applies to a man or woman, it doesn’t matter. But we’re hiring a consumer partner right now and we’ve been pretty public about wanting some of our partners to be female as well. But you do have to get the chemistry right, the desire to do this job right — everything has to really fit.

TC: What do you think about SoftBank and its Vision Fund? Is it the best thing to happen to venture capital? The worst thing? Soon to be tomorrow’s news?

MH: I’m confused by them. At the Series A, it really doesn’t have an impact. However, the downstream effects [are seen] as companies mature or need to raise capital, or don’t need to raise capital and are offered a bunch of money from SoftBank, which can draw out things. We’re seeing less and less of that, by the way. [There’s] less and less of ‘Here’s money that you don’t need, because we have lots of money to deploy.’ I don’t know why, but last year we saw a lot of that.

I’ve only worked with one company that has raised capital from SoftBank and there’s was a very normal looking round. But I don’t know what to make of SoftBank right now.

TC: How are you feeling about the market generally? A few weeks ago it looked like things were slowing down. Now it seems to have shifted yet again.

MH: It’s weird to be in a nine-, ten-year old bull cycle. Hindsight and statistics suggest that we should have a recession soon. But we’ll tell you that the view on the ground, and the companies we’re involved with, that there’s really strength in almost all of them. These are normal companies that should see softness in their business if there’s something coming down the pike, and we haven’t seen that softness yet in our order numbers. In fact, they’re stronger than ever before.

I don’t know. Maybe we’re in for a 15-year bull run. Maybe there’s this perfect storm of technology coming of age and being so mainstream that there’s not just hundreds of millions of users but billions, and the markets are going to continue to expand and tech companies will continue to thrive, which I think truly is the case. So I don’t know when this one stops. I’m not a macroeconomist, but so far, on the ground, it all looks good.

Ecommerce giant Alibaba is continuing its push into the world of youth culture after it scooped up an 8 percent stake in anime streaming and game publishing company Bilibili.

According to a securities filing on Thursday, Alibaba’s Taobao marketplace has acquired about 24 million shares in Bilibili, the Shanghai-based firm that has captured 93 million monthly users from hosting licensed anime titles, video games and user-generated content.

The financial gesture is hot on the heels of a partnership announced in December that saw the pair working to monetize Bilibili’s content assets. For one, Alibaba can help Bilibili creators sell merchandise like cosplay costumes and anime toys through Taobao’s online bazaar. Bilibili itself owns an e-store, but Taobao’s command of 700 million monthly users dwarfs its reach. 

“The partnership is great news for ACG content creators,” a Shanghai-based merchant that sells Lolita costumes on Taobao told TechCrunch, referring to the acrynom for “anime, comic and games.” The owner sells through both Taobao and Bilibili, though most sales have come from Taobao.

What Alibaba gets in return is access to China’s Generation Z. Bilibili claims that 82 percent of its users were born between 1990 and 2009. In a savvy move, Alibaba hooked up its food delivery unit Ele.me with Bilibili in December to tap a demographic of anime-watching and game-playing young people reliant on delivered meals.

“Over 1.6 million content creators, including anime, comic and games (ACG) experts, were actively supporting the Taobao app and helping brands on our platform engage with consumers,” said Fan Jiang, vice president of Alibaba and president of Taobao, back in December. “Through deep cooperation with intellectual property holders and content creators, Taobao has experienced the great potential of ACG.”

Investors’ darling

Tencent and Baidu’s iQiyi have also spent big bucks to beef up their respective anime offering, but Bilibili’s flourishing youth community gives it an edge over these deep-pocketed video-streaming heavyweights and to an extent makes it an investors’ darling. The eight-year-old company is notable for being one of the rare companies that count both Alibaba and Tencent — which compete on multiple fronts spanning ecommerce to cloud computing — as their investors. Other companies that won backings from the duo include China’s largest ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing.

Last October, social media and gaming juggernaut Tencent poured nearly $320 million into Bilibili in exchange for a 12.3 percent stake. While Alibaba helps drive revenues to Bilibili’s community of creators and potentially boost their loyalty to the site, Tencent could help it save on licensing fees for games and animes.

“Tencent and Bilibili are two of the major players in the animation industry. By working with Tencent, this will intensively expand our content offering and effectively decrease our content investment in the animation copyright procurement,” Chen of Bilibili said during the company’s Q3 earnings call.

“The agreement will enable us to leverage Tencent’s primary content, particularly in licensing, co-producing and investment in anime as well as publish Tencent’s large portfolio of high-quality mobile games,” Bilibili’s chief financial officer Sam Fan added.

Alarming reports popped up on Twitter late Thursday of incident involving an armed individual at Netflix’s Hollywood office on Sunset Blvd. TechCrunch has confirmed with the Los Angeles Police Department that a call reporting a man with a gun first came in at 3:53 Pacific Time. According to the LAPD, there were no shots fired, no reports of injuries and the suspect in question has been taken into custody. Though some reports on social media appeared to contradict those details, the LAPD again confirmed that there is only one suspect and that suspect is in custody. As of 5:12 Pacific Time, Netflix employees reported being allowed to leave on foot though some areas remained closed as a precaution.

Netflix first moved into the historic Hollywood Sunset Bronson studio site in 2015 and expanded its lease on the space in 2017. The company shares the location with local news outlet KTLA.

This story is developing.

Depending on who you ask, Citizen is either a useful urban safety tool or a menacing glimpse into a self-surveilled police state, but either way, the app is coming to Baltimore. Citizen, formerly known as Vigilante, is a crime tracking app that offers geo-targeted alerts that notify users of dangers lurking nearby, from carjackings to kidnappings and every mundane horror in between.

Citizen launched first in New York City before expanding to San Francisco in 2017. The app pulls in public safety data, sifts it through its own editorial team and dispenses it out to relevant users based on their location. Citizen’s founder and CEO Andrew Frame told the Baltimore Sun that Citizen is expanding to the city both because its team has connections there and due to Baltimore’s reputation for crime. The city’s reputation for a deeply corrupt police department with sometimes fatal results was not part of that calculation.

“Given the escalating crime and lack of public safety resources, Baltimore was a great place to try something new,” Frame said of the new market. “Citizen can now help Baltimore residents in the way it has helped New York and San Francisco, with real-time notifications that let a user escape a burning building or rescue a four-year old from an abductor. Citizen, with its real-time information, may be just what Baltimore needs.”

Considering the popularity of services like Nextdoor, it’s hard to argue that people don’t want to know what’s going on around them just for the sake of knowing. The problem is that there’s no evidence this state of hyper-awareness does any quantifiable good and at least some evidence that it can actually put people, specifically people of color, at more risk due to implicit bias and racial profiling. For better or worse, that fact paired with the collective lack of concern over the demonstrable ills of asking untrained individuals to assess and report threats explains Citizen’s apparent popularity. “How to Record Great Live Video on Citizen: By broadcasting live, you can help Protect the World,” the company implored in a blog post for users last October.

Still, given that its first iteration got banned from the app store for actually encouraging regular people to intervene in crimes in progress, the company could be said to have matured, if by no choice of its own.

As we wrote when Citizen expanded to San Francisco, “People who get off on local crime updates on the evening news with probably love Citizen. So will catastrophists, or anyone else rapt by what feels like a hastening pace of global disaster. Nextdoor-lovers who thrive in a state of hypervigilance will feel right at home.”

The net effect of all of that crime-watching is basically impossible to measure, but Citizen nonetheless revels in tackily taking credit for anecdotal success stories that mean little without proper outcome tracking or data sets to back them up. The whole thing is sort of the inverse of something like RideAlong, a software suite designed to help law enforcement and emergency workers provide more compassionate, longitudinal care for the individuals being policed instead of showcasing those incidents as faceless red crime dots on a map.

Unfortunately, contextual data isn’t quite as sexy as realtime threats unfolding all around us in every direction. People want the red dots. And investors are happy to throw money at the red dots. So, for Baltimore, red dots it is.

An extra special copy of Super Mario for NES just sold for a mind-boggling $100,150.

Before you go digging through the attic to find your old copy to throw up for auction, you should know: the version in question here is super, super rare.

So what makes it special?

Super Mario has been released and re-released dozens of times in the past three decades. Even if we’re just talking about the original NES cartridge that came in a black box, there were eleven ever-so-slightly-different versions of the box shipped between 1985 and 1994. Some had tabs for hanging them from store shelves; some lacked a trademark symbol or two in the right spots; others had slightly tweaked graphics for the Nintendo “Seal of Quality” on the face.

The very first few runs, though, had a particularly obvious quirk: rather than being shrink-wrapped, they were sealed with just a little black “Nintendo” sticker at the top of the box. These early versions hit just a handful of test markets. Remember, Mario wasn’t a thing at this point — no one really had any idea what this game was about, much less the worldwide icon that Mario would become. So even amongst the super small number of copies that were distributed prior to the game’s wider launch in 1986, most people who got their hands on it wouldn’t think to keep it in pristine condition.

Wata Games, which certified this copy, pins the condition at around 9.4 out of 10. It also says that this copy is the only known “sticker sealed” one still in existence, and that even the sticker itself is somehow in tip-top shape. Wata has a breakdown of the many variations of Super Mario prints and reprints here.

$100,000 is a hefty chunk of change to drop on a game, and a press release from Heritage Auction house says the purchase was actually a joint effort between multiple buyers, including a coin dealer, multiple video game collectors and the founder of the auction house itself.

If you’re a video creator in 2019, you’re probably thinking about a long list of publishing destinations: YouTube, of course, but also Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and more.

StayTuned Digital is a new startup trying to help video creators and publishers push their content to multiple platforms. The company, which bills itself as “content’s best friend,” is officially unveiling its product today and announcing that it’s raised $2.5 million in funding.

StayTuned was founded by CEO Serge Kassardjian (previously the global head of media app business development for Google Play) and Randy Jimenez (previously CTO at SinglePlatform). Kassardjian told me he saw the need for a product like this during his time at Google, when he would talk to content creators becoming “overwhelmed” by the fragmentation across all the different devices and platforms available to them.

“What’s happened is every single one of the platforms is releasing new formats, new ways to optimize, it’s constantly changing every couple of months,” Kassardjian said.

So with StayTuned, publishers shouldn’t have to worry about all that. Kassardjian said the product does three big things: optimizes the video so that it looks good and can perform well on each platform, pushes the video to each platform and then measures the results, which feeds back into the optimization.

Kassardjian acknowledged that getting into the media business, even as a technology provider, might seem like a bad idea right now, but he said, “There’s a misconception that what’s happening in the world is that media and content is dead, but there’s more media and content ever before.”

Nor does Kassardjian believe that publishers can stop relying on Facebook and other platforms. Sure, they may want to drive more traffic to their own properties or launch their own subscription services, but unless they’re Netflix-sized, they can’t ignore the big platforms entirely.

“We provide ubiquity to where the audience is,” he said.

And when he talks about video publishers, he isn’t just thinking about traditional media companies (although he’s looking to work with them too). He also said StayTuned could work with newer digital companies, ecommerce retailers and other brands that are created content — and eventually, small businesses.

As for the funding, it was led by Bowery Capital, with participation CourtsideVC, Quaker Health, Social Leverage, Liquid 2 Ventures, The Fund, Hive Ventures, Grape Arbor and a number of angel investors. StayTuned is also part the current GCT Startup-in-Residence program.

Email is certainly not dead, despite many such exclamations, but there’s no question that it’s a bloated, seeping hog of a platform on which it’s incredibly difficult for businesses to develop meaningful relationships with customers.

Postscript, a startup launching out of Y Combinator’s latest class, wants to learn from what email marketing got right and translate that to the next frontier of B2C communications: SMS. It basically wants to be the Mailchimp for texts.

“We are witnessing the decay of email,” Postscript president Alex Beller tells TechCrunch. “User behavior is all SMS now and e-commerce traffic and web traffic, in general, are so heavily mobile.”

The startup specifically wants to focus on shaping how consumers and businesses engage in the relationship around online commerce. Do you have a subscription to some cook-at-home meal startup? Then maybe they’ll shoot you a message asking if you want to add a new dessert option to your meal this week. Reply “YES” to add. That’s it.

The startup handles ensuring that businesses have proper consent from users to get text messages sent to them. From there businesses are able to segment users, plan SMS campaigns with text and media and have everything backed up by a decent analytics suite so that customers can see what happens on the other end of the texts. Beyond campaigns, communications can be automated based on customer actions so they get some feedback after they make a purchase or other action.

Being at the forefront of a new frontier for communicating with customers seems to have its advantages. Postscript claims a 95+ percent open rate and 35 percent click-through rate, numbers that are pretty wild for marketers that have dealt with the stats on email campaigns.

Given that people are used to SMS as a means of conversation, people are also a lot more likely to respond and ask questions inside the chain, something the Postscript founders were a bit surprised by but soon built into their feature set alongside integrations with customer support platforms.

“We rushed out this inbound feature when we realized how much [communication] we had coming in from users,” Postscript CEO Adam Turner told TechCrunch. “It’s all about engagement, not just clicks… and a one-way communication channel.”

As a consumer, the idea that my text messages are soon going to be inundated by #brands elicits a gut reaction to burn it all down, but there’s an air of inevitability that SMS will become the next place that businesses want to infiltrate. We’re already getting updates from food delivery services and UPS; Postscript wants their platform to let people expand and manage these relationships.

There are a few reasons why you don’t have to gravely fear your texting app turning into a corporate dump. The opt-in process for phone communications is already a bit more codified in the U.S., and as companies attempt to stay in the good graces of GDPR for fear of the EU god, it might be more likely they tread carefully. Additionally, while SMS fees aren’t substantial, there’s certainly a more baked-in cost than with forwarding an offer to a huge bank of emails. Lastly, users just have to punch out a quick “UNSUBSCRIBE” to get out of messages from which they’ve gotten their fill, a standard across carriers.

Right now the company is closely integrated with Shopify so users can add this to their storefronts. Pricing varies based on the amount of messages you’re sending. There’s a free tier for sending 100 messages per month, $50/month for sending 1,000 and a few more tiers topping out at a 40,000 SMS per month/$1,500 tier.

General Motors announced last year it was getting into the electric bike business. But besides a crowdsourcing name competition and a few teasers, details were scant.

Now, GM has given this new brand a name — ARĪV — as well as names for its two electric bikes, and some information about its go-to-market plan. The name ARĪV was selected as part of a global crowdsourcing campaign announced in November 2018.

The bikes

GM is bringing two new electric “connected” bikes to market this year — one folding and one compact — as it makes a broader push into electrification and experiments with how to diversify its business of making and selling vehicles.

The compact electric bike is called Meld and the folding one is called Merge.

GM says it brought “automotive-grade capabilities” to its bikes. The company’s experience with EV motor software and controls greatly influenced the proprietary GM motor that was built for the electric bikes, GM said.

The motor enables speeds up to 25 kph with four levels of pedal-assisted power. The battery allows users to travel 64 km, about 40 miles, on a single charge. The battery charges in about 3.5 hours.

Both bikes, which were engineered and designed in GM facilities in Michigan and Oshawa, Ontario, come standard with safety components such as integrated, rechargeable front and rear LED safety lights and oversized brake rotors to increase stopping power.

Where to find and buy them

GM plans to launch first in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands because of “popularity of lithium-ion battery-powered ebikes in those markets.” GM has opened up a website www.BikeExchange.com where customers can pre-order.

The Meld will be cheaper than the Merge, and prices depend on the country.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, the ARĪV Meld is €2.800, or about $3,100, and the Merge is €3.400 ($3,800). In Germany, the ARĪV Meld is €2.750 and the Merge is €3.350.

ARĪV e-bikes are scheduled to begin shipping to customers in the second quarter of 2019.

The connected bits

GM calls these connected bikes and that can mean a lot of different things. In this case, it means the bikes can connect with an app via Bluetooth.

The app gives riders all kinds of metrics such as speed, distance, remaining battery level, motor assist level and distance traveled. The company plans to add more features, including a mode that will use a proprietary algorithm to help riders arrive at their destination sweat-free.

These bikes also come with what it calls a “Quad Lock mount,” a system to securely attach a smartphone to the bike. An integrated USB port allows riders to maintain their phone’s charge while on the go.

Today, Zendesk announced it had hired three new executives — Elisabeth Zornes, former general manager of global support for Microsoft Office, as Zendesk’s first chief customer officer; former Adobe executive Colleen Berube as chief information officer and former Salesforce executive Shawna Wolverton as senior vice president, product.

The company emphasized that the hirings were about expanding the executive suite and bringing in top people to help the company grow and move into larger enterprise organizations.

Zornes comes to Zendesk with 20 years of experience at Microsoft working in a variety of roles around Microsoft Office. She says that what attracted her to Zendesk was its focus on the customer.

“When I look at businesses today, no matter what size, what type or what geography, they can agree on one thing: customer experience is the rocket fuel to drive success. Zendesk has positioned itself as a technology company that empowers companies of all kinds to drive a new level of success by focusing on their customer experience, and helping them to be at the forefront of that was a very intriguing opportunity for me,” Zornes told TechCrunch.

New CIO Berube, who comes with two decades of experience, also sees her new job as a chance to have an impact on customer experience and help companies who are trying to transform into digital organizations. “Customer experience is the linchpin for all organizations to succeed in the digital age. My background is broad, having shepherded many different types of companies through digital transformations, and developing and running modern IT organizations,” she said.

Her boss, CEO and co-founder Mikkel Svane sees someone who can help continue to grow the company and develop the product. “We looked specifically for a CIO with a modern mindset who understands the challenges of large organizations trying to keep up with customer expectations today,” Svane told TechCrunch

As for senior VP of product Wolverton, she comes with 15 years of experience including a stint as head of product at Salesforce. She said that coming to Zendesk was about having an impact on a modern SaaS product. “The opportunity to build a modern, public, cloud-native CRM platform with Sunshine was a large part of my decision to join,” she said.

The three leaders have already joined the organization — Wolverton and Berube joined last month and Zornes started just this week.