Year: 2019

Alibaba Group said today it has acquired NetEase Kaola for $2 billion and will integrate it into Tmall, creating the largest cross-border e-commerce platform in China. The announcement follows weeks of media reports about a potential deal, which was said to have stalled in the middle of August after the companies reportedly disagreed on transaction details.

Tmall Import and Export general manager Alvin Liu has been named as Kaola’s new CEO, replacing Zhang Lei, but Kaola will continue to operate independently under its own brand.

Tmall Global and Kaola are China’s largest and second-largest cross-border e-commerce platforms, respectively, holding 31.7% and 24.5% of the market, and their union means they will create a business that will far outstrip in size rivals like JD Worldwide, VIP International and Amazon China.

Alibaba and Yunfeng, the investment firm launched by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, also agreed to invest $700 million into NetEase Cloud Music’s latest funding round. This will give Alibaba a minority stake in the streaming music service, with NetEase remaining its controlling shareholder.

In a press release, NetEase CEO William Ding said “We are pleased to have found a strategic fit for Kaola within Alibaba’s extensive ecosystem, where Kaola will continue to provide Chinese consumers with high-quality import products and services. At the same time, the completion of this strategic transaction will allow NetEase to focus on its growth strategy, investing in markets that allow us to best leverage our competitive advantages.”

Daniel Zhang, Alibaba Group’s CEO, said “Alibaba is confidence about the future of China’s import e-commerce market, which we believe remains in its infancy with great growth potential.”

Medium seems to be building a tool to save and reformat online articles for future reading.

That’s according to Jane Manchun Wong, a reliable source of scoops on unreleased features. Wong said she spotted this one by reverse engineering Medium’s Android app and monitoring network traffic.

The “Save to Medium” feature appears to scrape webpages, then create a new, unlisted story on Medium. If deployed, it would mean Medium becomes not just a publishing platform, but also a product like Instapaper, which you could use to read content from around the web.

It also involves stripping the content of the publisher’s ads and moving it out from behind their paywalls. That doesn’t sound too different from existing reader apps, but Wong argued that it could be a more complicated situation for Medium, since it’s a publisher itself and operates a subscription paywall of its own. (The company was founded and led by Ev Williams, who’s pictured above.)

Still, Wong also noted that the feature is likely to evolve before it’s actually released, and she said, “If I may suggest, there are many ways for the media and news publishers to collaborate. Blocking Medium’s ‘Save To Medium’ scraper from accessing the site should be the last resort.”

When asked about this, Medium sent the following statement from Vice President of Product Michael Sippey: “Nothing to talk about now, but we’re always experimenting with ways to bring great reading experiences to Medium users.”

An exposed web server storing résumés of job seekers — including from recruitment site Monster — has been found online.

The server contained résumés and CVs for job applicants spanning between 2014 and 2017, many of which included private information like phone numbers and home addresses, but also email addresses and a person’s prior work experience.

Of the documents we reviewed, most users’ were located in the United States.

It’s not known exactly how many files were exposed, but thousands of résumés were found in a single folder dated May 2017. Other files found on the exposed server included immigration documentation for work, which Monster does not collect.

A company statement attributed to Monster’s chief privacy officer Michael Jones said the server was owned by an unnamed recruitment partner, which it no longer works with. When pressed, the company declined to name the recruitment partner.

“The Monster Security Team was made aware of a possible exposure and notified the recruitment company of the issue,” the company said, adding the exposed server was secured shortly after it was reported in August.

Although the data is no longer accessible directly from the exposed web server, hundreds of résumés and other documents can be found in results cached by search engines.

But Monster did not warn users of the exposure, and only admitted user data was exposed after the security researcher alerted TechCrunch to the matter.

“Customers that purchase access to Monster’s data — candidate résumés and CVs — become the owners of the data and are responsible for maintaining its security,” the company said. “Because customers are the owners of this data, they are solely responsible for notifications to affected parties in the event of a breach of a customer’s database.”

Under local data breach notification laws, companies are obliged to inform state attorney generals where large numbers of users in their states are affected. Although Monster is not duty bound to disclose the exposure to regulators, some companies proactively warn their users even when third-parties are involved.

It’s not uncommon for companies to warn their users of a third-party breach. Earlier this year after hackers siphoned off millions of credit cards from the American Medical Collection Agency, a third-party payments processor, its customers — LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics — admitted to the security lapse.

Monster said that because the exposure happened on a customer system, Monster is “not in a position” to identify or confirm affected users.

Getaround, a used car marketplace and winner of TechCrunch Disrupt New York Battlefield 2011, will enter the unicorn club with a roughly $200 million equity financing.

The deal values Getaround, founded in 2009, at $1.7 billion, according to an estimate provided by PitchBook. Getaround declined to comment, citing internal policy on “funding speculation.”

“Getaround and our investors work closely together on our growth strategy, and we’ll definitely plan to share more when we’re ready,” a spokesperson said in response to TechCrunch’s inquiry Thursday morning.

The news follows the company’s $300 million acquisition of Drivy, a Paris-headquartered car-sharing startup that operates in 170 European cities.

Getaround closed a Series D funding of $300 million last year, a round led by SoftBank with participation from Toyota Motor Corporation. Existing investors in the business, which allows its some 200,000 members to rent and unlock vehicles from their mobile phones at $5 per hour, include Menlo Ventures and SOSV.

Assuming an upcoming $200 million infusion, Getaround has raised more than $600 million in equity funding to date.

Whether SoftBank has participated in Getaround’s latest financing is unknown. The business is an active investor in the carsharing market, with investments in Chinese ride-hailing business Didi Chuxing, Uber and autonomous driving company Cruise. We’ve reached out to SoftBank for comment.

In conversation with TechCrunch last year, Getaround co-founder Sam Zaid emphasized SoftBank’s capabilities as a mobility investor: “What we really liked about [SoftBank] was they take a really long view on things,” he said. “So they were very good about thinking about the future of mobility, and we have a common kind of vision of every car becoming a shared car.”

Getaround was expected to expand into international markets with its previous fundraise. Indeed, the company has moved into France, Germany, Spain, Austria, Belgium and the U.K. where it operates under the brand “Drivy by Getaround,” and in Norway under the “Nabobil” brand.

The business initially launched its car-sharing service in 2011, relying on gig workers, who can list their car on the Getaround marketplace for $500 to $1,000 a month in payments, depending on how often their car is rented.

Since Getaround entered the market, however, a number of competitors have entered the space with similar business models. Turo and Maven, for example, have both emerged to facilitate car rental with backing from top venture capital funds.

Flat has raised one of Mexico’s largest pre-seed rounds to take the Opendoor real estate marketplace model across the Rio Grande. 

The company snagged a $4.5 million pre-seed round to expand its business helping homeowners quickly sell their properties in Mexico. The round was led by ALLVP, an active early stage fund in Mexico. California-based Liquid 2 Ventures (for which Hall of Fame Quarterback Joe Montana is a GP), NextBillion and a few angels supported the round as well. 

At the time of writing, Flat’s raise is the largest pre-seed funding round for a Mexican startup aside from the scooter company Grin, which was backed by Y Combinator and later went on to raise a $45M Series A and consolidate with Brazil’s bike sharing startup, Yellow. 

While this ‘i-buying’ business model was initially pioneered by Opendoor in the US, the same need to efficiently sell property exists for consumers in other growing markets around the world. That’s why co-founders Victor Noguera and Bernardo Cordero founded Flat. 

Bucking a trend that has seen many new Latin American founders hailing from Stanford University, Cordero and Noguera met at the University of California, Berkeley — just across the Bay.

The founders estimate the total value of the 40M homes in Mexico to be a $1.6 trillion total addressable market. They equate the value of homes sold per year to $25 billion. Let’s not forget the elephant in the room – SoftBank is undoubtedly eyeing Mexico with its $5 billion LatAm commitment. 

Flat says it’s solving a few problems in the local home-buying market in Mexico. Firstly, anyone interested in selling their property lacks information about how much there home is actually worth. In the U.S., sellers can reference Zillow – but no such centralized database of real estate pricing information for the market of Mexico exists. 

Then there’s the operational piece of transferring ownership of the property, which Flat says can take up to eight months and a notarized process – making the overall experience incredibly illiquid. 

Flat’s actual product is a marketplace focused on helping the seller sell quickly. Flat visits your home, takes measurements, documents how many bath and bedrooms exist in the property, and determines how much your home is worth. From there, they manage renovations and transfer ownership of the property. The seller is paid within 72 hours. 

International expansion has been difficult for many startups operating in Latin America as every country has its own regulatory barriers. That’s why when it comes to growth, Flat says it’s more focused on growing out their product within other verticals of property management to only serve a Mexican market, rather than expand to other Spanish-language countries in the LatAm region.

Novameat, a Spanish startup looking to accelerate the development of alternative proteins across the meat aisle, has gotten a boost in the form of new investment capital from the leading foodtech investment firm, New Crop Capital.

Founded by biomedical engineering expert Giuseppe Scionti, Novameat builds on Scionti’s decade of research as an assistant professor in bioengineering at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia, the University College of London, Chalmers University and Polytechnic University of Milan.

The company first came to fame with the production of the world’s first 3D printed plant-based beefsteak in 2018 and will use the new funds from New Crop Capital to further develop its platform for accelerating the development of meats like steak, chicken breasts and other fibrous textured meat replacements.

The company has developed a new scaffolding technology that mimics the texture, appearance, nutritional and sensorial properties of fibrous meats like beefsteaks, chicken breasts, and fish filets.

Scionti sees the technology as the next step in the development of plant-based and lab-cultured alternatives to traditional proteins. While many clean meat and plant-based food companies have managed to take ground meat replacements to market with similar taste and textural qualities to the real thing, steaks and cuts of muscle meat have proven harder to replicate.

Novameat potentially solves that problem.

“While I was researching on regenerating animal tissues through bioprinting technologies for biomedical and veterinary applications, I discovered a way to bio-hack the structure of the native 3D matrix of a variety of plant-based proteins to achieve a meaty texture,” said Scionti, in a statement.

The core of Novameat’s technology is a customized printer that enables companies to create the kinds of fibrous tissues needed to make a steak. “We are providing the equipment, the machinery, under a licensing agreement to these companies,” says Scionti. “Plant-based meat manufacturers have access to something that creates the texture and taste of a steak.”

Traditional extrusion technologies are not capable of using the ingredients from Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods and print a steak, but Novameat’s founder argues that his technology can.

The technology was promising enough to attract the attention of New Crop Capital, arguably one of the most seasoned investors in the expanding market of meat replacement. The venture firm’s portfolio includes Memphis Meat, Beyond Meat, Kite Hill, Geltor, Good Dot, Aleph Farms, Supermeat, Mosa Meat, New Wave and Zero Egg.

“We think the global food supply chain is broken and we are focused on fixing one of those challenges which is animal protein,” says New Crop Capital’s Dan Altschuler Malek. “We see that there is an opportunity to shift consumer behavior to reduce their consumption of animal protein products to products that are at the price point that people will pay.”

Novameat can help reduce costs, Malek thinks, because it speeds up the time to create meat substitutes.

Normally four weeks before you have enough material around the cells.. it’s important for the

Scionti says that the company’s micro-extrusion technology enables companies to get a three dimensional structure without having to go through an incubation period that can take a significant amount of time and increase costs.

“Novameat’s bioprinting-based technology provides a flexible and tunable method of producing plant-based meat, with the utility to create different textures from a wide variety of ingredients, all within a single piece of meat,” he said. “Low and high-moisture extruders are the primary method currently used to restructure plant proteins to create the texture of meat. While extrusion works well for some applications, this method may not be ideal for mimicking all types of animal meat. Alternative technologies like Novameat’s give plant-based meat manufacturers a wider array of tools to mimic all types of meat and seafood,” said Good Food Institute Director of Science and Technology David Welch, in a statement.

Superside, a startup aiming to create a premium alternative to the existing crowdsourced design platforms, is announcing that it has raised $3.5 million in new funding.

It’s also adding new features like the ability to work on user interfaces, interaction design and motion graphics. Co-founder and CEO Fredrik Thomassen said this allows the company to offer “a full-service design solution.”

You may have heard about Superside under its old name Konsus . In a blog post, Thomassen explained the recent change in name and branding, writing, “We changed our name and look to align with what we had become: The world’s top team of international designers and creatives.”

He told me Superside was created to address his own frustrations after trying to use marketplaces like 99designs and Fiverr. He argued that there’s a problem with “adverse selection on those platforms.” In other words, “The best people … don’t remain, because they don’t have a career path — they’re fighting with other freelancers to get the jobs.”

Superside, on the other hand, is picky about the designers it works with — it claims to select 100 designers from the more than 50,000 applications it receives each year. But if they are accepted, they’re guaranteed full-time work.

Thomassen said the platform is built for large enterprises that have their own design and marketing teams but still need additional support. Customers include Amazon, BBDO, Publicis and Clear Channel.

In addition to choosing good designers, Superside has also built a broader project management platform.

“We’re basically automating everything: Finding people, screening people, on-boarding, on-the-job learning, invoicing of custoemrs project management, all of the nitty gritty,” Thomassen said. “The only thing not automated is design — that’s where the human element and the creativity come in.”

Plus, Thomassen said Superside can turn around a standard piece of artwork in 12 hours: “Nobody else can do what we’re doing in terms of speed.”

The new funding comes from Freestyle Capital, with participation from High Alpha Ventures, Y Combinator and Alliance Ventures.

“We’re very much a mission-driven company,” Thomassen added. “For me, the reason to go to work in the morning is to help build an online labor market and create equal economic opportunity for everyone in the world.”

Evidence continues to roll in that American workers are out of position for the high-value jobs of today and tomorrow. Start with the fact that there are 7.3 million unfilled jobs, millions of which are high-skill positions in IT, professional services and healthcare. Then add that employment growth in IT is stagnant — a phenomenon that is entirely a supply-side problem.

What are America’s colleges and universities doing to solve the problem? Until recently, they’ve been a big part of the problem. Academic programs at colleges and universities are controlled by faculty members who typically aren’t incentivized to align curricula to employer needs. Few are interested in what employers are seeking, particularly for entry-level positions. Many have never worked in the private sector or have only outdated or tenuous connections to non-academic employers.

Most educators simply resist the idea that instruction should be aligned to employment opportunities. Colleges have always positioned themselves to help students gain the skills they need to get a good fifth job, not necessary a first job. Unfortunately, the labor market has changed: If you don’t get a good first job, you’re unlikely to get a good fifth job. And currently, around 45% of new college graduates are not getting good first jobs and find themselves underemployed.

In early August, EMSI, a provider of labor market analytics that is part of the Strada Education Network, released a study showing that our current system of post-secondary education is not providing linear paths to good first jobs, but rather a “crazy flow” or “swirl.” The report analyzed millions of graduates from six very different majors and found that graduates of all six are effectively going after the same jobs in sales, marketing, management, business and financial analysis.

Commenting on the study in Inside Higher Education, experts concluded that straightening the swirl might require integrating actual work into academic programs. “This really makes a strong case for work-based learning,” said Jane Oates, a former official in the U.S. Department of Labor during the Obama administration, now president of WorkingNation. “Colleges and universities need to provide students with practice in the context of the workplace,” agreed Lynn Pasquerella, president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Creating clearer pathways to good first jobs by connecting school and work becomes even more critical considering that a recent survey found that 61% of all full-time jobs seeking entry-level employees at least on the surface ask for at least three years of experience, and that summer employment for students remains near an all-time low. With this backdrop, perhaps 45% underemployment for new graduates is as good as we can do.

New models are emerging to better connect school and work. New career services management platforms like Handshake offer much more functionality than legacy systems to connect students with employers recruiting on campus. Portfolium — a division of Instructure — allows students to create ePortfolios of their work and show their skills to employers.

Many colleges and universities have invested in experiential learning and work-study programs. Some schools do this better than others; Northeastern University offers the most comprehensive co-op program of any American institution. But few have been able to do it systematically, for the same reasons academic programs aren’t well-aligned to employer needs. That’s all changing with the rise of new marketplaces connecting students and faculty with real work from real employers.

One such marketplace is Parker Dewey. Named for progressive educator Francis Parker and philosopher John Dewey, Parker Dewey helps employers create “micro-internships”: real projects that employers need done but that can be outsourced to college students. In Parker Dewey’s micro-internship marketplace, the employer defines a project and sets a fixed fee for completing the work. Parker Dewey reaches students through career services postings and attracts applicants for the project. Then the employer selects one or more students to do the work. The marketplace makes it easy for employers to try out students who may have no work experience and therefore reduces “Hiring Friction,” i.e. the reduced propensity of employers to hire candidates who literally haven’t done the same job before, and the reason so many entry-level jobs seem to be asking for experience.

Another marketplace that’s gained even more traction is Riipen, a platform that got its start in Canada, connecting Canadian colleges and universities with employers, but now growing rapidly in the U.S. While Riipen works with employers in a manner similar to Parker Dewey, its approach to colleges and universities is very different. Rather than approaching career services, Riipen incorporates employer projects directly into college and university courses, thereby connecting employment and employability with the beating heart of colleges and universities: individual faculty.

Riipen’s three-sided marketplace of employers, educators and students appears to provide a more effective vehicle for gathering talent (and employers) on the platform; once faculty incorporate projects into their coursework — e.g. a professor of marketing adding a project reviewing and analyzing Google Ads data — the projects become mandatory and more students complete them. On Riipen, small and mid-size businesses tend to provide real-time projects, while larger companies have begun to re-use the same projects in a bid to test dozens or hundreds of students and recruit top performers. Over the past year, Riipen reports an order of magnitude increase in platform usage by employers, faculty and students.

New marketplaces like Riipen have the potential to be win-win-win-win. First, employers recruit better talent, and more reliably; content valid simulations are more than twice as accurate as any other talent screening mechanism or criteria. And it’s more cost-effective than attempting to recruit on campus. Second, universities augment career services and improve employability of graduates, which should allow them to attract more students. Third, for the first time, faculty can easily incorporate real work projects into their courses — projects that students will be energized to complete knowing there’s a real employer on the other end. And last but not least, students gain a way to stand out from the pack by exhibiting their abilities in a meaningful context, hopefully clearing a path to a good first job at the same employer, or if not, gaining valuable relevant work experience.

In a few years, as a result of marketplaces like Riipen, completing real work projects as part of an academic program should be commonplace. So there’s also a fifth winner from marketplaces that connect school and work: the overall economy. Millions of new college graduates will get relevant work experience, many more will find good first jobs and our workforce will be better positioned for the high-value jobs of today and tomorrow.

It is a commonly held belief that startups can measure their way to success. And while there are always exceptions, early-stage companies often can’t leverage data easily, at least not in the way that later stage companies can. It’s imperative that startups recognize this early on — it makes all the difference.

In this piece, I draw on my experiences using data to take Framer from seed round to Series B. More concretely, I’ll describe what to (not) focus on, and then, how to get real results.

There are good and bad ways for startups to use data. In my opinion, the bad way unfortunately is often preached on saas blogs, a/b test tool marketing pages, and especially growth hacker conferences: that by simply measuring and looking at data you’ll find simple things to do that will drive explosive growth. Silver bullets, if you will.

The good way is comparable to first principles thinking. Below the surface of your day to day results, your startup can be described by a set of numbers. It takes some work to discover these numbers, but once you have them you can use them to make predictions and spot underlying trends. If everyone in your company knows these numbers by heart, they will inevitably make better decisions.

But most importantly, using data the right way will help answer the single most important – but complex – question at any moment for a startup: how are we really doing?

Let’s start with looking at what not to do as a startup.

Table of Contents

• Common pitfalls
  • Don’t measure too much
  • A/B tests are anti-startup
  • Understand your calculations
  • Don’t just use quantitative data
  • Use the real numbers
• Make a plan
  • Define a high-level product funnel
  • Define a metrics plan per stage and implement it
  • Get your whole team on board
• Perfect setup
  • Decide on infrastructure
  • What to build, ideally
• Typical problems
  • Non-measurable data
  • Defining what results are “good”
  • Turning data observations into actionable learnings
• Discovering data
  • Visualization
  • What to look for
  • Analyzing your splashes
  • Look for trends that are growing structurally
  • Look for trends that are growing exponentially
  • Look for trends that are dropping of cliffs
  • Look for predictors: correlations
  • Deciding what to work on

Common pitfalls

Don’t measure too much

Technically, it’s easy to measure everything, so most startups start out that way. But when you measure everything, you learn nothing. Just the sheer noise makes it hard to discover anything useful and it can be demotivating to look at piles of numbers in general.

My advice is to carefully plan what you want to measure upfront, then implement and conclude. You should only expand your set of measurements once you’ve made the most important ones actionable. Later in this article, I provide a clear set of ways to plan what you measure.

A/B tests are anti-startup

To make decisions based on data you need volume. Without volume, the data itself is not statistically significant and is basically just noise. To detect a 3% difference with 95% confidence you would need a sample size of 12,000 visitors, signups, or sales. That sample size is generally too high for most early-stage startups and forces your product development into long cycles.

While on the subject of shipping fast and iterating later, let’s talk about A/B testing. To get reliable measurements, you should only be changing one variable at a time. During the early stages of Framer, we changed our homepage in the middle of a checkout A/B test, which skewed our results. But as a startup, it was the right decision to adjust the way we marketed our product. What you’ll find is that those two factors are often incompatible. In general, constant improvements should trump tests that block quick reactionary changes.

Understand your calculations