Month: September 2020

Two direct listings in one day. Lots to talk about.

Asana started trading just a bit after noon Eastern today, quickly zooming to roughly $29 a share in early trading this afternoon. We are still waiting for the first trades of Palantir to hit the market.

Asana’s reference price was revealed yesterday by the NYSE, and it was set for $21 a share. The company had roughly 150 million shares of stock outstanding on a fully diluted basis, which gave it a pre-market reference value of $3.2 billion. Palantir for its part was assigned a reference price of $7.25 a share, giving it a $16 billion implied valuation. At its current share price, Asana is valued at roughly $4.4 billion.

The two companies trade on the NYSE, with Asana under ticker ASAN and Palantir under the ticker PLTR.

For both companies, which are well capitalized, a direct listing seemed to be the right approach to give early employees and other insiders a liquidity option while continuing to maintain tight control of the ship. One difference between the two initiatives is that Asana has no lockup for employee and other insider shares as is typically customary with a direct listing. Palantir pioneered a lockup provision with a direct listing that will allow only roughly 29% of the company’s shares to be available potentially for trading today. The remainder of those shares become eligible for sale over the coming months.

As with all direct listings, no shares are offered by the company upon market debut, and the reference prices published by the NYSE are imaginary if important mental benchmarks for where bankers believe a hypothetical price lies for these two companies.

As my colleague Jon Shieber described a few weeks ago, Asana is an interesting entry into the markets as a long-time SaaS company stalwart that continues to lose buckets of revenue. Despite fast revenue growth of roughly 71%, the company lost $118.6 million on revenues of $142.6 million in fiscal 2020 (Asana has a Feb 1 fiscal year calendar, so those figures are for the bulk of 2019).

The company was last valued at $1.5 billion in late 2018. It secured a bit more than $200 million in venture financing since its founding in 2009, and its founders Dustin Moskovitz and Justin Rosenstein hold large stakes in the company of roughly 36% and 16.1% respectively.

Over at Palantir, which we have covered extensively the past few weeks, the company is even more of an outlier, with large-contract government sales that accrue over many years. The company reported a total of 125 customers, losses of $580 million on revenues of $743 million last year, and projected revenues of just above $1 billion for 2020.

While Palantir’s reference price was below the final secondary trades held by the company in early September before it closed the window in the run up to its IPO, that price was well-above the average trading of the past 18 months.

For both companies now, the public markets beckon, and the first public quarterly results are coming due here in a few weeks. You can read more about Asana on the company’s investor relations page. Like so much else at Palantir, it doesn’t have an investor relations page (yet?) as of the time of writing this article, but presumably the company will want to connect with investors at some point in the near future, one would hope.

Twilio is hosting its annual Signal conference today and as usual, the company is using the event to launch a host of new products and features. For the most part, especially if you’re a web or mobile developer, these are not groundbreaking new features. The core Twilio services, after all, have been in place for a while now. Instead, today’s announcements build out some of the edges of the overall Twilio product ecosystem.

The most interesting launch — at least from the perspective of most developers — is probably the general availability of Twilio’s Video Web RTC Go. The free video service allows you to add 1:1 video chats to your web and mobile applications. The company notes that this is not a free trial, but you are limited to 25 GB of bandwidth through Twilio’s relays per month, or about 100,000 participant minutes. You also get logging and diagnostic features. So freemium, I guess, but with generous limits to get you started. If you need more, you can upgrade to a higher tier later.

“Twilio Video WebRTC Go is a free tier and a free offering for developers to get started building those one to one video connections for things like distance learning, client consultations — all of those things that you might have a need for in these new use cases that we’ve seen evolve through the pandemic,” Quinton Wall, Twilio’s Senior Director for Platform and Developer Experience, told me. “And what we really wanted to do is take away all the barriers and make a free tier — and a perpetually free tier — that gives them all the tools that they need to build on top of WebRTC to get going. ”

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The second major announcement is the launch of Twilio’s latest IoT service: the Microvisor IoT platform. Twilio acquired IoT hardware and software specialist Electric Imp earlier this year and when it first launched its IoT efforts, it started with cellular connectivity through its Super SIM product. The idea behind the Microvisor IoT platform is to give embedded developers all the tools they need to build connected devices and the lifecycle management tools to keep them updated and secure.

As Evan Cummack, the GM of Twilio IoT, told me, as the company dug deeper into the IoT market, it found that a lot of projects were failing.

“When we really dug into what was going on with our customers individually, what we saw was the reasons for a lot of these failures,” he explained. “Sometimes it was a fundamental misjudgment in terms of what end-users wanted, or the end-user experience, or value and business models, but a lot of the time, it was a technical failure, or it was that the technical challenges were so steep that the ROI equation fell apart. You couldn’t deliver substantial enough value in order to justify the technical effort required.”

With Electric Imp, Twilio bought a full-stack platform — and there are others like it on the market. But as Cummack noted, most businesses aren’t buying those. Instead, they are trying to build their solutions from scratch and Twilio’s hypothesis was that they were doing so because they wanted to be able to write native code for these devices. Combining that with the convenience of a full-stack platform is difficult.

Image Credits: Twilio

The solution the team came up with combines this new software platform with a recent hardware innovation by Arm: TrustZones. But with Arm’s TrustZone hardware isolation feature at its core, the Microvisor platform only runs on devices that use the latest Cortex M-based processors, which obviously means its not a service you can use to upgrade your existing solutions. In return, users get secure boot features, over-the-air firmware updates and secure tunnels to connect to their devices, in addition to remote debugging features.

Also new today is Event Streams, a new API that helps developers aggregate data from all of their Twilio-powered experiences across voice, SMS, wireless connectivity through Super SIM, TaskRouter and more. The idea here is to give users a better understanding of how these channels are being used — and less so for understanding their bills and more for helping them build tools that allow businesses to better understand how they are interacting with customers.

Image Credits: Twilio

Lastly, there’s Twilio Frontline. This isn’t really a developer product but a React Native-based app for frontline workers who may need to communicate with customers. Think of an employee in a store who needs to talk to a customer who is waiting outside. The app focuses on chat, with support for SMS, WhatsApp, and web-based and in-app chat clients. Frontline can also be integrated with existing enterprise authentication and CRM systems.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I’ve been waiting for years for my green card. Is there any way to expedite my case? What does the October shift in Visa Bulletin priority dates mean for me?

—Waiting in Woodside

Dear Waiting:

Thanks! There are a lot of ways to speed up the immigration process. Great news — last week the State Department released the October 2020 Visa Bulletin, which significantly reduces the waiting time for many folks from around the world seeking green cards. Basically final action dates progressed for EB-1, EB-2 and EB-3 and are all current now if you can use categories besides being born in India or China! Feel free to check out my recent podcast on seven ways to expedite an immigration case and check out our upcoming free educational webinar on October 8 for the latest on H-1Bs and other immigration updates.

If you were born in India or China, dates for filing for Adjustment of Status and the National Visa Center also sped up significantly for individuals in these categories. Here’s a typical question I receive: “I’m currently in the U.S. in valid nonimmigrant status. If I was born in India or China, can I file my I-485 in October 2020?” See below to check your priority date and talk to an immigration attorney to see what you can file in October 2020!

Is my China/India priority date current in October?

Here’s an overview of how to figure out whether you can file your I-485 this month if you need to use the categories of being born in India or China:

• Step 1. Double-check your I-140 I-797C approval notice to determine your category and priority date:
  • Sec. 203 (b)(1) → EB-1 Category
  • Sec. 203 (b)(2) → EB-2 Category
  • Sec. 203 (b)(3) → EB-3 Category
• Step 2. Check out the October Visa Bulletin. To understand the Visa Bulletin in more detail:
  • The number of green cards the U.S. issues each year is capped based on the type of green card and the green card candidate’s country of birth
  • As my podcast on priority dates explains, it is the date your green card petition was submitted or the date your employer submitted your PERM labor certification application.
• Step 3. Find the date in the cell at the intersection of your category and country.
  
  

If you thought to invest in more plants or started growing a small garden during 2020’s coronavirus lockdowns, you weren’t alone. According to Bloomscape, a company that ships live plants straight from greenhouses to customers’ homes, a number of people become interested in plants this year, increasing demand for its already growing service. Today, Bloomscape announced it’s expanding its business with the addition of $15 million in Series B funding as well as the acquisition of plant care app Vera.

The new round of financing was led by General Catalyst, and included participation from Annox Capital’s Bob Mylod; former Chairman of Booking Holdings and Home Depot board member Jeff Boyd; former Seventh Generation and Burt’s Bees CEO John Replogle; along with existing investors Revolution Ventures and Ludlow Ventures.

Joel Cutler, co-founder and Managing Director of General Catalyst and Bob Mylod, Managing Partner at Annox Capital Management will join Bloomscape’s Board of Directors as part of the round. To date, Bloomscape has raised $24 million.

Image Credits: Bloomscape, screenshot via TechCrunch

Bloomscape was founded by Michigan designer and entrepreneur Justin Mast and launched in 2018 with the goal of reinventing how plants move about the country and arrive on customers’ doorsteps.

Today, there are other businesses that ship live plants, including home improvement stores and large e-commerce retailers like Amazon. But what makes Bloomscape different are the steps it has made to ensure a better delivery process and its logistics operations behind-the-scenes.

The company has filed a patent on parts of its plant packaging technology, where plants and pots are held securely at the right temperature. It also uses a proprietary soil mix that has a bonding agent that holds the soil together better during shipping and better protects the roots, explains Boomscape CEO Justin Mast.

In addition, because plants are shipped directly to the customer from the greenhouse, they’re healthier upon arrival than those spend, on average, 4 weeks traveling from a greenhouse to a big box store before being sent to a customer’s home.

The company is also now working to refine its regional fulfillment strategy to include localized centers and systems that will shorten transit times even further.

Image Credits: Bloomscape

Mast stresses that Bloomscape’s success to date wasn’t dependent on any one factor, but rather has been a combination of people, processes and systems.

“Key people on our product and supply chain team have decades of experience in shipping plants around the country through couriers and best in class fulfillment processes,” says Mast. “And now internally we have gathered a massive amount of information about which plants ship well during varying conditions. We are now systematizing this information so we can really optimize our product mixes to really ensure healthy plants, more successful plant parents, and ultimately a much better customer experience,” he notes.

Even before the pandemic, Bloomscape was seeing steadily rising growth. Though the company doesn’t share its specific metrics, Mast would say that his business has grown by 4x since last year and it has more than doubled its staff.

Millennials are Bloomscape’s fast-growing segment, including those outside urban centers in the south and mid-Atlantic regions. Many are also new or recent single-family homeowners, as well.

When COVID-19 hit and lockdowns were in force, Bloomscape had to quickly adapt to not just growing consumer demand but also a remote work lifestyle among employees.

“During a time of immeasurable difficulty for so many people, we are very fortunate that the business was not negatively affected by the pandemic. During the first few months of COVID, along with the rest of the world, we saw a lot of things change,” Mast says. “A lot of people found comfort and became interested in plants. We are incredibly grateful that our plants offer that little bit of solace and joy via nature into the home. We were thrilled to be able to bring something so meaningful to people during that time,” he adds.

The accelerated shift to e-commerce prompted by the pandemic will likely continue to benefit Bloomscape even when the health crisis passes. Plus, as Mast points out, once people dip their toe in with plants, they often don’t stop at one.

As a part of the funding news, Bloomscape also acquired plant care app Vera for an undisclosed sum. The deal was for the tech only, not the team who built the app itself, we’re told.

Image Credits: Bloomscape

Vera today provides customers with plant care tips, content, troubleshooting help, watering reminders and more. Bloomscape plans to leverage the app to better connect with customers and integrate its own plant care content and resources, like its existing Talk to Plant Mom plant care assistance service.

In addition to its expansion of plant care offering with Vera, Bloomscape plans to use the new capital to grow its team, refine its regional fulfillment strategy, and launch new products. One such product is its Edible Garden Shop, where customers can buy small tomato, lavender, sweet pepper, hot pepper, kale mix, mint and chamomile plants.

Next year, the company will move into outdoor plants, the company says.

“You’d be hard pressed to find a team that understands a consumer vertical better than Bloomscape does with home gardening,” said Joel Cutler, co-founder and managing director, General Catalyst, in a statement about his firm’s investment. “The team has found not just excellence in the complicated logistics of cultivating and shipping live plants nationwide, but also a strong resonance with today’s consumer who’s looking to green up their living spaces,” he said.

We’ve been tracking one of the few genuinely interesting stories to come out of the blockchain world, ever since Dfinity raised $102M from Andreessen Horowitz and Polychain Capital for a decentralised ‘Internet Computer’ to rival AWS in August last year. It later revealed more this past January, and has dince then started to open up to developers.

But today it unveils it’s governance system and token economics. This will mean the market knows for first time how it will allow a mathematical calculation of valuations, based on token supply and futures price.

The effect of this is that the company is now valued at a notional $9.5bn, and as such would make it a top five cryptocurrency. The last valuation was $2bn, based on a $105mn round led by Andreessen and Polychain in August 2018.

Today it launches the “Network Nervous System (NNS)”, an open algorithmic governance system that controls Dfinitiy’s “Internet Computer” and acts as its brain.

Dubbed the Sodium network, this reveals the novel algorithmic governance and the token economics needed to build ‘decentralized finance’ (DeFi) and dapps, open internet services, and pan-industry enterprise systems. Sodium is the last milestone before the public launch of the Internet Computer later this year, when it will be spun out as part of the public internet.
 
Dominic Williams, founder and chief scientist of the Dfinity Foundation commented in a statement: “The NNS now means the Internet Computer is feature complete. It represents a seminal moment in the history of the internet. For the first time, internet services will be governed in a completely independent, decentralized manner. It is the technical solution to the systemic problems Big Tech has created with its monopoly over the internet, a public utility that should be completely open — bringing back the concept of the programmable web. The NNS is the catalyst for the open internet we were promised in the 1990s, and it ensures that the future of the internet remains open and free.”
 
Dfinity’s ‘Internet Computer’ is effectively a ‘blockchain computer’ powered by a network of independent data centers, allowing software to run anywhere on the internet rather than on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft -controlled server farms. Dfinity is pitching it as – eventually – an alternative to the $3.9-trillion-dollar IT stack in operation today. 

Dfinity is backed by Andreessen Horowitz (via its crypto fund a16z crypto), Polychain Capital, SV Angel, Aspect Ventures, Village Global, Multicoin Capital, Scalar Capital, and Amino Capital, KR1, as well as Dfinity community members.

Twitch today is introducing a new tool, Soundtrack by Twitch, that will allows it creators to add licensed music within their streams. The feature, which has been in development over the past year, is meant to not only make it easier to find rights-cleared music, but also to address the ongoing issues creators face with having their archives muted.

At launch, Soundtrack by Twitch is working with a variety of label and distribution partners, but doesn’t have agreements with the majors themselves. Instead, the initial lineup of supported partners includes Soundcloud, Monstercat, Distrokid, cdbaby, Empire, Westwood Recordings, United Masters, Alpha Pup, Popgang, Text Me Records, Dim Mak, Create Music Group, Chillhop Music, Anjunabeats, Soundstripe, LabelWork, mxmtoon, future classic, Nuclear Blast, Season of Mist, Chilled Cow, Pure Noise Records, Symphonic, Blkbox, and Songtradr.

Twitch says this lineup will give creators access to a range of music, including artists like Above & Beyond, mxmtoon, Porter Robinson, RAC, SwuM, and others.

Image Credits: Twitch

Some of Twitch’s music partners had already been catering to creators by publishing their free-to-use music as Spotify playlists, for example. Others had previous agreements with Twitch, like dance music label Anjunabeats which had cleared 350 tracks last year for use in Twitch streams. Soundcloud, meanwhile, had more recently launched its own channel on Twitch to help connect with viewers interested in discovering new music. Other details about this new upcoming Twitch integration were pre-announced by some participants.

Before today, Twitch’s Audio Recognition system would automatically flag any audio where users didn’t have the necessary rights to play it during the stream. Many creators mistakenly believed if they had bought the bought or paid for a streaming subscription service that would allow them to feature the music while streaming. This wasn’t true.

In reality, the only music creators were able to legally play largely fell under a few, narrow categories: music they themselves owned or music that was licensed to them. (Vocal performances captured during Twitch Sings gameplay were also permitted.)

That meant a wide variety of music-related content on Twitch simply wasn’t allowed, including radio-style listening shows, DJ sets, karaoke and lip syncing, cover songs where creators used any sort of musical accompaniment besides themselves, or even the display of lyrics.

When music was flagged, creators could find their VODs (video on demand) muted.

Image Credits: Twitch

Twitch in the past had tried to address music rights issues with the launch of the Twitch Music Library in 2015, but this was shut down last year without explanation.

With the launch of Soundtrack by Twitch, music will be separated into its own audio channel so creators can play the tracks without being worried about muting or receiving strikes against their channel. Creators will be able to choose music from a set of stations and playlists curated by Twitch staff, by theme or genre — like “just chilling” or “Lofi Hip Hop/Beats” or “Rap,” for example.

The launch of Soundtrack comes at a time when music has become a larger part of the Twitch experience, thanks to the live-streaming platform’s adoption by artists during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company hosted a benefit in partnership with Amazon Music, called Stream Aid, which featured a number of artists, like Diplo, Barry Gibb, Ryan Tedder, Lauv, Charlie Puth, Die Antwoord and others. It since has hosted a flood of other musicians’ live stream, leading the “Music & Performing Arts” category to surge by 387% year-over-year as of this July.

Twitch also hired Spotify’s Tracy Chan as its new head of Product & Engineering for Music, partnered with Bandsintown, and rolled out several ways for artists to fast-track their way to Twitch Affiliate status. This month, Twitch livestreams were also integrated with Amazon Music’s app.

The early version of Soundtrack by Twitch is launching today and will be compatible with OBS on PC, Twitch Studio, and Streamlabs OBS (soon), the company says.

Lawyers applying for a license to practice law in Washington, D.C., say a security lapse by the bar association exposed their application files, including their government-issued IDs and background checks.

Applicants said the District of Columbia Bar, which oversees the admissions and licensing for lawyers practicing in the U.S. capital, was storing the applications in an unprotected directory on its website.

The DC Bar did not respond to multiple emailed requests and a voicemail requesting comment prior to publication.

The security lapse was first disclosed in an August 26 email, obtained by TechCrunch, by an unnamed whistleblower who said they “reported this issue on three separate occasions” to the DC Bar, but that their email was not returned nor was the issue fixed. The email said that documents contained personal information like names, phone numbers, and email addresses, as well as Social Security number, the applicant’s full employment history, previous home addresses, and any disciplinary records.

The whistleblower said they began notifying news outlets “in a good faith effort to notify affected users and ensure the issue is fixed.” TechCrunch obtained the email from a pseudonymous Twitter account that goes by the handle Bar Exam Tracker.

The email said that the security lapse meant that applicants could still access their uploaded application files from the DC Bar website, even after they logged out. But because the application files followed a consistent naming scheme, anyone could access the application files of other applicants by incrementally changing the web address.

“The documents are publicly accessible merely by opening their addresses in a web browser, and are not protected by any authentication system,” the whistleblower’s email wrote.

Word of the security lapse quickly spread among some bar applicants. Two applicants, who agreed to be quoted but asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told TechCrunch that they were able to access their application files after they had logged out.

“We did take some steps to verify it,” said one applicant, referring to the claims in the whistleblower’s email. “A colleague and I both were able to access our documents while not logged into the system through a new browser.”

“Several of us tried it, myself included, and found that it worked,” said another applicant.

The applicants also reported the issue to the DC Bar. Soon after, a notice on the application site said the DC Bar was “investigating some technical issues,” and asked applicants not to upload any files.

The security lapse was subsequently fixed, but the applicants say that the DC Bar has not yet disclosed the security incident.

“Truly can’t believe the bar didn’t notify us of the issue,” one of the applicants said.

A spokesperson for the Office of the Attorney General for the District of Columbia would not say if the DC Bar had notified the office of the security lapse.

We’re in the final run up to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 on October 6-7, and the great stuff just keeps on coming. We’ve stacked the two-day agenda with plenty of programming to keep you engaged, informed and on track to build a stronger business. You’ll always find amazing speakers — some of the most innovative minds out there — on the main stage, but don’t forget about the breakout sessions.

Dramatic pause for a pro tip: Don’t have a pass yet? Buy one here now, before prices go up on October 5. TIP: You can check out the some of the breakout sessions, q&a sessions, startup mobility pitches and the expo when you get the Expo Ticket for just $25.

The smaller breakout sessions, led by top experts in their field, let you dig into specific topics, ask questions and make connections. A lot of excitement and startup magic can happen at the breakout sessions.

“I enjoyed the big marquee speakers from companies like Uber, but it was the individual presentations where you really started to get into the meat of the conversation and see how these mobile partnerships come to life.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

Before we share the breakout session topics, we have another exciting bit of news. We’re hosting pitch sessions for early stage startup founders who exhibit in the expo at TC Sessions: Mobility. Each startup gets five minutes to pitch to attendees in a breakout session. Remember, this conference has a global reach — talk about visibility! Want to pitch? Buy an Early Stage Startup Exhibitor Package before sales close on Friday.

Alrighty then…let’s look at some of the breakout sessions waiting for you at TC Sessions Mobility 2020.

Tuesday, October 6

10:00 am -10:50 am PDT

Software is Revolutionizing the Driver Experience and Driving Mass Electrification – Software in EVs enables a shift from buying a car to investing in an experience. Hear how it’s driving adoption, revolutionizing behavior & keeping up w/demand. Brought to you by Chargepoint

10:25 am -10:45 am PDT

Main Stage: Driving the Mobility revolution with Connected Car Data – Learn from Wejo’s VP of Partnerships about the future of mobility and how connected car data impacts the world of autonomous, electric and shared. Brought to you by Wejo

10:55 am – 11:15am PDT

Main Stage: Designing Driverless: A look into the Waymo One experience – Waymo’s head of ux research and design gives an inside look look into their fully driverless service experience and its design. Brought to you by Waymo

11:00 am – 11:15am PDT

Q&A Session w/Reilly Brenna, Amy Gu, Olaf Sakkers

12:15 pm – 12:30 pm PDT

Q&A Session w/Danielle Harris, Avra van der Zee and Dmitry Shevelenko

12:30 pm -1:20 pm PDT

Mobility Startup Demo Pitch Session – Part 1

Wednesday, October 7

9:00 am – 9:50 am PDT

Mobility Startup Demo Pitch Session – Part 2

10:00 am – 10:50 am PDT

Mobility Startup Demo Pitch Session – Part 3

10:55 am – 11:15 am PDT

Main Stage: Public-Private Partnerships: Advancing the Future of Mobility – Join us to learn how the public and private entities partner together to shape the future of mobility with the next generation of transportation solutions. Brought to you by Planet M

11:00 am – 11:20 am PDT

Q&A Session w/ David Estrada, Melissa Froelich, Jody Kelman, Prashanthi Raman

12:15 pm – 12:30 pm PDT

Q&A Session w/ Ben Bear, Fredrik Hjelm

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

As two female investors who themselves identify as hypercultural (HC) Latinx, we see much potential for brands and startups that invest in this demographic.

For the purpose of this article, we will focus on 13-to-25-year-old individuals who can trace their heritage to a Latin American country who have spent the majority of their lifetime in the U.S. Whether they were born in the U.S. doesn’t matter as much as how much time they have spent immersed in mainstream American culture. This is important to note because this demographic is largely defined by always having one foot in their parents’ native country and another in the United States.

In simplest terms: A Latinx person has origins from a country in Latin America, like Mexico or Brazil, while a Hispanic person has origins from a country where Spanish is the dominant language, such as Mexico or Spain. A Pew Research study found that one in four people who describe themselves as Hispanic or Latino have heard of the non-gendered “Latinx,” but only 3% of them use the term in everyday life.

So what makes the hypercultural Latinx so unique and worthy of pursuit? It’s not a secret that they have massive purchasing power behind them (a collective $1.9 trillion to be exact). However, they are also different from their mostly white counterparts in the way they vigorously engage with technology, their obsession with being online at all times and their unique shopping habits.

Hypercultural Latinx consumers are accustomed to being early adopters of new technology: 81% of them say they like to learn about the latest technology (overindexing their white counterparts by 36%). Latino households are filled with the latest gadgets and smart tech toys. Although we assume most Gen Zers and young millennials love technology, HC Latinx love tech at astronomical rates and shell out more dollars than their white, mostly monocultural counterparts.

This makes sense given that 60% of HC Latinx grew up in the internet age versus only 40% of their white counterparts. Across levels of HC Latinx income (or their parents’), there is always a budget for technology. In my own Mexican household (Ilse), I grew up prioritizing tech over other (sometimes more important) categories like books or vacations.

The online lives of the HC Latinx can be summed up by one statistic: 24% spend three hours or more on social media per day. compared to only 13% of their white counterparts. So much time is spent online by this Latinx youth that they are able to create a digital comunidad where they thrive socially and intellectually. This comunidad has so much influence in how the HC Latinx thinks about what they purchase and how loyal they are to the brands they buy from.

When Vista Equity Partners acquired backup and disaster recovery firm Datto in 2017, it was easy to think that was the end of the company’s story. It would be comfortably absorbed into the private equity portfolio continuing to make money for the firm, but that’s not really the way Vista works. It tends to build up its companies, sometimes eventually taking them public, and yesterday that’s what happened when Datto filed its S-1.

Datto has been busy since it was acquired and reports a healthy $507 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) along with 17,000 managed service provider (MSP) customers. Among those, it has more than 1000 customers contributing over $100,000 in ARR. MSPs are service providers that act as a company’s IT department when they don’t have internal resources.

The company has included a standard $100M placeholder for the amount they intend to raise for the event, and that will almost certainly change. In a nod to its manage service provider customer base, the company’s ticker symbol will be MSP.

When the company raised its $75 million Series B in 2015, CEO and founder Austin McChord, who is still leading the company today, said that the company was already profitable at that point, two years before Vista came knocking. “As a profitable company, Datto isn’t raising capital to fund operations, but instead, to enter new markets and build new products and technology,” he said in a statement at the time.

You can see that in the company’s financials. In the first six months of 2020, the company had subscription revenues of $234 million and a gross profit of $178 million. When sales and marketing and other costs are added in, the company had a net income of $10 million. That’s compared to $196 million in subscription revenue in the same period of 2019, a gross profit of $143 million, and a net loss of about $26 million.

In short, the company has managed to grow topline revenue, keep its cost of revenues flat, and manage the growth of its other expenses to limit their effect on the bottom line. That swung its net income per share from -$0.19 to $0.07.

Of course, companies like Datto always try to make the numbers look good in preparation for a public offering, so the real understanding will come in the next few quarters as we see if Datto can sustain its growth and keep expenses in check.

When I spoke to Alan Cline, senior managing director at Vista last year, he said his firm tends to like high performing startups like Datto that have built substantial companies.

“Software is the easiest place to innovate inside of technology. We see a huge advantage in terms of the productivity that it drives for the end business customer, and to us that high ROI is powerful because whether it’s up market or a down market, if I can prove to you you’re going to make more money or save money in your own operations by using my software, you can find the budget,” Cline told TechCrunch.

Just last year another company in the Vista portfolio, Ping Identity, filed to go public for the same $100 million placeholder, eventually offering 12.5 million shares at $15 per share. Today the company is trading at $31.68 per share with a market cap of over $2.5 billion.