Month: September 2020

There’s a reality TV competition show in the works that will feature a 2023 trip to the International Space Station as the grand prize, Deadline reports. The production company behind the show, which will be called ‘Space Hero,’ has booked a seat on a SpaceX Dragon crew spacecraft set to make the trip to the ISS in 2023, and will make it the reward for whoever comes out the winner in a competition among “everyday people from any background who share a deep love for space exploration,” according to the report.

The competition will be an ersatz astronaut training program of sorts, including physical challenges, as well as puzzles and problem-solving tasks, as well as emotionally challenging scenarios, according to Deadline. That will lead up to what producers are currently planning will be a live episode featuring a global viewer vote about who ultimately will win. The show will also include documenting the winner’s ISS trip, including their launch and 10-day space station stay, as well as their return journey and landing.

To bring all these pieces together, the reproduction team is working with Axiom Space, a private space travel services provider and mission operator, as well as NASA, with which it’s discussing what might be done in terms of STEM education add-ons for this planned programming.

Apparently, Deadline says that Survivor creator and reality industry giant Mark Burnett has previously tried multiple times to create a reality show with a trip to space as the main component. One such effort, an NBC-based program called ‘Space Race,’ was created in partnership with Richard Branson and focused on Virgin Galactic, but it was ended after that company’s fatal testing accident in 2015.

There’s also a movie production in the works that’s bound for the Space Station as a filming location, and those efforts are being spearheaded by Tom Cruise, who will star in the yet untitled project. NASA has repeatedly said it welcomes increased commercialization of low Earth orbit and the ISS, and it also intentionally sought out private partners like SpaceX for its US-based astronaut launch vehicles, in the hopes that they would be able to book other, private clients for flights to help defray mission costs.

Demand Sage, a new startup from the founders of recently-acquired mobile analytics company Localytics, announced this morning that it has raised $3 million in seed funding led by Eniac Ventures and Underscore VC.

When I spoke to CEO Raj Aggarwal, CTO Henry Cipolla and CPO Randy Dailey back in February, they outlined a vision to make it easier for marketers to get the data and insights they need, initially by automatically generating Google Sheets reports using data from HubSpot.

More recently, Demand Sage has been expanding into sales data.

“From our solid base with marketers we noticed sales leaders pulling us in to help them too,” Aggarwal told me via. “We’ve been able to give them visibility they didn’t have, in areas such as where deals are getting stuck and which activities actually drive revenue. It makes sense since there is a ton of overlap between the sales and marketing functions, especially in SMBs. ”

Aggarwal also said that Demand Sage has expanded its product lineup beyond pre-built report templates by introducing a no-code “Report Builder,” and by testing out an insights tools that could, for example, help salespeople determine which deals need their attention.

In a statement, Vinayak Ranade, CEO of Demand Sage customer Drafted, said, “With every sales and marketing tool I’ve used, eventually you give up and export data to a spreadsheet to dig into the numbers,” whereas with Demand Sage, it’s “like having a Google Sheets power-user that automatically makes the spreadsheets that you really want to see.”

As for how the business has fared during the pandemic, Aggarwal said, “Demand has really jumped. Companies need more cost-effective solutions and greater flexibility as business models shift.”

Polestar is a startup in an unusual situation. Polestar has the car. It has the executives. Polestar has factories, partners, and distribution channels. It’s set for success in a way most startups are not. And yet, success is not guaranteed. I fear Polestar is missing a critical aspect of electric vehicles and selling against Tesla.

I anticipate this will be a crucial point of discussion with Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility. We’re excited to have Ingenlath join the event for a fireside chat on the company and electric vehicles’ future.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve driven both of Polestar’s vehicles and attended briefings. I’ve learned about their roll-out plan, target demographics, and countless technical details about the company’s $155,000 hybrid coupe (full review) and $60,000 electric sedan (first drive review). It’s a fascinating company that built two world-class vehicles able to stand tall against anything from Tesla, Mercedes, or BMW.

But Polestar is missing the Tesla factor, and I fear sales will lag because of it.

Polestar is seemingly following a similar product cycle as Tesla by offering a limited-run super sports car followed by more affordable family cars. The Polestar 1 is the company’s Tesla Roadster while the Polestar 2 is its Tesla Model S.

I noted this similar in my write-up about the fantastic Polestar 1 hybrid grand tourer. The large coupe is superb, with excellent driving characteristics and top-notch fit and finish. The Polestar 1 does not feel like the first vehicle from a startup. Compare the Polestar 1 to an early Tesla Roadster (or even current Model 3), and the differences are profound. The Polestar 1 looks and feels as good as anything from Mercedes or BMW, and better than any Tesla model.

And yet, fit and finish is not enough to sell against Tesla because Tesla created a practical and exciting ecosystem around its vehicles.

It starts with Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk, who alone has a social media presence many multiples larger than Polestar’s. With a charismatic leader at the helm, consumers are more likely to pay attention. What’s more, Elon Musk frequently responds and interacts with Tesla owners on Twitter. Love him or hate him, Elon Musk is the world’s best car salesman.

Polestar’s social media presence is small. Instagram seems to be it’s largest channel as its posted 1,366 items to its 356,000 followers. On Facebook, Polestar has 461,000 followers, but the company hasn’t posted any pictures, stories, or posts. YouTube is more of the same where Polestar only has 40,000 subscribers instead of Tesla’s 1.4 million.

The lack of social outreach seems antiquated and short-sited; we’ll talk about this at the Mobility event.

Polestar CEO Ingenlath seems different from Elon Musk in several critical aspects. He’s measured and focused and appears to be piloting Polestar more like a traditional automaker than a free-wheeling startup — that’s likely due to his past positions inside Volvo and Volkswagen Group. He joined Volvo in 2012 and became the CEO of the Polestar subsidiary in 2017. Before Volvo, he was the chief exterior designer for Volkswagen, Chief Designer at Skoda, and finally, the Director of Design at the Volkswagen Design Center.

Polestar is technically an OEM like BMW, General Motors, or Tesla. The company was spun out of Volvo, where it was previously a performance division akin to Mercedes Benz’ AMG division. In 2017 Volvo and Geely (which owns Volvo) spun Polestar out of the fold, although Polestar still retains relationships with both of its parents.

Being an OEM means it’s more on its own to chart its path to success or failure. As a startup, Polestar faces the same challenges as other startups, most notably other automotive startups like Tesla, Rivian, or Nio.

In an August call with Polestar, CEO Thomas Ingenlath talked about the company’s retail plans. Unlike Tesla, Polestar vehicles will only be sold through partnerships with dealerships. Polestar vehicles will not be sold directly to consumers. Ingenlath said the company is working with existing Volvo dealerships though the company has fielded outreach from BMW, Mercedes, and other dealerships looking to sell Polestar vehicles.

Using existing dealership relationships, Polestar quickly spun up a dealer and service network, while bypassing the trouble Tesla often faces in states with dealership laws.

Polestar also intends to use existing dealerships to build showcase retail locations in high-traffic areas similar to those produced by Tesla. Will shoppers still have to haggle with a dealership salesperson when buying a Polestar vehicle? It’s unclear, and it’s likely some potential buyers will be turned off by the thought having to use a dealership for sales and service.

The electric vehicle scene is quickly growing up, and Polestar’s positioning puts it in an unusually mature situation ahead of other similar age startups.

It’s thrilling to have Thomas Ingenlath speak at TC Sessions: Mobility. As outlined above, there are plenty of topics to discuss. Ingenloth is the latest in our all-star lineup of speakers, including Bryan Salesky, Co-founder, and CEO of Argo AI, Klaus Zellmer, President, and CEO of Porsche Cars North America, and Tekedra Mawakana, Chief Operating Officer at Waymo.

We hope you can join in October 6-7, 2020 at the event. For the first time, TC Sessions: Mobility is a virtual event, and we’ve built incredible features into our platform to give attendees unparalleled access to speakers, investors, and fellow founders. Get a ticket here.

Pachama, the forest carbon sequestration monitoring service that tracks how much carbon dioxide is actually captured in forestry offset projects, has raised $5 million in fresh funding from a clutch of high profile investors including Amazon, Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

The investment is one of several deals that Amazon has announced today through its Climate Pledge Fund. Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the firm backed by Bill Gates and other billionaires, led the round, which brings Pachama’s total haul to $9 million so it can scale its forest restoration and conservation emissions reduction monitoring service, the company said.

With the Western United States continuing to burn from several fires that cover acres of drought-impacted forests and deforestation continuing to be a problem around the world, Pachama’s solution couldn’t be more timely. The company’s remote verification and monitoring service using satellite imagery and artificial intelligence measures carbon captured by forests.

It also couldn’t be more personal. Pachama’s founder, Diego Saez-Gil, lost his own home in the wildfires that tore through California earlier this year.

“We will need to restore hundreds of thousands of acres of forests and carbon credits can be the funding mechanism,” Saez-Gil wrote in a direct message.

Pachama joins two other companies that are jointly financed by Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Amazon’s Climate Pledge Fund.

Other big corporate investors also backed Pachama. Groupe Arnault’s investment arm, Aglaé Ventures, and Airbnb’s alumni fund, AirAngels invested as did a number of prominent family offices and early stage funds. Sweet Capital, the fund investing the personal wealth of gaming company King.com’s management team; Serena Ventures (the investment vehicle for tennis superstar Serena Williams) and Chris Sacca’s Lowercarbon Capital fund also invested in the round along with Third Kind Ventures and Xplorer Ventures.

“There is growing demand from businesses with ESG commitments looking for ways to become carbon neutral, and afforestation is one of the most attractive carbon removal options ready today at scale,” said Carmichael Roberts, of Breakthrough Energy Ventures, in a statement. “By leveraging technology to create new levels of measurement, monitoring, and verification of carbon removal—while also onboarding new carbon removal projects seamlessly—Pachama makes it easier for any company to become carbon neutral. With its advanced enterprise tools and resources, the company has enormous potential to accelerate carbon neutrality initiatives for businesses through afforestation.”

Over the past 24 hours, rumors picked up by Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal and CNBC have put some boundaries on what a possible deal between Oracle and TikTok’s parent company ByteDance will look like.

In its current incarnation floating around the DC press corps, it appears that TikTok’s data on American users will be stored in Oracle’s cloud, with Oracle acting as a “trusted technology partner.” Oracle will have some sort of real-time source code verification duty, in which it will audit TikTok’s codebase to ensure that there aren’t “backdoors” that allow China to siphon data into its national security apparatus. ByteDance will create a new organization for its U.S. operations, which will have a board of directors approved by the U.S. government and will have a license agreement to access TikTok’s algorithms. One member of that board (at least) will come from the American national security community.

There remains a pretty yawning gap in these rumors over what the ownership of this new entity looks like, and precisely who is going to own what. Oracle is presumed to take a fairly large stake, with CNBC reporting this morning that it will get a 20% stake. Walmart apparently has broken away from its deal partner Microsoft, and is still pursuing some sort of deal engagement with the company, now with Oracle as its champion.

While President Trump has repeatedly said that a deal had to be reached by September 15, his executive order gave the parties until September 20 to hash out an agreement. Therefore, we expect a final deal to be approved — or denied outright — in the next two to three days.

Obviously, all terms are still under negotiation, and for all we know, McDonalds will end up buying the company (it’s been that kind of year).

Given what we know so far though, how did the Trump administration do in furthering its goals? The administration has repeatedly said that it wants to protect American users, particularly the young users who love TikTok, from the prying eyes of China. It also wanted to ensure that any protections would last into the future and couldn’t be changed retrospectively by, say, a more aggressive future policy implemented by China. And Trump has also said that the U.S. government should be paid for allowing the company to essentially continue to exist in the U.S. at all.

The latter point is the easiest one — U.S. government lawyers have said outright that the country can’t accept a payment for allowing a deal through, a point that Trump now appears to agree with.

So let’s head over to national security and privacy. Hosting American data on American soil helps with some jurisdictional issues of course. So-called data sovereignty laws have been popular in the European Union, China, India, Brazil and elsewhere as a means of ensuring that citizen data comports with the laws of those citizens’ countries. If the EU wants better privacy protections than America for instance, then it actually needs to “own” its own data to put its policies into place.

However, what has not been made clear is how “TikTok US” (or whatever the entity is called) will be able to take advantage of its parent company’s algorithms without actually handing American data over for processing.

The kinds of algorithms that run TikTok’s feed — like other social media feeds or Google’s search results — require real-time tuning of millions if not billions of parameters benchmarked against the quality of the user experience. For instance, users who linger on a particular video for longer than others, interact with it in specific ways, and share it are all data points that get fed into the “algorithm” to optimize exactly what each user sees in their own feeds.

This is an extraordinarily hard problem, and one that the word “algorithm” barely begins to describe. TikTok has to ingest billions of data points in real time from its app, needs to evaluate mullions of uploaded videos in real time, and needs to curate a custom stream of videos in real time for hundreds of millions of active users. That’s not an algorithm so much as a massively scaled computing system.

In the current deal framework, it sounds like “TikTok US” will supposedly “license” the underlying systems that power TikTok Global’s feeds. Yet, there has so far been zero clarity on how those algorithmic systems can tune their parameters without peering into U.S. data, or even how you can bifurcate such a system into a global half and a U.S.-only half.

One answer might be that the U.S.will just have an entirely independent algorithmic system that is tuned to the tastes of U.S. users and doesn’t take input from other global sources. That might work, although it’s an open question whether the smaller scale of TikTok US’ data will allow it to create as compelling a feed as today.

The larger issue is the pace of change in these systems. Updates to these algorithmic systems happen around the clock as engineers, product managers, data scientists and others determine ever more optimal and novel ways to improve the user experience. TikTok’s engineering team is expected to stay in China, meaning that any entity licensing those systems would have to absorb that constant avalanche of new code changes and integrate it into the U.S. codebase. Worse, those changes would have to be continuously evaluated by Oracle for backdoors — an incredibly hard engineering problem that remains by and large unsolved even if certain services offer a modicum of protection here.

Finally, building this infrastructure is not going to be easy. We haven’t heard much on how long TikTok would have to transition its systems, but it is hard to imagine that the company could rebuild its infrastructure on Oracle, add in real-time source code verification, completely separate its core machine learning algorithms into independent systems, and do all that while continuing to adapt its product to changing consumer whims in anything less than three years. One doesn’t just rebuild the code from scratch of a system used by hundreds of millions of people.

In all honesty, the rapid iterations required of a social media service will wither and die in the deal framework offered here. Which means that TikTok’s U.S. engineering efforts look all but doomed if this deal is approved.

Then there is this deal term of potentially adding an all U.S. government-approved board, with at least one director coming with a national security background. That experience isn’t unheard of in tech companies these days: Amazon just last week added former National Security Agency director Keith Alexander to its board, presumably due to the company’s expanding cloud services sales to the government.

Given that so many of the concerns expressed by the administration were around citizen privacy though, how exactly does this board structure protect privacy whatsoever? The company will essentially replace presumed Chinese surveillance with presumed American surveillance, and that’s a Pyrrhic victory in the end. We’ve heard next to nothing in these rumors about how the company can better protect user data in a more transparent fashion.

So the net-net right now is that the U.S. government isn’t going to get paid its tithe/bribe, the company’s engineering velocity is going to crater from bureaucracy, and its user data won’t have any more protections than what pretty much already exists with other social networks.

Maybe in the end, killing TikTok was the goal all along. Certainly some analysts in the DC national security community would like to see that happen. But at least from the seat over here, what a colossal failure of imagination and opportunity.

As part of Disrupt 2020 we wanted to look at the contrasting positions of both early and later-stage investing in Europe. Who better to unpack this subject than two highly experienced operators in these fields?

After a career at Spotify and then as a VC at Atomico, Sophia Bendz has rapidly gained a reputation in Europe as a keen early-stage investor. She recently left Atomico to pursue her early and seed-stage passion with Cherry Ventures. Bendz is a prolific angel investor, with a total of over 44 deals in the last 9 years. Her angel investments include as AidenAI, Tictail, Joints Academy, Omnius, LifeX, Eastnine, Manual, Headvig, Simple Feast, and Sana Labs. She is known for being a champion of the femtech space, and her angel investments in that space include Clue, Grace Health, Daye, O School, and Boost Thyroid.

Carolina Brochado, the former Atomico partner and most recently a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund’s London office, recently joined EQT Ventures to help launch EQT’s Growth fund, which is positioned between Ventures and Private Equity. Brochado led investments in a number of promising companies at Atomico,  including logistics company OnTruck, health tech company Hinge Health and restaurant supply chain app Rekki.

After establishing that these two knew each other while at Atomico, I asked Bendz why she headed back into the seed stage arena.

“I’m a trained marketeer and storyteller by heart… What makes me excited is new markets opportunities, people, culture, teams. So with that, in combination with my angel investing, I think I’m better suited to be in the earlier stages of investing. When I was investing before joining Atomico, I said to myself, I want to learn from the best, I want to see how it’s done how you structure the process and how you think about the bigger investments.”

Brochado says the European ‘cat is out of the bag’ as it were:

When I first moved to Europe in 2012 and first joined Atomico, after having been at a very small startup, there was still a massive gap in funding and Europe versus the US. I think you know the European secret is no longer a secret, and you have incredible funds being started at that early stage seed and series A, and because I was here in 2012, I’ve seen the amazing pipeline of growth companies that are coming up the curve, how the momentum of those companies is accelerating and how the market cap of those businesses are growing. And so I just became super excited about helping those businesses scale… I just you now felt like bridging that gap in between ass really exciting and.

One of the perennial topics that come up time and time again is whether or not founders should go with VC partners who have previously been operators, versus those with a finance background.

“Looking back, my years at Spotify, we had great investors, but there were not many of them that had the experience of scaling a big company,” Bendz said. “So, I’m happy to give [a startup] more than just the check in a way that I would have wished I had a sounding board when I was 25 and tackling that challenge at Spotify.”

Brochado concurred: “Having operators in the room is just is an incredible gift I think to a fund and at certain levels, having people that understand you know different forms of financing and different structures can also be incredibly helpful to founders who may not necessarily have that background. So I think that the funds that do it best have that diversity.”

Bendz is passionate about investing in female founders and femtech: “It’s such a massive business opportunity that is completely untapped. We’ve seen it many times when you have a female investment partner [that] the pipeline opens up and you get more deal flow from female founders…. So I think we have a lot of work to do. I think it’s definitely improved a lot in the last couple of years but not enough… That is one of the drivers for why I put my money where my mouth is and invest in lifting the founders, but also because there are incredibly interesting business opportunities… There are so many opportunities and products or services that we will see being developed. When we have a more equal society, and more women, both building their own companies, coding and also investing… I can’t wait to see what that world will look like.”

Brochado’s view is that “even beyond founders… the best managers today are putting a lot of focus on this and I think what’s exciting is, I think we’re past the point where you have to explain to people why diversity matters.”

Is there a post-Series A chasm?

Bendz thinks: “We have more big funds in Europe [now]. We have a really solid ground here in Europe of a, b and c investors.”

Brochado said: “it’s definitely getting better. You don’t hear as many founders say that to do my Series B or my Series C I have to move to the Valley as you used to. But there’s a lot of room still for growth investors in Europe. I think Series B is the hardest round actually because, at seed or series A, you can raise on very early traction or the quality of the management team. At Series B the price goes up but the risk doesn’t necessarily go down as much. And so I think that’s where you really need investors who are sector or thematic focused, who can come with conviction and also some knowledge around the company to really propel that company forward.”

Did they both see European entrepreneurs still making silly mistakes, or has the ecosystem mastered?

Brochado thinks ten years ago was it was hard for European founders as a lot of the talent to scale companies was still in the US. “What you’ve seen is a lot of big companies grow up in Europe, a lot of people come back from the US, and so I think that pool of talent now is larger, which is very helpful. I don’t think it’s yet at the scale of where the US is. But it gives us, you know as investors, a great window of opportunity to help get some of that talent for our portfolio companies.”

The impact of COVID-19

Bendz thinks we will “see a much slower Spring, but… I think it has been overall a good exercise for some companies, and I have not seen a slower deal flow. I’ve actually done more Angel deals this Spring than I normally do… Some businesses have definitely accelerated their whole business concept because of COVID. Investments are being made even though we haven’t met the founders. We’re able to do everything remotely so I think the system is kind of adjusting.”

Brocado’s view is that at the growth stage “there’s been a flight to quality. So actually, the really great companies or the companies that are seeing great tailwinds or companies that will still be category-leading once [have] seen a lot of interest. It’s been a very busy summer, which usually it isn’t usually, particularly at the growth stage… I think a lot of money is still in the system, and has flown into technology. And so if you look at how tech in the public markets has performed it’s performed extremely well. And that includes European public companies and within tech.”

Watch the full panel below.

Hulu was one of the first major streaming services to introduce a “co-viewing” feature that allows friends and family to watch Hulu content together from different locations. The feature, Hulu Watch Party, was initially only available for subscribers on the the ad-free tier of Hulu’s streaming service. Now, the company is making Watch Party available to ad-supported subscribers as well, but in a more limited capacity.

When Hulu Watch Party launched in May, it worked across thousands of movies and TV shows in Hulu’s on-demand streaming library. As Hulu explained at the time, if a show is available for co-viewing, it will indicate this with a “Watch Party” icon on the title’s Details page. Users can then provide the co-viewing link to those they want to watch together with. Currently, a Watch Party session supports up to 8 people.

What makes Hulu’s implementation different from those seen on rival services is that viewers can control their own Watch Party experience. If someone wants to grab a snack or needs a bathroom break, for example, they can pause playback. But doing so doesn’t impact the group’s shared stream. Then, when they return, the viewer can either watch what they missed or tap a “Catch Up” button to get back in sync with the group.

Hulu says since the product debuted, viewers have used Watch Party to host movie nights and watch new series premieres. “Palm Springs,” “Parasite,” and “Love, Victor” were among the top titles that were co-viewed to date.

Now, Hulu wants to bring the feature to ad-supported viewers.

The company is testing co-watching on “Pen15,” whose season 2 premieres on Friday, Sept. 18.

Over the next 10 days, Hulu subscribers on both the ad-supported and ad-free plans will be able to join Watch Parties for this particular program.

Hulu is also trying out a branded experience within Watch Party for this particular test.

In a nod to the show, the Watch Party interface will be designed to resemble a classic instant messenger chat room, and will include screen names taken from the series. This design will only display when Watch Party is used to stream “Pen15,” not other shows. It’s an interesting example of how Watch Party could help to build out more of a fan community around a show by theming the chat interface in a unique way for viewers.

Users today have to be 18 and up to use Watch Party, Hulu says. Support for co-viewing of “Pen15” across Hulu’s tiers is live as of Wednesday and will continue for 10 days from that date.

The company is now one of several to either officially support co-viewing or at least endorse it.

Amazon’s Twitch launched Watch Parties for Amazon Prime Video following by a built-in feature on Prime Video itself. Plex added Watch Together in May, and HBO teamed up with Scener for co-viewing experiences. Instagram in March rolled out co-watching features, while HouseParty debuted co-watching of events in May. More recently, Instagram Messenger and Messenger Rooms added the ability to co-view Facebook Watch content.

Hollywood has been better known for making films and TV shows about the tech industry than it has been for being a part of it, but today a new enterprise is launching, backed by a major Silicon Valley venture firm, that hopes to hit pause on that image.

Imagine Impact, a content accelerator that launched two years ago under production powerhouse Imagine Entertainment to impart a “Y Combinator” approach to sourcing new work and connecting it with production opportunities, has raised a Series A round of funding from Benchmark, the VC firm that has backed Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, Snapchat and many more — funding that it plans to use to continue building out its accelerator model as well as launching new technology ventures, it said.

With the investment, Imagine Impact is effectively spinning out of Imagine Entertainment, and rebranding as a standalone company called Impact Creative Systems.

Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, the high profile duo that in 1985 started the film and TV production company that has been behind a string of hits, stay on as founders, but Impact (as the firm calls itself) will be run day to day by CEO Tyler Mitchell. (And all three will be talking with us on the Disrupt stage today about this and more.)

Mitchell says that the amount of the investment, the first outside money that Impact has taken, is not being disclosed but that it’s in line with a typical Benchmark Series A. That would put it between $10 million and $20 million. The investment is being led by Bill Gurley, who will join the board with the deal.

The funding will be used to help the firm spearhead new ventures that continue building out the idea of taking a new approach to networking and finding career opportunities throughout the entertainment industry, breaking down some of the barriers of how business has always been done — through networks of who you know, lots of lunches and other hobnobbing. The idea is for the projects coming out of Impact to be underpinned not just with a tech ethos, but with actual technology.

First up is the launch later this year of The Creative Network, which Imagine describes as “an online marketplace and professional networking platform designed specifically for entertainment industry professionals to help bring efficiency and access to Hollywood.” It’s a little like LinkedIn meets Behance.

Up to now, Impact has been focusing its energies on building out its accelerators and securing deals for the writers in its cohorts, with the whole set-up inspired by the famous Silicon Valley accelerator.

The YC playbook is used in two ways. The first is in the model it’s using, where it opens applications to anyone interested to applying, and then provides those selected with mentorship, time and a little financing to do their creative work. The second comes in the form of the mentors having a lot of connections in the industry and using those to help the writers connect with others to produce their work.

The accelerator model has seen an accelerating amount of interest. Impact now has built a second accelerator outside of LA, in Australia; it has started a podcast featuring interviews with famous actors, directors and others (pointing to other kinds of content that it might spin out as business projects). And its inked a deal with Netflix Films to help source and develop content globally.

And perhaps most interestingly for laying groundwork for The Creative Network, it has built up a network of 30,000 writers across 80 countries; it has helped develop 72 projects; and 25 of those are now with major studios.

Those efforts have also had some tech built around them. Mitchell said that a beta of sorts for The Creative Network was built originally to use for the accelerator. “We built it because we were just three people running the accelerator and didn’t have the human resources available to send out or read potentially thousands of scripts” — specifically 3,000 script submissions in 72 hours — “so we built a mobile app.” Features include the ability to push submissions, make watermarks and track emails in the bigger database, the said.

“We talk about ourselves as a dating app,” joked Mitchell. “You have to get four people to fall in love with one story or writer or piece of material” to advance, he said, “the producer, director, star and financier. That involves a lot of phone calls and relationships and phone tag. It can be a very long process to triangulate and build the right teams.”

While efforts so far have been focused on building ways of connecting writers with producers, the bigger picture is to build a network that can bring in the rest of the ecosystem, including directors, actors and the extensive technical and admin talent needed to get a project off the ground and on to a screen. All of these connections up to now have been firmly stuck in the analogue world, making them slow, limited in terms of inclusiveness, and obviously very ripe for technological disruption.

“It takes 500-1,000 people in total to bring a project to life,” Mitchell said. And the bigger opportunity for connecting networks is massive. Mitchell estimates that just in the US, the production business employs 2.6 million people and accounts for some $177 million in wages each year and it’s growing.

“The old way of sourcing talent in the entertainment industry is based on who you know, which presents high barriers-to-entry for the fresh voices we need to hear from,” said Gurley, in a statement. “Impact is knocking down these barriers through a marketplace model that reduces information asymmetry and levels the playing field. Ultimately this leads to more opportunities and better outcomes for everyone involved.”

Indeed, Hollywood has been between a rock and a hard place when it comes to changing up its ways.

On one side, the industry regularly faces criticism for lacking diversity in its ranks and failing to identify with the masses. Complaints include too few women in decision-making roles and the difficulty of finding work if you don’t fit into particular age and appearance types; accusations of racism (OscarsSoWhite being a recurring theme each awards season); and more.

On the other, the media industry — including how consumers watch video — is rapidly evolving. For better or worse, the TV was once the absolute epicenter of how a family came together and saw what was happening in the world outside. Those Happy Days are gone now, so to speak. People watch YouTube and TikTok, Snapchat and Netflix, and while some of that definitely is still tapping into the older Hollywood ecosystem — Netflix, of course, repurposes a lot of traditional TV and film content, and commissions its own — it also speaks to just how rapidly the mediums and their delivery are changing.

While the first efforts of Impact are addressing the first group of these issues, one follow up question — the sequel, you might say — might be how and if Impact chooses to use its networks, tech and strategy to think about the second of these.

Before coming to the entertainment industry (he was been a writer and producer for years before this) Mitchell said he had a background in finance and has “always been entrepreneurial.” The tech scene in LA has definitely been growing over the years — it’s home to Snap and others — meaning its ripe for tapping for hiring more people for the startup.

“We’re talking with data scientists to build better algorithms for the Network and yes we’re hiring engineers,” he said. “We’ve attracted some incredible talent and the majoirty of the investment is going to scaling our team.” Impact now has 11 full time technical staff, he said. 

“We could not be more thrilled to be working with Benchmark. They have an unrivaled track record in building marketplaces and companies that have changed the world,” said Grazer, in a statement. “From the moment we met Bill, it was clear that he understood and believed in our vision. Benchmark is not just an investor, but a true partner, whose expertise you can’t put a price on.” 

“With Benchmark, we are now in a better place to serve the greater creative community worldwide,” said Howard, in a statement. “Their investment enables us to go wider and deeper in bringing great storytellers to the forefront and connecting them to the entertainment industry.”

SpaceX is set to launch the latest batch of its Starlink satellites on Thursday, with a target lift-off time of 2:19 PM EDT (11:19 AM PDT). The mission will take off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and there’s a backup opportunity tomorrow at 1:57 PM EDT (10:57 AM PDT) in case weather or any other issues prevent a launch attempt today.

The launch today will add to SpaceX’s growing constellation of operational Starlink satellites on orbit. There are now over 500 of these circling the globe, as SpaceX conducts private beta testing of its high-speed, low-latency consumer internet service and prepares for an open beta launch later this year. The goal is to create a scalable, eventually globe-spanning service that can provide service where previously unavailable, or to customers who had to rely on shaky or slow connections in past.

The launch today includes use of a Falcon 9 first stage booster that has flow twice previously, including first during SpaceX’s landmark Demo-2 Crew Dragon mission, the first ever for the company to carry human astronauts. SpaceX will also be attempting to recover the booster yet again for another future launch. One of the two fairing halves that protect the cargo atop the Falcon 9 was also used previously, on two separate occasions, for other Starlink satellite launches.

The livestream above will begin roughly 15 minutes before the target liftoff time, so at around 2:04 PM EDT (11:04 AM PDT).

Hello from the midst of Disrupt 2020: after this short piece for you I am wrapping my prep for a panel with investors from Bessemer, a16z and Canaan about the future of SaaS. Luckily, The Exchange this morning is on a very similar topic.

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The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

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Today we’re parsing some data that Bessemer and Forbes shared regarding their yearly Cloud 100 list. It’s a grouping of private cloud and SaaS companies, giving us a good look into valuation trends over time and also where the most valuable startups are focusing their efforts.

The data show a changing focus from the biggest and most impressive private SaaS and cloud companies. And the valuation trends show how growing private valuations could limit future returns, given historical results.

Of course, modern cloud valuations make it hard to be bearish on SaaS revenue multiples, but all the same, how much higher can they go? Every startup looks cheap when money is cheap. Let’s get into the numbers.

A changing sector focus

The Cloud 100 cycles companies in and out as time passes. As the list is focused on private companies, cloud and SaaS firms that sell to another company, or go public leave the cohort. And new companies join, keeping the total group at precisely 100 companies.

And here are the top five sectors those 100 companies are focused on, in order of popularity: