Year: 2020

Entrepreneurial creators have to do a lot with limited time. They need to, well, create, but then they also need to build their marketing funnels, convert users to their paid products, and manage business operations. Yet, perhaps the most important task they face is keeping their existing fans engaged, since ultimately, that engagement ties directly to the health of their brand long-term.

Social tools are abysmal on platforms like YouTube and Instagram, particularly when it comes to creators owning their own communities and building deeper relationships with them. Other products like Discord have been used to some success, although Discord was built with a different focus in mind and is being hammered in to fix the problem.

Circle believes there is a better way. The New York City-based startup officially launched today for creators following eight months of product beta testing. The platform is designed from the bottoms-up to offer better community building and engagement tools for creators, while also integrating with other software typical in the creator toolkit.

Circle co-founders Sid Yadav, Rudy Santino, and Andrew Guttormsen. Photo via Circle.

The key DNA for the company is another NYC-based startup called Teachable. Two of Circle’s three founders, Sid Yadav and Andrew Guttormsen, hail from the edtech platform, which helps entrepreneurial teachers setup online storefronts for their classes. Teachable was sold to Hotmart earlier this year for what was reported to be a quarter of a billion dollars. Yadav was VP of Product there, and Guttormsen was VP of Growth and Marketing. Their third co-founder, Rudy Santino, knew Yadav from previous work.

Yadav spun out of Teachable and actually got his start as a contractor for Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad who we were just talking about last week since he launched a brand new seed fund. He worked part-time as a product and design consultant, allowing him the flexibility to begin spending time thinking about new product ideas.

“I always knew that my next startup was going to be in [the creator] space,” Yadav said. “I just loved what they’re all about, which is about making an income from what they love doing.”

Teachable’s rapid growth in a small slice of the creator space taught Yadav some of the key challenges that creators face, and what a new product needed to solve in order to help them. With his co-founders, he enlisted a group of creators including Pay Flynn at Smart Passive Income and Anne-Laure Le Cunff who operates a newsletter called Ness Labs to actively build communities on Circle to prove out their various design and product decisions.

The growth of the platform and the engagement of potential customers attracted the attention of Notation Capital, a NYC-based pre-seed fund that just announced its third fund late last month. Notation led a $1.5 million seed round into Circle, which also included Lavingia, Ankur Nagpal, the founder and CEO of Teachable, Dave Ambrose, Peter Treadway, among others.

There is a growing movement of software designed to help creators start their businesses. Substack of course has gotten the most attention in Silicon Valley, with a platform designed mostly around email newsletter subscriptions. Pico, meanwhile, has focused on building out more of the infrastructure of the creator business through a CRM that integrates with most other platform. Patreon handles more of the payments and revenue engagement of fans.

Circle may end up touching on those areas, but today, wants to be the destination where you send all of your creators in between newsletters or blog posts or Instragrams. It’s a smart part of the creator stack to play in, and with strong early customer enthusiasm and a chunk of funding, seems ready to make a mark in this burgeoning market.

We’re excited to announce that Rep. Zoe Lofgren is coming to Disrupt 2020 this September 14-18.

Lofgren, a Democrat congresswoman and California native, has served at the heart of Silicon Valley since she was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1995, under which she’s served four presidents — and impeached exactly half of them.

As one of the most prominent lawmakers in Silicon Valley, Lofgren has a unique insights into the wants and needs of the world’s biggest tech giants that serve in her constituency — but also to hold them to account.

As a staunch defender of the people and their constitutional rights, Lofgren has pushed to protect net neutrality, fought to curb domestic government surveillance, and lobbied against far-reaching anti-piracy rules that critics said would have led to online censorship. She has campaigned to protect good-faith security researchers from “overzealous prosecutions,”and is a fervent supporter of secure encryption — despite efforts by the government to push for backdoors. Lofgren also continues to press the federal government to improve election security ahead of November’s presidential vote.

But she has also been at the forefront of keeping Big Tech in check, and hasn’t shied away from pushing legislation to rein in some of Silicon Valley’s more egregious data privacy and business practices.

Lofgren is by far one of the most clued-in and tech savvy lawmakers on Capitol Hill, which is precisely why we’re thrilled she will join us at Disrupt 2020 to talk about some of the most hot-button issues.

Should every American have the legal right to online privacy from data-hungry tech giants? What does it mean to be a startup in an ever-changing world of security and privacy rules? How worried is she about foreign powers interfering with our democratic process? And what can ordinary Americans do to push back against government snooping?

Come to Disrupt 2020 to find out. We’re getting closer to the event and early bird pricing is about to expire at the end of the week. Save some $$ by grabbing your pass before July 31!

The COVID-19 pandemic has utterly decimate a number of industries over the the past several months, but the U.S. gaming industry continues to benefit as people continue to be stuck at home. Yet another report from NPD highlights an excellent quarter, with spending hitting a new Q2 record in the States.

According to the figures, gamers spent $11.6 billion, marking a 30% increase over a year prior. It was also a 7% increase over Q1’s 10.9 billion, as spending continues while the pandemic continues to rage.

Games themselves comprised $10.2 billion of that figure (itself a 28% increase y-o-y), with some familiar titles occupying the top spots, including Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Calls of Duty Warzone and Modern Warfare. The gaming hardware category saw a 57% increase from 2019, with Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One all seeing strong sales.

The Switch isn’t a surprise, given shortages experienced earlier in the year. Perhaps a bit more unexpected are continued sales on the PS4 and Xbox One, given that both consoles are set to be eclipsed by next generation devices later in the year. Of course, those upcoming systems aren’t doing gamers much good during the current moment of stay at home orders.

As deep space missions and Mars colonies continue to shift from science fiction to potential near future reality, it’s not surprising to see Hollywood think about different types of stories to tell about space exploration. Away, a new series from Netflix premiering on September 4, looks like that kind of story.

The show stars Oscar-winner Hilary Swank, and is created by the people behind Parenthood and Friday Night Lights. It’s a show about an astronaut mission to Mars – but it’s clearly also about the family drama and tensions that arise, both for those in space on a multi-year long-duration mission, and for the families they left back home on Earth.

The show also looks to feature The Good Wife’s Josh Charles in a key supporting role, which is awesome because he’s fantastic. Given the level of talent, the pedigree of the show runners and the space setting, this looks like a fantastic recipe for a great new show. The first season will be available to stream on September 4 on Netflix.

Skillshare CEO Matt Cooper said 2020 has been a year of rapid growth — even before the pandemic forced large swaths of the population to stay home and turn to online learning for entertainment and enrich.

Cooper (who became CEO in 2017) told me that the company decided last year to “focus on our strength,” leading to a “brand relaunch” in January 2020 to emphasize the richness of its creativity-themed content. At the same time, Cooper said the company defines creativity very broadly, with classes divided into categories like animation, design, illustration, photography, filmmaking and writing.

“It’s not Bob Ross,” he said. “And I love Bob Ross, but that’s a very narrow definition of creativity. Creativity can come in lots of different forms — art, design, journaling, creative writing it can be culinary, it can be crafts.”

Cooper added that daily usage was already up significantly by mid-March, when the pandemic led to widespread social distancing orders across the United States. That created some challenges, particularly for the more polished Skillshare Originals that the company offers alongside its user-generated classes. (For example, Originals include a color masterclass taught by Victo Ngai, a class on “discovering your creative voice” taught by Shantell Martin and a creative nonfiction class by Susan Orlean.)

But of course the pandemic also meant that, as Cooper put it, “A lot more people had a lot more free time at home and were looking for a constructive way to spend it.” In fact, the company said that since its rebranding, new membership sign-ups have tripled, with existing members watching three times the number of lessons.

And Skillshare has continued producing Originals by sending instructors “a huge box of gear” and then supervising the shoot remotely. In fact, Cooper suggested that this has “opened up a whole new world” for the Originals team, allowing them to “look at parts of the world where we probably weren’t going to fly a camera crew to go shoot.”

The company now has 12 million registered members, 8,000 teachers and 30,000 classes — all accessible for $99 a year or $19 a month. And it’s announcing that it has raised $66 million in new funding led by OMERS Growth Equity, with managing director Saar Pikar joining the board of directors. Previous investors Union Square Ventures, Amasia Ventures, Burda Principal Investments and Spero Ventures also participated.

“Skillshare serves the needs of professional creatives and everyday creative hobbyists alike, which presents a highly-innovative value proposition for the online learning market,” Pikar said in a statement. “We look forward to deepening our partnership with Skillshare, and our fellow investors, in order to help Matt Cooper and his team scale up the company’s international reach – and help Skillshare achieve the full potential of its unique approach to online learning.”

Cooper added that the company (which had previously raised $42 million) was cashflow positive for the first half of 2020, so it raised the new round to invest in growth — particularly in the Skillshare for Teams enterprise product, which allows customers like GM Financial, Vice, AWS, Lululemon, American Crafts and Benefit to offer Skillshare as a perk for their employees.

Cooper i also hoping to expand internationally. Apparently two-thirds of new member sign-ups are coming from outside the United States, with India as Skillshare’s fastest growing market, and that’s with “no local language content, no local language teachers.” While Cooper plans to remain focused on English content for the near future, he noted that there are other steps Skillshare can take to encourage global viewership, like accepting payments in different currencies and supporting subtitles in different languages.

“Just by making it a little easier for those international users to get value from the platform, we expect to see dramatic growth in these international markets,” he said.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This morning was a bit of a grab-bag of news, but of course we had to start off with the biggest story from the past few week:

• It’s TikTok around the clock: News broke recently that Twitter could be interested in TikTok after Apple came and somewhat went as a possible suitor. What matters is that Microsoft is not a full-lock on TikTok’s exit. No word lately on whether the Trump administration’s decision to try to extort a chunk of the sale price will go through. (It won’t.)
• TikTok may sue the Trump administration as early as this week over its possible forced sale.
• Do startup culture, venture capital, and mental health mix well?
• Amazon is talking about turning some malls into fulfillment centers, TechCrunch has more.
• The huge wealth of major tech companies is only growing, meaning that a rising share of the public market run is based on a handful of big-tech results.
• Flipkart is building an accelerator.
• Expert System has raised $29.4 million, while Palmetto has raised $29 million, and Silverfort put together a $30 million round. How’s that for three rounds of the same size?

All that and earnings season is largely behind us, leaving tech companies generally unscathed. So, the good times will persist for a while yet. Have a great week!

Late last-month, CES’s organizers called an audible, canceling the in-person tech show for 2020. The news seemingly cause the forces behind Berlin-based IFA to double down on the messaging for their upcoming event. Ahead of the September show, IFA has been particularly aggressive in attempting to get the word out.

Take the August 4 press release, “IFA 2020 Special Edition: News Announcements non-stop at the IFA Global Press Conference – Global Brands unveil their latest Products, News and Services for the upcoming end-of-the-year Shopping Season.” I’ve seen press releases shorter than that subject line. The point is, the show can and must go on, in spite of, well, everything.

This morning, however, organizers announced that the show will be skipping a year for one of the conference’s key events, Global Markets. Launched in 2016, the event is designed to bring together OEMs/ODMs, retailers and distributors. This time, the press release subject line reads, hopefully, “IFA 2020 Special Edition: IFA Global Markets postponed to 2021 despite industry’s high interest” and sports a “Tech is Back” banner. IFA notes that the travel was proving to be an issue for attendees, particularly those coming from Asian markets.

“[P]ersistent travel restrictions prevent Asian companies from joining the live event in Berlin,” IFA Executive Director Jens Heithecker said in the release. “Under these circumstances, many had to postpone their participation in IFA Global Markets to next year. Pan-Asian suppliers within the consumer and home electronics industry account for a major part of IFA Global Markets exhibitors.”

IFA is one of exceedingly few tech shows that have opted to go ahead in person this year, albeit with a number of previously outlined safeguards and restrictions, including a limit on attendees. A new poll of German businesses released today notes that restrictions on public life are expected to last another 8.5 months, in the face of a rising number of COVID-19 cases in the country.

IFA 2020 is set for September 3-5.

Microsoft today announced that Minecraft: Education Edition is now available on Chromebooks.

Now, if you were hoping that this means that the standard Minecraft game is now available on Chromebooks, too, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you. The Education Edition not only requires a Microsoft 365 for Education (A3 or A5) license, it’s also meant to more of an educational tool than a game, with lessons that focus on math, science, language arts, history and visual arts.

The company says that it is partnering with the Google Education team to welcome educations on Chromebooks to Minecraft.

The Chromebook version will offer the same set of features as Minecraft: Education Edition on Windows, Mac and iOS, including cross-platform multiplayer support. For now, students will need a Microsoft account to log in, though the company says support for logging in with Google accounts is coming “in the near future.”

Image Credits: Microsoft

“Minecraft: Education Edition is a game-based learning platform that helps build key 21st century skills like coding and creative problem solving,” Microsoft explains in today’s announcement. “Hundreds of free standards-aligned lessons, design challenges, and STEM curriculum are available in-game and online, along with flexible templates for teachers to design their own learning activities. In a time when staying connected to the classroom is of extra importance, Minecraft supports collaboration and meaningful student-led learning.”

The Minecraft: Education Edition is now available in Google’s Play Store for users with the right licenses. Despite a clear warning that it takes an Office 365 Education account to log in, you’ll see plenty of one-star reviews from disappointed players who think it’s the regular Minecraft. With the right Chromebook, though, these players could always play Minecraft for Android on Chrome OS, too.

CakeResume is a startup creating an alternative for the tech industry to job search platforms like LinkedIn. The Taipei-based company, founded in 2016, announced today that it has raised $900,000 in seed funding from Mynavi, one of the largest staffing and public relations companies in Japan. The round will be used to expand CakeResume’s operations in other countries, including Japan and India.

Founder and chief executive officer Trantor Liu, who was a full-stack web developer at Codementor before launching CakeResume, said the startup’s goal is to have the biggest pool of tech talent in Asia. The platform currently has about 100,000 active resumes, 75% of which were created by job seekers in Taiwan. More than 3,000 employers, ranging from startups like Appier to   companies like Amazon Web Services, TSMC, Nvidia and Tesla, use it for recruitment.

The other 25% of resumes come from countries including India, Indonesia and the United States. CakeResume plans to expand in Japan with the help of Mynavi, a strategic investor, and is also seeking partnerships in Southeast and South Asia with recruiters. Liu said CakeResume has a particularly high conversion rate in India, and its goal is to build a pool of at least 100,000 resumes there.

In statement about its decision to invest in CakeResume, a Mynavi represenative said, “The global shortage of IT engineers is becoming more apparent and we are focusing on services related to IT talent in Asia. Among them, CakeResume’s service is excellent in product design, and the service is already used by many talent in the country,” adding that it expects the platform to become “the largest IT talent pool in Asia in the near future.”

In Taiwan, CakeResume’s main rivals are LinkedIn and job search site 104.com.tw. It also competes against other job sites like AngelList, Indeed and Glassdoor.

CakeResume differentiates by giving tech professionals more ways to show off their skills, since many tech companies want more in-depth resumes than the traditional one-pagers used in other fields. The startup was named because its resume builder enables job seekers to add more layers of information, like assembling a cake. For example, CakeResume’s template allows engineers to embed projects from GitHub, while designers can add data visualizations, instead of just including links to them.

“We aren’t just providing a form to fill in that you can then download as a formatted PDF resume. We want to allow you to be more creative,” said Liu. “You can easily embed project images and add descriptions, which makes it easier for HR to understand what you can contribute.”

Another difference between CakeResume and its competitors is that most people who create a profile are actively seeking new positions, instead of professional networking opportunities. Since it is also tailored for the tech industry, recruiters have a higher chance of getting responses from interested candidates, Liu said.

“We recently got a review from one of our clients, and they said when they used our platform to contact talent, they got about a 50% reply rate, but on LinkedIn it might be less than 10%,” he added.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, many job seekers were willing to relocate, but chief operating officer Wei-Cheng Hsieh said CakeResume is now focusing more on helping people find remote jobs. More tech companies, including Facebook and Google, are extending their work from home policies until at least summer 2021.

Though many job postings still specify a location, Liu said CakeResume’s team anticipates this will change as companies continue adapting to the pandemic. While CakeResume will remain focused on matching applicants to jobs instead of networking, it also also testing some social features to help workers around the world connect with companies and each other.

As countries around the world ban or threaten to restrict TikTok, interest in virtual private networks has spiked.

The use of VPNs can let users access an online service from an encrypted tunnel and thus bypass app blocks. “We are seeing an increasing number of governments around the world attempting to control the information their citizens can access,” observes Harold Li, vice president of ExpressVPN, which claims to have over 3,000 servers across 94 countries. “For this reason, VPNs are used to access blocked sites and services by many worldwide.”

Indeed, ExpressVPN’s website saw a 10% week-over-week increase in traffic following the U.S. government’s announcement of a potential TikTok ban. The VPN service recorded similar trends in Japan and Australia, where it saw a 19% and 41% WoW increase in traffic respectively after the governments said they might block TikTok.

When India officially shut down TikTok, ExpressVPN saw a 22% WoW jump in web traffic. In Hong Kong, where TikTok voluntarily pulled out following the enactment of the national security law, the VPN service logged a 10% WoW traffic growth.

Not a ‘magic bullet’

VPNs have long been a popular solution for people to elude restrictions on the internet, be it censored content or app bans. We wrote about Hong Kong residents flocking to VPN services in anticipation of heightened censorship, but the use of a VPN is not a ‘magic bullet,’ as a Hong Kong media scholar warned.

Governments can make it difficult for average users to access VPNs by removing them from local app stores. Users will have to register in another regional app store, which often involves roadblocks like owning a local credit card. Countries can also illegalize the use of VPNs, imposing fines on users and even imprisoning VPN vendors as China did.

Depending on how an app block plays out in practice, there may be other challenges unsolvable by VPNs. “We don’t know how potential bans may be enforced yet, and it may require users to jump through other hoops on top of using a VPN, such as removing their local SIM card,” suggested Li.

Users can look for alternatives to banned apps, but switching services can entail high costs, especially when a product has strong network effects. TikTok, for instance, enjoys a ‘content network effect’ that makes it difficult for rivals to match its user experience, as my former colleague Josh Constine pointed out.

Similarly, those who worry about a potential WeChat ban in the U.S. may simply lack a viable alternative to the Chinese messenger with over 1 billion users. For members of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S., WeChat is the only way for them to reach their families and friends in China, where it’s the dominant chat app while major Western social networks are unavailable.

Smaller apps are flying under the radar of the authority. Unlike rivals Telegram and Whatsapp, encrypted messenger Signal is still accessible in China — for now, and the app climbed 51 spots in the China rank of iOS social apps just between August 7-9, currently sitting in the 36th place. Others in China use iMessenger, which also remains unblocked, to stay in touch with their U.S. contacts, but the option is exclusive to iPhone users.

Individuals and businesses worldwide increasingly need to adapt to service shutdowns or risk losing access to the free and open internet. As Telegram founder Pavel Durov lamented: “[T]he U.S. move against TikTok is setting a dangerous precedent that may eventually kill the internet as a truly global network (or what is left of it).”