Year: 2020

After what felt like winter, investors say startup deals are back on — although the numbers suggest they never stopped. As Semil Shah of Haystack VC phrased it in a blog post, “It’s game on, pandemic or bust.”

This is good news for founders and big funds, but the investment landscape becomes more complicated when it comes to up-and-coming venture capitalists. “My impression of the current mood amongst traditional limited partners is that most have slowed down considerably in terms of net new investments, new relationships,” Shah told TechCrunch.

So rebound or not, we’re in a volatile time, and first-time fund managers are looking for unique ways to de-risk themselves.

One route: Put liquidity up high in your pitch deck. Moore Ventures, a new fund focused on investing in diverse teams working on sustainability, is experimenting with an unconventional fund structure. Instead of traditional ventures where returns come from multiple rounds of financing and an exit either through acquisition or IPO, Moore is concentrating on successful liquidity strategies throughout a portfolio company’s life.

Constant commercialization, if it works, could be music to a limited partner’s ears.

“Some will fall into the licensing model, some will be developing the product and then selling the design and manufacturing process to an existing company before expanding marketing and sales. Only if a company has the ability to expand its product base and scale will we plan to commercialize through the traditional company development process,” said Darius Sankey, a general partner at Moore Ventures.

Does your elevator pitch lack traction? Could it do with a serious makeover? We’re here to help. Tune into Pitchers & Pitches, an interactive pitch-off and feedback session, on July 1 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. This event is 100% free — simply register here to attend.

Pitchers & Pitches — part pitch-off, part masterclass — features startups (all exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley during Disrupt 2020) delivering their best 60-second pitch to a panel of judges. The panel for this session consists of two TechCrunch editors — Jordan Crook and Kirsten Korosec — and two VCs — Matthew Hartman of Betaworks Ventures and Dayna Grayson of Construct Capital.

The panel will critique each presentation, offer advice and suggest ways to forge a pitch for the ages. Take their tips, adapt them your specific situation and get ready super charge your elevator pitch.

Note: The Pitchers & Pitches webinar series is free and open to all, but only companies that purchased a Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package are eligible to pitch. We randomly chose these startups to compete on July 1st:

Cognidna – provides DNA insights on cognitive traits, helping parents make more informed educational decisions for their children.

Munch – a digital platform for restaurants designed to create better customer experiences.

Flexlane – an online wholesale marketplace that transforms the way local retailers in Asia buy for their stores.

Bitsensing – aims to design future safety in the era of Autonomous Vehicles.

What’s a pitch-off without a prize? One pitching startup will win a consulting session with cela. cela connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help them scale their businesses.

And while the judges evaluate and provide feedback, it’s the virtual audience (i.e., you) who determines the ultimate winner. That said, everyone who attends the event comes away with a stronger pitch and stands a greater chance of catching investor attention. Win-win.

Keep your startup focused and on track. Register for Pitches & Pitchers and join us next week, July 1 at 4pm ET / 1pm PT. If you want to be eligible to pitch your startup at Pitchers and Pitches, purchase your Digital Startup Alley ticket and opt in to being considered for our fourth installment of Pitchers and Pitches.

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

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has opened a preliminary investigation into allegations of failing touchscreens on Tesla’s older Model S vehicles.

The federal agency launched the probe after receiving 11 complaints from Tesla owners over a 13-month period alleging failures of the touchscreen in 2013 through 2015 Model S vehicles. The problem, which stems from a problematic flash memory device, renders the touchscreen black, including the loss of the rear camera image display when reverse gear is selected.

The focus of NHTSA’s preliminary evaluation is an Nvidia Tegra 3 processor with an integrated 8GB eMMC NAND flash memory device. The flash devices have a finite lifespan that is based on the number of program and erase cycles. The central display, or media control unit, allegedly fails prematurely because the memory wears out in the eMMC NAND flash. NHTSA’s initially estimated 63,000 Model S vehicles, which use this flash memory device, are potentially affected. However, the federal agency notes that the number could be as large as 159,000 vehicles. The Tegra 3 processor was used in 2012 to 2018 Model S sedans and 2016 to 2018 Model X SUVs.

The touchscreen in Tesla vehicles, which include infotainment, navigation and web browsing, have been both hailed for its design and criticized for its glitchy tendencies, particularly around the flash memory device.

NHTSA said the eMMC memory wears out after periods of progressively degraded performance. The final failure results in loss of audible and visual features, including loss of rear camera image display when reverse gear is selected. Other effect of MCU failure include climate control defaulting to Auto mode and limits on battery charging current and maximum state of charger when recharging. The failure doesn’t affect vehicle control systems such as braking, speed control or steering.

Facebook shifts its VR strategy, WhatsApp’s payment service hits a snag in Brazil and we look at how Trump’s visa ban will affect Silicon Valley.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for June 24, 2020.

1. Facebook kills off its cheapest VR headset

Just two years after launching the Oculus Go, Facebook announced that it’s discontinuing the headset — the least powerful and least expensive VR hardware the company sold.

The entry-level product was meant to hook consumers on the idea of VR and convince them to upgrade. Last year, however, Facebook released the $399 Oculus Quest, and it quickly became clear that the Quest was likely the best path forward for Oculus’ consumer ambitions.

2. Brazil suspends WhatsApp’s payments service

Speaking of Facebook, the new payment feature in its popular messaging app has been blocked in its second largest market. Brazil’s central bank said it was making the decision to “preserve an adequate competitive environment” in the mobile payments space and to ensure “functioning of a payment system that’s interchangeable, fast, secure, transparent, open and cheap.”

3. Trump’s worker visa ban will hit Silicon Valley hard

We’ve been regularly featuring immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn’s column. But for this piece, editor Walter Thompson interviews Alcorn about President Trump’s executive order extending an existing ban on immigrant work visas. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

4. Stacy Brown-Philpot is stepping down as CEO of TaskRabbit

Brown-Philpot joined TaskRabbit seven years ago as the company’s chief operating officer and was promoted to CEO in the spring of 2016. In the fall of 2017, the company was acquired by Ikea for undisclosed terms in a stock deal and has continued to operate independently as a subsidiary of the company.

5. Olympus plans to sell its struggling camera division

After three straight years of operating losses, one of the world’s foremost camera makers is giving up the ghost. Olympus announced its intentions to sell off its imaging unit by the end of September 2020.

6. 11 top VCs discuss the future of New York startups

New York City was an initial U.S. hotspot for the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s also one of the most expensive cities in the world — so you might think startups would be anxious to leave. However, when we surveyed a number of New York-based venture capitalists, they seemed bullish about the city’s future as a startup and technology hub. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

7. Google updates its analytics tools for newsrooms

Google is introducing version 2.0 of both News Consumer Insights and Realtime Content Insights, while also adding a new feature called the News Tagging Guide. These efforts fall under the umbrella of the broader Google News Initiative, introduced in 2018 as a way for the search giant to fund quality journalism and find other ways to support the industry.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

When we announced the formation of The TechCrunch List last week, we had no idea what response we would get to our proposal for founders to recommend their “first check” investors. While plenty of founders over the years had told us that they wanted such a database to rely on or to refer to other founders who are raising for the first time, there is always something nerve-wracking about launching a new product and waiting for feedback.

Well, the TechCrunch community came through, since in just a few days, we’ve already received more than 500 proposals from founders recommending VCs who wrote their first checks and who have been particularly helpful in fundraising and getting a round closed.

If you haven’t submitted a recommendation, please help us using the form linked here.

The short survey takes 5 minutes, and could save founders dozens of hours armed with the right intel. Our editorial team is carefully processing through these submissions to ensure their veracity and accuracy, and the more data points we have, the better the List can be for founders.

We’ve gotten quite a few questions about this new initiative, so we wanted to answer some common queries.

First check into each round: We want to know who wrote the first check that helped catalyze a round at each stage of a startup. So it’s okay to submit a name for each round.

Only one recommendation per early-stage round: We are holding the line on only allowing one name per round though. We realize that party rounds are not uncommon at the angel and seed stages, but a list of 30 people who all “led” a round is precisely what we are trying to avoid with the List. So keep the recommendations to one name, please, or if you can’t, it’s best not to recommend anyone at all.

Deadline: There is no single deadline. We intend to publish a first draft of the list in the next 2-3 weeks, so earlier submissions are more likely to be processed in time for the draft list. Our goal with The TechCrunch List is to make it an up-to-date and living product, and so we intend to update it regularly with new information as we learn it. So it’s a rolling deadline.

Founders Only: While we certainly appreciate VCs offering to humbly submit their own names for consideration, we really want to hear from the founders themselves who did the fundraise. Feel free to reach out to your founders to submit — many firms have already done so if our early data is any indication.

People not Firms: We are obsessed about moving beyond firm brand names and instead identifying individual partners on recommendations, since ultimately, founders work with a person and not a brand.

Weighting: We’ve been asked how we are “weighting” the submissions. The simple answer is that we are (mostly) not weighting them. In addition to fact-checking and verifying each submission, our main consideration is a basic assessment of a startup’s quality — what was the size of the round, has it raised any follow-on financing, and any other public displays of performance. The TechCrunch List isn’t assessing investor quality (there are plenty of other lists in our industry for that), but rather assessing the willingness of an investor to write a “first check.”

Keep submitting those names, and reach out to us if you have any questions.

In a filing this week, connected speaker maker Sonos noted plans to cut 12% of its workforce, in addition to closing some of its smaller offices and its garish showroom in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood.

The move follows a letter to shareholders sent last month that acknowledged struggles stemming from a combination of closed retail storefronts and a broader lowering of demand for its luxury audio products.

“Our second quarter was challenging, as we experienced a 17% year-over-year decline in revenue,” the company wrote. “Coming off a strong first quarter, we had expected some softness in the second quarter and we did see challenges primarily from a large retail partner in the US rebalancing inventory as well as some weakness in our German market from inventory rebalancing at our distributor. In March, our total revenue declined 23% year-over-year as the typical replenishment order cycle in the majority of our end markets was disrupted due to the softer global demand environment and broad-based physical retail closures stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.”

CEO Patrick Spence confirmed the move in a statement sent to TechCrunch, placing much of the blame at the feet of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“When the pandemic hit, we took immediate action to review our investments for the year and made changes to reduce operating expenses and preserve liquidity,” Spence wrote. “The pandemic and resulting economic impacts have caused us to have to make some hard choices, including reductions to our workforce, and the closure of some of our smaller offices and our storefront in New York City. These changes are necessary in order for us to emerge from this period ready to take advantage of opportunities we see in the future.”

The chief executive says staff were notified during multiple all-hands meetings over the course of the day yesterday, adding that the hardware maker will be offering up severance, healthcare and career coaching for those impacted by the decision.

The company’s board has also agreed to a 20% cut in Spence’s base salary, effective July 1 through the end of September.

In a preshow post, I compared the upcoming virtual WWDC to late-season “M*A*S*H.” If you watched the show during its original run or have since binged it on Netflix or Hulu, you’re likely aware of the producers’ uncomfortable transition away from using a laugh track. It was an ultimately beneficial choice in a show about a mobile military hospital during the Korean War, but shifting viewer expectations wasn’t easy, so it was done gradually, over time.

After so many years of priming audiences for a large online spectacle, event teams haven’t had the same luxury. Some shifted online last minute and others simply canceled the shows altogether. Even though COVID-19 was looming for months, there was really no simple decision here, and as such many of these first-time virtual-only events have been uncomfortably awkward and primarily defined by what they’re not.

Microsoft made a valiant attempt to embrace the temporarily new normal with its recent Build conference. The result was, at best, a mixed bag, relying on cringe-inducing banter by two employees to anchor several days of developer events. Where the presentation most shined, however, was when it was at its most simplistic: Satya Nadella stood in front of a bookshelf to address the weirdness of the situation and moved on with the day’s news. It was one of those moments where you found yourself grateful that the CEO is the emotional opposite of his screaming predecessor.

One could simply ignore the strangeness of it all — the absence of a live audience packed with a cheering section full of developers and employees. But to do so would be doing it a disservice.

At a time where IT has to help employees set up and manage devices remotely, a service that simplifies those processes could certainly come in handy. Apple recognized that, and acquired Fleetsmith today, a startup that helps companies do precisely that with Apple devices.

While Apple didn’t publicize the acquisition, it has confirmed the deal with TechCrunch, while Fleetsmith announced the deal in a company blog post. Neither company was sharing the purchase price.

The startup has built technology that takes advantage of the Apple’s Device Enrollment Program allowing IT departments to bring devices online as soon as the employee takes it out of the box and powers it up.

At the time of its $30 million Series B funding last year, CEO Zack Blum explained the company’s core value proposition: “From a customer perspective, they can ship devices directly to their employees. The employee unwraps it, connects to Wi-Fi and the device is enrolled automatically in Fleetsmith,” Blum explained at that time.

Over time, the company has layered on other useful pieces beyond automating device registration like updating devices automatically with OS and security updates, while letting IT see a dashboard of the status of all devices under management, all in a pretty slick interface.

While Apple will in all likelihood continue to work with Jamf, the leader in the Apple device management space, this acquisition gives the company a remote management option at a time where it’s essential with so many employees working from home.

Fleetsmith, which has raised over $40 million from investors like Menlo Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Upfront Ventures and Harrison Metal will continue to sell the product through the company website, according to the blog post.

The founders put a happy on the face on the deal, as founders tend to do. “We’re thrilled to join Apple. Our shared values of putting the customer at the center of everything we do without sacrificing privacy and security, means we can truly meet our mission, delivering Fleetsmith to businesses and institutions of all sizes, around the world,” they wrote.

Virtual events are the new norm for product rollouts in 2020, with Slack taking to the internet earlier today to talk about a new part of its service called Slack Connect.

On the heels of Apple’s lengthy and pretty good virtual WWDC that took place earlier this week, Slack’s event, part experiment and part press conference, was called to detail the firm’s new Slack Connect capability, which will allow companies to better link together and communicate inside of their Slack instance than what was possible with its shared channels feature. The product was described inside of a business-to-business context, including examples about companies needing to chat with agencies and other external vendors.

In its most basic form, Slack is well-known for internal chat functionality, helping teams talk amongst themselves. Slack Connect appears to be a progression past that idea, pushing internal communications tooling to allow companies to plug their private comms into the private comms of other orgs, linking them for simple communication while keeping the entire affair secure.

Slack Connect, a evolution past what shared channels offered, includes better security tooling and the ability to share channels across 20 orgs. The enterprise SaaS company is also working to give Connect-using companies “the ability to form DM connections independent of channels,” the company told TechCrunch.

The product could slim down email usage; if Slack Connect can let many orgs chat amongst themselves, perhaps fewer emails will be needed to keep different companies in sync. That said, Slack is hardly a quiet product. During his part of the presentation, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield noted that the service sees up to 65 million messages sent each second at peak times.

According to the CEO, Slack Connect has been piloted for a few months, and is now available for paid plans.

Slack shares are off 3.8% today, before the news came out. Its broader company cohort (SaaS) are also down today, along with the market more broadly; investors don’t appear to have reacted to this piece of news, at least yet.

Google said Wednesday it’s making a handful of privacy changes for users.

In a blog post, the search giant said it’ll make it easier for users to go “incognito” and pause data collection as they use Google’s mobile apps. It’s also adding proactive account security recommendations to its Security Checkup tool.

Google also said it’ll allow its users to auto-delete their data after 18 months.

It explains:

Starting today, the first time you turn on Location History — which is off by default — your auto-delete option will be set to 18 months by default. Web & App Activity auto-delete will also default to 18 months for new accounts. This means your activity data will be automatically and continuously deleted after 18 months, rather than kept until you choose to delete it. You can always turn these settings off or change your auto-delete option.

The privacy changes come months after European regulators opened an investigation into Google’s processing of location data on the continent.

Meanwhile stateside, Google is one of many Silicon Valley tech giants also facing renewed questions about how they reconcile protecting users’ privacy while still providing their technology to law enforcement, amid protests against police brutality in the wake of the killing of George Floyd.

Over a thousand of Google’s own employees have asked the company to stop selling its technology to police departments across the United States. Amazon, IBM and Microsoft have already pulled the plug on selling their facial recognition technology to police, but left a wide berth to still sell to federal law enforcement.

Google is also facing a $5 billion class action suit in California for allegedly pervasively tracking the internet use of its users through their browser’s “incognito” mode.