Month: March 2021

New York State officials struck a deal with Gov. Andrew Cuomo to allow recreational use of cannabis. The move would create the largest legal cannabis market on the East Coast, potentially creating tens of thousands of jobs and significant startups opportunities.

This is a big first step, though the first sale of recreational weed is unlikely to happen in 2021. The framework needs a final review, and lawmakers still need to create the rules and regulations surrounding commercial sales. According to the New York Times, the Democratic-controlled State Legislature could pass the bill as soon as next week.

The deal comes after several failed attempts to bring recreational cannabis to New York. Neighboring state New Jersey passed a recreational marijuana bill in the 2020 election.

The legislation, as purposed, has several interesting aspects. The purposed bill allows for weed delivery and club-like consumption lounges where patrons can consume cannabis but not alcohol. In-home growing is also allowed and limited to six plants for personal use. According to the NYT, the proposed deal funnels millions of dollars in tax revenue back to the communities where the failed war on drugs had a disproportionately negative impact. This includes reserving many business licenses for minority business owners and providing loans, grants, and incubator programs for small farmers.

New York lawmakers also intend to rework laws around possession by eliminating penalties for less than three ounces of cannabis. This would also expunge the record of those convicted of activities that are now legal.

Baking operational flexibility, agility and speed into your startup’s DNA from the get-go will go a long way toward driving your ultimate success. Understanding its importance and learning best practices might seem daunting, but TC Early Stage 2021: Operations and Fundraising (April 1-2), is all about connecting early-stage founders with subject-matter experts across the startup ecosystem.

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with some of the leading gurus on operational speed and efficiency. We’ve assembled a veritable dream team to answer your questions — these breakout sessions are highly interactive — help you avoid missteps and drive your startup like a finely tuned machine.

Our next event, Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place July 8-9 with all-new speakers, content and presentations. Buy a dual-event early-bird pass, attend both Early Stage conferences and save $100 or more — if you purchase before Friday, March 26 at 11:59 pm (PST).

Want to be a fast, agile, operational contortionist? Check out these sessions and get your startup poised for success:

Using Fast Feedback to Make Higher-Confidence Decisions and Accelerate the Dev Process

Michael Mace, VP of Market Strategy at UserTesting, leads this discussion on how to use fast feedback methodologies to make high-confidence product decisions based on objective customer data in real time, without slowing the dev process. Quickly diagnose problems, settle disputes, reduce the risk of rework, and iterate faster. This session will include real-world case studies. Brought to you by UserTesting.

Why Founders Should Adopt OKRs Now

Execution is key to a startup’s survival and growth — especially when it comes to fast-moving software and technology products. Standing in the tricky intersection of investors, customers and employees, a founder needs to balance priorities, align teams and create a visionary product that works. Moreover, in this age of hyper feedback loops and changing business models, the founder must be agile enough to absorb and quickly react to changes in the product roadmap and consumer needs. OKRs, a toolkit used extensively by engineering and product teams, is more than relevant now for founders of all kinds to embrace. Join Rahul Agarwal, product manager at Boomi, to learn the history of OKRs, what they’re about and witness case studies of successful real-life adoption. Brought to you by Dell for Entrepreneurs.

Nailing the Little Things – How Startups can Achieve Operational Excellence from Day One

The early days of launching a company can be a whirlwind for founding teams as unexpected challenges and opportunities require flexibility, agility and speed. But implementing a few key operating best practices and processes early can be a crucial part of a startup’s success when it prepares for rapid growth. Join partners from B Capital Group, a multi-stage global investor, to learn the most important things you can do to set your startup up for success early in your journey, and what’s most important to investors as you raise your Seed, A and B funding rounds. Speakers include Howard Morgan, chairman of B Capital Group and co-founder of First Round Capital, and Partners Karen Page (formerly of Box) and Gabe Greenbaum (formerly of Pritzker Group). Brought to you by B Capital Group.

Don’t forget to explore the TC Early Stage 2021 agenda. You’ll find tons of presentations and discussions with some of the most experienced operators in legal, recruiting, product, data security and sales. Then grab your ticket to attend below!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 — Operations & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Big tech is back on the virtual hill.

Three of tech’s most prominent CEOs will appear before the House Energy and Commerce committee today at 9AM PT as lawmakers grill the companies on their failure to contain disinformation and extremism.

In opening statements made available before the hearing, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and Google’s Sundar Pichai each laid out the conversation they’d prefer to have.

Zuckerberg pushed for reforms to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that wouldn’t resolve the issues at hand, but would probably give Facebook another leg up on smaller competitors. Google defended Section 230 and pointed to its own often mild or delayed efforts to contain election misinformation that ultimately snowballed into the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Twitter mostly looked forward rather than back, pointing to initiatives to make its own algorithms transparent and to invite more community-level moderation efforts.

The topic at hand Thursday is a big one, and there are plenty of directions lawmakers might take the hearing. In recent months, the two subcommittees leading the joint hearing have questioned Facebook about its algorithmic group recommendations — a frequent concern among extremism experts — and reports that the company served combat gear ads next to posts promoting the Capitol riot. More broadly, the committee will delve into social media’s role in disseminating dangerous misinformation, but it’s possible we’ll take detours through some regulatory solutions like antitrust legislation and Section 230 reform along the way.

If you’d like to follow along, we’ve embedded the hearing above or you can check back for other coverage as we go.

In the trucking industry, “dwell and detention” times are the enemies of efficiency, profits and drivers. More than two billion hours are lost each year due to dwell —the time spent at a distribution yard or facility — and detention — the gap between when unloading or loading is supposed to begin and when it actually does.

Baton, a San Francisco-based startup developed out of 8VC’s incubator program, has developed a business that it believes will solve these long-standing problems truckers. The company’s name gives a hint at its business model. Baton is developing a network of drop zones, 24-hour facilities it has sub-leased from partners, that are located outside of busy urban centers. Long-haul truckers can pull up and leave their loaded trailers at these drop zones. Baton then partners with local fleets of Class 8 trucks that will arrive at the drop site, grab the load and then take the freight to its final destination.

The startup developed a software platform that coordinates vehicles, drop-zones, warehouses and local drivers through a single API. Customers also receive live automated updates via API as loads are delivered.

“In long-haul trucking, there’s a remarkable amount of wasted time,” co-founder Andrew Berberick said in a recent interview. Baton’s pitch is that it eliminates hours wasted with dwell and detention as well as the time spent sitting in traffic. The company says it can also help increase wages for drivers, who are typically paid by the mile and not the hour, as well as cut carbon emissions.

Baton has landed long-haul trucking firms as customers, including CRST, the private freight company that carries loads for some of the country’s largest retailers including Walmart. And it’s also attracted a variety of strategic investors. The company raised its first $3.3 million from real estate corporation Prologis and 8VC, in a seed round that closed in December 2019. Now, it’s tacking on more capital and investors in a Series A funding round, co-led by 8VC and Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of logistics giant AP Moller-Maersk.

Baton raised $10.5 million in the Series A, and now has a post-money valuation of $50 million, co-founders Nate Robert and Berberick told TechCrunch. Prologis, Ryder, Lineage Logistics, Project44 CEO Jett McCandless, KeepTruckin’ CEO Shoaib Makani, Clarendon Capital operating partner John Larkin, I.S.G founder Trace Haggard, and Cooley LLC all participated in the round.

Baton has several drop zones in Los Angeles with plans to open more in the city. Robert and Berberick said their plan is to open zones in Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas in the next 12 to 18 months.

Baton’s short term aim is to end waste in human-driven trucking operations. But Robert says the business model is well positioned to handle what he says will be the first viable applications of autonomous trucks. “The answer is on highways only,”Robert said. “And for that to occur you’ll have to have a nationwide network of transfer hubs.”

Baton is already piloting the idea, which Robert called “autonomous relays” with an unnamed self-driving trucks company on the Arizona-California border.

“As we see automated and eventually electric trucks become standard for certain routes, the network of Baton hubs and the coordination provided by its software will become seen as core infrastructure. Baton makes the transformation to automated trucking possible,” 8VC partner and co-founder Jake Medwell said.

I’ve recently advised a number of emerging venture capital funds that are struggling to determine the most effective steps they can take to support their portfolio companies.

Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. The popularity of the model can be judged by the fact that the U.S. VC Platform community has grown approximately 120 percent in the last three years. Similarly, its European counterpart, the EU VC Platform, has tripled in the same period.

However, most of us don’t have the budget of an Andreessen Horowitz to support almost every major need of emerging companies. You could spend an unlimited budget on all possible company-building resources. “You can’t pick a platform strategy that’s unique, but you can pick a platform strategy that your firm can uniquely execute,” noted Maria Palma of REE Ventures.

I propose here a framework for prioritizing your platform buildout. Once you have assembled the right core team, I recommend prioritizing as follows:

First, meet with your portfolio company management. As an agenda for each meeting, I suggest:

•  How can we most add value, in addition to helping with financing? (This is an open-ended query and the most important question.)
• What are your fundraising goals?
• What is the profile of people whom you are most interested in meeting?
• From which service providers have you received the most value?

In a presentation at the 4th Annual VC Platform Summit, Nick Kim, Crosscut Ventures’ head of platform, shared their platform development methodology, which he viewed as an exercise in product development.

“Firms should match services to the stage-specific needs of companies,” Dan Kozikowski, partner and head of platform for FirstMark Capital, told me. “For example, recruiting writ large is useful at all stages of development. But things like vendor introductions are only needle-movers at the earliest stages. Similarly, customer introductions are invaluable in the early days, but become less valuable once a company has a fully formed go-to-market function.”

Then, pluck the low-hanging fruit: easy, low-cost, and highly scalable infrastructure. This typically includes:

• Relationships with relevant service providers in your vertical, often with pre-negotiated discounts: coaches, lawyers, accountants, common software vendors, consultants. Generally, I suggest exploring BuiltFirst, Clutch, FundedBuy, Rocketplace and/or SpotSource. For negotiation with providers, consider Buyer. Alpaca VC shares their Master Agency List.
• A well-organized library of best practices for founders in your vertical, which you can share as appropriate. First Search, Startup School and OneValley Passport are examples of comprehensive founder resources from investors. Ask Anything aggregates resources from all the VCs. I have developed a founder curriculum on my blog.
• Relationships with venture partners, entrepreneurs in residence and other non-salaried personnel who can help your companies. Explore a roadmap of your options in working with outside talent.
• Organize events in your vertical. Particularly when events are all-virtual, this is an easy and low-cost way to build trusted relationships with the leaders in your space.

I recommend building a strong internal tech stack to handle the deluge of requests for help you’ll get from companies as you scale. “The biggest investment of resources with our tech platform relates to the capturing and maintenance of data on our huge portfolio of 1,100-plus evolving tech companies,” Jeff Pomeranz, partner at Right Side Capital, said.

“For instance, tracking ‘months-of-runway’ combined with the month-over-month change to that metric allows us to rapidly identify companies that may be distressed. Adding full lifecycle data and industry exposure tags to that, across such a large number of companies, often enables us to see trends ahead of the market, such as retail decimation a few years ago.” Investigate ways to use technology and analytics to make better investments.

Beyond these steps, I suggest you apply a two-part test:

Holberton, the education startup that started out as a coding school in San Francisco and today works with partners to run schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Europe, today announced that it has raised a $20 million Series B funding round led by Redpoint eventures. Existing investors Daphni, Imaginable Futures, Pearson Ventures, Reach Capital and Trinity Ventures also participated in this round, which brings Holberton’s total funding to $33 million.

Today’s announcement comes after a messy 2020 for Holberton, and not only because the pandemic put a stop to in-person learning.

The original promise of Holberton was that it provided students — which it selects through a blind admissions process — with a well-rounded software development education akin to a college education for free. In return, students provide a set amount of their salary for the next few years to the school as part of a deferred tuition agreement, up to a maximum of $85,000.

But early last year, California’s Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) directed the school to immediately cease operation, in part because the agency found that Holberton had started offering a new, unapproved program. This program, a nine-month training program augmented by six months of employment, required students to pay the full $85,000 cost of its approved programs. After a hearing, the BPPE allowed Holberton to continue to operate its other programs. A number of students also accused the school of not giving them the education it had promised.

Throughout this period, Holberton continued expanding, though. It opened campuses in Mexico and Peru, for example. Indeed, it doubled the number of schools in its system from nine to 18 in 2020.

But on December 17, 2020, Holberton voluntarily surrendered its operating license in California. The day before, Holberton announced that it would not re-open its campus in San Francisco, which had been shut down since March because of the pandemic. Holberton co-founder Sylvain Kalache argued that the school would be best positioned to achieve its mission by “working with amazing local partners who operate the campuses and deeply understand their markets’ unique needs” and not by operating its own campuses.

It now thinks of itself more as an “OS of Education” that offers franchised campuses and education tools.

In January, California’s attorney general struck down the fraud allegations against the school. “California was the only market in which Holberton faced any regulatory challenges,” Kalache wrote in the company’s first public acknowledgment of the lawsuits. “With this now behind us, we are excited to move forward with our original mission of providing affordable and accessible education to prospective software engineers around the world.”

Clearly, that’s how Holberton’s funders feel about this, too.

“They’ve proven successful in breaking down barriers of cost and access while delivering a world-class curriculum,” said Manoel Lemos, managing partner at Redpoint eventures. “With the concept of ‘OS of Education’ as a service, they provide customers with all the tools they need for success. Customers can be nonprofit impact investors who want to improve local economies, education institutions who want to fill gaps in how they teach in a post-COVID learning environment, or corporations who want to provide the best training possible as education providers themselves or as employee development programs.”

Holberton founder and CEO Julien Barbier tells me that, today, “for the first time since our creation, we have started working with universities to help them create a better experience and add hands-on education on top of their traditional methodology. Everyone’s happy: the school, the students, and the teachers — because they prefer to focus on teaching and not spend huge amounts of time correcting projects.”

He expects to see 5,000 students join this year, up from 500 in 2019, and see the network expand with new schools in the U.S., Europe, LatAm and Africa. He also noted that the company already has customers for its “OS of Education” tools for auto-grading projects and its online programs. Just this week, Holberton Tulsa announced plans to more than double its physical campus in the city.

“Raising funds is helping us support and accelerate our vision of creating this ‘OS of education.’ Many educational entities need help and tools to better support their students and their staff. It is now that they need our help. Again, COVID has accelerated the digital transformation, and clearly, there are a lot of gaps that need to be filled,” he said. “[…] We are now a SaaS company which charges other businesses, universities or non-profits to use our tools and/or contents so that they can run their education/training programs at scale, with a better experience, while increasing the quality of education.”

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with Yay Images for a new Extra Crunch Partner Perk. Starting today, Extra Crunch members can get unlimited access to Yay Images’ collection of over 12M stock images, 1.5M vectors, and 250,000 HD/4K Videos at a discounted annual rate.

The Yay Images Solo Plan (one user) can be purchased by Extra Crunch members for only $99/year, while the Growth Plan (2+ users) will run your team $199/year. 

Full details on the Yay Images’ Partner Perk:

• Unlimited downloads across a collection of over 12M images, 1.5M vectors, and 250K HD/4K Videos
• Unlimited team members with the Growth Plan
• Flexible licensing with both Standard Commercial & Extended Licenses
• Advanced search and filters
• $25K Copyright Protection per asset
• Dedicated account manager
• 300K+ in Partner Perks Offers from IBM, Google, Airtable, Zendesk, and more

Much like TechCrunch, Yay is also on a mission to help founders and startup teams. Yay Images was born in 2008 in Oslo, Norway to create an affordable stock media agency with high-quality content. With a shared vision from the Founders Fund, Yay Images got an investment in 2014 from top Norwegian serial entrepreneurs and StartupLab for the world’s first unlimited download stock media product. More recently, Yay has created a product designed for individuals or startup teams with flexibility and affordability in mind.

Ryu Games, a startup that helps developers add cash tournaments to their mobile games, announced this morning it has raised $2.3 million in a seed round. The funds came from a number of investors, including Side Door Ventures, MGV Capital, Velo Partners and Citta Ventures.

In addition, 500 Startups participated in the round. To see the accelerator take part in the funding round is not a surprise, as TechCrunch first caught wind of Ryu during its participation in the most recent 500 Startups demo day. At the time, we were enthused by the idea of gamers wagering money to go head-to-head with other players on mobile devices. Investors appear to back our first impression of the company.

The gist behind our bullishness on the company’s idea is that esports is cool. And though your humble servant is sufficiently ancient as to favor PC-based esports, younger folks are into mobile gaming esports. Fair enough. Now mix in the sports-betting frenzy that we’ve seen in the United States, and you have a potentially potent cocktail.

TechCrunch caught up with Ryu Games co-founder and CEO Ross Krasner to dig in a bit more. It turns out that the original esports-y model that we envisioned for Ryu was a bit off. Instead, players will often go toe-to-toe in an asynchronous fashion, betting high scores in a game against one another. So, competitive “StarCraft II” this is not. But “StarCraft” is famously difficult to be even mediocre at, while mobile games are simpler by nature, and thus more popular.

Perhaps your parents will square off against office friends in cash-fueled solitaire tournaments.

The money setup is simple, with Krasner likening it to a poker tournament. You wager a set amount, and then play. Ryu collects a fee for hosting, and then players get to it.

Ryu hopes to be present on a few dozen games this year. One matter that could slow adoption, however, is that games it partners with tend to relaunch a version of their title with Ryu’s SDK built in. The startup bites back against the work that partner-developers have to undertake by cross-promoting titles that use its system. So, if you sign up, you can do more than generate revenue. Your game might also find a new audience.

Like with most seed-stage startups, Ryu Games is more of a bet on the future than proof of a new trend. Let’s see how far it can get with this set of capital, especially as vaccines take larger and larger bites out of the pandemic that has kept us locked up for so very long.

Online branded payments now run the gamut of anything from Spotify vouchers, Netflix vouchers, Neosurf, PaySafe cards, and everything in between. Consumers use them to pay for a variety of things. In Europe, they are an increasingly big business. Now, European branded payments company Recharge.com has raised €10m ($11.8m) in a debt funding round led by London-based Kreos Capital, a growth debt provider for high-growth companies. In 2019 the Dutch fintech Creative Group, which owns the Recharge.com and Rapido.com brands, took investment of €22m from Prime Ventures.

Recharge has also appointed Michael Kent – who previously founded payments companies Small World and Azimo, along with UK neobank Tandem – as its non-executive chairman.

Recharge.com says it plans to use the funding to extend its mobile offering, product range, and expand in regions such as North America, Latin America and the GCC. It’s also aiming for sales of €450m in 2021.

Günther Vogelpoel CEO of Recharge.com said in a statement: “We live in a world of instant wish fulfillment, from taxis that appear on demand to same-day delivery of consumer goods. Recharge.com gives customers a fast, safe and simple way to fulfill their wishes, whether that’s an essential remittance or access to digital goods and services.”

Commenting, Kent said: “The era of supermarket gift cards and mobile top-ups is drawing to a close. Branded payments have exploded during the global lockdown as consumers seek digital alternatives to the high street. People are now aware that online branded payments are safe, fast, and convenient.”

Through a range of digital vouchers from brands including Apple, Google, Spotify, Xbox and PlayStation as well as cross-border remittances of call, data credits etc Recharge is attacking the market from the consumer angle.

The biggest company in this space is Blackhawk networks which is owned by private equity group Silverlake. It’s considered a large player in Europe which has a direct-to-consumer model.

As Kent told me over a Zoom call: “Nobody actually owns the consumer side of this business globally so that’s the big opportunity.”

What happens to hot fintech startups that have benefited from a rise in consumer trading activity if regular folks lose interest in financial wagers?

That’s the question facing Robinhood, Coinbase and other trading platforms that have ridden an upward cycle. Each has performed well in recent quarters: Robinhood by securing huge payment-for-order-flow revenues, while Coinbase’s trading fees have proven incredibly lucrative, something we learned when it filed to go public.

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

According to recent reporting, the consumer trading frenzy could be slowing: Bloomberg recently noted that options trading volume is slipping, Robinhood’s app store ranking is falling, and some alternative assets are also losing steam. Other reporting from the publication notes that many SPAC shares are underwater while Google trends data indicates falling consumer trading interest, perhaps limiting the inflow of new users for equities-focused apps.

There are other indications that the red-hot speculative consumer market is cooling. Bitcoin is off around 10% in the last week after a blistering rise in recent quarters. Hot stocks like Peloton, once a darling of traders, fell more than 10% yesterday alone.

But looking past price declines and other signals of market chop, volume itself at some well-known exchanges could be falling.

There’s a historical precedent for such declines. Coinbase’s historical revenues, to pick an example, have proved variable based on consumer interest in cryptocurrencies, with the company benefiting from rising demand and trading activity and seeing its top line decline in periods of restrained enthusiasm.

Robinhood and its fellow free-trading apps have yet to undergo a similar rise-and-fall in trading volume, I’d reckon. At least of the sort of extreme up-and-down that Coinbase endured after the 2017-2018 bitcoin boom. Our question is, what would happen to Robinhood and its cohorts if the apparent cooling in consumer trading demand continues? Let’s talk about it.

Coinbase’s historical revenue declines, and the Robinhood example

Coinbase was a famously lucrative organization during the 2017/-2018 bitcoin boom.

Indeed, we can see from the following chart from its S-1 filing that the company’s Monthly Transacting Users (MTUs) dropped sharply into 2018. The percentage decline from 2.7 million to 800,000 is just over 70%.

And in case you think we’re being rude, we have a related chart from the same SEC filing that shows trading volume falling over the same period, not merely MTUs. We’re not picking a loose proxy to merely infer that trading revenue dipped at Coinbase. We can show it: