Month: August 2021

Indian startups of all sizes are raising record amounts of investment funding this year and getting public exits, as we’ve been covering in recent months. To hear more about the growth behind the numbers we caught up with Ayush Srivastava, a cofounder of growth marketing group Growth Folks (and a growth marketer at Zynga by day).

The organization, which describes itself as “India’s largest community of growth enthusiasts,” began as in-person events for growth marketers across major cities, but made the jump to online networking during the pandemic. From there it began an online speaker series for its 1300-some members, introduced more community networking groups and virtual events, and one-on-one mentoring.

In the interview below, part of our ongoing series profiling growth marketers around the world, he says India’s startup scene has quickly gotten more sophisticated about growth in recent years. Companies are centering high-quality user growth as a shared team goal, not as a side job, and are thinking more creatively about where and how to find users. “I am amazed at how the startups are focusing on tier 2-3 cities here in India. With the pace with which internet access has grown… they are making sure they are solving the problem faced by rural Indians as well. [I] just love the fact that proper solutions are being built in the right manner for the concerned pain point.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You describe Growth Folks as “India’s largest community of growth enthusiasts,” with more than 1,300 members. What does “growth enthusiast” mean to you, and how does that term define you?

The terms ‘growth’ and ‘growth marketing’ have picked up a lot in the last five years in the Indian startup ecosystem. All of a sudden there are more than a million heads who are interested to be a part of this circle or are already a part of this community. This had a positive impact as more and more people started to look at their growth problems and not only just promoting their business. For us, growth enthusiasts are everyone and anyone who is even a percent excited about how to grow a particular brand/service.

How did the focus and efforts of Growth Folks change during the pandemic for community engagement?

In the pre-COVID era, Growth Folks was heavily functional in the offline space. We used to manage and engage the community online but most of the efforts went in and success used to come from the offline activities that we used to organize. From December 2018 through the end of 2019, we organized more than 80+ offline events in nine cities of India. These events were previously panel discussions, industry talks or seminars followed by networking sessions…

[H]owever, once COVID came into the picture, our operations shifted completely online and I must say the shift was quite smooth but exciting for me.
We started hosting bi-weekly online webinars with industry leaders and tried giving our community folks (and new attendees) a look and feel of the physical event in the form of this virtual gathering so that they feel connected.

Ever since lockdown began, we have done over 25+ events and have had speakers from companies like SEMRush, Baremetrics, Zynga, Indigo Airlines, Adjust, Myntra and many more. Not only this, we started a lot of interesting threads on our Facebook group to get people to engage more. Within the same period, we launched our website to give people an idea about all our services.

We made sure that we are having dedicated networking sessions after the webinars for people to interact with each other. In October 2020, we re-launched the online version of “Brunch Sessions” that we used to have in the pre-COVID times. These brunch sessions helped the fellow community people to come together on a single day and interact and chill with each other virtually. We started producing more online content knowing the fact that this could be a way to have a value add and it worked.

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Growth Folks is multifaceted, offering traditional growth marketing services as well as hosting a “growth hackathon” and community activities. What can a startup expect when working with Growth Folks? How is it different from existing services?

We have been virtually able to connect with so many people and we continue to do so… [W]e started something which is called “growth huddle”. It is a highly curated one-on-one mentorship session with a few of the best talents out there in the growth space. You can book your session and we will take you through the entire process to make sure that the session is right on point and you learn what you want, not what we want.

All of the mentors who were onboarded vary from experience level to expertise and provide the right set of guidance needed for individuals and startups to grow further. We also partnered with startups and companies for various online events to promote them and make sure that the right voice reaches out to the right set of people who matter to them – the Growth Folks. We have collaborated with companies like Adjust, Microsoft, Rocketium, Canva and many more and we have been able to make people learn the right things.

What are startups doing better now than ever before? In India? Around the world?

Companies have started realizing the true importance of having a fully functional growth team and they have started acknowledging their one metric that matters as well. The growth marketers have also started setting up a lot of experiments and have taken a data-driven approach to solving a problem. Now, I see many startups going out of the box and putting in efforts to find new ways of acquisition. They haven’t restricted them to acquiring users via the traditional ways and that’s why you see so many ideas going viral so easily. And all in different ways…

I see so many founders not restricting themselves to hiring just a growth marketer for leading all growth initiatives. Rather, they have spent time understanding the importance of it and have ended up building a full force growth team of marketers, PMs, tech people, designers etc. I feel that is the best way to look at any growth problem statement.

I am amazed at how the startups are focusing on tier 2-3 cities here in India. With the pace with which internet access has grown… they are making sure they are solving the problem faced by rural Indians as well. [I] just love the fact that proper solutions are being built in the right manner for the concerned pain point.

Lastly, companies have started considering the importance of the entire customer experience more seriously than ever before. This is helping brands to grow via communities easily and create a strong brand presence.

Way back in January 2020, Sonos sued Google over patent infringement. Today, the streaming speaker company scored an early victory with the U.S. International Trade Commission. A preliminary ruling penned by ITC chief administrative law judge Charles Bullock finds that Google infringed on five patents.

“Today the ALJ has found all five of Sonos’ asserted patents to be valid and that Google infringes on all five patents,” Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We are pleased the ITC has confirmed Google’s blatant infringement of Sonos’ patented inventions. This decision re-affirms the strength and breadth of our portfolio, marking a promising milestone in our long-term pursuit to defend our innovation against misappropriation by Big Tech monopolies.”

The finding is still very much early days for what’s likely to be an even more protracted battled battle between the two companies. Sonos’ complaint stems from Google’s own family of streaming speakers. Google entered the category, long dominated by Sonos, roughly four and a half years ago with the original Home speaker. The line now includes a number of products now listed under the Nest banner.

“Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in a statement when the suit was initially filed. “Despite our repeated and extensive efforts over the last few years, Google has not shown any willingness to work with us on a mutually beneficial solution. We’re left with no choice but to litigate.”

Sonos noted similar issues with Amazon devices (Google’s chief competitor in the category) at the time, but the company opted to focus its time, money and resources on a battle with Google, instead.

Ultimately, Sonos is hoping to use the ITC to block the import of those smart speakers, along with other Google hardware, including the Chromecast and Pixels. Such a decision would be a massive hit to Google’s hardware ambitions. A final ruling isn’t expected until December 13, however, after which point a potential import ban would take 60 days to go into effect.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the preliminary ruling.

After teasing its new font in January, Twitter made some major changes to its website and app design this week. But while Twitter framed these updates as making the platform “more accessible,” some accessibility experts say that these changes missed the mark.

Most noticeably, tweets now appear in “Chirp,” Twitter’s proprietary typeface, and the display has even more visual contrast between the background and text. Other updates made the interface less cluttered, removing unnecessary divider lines. For people with low vision, high-contrast design can make websites more legible, but the current contrast level is so high that it’s causing strain for some users. Twitter far exceeds the minimum contrast standards set by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which provides recommendations for making websites accessible to disabled people. But web accessibility isn’t one-size fits all — while some users may need a high-contrast display, others who suffer from chronic migraines might require a more muted experience. Research has also shown that dyslexic people tend to read faster when presented with lower-contrast text.

“When the update hit, I could immediately feel pain in my eyes, and within about half an hour, I was having a tension headache,” said Alex Haagaard, a design researcher and founding member at The Disabled List. “I have a lot of chronic pain, and I cannot deliberately expose myself to something that is going to be exacerbating my levels of pain, because then that has cascade effects.”

Up until last year, Twitter’s accessibility team was volunteer-based — paid employees at Twitter would take on accessibility projects on top of their existing jobs, TechCrunch reported. In September, a few months after Twitter had released an audio tweet feature without accessibility considerations, Twitter introduced two dedicated accessibility teams within its company. But experts emphasize that including disabled people in design decisions from the get-go is necessary when implementing new features.

“They talked a good talk about how they were going to change this, that they were going to integrate accessibility and disabled perspectives more into their design processes, and from this, it seems they have not done an adequate job with that,” said Haagaard. “Engaging people from disabled communities as consultants at the high-level stages, within the research and conceptualization phase, would prevent designers from getting to a point where you’re testing something and you realize it’s fundamentally problematic and it’s too late.”

Twitter told TechCrunch that “feedback was sought from people with disabilities throughout the process, from the beginning. However, people have different preferences and needs and we will continue to track feedback and refine the experience. We realize we could get more feedback in the future and we’ll work to do that.”

On its accessibility account Twitter, acknowledged the problems that users were reporting with eye-strain and migraines after the update. This afternoon, the platform added that due to user feedback, it is making contrast changes on all buttons to make them “easier on the eyes.”

“When a design organization makes an announcement, and the accessibility organization alongside it actually has things to say about it, that means they work together, and that’s always a good thing,” said Matt May, head of Inclusive Design at Adobe. “The key thing is to continue to listen and find the people who aren’t being represented, and try to synthesize them within the rest of the system.”

It’s odd that Twitter neglected to add customization capabilities when it rolled out its higher-contrast display and new default typeface, since the company has a history of offering customization elsewhere in its user experience. Currently, users can toggle among dark, light and dim modes, make their default font size bigger or smaller, and even change the look of buttons and hyperlinks to colors like purple, orange and pink. Even before this week’s update, Twitter’s accessibility panel allowed users to enable a higher contrast mode. But still, there is no way for users to reduce the contrast or change what font the site uses, which experts cite as a design flaw. With its first proprietary typeface Chirp, Twitter sought to “improve how we convey emotion,” but users reported the font to be more difficult to read than Helvetica, which Twitter used before Chirp.

According to Shawn Lawton Henry — a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, editor of the WCAG recommendations, and leader of the World Wide Web Consortium’s accessibility education and outreach — websites should include customization options for users to toggle among fonts, contrast levels and more. WCAG doesn’t require this currently, but Henry says that future updates of the guidelines will recommend that websites give users the option to change contrast.

“The main issue is that the default contrast should [meet the WCAG standards] and users should be able to change it. It’s not hard, right?” Henry said. “It’s fine to have a default font, but you have to make it customizable. Even if it was the most readable font known, it would still be important to allow people to change it because of individual differences.”

When asked about adding ways for users to change typefaces and contrast levels, a Twitter spokesperson said that the company had “no concrete plans to share right now, but we’re always looking at ways to improve the experience and listening to feedback.”

“I think part of the disappointment here is that they’re framing this as an accessibility thing, but it’s also really clear that it was equally about building brand identity,” Haagaard said.

While some users will override website settings with USS (User Style Sheets), Henry’s research for the World Wide Web Consortium showed that user agents like web browsers and e-book readers should provide users the ability to customize these settings more easily. Not all users are tech-savvy enough to write USS, and it’s easier for users to toggle among the accessibility settings specific to an app. This level of customization isn’t unprecedented — in June, Discord added a saturation slider in its accessibility settings, for example.

“The beauty of the web is that it’s not paper, and we can change it,” Henry said.

Carta, the nine-year-old, San Francisco-based cap table management and valuation software company, just raised $500 million in its eighth round of funding, at a $7.4 billion valuation. That’s more than double where the company was valued eight months ago when it closed its seventh round of funding at a valuation of $3.1 billion.

With so much money flooding into privately held companies, giant leaps in valuation are no longer all that notable. What’s different about this particular story is how Carta’s new valuation was established, which was to run an auction using its own trading platform to sell $100 million of its shares to secondary buyers, then use the valuation at which the shares sold — $6.9 billion — as evidence to primary investors of Carta’s true value.

For a company that’s trying to raise awareness of its trading platform — Carta wants to sell more of the secondary shares of other companies, too — it was a smart marketing play. It was Carta eating its own dog food, in the somewhat repellant parlance of the startup world. Still, it’s unclear whether we’re likely to see it replicated by other companies going forward.

First, what Carta did is — we think — unprecedented in establishing a price for secondary shares. Typically, a small group comes together and negotiates a price or, if it’s 20 or more sellers who are willing to offload shares to buyers, it’s considered a “tender offer” and out comes the prospectus-type document, including financial statements, risk factors and all that other jazz, which is sent to a set group of potential buyers.

In Carta’s case, as Carta CEO Henry Ward suggests in a new Medium post, by running an auction process, many more investors participated in the price discovery of its shares than might have been possible otherwise. (A prior post by Ward pegs this number at 414 participants that participated in 1484 executed orders.)

It makes a lot of sense, says longtime startup attorney Tim Harris of Morrison & Foerster, who was not involved in the process but is a student of market efficiencies. “Ward is basically saying, ‘We’re using a broader market price-seeking process instead of what he describes as one-off. You see it in real estate listings all the time,” adds Harris. “There’s no reason companies can’t do the same.”

The question that startup founders may be wondering right now is whether an auction process like Carta’s can truly help establish a price for primary shares. Naturally, Ward says it can. Indeed, in his Medium post, he says the auction very much strengthened the case that Carta could make to investors, including Silver Lake, the investment firm that ultimately led Carta’s newest $500 million round (a Series G).

While we don’t doubt it was a useful data point, Silver Lake is a sophisticated investment firm has been valuing companies for 21 years; likely, it have arrived at the valuation it did without that earlier auction.

Meanwhile, there are other reasons to think an auction like Carta’s will remain an outlier. For his part, attorney Anthony McCusker, who cochairs the tech practice at Goodwin Proctor, questions whether “companies are going to outsource their valuation discovery to Carta.” Most founders and CEOs would prefer to talk directly with investors when it comes to establishing the valuation of their company rather than leave it to the wisdom of crowds, he suggests.

Markets can also “be gamed,” as notes Harris of MoFo, observing that the integrity of any platform “depends on oversight and the quality of bids on a platform,” (Harris half-kiddingly wonders what happened, for example, to the bidder who said he or she would pay $28 million to join Jeff Bezos on his trip to space, then later cited “scheduling conflicts.”)

As for us, we wonder how many founding teams are willing to open up the secondary sale of their shares to a potentially much wider circle of backers when historically, they have not.

We also wonder whether, for some companies, that discovery process could backfire. After all, Carta is a hot commodity that likely didn’t need to set a floor for its auction offering. But we can imagine scenarios in which companies’ secondary shares aren’t worth to outsiders what founders think that they are.

Of course, the industry is changing fast, so very little would surprise us at this point. Indeed, whatever happens, the auction is clearly part of a larger trend toward transparency that continues to play out in interesting new ways all the time.

As Harris notes,  when he began practicing law 26 year ago, “venture was a completely closed ecosystem.” Now, he says, “There’s a wealth of data being shared and disseminated to maker smarter business decisions. You can just go to Pitchbook or Crunchbase to learn a lot of what you need to know.”

Featured above: Carta founder and CEO Henry Ward.

After all the leaks and teases, Lamborghini has finally announced its new hybrid-engine Countach.

Thankfully, almost everything you need to know about the car is in its model designation: LPI 800-4.

The first part is short for Longitudinale Posteriore Ibrido, referencing how the powertrain is mounted lengthwise toward the back of the supercar and the fact that it’s a hybrid.

Meanwhile, the two numbers point to the approximately 802 horsepower the Countach’s V12 6.5-liter engine and 48-volt electric motor can output together, as well as the fact that it has four-wheel drive.

Lamborghini

All of that makes for one powerful car. The Countach can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds and zero to 124 miles per hour in just under nine seconds. As for a top speed, you can push it to 221 miles per hour, and it has a maximum torque of 531 lb-ft.  

Lamborghini

Powering the Countach’s electric motor is a supercapacitor Lamborghini claims delivers three times more power compared to a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. The automaker says it mounted the electric motor directly to the gearbox to preserve the feeling of power transfer you get from a V12 engine.

Carbon fiber makes up most of the chassis and exterior of the Countach LPI 800-4. “It imagines how the iconic Countach of the 70s and 80s might have evolved into an elite super sports model of this decade,” Lamborghini says of the design, which is more reminiscent of the Aventador than its original namesake. Inside, you’ll find an 8.4-inch touchscreen display that includes CarPlay integration and a button labeled “Stile.” Pressing it “explains the Countach design philosophy to its privileged audience.”

Speaking of a privileged audience, Lamborghini will only make 112 units of the Countach LPI 800-4. The press release the automaker sent over doesn’t even mention a price tag. It seems Lamborghini is keen on looking forward, but the Countach was too important not to acknowledge with a limited run.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

Five years ago, the playbook for launching a new company involved a tried-and-true list of to-dos. Once you built an awesome product with a catchy name, you’d try to get a feature article on TechCrunch, a front-page hit on Hacker News, hunted on ProductHunt and an AMA on Quora.

While all of these today remain impressive milestones, it’s never been harder to corral eyeballs and hit a breakout adoption trajectory.

In this new decade, it is possible to first out-market your competitor, and then raise lots of money, hire the best team and build, rather than the other way around (building first, then marketing).

Outbound marketing tools and company newsletters are useful, but they’re also a slow burn and offer low conversion in the new creator economy. So where does this leave us?

With audiences spread out over so many platforms, reaching cult status requires some level of hacking. Brand-building is no longer a one-hit game, but an exercise in repetition: It may take four or five times for a user to see your startup’s name or logo to recognize, remember or Google it.

Below are some growth tactics that I hope will help jump-start the effort to building an engaged user base.

Laying the groundwork for user-generated content

Before users are evangelists, they are observers. Consider creating a bot to alert you of any product mentions on Twitter, or surface subject-matter discussions on Reddit (“Best tools to manage AWS costs?” or “Which marketplace do you resell your old electronics on?”), which you can then respond to with thoughtful commentary.

Join relevant communities on Discord, infiltrate Slack groups of relevant conferences (including past iterations of a conference  —  chances are those groups are still alive with activity), follow forums on StackOverflow and engage in the discussions on all these channels.

The more often you post, the better your posts convert. The more your handle appears on newsfeeds, the more likely it will be included on widely quoted “listicles.”

Most “user-generated content” in the early innings should be generated by you, from both personal accounts and company accounts.

Build in public …

Building in public is scary given the speed at which ideas can be copied, but competition will always exist, since new ideas are not born in vacuums. Companies like Railway and Replit post to Twitter every time they post a new changelog. Stir brands its feature releases as “drops,” similar to streetwear drops.

Building in public can also lend opportunities for virality, which requires drama, comedy or both. Hey.com’s launch was buoyed by Basecamp’s public fight against Apple over existing App Store take rates.

Mmhmm, the virtual camera app that adds TV-presenter flair to video meetings, launched with a viral video that hit over 1.5 million views. The company continues to release entertaining YouTube demos to showcase new use cases.

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… or build in private

Like an artist teasing an upcoming album, some companies are able to drum up substantial anticipation ahead of exiting stealth mode. When two ex-Apple execs founded Humane, they crafted beautiful social media pages full of sophisticated photography without revealing a single hint of what they set out to build.

Nearly three in 10 employees (29%) would quit their job if they were told they were no longer allowed to work remotely, according to a recent survey. In addition, a recent Harvard Business Study found that “companies that let their workers decide where and when to do their jobs — whether in another city or in the middle of the night — increase employee productivity, reduce turnover and lower organizational costs.”

Over the past 18 months, while instituting a remote work model, our turnover rate at Insightly was the lowest in company history and an internal survey found happiness levels to be twice as high from the previous year. This in the midst of a major pandemic, social movement, forest fires and a disruptive election — all happening at the same time.

On a larger, global scale, employers from companies around the world are coming to the same realization: You don’t need an office to be productive and employees are happier working from home.

The next logical step is, at the same time, a majorly disruptive one and a 180-degree shift toward how companies have operated for over 100 years — the transition from in-person headquarters to a remote, work-from-anywhere model. In line with this shift, we’ve foregone our 40,000-square-foot Soma office space and employees are able to work from anywhere in the United States while keeping the same salary.

There will no doubt be challenges, and there already have been. But with these challenges also arises immense opportunity. Here are a few battle-tested tips on how to maintain productivity while delivering flexibility with this new work model:

Reallocate overhead savings

Let employees choose where they live. Allowing this option will better their lives and make for happy, engaged employees. Overhead costs, especially in large cities such as San Francisco, are the largest operating expense for most companies. Take this large sum of money and invest in employee happiness. You don’t need thousands of square feet in office space to be successful.

That massive overhead cost you just got rid of? Use this toward more meaningful employee experiences that will enhance their lives.

Kiddom, a platform that offers a digital curriculum that fits the core standards required by states, announced today that it has raised a $35 million Series C round led by Altos Ventures, with participation from Owl Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Outcomes Collective. The financing came nearly three years after Kiddom’s Series B, a $15 million round led by Owl.

The startup didn’t just raise money, it finally learned how to make some. Founded in 2012, Kiddom was able to raise millions without revenue or a clear business model. But Ahsan Rizvi, CEO and co-founder of Kiddom, and Abbas Manjee, chief academic officer and co-founder of Kiddom, think an early focus on adoption instead of monetization was necessary.

“At our Series B, we were definitely not making money,” Manjee said. “But we have a free product that teachers and students use, and the idea was to build an enterprise product on top of it.” It’s a common strategy with bottom up sales. For example, ClassDojo prioritized adoption for years before it finally introduced a paying version of its classroom socialization product.

Kiddom poured most of its capital into research and development into its enterprise product. It has two parts. First, it offers a platform that helps schools integrate all of their different platforms into an interface that tracks student utilization and achievement. Second, it offers that platform alongside the product it’s built up for years, a digital curriculum that fits in with Common Core, a set of math and English academic standards that students are required to learn on a grade by grade level. The latter is perhaps the hardest sell for Kiddom, but also the most lucrative.

Manjee explained vendor approval processes across the States can take a long time, and the stakes are high since decision-makers will only turn to a handful of vendors when it comes to meeting core standards.

A lot of Kiddom’s success depends on if traditional curriculum providers, like the Pearsons and McGraw-Hills of the world, don’t catch up to the digitization of education. Rizvi explained that older companies are “losing market share rapidly” right now. Last year, McGraw-Hill and Cengage terminated a proposed merger that would’ve added some fresh competition to the curriculum world.

The product has resonated with some users. While Kiddom declined to give specifics, it said that new ARR growth grew 2,525% its first year. In 2020 to 2021, ARR growth is on track to be 300%. It said that at least one teacher uses its product in 70% of schools in the United States, a metric that has remained consistent since 2018.

Kiddom’s fresh funding and revenue shows that its years of product development have kept it competitive in the eyes of investors, synergistic unicorns and the stingiest enterprise customer of them all, school districts.

Facebook has extended the option of using end-to-end encryption for Messenger voice calls and video calls.

End-to-end encryption (E2EE) — a security feature that prevents third-parties from eavesdropping on calls and chats — has been available for text conversations on Facebook’s flagship messaging service since 2016. Although the company has faced pressure from governments to roll back its end-to-end encryption plans, Facebook is now extending this protection to both voice and video calls on Messenger, which means that “nobody else, including Facebook, can see or listen to what’s sent or said.”

“End-to-end encryption is already widely used by apps like WhatsApp to keep personal conversations safe from hackers and criminals,” Ruth Kricheli, director of product management for Messenger, said in a blog post on Friday. “It’s becoming the industry standard and works like a lock and key, where just you and the people in the chat or call have access to the conversation.”

Facebook has some other E2EE features in the works, too. It’s planning to start public tests of end-to-end encryption for group chats and calls in Messenger in the coming weeks and is also planning a limited test of E2EE for Instagram direct messages. Those involved in the trial will be able to opt-in to end-to-end encrypted messages and calls for one-on-one conversations carried out on the photo-sharing platform.

Beyond encryption, the social networking giant is also updating its expiring messages feature, which is similar to the ephemeral messages feature available on Facebook-owned WhatsApp. It’s now offering more options for people in the chat to choose the amount of time before all new messages disappear, from as few as five seconds to as long as 24 hours.

“People expect their messaging apps to be secure and private, and with these new features, we’re giving them more control over how private they want their calls and chats to be,” Kricheli added.

News of Facebook ramping up its E2EE rollout plans comes just days after the company changed its privacy settings — again.