Year: 2021

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by what the weekday Exchange column digs into, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 

Hey friends! This week was more than hectic, so we have a lot of ground to cover. Below are more notes on the Brazilian IPO market, more coverage of the Chicago startup scene and a host of numbers from startups concerning their recent growth results. So, if you like early-stage or later-stage startups, international startups or domestic startups, we have just what you want!

Another week, another Twitter conversation about funding rounds. To catch you up, this week saw more folks complaining about the media covering funding rounds over other examples of startup activity. My contention for years has been that we, the scribbling classes, cover funding rounds because they are the rare moment that startups are willing to actually share results of their operations.

That VCs will occasionally complain about this is particularly rich, given that investors would hardly be willing to invest in a company based on a short call with a founder about how they came up with an idea. And yet they tell founders to not tell the media anything at all. Alas.

Regardless, all this shook out to me saying, “Hey startups, send in your data!” And some folks did! Others sent in notes about stuff that they had announced before, but that we’d missed.

So here’s a digest of startup growth from a number of stages, markets and the like:

CopyAI: The company recently crossed the $2 million ARR threshold. CopyAI is busy building its business in public, which we love, sharing metrics as it goes. And it has raised external capital and grown rapidly while doing so, providing a proof point that you can share information and not have your startup instantly burst into flames.

I asked CEO Paul Yacoubian if growth has kept up with his expectations, and he said that it has. Our next question: How long until the company can double in size yet again? CopyAI reached $1 million ARR earlier this year.

TextNow: Now over the $100 million ARR mark. The company, essentially bootstrapped after raising less than $2 million during its life, also recently hired a CFO. You know what that means — an IPO is coming. Frankly TextNow is not a company I know well, but thanks to it sharing information, I now want to learn more about it. See!

Kalendar AI: This company helps folks book sales meetings using AI, it appears. And the model is showing some traction, according to founder and CEO Ravi Vadrevu. He shared a host of metrics with The Exchange, including its bank balance and growth charts. (Hell yeah, data!) The company is generating ARR in the six figures and raised $700,000 in a recent round.

And per its charts, subscriber signups appear to be accelerating. Per a different dataset shared, August is going to be the company’s busiest month yet when it comes to meetings booked, the key non-GAAP metric for its business. That figure is growing at 30% monthly, the startup said.

In Vadrevu’s own phrasing, Kalendar AI wants to “democratize growth for companies like how AWS democratized innovation with virtualization.”

Balto: Balto is a St. Louis-based startup that has raised just over $50 million. The company reached out with some neat data from its recent round, a $37.5 million Series B. Per the company’s COO Chris Kontes, “Jump Capital, OCA Ventures and Sandalphon” took part in the round. Which matters if you read our recent dig into the Chicago market.

Regardless, Balto said that it grew its customer base by 84% and its revenue by 200% since it raised its Series A in Q3 2020. I asked if the ∆ between the company’s customer and revenue growth was driven by net dollar retention (NDR) or larger customers. Per Kontes, “the answer is a bit of both” with a bias toward NDR. He didn’t share an absolute number, but did say that Balto’s “NDR is north of 150%.” Hot dang.

The company, by the by, built tech to help support agents know what to say during calls. Which, it appears, is big business.

HostiFi: Headquartered near Detroit, HostiFi helps customers “remotely monitor and manage UniFi Network devices.” I do not know what that means, sadly, and don’t have the minutes right now to dig in more deeply.

But in better news, HostiFi’s founder Reilly Chase dropped a grip of metrics into our inbox. His company will reach $1 million in ARR in the “next few weeks,” and wants to hit $10 million ARR in “the next 3 years,” which we dig. The company raised $100,000 from what was previously known as Earnest Capital, a group that we’ve covered. HostiFi has 1,700 customers, it says, and a fully remote team of six.

Fun, yeah? Private companies being more open with their financial performance is good for the world as the activity has a way of making the opaque startup world just a bit more limpid.

Brazil

Our dive into the Brazilian startup market and its impending IPOs was good fun to write. But as we went to press, Brazil’s B3 stock exchange got back to our questions with answers. They just missed our timeline, but we’d be remiss to not share some of their notes here.

Regarding the present state of the Brazilian technology IPO market, B3’s Rafaela Vesterman Araujo wrote the following (minor edits for clarity):

We are passing through a period of records in the Brazilian Capital Markets. Through the first half of August 2021 we had 44 IPOs (for comparison purposes, in all of 2020 we had 28) and around 30% of these IPOs were technology companies, which is very interesting, considering that before 2020, the technology sector was underrepresented at B3.

This is precisely the trend that we were trying to highlight, and note, so it’s nice to see the data back us up.

Next up, how big does a company have to be to list on B3? Here’s Vesterman Araujo (minor edits for clarity):

Around 70% of 2020 and 1H21 technology IPOs raised between [$110 million] and [$367 million]. In addition, 70% of these companies had a net income up to [$55 million]. In some of the cases, even with a lower net revenue compared to other sectors, we have noticed that many of them have been raising a greater amount of capital, probably reflecting the growth expectations.

Hello, growth premium! That’s great news for local Brazilian startups hoping to get public in their home market. With Nubank and Nuvemshop growing huge while private, where the country’s companies will go public is no small matter.

Chicago

We dug into the Chicago boom this week, tracking the Windy City’s huge venture capital results from the past few quarters and asking locals precisely what was driving the wave of funding and startup activity. As we got that into WordPress, another set of answers came in that we want you to read.

Techstars’ Neal Sáles-Griffin, managing director of its Chicago operations, had this to say about why Chicagoland startups have excelled in attracting capital since late 2020:

It’s a flight to quality. For too long, there’s been a concentration of capital in one hub and VCs following the decentralization of innovation after the COVID [lockdowns]. The pandemic broke old habits and brought investors to mature markets like Chicago. [ … ] For years, Chicago has grown as a national, top-tier destination for startups. The national VC community is finally catching up, exploring our amazing community of founders who are scaling fast in the Midwest.

I went to school in Chicago, so am pretty aware of the density of schools in the area. I was curious if that fact was beneficial to local startups. Per Sáles-Griffin, the answer is a hard yes:

Absolutely, we’re home to two of the top five MBA programs (UChicago, Northwestern), home to a top-five engineering college (UIUC) and [to] one of the most diverse engineering colleges in the country (UIC). But we’re also home to one of the largest city college districts in the region (City Colleges) and historically Black institutions like Chicago State — both home to several engineering and IT programs, training the next generation of talent.

Where should we look for the next generation of startups from Chicago? The Techstars denizen listed healthcare and life sciences as a key market, as well as food tech and companies building in the larger transit space.

So many other things!

Sadly, we are way over our word count for this newsletter, so we have to stop. But lots of other things out there are worth your attention. Like Indianapolis-based Lessonly being acquired by Seismic. Lessonly had raised just under $30 million while operating on its own, helmed by the dynamo-like Max Yoder. And Aspiration Partners — backed by a number of well-known actors — is going public via a SPAC. The deal will provide hundreds of millions in fresh capital to the company.

More next week.

— Alex

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

This week, investors’ concerns mount as news came that the Chinese government has taken a stake ByteDance, TikTok’s parent and one of the world’s largest private internet firms. Meanwhile, Amazon’s crackdown on Chinese sellers continues and is forcing many traders in southern China out of business, and the government passed a sweeping data protection law that will take effect in November.

A state stake

The Chinese government’s grand plan to assert more control over the country’s internet behemoths continues. This week, The Information reported that a domestic entity of ByteDance sold a 1% stake to a government affiliate in April. The deal was also recorded on Tianyancha, a database of publicly available corporate information, as well as the official enterprise registration index.

The move didn’t come abruptly. Beijing was mulling over small shares in private tech firms as early as 2017. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that internet regulators discussed taking 1% stakes in companies including WeChat operator Tencent, Twitter-like Weibo and YouTube-like Youku.

In April 2020, WangTouTongDa, a subsidiary of China Internet Investment Fund, which is in turn controlled by China’s top internet watchdog, acquired a 1% stake in Weibo for 10 million yuan, according to Weibo’s filing to the U.S. securities regulator. Weibo did not mention WangTouTongDa’s relationship with the state in its filing.

Similarly, ByteDance sold a 1% stake to three entities set up by top regulatory bodies: China Internet Investment Fund; China Media Group, controlled by the Communist Party’s propaganda department; and the Beijing municipal government’s investment arm.

In response to Beijing’s move on ByteDance, Republican senator Marco Rubio urged President Joe Biden this week to block TikTok in the U.S.

Exactly how much power Beijing gains over ByteDance from taking the small stake remains fuzzy, but Weibo’s disclosure to investors offers some clues.

It’s critical to note that the government holds stakes in the domestic operating entity of both Weibo and ByteDance. Internet companies in China often set up offshore entities that are entitled to the financial benefits of their mainland Chinese operations through contractual agreements. The framework is called a variable interest entity or VIE. While the structure allows Chinese firms to seek overseas funding due to China’s restrictions on foreign investments, it has come under increasing scrutiny by Beijing.

Weibo said in the filing that WangTouTongda, its state-owned investor, will be able to appoint a director to the three-member board of its Chinese entity and veto certain matters related to content and future financings.

ByteDance likely has a similar arrangement with its state investor. The government did not obtain a stake in TikTok, which is a subsidiary of a separate offshore entity incorporated in the Cayman Islands, The Information pointed out. This should provide some reassurance to U.S. regulators, though concerns about Beijing’s sway in Chinese companies abroad probably won’t go away.

Indeed, the Biden administration in June replaced the Trump-era orders to ban ByteDance and WeChat with a more measured policy requiring the Commerce Department to review apps with ties to “jurisdiction of foreign adversaries” that may pose national security risks.

TikTok has been fighting accusations that it hands over user data to Beijing. ByteDance is the fourth-largest lobbying spender in the U.S. so far this year, just after Amazon, Facebook and Alphabet. Beijing’s investment is going to cost it more campaign efforts.

Beleaguered Amazon sellers

In May, I reported that Amazon shuttered some of its largest sellers from China over violations of platform rules, including using fake reviews and incentives to solicit positive reviews from customers. The crackdown drove China’s online exporters into a panic, and as it turned out, it wasn’t a one-off ambush from Amazon but a prolonged war. While the exact number of Chinese stores affected is not disclosed, industry observers such as Marketplace Pulse said “hundreds of” top Chinese sellers had been suspended as of early July.

Punished accounts are suspended, with their goods withheld and deposits frozen by Amazon. Companies in Shenzhen, home to the majority of the world’s Amazon sellers, laid off thousands of staff in recent months. The owner of a sizable seller in Shenzhen recently died by suicide due to the debacle, according to an acquaintance of the owner.

To sellers that have survived the crackdown, the attack by Amazon “would have happened sooner or later.” Most of the exporters I talked to came to the same conclusion: The Seattle-based titan now wants quality and design over generic products that compete solely on price and manipulation of ranking.

The Chinese government has taken note of the incidents. An official from the Ministry of Commerce compared the wave of store closures as Chinese exporters being “fish out of water” during a press conference in July.

“Due to differences in laws, culture and business practices around the world, [Chinese] companies are facing risks and challenges as they go overseas,” said Li Xingqian, director of foreign trade at the Commerce Ministry.

“We will help companies improve their risk control and comply with international trade standards.” Meanwhile, the official called for “the platform/platforms to cherish the important contribution from various companies and fully respect different trade entities.”

Data protection

And finally, China passed a sweeping data protection law this week that will strictly limit how tech companies collect user information, but the rules won’t likely have an impact on state surveillance. The regulation, which was proposed last year, will take effect on November 1. Read more about the rules here:

Software as a service is one of the most important sectors in tech today. While its transformative potential was quite clear before the pandemic, the sudden pivot to distributed workforces caused interest in SaaS products to skyrocket as medium and large enterprises embraced digital and remote sales processes, significantly expanding their utility.

This phenomenon is global, but India in particular has the opportunity to take its SaaS momentum to the next level. The Indian SaaS industry is projected to generate revenue of $50 billion to $70 billion and win 4%-6% of the global SaaS market by 2030, creating as much as $1 trillion in value, according to a report by SaaSBOOMi and McKinsey.

There are certain important long-term trends that are fueling this expansion.

The rise of Indian SaaS unicorns

The Indian SaaS community has seen a flurry of innovation and success. Entrepreneurs in India have founded about a thousand funded SaaS companies in the last few years, doubling the rate from five years ago and creating several unicorns in the process. Together, these companies generate $2 billion to $3 billion in total revenues and represent approximately 1% of the global SaaS market, according to SaaSBOOMi and McKinsey.

These firms are diverse in terms of the clients they serve and the problems they solve, but several garnered global attention during the pandemic by enabling flexibility for newly remote workers. Zoho helped streamline this pivot by providing sales teams with apps for collateral, videos and demos; Freshworks offered businesses a seamless customer experience platform, and Eka extended its cloud platform to unify workflows from procurement to payments for the CFO office.

Other SaaS firms stayed busy in other ways. Over the course of the pandemic, 10 new unicorns emerged: Postman, Zenoti, Innovacer, Highradius, Chargebee and Browserstack, Mindtickle, Byju, UpGrad and Unacademy. There were also several instances of substantial venture funding, including a $150 million deal for Postman, bringing the total amount raised by the Indian SaaS community in 2020 to around $1.5 billion, four times the investment in 2018.

India’s path to leadership

While the Indian SaaS community has made admirable progress in recent years, there are several key growth drivers that could lead to as much as $1 trillion in revenue by 2030. They include:

The global pivot to digital go-to-market

The number of enterprises that are comfortable with assessing products and making business decisions via Zoom is increasing rapidly. This embrace of digital go-to-market fundamentally levels the playing field for Indian companies in terms of access to customers and end markets.

In a late Friday night blow to Uber, Lyft and other gig worker-centered companies, a superior court judge ruled that California’s Proposition 22, which was passed in 2020 and designed to overrule the state’s controversial AB-5 law on the employment status of gig workers, violates the state’s constitution.

Frank Roesch, a superior court judge in Alameda County, which encompasses Oakland, Berkeley and much of the East Bay, ruled that the law would limit “the power of a future legislature” to define the employment status of gig workers. The lawsuit was filed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in January, after a similar lawsuit was rebuffed by the California Supreme Court and referred to a lower court.

The court’s decision will almost certainly be appealed and further legal arguments are to be expected.

The superior court’s decision is just the latest in a long line of victories and defeats in the battle between companies that heavily rely on gig workers like Uber and DoorDash, and unions and advocates representing workers. Much of the debate centers on the legal distinction between a freelancer and an employee, and to what extent companies are responsible for the care and benefits of their workers.

Such a distinction is big business: Uber, Lyft and other companies spent more than $200 million collectively to push Prop 22 to victory last year. California voters passed the proposition roughy 59% to 41% in what was widely perceived as a major victory for gig worker platforms.

Such fights are not limited to merely Silicon Valley’s home state, however. Earlier this year in the United Kingdom, Uber lost a legal battle over its employment classification decisions and ultimately reclassified tens of thousands of its drivers as workers, a decision which offered them a range of benefits not previously guaranteed.

Disrupt is right around the corner, and this year the show is packed to the brim with incredible panels and conversations, an absolutely stacked Startup Battlefield cohort of companies launching on our stage, investor insights and a virtual expo hall full of exciting new products and services in the Startup Alley.

We can’t wait! Literally. So we’re giving you guys a sneak peek at some of the startups you might see at Disrupt in upcoming episodes of Extra Crunch Live.

Usually, the Extra Crunch Live crew sits down with founders and the investors who finance them to learn how they decided to partner with one another and, ultimately, how startups can get to “yes” when fundraising. In the latter half of the episode, those same guests give live feedback to folks in the audience who come on our virtual stage and pitch their products.

Truth be told, everyone loves a good pitch-off. So in these upcoming Startup Alley Edition episodes of Extra Crunch Live, we’re turning the entire episode into a pitch-off. SUA companies will come on stage, one at a time, and have exactly 60 seconds to get us excited about their startup. But it wouldn’t be a true pitch-off without some expert feedback.

I’m excited to announce the investors joining us on these episodes to share their insights and wisdom with both the startups and the audience.

On September 1, we’ll be joined by Neil Sequeira, founder at defy.vc, as well as Stacey Bishop, partner at Scale Venture Partners.

Image Credits: Elena Zhukova / Scale Venture Partners

Sequeira was managing director at General Catalyst before venturing out to start Defy. Before GC, he was at TimeWarner Investments and was a founding member of AOLTW Ventures. Defy has a portfolio that includes Airspace, HonorLock, Novi and more. Sequeira has served on more than 40 company boards, so it should go without saying that he’ll have plenty of insightful feedback for our founders.

Bishop brings more than 20 years of investment experience to our little pitch-off. She currently serves on the boards of Abstract, Airspace, Demandbase, Extole, Lever and more. Bishop has also served on several boards where the company has seen a successful exit, including HubSpot, Bizible and Vitrue. Bishop specializes in business applications and will have lots to share with our pitch-off startups.  Register here for Extra Crunch Live with defy.vc and Scale Venture Partners.

On September 8, we’ll be joined by Next47 CEO and Managing Partner Lak Ananth and Moxxie Ventures founder and General Partner Katie Stanton.

Image Credits: Next47 / Amanda Aude

Ananth serves as founding CEO at Next47, which is backed by Siemens AG. He’s sat on several boards where he has helped the companies grow beyond $1 billion valuations. Ananth specializes in emerging areas of deep tech, including AI/ML, vertical SaaS, robotics, mobility, etc. Some of Ananth’s current investments include Verkada, rideOS and Markforged.

Katie Stanton has been an executive and an operator for much of her career, holding roles at Twitter, Google, Yahoo and Color across a wide variety of departments, including marketing, comms, recruiting, product and media. Stanton also served in the Obama White House and State Department after getting her career started as a banker at JP Morgan. She currently sits on the board of Vivendi and has invested in dozens of early-stage companies, including Airtable, Cameo, Carta, Coinbase, Literati, Modern Fertility, Shape Security and Threads. Register here for Extra Crunch Live with Next47 and Moxxie Ventures. 

You don’t want to miss these episodes of Extra Crunch Live. Register (for free) to come hang out with us!

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 20, 2021. The week is finished, but our work to catch up with the torrent of technology, startup and venture capital news is not. Today we have software companies investing in hotels, profitable scooters, at-home rowing machines and TikTok radio? Oh, and apparently Elon is building a robot. It’s a great group of stories! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Microsoft backs OYO: A while back TechCrunch broke the news that Microsoft might back Indian hotel upstart OYO. It was a bit of a wild story, as it didn’t seem to make that much sense. Well, the deal happened. Microsoft has invested $5 million into the company at a $9.6 billion valuation. Notably, that is only a slight discount from the company’s old $10 billion valuation. Next up for OYO is an IPO, we presume.
• Bird shows improving scooternomics: American scooter company Bird is going public via a SPAC — more here — and we got a look at the company’s most recent financial performance. In short, a shake-up of its operating model has improved its economics, even if the company still has a long way to go to turning a real profit.
• China shakes up its data privacy rules: For companies, that is, not the state; don’t expect the CCP to start respecting privacy anytime soon. But for companies in the country, a strict new law called the Personal Information Protection Law is coming into effect November 1. Per TechCrunch, the new set of rules will require “app makers to offer users options over how their information is or isn’t used, such as the ability not to be targeted for marketing purposes or to have marketing based on personal characteristics.”

Startups/VC

• Alerzo raises $10.5M to digitize Nigeria’s economy: Nigeria’s expanding startup scene got another boost today with Alerzo’s latest round. The “B2B e-commerce retail” startup wants to help bring the country’s informal economy online. According to TechCrunch that part of the Nigerian economy is worth some $100 billion.
• São Paulo-based QuintoAndar puts points on the board for Brazil: What does one do after raising a $300 million round? Well, if you are a Brazilian property technology company, you raise another $120 million. That’s what QuintoAndar just did, at an eye-popping $5.1 billion valuation. The company connects demand and supply in the country’s rental and home markets.
• For more on Africa’s startup market, head here. And if you want more notes on Brazil, we’ve got you covered.
• Breef wants to connect brands and agencies: Normally we’d try to make a pun about how we hope that this startup’s life is not, ahem, breef, but we’re more mature than that. Instead, we’ll note that the Greycroft-backed company just raised $3.5 million, and it connects teams at boutique agencies with larger, more long-term contracts with brands than what most freelance platforms offer.
• Cardiomatics does just what it says on the tin: Yes, Cardiomatics is an electrocardiogram-reading automation company, like you surmised from its name. And it just loaded its accounts with $3.2 million. The company helps “GPs and smaller practices offer ECG analysis to patients without needing to refer them to specialist hospitals,” TechCrunch reports.
• Rutter is building the Plaid of e-commerce data: API-delivered startups are hot these days. Connecting various services in a particular niche via API is a popular idea as well. And e-commerce is booming. At the intersection of those three trends is Rutter, which just raised $1.5 million and is building a “unified e-commerce API that enables companies to connect with data across any platform.” Very cool.
• If you need more startup news, we have just what you require on this week’s Equity podcast.

4 common mistakes startups make when setting pay for hybrid workers

In a recent survey, 58% of workers said they plan to quit if they’re not allowed to work remotely.

Startups that don’t offer employees work-from-home flexibility are at a competitive disadvantage, but figuring out how to pay hybrid workers raises a complex set of questions:

• Should you localize salaries for workers in different areas?
• How should you pay workers who have the same job when one is WFH and the other is at their desk?
• Are you being transparent with your staff about how their compensation is set?

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• Peloton wants to get into erging: Do you like the Peloton model, but aren’t interested in stationary biking? Don’t worry, the company is building a rowing machine, it appears. We hope that the machine is a bit safer than the Peloton treadmill turned out to be. Frankly the decision makes sense as erging is popular and healthy and good, and it’s not like folks who row are famous for not having money.
• Sirius wants to be TikTok cool: This is the “How do you do fellow kids?” meme, but IRL. Sirius, the satellite radio company that is well known in the United States, has launched a radio station that plays songs popular on the social platform hosted by well-known TikTokers. Parents, get ready for rather annoying road trips.
• Spotify wants to retire shares: Spotify is spending another $1 billion buying its own shares back from the public markets. In short, Spotify is wealthy and generates enough cash to power all of its work without dipping into its reserves. So it is spending some of its extra cash buying back its own stock, which has seen its value decline in recent months.
• Elon Musk dressed a dude in a suit and promised a future robot: When are we going to stop falling for Elon vaporware? Around when those solar roofs launch, I reckon. This time Tesla chatted about a future humanoid robot. And the company dressed up a human in an unconvincing suit to demonstrate what it will look like? Er, sure. Not that we’re opposed to the tech. We aren’t. But what a weird way to announce a future product.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Image Credits: SEAN GLADWELL (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

We’re reaching out to startup founders to tell us who they turn to when they want the most up-to-date growth marketing practices. Fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: Fernando Vitti, Nexforce

Recommended by: Raphael Freitas, Intuit

Testimonial: “Fernando is a strategic thinker. He’s a hard-working, data-driven and customer-obsessed individual that really contributed to our company’s growth.”

Community

Image Credits: Simon and Schuster

Join Danny Crichton on Tuesday August 24, at 3 p.m. PDT/6 p.m. EDT for a Twitter Spaces interview with Eric Dean Wilson, author of, “After Cooling: On Freon, Global Warming, and the Terrible Cost of Comfort.”

“Email impacts marketing strategy and enables better overall business success. It’s the lifeblood of an effective multichannel campaign,” says Melissa Sargeant, CMO at Litmus. “However, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection — announced earlier this summer with its iOS 15 update — attempts to eliminate metrics and data associated with email.”

This week in marketing, Sargeant dives into the changes that Apple is making through the new privacy protection in iOS 15 and how these updates affect marketers. Sergeant leaves no stones unturned, covering the impact on consumers and how marketers can prepare for this. Anna Heim, Extra Crunch daily reporter, interviewed some team members at Ascendant, a London-based agency, about the methods they use when working with startups, no matter what stage they’re in.

Ascendant was recommended to us through our Experts Survey. If there’s a growth marketer that you’ve enjoyed working with, we’d love to hear about them. Please fill out our survey.

Marketer: Jack Abramowitz
Recommended by: Frida Leibowitz, Debbie
Testimonial: “Jack is personable, sharp and overall a super helpful guy. He genuinely wanted to help and started adding value before we even formalized our relationship. Whether it’s making useful intros, or getting into the nitty-gritty details of campaign strategies, he rolls up his sleeves and gets right in the trenches together with the team. He’s really treated our project as his own.”

Marketer: Nate Dame, Profound Strategy
Recommended by: Diana Tamblyn, Danaher
Testimonial: “[I] did a fairly extensive search for a content partner. [I] was impressed with their expertise, their references (I spoke to three), and their growth forecasting.”

Marketer: Kyle Lacy
Recommended by: Natalie Beaulieu, Seismic
Testimonial: “Kyle is a marketing master of none, and successfully built a brand that is fun, engaging and lively out of the otherwise dull ‘sales readiness’ and ‘corporate LMS’ industries. When’s the last time a B2B brand had a llama for a mascot and sent golden llamas to its customers? He leads a team of writers, creatives, performance marketers and more as one cohesive team, fueling Lessonly’s growth through to its acquisition by Seismic. Can’t wait to see what he does at Seismic!”

(Extra Crunch) Apple is changing Mail Privacy Protection and email marketers must prepare: Melissa Sargeant wrote a guest column about email privacy changes and what it means for marketers. Sargeant says, “Litmus data collected from over a billion email opens worldwide found Apple Mail held a 48.6% total share across iPhones, Macs and iPads in June 2021. Though down slightly from April (51.1%), the data still suggests Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection will significantly impact email marketers, entire marketing teams and especially consumers.” Sergeant also covers how marketers can prepare for these changes.

For British agency Ascendant, growth marketing is much more than a set of tactics: Anna Heim spoke with Ascendant, a British growth agency, about their experience working with startups. Gus Ferguson, co-founder of Ascendant tells us, “We also know that probably one of the biggest barriers to growth is marketers being dependent on developers, which are such a rare resource. We address that by implementing marketing frameworks at a basic level of the business whereby marketers are able to at least control basic marketing operations directly.”

Is there a startup growth marketing expert that you want us to know about? Let us know by filling out our survey.

With the hasty U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan underway after two decades occupying the country, social media platforms have a complex new set of policy decisions to make.

The Taliban has been social media-savvy for years, but those companies will face new questions as the notoriously brutal, repressive group seeks to present itself as Afghanistan’s legitimate governing body to the rest of the world. Given its ubiquity among political leaders and governments, social media will likely play an even more central role for the Taliban as it seeks to cement control and move toward governing.

Facebook has taken some early precautions to protect its users from potential reprisals as the Taliban seizes power. Through Twitter, Facebook’s Nathaniel Gleicher announced a set of new measures the platform rolled out over the last week. The company added a “one-click” way for people in Afghanistan to instantly lock their accounts, hiding posts on their timeline and preventing anyone they aren’t friends with from downloading or sharing their profile picture.

Facebook also removed the ability for users to view and search anyone’s friends list for people located in Afghanistan. On Instagram, pop-up alerts will provide Afghanistan-based users with information on how to quickly lock down their accounts.

The Taliban has long been banned on Facebook under the company’s rules against dangerous organizations. “The Taliban is sanctioned as a terrorist organization under US law… This means we remove accounts maintained by or on behalf of the Taliban and prohibit praise, support, and representation of them,” a Facebook spokesperson told the BBC.

The Afghan Taliban is actually not designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, but the Taliban operating out of Pakistan has held that designation since 2010. While it doesn’t appear on the list of foreign terrorist organizations, the Afghanistan-based Taliban is defined as a terror group according to economic sanctions that the U.S. put in place after 9/11.

While the Taliban is also banned from Facebook-owned WhatsApp, the platform’s end-to-end encryption makes enforcing those rules on WhatsApp more complex. WhatsApp is ubiquitous in Afghanistan and both the Afghan military and the Taliban have relied on the chat app to communicate in recent years. Though Facebook doesn’t allow the Taliban on its platforms, the group turned to WhatsApp to communicate its plans to seize control to the Afghan people and discourage resistance in what was a shockingly swift and frictionless sprint to power. The Taliban even set up WhatsApp number as a sort of help line for Afghans to report violence or crime, but Facebook quickly shut down the account.

Earlier this week, Facebook’s VP of content policy Monika Bickert noted that even if the U.S. does ultimately remove the Taliban from its lists of sanctioned terror groups, the platform would reevaluate and make its own decision. “… We would have to do a policy analysis on whether or not they nevertheless violate our dangerous organizations policy,” Bickert said.

Like Facebook, YouTube maintains that the Taliban is banned from its platform. YouTube’s own decision also appears to align with sanctions and could be subject to change if the U.S. approach to the Taliban shifts.

“YouTube complies with all applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws, including relevant U.S. sanctions,” a YouTube spokesperson told TechCrunch. “As such, if we find an account believed to be owned and operated by the Afghan Taliban, we terminate it. Further, our policies prohibit content that incites violence.”

On Twitter, Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid has continued to share regular updates about the group’s activities in Kabul. Another Taliban representative, Qari Yousaf Ahmadi, also freely posts on the platform. Unlike Facebook and YouTube, Twitter doesn’t have a blanket ban on the group but will enforce its policies on a post-by-post basis.

If the Taliban expands its social media footprint, other platforms might be facing the same set of decisions. TikTok did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment, but previously told NBC that it considers the Taliban a terrorist organization and does not allow content that promotes the group.

The Taliban doesn’t appear to have a foothold beyond the most mainstream social networks, but it’s not hard to imagine the former insurgency turning to alternative platforms to remake its image as the world looks on.

While Twitch declined to comment on what it might do if the group were to use the platform, it does have a relevant policy that takes “off-service conduct” into account when banning users. That policy was designed to address reports of abusive behavior and sexual harassment among Twitch streamers.

The new rules also apply to accounts linked to violent extremism, terrorism, or other serious threats, whether those actions take place on or off Twitch. That definition would likely preclude the Taliban from establishing a presence on the platform, even if the U.S. lifts sanctions or changes its terrorist designations in the future.

General Motors is recalling even more Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles due to possible battery cell defects that could increase the risk of fire. This latest recall, announced by the automaker on Friday, marks the third time GM has issued the consumer notice for the Bolt.

The second recall, which was issued in July, covered 2017 to 2019 Bolt EVs. Now, GM is expanding that recall to include an additional 9,335 2019 model year Bolts, as well as 63,683 2020–2022 Bolt EV and EUV vehicles.

“In rare circumstances, the batteries supplied to GM for these vehicles may have two manufacturing defects – a torn anode tab and folded separator – present in the same battery cell, which increases the risk of fire,” the company said in a news release. It added that it was working with its cell supplier, South Korea’s LG, regarding the issue.

This recall is expected to cost GM an additional $1 billion – that’s on top of the $800 million the company has already estimated for the prior recalls. Costs associated with fixing defective Bolt batteries made up the lion’s share of GM’s $1.3 billion in warranty expenses last quarter, the automaker said in an earnings call earlier this month.

GM is recommending that included Bolt drivers to a 90 percent state of charge limitation and avoid depleting the battery below a 70 mile range. The automaker also suggests parking the vehicle outside right after charging and not leaving the vehicle charging indoors overnight – likely due to the risk of fire. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration released its own recommendation to Bolt drivers to park their vehicles away from their homes to reduce fire risk.