Author: azeeadmin

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Hi friends!

Welcome to the Daily Crunch for Wednesday, September 8, 2021. Alex is still out, so I’ll be steering this ship for a few more days while (I hope) he stares at trees, or the ocean, or really anything but words on a computer screen. Alex, if you’re reading this, please put your phone in airplane mode and do something cool. — Greg

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Wright tests its electric engine for passenger planes: Electric planes face challenges that electric cars don’t, like … you know, needing to get off the ground. Current battery tech is just too heavy for existing engines to get up in the air efficiently. Devin Coldewey has a profile on Wright, a startup looking to tackle this by making an electric engine that produces more thrust from less energy. They’re currently testing it at sea level, with plans to get it up to flying heights sometime next year.
• Howard University cancels classes after ransomware attack: “Sorry class, lessons are canceled for the day because we got hacked.” It’s the oh-so-2021 version of a snow day. Snow Crash Day?
• SEC threatens to sue Coinbase: Looks like there’s a bit of a battle potentially brewing between Coinbase and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Coinbase wants to launch a service that would let users loan out crypto assets to a lending pool and gain interest (noting that others already have launched similar services). Coinbase gave the SEC a heads-up … which, according to Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, led to the SEC threatening to sue Coinbase if it moved forward.

Startups/VC

• The credit card with a $27 limit: “The relatively young credit-rating system in India covers only a tiny fraction of the nation’s population,” writes Manish Singh. As a result, an equally tiny fraction of the population has access to credit cards. Slice, a startup out of Bangalore, is looking to help young people in the region start to slowly build their credit by introducing a card with a cap of 2,000 Indian rupees — or about $27.
• A social network for making music: TikTok remixed the concept of the remix, allowing users to take another user’s video and remold it into their own thing. Mayk.it, a new social app founded by TikTok/Snap alums, wants to bring the focus back to music. One user makes a beat, others add vocals and everyone crosses their fingers for a hit. The app launched this week, simultaneously announcing it had raised $4 million in seed funding.
• PayPal buys Paidy: $2.7 billion! That’s how much PayPal is dropping on Paidy, a popular buy now, pay later service from Japan. Kate Park writes that this move should help PayPal dive right into deferred payments in the country — which, as she points out, is the third largest e-commerce market in the world.

Debt versus equity: When do non-traditional funding strategies make sense?

Many potential founders are well versed in startup economics — and many are completely green.

When it comes to raising funds, understanding the relative benefits (and limitations) of debt and equity financing is required knowledge, however.

Founders who are less willing to dilute their control may be willing to use debt financing to fund their capital expenditures, “but it doesn’t make sense for everyone,” says six-time entrepreneur David Friend.

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Microsoft launches a personalized news service: Microsoft is taking a swing at the Apple News/Flipboard concept with Microsoft Start, a site/app that aggregates content from your favorite news sources. You can thumbs up/down things to tune the algorithm over time, because what the world needs is more robots telling us what to read. I miss Google Reader.
• Google opens Spaces for all: Last year Google rebranded its built-for-work toolset from G Suite to Google Workspace. Around the same time, it started testing new features that makes the myriad Workspace tools (Gmail, Docs, Meet, etc.) work more cohesively, retuning them with the sudden work-from-home spike in mind. As of today, those features are rolling out to everyone.
• Twitter is testing big ol’ full-width photos and videos: “While the result looks like a win to us, any change to Twitter’s design is likely to inspire a vocal subset of users to hate-tweet about it for a day or so before forgetting the changes altogether,” Taylor Hatmaker so perfectly sums up.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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

TechCrunch wants to help startups find the right expert for their needs. To do this, we’re building a shortlist of the top growth marketers. We’ve received great recommendations for growth marketers in the startup industry since we launched our survey.

We’re excited to read more responses as they come in! Fill out the survey here.

Our editorial coverage about growth marketing includes articles from the TechCrunch team, guest columns, and posts like “Use cohort analysis to drive smarter startup growth” by Jonathan Metrick on Extra Crunch.

Earlier this year, Apple officially discontinued Music Memos, an iPhone app that allowed musicians to quickly record audio and develop new song ideas. Now, a new startup called Tape It is stepping in to fill the void with an app that improves audio recordings by offering a variety of features, including higher-quality sound, automatic instrument detection, support for markers, notes, and images, and more.

The idea for Tape It comes from two friends and musicians, Thomas Walther and Jan Nash.

Walther had previously spent three and a half years at Spotify, following its 2017 acquisition of the audio detection startup Sonalytic, which he had co-founded. Nash, meanwhile, is a classically trained opera singer, who also plays bass and is an engineer.

They’re joined by designer and musician Christian Crusius, previously of the design consultancy Fjord, which was acquired by Accenture.

The founders, who had played in a band together for many years, were inspired to build Tape It because it was something they wanted for themselves, Walther says. After ending his stint at Spotify working in their new Soundtrap division (an online music startup Spotify also bought in 2017), he knew he wanted to work on a project that was more focused on the music-making side of things. But while Soundtrap worked for some, it wasn’t what either Walther or his friends had needed. Instead, they wanted a simple tool that would allow them to record their music with their phone — something that musicians often do today using Apple’s Voice Memos app and, briefly, Music Memos — until its demise.

Image Credits: Tape It

“Regardless of whether you’re an amateur or even like a touring professional…you will record your ideas with your phone, just because that’s what you have with you,” Walther explains. “It’s the exact same thing with cameras — the best camera is the one you have with you. And the best audio recording tool is the one you have with you.”

That is, when you want to record, the easiest thing to do is not to get out your laptop and connect a bunch of cables to it, then load up your studio software — it’s to hit the record button on your iPhone.

The Tape It app allows you to do just that, but adds other features that make it more competitive with its built-in competition, Voice Memos.

When you record using Tape It, the app leverages A.I. to automatically detect the instrument, then annotate the recording with a visual indication to make those recordings easier to find by looking for the colorful icon. Musicians can also add their own markers to the files right when they record them, then add notes and photos to remind themselves of other details. This can be useful when reviewing the recordings later on, Walther says.

Image Credits: Tape It

“If I have a nice guitar sound, I can just take a picture of the settings on my amplifier, and I have them. This is something musicians do all the time,” he notes. “It’s the easiest way to re-create that sound.”

Another novel, but simple, change in Tape It is that breaks longer recordings into multiple lines, similar to a paragraph of text. The team calls this the “Time Paragraph,” and believes it will make listening to longer sessions easier than the default — which is typically a single, horizontally scrollable recording.

Image Credits: Tape It

The app has also been designed so it’s easier to go back to the right part of recordings, thanks to its smart waveforms, in addition to the optional markers and photos. And you can mark recordings as favorites so you can quickly pull up a list of your best ideas and sounds. The app offers full media center integration as well, so you can play back your music whenever you have time.

However, the standout feature is Tape It’s support for “Stereo HD” quality. Here, the app takes advantage of the two microphones on devices like the iPhone XS, XR, and other newer models, then improves the sound using A.I. technology and other noise reduction techniques which it’s developed in-house. This feature is part of its $20 per year premium subscription.

Over time, Tape It intends to broaden its use of A.I. and other IP to improve the sound quality further. It also plans to introduce collaborative features and support for importing and exporting recordings into professional studio software. This could eventually place Tape It into the same market that SoundCloud had initially chased before it shifted its focus to becoming more of a consumer-facing service.

But first, Tape It wants to nail the single-user workflow before adding on more sharing features.

“We decided that it’s so important to make sure it’s useful, even just for you. The stuff that you can collaborate on — if you don’t like using it yourself, you’re not going to use it,” Walther says.

Tape It’s team of three is dually based in both Stockholm and Berlin and is currently bootstrapping.

The app itself is a free download on iOS and will later support desktop users on Mac and Windows. An Android version is not planned.

“Conversational AI” startup PolyAI, based out of London, has raised $14 million in a funding round led by Silicon Valley’s Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors (Point72 Ventures, Amadeus Capital, Sands Capital Ventures, Passion Capital and Entrepreneur First). This follows their $12m Series A, and will provide resources for further US expansion beyond its existing US team. The startup has now raised $28m to date.

PolyAI builds and deploys voice assistants for automating customer services, which, claims the startup, sound like real humans. This helps companies get an infinite and cheaper supply of their best human voice operators, which reduces customer waiting times, and increases customer satisfaction and retention, says the company.

Co-founder Dr Nikola Mrkšić said: “The technical term for our technology is ‘multi-turn conversational AI’, but all the caller has to do is talk to it, like they would to a human. Compared to existing call centers, our assistants can boost customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores by up to 40% and reduce handling times by up to five minutes.”

“We build these systems very quickly (relative to the competition) — we get experiences like these up and running in 2-4 weeks thanks to our transformer-based language understanding models and the underlying dialog management platform,” he added.

In a statement, Vinod Khosla said: “PolyAI is one of the first AI companies using the newest generation of large pre-trained deep learning models (akin to BERT and GPT-3) in a real-world enterprise product. This means they can deploy automated AI agents in as little as two weeks, where incumbent providers of voice assistants would take up to six months to deploy an older version of this technology.”

A spinout from the University of Cambridge, PolyAI says it is is effectively ’pushing at an open door’ as the pandemic has led to staffing shortages in call centers, driving more companies to deploy smart voice assistants, which appear not to have been replaced chatbots at all, as consumer generally prefer to speak than type.

“We were expecting the system to handle 40% of calls, but at launch it handled 80%, and within two weeks it was up to 87%,” said Brian Jeppesen of Landry’s Golden Nugget Hotels & Casinos. “Callers think the AI agent is human”, Jeppesen continued, “which is great because the voice assistant never has a bad day, and is on 24/7. I wish I could hire more agents like that!”

Competitors include Nuance (recently acquired by Microsoft), IPSoft, Interactions, SmartAction, and Replicant. But PolyAI says its voice assistant can be turned live more quickly, in more languages, and charges on a per-minute basis.

Founded by Nikola Mrkšić (CEO), Tsung-Hsien Wen (CTO), Pei-Hao Su (Engineering Director), the three met while doing PhDs with Professor Steve Young, a leader in spoken dialog systems who pioneered many technologies that underpin voice assistants like Siri, Google Assistant, and Alexa.

Recent PolyAI clients include Landry’s Entertainment, Greene King, Starling Bank, and Viasat. 

When you’re in the mood for a pep talk, who better to turn to than a well-networked, optimistic mentor who is naturally in your corner? That friendly shoulder is the role that “Masters of Scale” wants to play.

Inspired by LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman’s hit podcast, the new book, co-authored by Hoffman along with podcast executive producers June Cohen and Deron Triff, came out this week. Riddled with anecdotes and actionable takeaways, the book’s strength is wholly related to the sheer diversity of entrepreneurs that are represented in the text. Beyond sticking to tech leaders, the book draws lessons from Spanx founder Sara Blakely, Starbucks founder Howard Schultz and Union Square Hospitality Group CEO Daniel Meyer. Like any good mentor, the book is realistic. Mentors know you aren’t Bumble’s Whitney Wolfe Herd or Airbnb’s Brian Chesky yet, but can extract universally applicable lessons from those leaders so that you can relate to them.

While press wasn’t a main character in the book, “Master of Scale” has already changed my perspective on how I interview founders. Lessons from Tristan Walker made me want to ask more questions about founders, and their most controversial beliefs, rather than how they plan to spend their new round of funding. A note from Andrés Ruzo made me realize that a startup that makes too much sense might be a comfortable read, but it might not be a moonshot that disrupts the world; in other words, pursue the startups that have too much seemingly foolish ambition — because they may be where the best strides, and stories, are made. Finally, it confirmed my belief that the best litmus test for a founder is if they are willing to talk about the hardships ahead of them in an honest, humble way.

Through every feel-good story, I waited for the pandemic to be addressed. The pandemic’s impact on startup advice was largely isolated to a single chapter about the art of the pivot. Instead of interspersing advice on how to deal with the pandemic’s impact on venture capital, funding and markets more broadly, the book limited its references to the cataclysmic event. This choice keeps the advice smartly evergreen. That said, I felt like the book’s choice to not talk much about the ugly within startupland creates an imbalance of sorts. It would have benefitted from talking directly about divisive dynamics, ranging from how WeWork’s Adam Neumann impacted the way we talk about visionary founders, Brian Armstrong’s Coinbase memo and what it means for startup culture, or even the role of the tech press today. One could argue that the book never claims to be journalistic, and instead wanted to play the role of a cheerleading mentor, not a cynical one.

Writing a book based on a hit podcast isn’t necessarily a walk in the park. Audio is an entirely different medium from written text, and it takes a certain finesse to translate into text the charisma and humility of vocal banter. Hoffman and the authors thus certainly shine brighter in some stories than others, leaning heavily on a repeated, yet effective storytelling arc throughout the text: introduce problem, present aha moment, offer solutions and share universal lessons.

I read the book over a weekend; I recommend the same move for any aspiring entrepreneur, techie or startup journalist looking to pick up a copy. Reid and the coauthors will do a fantastic job connecting the dots of over 70 entrepreneurs for you, but the real magic will come from what happens when you pause in between the stories — either to Google a founder you resonate with, to change up your interview style or to finally start working on the idea you one day may just blitzscale.

Farmland as an asset class has proven itself to be a stable investment decade after decade. Farmland’s negative correlation with the Dow Jones Industrial Average sits at an eye-popping -43% for a three-year hold period, making it an excellent hedge against market volatility.

The asset has also been a steady appreciator since 1987, when institutional investors began incorporating farmland into their portfolios. Equally, investments into sustainably managed farmland have the potential to transform agriculture from one of the largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions to one of the largest carbon sinks.

However, while farmland is among the oldest investment classes around, the average investor hasn’t had access to farmland the way that billionaires and institutional investors have.

Revolutions in fintech and a host of startups are changing this.

Why farmland?

COVID-19 affected the world in ways we couldn’t have predicted, and the markets were no exception. The S&P 500 plummeted in mid-March and shed 34% of its pre-COVID peak value. But unlike past crises, the index rebounded just a month later.

This doesn’t mean that financial markets have fully recovered, however. We’ve seen plenty of volatility since, both in the form of rallies and losses. This has caused many investors to move some of their portfolio out of equities.

This is where farmland entered the discussion.

Image Credits: FarmTogether (opens in a new window)

A historically stable asset class

Wild stock market fluctuations existed well before COVID-19. The latest era of volatility began in 2018 and continued even as the economy grew prior to the pandemic. Given the unpredictability of the equities market, investors need to counterbalance what’s in store for stocks and funds.

The U.S. produces more new startups and unicorns each year than any other country in the world, but 90% of startups fail, with cash flow often being a major challenge.

Entrepreneurs trying to raise funding for their new businesses are faced with a maze of options, with most taking the common route of equity rounds. There’s clearly a lot of venture money to be raised — and most tech entrepreneurs happily take it in exchange for equity. This works for some, but too often founders find themselves diluting their equity to unrecoverable portions rather than considering other financing options that allow them to hold on to their company — options like debt capital.

Despite the VC flurries of 2020 creating an ecosystem of seemingly endless equity, it’s important for entrepreneurs and founders to understand that there is no one-size-fits-all model for raising capital. Debt capital, which refers to capital raised by taking out a loan, is an alternative route that entrepreneurs should consider.

Understanding the real cost of venture debt and when it makes more sense than the traditional equity route relies on an understanding of what you and your company hope to achieve.

Understanding your goals

We mainly see two kinds of startups today: Those that want to try something new, and the ones that focus on making things faster, cheaper or simpler. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are good examples of the first kind — social media didn’t exist before the internet. Discount airlines, cell phones (not smartphones) and integrated circuits are good examples of the “faster, cheaper, simpler” variety, because they simply displaced familiar incumbents.

Many entrepreneurs are eager to be the next “try something new” success story, and I applaud them for feeling that way. Carving out your own market is a fast-track to entrepreneurial stardom if you’re successful. But unless your main goal is to be famous, it’s often impractical and distracting.

People tend to think that category creation is less risky than incumbent disruption. However, as long as you’re truly faster, cheaper and simpler, patience and strategy can propel you to where you want to be.

Just as there are different market approaches, there are a number of funding strategies that work best for your goals. Landing investments from leading VC firms has benefits and is a good avenue to opt for if you’re a young startup carving out a market and in need of validation and experience. These firms bring trusted advisers that are laser-focused on growth and have the resources and experience to navigate the murky waters of category creation.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has reacted strongly to the company’s current relationship with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. According to him, the SEC is threatening to sue the cryptocurrency exchange if it launches its yield-generating product called Coinbase Lend.

With this new product, Coinbase wants to compete with popular decentralized finance (DeFi) products, such as Compound and Aave. The company wants to operate a lending pool focused on USD Coin (USDC), a stablecoin that is pegged to USD.

If the company manages to launch Coinbase Lend, users will be able to contribute to the lending pool by sending crypto assets to Coinbase Lend. Eventually, the company plans to lend out those crypto assets. What Coinbase users get in exchange to contributing to the lending pool is high interests. Coinbase promises 4% APY on its preview page.

According to Brian Armstrong, the company reached out to the SEC before releasing it. “They responded by telling us this lend feature is a security,” he said on Twitter.

“They refuse to tell us why they think it’s a security, and instead subpoena a bunch of records from us (we comply), demand testimony from our employees (we comply), and then tell us they will be suing us if we proceed to launch, with zero explanation as to why,” he added.

Coinbase’s Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal also wrote about the events on the company’s blog. It appears that the company decided to move forward and pre-announce the new feature despite the SEC saying that Coinbase’s Lend program is a security.

“The SEC told us they consider Lend to involve a security, but wouldn’t say why or how they’d reached that conclusion. Rather than get discouraged, we chose to continue taking things slowly. In June, we announced our Lend program publicly and opened a waitlist but did not set a public launch date,” Paul Grewal wrote.

Here’s a pro tip for entrepreneurs reading this post. If the SEC tells you that you can’t launch something, don’t put up a waitlist with the words ‘coming soon’.

To no one’s surprise, Coinbase says that the SEC decided to open a formal investigation after that. One employee also had to spend a day with the SEC to answer questions.

“They asked for documents and written responses, and we willingly provided them. They also asked for us to provide a corporate witness to give sworn testimony about the program. As a result, one of our employees spent a full day in August providing complete and transparent testimony about Lend,” Grewal wrote.

As a result, Coinbase is now mad and has chosen to launch a PR campaign against the SEC. Brian Armstrong’s main argument is that other companies have been offering lending pools already, so there’s no reason why some companies can offer such a product and not Coinbase.

“Meanwhile, plenty of other crypto companies continue to offer a lend feature, but Coinbase is somehow not allowed to,” he tweeted.

This is a risky strategy as Coinbase could end up alienating the crypto ecosystem at large. There could be increased scrutiny on DeFi and industry-wide enforcement of stricter rules, as Sar Haribhakti pointed out.

“Ostensibly the SEC’s goal is to protect investors and create fair markets. So who are they protecting here and where is the harm? People seem pretty happy to be earning yield on these various products, across lots of other crypto companies,” Brian Armstrong said.

If you read the fine print, Coinbase doesn’t protect investors with its Lend program. Here’s what it says at the bottom of the Coinbase Lend page: “Lend is not a high-yield USD savings account, and Coinbase is not a bank. Your loaned crypto is not protected by FDIC or SIPC insurance.”

That’s not very reassuring for investors. At some point, Coinbase and the SEC will have to sit at the same table to discuss crypto lending products because a tweetstorm won’t solve the issue.

Twitter is a useful place for following breaking news and keeping up with what the people you’re already interested in are doing, but its relative dearth of discovery features and a lack of organized community spaces make it pretty hard to connect with anyone you aren’t actively seeking out.

The company is thinking about changing that. Twitter is on a tear with new features lately and its latest experiment, called Communities, is designed to make it easier to connect around shared interests. Users will be able to join these new social hubs and tweet directly to other people with shared interests rather than their regular group of followers. Those tweets will still be public, but replies will be limited to other community members.

Communities will be user-generated, though Twitter says that will be “limited,” for now, so most people will have to wait a few months before starting their own groups. The earliest Communities will center around popular and generally benign topics on Twitter including “dogs, weather, sneakers, skincare, and astrology.” Twitter’s example images also include cryptocurrency, plants and Black women photographers.

The test begins Wednesday and will show up in a dedicated spot at the bottom of the iOS app or in the side menu on Twitter.com. Twitter says that Android users will be able to read Community tweets too, though “more functionality” is on the way soon — presumably a dedicated app tab and the ability to join and participate in the new groups.

Communities will be created and maintained by designated moderators, who will have the ability to invite other users to the group via DM and remove content posted within the group. Initially invites will be the only way into a Community, but it sounds like Twitter has some grand plans for discovery features that make it easier for people to find places they might want to hang out.

“Some conversations aren’t for everyone, just the people who want to talk about the thing you want to talk about,” Twitter Staff Product Manager David Regan wrote in a blog post announcing the feature. “… We want to continue to support public conversation and help people find Communities that match their interests, while also creating a more intimate space for conversation.”

With any user-driven community space on social media — particularly one where algorithmic discovery factors in — moderation is the big concern. Twitter says that anyone will be able to read, report and quote content posted in a Community, so you don’t have to be a member of a community to flag harmful content like you would in a private Facebook group. Twitter says that it is working on “new reporting flows, and bespoke enforcement actions” to proactively identify problem Communities.

The introduction of Communities pairs well with Twitter’s recent efforts to court creator communities. The company rolled out Super Follows, its paid subscription tool, earlier this month and also recently invited some users to sell tickets for audio rooms with Ticketed Spaces. It’s also testing one-time payments with a feature called Tip Jar that’s currently only available for a subset of accounts.

Communities are a pretty big departure for Twitter, which is obviously in the throes of reimagining the platform as a more dynamic place for community building. By carving out substantial space for subcommunities on Twitter, the company seems to be inching in the direction of a platform like Discord or Reddit, where everything revolves around self-moderating interest-based communities. Those platforms grapple with their own moderation headaches, but specific, interest-driven communities invite users to go deep in a way that makes interactions on Twitter look shallow by comparison.

The introduction of Communities is an interesting direction for a prominent social network that’s remained largely unchanged for more than a decade at this point. If the test sticks, Communities could build connective tissue between users and make the social network generally a more dynamic place to hang out — but that’s only possible if Twitter can strike the right balance between encouraging its newly imagined subcommunities to grow and keeping them safe.

The travel industry was one of the hardest hit by the pandemic, and startup Headout was no exception. A marketplace that let tourists make same-day bookings for tours, events and activities, the app expanded around the world after launching in 2015. Then COVID-19 hit.

But business is growing again thanks to rebounds in domestic travel and Headout claims it has grown 800% since January 2021. The company announced today it has raised $12 million led by Glade Brook Capital, which has also invested in marketplaces like Airbnb, Meituan, Uber and Instacart. The round included participation from returning investors Version One Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, FJ Labs, 500 Startups, Haystack and Ludlow Ventures, and new investors Espresso Capital and Practical VC. 

Headout says it reached profitable EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) in July. The new funding will be used to expand into 300 cities, product development and its product, business, marketing and operations teams. Headout plans to hire more than 150 employees around the world and is also looking for opportunities to acqui-hire travel and entertainment startups. 

This represents a massive turnaround from the beginning of the pandemic. In an email, co-founder and chief executive officer Varun Khona told TechCrunch “the pandemic was devastating as you’d imagine. Our business went from doing $250M+ to negligible scale in a matter of weeks.” 

But as travel gradually resumes, Headout identified “two massive tailwinds.” The first is an unprecedented demand for domestic travel. The second are travel experience providers who are digitizing for the first time. The company began focusing on domestic tourism in the last quarter of 2020. It’s seeing the highest demand in places with relatively high vaccination rates, like the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and the United Arab Emirates. 

“To win this space, we prioritized onboarding new experiences that are more diverse, local and niche to attract domestic travelers. We standardized these room and pop experience providers, upgraded their services and brought them online,” said Khona. “In conjunction, we worked hard on making Headout available in local languages—not just with machine translation but by actually ensuring we create content that is compelling and inspiring.” For example, 85% of bookings in Spain are sold in Spanish. 

When asked how Headout differentiates from other on-demand booking marketplaces, Khona said in 2018 it evolved from a traditional listings oriented marketplace, like Booking.com, to a “more managed marketplace” by standardizing, upgrading and branding experiences to ensure consistent quality. This increased conversion rates, which in turn “helped us provide more sales to our partners and hence command a higher take rate,” leading to profitable unit economics. 

It’s been a wildly unprecedented year and a half by any metric. The pandemic has utterly transformed many industries and made or broken others. In the world of technology, however, few categories were as well positioned to embrace a changed world than connected fitness.

The space was well on its way prior to the arrival of COVID-19, of course, and Peloton was largely seen as the tip of that spear. Founded in 2012, the company’s connected stationary bicycles have redefined the landscape for home workouts, through instructor-led live courses.

Demand for Peloton’s growing selection of fitness equipment saw a sharp spike as gyms all over the world shut down for indefinite periods, leaving many stuck at home to reimagine their workout experience.

But the period arrived with its share of challenges for Peloton’s executives. Increased demand saw the company battling supply chain issues, while in May, its treadmills were met with a pair of recalls over injury concerns.

On September 21-23 at Disrupt, Peloton CEO John Foley and Chief Content Office Jennifer Cotter will join us to discuss the company’s rise and successes and struggles amid the pandemic.

Foley is the former CEO of Evite.com and Pronto.com, and former president of BarnesandNoble.com. He co-founded Peloton in June 2012 and has served as CEO since its inception. Cotter joined the company in 2019 to oversee Peloton’s streaming content. Her background in television programming includes stints at the Home Shopping Network and Oxygen Media.

Foley and Cotter join a growing list of great guests, including Canva CEO Melanie Perkins, investor Chamath Palihapitiya, Calendly CEO Tope Awotona and Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. Get your ticket for less than $100 for a limited time!