Author: azeeadmin

The new, Los Angeles-based online professional network for Black talent, Valence, has launched a new initiative called the Valence Funding Network to link Black entrepreneurs with top partners at firms including Accel, Sequoia, GGV, First Round Capital, Bessemer Ventures, Greylock, Upfrton Ventures, and Collab Capital.

“For years, Black entrepreneurs have been told that Silicon Valley is a meritocracy, but at the same time most haven’t had access to the top networks, the warm introductions, and the mentorship that underpin lasting success in tech. Valence is upending this completely by bringing the top VCs to compete for the best Black entrepreneurs.”  said Valence co-founder, Kobie Fuller, who also works as a general partner at Upfront Ventures. “We want to even the playing field with the goal of exponentially growing the number of Black-owned startups that get funded.”

Founded in November 2019, Valence is a still-small professional network that provides opportunities for Black entrepreneurs and professionals to connect with peers and mentors. So far, the company has a user base of around eight thousand members, but is growing rapidly, according to Fuller.

That growth may be boosted by the new initiative with investors. Through the Valence Funding Network Black founders and would-be founders have the opportunity to receive direct pitch coaching and mentorship from general partners and partners at some of the nation’s top venture firms. In all, the 26 firms who have committed to working with the Funding Network represent over $60 billion in assets under management.

Some of the participating firms and investors include:

• 645 Ventures — Nnamdi Okike
• Accel — Rich Wong
• Base10 — Ade Ajao
• Bessemer — Elliott Robinson
• Capital G — Gene Frantz
• Collab Capital — Jewel Burks
• Concrete Rose — Sean Mendy
• Defy Partners — Neil Sequiera
• Equal Ventures — Richard Kerby
• First Round — Josh Kopelman
• Forerunner — Brian O’Malley
• Foundry — Brad Feld
• General Catalyst — Peter Boyce
• GGV — Hans Tung
• Greylock — Sarah Guo
• High Alpha — Scott Dorsey
• Lightspeed — Mercedes Bent
• Lux — Deena Shakir
• Outlander — Paige Craig
• Precursor — Charles Hudson
• Redpoint — Annie Kadavy
• Sequoia — Jess Lee
• Sinai Ventures — Jordan Fudge
• Spark Capital — Nabeel Hyatt
• Techsquare Labs — Paul Judge
• Union Square — Rebecca Kaden
• Upfront — Kobie Fuller

As Valence noted in a press release, Black founders have been historically disenfranchised by the venture capital community. Only 1 percent of venture-funded startup founders are Black and the company believes that this underrepresentation contributes to America’s racial wealth gap, which sees roughly 13 percent of the United States population, holding less than 3 percent of the nation’s total wealth. It’s Valence’s mission to change this that statistic. 

Along with its new venture capital initiative, the company has also named a new chief executive officer, Guy Primus, the former chief executive of the Virtual Reality Company, an LA-based VR production studio. Primus also serves on the board of trustees of Southern California Public Radio, where he leads the strategic planning committee and is past chairman of the advisory board at Georgia Tech’s top-ranked school of Industrial and systems engineering. 

“Facilitating success in the innovation economy is key to Valence’s mission. By creating the Valence Funding Network, we are eliminating one of the most formidable structural obstacles to success—the access to venture investors.” said Guy Primus, Valence’s new CEO. “Our mission has come into focus even more clearly. This moment in America is an urgent one and I feel called to help bring the Valence mission to life. 2020 has showcased how important it is for Black professionals to have as many financial and professional resources as possible. 

The coronavirus pandemic has bruised and battered many technology startups, but it has also boosted a small few. One such company is Zoom, which has shouldered the task of keeping us connected to one another in the midst of remote work and social distancing.

So, of course, we’re absolutely thrilled to have the chance to chat with Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yuan at Disrupt 2020 online.

Yuan moved to Silicon Valley in 1997 after being rejected for a work visa nine times. He got a job at WebEx and, upon the company’s acquisition by Cisco, became VP of Engineering at the company. He pitched an idea for a mobile-friendly video conferencing system that was rejected by his higher-ups.

And thus, Zoom was born.

Zoom launched in 2011 and quickly became one of the biggest teleconferencing platforms in the world, competing with the likes of Google and Cisco. The company has investors like Emergence, Horizon Ventures, and Sequoia, and ultimately filed to go public in 2019.

With some of the most reliable video conferencing software on the market, a tiered pricing structure that’s friendly to average users and massive enterprises alike, and a lively ecosystem of apps and bots on the Zoom App Marketplace, Zoom was well poised to be a public company. In fact, Zoom popped 81 percent in its first day of trading on the Nasdaq, garnering a valuation of $16 billion at the time.

But few could have prepared the company for the explosive growth it would see in 2020.

The coronavirus pandemic necessitated access to a reliable and user-friendly video conferencing software for everyone, not just companies moving to remote work. People used Zoom for family dinners, cocktail hours with friends, first dates, and religious gatherings.

In fact, Zoom reported 300 million daily active participants in April.

But that growth led to increased scrutiny of the business and the product. The company was beset by security issues and had to pause product innovation to focus its energy on resolving those issues.

We’ll talk to Yuan about the growing pains the company went through, his plans for Zoom’s future, the acceleration in changing user behavior, and more.

It’ll be a conversation you won’t want to miss.

Disrupt 2020 runs from September 14 to September 18, and the show will be completely virtual. That means it’s easier than ever to attend and engage with the show. There are just a few Digital Pro Passes left at the $245 price – once they are gone, prices will increase. Discounts are available for current students and non-profit/government employees. Or if you are a founder you can exhibit and be able to generate leads even before the event kicks off at your virtual booth for $445. Get your tickets today.

Picture the drive to work you used to make every day before the COVID-19 pandemic struck — the same route, the same time and the same old billboards on the side of the freeway. Your drive to work isn’t about discovering new products or services, so in theory, you wouldn’t care about the dental offices, lawyers or whatever else that billboard is promoting.

But when there comes a day when your tooth aches and your insurance no longer covers your old provider, you might end up calling the number on that billboard after seeing it hundreds of times. That’s the billboard effect.

Digital marketing has largely left billboards in the dust, making it far easier to reach any of the billions of people online. But that doesn’t mean brands should be ignoring the principles that made billboards work in the first place.

Over the last five years, I’ve helped clients implement those principles by running video ads and have, for instance, helped a family lawyer in Joliet, Illinois book 130 phone calls with $1,000 in advertising spend with the strategy. Here’s how it works from start to finish.

The key to optimizing phone calls: Don’t link your website

While many brands already see the value in video marketing, most still don’t know how to go about making an effective video without having to hire an expensive video production company. Remember, the video doesn’t have to be a high-production project; it just has to get the message across to the right audience and give people a way to learn more.

Videos generally have three components:

Frank Patterson, president and CEO of Pinewood Atlanta Studios, said that in March, his studio was “utterly full” with two major films and three streaming shows in production. (Pinewood doesn’t disclose what’s currently shooting on its 1 million-plus square feet of studio and office space, but past films made at the Atlanta studio include “Ant-Man and the Wasp” and “Avengers: Endgame.”)

Of course, that all came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the months since, industry groups — including a task force with members from a variety of Hollywood guilds and unions— have been putting together guidelines for how production can resume safely, with recommendations on everything from meal times (which should be staggered, with individually wrapped food) to crowd scenes (which should be minimized).

Patterson said he’s been working with the guilds and the studios to figure out Pinewood Atlanta’s reopening. At the same time, he said he didn’t want to simply “follow along,” but also to develop plans and safety measures of his own.

“To be honest, we were nervous that there was no known roadmap here,” he said. “Nobody has dealt with this in the movie business before.”

Today, the studio is announcing new safety measures that fall into three broad categories — security, facilities improvements and best practices and protocols. Patteron said that on the security front, Pinewood Atlanta was already “one of the most studio lots in the world” (after all, Marvel is very protective of its secrets), but it’s now upgraded everything including its badging systems, and it will be limiting access to only essential cast and crew.

Image Credits: Pinewood Atlanta Studios

In order to test everyone entering its facilities, Pinewood Atlanta is also partnering with BioIQ, which will be providing the testing kits and overseeing the testing process.

On the facilities side, Patterson said improvements include “obvious things” like protective equipment and handwashing stations, but also technology created by Synexis that pumps dry hydrogen peroxide into the air to reduce viruses and other germs in the air. A similar solution was already been used by the Tampa Bay Rays to disinfect the air in their clubhouse.

“What this does is, it inejcts dry hydrogen peroxide into the air,” Patterson said. “If you sneeze — this is how it works for [Major League Baseball] — if you sneeze, it kills it instantly on contact.”

Along with the new facilities, there will be a broader array of best practices — like using smaller sets and crews — that Pinewood will be working with the production teams to implement.

None of this, of course, can reduce the risk of disease to zero. As Patterson put it, when his team started investigating possible technologies, “We want to find out: What is the best solution? Well it turns out, there is no such thing.” Instead, they tried to answer the question: “What is the best we can do to keep people as safe as possible?”

And it sounds like movie and TV studios preparing to resume production, particularly as movie theaters reopen and streaming services eagerly await new content. Patterson predicted that construction of new sets could begin in July, with actual shooting resuming in mid-August.

“There’s no doubt that for all our planning, [production is] going take longer,” Patterson said. “In the process, it’s going to cost more money. There’s no choice on this. We have to keep people safe.”

Entrepreneurs-turned-investors are in a truly unique position in the tech world, with experience on both sides of the table and unique insights into how businesses should operate and grow.

Alexa von Tobel takes that breadth of experience and those unique insights to a new level, as a founder who has pretty much exclusively started her ventures in the midst of a recession. So it should come as no surprise that we’re absolutely amped to be sitting down (virtually, of course) with von Tobel for an episode of Extra Crunch Live today at 11am PT/2pm ET. (Full details after the jump.)

LearnVest was founded by von Tobel in 2006, just before the crash of ’08, and was poised to grow voraciously due to the economic landscape of the time. The personal finance platform raised a total of $72 million over the following years and was ultimately acquired by Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance in 2015.

In 2019, von Tobel launched Inspired Capital, a $200 million early-stage firm that has invested in Chief, Finix, SnackPass and Rho Business Banking.

And here we are, in the midst of yet another recession with some 30 million people out of a job due primarily to the coronavirus pandemic.

Von Tobel says that, in times of economic uncertainty like these, startups have a real opportunity to disrupt and accelerate.

We’ll chat with von Tobel about how she’s advising her portfolio companies right now, the biggest lessons she’s learned throughout her career, her thoughts on how tech can improve diversity and inclusion efforts in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, and which trends and sectors she’s most interested in pursuing right now.

Extra Crunch members will be able to ask their own questions during the conversation, so if you’re not already an Extra Crunch member, make sure you do that before we go live.

von Tobel joins a stellar group of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Sequoia’s Roelof Botha, Eventbrite’s Julia Hartz, BLCK VC’s Sydney Sykes, Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra, Cowboy VC’s Aileen Lee and Ted Wang, and Plaid’s Zach Perret.

You can check out the complete library of episodes here.

We look forward to seeing you in the chat!

Details:

NASA is working with two other of its largest global space agency partners, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on a combined effort to collect satellite-based Earth observation data and provide it via a dashboard in order to help monitor the impacts of COVID-19. The dashboard combines data collected by Earth observation satellites operated by each of the agencies, which monitor photographic, air quality, temperature, climate and other indicators.

The COVID-19 Earth Observation Data provides views into changes globally in water quality, climate change, economic activity and also agriculture. It’s intended to provide policymakers, health authorities, city planners and others with key information that they can use to study both short- and long-term impacts of the ongoing global COVID-19 crisis, which is definitely changing the way that cities and the people within them work and live.

The agencies involved in the project formed a project for the purposes of building this in April, so it came together rather quickly for a cross-agency, international collaboration. Data so far indicates significant changes, including positive environmental ones around air and water quality due to decreased activity – but also significant slowdowns in key economic activity including shipping activity in ports, the number of cars in shopping mall parking lots, and more.

While the project is specifically intended to provide data around COVID-19 and its impacts, and the current plan only includes the pandemic within its scope, on a call discussing the initiative, ESA Director of Earth Observation Programmes Josef Aschbacher said that the agencies are already considering whether to extend he dashboard beyond the scope of COVID-19 since it could be useful in addressing any number of global-scale problems that we collectively face.

NASA is getting ready for its Artemis program, which seeks to return Americans to the Moon and help establish a permanent presence for humans on the lunar surface, with a new crowdsourcing competition launched in partnership with HeroX, seeking designs for a better way for astronauts to pee and poo on the Moon. Specifically, the competition seeks “innovative designs for fully capable, low mass toilets that can be used both in space and on the Moon.”

The challenge is open to anyone in the “global community of innovators,” and will span eight weeks, with up to $35,000 in prizes available to the competitors winners. Surprisingly, this isn’t actually the first time that NASA has enlisted the power of the crowd, and HeroX’s crowdsourcing platform, to come up with innovative technology around human waste management: its Space Poop challenge from 2016 garnered a lot of attention and awarded a total of $30,000 to three winners.

That competition focused on designing a system specifically for use by fully space-suited astronauts, which is quite different from the toilet designs sought for this challenge, which will be able to be used by astronauts when they’re out of their big, bulky EVA suits during the trip to the Moon within the Artemis landers that astronauts will be using to return to the lunar surface. NASA notes that while the agency already has microgravity toilets that work perfectly well in use on the International Space Station, the low gravity conditions of the Moon will require different designs, and also the nature of the trip to the Moon mean that they’ll be looking for smaller, more power efficient designs – since when you’re launching a self-contained spaceship, every ounce and every watt of power used matters a great deal.

NASA isn’t fully relying on the crowd to come up with unique and innovative space toilet designs, of course. It’s already working on miniaturization of existing versions in-house. But the agency wants to open this up to outside academics, researchers, designers and engineers because they’re hoping that fresh perspective from outside the aerospace industry can help them see potential solutions that otherwise wouldn’t have occurred to people used to working in the field.

This morning Hopin, a London-based startup building virtual events technology, announced that it has raised a $40 million Series A led by IVP. According to the company, Salesforce’s corporate venture arm Salesforce Ventures also took part in the round, as did a number of its prior investors, including Slack’s venture capital group the Slack Fund, European venture groups Seedcamp and Northzone, and US-based Accel.

The round comes after Hopin had raised relatively modest capital before, including a $6.5 million round in February of this year.

Hopin is busy scaling. The company has seen its employee base grow from eight to sixty this year, and targets 200 by the end of 2020, according to CEO Johnny Boufarhat. The firm is staffing up as usage of its technology expands, with the “number of monthly attendees of events” hosted using its technology growing from 16,000 in March — when COVID-19 lockdowns were accelerating — to 175,000 in May, according to the company.

That’s the sort of growth that venture capitalists flock to, checkbooks in hand. Even better, Hopin’s current marketing costs are around zero, as there’s simply more groups that want to host events on the company’s platform than it can handle.

Why does a virtual event technology provider have a bottleneck? “Hopin is a venue,” Boufarhat told TechCrunch in an interview, meaning that its customers need support to make sure things go well when they use the software. If a piece of business technology hiccups for a few minutes, Boufarhat explained, citing CRM as an example, it’s not the end of the world. If a Hopin instance has issues, he explained, 1,000 people could be impacted, causing them to judge both the hosting group and his company.

Hopin’s technology allows events to recreate the traditional in-person conference, online. This includes features that allow hosts to have digital equivalents of real-world event locations and activities, like expo centers, various stages, and networking capabilities. This mirroring of an IRL get-together, online, could make digital events more attractive to attendees who have become accustomed to a certain method of congregating.

A history of growth

Hopin first raised money in October of 2019, during a period of rapid expansion. According to Boufarhat, his startup was seeing about 60% growth, month-to-month. At that time the company was operating with reduced entry, only accepting a portion of market demand. After the October round was complete, the business kept growing, allowing it to collect more data on its product and how it was used.

That information led to its February, 2020 Seed round. Back then the company was seeing revenue scale roughly along with expenses, allowing it to be “nearly profitable” during the period, according to its CEO. For venture capitalists, seeing a company with more demand than it can handle grow, while also not losing much — if any — money is attractive.

Hopin’s quick round in early 2020 then was not a surprise. The same confluence of factors, including usage growth and revenue expansion, are also what came together for its most-recent Series A.

COVID-19 was an accelerant for Hopin, it appears. As the pandemic spread, the company realized that companies were going to switch from in-person events to webinars, which, in its view, aren’t great. So, it moved to make Hopin more available, earlier, than planned.

Now with more money than it has had to-date, Hopin can likely accelerate its hiring, and onboard more clients than before. That means more virtual events, and more revenue for the company. It will be interesting to see how the company’s gross margins shape up over time, and what percent of the events that it helps host recur. If the margins are good, and events periodic, the firm could argue for a SaaS multiple long-term.

Ahead

Looking towards the future, it will be interesting to see how the company approaches the realm of digital worlds, and if there’s space in its current model for more VR-style experiences. And there are other questions in the distance, including what happens when a vaccine is eventually found for COVID-19? Do events go back to normal, or do they wind up splitting the IRL-online divide, giving Hopin and similar companies a place in conferences for good?

Firms like Teeoh and even Eventbrite also want a piece the virtual event market, so Hopin won’t have a walkover. That said, there’s little indication yet that virtual event hosting will be a single-winner category. Given the sheer TAM of the events world, there’s probably room for several.

How quickly Hopin raises again should give us our next signal regarding the pace of its growth. More when we have it.

Storyblocks, the subscription-based stock media service, today announced that it has been acquired by private equity firm Great Hill Partners. The firm previously backed companies like Wayfair (and then exited that specific investment in 2017) and Custom Ink. Great Hill also acquired Gizmodo Media Group in 2019. Storyblocks and Great Hill did not disclose the price of the acquisition.

Storyblocks was founded in 2009 and raised about $18.5 million since its launch. Over the years, it went through a few changes. Its early focus was on video content and until 2017, it operated under the VideoBlocks moniker (before that, it was FootageFirm). The company’s focus was always on its buffet-style subscription service, though it also offered an “a la carte” marketplace for one-time purchases. Only a small fraction of users actually bought from the marketplace, so last year, it doubled down on its subscription library.

“Our mission was really all about this idea of affordability and access,” Storyblocks CEO TJ Leonard told me ahead of today’s announcement. “That’s core to our DNA. It always will be. But as we look to the future, we see ourselves supporting our customers across their entire workflow as they work to keep up with the content demand of their audience. You wrap all that together and it felt like the moment was right to take the next step. Update, North Atlantic Capital, QED [Investors] — all of our early investors — have done an awesome job supporting the business over the last eight years to help us get to this point. But Great Hill brings a track record — and I think an expertise — that is perfect for this next stage for us.”

Leonard, who just like the rest of the team is staying on, noted that Storyblocks is profitable and wasn’t actively trying to raise any capital to sustain its business or looking for an exit. Instead, he argued, this sale was simply a logical progression.

“We’ve long felt that even though the business is more than ten years old, there’s still a lot of chapters left in our story. We’re really excited to continue to chase them down,” he said. “And we’ve said all along that if we were going to find a new partner, our first criteria was that they needed to believe in the same mission and vision that we had, they needed to believe the same market opportunity that we saw — and they needed to feel like we had the right model and the right team to go take advantage of that opportunity. As we got to know Great Hill better, it was clear that we were really well aligned across all those important points.”

He also noted that he tends to think of Great Hill as “a growth-oriented private equity investor, almost a growth equity investor masquerading with a private equity structure” given that the firm tends to acquire companies but then also often spins them out again. “All of our conversations have been oriented around how do we change what’s working today and accelerate it. How do we take our long term strategic growth plan that sets certain goals over the next five years and accomplish them in three,” he said.

Storyblocks will continue to operate as usual and continue to invest in its content libraries, Leonard told me. COVID-19 only made the demand for stock footage go up (Storyblocks now sees twice as many downloads per week compared to the start of 2020), but the company was already seeing a growing demand for its service before the pandemic, in large parts because the demand for video content only continues to increase.

“This doesn’t feel like an ending. It feels like we have a lot of good work to do,” said Leonard. “It feels like in a lot of ways, the market is just kind of catching up to what we’ve believed since our founding, which is that if you can help people create more high-quality video content, do it at an affordable price, do it in a way that saves them time, then there’s a huge opportunity out there.”

New Enterprise Associates has launched a new investment initiative with the Hollywood talent agency Creative Artists Agency.

The new partnership, called Connect Ventures, said it will identify and accelerate the growth of early-stage, consumer-focused businesses formed in the wake of the global pandemic.

In a world where everything is a commodity and nothing is more commoditized than influence, the merger of these two entities — one which develops technology platforms, the other which tries to make money from the celebrities that have capitalized on those platforms and the whole attention economy — makes total sense (in an ‘everything is a dumpster fire and there are over 120,000 Americans that have died from an epidemic, but who cares,’ kind of way).

“Connect Ventures is uniquely positioned to identify and support the most innovative entrepreneurs, helping accelerate the growth of their businesses by providing access to the expertise, knowledge, and relationships of both CAA and NEA,” said Richard Lovett, President, CAA, in a statement. “Connect Ventures will be deeply integrated into CAA’s ecosystem to help unlock new opportunities in service of our clients.”

Cool.

CAA has celebrity endorsers at the ready across movies, television, social media, and sports — with around 2,000 athletes and others at the ready to pitch products for profit.

This new initiative is CAA’s umpteenth shot at breaking into startups or later stage media investing. Other programs that the company has initiated include an incubator and business development arm, a late stage investment fund, and now Connect.

“In creating Connect Ventures, we’re bringing together two proven platforms built on decades of experience to unlock a really exciting opportunity set that is emerging at the intersection of culture and commerce, as well as data and software,” said Tony Florence, General Partner and Head of Technology Investing at NEA, in a statement. “Heightened consumer demand for new ways to explore, engage and transact across nearly all categories of daily life will give rise to powerful new creative tools and distribution platforms—a trend already underway but accelerated as a result of the global health crisis.”

The new endeavor will be led by NEA’s general partner, Rick Yang, and CAA’s Michael Blank, the head of the firm’s Consumer Investments, will lead the agency’s involvement in Connect Ventures.

The new firm also has made its first investment in Spire Animation Studios, a new feature animation studio from the Academy Award-winning producer of Ratatouille, Brad Lewis and serial entrepreneur P.J. Gunsagar. The studio said it will release its first animated feature n 2023.

“The animation industry is ready for a new voice in feature animation.  We’re super excited about forging creative chemistry with talented filmmakers from across mediums to make inspiring original stories for global audiences,” said Lewis.