Author: azeeadmin

Before you hire a marketing consultant who doesn’t understand your products or commit to a CMO who has several years of experience — but none in your sector — consider influencer marketing.

If the phrase evokes images of celebrities hawking hard seltzer, think again: An influencer can be as humble as an enthusiastic Reddit user who manages your Telegram channel.

According to Uber growth marketing manager Jonathan Martinez:

“ … You don’t need to find influencers with millions of followers. Instead, lean toward microinfluencers for testing, which will bring cost efficiency and the ability to sponsor a diverse range of people.”

If your startup has a clear brand pitch, “an enticing offer” and “clear next steps,” you’re ready to reach out to influencers, he says.

In a guest post, Martinez explains how to structure offers that will maximize conversions and keep your representatives motivated to promote your products and services.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Image Credits: Julian Shapiro

This morning, we published an interview with growth expert Julian Shapiro, a founder and angel investor who also advises startups on the best way to present themselves.

Marketing is data-driven, but good storytelling is an art, says Shapiro.

To connect with consumers on an emotional level, “you need a mix of goodwill, what-we-stand-for ideology, social prestige and customer delight — among other affinity-building ingredients.”

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson

Senior Editor, TechCrunch

@yourprotagonist

Everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

“In celebration of Coinbase’s earnings report today, investors poured a mountain of cash into one of the company’s global competitors,” Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.

Rolling up his sleeves, he dug into numbers from Coinbase, FalconX and FTX to give readers some perspective on the state of cryptocurrency exchanges.

How to hire and structure a growth team

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

Companies that have reached $5 million to $10 million in annual revenue are more likely to assemble growth teams; it’s a smart investment for any startup that’s achieved product-market fit.

It can also be potentially disruptive: Early marketing and product managers may feel sidelined by new cross-functional teams that suddenly take a leadership role.

In a detailed walkthrough, senior director of growth at OpenView Sam Richard explains the core players needed to build a growth team and how to integrate them into the organization smoothly, and shares some useful experiments to run.

“Don’t expect a single hire to scratch the growth itch for you,” Richard warns.

“A brilliant hire is going to come up with ideas, but will absolutely need a team to support them, turn them into experiments and then make them a reality.”

Indiegogo’s CEO on how crowdfunding navigated the pandemic

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

In an interview with Brian Heater, Indiegogo CEO Andy Yang spoke about how the pandemic has impacted the crowdfunding platform, the challenges of stepping into the role after the previous CEO departed, and how the company reached profitability.

The company wasn’t profitable when you joined?

We weren’t profitable. I joined and then we cut to profitability, or at least kind of a neutral state, and with any kind of change in leadership, some tenured folks opted out, and we basically became a new team overnight to kind of re-found the company, and we’ve been slowly adding people over the last couple years, but always with that eye on profitability and controlling our own destiny.

Kickstarter’s CEO on the future of crowdfunding

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Last week, Kickstarter announced that people have backed more than 200,000 projects with $6 billion in pledges since the company launched in 2009. Just 15 months ago, it crossed the $5 billion threshold.

Brian Heater spoke to CEO Aziz Hasan, who took over in 2019, about last year’s substantial of layoffs, the pandemic’s long-term impact on crowdfunding, and how he’s working to build a more resilient company:

I think for us some of the most important things are to really just understand how we’re operating the business, making sure that we are sufficient in the buffer that we have for the business to make sure that we’re operating in a way that we can feel confident that the team is going to have some stability, that they’re going to have this resilience.

Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’

We frequently run articles with advice for founders who are working on pitch decks. It’s a fundamental step in every startup’s journey, and there are myriad ways to approach the task.

Michelle Davey of telehealth staffing and services company Wheel and Jordan Nof of Tusk Venture Partners appeared on Extra Crunch Live recently to analyze Wheel’s Series A pitch.

Nof said entrepreneurs should candidly explain to potential investors what they’ll need to believe to back their startup.

” … It takes a lot of guesswork out of the equation for the investor and it reorients them to focus on the right problem set that you’re solving,” he said.

“You get this one shot to kind of influence what they think they need to believe to get an investment here … if you don’t do that … we could get pretty off base.”

Online retailers: Stop trying to beat Amazon

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

Going up against global e-commerce behemoth Amazon might seem futile, but smaller players can leverage value adds that give them a leg up when it comes to ensuring a loyal customer base, says Kenny Small, vice president SAP and Enterprise at Qualitest Group.

“The reality is that Amazon’s true unique selling proposition is its distribution network,” he writes in a guest post. “Online retailers will not be able to compete on this point because Amazon’s distribution network is so fast.

“Instead, it’s important to focus on areas where they can excel — without having to become a third-party seller on Amazon’s platform.”

The China tech crackdown continues

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Edtech and fintech have been in the Chinese Communist Party crosshairs in recent weeks — now, chat apps and gaming are among the targets.

Beijing filed a civil suit against Tencent over claims that its WeChat Youth Mode flouts laws protecting minors, and state media criticized the gaming industry as the digital equivalent of passing out drugs to kids, Alex Wilhelm writes in The Exchange.

He writes that the “news appears to indicate that we should expect more of the same as we’ve seen in recent months from the Chinese government: More complaints about the impact of ‘excessive’ capital in its industries, more tumbling share prices and more held IPOs.”

5 ways AI can help mitigate the global shipping crisis

Image Credits: Yuichiro Chino (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In an increasingly on-demand world, shipping delays and disruptions are a major roadblock to customer happiness.

AI can help, says Ahmer Inam, chief artificial intelligence officer at Pactera EDGE, who offers five strategies for using AI that can help startups understand supply chain disruptions and prepare for a Plan B.

“While AI won’t protect startups, manufacturers and retailers from these types of disruptions in the future, it can help them sense, anticipate, reroute and respond to them more effectively.”

Starship Technologies, an autonomous delivery services company, announced that it will begin delivery service on four additional college campuses this fall, adding to the 20 campuses on which it already operates.

The University of Illinois Chicago (UIC), the University of Kentucky (UK), the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University’s Daytona Beach, Florida campus will all be graced with the Estonian-born company’s little six-wheeled, zero-emissions delivery robots.

This announcement comes the same day as Kiwibot, another autonomous sidewalk delivery robot company, has partnered with hospitality giant Sodexo to bring food delivery to college campuses. Whereas Kiwibot will focus more on delivering food from dining halls and university stores, it looks like Starship will work with on-campus merchants like Starbucks, Panda Express and Panera Bread, among others. Despite the different approaches, the outcome is the same: Delivery companies are preparing for a more “normal” school year, even though the Delta variant continues to ramp up case loads. That could either be a blessing or a problem for the Starships and Kiwibots of the world. On the one hand, more ‘Rona means more students staying inside and avoiding other humans. On the other, it could also mean school shutdowns and a bunch of useless bots.

“We see the Starship robots as an important part of safely bringing students back to campus,” said Dean Kennedy, executive director of residential life, housing and food services at UNR, in a statement. “Everyone wants to resume in-person classes and be back on campus so we’re doing everything we can to make sure it’s done responsibly. The robots offer several advantages – they make social distancing easier, they are convenient, the students we have spoken with love this idea and they continue our heritage of being an innovative campus.”

UIC will have 25 Starship robots and UNR and Embry-Riddle will get 20 robots each, all of which add to Starship’s fleet of over 1,000 delivery robots. The company says it has completed more than 1.5 million rides since its founding in 2014. It has raised a total of $102 million, including its recent $17 million funding round.

“We’ve worked hard to become a trusted and integrated partner on our campus communities and that hard work has paid off,” said Alastair Westgarth, CEO of Starship, in a statement. “We are continuing to add new schools every semester, with more to be announced this fall. The students love the robots and the schools appreciate the ability to offer this service. We can’t wait to meet the students at each of these schools and look forward to hiring students on all of the campuses to give them real world experience working with robots and AI.”

Students and faculty will be able to download the Starship Food Delivery app to choose meals and then drop a pin where they want their delivery to be sent. They can track the robot or they can wait for an alert to go outside and meet the robot once it has arrived, where they can then unlock it through the app. Starship says it aims to train and hire students at local campuses who are interested in joining the team and learning more about autonomous technology.

After the bell today, Coinbase reported another period of impressive results in its second quarter earnings report.

During the quarter, Coinbase’s total revenue reached $2.23 billion, which helped the company generate net income of $1.61 billion in the three-month period. The company benefited from a one-time line item worth $737.5 million, which stemmed from what Coinbase described as a “tax benefit” from its direct listing earlier the quarter.

This puts us in the odd position of leaning more heavily on the company’s adjusted EBITDA metric, a figure that we usually discount, rather than the stricter net income result. This quarter the adjusted metric is actually a bit clearer regarding the company’s regular profitability. Coinbase posted adjusted EBITDA of $1.1 billion in the period.

The company easily bested expectations, with the market expecting revenues of just $1.85 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $961.5 million, per Yahoo Finance.

All that’s well and good, but the company provided a fascinating set of data for us to peruse that may help us better understand where the crypto economy stands today. Let’s get into the details.

Trading volume

There are two datasets from Coinbase’s Q2 that we need. The first deals with monthly transacting users, and overall trading volume:

Seeing Coinbase continue to add MTUs in the second quarter was impressive, as was the company’s Q2 trading volume result in light of the falling platform asset figure. Quite simply, Coinbase managed to accrete trading volume despite generally falling crypto prices over the time period in question.

Or as the company put it, “[d]espite price movements, we saw billions of dollars of net asset
inflows and new customers added throughout Q2.”

The next dataset deals with a breakdown of trading volume by source, and type:

The incremental growth in retail volume from Q1 2021 to Q2 2021 is impressive for a single quarter, frankly, but the pace at which Coinbase added institutional volume in the quarter is even stronger. It’s a huge result.

For the more crypto-focused than financials-focused out there, the second set of numbers is even more notable. Ethereum trading volume beat bitcoin trading volume, while “other” was more than twice what bitcoin itself managed.

A changing of the guard? The company listed three reasons for why this happened, the second of which is the most interesting. Per the earnings report:

[The mix shift was driven by] meaningful growth in Ethereum trading volumes, surpassing Bitcoin trading volumes on Coinbase for the first time driven by growth in the DeFi and NFT ecosystems (where Ethereum is an important underlying blockchain), and increased demand driven by our ETH2 staking product.

Basically, the neat stuff that the Ethereum blockchain enables is driving volume in its underlying coin, ether. Bitcoin may be the oldest crypto, but its crown may be starting to rust. Bitcoin remains the largest asset on Coinbase, at 47 percent, however.

Now let’s talk revenues.

Top line

While institutional trading volume was an impressive source of growth for Coinbase, the company’s revenue breakdown remained retail-heavy. Here’s the data:

The transaction revenue growth from Q1 to Q2 speaks for itself, and was a key driver of the company’s strong second-quarter aggregate results. But perhaps more notable was the huge differential in subscription and services revenue at the company, growing nearly 100 percent from $56.4 million in Q1 2021 to $102.6 million in the most recent period.

Certainly, Coinbase remains a transaction-led company, but in revenue terms, its third line-item is becoming material.

Now, the somewhat bad news.

What about Q3 2021?

Let’s start with how Coinbase describes the start to its third quarter:

In July, retail MTUs and total Trading Volume were 6.3 million and $57.0 billion, respectively, as crypto asset prices and crypto asset volatility declined significantly relative to Q2 levels. August month-to-date, retail MTUs and Trading Volume levels have slightly improved compared to July levels but remain lower than earlier in the year. As a result, we believe retail MTUs and total Trading Volume will be lower in Q3 as compared to Q2.

In contrast, Q2 MTUs were 8.8 million and total trading volume, pro-rated for each month of the quarter, came to $154 billion. Therefore, Coinbase had a far smaller July than what it managed on a monthly basis in Q2. That August is trending better than July is a small consolation, but it does appear that Coinbase will be a smaller business in Q3 than it was in Q1 or Q2.

If you were curious why Coinbase’s stock is not flying in the wake of its strong Q2 results, this is likely why. Of course, any serious investor in a crypto exchange is aware of how variable results can be in the sector. So a decrease after a few periods of strong results is not a huge lump to swallow.

Coinbase is worth $267.55 per share in after-hours trading as of the time of writing, off around three-quarters of a percent. That’s not even a haircut.

All told, Coinbase’s second quarter was excellent.

As a startup founder, there will be three scenarios in which you’ll need to understand how to properly do a quality of earnings (QofE) if you want to maximize value.

The first scenario will be when you decide to raise a Series A and subsequent VC rounds, followed by when you do a strategic acquisition, and lastly, when you sell your company.

This post is a framework for how to think and organize your QofE and go through the most common items that you’ll want to keep top of mind for every M&A and private equity transaction you may be part of.

Why perform a QofE?

The goal of a QofE is to adjust the reported EBITDA to calculate a restated EBITDA that best reflects the current state of the company on an ongoing basis. It also presents a historical adjusted EBITDA that is comparable throughout the last two or three years.

QofE can have a significant impact on a company valuation for three main reasons:

1. The adjusted EBITDA will be used by a buyer/investor as the basis for valuation (for companies valued based on an EBITDA multiple).
2. The adjusted revenue will be used to recalculate the effective growth rate.
3. The adjusted revenue and EBITDA will form the basis of forecasts.

With that in mind, every entrepreneur must understand how to properly form a view of what is the proper adjusted EBITDA and adjusted revenue of your company. It is common for founders in an M&A process to be unfamiliar with the notion of QofE and leave value on the table.

This breakdown aims to ensure that you won’t be that founder and that you’ll be armed to negotiate your company valuation on equal ground with your investors. If you are in the seller’s shoes, you will get the advantage of understanding how an experienced investor or buyer thinks. If you’re in the buyer’s shoes, you’ll benefit from understanding and valuing your acquisitions better.

How is a QofE professionally performed?

When performed by a professional transaction service advisory team, the quality of earnings is a result of a thorough review of all the documents generally available in a data room. These include, but are not limited to: Legal documentation, financial statements (P&L, balance sheet, cash flow), audit reports, management presentation and contracts.

When doing a QofE analysis, it’s key to consistently ask yourself: “Can or should this information translate into an adjustment of revenue or EBITDA, net working capital (NWC) or net debt?”

Why did we include NWC and net debt? That is because they often have an indirect impact on adjusted EBITDA. Think of an adjustment to the historical level of inventory. Less inventory likely means fewer storage costs. So if you adjust historical inventory, you’ll want to also impact your adjusted EBITDA.

On top of reviewing all the aforementioned documents, your QofE analysis will heavily rely on interviewing management. No matter how long you look at the financials, if you can’t have management confirm information or explain trends, you won’t be able to draw proper conclusions and understand the numbers.

Principles for efficiently building your QofE

1. Automatically link everything you read and hear to potential QofE adjustments. This has to become second nature during the engagement.
2. Always think about all the ways an event or item that qualifies for an adjustment impacts the financial statements overall. For instance, if the event impacted revenue, did it impact costs in some way as well?
3. Make sure that the cost you are adjusting was not already offset by another accounting entry (i.e., had no impact on EBITDA).
4. Make sure that the cost you adjust for was classified above EBITDA in the first place.
5. Make sure that you can quantify each adjustment in the most objective and rational way. This is sometimes not possible and you may have to come up with a range.
   
   

The encrypted chat app Signal is adding a few new options for users looking to lock down their messages. The app will now allow anyone to turn on a default timer for disappearing messages, automatically applying the settings to any newly initiated conversations.

Signal’s disappearing messages option deletes chats for both the sender and receiver after a set amount of time passes. Previously, you had to toggle the option on and select an interval for each individual conversation, which made it easy to overlook the extra privacy feature if you had a lot of chats going at once.

Signal is also adding more options for how long disappearing messages stick around before evaporating. The app’s users can now select an interval up to four weeks and as low as 30 seconds. You can even lower than to a single second in the app’s custom time options.

On any chat app, it’s important to remember that disappearing messages vanish from the user interface but that doesn’t mean they’re gone for good. Anything you share online can live on indefinitely via screenshots or through someone taking a photo of an app’s screen with another device.

Signal wants its users to keep this in mind, noting that the disappearing message options are best for saving storage space and keeping conversation history to a minimum, just in case. “This is not for situations where your contact is your adversary,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The app remains one of the most popular end-to-end encrypted messaging options to date and earlier this year even managed to absorb some WhatsApp users who grew skittish over data sharing policy changes at Facebook.

The privacy-minded messaging app is very well regarded for its strong feature set and the company’s independence, though Signal remains relatively small compared to Facebook’s own end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp, which the company acquired in 2014. As of December 2020, Signal boasted around 20 million monthly active users, while WhatsApp hit 2 billion users early last year.

Blue Origin and Dynetics are still steaming over NASA’s decision to award only one contract — to SpaceX — to build a Human Landing System for the Artemis program. Their protest of the decision was recently rejected, and now the Government Accountability Office’s arguments, which Blue Origin publicly questioned, are available for all to read. Here are a few highlights from the point-by-point takedown of the losing companies’ complaints.

In case you can’t quite remember (2020 was a long year), NASA originally selected the three companies mentioned for early funding to conceptualize and propose a lunar landing system that could put boots on the Moon in 2024. They suggested the next step would be, if possible, to pick two proposals to move forward with. But when the time for awards rolled around, only SpaceX walked away with a contract.

Dynetics and Blue Origin protested the decision separately, but on similar grounds: first, NASA should have awarded two companies as promised, and not doing so is risky and anti-competition. Second, it should have adjusted the terms of the award process when it learned it didn’t have much budget to set aside for it. Third, NASA didn’t evaluate the proposals fairly, showing a bias to SpaceX and against the others in various ways.

The GAO puts all of these concerns to bed in its report — and in the process makes Blue Origin’s follow-up complaint, that the agency’s “limited jurisdiction” meant it couldn’t adequately address the protests, look like the sour grapes it is.

One and done

Image Credits: SpaceX

As to awarding one rather than two companies a contract, the answer is right there in black and white. The announcement clearly stated multiple times that the whole thing was contingent on having enough money in the first place. NASA may have preferred , hoped, even expected to award two contracts, but it was very clear that it would be awarding “up to two” or “one or more” of them. After all, what if only one met the requirements and the others didn’t? Would NASA be obligated to throw money at an unsuitable applicant? No, and that’s more or less what happened.

From the report:

Even where a solicitation contains an intention to make multiple awards, we have recognized that an agency is not required to do so if the outcome of proposal evaluation dictates that only one contract should be awarded. For example, regardless of an agency’s intention, it cannot, in making contract awards, exceed the funds available.

The GAO explains that the decision-making process at NASA weighted the technical approach the highest, then price, then management (i.e. organization, scheduling, etc.). Each company’s proposal was evaluated independently on each of these characteristics, and the final results were compared. Here’s a top-level summary of the ratings assigned:

Image Credits: GAO / NASA

And the report again:

The technical approach factor was to be more important than the total evaluated price factor, which in turn was to be more important than the management approach factor; the non-price factors, when combined, were significantly more important than price.

…Contrary to the protesters’ arguments, even assuming a comparative analysis was required, SpaceX’s proposal appeared to be the highest-rated under each of the three enumerated evaluation criteria as well as the lowest priced.

When the budget for NASA was finalized, it left less for the HLS program than expected, and the agency was forced to make some tough choices. Luckily they had a proposal that was as good or better than the others technically (the most important factor), considerably better than the others organizationally, and came in at a very reasonable cost. It was a clear choice to award a contract to SpaceX.

But having done so, NASA found that the cupboard was bare. Even so, Blue Origin argued that it deserved to be contacted about somehow making it work. Perhaps, they suggested, if NASA had come to them to negotiate, they could have put together a proposal that might have looked even better than SpaceX’s. (Jeff Bezos’s brazen after-the-fact $2B offer suggests they had some wiggle room.)

NASA, however, had already concluded otherwise, as the GAO confirms:

…The agency concluded that it was not “insurmountable” to negotiate with SpaceX to shift approximately $[DELETED] in FY2021 proposed milestone payments (or approximately [DELETED] percent of the $2.941 billion total proposed price) to later years to meet NASA’s FY2021 funding limitations. In contrast, the SSA concluded that it was implausible for Blue Origin ($5.995 billion) and Dynetics ($9.082 billion) to materially reduce their significantly higher total proposed prices without material revisions to their respective technical and management approaches…

Redactions notwithstanding, it’s not difficult to see the issue here. While it was conceivable, even reasonable for SpaceX to shift a few hundred million or so around to make the fiscal math work, already questionable at the $3B mark, it was not conceivable that Blue Origin or Dynetics could shave half or more off their costs to meet those same fiscal milestones happen.

As NASA’s selection group explained at the time:

After accounting for a contract award to SpaceX, the amount of remaining available funding is so insubstantial that, in my opinion, NASA cannot reasonably ask Blue Origin to lower its price for the scope of work it has proposed to a figure that would potentially enable NASA to afford making a contract award to Blue Origin.

Blue Origin complained that NASA should have warned them that the budget might lead to restrictions in the selection process, but the GAO simply notes that not only is the federal budget hardly secret, but that the companies waited until after the award was made to raise an issue. Such complaints need to be timely in order to be taken seriously, it wrote, and furthermore there is nothing in the complaints that suggests that even had NASA warned them, anything would have turned out differently.

There is also the question of whether choosing a single provider is “anticompetitive and unduly risky,” as the protests put it. While the GAO admits that “these important questions of policy may merit further public debate,” the complaint is moot since NASA didn’t have the money to do more than one in the first place. As voters and advocates of a generous budget for space exploration, we may say it’s a shame that NASA didn’t have $6B more to play with, but that doesn’t mean the agency’s decision to put the money it had to the best purpose possible was incorrect.

In space, no one can hear you cry

Image Credits: Joe Raedle / Getty Images

Blue Origin and Dynetics alleged that the process was biased in favor of SpaceX in that the various companies were unfairly evaluated for strengths and weaknesses. But the GAO sees these complaints for the fluff that they are.

In one case, Blue Origin complains that the announcement did not specifically require the vehicles to be able to land in the dark. Well, first of all, it does, and second of all, space is dark. If your design doesn’t take that into account, you’re gonna have a bad time out there.

In another instance, the communications systems proposed by Blue Origin and SpaceX both were flagged for not meeting certain requirements — but Blue Origin got a “significant weakness” listed for its system and SpaceX only got a “weakness.” Evidence of preferential treatment, they suggest.

Not so much, says the GAO: “Even a cursory review of the evaluation record demonstrates material differences between the
proposals that support NASA’s different evaluation findings.” In this case four of Blue Origin’s communications links didn’t work as required, and a fifth was a maybe. SpaceX only had two not work right. This sort of substantial difference appeared in each of the objections cited by the complainants.

In fact, the report goes on to say:

We note that Blue Origin fails to rebut any of the analysis presented by the contracting officer with respect to Blue Origin’s or SpaceX’s proposals. In fact, Blue Origin initially challenged the agency’s evaluation of its own proposal, but then affirmatively withdrew that protest ground after receipt of the agency report.

Blue Origin groused that SpaceX got extra points for a design that focused on the crew’s safety, health, and comfort, despite many of the design choices not being explicitly required. The GAO says NASA is well within its discretion as an expert agency to consider these as meritorious — in fact, they call it a “representative example of why discretion is due” in such cases — and really, if you’re objecting on the grounds that the competition’s capsule was too nice, it may be advisable to reconsider your priorities.

Image Credits: Blue Origin

Even had several of the decisions been successfully challenged, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome, the report explains.

SpaceX received the following evaluation totals:

• Technical: 3 significant strengths; 10 strengths; 6 weaknesses; and 1 significant weakness
• Management: 2 significant strengths; 3 strengths; and 2 weaknesses

While Blue Origin received the following:

• Technical: 13 strengths; 14 weaknesses; and 2 significant weaknesses
• Management: 1 significant strength; 2 strengths; and 6 weaknesses

It’s never a pleasant occasion to find one has been thoroughly beat on practically every factor that counts, but that really seems to be the factor here. Dynetics and its complaint meet the same fate, by the way, but with a bit more rough treatment.

…Even allowing for the possibility that the protesters could prevail on some small subset of their challenges to NASA’s evaluation, the record reflects that NASA’s evaluation was largely reasonable, and the relative competitive standing of the offerors under the non-price factors would not materially change…

The protests are denied.

It’s a pretty brutal documentation of the shortcomings of Blue Origin and Dynetics, and one that would not have been necessary had the companies taken their lumps and accepted that NASA isn’t out to get them. They lost fair and square, and now they look like whiny also-rans instead of ambitious could-bes.

Unity, the company behind the super popular 2D/3D engine of the same name, is today announcing plans to make its biggest acquisition to date. Unity says it will acquire Parsec, a remote desktop tool for developers and creatives, for $320 million in cash.

Parsec’s pitch has long been remote desktop access without compromise. Tuned for creatives, it works fine even if your rig has multiple high resolution displays. It’ll stream your work-in-progress artwork without screwing up the colors, and it’ll play friendly with fancier input devices like pressure sensitive drawing tablets.

Parsec began its life back in 2016, initially focused on helping gamers stream games from their powerful PCs to other (generally less powerful) devices. It turns out the same things that made it good for game players — low latency, high-resolution display support, and compatibility with all kinds of different input devices — made it good for game makers as well. After noticing a number of users across the creative industry tapping Parsec to beam into their workstations, the company started rolling out plans and features just for creative teams. When the pandemic sent more teams home and away from their office setups, usage of Parsec took off.

“We believe that, more and more, creators will need to be able to work anywhere” Unity Senior Vice President Marc Whitten told me in a call earlier this week. “They’re going to work in groups that are dispersed by distance, or they’re going to be in a hybrid environment where they might be working in the office sometimes and at home sometimes.”

“I think that’s going to mean that those creators are going to need to have access to the power they need on the glass that they have, wherever they are.” he adds. “And Parsec is a great example of a company that has just deeply innovated in that space.”

Whitten also alluded to this being the beginning of a deeper cloud push for Unity: “I think you’re gonna see that Parsec is a great foundational block for a broad sort of cloud ambition that we have as a company,” he said. “You’re going to see a lot more from us in that particular regards.”

Parsec’s total funding before the acquisition was $33 million, according to Crunchbase. Its most recent funding was a $25 million Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz last December.

Whitten tells me that he doesn’t foresee any changes for existing Parsec users, but couldn’t comment yet on any potential changes to subscriptions/pricing.

Most businesses by now are well versed with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic: Faltering offline sales, flexible work-from-anywhere options, fluctuating foot traffic with lockdown mandates and e-commerce becoming a channel many brands wished they had built infrastructure for earlier.

As a record number of consumers in Southeast Asia move from shopping malls to online platforms like Shopee, Lazada, Tiki and Tokopedia, the advertising dollars are naturally flowing in. Emerging markets are witnessing the advent of retail media right now.

Amazon paved the way in North America in 2018 by launching Amazon Advertising to become the first bid-and-buy marketplace. BCG now estimates retailers have a $100 billion business opportunity to capture, if they can keep up.

The money is where the consumer is

To understand why retailers will capture more ad spend, it’s important to evaluate what modern day marketing has become.

Is it bus stop advertisements? Bidding on Google keywords or a Clubhouse session? Or is it a viral TikTok video? As the world becomes more connected and the lines between offline and online blur even more, modern day marketing is a mix of all the channels tied to key performance metrics.

The main goal of marketing, no matter the medium, is to highlight a business or product to the right consumers to score a potential sale. And like most things, there is a bad, a good and a much better way of doing things.

Traditional marketing channels were primarily linear TV, radio and print, because the mediums were highly popular at the time. However, with the birth of the internet newer platforms emerged such as email, websites and streaming. Then came the rise of social media and apps that shook up the advertising landscape. But regardless of these shifts, there has always been one constant: The business went where the consumer was.

So when sources of traffic and revenue once again change, let’s say due to a pandemic, the marketing mix follows. In the next 12 months alone, many marketers are planning to decrease spending in cinema, print and out of home (OOH), while the majority will increase budgets in social and search, according to Nielsen.

The search for superior advertising channels

So which channels will benefit as money flows out of outdated buckets? A good indicator is ad revenue trends in mature markets like the U.S. While Google and Facebook remain the dominant advertising players, Amazon has eaten into the duopoly’s ad revenue pie in the U.S., growing its share from 7.8% to 10.3% in 2020 alone, according to eMarketer.

How? Because the most valuable advertising channel is the one that has the most measurable touch points with the consumer.

Traditional MBA programs can be costly, lengthy, and often lack the application of real world skills. Meanwhile, big global brands and companies who need Product Managers to grow their businesses can’t sit around waiting for people to graduate. And the EdTech space hasn’t traditionally catered for this sector.

This is perhaps why Product School, says it has secured $25 million in growth equity investment from growth fund Leeds Illuminate (subject to regulatory approval) to accelerate its product and partnerships with client companies.

The growth funding for the company comes after bootstrapping since 2014, in large part because product managers (PMs) no longer just inside tech companies but have become sought after across almost virtually all industries.

Product School provides certificates for individuals as well as team training, and says it has experienced and upwelling of business since Covid switched so many companies into Digital ones. It also now counts Google, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb, PayPal, Uber, and Amazon amongst its customers.

“Product managers have an outsized role in driving digital transformation and innovation across all sectors,” said Susan Cates, Managing Partner of Leeds Illuminate. “Having built the largest community of PM’s in the world validates Product School’s certification as the industry standard for the market and positions the company at the forefront of upskilling top-notch talent for global organizations.”

Carlos Gonzalez de Villaumbrosia, CEO and Founder of Product School, who started the company after moving from Spain, said: “There has never been a better time in history to build digital products and Product School is excited to unlock value for product teams across the globe to help define the future. Our company was founded on the basis that traditional degrees and MBA programs simply don’t equip PMs with the real-world skills they require on the job.”

Product school has also produced the The Product Book, The Proddy Awards and ProductCon.

It’s main competitor is MindTheProduct community and training platform, which has also boostrapped.

Zomato’s losses more than tripled in its first quarterly earnings report since its listing last month as the company’s expenses grew and the pandemic hit the firm’s dining-out business.

The Gurgaon-headquartered firm reported (PDF) a net loss of $48 million in the quarter that ended in June, up from about $13.5 million during the same period last year.

The 12-year-old firm also reported strong revenue growth, moving from $35.7 million to $113.4 million during the aforementioned period as more people in the country began to order food online.

The firm said it delivered more than 100 million food orders last quarter and has surpassed a billion orders in the past six years.

“This is largely on account of non-cash ESOP expenses which have increased meaningfully in Q1 FY22 due to significant ESOP grants made in the quarter pursuant to creation of a new ESOP 2021 scheme. This divergence in reported profit/loss and Adjusted EBITDA will continue going forward,” a blog post signed by top Zomato executives read.

The executive said in the post that the second wave of the coronavirus, which hit the country beginning in April, “significantly impacted the dining-out business in Q1 FY22 reversing most of the gains the industry made in Q4 FY21.”

Zomato’s shares on BSE.

Shares of Zomato, which had a stellar debut on the Indian stock exchanges last month, fell 4% on Tuesday ahead of the results and ended at slightly below the original issue price of $1.68 a share on July 13, which valued Zomato then at $13 billion.

The company said it will hold one call with analysts a year — instead of the typical four — and address questions through blogs and quarterly shareholder letters.

In India, Zomato competes with Swiggy, which is backed by SoftBank and Prosus. Last month, the Indian food delivery startup said it had raised $1.25 billion in a new financing round. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 evaluated Zomato before making its bet on Swiggy, people familiar with the dealflow said.

Both the firms in recent quarters have expanded to new categories including grocery delivery.

Zomato is the first Indian consumer internet startup in the current wave to go public. India’s financial services Paytm and MobiKwik as well as online insurer PolicyBazaar and online beauty products firm Nykaa have filed the paperworks to go public later this year.