Author: azeeadmin

The tech boom in Southeast Asia isn’t just seeding a wave of new entrepreneurs building the next generation of unicorns, it’s also ushering young talent into the roles of first-time managers. And NewCampus, a Singapore-based startup co-founded by Will Fan and Fei Yao, announced today that it has raised millions of dollars to help coming of age companies train their maturing workforce to help them grow into those new, larger roles.

NewCampus is an online, live learning platform that hopes to train rising managers within hyper-growth organizations. It’s leadership “sprints” focus on topics like retaining knowledge, and what goes into curating a safe environment for teams. The company was part of SuperCharger Ventures’ inaugural edtech accelerator, and today announced that it has attracted millions of dollars in investor interest.

The startup has closed a seed financing round of $2.5 million in a round led by Juvo Ventures’ Maia Sharpley. Other investors include Zanichelli Venture, M Venture Partners, 27V, Pavan Katepalli, the former Chief Learning Officer at Trilogy Education, along with existing investors SOSV and 500 Startups.

While first describing itself as a membership gym for learning experiences, the 2019-founded startup raised capital to further invest in its latest iteration: an up-skilling platform for SMBs.

Currently, NewCampus builds content in-house, and then asks industry experts to come in and add in their flair of expertise. Users are expected to dedicate between 4 to 5 hours a week for work, with 90 minutes of that time devoted to live, instructor-led workshops. The material differs from other online programs by focusing on more philosophical skills, like how to create a safe environment for teams or how to retain knowledge, instead of topics like like Finance 101. Currently, its content looks more general, serving the emerging manager in tech, not the first-time manager handling a fintech startup during a pivot.

NewCampus offers live classes for first-time managers.

There’s a lot of workforce training tools on the market right now: Udemy, BetterUp, Skillshare, Udacity, but NewCampus is confident that it can win by selling to a market it believes is underserved: Southeast Asia.

NewCampus targets companies that have a presence of between 500 to 1,000 people in the Southeast Asia region. Fan mentioned how companies like Grab, GoJek and Carousell still turn to local trainers in countries like Indonesia, Thailand and Singapore — giving his company an opportunity to come in and bring more advanced pedagogy and branding.

While India’s frenzy of hiring and retaining talent is not to be missed, the co-founder says that the startup is looking in other, less crowded markets.

“[The customer] may be a 600-person fintech company with an HQ in Hong Kong, but their management team is sitting in Hong Kong, their sales teams in Sydney, Melbourne, their dev team is in Indonesia and their sales team is in Philippines, and already that breakdown of managing remote teams is sophisticated and nuanced in its own way,” Fan said.

Yao likened the momentum around improving diversity and inclusion efforts in the United States to the momentum around enhancing cross-cultural communication in Southeast Asia, “because of how fragmented the market is and how fast teams are growing across the region.” She added that a lot of United States-based upskilling products “don’t speak to the rest of the world,” which gives NewCampus a chance to curate an instructor pool, time zone focus, and product for its end-users.

Smaller organizations can buy annual subscriptions for their managers to take general content courses, while larger organizations can pay for in-house programs that NewCampus will then manage and run themselves. As with any B2B business model, selling to an institution versus an individual appears to be more lucrative over time when the startup starts serving hundreds and thousands of managers. However, Yao stressed that NewCampus’ strategic advantage is more in helping upskill smaller organizations.

“It actually really does serve underserved businesses that don’t have access to traditional training facilities at those price points,” Yao said. “At the same time, a lot of the companies that we’re currently working with are more familiar with keeping something that’s within their company, it’s a bit of a balance of both.” The split between individual programming and in-house programming is currently 50/50.

Currently about 80% of NewCampus’ learners and 60% of its instructors identify as women.

Testing the tester

The test for NewCampus is if it can scale its content to be effective and inclusive of hundreds of thousands of emerging managers. This will require the company to niche down its content to specific managerial paths depending on profession, or grow bigger and serve seasoned managers as well.

NewCampus is pursuing university accreditation, which suggests that it sees itself eventually becoming a replacement for traditional degrees. Fan likened it to how fintech startups acquired banking licenses half a decade ago, in an attempt to build brand awareness and trust.

Per a number of investors who had seen NewCampus’ pitch deck, the university licensing move, is a nod to NewCampus’ initial bet: that it could become an alternative to the MBA.

The issue with modern business schools is that much of the utility in higher-ed isn’t the content, but the network and brand name making its way to a student’s resume. While NewCampus may thus lean on accreditation as differentiation, it really needs to lean on different ways to signal to society that its content — and consumers of its content — matters. Yao thinks that investors may be off on NewCampus’ interpretation of replacing the business school degree.

“They’re thinking of big names, like Stanford and Harvard,” she said. “We’re taking on the vertical of business education as a whole, the people who come to us, they’re not the people who haven’t gotten into Harvard, they’re 100% the people who had never considered Harvard to begin with.”

NewCampus’ team

Today, Tractable is worth $1 billion. Our AI is used by millions of people across the world to recover faster from road accidents, and it also helps recycle as many cars as Tesla puts on the road.

And yet six years ago, Tractable was just me and Raz (Razvan Ranca, CTO), two college grads coding in a basement. Here’s how we did it, and what we learned along the way.

Build upon a fresh technological breakthrough

In 2013, I was fortunate to get into artificial intelligence (more specifically, deep learning) six months before it blew up internationally. It started when I took a course on Coursera called “Machine learning with neural networks” by Geoffrey Hinton. It was like being love struck. Back then, to me AI was science fiction, like “The Terminator.”

But an article in the tech press said the academic field was amid a resurgence. As a result of 100x larger training data sets and 100x higher compute power becoming available by reprogramming GPUs (graphics cards), a huge leap in predictive performance had been attained in image classification a year earlier. This meant computers were starting to be able to understand what’s in an image — like humans do.

The next step was getting this technology into the real world. While at university — Imperial College London — teaming up with much more skilled people, we built a plant recognition app with deep learning. We walked our professor through Hyde Park, watching him take photos of flowers with the app and laughing from joy as the AI recognized the right plant species. This had previously been impossible.

I started spending every spare moment on image classification with deep learning. Still, no one was talking about it in the news — even Imperial’s computer vision lab wasn’t yet on it! I felt like I was in on a revolutionary secret.

Looking back, narrowly focusing on a branch of applied science undergoing a breakthrough paradigm shift that hadn’t yet reached the business world changed everything.

Search for complementary co-founders who will become your best friends

I’d previously been rejected from Entrepreneur First (EF), one of the world’s best incubators, for not knowing anything about tech. Having changed that, I applied again.

The last interview was a hackathon, where I met Raz. He was doing machine learning research at Cambridge, had topped EF’s technical test, and published papers on reconstructing shredded documents and on poker bots that could detect bluffs. His bare-bones webpage read: “I seek data-driven solutions to currently intractable problems.” Now that had a ring to it (and where we’d get the name for Tractable).

That hackathon, we coded all night. The morning after, he and I knew something special was happening between us. We moved in together and would spend years side by side, 24/7, from waking up to Pantera in the morning to coding marathons at night.

But we also wouldn’t have got where we are without Adrien (Cohen, president), who joined as our third co-founder right after our seed round. Adrien had previously co-founded Lazada, an online supermarket in South East Asia like Amazon and Alibaba, which sold to Alibaba for $1.5 billion. Adrien would teach us how to build a business, inspire trust and hire world-class talent.

Find potential customers early so you can work out market fit

Tractable started at EF with a head start — a paying customer. Our first use case was … plastic pipe welds.

It was as glamorous as it sounds. Pipes that carry water and natural gas to your home are made of plastic. They’re connected by welds (melt the two plastic ends, connect them, let them cool down and solidify again as one). Image classification AI could visually check people’s weld setups to ensure good quality. Most of all, it was real-world value for breakthrough AI.

And yet in the end, they — our only paying customer — stopped working with us, just as we were raising our first round of funding. That was rough. Luckily, the number of pipe weld inspections was too small a market to interest investors, so we explored other use cases — utilities, geology, dermatology and medical imaging.

Our kids can’t read. As of 2019, roughly a third of US fourth graders were unable to read at the level expected of them. The scores have barely changed in decades. Something isn’t working here.

Litnerd, a company out of New York City, wants to try something new. They’re writing books and building lesson plans with a twist: professional actors, streamed into the class, to recreate scenes from each book and — hopefully! — help keep students engaged.

Litnerd programs are built as four one-hour, once-a-week sessions. Students read the book between sessions; once a week, an actor is streamed to the class to re-enact scenes, bring everything together, and move the story along. Sometimes this actor’s segment is pre-recorded. Other times it’s live, with choose-your-own-adventure elements mixed in to let the students steer the ship.

Something about the whole thing just tugs at my heart strings. It reminds me of “auditorium day” in school; those rare days in which our school brought in a special performer — a singer, a motivational speaker, a puppet show, whatever — to somehow wrangle our collective attention. Those days felt so unique, so special. Even decades later, fond memories of those days stick with me.

While it’s currently basing its lesson plans around existing stories and content, Litnerd has its own publishing operation in the works. The goal is to identify the categories and genres that best catch each age group’s (PreK through 5th grade) attention, then write books that, as the team puts it, “help celebrate diversity and inclusion so that all children can see themselves in the stories.”

Litnerd began its life during the pandemic under a different name: TinyBroadway. TinyBroadway shared a lot of its DNA with what would eventually become Litnerd — actors, beamed in through the magic of the Internet, work through lessons and crafts with a handful of kids at a time. Litnerd shifts the concept from B2C to B2B; whereas TinyBroadway’s customer was the parent looking to fill their own kid’s schedule, Litnerd dramatically expands its audience (and hopefully deepens its impact as a result) by working with schools.

I asked Litnerd CEO and founder Anisa Mirza for her thoughts on the shift via email:

“The reality is, the majority of Americans, some 95%, cannot afford homeschooling. ESP when it comes to K-5 years. And doubly when it comes to parents of children belonging to Title 1 schools (majority of NYC schools),” she writes. “This isn’t simply because parents can’t pay out of pocket. Rather, because for 95% of Americans, School represents free daycare (if both parents have to work a typical 9-5, they cannot afford to stay home and watch little Anisa, no matter how fabulous the online homeschool teacher is!). This is when I realized that if we truly want to disrupt K-12 (esp K-5) education, we need a solution that works from the outside in – being part of classroom time and funded by schools.”

Working with schools introduces new challenges and processes, varying a bit from city to city and state to state. In many regions, schools can’t just bring in a company like this on a whim — they’ve got to work with pre-approved, contracted vendors. Since becoming an approved vendor with the New York City Department of Education earlier this year, Anisa tells me over 14,000 students have taken part in Litnerd’s programs. She expects that number to double in the coming months.

Litnerd’s books, workshops and lesson plans are built around the social and emotional learning (or SEL) practices that most US states expect, bringing in topics like self-awareness, responsible decision making, and social awareness to help students grow more than just their ability to read.

Each book comes with its own lesson plan, complete with worksheets and activities for the students and suggested dialogue to help teachers identify and highlight the intended learnings from the stories.

Importantly, the company seems quite mindful about how it all plays out from the teacher’s perspective. They know that most teachers already have far too much to do, and design lesson plans with the goal of minimizing the amount of work they’re adding to a teacher’s day.

“We need SEL for the teachers, too,” Mirza tells me. “We need a social and emotional break for them, as well.”

It’s also a pretty dang cool gig for actors, particularly as the live acting industry works to recover from the pandemic. Actors currently perform and record all their sessions from home; as Litnerd grows, the company hopes to open up coworking-space style drop-in studios.

Litnerd is currently focused on expanding to more schools in New York City, growing beyond that as the varying regional processes allow.

Maya Moufarek, founder of Marketing Cube, spent more than 15 years working for companies like Google and American Express before launching her own agency. Today, her London-based firm works with startups around the world — and her startup clients have raved about the results, based on what we’ve heard in our TechCrunch Experts growth marketing survey.

“She’s an absolute powerhouse who knows growth better than anyone I know,” according to Alice at The Lowdown. Nikki O’Farrell of KatKin told us that “[She has an] expert ear and eye from the world of startups/scaleups and growth. Her functional and direct approach allows you to execute at speed and see results quickly.” Constance at Luko said that they “[r]eally liked her mindset, both hands-on, no bullshit while also super strategic.”

We interviewed Moufarek to get her take on lessons she’s learned from working with larger companies, how she applies them to smaller companies, her approach to optimizing her clients’ success, trends she’s seeing in growth marketing and more.

(This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.)

We received many testimonials about you through our TechCrunch Experts project that mentioned your direct approach and hands-on experience. How do you think those qualities contribute to your success in working with startups and forming strategies?

The truth is, a lot of the time ambitious founders and executive teams don’t have a marketing background, so they need to outsource to find the right support to deliver on huge growth ambitions — usually within very limited time frames.

In that situation, experience is everything — there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing approach for startups. Marketing strategies that help find product-market fit are very different from acquiring your first 100 customers, which is very different from scaling your customer acquisition or lead generation. There are also a lot of intricacies to this sort of role, which makes it pretty unique — choose a marketer or agency with no direct experience and you may simply get the wrong answer for your situation.

Having gained 15+ years of experience in a range of businesses — from startups to conglomerates, and experience of Series A to private equity — I’ve had the opportunity to actually apply the tried-and-tested practices of hypergrowth, as well as offer the full stack of C-level support. That’s why I founded MarketingCube.co, a boutique strategic growth consultancy for innovative startups and scaleups.

Being direct is critical, because by their very nature, startups are after fast and transformative outcomes, not never-ending presentations and lengthy processes, so a hands-on approach is crucial. You need to get straight to the beating heart of the business, understand the culture, involve the right people — and be comfortable telling founders and exec teams things they don’t always want to hear. In return, they get a solid foundation, ambitious deliverables, and the right tools to hit the ground running and continue to do so after you leave the room.

What lessons did you learn from working with larger companies such as Google and American Express that you use when working with startups?

Now, everyone sees Google as this huge company with endless products and expansive teams, but back in 2005 when I worked there, it didn’t seem like a megacompany. It was post-IPO hypergrowth, but the EMEA and emerging markets I contributed to were like regional startups within a scaleup. At the other end of the scale, American Express was a more traditional and established corporation with legacy systems and processes that was beginning to go through a digital transformation.

So the lessons learnt from these companies vary widely — but there are some universal principles that are always relevant.

One lesson — which was especially true at Amex — is to always be prepared for shifting markets that may disrupt your business. That may seem strange advice for a new startup, but the economy is volatile and things change very fast. It’s hard to prepare for every situation, but you need to have the vision and drive to lead the market, as well as the means to execute it.

In terms of CX/UX, I tell everyone I work with that less is always more. It might be a cliché, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. By this I mean, customers want fewer clicks, fewer words and simpler, more direct steps to reach their end goal.

Google really understood that it’s essential to provide your customers with a seamless experience and to delight them throughout — after all, customers are the lifeblood of any successful business.

If your organization is truly customer-centric, it’s always possible to deliver a digital transformation successfully or adapt to a changing market. Amex has shown how a brand and business can reinvent itself many times over.

Finally, always agree on a clear set of objectives and key results (OKRs) to ensure focus, prioritization and collaboration. Agility and speed are the competitive advantages of young businesses and OKRs help deliver that, as well as create accountability.

Has a growth marketing expert made a big difference for your startup? Please share your recommendation in our survey.

When looking at your portfolio, you’ve worked with companies in various areas, like Pexxi/Tuune in health tech, YuLife in insurtech and Andjaro in HR tech. How does your approach to each client differ to make sure you’re optimizing your clients’ success in their field?

The first thing is that — regardless of their specialism — every company is at a different stage and has different needs. So asking the right questions, setting the right goals, and including the right people and teams at the start is key.

Beyond that, each business model, industry and audience has its own principles, best practices and proven strategies. For instance, in health and finance, credibility and trust are critical. Whereas for an HR SaaS brand, the challenge is all around driving adoption because the market they are creating is totally new.

So, I always start with an audit of their customer base or target audience:

• What role are they hiring the business to do?
• What problem are they solving?
• What value do they add?

I find Clayton Christensen’s jobs to be done (JTBD) framework very powerful because it’s relevant to the product, marketing and strategy teams. It’s built on the assumption that consumers don’t buy products, they “hire” solutions … and they can “fire” them just as quickly if they’re not doing the job properly. It shifts the focus away from the “ideal” customer persona to the real issue and how to solve it.

Understanding the business levers and Sean Ellis’ North Star metric is vital for growth. It’s about focusing on the metric that directly reflects the value that your company and products bring to your customers. For example, for Airbnb that may be the number of nights booked; for Spotify, minutes listened to. It’s all about simplifying your strategy into something that is digestible, memorable and applicable.

The North Star metric is not a revenue metric. Revenue is the result of the value you deliver. Not the value itself.

What do startups continue to get wrong?

All too often startups don’t truly know their audience or make the mistake of thinking that brand-building can wait.

According to CB Insights, “no market need” is the main reason startups fail, coming in at 42%. For me, this shows that too often founders do not fully understand the market potential and its alternatives, their customers’ pain points and anxieties, what’s pushing the audience away from their current solutions, and what the pull points are for the business.

This is why I really love the JTBD framework — it stops you from seeing the customer like a strict “persona” and lets you start seeing the solutions they need to find instead.

No matter what maturity stage or success level of the startup/scaleup, we often end up going back to customer insights and really stress-testing how well they know their audience to help elevate their value proposition, messaging and growth opportunities.

When it comes to brand-building, a brand really exists in the hearts and minds of consumers, which makes it hard to quantify. So founders often delay the brand-building process or laying the foundations for one. But an established brand helps increase perceived value, unlocking incredible margins or market share, depending on a firm’s pricing strategy.

Strong, effective brands are not built overnight. Many founders think that brand-building means costly advertising, which is not the case. Brand-building occurs at every interaction between a brand and its customer base across the purchase lifecycle — pre (advertising), during (how and where the purchase happens) and post (CRM, warranties, customer service).

On the other side, what are startups doing better now than ever before?

Right now, startups are working on bolder, more diverse and more impactful issues.

I started angel investing and it gave me exposure to a fantastic and wide variety of founders and innovative ideas. I have been fascinated by how far and wide founders are spread to help reshape our lives and change the future.

A few recent businesses that have inspired me are:

• FairHQ blends scientific research, data-driven insights and best practices to help you embed D&I into your business.
• Fertility Circle helps find the best tailored fertility information for parents. With one in six struggling to conceive, they connect individuals with a supportive community and provide access to expert medical professionals.
• Hapi plan empowers family and friends to invest in their children to ensure their financial security for the present and in the future.

What major trends are you seeing right now with hiring growth marketers?

I often hear founders say that “growth is the new engineering.” Tech companies have been fighting over engineering talent for as long as I can remember, and now it’s the same for growth talent.

Why?

I think there are multiple reasons: One being the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, as businesses heavily impacted by the crisis are now hiring at the speed of light. A lot of small businesses applied the “cut deep and early” recommendations to manage their cash flow, so they now need to rebuild entire marketing and growth functions.

Thankfully, there is a lot of funding going into startups at the moment, so there has been a huge spike in demand for growth talent. Lastly, as we’ve all seen, the crisis catapulted the digitization of businesses and purchase funnels for more established businesses that now need digital growth marketing talent to help maintain their sustainability.

During times of disruption, there is a great opportunity for innovation, and from what I’ve seen, this has made hiring managers and recruiters quite creative about how they go about sourcing and attracting growth talent. Lots have expanded their geographical search thanks to remote working becoming the norm. Some even applied account-based marketing best practices by building target lists of talent and creating automated sequences to reach out to them. It’s been really interesting to see.

In your “Hiring Growth Marketers — Where to Begin” post on your website, you mention the T-shaped growth marketer. How has the shift in company’s priorities during the pandemic changed the skills that growth marketers consider essential in their T?

During the pandemic, we had two categories of businesses: (a) those seriously impacted by the restrictions and (b) those who saw a spike in demand for services, like Deliveroo and Netflix.

Those severely affected had to pivot and pivot quickly to survive. A great example is Airbnb, launching digital tours and online experiences to support their hosts and ensure they continue connecting with guests. Another is Oxwash, previously exclusively washing laundry within the hospitality industry, who shifted their business to cleaning scrubs and bedding for NHS hospitals during the height of the pandemic. By adapting, they learned to clean to clinical NHS standards and help keep a strained health service afloat. For these businesses, the flexibility and customer development were the essential elements of the T in their growth teams, as they had to build an entirely new proposition on the fly.

On the flip side, businesses who thrived through lockdown saw an increase in requirement for CRM skills and merchandising. To find the right tone to match the mood of the nation — and curate relevant recommendations or services to engage with existing and new customers — was the name of the game. Data and analytics became an essential skill to make sense of the changing behaviors, and understanding how to manage pandemic demand levels, especially as companies like Ocado early in the pandemic struggled to meet customer demand and so allocated limited slots for delivery.

The wealth of knowledge and adaptability of the growth teams in both of these types of businesses shows how valuable T-shaped marketers are to whether businesses big and small fail or succeed.

PayPal-owned payments app Venmo will no longer offer a public, global feed of users’ transactions, as part of a significant redesign focused on expanding the app’s privacy controls and better highlighting some of Venmo’s newer features. The company says it will instead only show users their “friends feed” — meaning, the app’s social feed where you can see just your friends’ transactions.

Venmo has struggled over the years to balance its desire to add a social element to its peer-to-peer payments-based network, with the need to offer users their privacy.

A few years ago, the company was forced to settle a complaint with the FTC over its handling of privacy disclosures in the app along with other issues related to the security and privacy of user transactions. One of the concerns at the time was a setting that made all transactions public by default — a feature the FTC said wasn’t being properly explained to customers. As part of the settlement, Venmo had to inform both new and existing users how to limit the visibility of their transactions, among other changes.

However, privacy issues have continued to follow Venmo over the years. More recently, BuzzFeed News was able to track down President Biden’s secret Venmo account because of the lack of privacy around Venmo friend lists, for example. Afterwards, the company rolled out friend list privacy controls to address the issue.

Image Credits: Venmo

In the newly updated app, Venmo will still highlight this friend list privacy setting so users can choose whether or not they want to have their profile appear on other people’s friends’ lists. Users will also still be able to remove or add contacts from their friend list at any time, block people, and set their transaction privacy either as they post or retroactively to public, private, or friends-only. It’s unclear what advantage posting publicly has though, as the global, public feed is gone. Instead, public transactions would be visible to a users’ non-friends only when someone visited their profile directly.

In addition to the privacy changes, Venmo’s redesign aims to make it easier for people to discover the app’s new features, the company says.

Now, a new bottom navigation option will allow users to toggle between their social feed, Venmo’s products like the Venmo Card and crypto, and their personal profile. The newly elevated “Cards” section will allow Venmo Credit and Debit cardholders to manage their cards and access their rewards and offers, as before. Meanwhile, the “Crypto” tab will let users learn and explore the world of crypto, view real-time trends, and buy, sell or hold different types of cryptocurrencies.

Image Credits: Venmo

Venmo first added support for crypto earlier this year, following parent company PayPal’s move to do the same, and now offers access to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash. Before, the option appeared as a small button next to the “Pay or Request” button at the bottom of the screen, which contributed to Venmo’s cluttered feel.

The updated app will also include support for new payment types and expanded purchase protections, which Venmo announced last month, and said would arrive on July 20. Customers will now be able to indicate if their purchase is for “goods and services” when they transact with a seller, which will make the transactions eligible for Venmo’s purchase protection plan — even if the seller doesn’t have a proper “business” account.

Because this now charges sellers a 1.9% plus 10-cent fee, there had been some backlash from users who either misunderstood the changes or just didn’t like them. But the move could help to boost Venmo revenue.

PayPal said in February that Venmo grew users 32% over 2020 to reach 70 million active accounts and expects the app to generate nearly $900 million in revenue this year — likely in part thanks to this and other new initiatives, like its crypto transaction fees.

Image Credits: Venmo

Beyond the more functional changes and the privacy updates, Venmo’s redesign also modernizes the look-and-feel of the app itself, which had become a little dated and overly busy. As Venmo had expanded its array of services, the hamburger (three line) menu in the top right of the old version of the app had turned into a long list of options and settings. Now that’s gone. The app uses new iconography, an updated font, and lots of white space to make it feel fresh and clean.

The app’s changes also somewhat de-emphasize the importance of the social feed itself. Although it may still default to that tab, other options now have equal footing with tabs of their own, instead of being hidden away in a menu or in a smaller button.

Venmo says the redesigned Venmo app will begin to roll out today to select customers and will be available to all users across the U.S. over the next few weeks.

Jeff Bezos was so triumphant he was practically glowing at a press conference following the Blue Origin’s first crewed mission to space, 21 years after he founded the company in 2000. The billionaire talked about the future of the company and his role in it, and then casually gave away a couple hundred million dollars.

Bezos was one of four that rode in the RSS First Step capsule; the others were his financier brother, Mark; aviation legend and Mercury 13 veteran Wally Funk; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the son of the second-highest bidder on the Blue Origin seat auction. (The $28 million dollar winner postponed his seat due to scheduling conflicts.)

The company now joins a very tiny circle of companies that have sent private citizens to space, in the biggest boost yet for the nascent space tourism industry. Tuesday also marks the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the next step in space travel paying homage to the very first.

The press conference opened with the grinning foursome being pinned with astronaut ‘wings,’ a badge traditionally granted to those that have gone to space. “I’m so happy,” said Bezos at the press conference, donning the same cream cowboy hat he wore moments after emerging from the capsule a little over two hours earlier.

Bezos also thanked the city of Van Horn, acknowledging Blue Origin has made “a dent in it,” and followed by thanking every Amazon employee, plus its millions of customers: “Seriously, you paid for this.”

They also showed a brief video of the four crew members cavorting in four minutes of microgravity, including footage of the crew members catching floating Skittles in their mouths.

This is the second suborbital mission crewed entirely by private citizens this month alone, a first in history. The first was accomplished by Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, a rocket-powered spaceplane, on July 11; its founder, billionaire Richard Branson, was aboard, which helped foment a truly petty spat between the two ultra-wealthy founders. That aside, the two flights have helped make space tourism more of a reality than ever before.

The flight will also likely be a boost for Blue Origin’s commercial heavy-lift rocket launch arm, which for the moment is largely occupied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The same technologies that are used to perfect New Shepard’s reusability could come in handy for the development of New Glenn, the company’s massive orbital launch. Bezos said in February that the company was pushing the inaugural launch of New Glenn from late 2021 to the latter quarter of 2022.

Image Credits: Blue Origin / YouTube

“The fact of the matter is, the architecture and the technology we’ve chosen is complete over-kill” for space tourism, Bezos said. Instead, Blue Origin chose it “because it scales […]  the whole point of this is to get practice” for larger and heavier missions.

On why Blue Origin chose liquid fuel, he reiterated that it’s practice for future launches. “Every time we fly this tourism mission, we practice flying the second stage of New Glenn.”

In December 2020, NASA added Blue Origin to its roster of space companies eligible to compete for contracts under its Launch Services II program. While it doesn’t guarantee that New Glenn or any other Blue Origin rocket would be awarded a launch contract, it’s the first step to getting there.

Jeff Bezos confirmed that Blue Origin will fly two additional crewed launches this year alone, but it has yet to announce the price per seat. “We want the cadence to be very high […] We’re approaching $100 million in private sales already.” When asked how to get the cost per seat down, Bezos said the space tourism industry would follow the trajectory of commercial space travel, now widely used by millions of travelers each year.

At the end of the conference, Bezos announced he was starting a $100 million Courage and Civility Award, with CNN contributor Van Jones and Michelin star chef José Andrés as the first two recipients. The winner will give that money away to the charities of their choice. The award is for people who apparently demonstrate civility and resist ad hominem attacks. Reading between the lines (frankly, you don’t even really have to do that) it seems like a commentary on contemporary political discourse, especially the emphasis on civility in disagreement.

Looking to the future, the Amazon founder said he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion investment fund focused on climate change.

“This is not about escaping Earth. The whole point is, this is the only good planet in the solar system,” Bezos said. “We have to take care of it.”

Rewatch the press conference here:

The startup market is having a moment around the world, but few regions can brag as much as Europe when it comes to venture capital investment. Yes, the United States is putting up impressive numbers and Indian startups are booming. But Europe is such a bright spot in the larger world of private startup investment that it deserves more solo attention.

The data coming out of the continent is staggering: According to a Dealroom report, some €49 billion was raised by European startups in the first six months of 2021. That’s 2.9x as much as was raised by the region’s technology upstarts in the first half of 2020, and easily crests previous full-year records set in 2020 and 2019.

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The epic start to 2021 for European startup fundraising crushes any preceding year that The Exchange has data for, erasing concerns that the continent simply won’t be able to create breakout tech companies that compete globally.

There are other signals that things are red-hot in Europe, including the recent direct listing of Wise on the London Stock Exchange. The company was valued at a huge $11 billion price when it did so.

Rapid investment and big exits are now the norm out of Europe. Naturally, we wanted to learn more about where venture dollars may point in the future. What follows is a synthesis of market data and notes from Diana Koziarska, a partner at SMOK Ventures; Vinoth Jayakumar, a partner at Draper Esprit; Simon Schmincke, a partner at Creandum; and Javier Santiso, a partner at Mundi Ventures.

The picture that emerges is one of sustained optimism, an expectation that venture investment is going to blast through traditional lulls and sustain a rapid-fire cadence during the rest of 2021. Records shall be smashed. But inside the various superlatives, a few sectors may do better than others. And Europe’s comparative gains in the venture capital world aren’t without impacts. Let’s explore what data says about the first half of 2021 in Europe’s startup market, and what its in-crowd expects for the rest of the year.

Inside Europe’s epic start to 2021

The European startup market is putting up notable results for both early-stage and super-late-stage funding. Dealroom reports that in the first half of 2021, some €18.1 billion was raised by European startups in the form of rounds greater than €250 million. For reference, the entire European startup market raised €16.7 billion in the first half of 2020.

But there’s also solid data indicating that Europe is doing a better job than ever in getting smaller companies off the ground. The same Dealroom report indicates that while Europe has created 15% of new global unicorns since 2020, it created 20% of new Series A-stage startups and a huge 35% of seed-stage tech upstarts.

China, in contrast, is the opposite; the country has 8% of new unicorns since 2020, 6% of Series A-stage startups and just 3% of the world’s seed-stage tech upstarts.

The interesting China dynamic is repeated in other statistics. Dealroom reports that Latin American venture capital is up 5.5x on a year-over-year basis in H1 2021. Asia excluding China is up 2.3x, as is investment in the United States. In China, a far smaller 1.6x growth rate was seen in the half-year period. But inside that data is the fact that every region we just listed set records in H1 2021, while China posted a figure that was sharply down from prior peak results.

This shows that regions that see a boom in investment can later see declines. But at least in the near term, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

There are many things I wish I knew when starting out with my small customer support team at RingCentral, but in the end, we figured it out. I’m going to share some critical lessons I learned along the way that I wish I had known at the outset, so that when it comes to scaling your own support team, you’ll have an idea of what to expect.

When I first started with RingCentral, we were working with a small-scale support team undergoing rapid growth. Our main goal was to maintain an excellent level of customer service with smart operational decisions.

You have some choices when it comes to scaling up customer support:

• Increase your employee headcount to cover the increase in customers. This is an expensive option, and onboarding employees too quickly can result in lower-quality training that results in lower-quality customer service.
• Operate with a reduced staff and rely on decreased customer interaction. This increases wait times and can prove catastrophic to customer satisfaction.

But the real strategy to embrace, and the one we instituted at RingCentral, was investing in the employees we were onboarding and ensuring all our existing processes were running efficiently.

While automating processes and developing new strategies to address customer support is essential, building an efficient and empowered support team is the real key to scaling your customer support operation.

Hiring the right employees is critical. You want to find people with the right foundational skill sets and not necessarily the technical know-how to execute the job.

A foundational skill set combined with robust training enables employees to thrive with whatever is thrown at them, like adapting to remote support in the past year. An enabled employee can resolve support issues faster, making your whole operation more efficient. That’s a real win-win.

As you scale and onboard employees, make sure they know their importance — emphasize the stakes in their role related to the business and value that responsibility. We want our employees to feel engaged, so we offer them opportunities to pursue passion projects tied to business initiatives and the opportunity to shadow across different organizations.

As you adapt to growth by scaling your support team, you’ll develop operational elements and firm work streams that increase efficiency, enabling you to further grow without the need to hire additional support.

It’s been a team effort to get to where we are now, so keep that in mind as you plan your growth scaling. Your support team is your most important asset.

Lesson 1: Go beyond simplistic support

While it’s convenient to buy into the accepted truth that customer support consists of only two departments — inbound and outbound, at RingCentral, I encouraged diversity within our support teams.

With different skill sets come support agents who bring something unique to the table. While developing our support frontline, I soon learned that talents could be utilized in a query-specific function. By placing the support associate in the most suitable role, we increased job satisfaction for employees while remaining highly focused on the customer experience.

Here’s an overview of the teams we developed:

Professional services team

Late last month, Facebook announced Bulletin, its newsletter platform. Unlike Substack, Medium, and other competitors, Bulletin hand-picks its writers to curate a more controlled platform, with stars ranging from Mitch Albom, whose book Tuesdays With Morrie continues to break hearts in seventh grade English classes, to Queer Eye’s Tan France, who taught a generation of young people how to perfect their French tuck. Today, Facebook announced its first new wave of newsletter writers after its initial beta launch.

This next wave of writers includes 24-year-old Nobel Peace Prize Malala Yousafzai, writing about “big debates and small moments; Maria Celeste, a Puerto Rican journalist who will write Bulletin’s first Spanish language newsletter; and Nedra Tawwab, a relationships therapist with millions of social media followers.

Bulletin boasts a breadth of free content and contains minimal Facebook branding — it’s hosted on its own separate website, not the Facebook app. But newsletter writers can choose what content to put behind a paywall, which readers purchase access to, of course, via Facebook Pay. Newsletter subscribers might also gain access to subscriber-only Facebook groups, Live Audio Rooms, and podcasts — so, Bulletin helps Facebook funnel subscribers into other products under its growing brand. But while Bulletin grows as a curated, invite-only platform for public figures that’s more exclusive than Raya, other platforms have struggled with the ethics of content moderation.

“We respect the work of writers and want to be clear that anyone who partners with us will have complete editorial independence,” Facebook wrote in a blog post after Bulletin’s launch. And, after reading comedian Greg Mania’s Bulletin-hosted essay about hemorrhoids, this statement feels accurate.

But when we talk about “editorial independence,” we’re not really talking about the ability to publish an essay called “My Date With the Rectal Surgeon.” With this statement, the company seemed to be nodding to the controversial “hands-off” approach that Substack has taken with its platform. Medium has dealt with a cultural reckoning of its own, too — the platform used to host in-house publications like GEN and Elemental, which were written and edited by trained journalists, but a pivot in the company’s vision effectively shut down editorial operations. So, Facebook’s investment in platforming (a select few) journalists and writers comes in direct opposition with the emphasis from Substack and Medium on user-generated content.

Facebook isn’t the only major social media platform that’s interested in newsletters — in January, Twitter acquired the newsletter platform Revue, but aside from some quiet updates, it seems like Twitter’s attention is focused elsewhere for now.

Research says that counterfeit medication is the cause of 1 million deaths per year. One-tenth of this number comes from Africa. Counterfeiting is hard to detect, investigate, quantify or stop. It is a global problem, with annual earnings from substandard drugs standing at over $100 billion.

Some technologies have helped deal with this menace; for instance, radio frequency identification, which works by assigning serial numbers to containers of each product. More modern approaches are being adopted these days, which is the case of RxAll, a startup using deep technology to provide quality medication to patients. Today, the U.S. and Nigerian-based company is announcing a financing round of $3.15 million to scale across existing markets and improve its technology.

RxAll was founded in 2016 by Adebayo Alonge, Amy Kao and Wei Lui. As students at Yale University, the trio came together to collectively solve a problem they faced firsthand, either personally or relating to a loved one.

In 2006, Alonge was a victim of fake pharmaceuticals and almost died after taking medicine that contained lethal levels of diazepam. He went into a coma for three weeks.

“I survived a 21-day coma in Nigeria 15 years ago. My co-founder, Amy, was hospitalized in Thailand after taking counterfeit medicine. And Wei lost a family member due to contaminated drugs,” Alonge told TechCrunch over a call.

Based on an R&D project at the college’s chemistry department, Alonge, Kao, and Lui began to analyze how to use machine learning and molecular spectroscopy for drug quality and material and quality assurance. The big idea was to address the problem of poor access to high-quality medicine across Africa first, then the rest of the world by building a marketplace for authenticating the sale of safe and reputable pharmaceuticals.

“After going through that, information out there further confirmed that what we experienced wasn’t a one-off situation. It’s an ongoing problem; 100,000 Africans die from this problem every year. One million people die across the world from this problem,” CEO Alonge continued. 

Image Credits: RxAll

Its proprietary technology, RxScanner, is a handheld authenticator designed for patients to verify their drugs. According to the company, the RxScanner can identify the quality of prescription drugs in 20 seconds and display results in real-time via mobile apps.

RxAll curates high-quality sellers to its marketplace and provides them with the RxScanner. The machine learning model reads the sample spectra and send test results indicating the identity and the quality versus the reference. Sellers can be found by using the filter, and once the batch testing is done, the seller can push out the product into the marketplace and make it available for on-demand ordering, pick-up and deliveries as well.

The company makes money through commissions via transactions made on the marketplace. It also employs a subscription model with the RxScanner for individual and business customers.

Despite the company’s innovation, funding has been few and far between, as with many deep tech platforms with a significant focus on Africa. This is mainly due to the long cycle from research to commercialization of such ventures, so most VCs would instead get involved in the company’s later stages. So far, RxAll has stayed alive by winning grants and prize monies at competitions, with some equity financing from the likes of Africa-focused accelerator Founders Factory Africa.

Alonge sees RxAll as a pioneer in the world of deep tech mixed with health tech. He reckons there’s no direct competition with how the RxScanner operates, at least for the time being.

“In terms of pharmaceutical e-commerce, yes that’s a different ballgame. In terms of drug testing, the only other solutions out there are laboratory equipment, and they can be expensive. But in the space we play in, the application area, the price point, the way we’re going about it using deep learning and mobile phones, there’s no comparison,” the CEO said.

However, technological edge alone does not sell a product or run a business. With RxAll, the key to scaling its tech, according to Alonge is making its products affordable for the market despite the costs incurred. That’s a challenge the company is taking strides to tackle in addition to making its technology easier for investors to understand.

A part of the RxAll team

RxAll describes itself as a company playing in a global market. But as highlighted previously, a bulk of its customers and revenues come from Africa, especially Nigeria. It is currently serving ten cities and is actively validating the authenticity of drugs for 1 million patients while servicing over 2,000 hospitals and pharmacies in the West African nation. The company has plans to add an extra 14 cities before this year runs out, with a pan-African play set in motion for next year.

This financing round is a cumulation of a recently closed $2 million seed round (oversubscribed with $2.25 million) and a $900,000 pre-seed raised at the tail end of last year. Launch Africa led the round with participation from SOSV’s HAX and Keisuke Honda via his KSK fund.  

Speaking on the round, managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures Zachariah George said, “Launch Africa Ventures is excited to be co-leading this round of financing into a strong, experienced team at RxAll. We believe that RxAll is bridging a major gap in access to quality healthcare in Africa by pioneering a drug delivery platform to enable pharmacies and patients to buy authenticated medicines online. The ability to achieve favourable unit economics and multiple revenue streams by leveraging anti-counterfeiting mobile spectrometer technology, owning the entire drug delivery supply chain and their own payment wallet, provides a massive growth and scaling opportunity across Africa and beyond.”

Duncan Turner, general partner at SOSV and managing director of HAX added, “We’ve been incredibly impressed by RxAll’s ability to scale and meet customer demand. In just the last year, the team has brought together world-class hard tech and operational excellence to solve pressing issues for over a million Nigerians, and we couldn’t be more excited by their vision for the broader pharmaceutical market.”

So what’s next for RxAll? Alonge said the company’s next focus is on partnerships. According to him, they will be integral in RxAll’s push to scale its marketplace and scanner across Nigeria, Africa and the rest of the world.

“Asides from the hospitals, pharmacies and patients, we also sell to governments and country FDAs on the scanner side of things. So we’re looking to secure key partnerships globally, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa, Southeast Asia, North America and South America. Those are the key markets we’re looking to scale into.”