Author: azeeadmin

Reliance on a single technology as a lifeline is a futile battle now. When simple automation no longer does the trick, delivering end-to-end automation needs a combination of complementary technologies that can give a facelift to business processes: the digital operations toolbox.

According to a McKinsey survey, enterprises that have likely been successful with digital transformation efforts adopted sophisticated technologies such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things or machine learning. Enterprises can achieve hyperautomation with the digital ops toolbox, the hub for your digital operations.

The toolbox is a synchronous medley of intelligent business process management (iBPM), robotic process automation (RPA), process mining, low code, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and a rules engine. The technologies can be optimally combined to achieve the organization’s key performance indicator (KPI) through hyperautomation.

The hyperautomation market is burgeoning: Analysts predict that by 2025, it will reach around $860 billion. Let’s see why.

The purpose of a digital ops toolbox

The toolbox, the treasure chest of technologies it is, helps with three crucial aspects: process automation, orchestration and intelligence.

Process automation: A hyperautomation mindset introduces the world of “automating anything that can be,” whether that’s a process or a task. If something can be handled by bots or other technologies, it should be.

Orchestration: Hyperautomation, per se, adds an orchestration layer to simple automation. Technologies like intelligent business process management orchestrate the entire process.

Intelligence: Machines can automate repetitive tasks, but they lack the decision-making capabilities of humans. And, to achieve a perfect harmony where machines are made to “think and act,” or attain cognitive skills, we need AI. Combining AI, ML and natural language processing algorithms with analytics propels simple automation to become more cognitive. Instead of just following if-then rules, the technologies help gather insights from the data. The decision-making capabilities enable bots to make decisions.

Simple automation versus hyperautomation

Here’s a story of evolving from simple automation to hyperautomation with an example: an order-to-cash process.

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 13, 2021. Have you gotten into the fake meat craze yet? Or are you sitting on the sidelines still, holding a turkey leg in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other? The good news for primitive humans like you and me is that more fake meat is cropping up in more places. Like Beyond Meat’s fake chicken at Panda Express.

Look, I love to be a carnivore. But I don’t love the carbon footprint. Maybe tech companies will chart a more sustainable path for the rest of us. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple gets into the external battery game: If you’re anything like me, your mobile phone is usually about to die. If you own an iPhone, there’s good news today in the form of Apple announcing a $99 battery pack that will provide wireless juice to your handset. It snaps to the back of the phone. Frankly, I am irked that I need this, but I do.
• There have never been so many great startups: That’s what TechCrunch learned today from investors. The U.S. venture class said that high prices weren’t keeping them on the sidelines, and that you essentially have to pay up to stay in the game. So if you are a founder with a good growth story, congratulations on your salad days.
• For example, Zomato just raised more money before its IPO: The Indian food delivery startup is looking to list this week at the high end of its range, with 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise coming from its anchor investors. That’s some hot demand.

Startups/VC

First up from our startup digest today is a piece from our own Danny Crichton announcing the winding down of The TechCrunch List. The original idea was simple: “A curated directory of venture capitalists designed to guide founders to the VCs most relevant to their startups.”

But after reading thousands of entries and building out a huge database, the experiment went a bit stale. Here’s Danny on what happened: “The venture capital industry has radically changed over the past year, and the central thesis we used in constructing the list no longer applies.” Why? Because the venture capital world has become more competitive, quicker and geographically flatter. So terms and pricing matter more, we’re told, than expertise.

Consider that fact duly noted. Now, our usual rundown of funding events, from smallest to largest:

• AttackIQ raises $44M to help companies manage breaches: It does so in an interesting manner, by simulating attacks themselves. It’s a bit like having a scrimmage match against yourself. The latest AttackIQ deal underscores just how valuable cybersecurity startups have proven to be in recent months.
• Marco Financial raises $82M to fund LatAm exporters: The Miami-based, trade-focused startup raised $7 million in cash and $75 million in credit to help grow its business. Marco Financial uses a “tech-enabled risk assessment platform” to determine creditworthiness, which is neat. Anything to provide more capital access to more people in more places.
• Amperity raises $100M, becomes unicorn: What does it do? The startup built a customer data platform to help big companies better understand to whom they sell. As our own Ingrid Lunden reports, the startup is working in a world where some traditional methods of tracking customers — like browser cookies — are fading from our shared reality.
• Sourcegraph raises $125M for its code-search tool: This is an interesting one. Now worth $2.625 billion — up 3x from its December round — Sourcegraph is on fire. Other reporting indicates that the company could be at around a $10 million annual run rate. That’s, ahem, a healthy multiple.

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

The days of gaming search engines to drive traffic are long gone. Startups that want to be noticed must invest in producing high-quality content that accurately describes their products and services.

Beyond the basic best practices you’ll find on SEO blogs and newsletters, Mark Spera, head of growth marketing at Minted, offers five “advanced-ish” tactics “to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search.”

Strategy No. 1? Start out by using content-generation tools to automate tasks like creating search-friendly headlines, titles and blog outlines.

“We’ve been able to bring our article-writing process down from four hours per article to around 90 minutes,” writes Spera. “Imagine what you could do with all that time!”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Yes, there was other Big Tech news apart from Apple’s battery pack today. Here’s what you need to know:

• Discord buys Sentropy: Discord is a big company today, with lots of staff, lots of users and a big valuation. And it just bought Sentropy, a startup that TechCrunch wrote “makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate.” Given that some loathsome groups use Discord here and there, the buy makes sense.
• Facebook wants to pay bug hunters more: A new Facebook program called the “Payout Time Bonus” may boost fees paid to bug hunters in the social network’s world. The company pays out less per year than some other megacorps, but the gap could tighten thanks to the new effort.
• ZoomInfo buys Chorus.ai for $575M: Early today news broke that ZoomInfo, a public company, will drop more than half a billy on Chrous.ai, a company that provides sales intelligence tools focused on conversations. It’s related to what Gong.io is building, though Gong remains independent and worth around 13 times as much.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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

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

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: MuteSix

Recommended by: Rhoda Ullmann, Sense

Testimonial: “We’ve tried a number of different agencies, they demonstrate best-in-class expertise with Facebook and Google paid ad platforms. They also have a very smart and efficient approach to creative development that was critical to helping us scale.”

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

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 13, 2021. Have you gotten into the fake meat craze yet? Or are you sitting on the sidelines still, holding a turkey leg in one hand and a bacon sandwich in the other? The good news for primitive humans like you and me is that more fake meat is cropping up in more places. Like Beyond Meat’s fake chicken at Panda Express.

Look, I love to be a carnivore. But I don’t love the carbon footprint. Maybe tech companies will chart a more sustainable path for the rest of us. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Apple gets into the external battery game: If you’re anything like me, your mobile phone is usually about to die. If you own an iPhone, there’s good news today in the form of Apple announcing a $99 battery pack that will provide wireless juice to your handset. It snaps to the back of the phone. Frankly, I am irked that I need this, but I do.
• There have never been so many great startups: That’s what TechCrunch learned today from investors. The U.S. venture class said that high prices weren’t keeping them on the sidelines, and that you essentially have to pay up to stay in the game. So if you are a founder with a good growth story, congratulations on your salad days.
• For example, Zomato just raised more money before its IPO: The Indian food delivery startup is looking to list this week at the high end of its range, with 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise coming from its anchor investors. That’s some hot demand.

Startups/VC

First up from our startup digest today is a piece from our own Danny Crichton announcing the winding down of The TechCrunch List. The original idea was simple: “A curated directory of venture capitalists designed to guide founders to the VCs most relevant to their startups.”

But after reading thousands of entries and building out a huge database, the experiment went a bit stale. Here’s Danny on what happened: “The venture capital industry has radically changed over the past year, and the central thesis we used in constructing the list no longer applies.” Why? Because the venture capital world has become more competitive, quicker and geographically flatter. So terms and pricing matter more, we’re told, than expertise.

Consider that fact duly noted. Now, our usual rundown of funding events, from smallest to largest:

• AttackIQ raises $44M to help companies manage breaches: It does so in an interesting manner, by simulating attacks themselves. It’s a bit like having a scrimmage match against yourself. The latest AttackIQ deal underscores just how valuable cybersecurity startups have proven to be in recent months.
• Marco Financial raises $82M to fund LatAm exporters: The Miami-based, trade-focused startup raised $7 million in cash and $75 million in credit to help grow its business. Marco Financial uses a “tech-enabled risk assessment platform” to determine creditworthiness, which is neat. Anything to provide more capital access to more people in more places.
• Amperity raises $100M, becomes unicorn: What does it do? The startup built a customer data platform to help big companies better understand to whom they sell. As our own Ingrid Lunden reports, the startup is working in a world where some traditional methods of tracking customers — like browser cookies — are fading from our shared reality.
• Sourcegraph raises $125M for its code-search tool: This is an interesting one. Now worth $2.625 billion — up 3x from its December round — Sourcegraph is on fire. Other reporting indicates that the company could be at around a $10 million annual run rate. That’s, ahem, a healthy multiple.

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

The days of gaming search engines to drive traffic are long gone. Startups that want to be noticed must invest in producing high-quality content that accurately describes their products and services.

Beyond the basic best practices you’ll find on SEO blogs and newsletters, Mark Spera, head of growth marketing at Minted, offers five “advanced-ish” tactics “to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search.”

Strategy No. 1? Start out by using content-generation tools to automate tasks like creating search-friendly headlines, titles and blog outlines.

“We’ve been able to bring our article-writing process down from four hours per article to around 90 minutes,” writes Spera. “Imagine what you could do with all that time!”

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

Big Tech Inc.

Yes, there was other Big Tech news apart from Apple’s battery pack today. Here’s what you need to know:

• Discord buys Sentropy: Discord is a big company today, with lots of staff, lots of users and a big valuation. And it just bought Sentropy, a startup that TechCrunch wrote “makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate.” Given that some loathsome groups use Discord here and there, the buy makes sense.
• Facebook wants to pay bug hunters more: A new Facebook program called the “Payout Time Bonus” may boost fees paid to bug hunters in the social network’s world. The company pays out less per year than some other megacorps, but the gap could tighten thanks to the new effort.
• ZoomInfo buys Chorus.ai for $575M: Early today news broke that ZoomInfo, a public company, will drop more than half a billy on Chrous.ai, a company that provides sales intelligence tools focused on conversations. It’s related to what Gong.io is building, though Gong remains independent and worth around 13 times as much.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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

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

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Marketer: MuteSix

Recommended by: Rhoda Ullmann, Sense

Testimonial: “We’ve tried a number of different agencies, they demonstrate best-in-class expertise with Facebook and Google paid ad platforms. They also have a very smart and efficient approach to creative development that was critical to helping us scale.”

If you’ve done any online shopping in the last little while, there’s a good chance you’ve run into services like Affirm and PayPal’s Pay in 4. They allow you to purchase something and pay for it later by splitting up the total cost of the item into several installments.

By the looks of things, Apple could soon offer a similar option to Apple Pay users. According to Bloomberg, the company is working with Goldman Sachs on a service called “Apple Pay Later” that will allow those with its devices to settle purchases over time, including ones they make at physical shops.

When using the service, the outlet says you’ll have two ways of paying for your purchase. If you pick the “Apple Pay in 4” option, you’ll need to make four interest-free payments across two months.

The other option is to extend the payment period over multiple months, though in that case interest comes into play. Bloomberg says it wasn’t able to determine how much interest Apple plans to charge or when the company will roll out the service.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the report, and we’ll update this article when we hear back from the company. But in many ways, Apple Pay Later sounds like a logical extension of what the company is already doing with Apple Card, where one of the perks it offers is installment plans for Mac and iPad purchases.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. 

The next time you’re on a plane, searching for a Wi-Fi connection while soaring thousands of feet above the ground, don’t look for the Gogo name. The longstanding standard of in-flight internet, Gogo Commercial Aviation, has been rebranded to Intelsat.

Intelsat, an international satellite communications provider, purchased Gogo Commercial Aviation in December 2020. It was a cash deal valued at $400 million. Gogo still exists and focuses on business aviation services.

Gogo has been a staple of in-flight entertainment for the past decade, partnering with 17 major airlines. The service is as impressive as it is frustrating, though it’s improved with time. In 2019, Gogo announced plans to roll out 5G in-flight services this year, and it began testing those antennas in June. As Intelsat, 5G is still the goal.

“This name change is happening while Intelsat is leveraging its unparalleled global orbital and spectrum rights, scale and partnerships to build the world’s first global 5G satellite-based software-defined network of networks,” Intelsat CEO Stephen Spengler said in a press release.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. 

Masten Space Systems, a startup that’s aiming to send a lander to the Moon in 2023, will develop a lunar navigation and positioning system not unlike GPS here on Earth.

Masten’s prototype is being developed as part of a contract awarded through the Air Force Research Laboratory’s AFWERX program. Once deployed, it’ll be a first-of-its-kind off-world navigational system.

Up until this point, spacecraft heading to the Moon must carry equipment onboard to detect hazards and assist with navigation. To some extent, it makes sense that a shared navigation network has never been established: humans have only landed on the Moon a handful of times, and while there have been many more uncrewed landings, lunar missions still haven’t exactly been a regular occurrence.

But as the costs of going to orbit and beyond have drastically decreased, thanks in part to innovations in launch technology by companies like SpaceX, space is likely to get a lot busier. Many private companies and national space divisions have set their sights on the Moon in particular. Masten is one of them: it was chosen by NASA to deliver commercial and private payloads to a site near the Haworth Crater at the lunar south pole. That mission, originally scheduled for December 2022, was pushed back to November 2023.

Other entities are also looking to go to the Moon. Chief amongst them is NASA with its Artemis program, which will send two astronauts to the Moon’s surface in 2024. These missions will likely only increase in the coming decades, making a common navigation network more of a necessity.

“Unlike Earth, the Moon isn’t equipped with GPS so lunar spacecraft and orbital assets are essentially operating in the dark,” Masten’s VP of research and development Matthew Kuhns explained in a statement.

The system will work like this: spacecraft will deploy position, navigation and timing (PNT) beacons onto the lunar surface. The PNT beacons will enable a surface-based network that broadcasts radio signal, allowing spacecraft and other orbital assets to wireless connect for navigation, timing and location tracking.

Image Credits: Masten Space Systems (opens in a new window)

The company already concluded Phase I of the project, which involved completing the concept design for the PNT beacons. The bulk of the engineering challenge will come in Phase II, when Masten will develop the PNT beacons. They must be able to withstand harsh lunar conditions, so Masten is partnering with defense and technology company Leidos to build shock-proof beacon enclosures. The aim is to complete the second phase in 2023.

“By establishing a shared navigation network on the Moon, we can lower spacecraft costs by millions of dollars, increase payload capacity, and improve landing accuracy near the most resource-rich sites on the Moon,” Kuhns said.

Swedish electric aviation startup Heart Aerospace has received its biggest order to date: 200 of its inaugural ES-19 electric aircraft from aviation giant United Airlines and its regional airline partner Mesa Air Group.

The deal, which includes an option of purchasing up to 100 additional aircraft, was announced together with a $35 million Series A funding round. Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, United’s venture arm and Mesa led the round. Seed investors EQT Ventures and Lowercarbon Capital also participated.

The ES-19 is a regional airplane that seats 19 and runs on batteries and electric motors instead of traditional jet fuel. The startup says it will deliver the first aircraft for commercial use by 2026. These aircraft will be designed for flights of up to 250 miles based on today’s battery technology.

Heart has made a full-scale prototype of its electric propulsion system, the core of its technical innovation. But the company still has to complete many steps along the way to its proposed date of commercial operations. Chief amongst these is actually assembling a prototype of the full aircraft, testing it and getting it certified with relevant authorities in the U.S. and Europe.

Heart’s founder, aerospace engineer Anders Forslund, said this recent funding round will go toward working with suppliers to validate the safety and reliability of the myriad other systems that need to go in the aircraft, like the avionics system, flight control and even the all-important de-icing system. The company’s talking with around 50 suppliers for these remaining parts, he said. The aviation startup is also building a massive test facility to assemble and demonstrate the full prototype ES-19.

Heart’s in a relativity advantageous position compared to electric air taxis, at least with regard to regulators, because it intends to slot in with existing aviation infrastructure (no special vertiports for the ES-19). Besides the electric propulsion system, which is admittedly a major innovation, the company will be relying on existing technology for other individual systems.

Image Credits: Heart Aerospace

Forslund noted in an interview with TechCrunch that the 2026 launch date is “not just something that we have as a lofty goal that we’d like to parade around on the internet, but it’s what our suppliers are working toward, what our certifying authorities are working toward as well.”

Although the company is based in Sweden, it’s likely that final assembly of at least some of the aircraft will take place in North America to fulfill orders with companies in those countries, Forslund added.

The agreement with Heart is the latest electric aviation wager made by United this year. The airline also put in a $1 billion order and invested in air taxi startup Archer Aviation in February (Forslund declined to specify the financial amount of United’s order). Both the Archer and Heart orders are conditional on certain safety and operational standards, and both companies are at least a handful of years away from going to market. The investments mark the beginning of a sea change in aviation — one already well underway in personal vehicle transportation — toward lower- and zero-emissions technologies.

The deal may also revitalize the 19-seat plane, once a mainstay of regional air travel. The plane type has fallen victim to unprofitable margins resulting in the retirement of more than 1,500 of the aircraft over the past 30 years. Regional air travel has also steadily declined in the United States since the 1990s. Mesa was at one point the largest operator of the 19-seater.

On its website, Heart points out that the smaller conventional planes are no longer economical when the engine cost of ownership is equivalent for a 19- or 70-seater. But it says that its electric aircraft will change the equation. The ES-19 electric motor is 20 times less expensive than an equivalent turboprop and maintenance costs will be reduced by 100-fold, Heart claims.

Heart was founded in 2018 after being spun out of a research project at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden. The company joined Y Combinator’s winter 2019 cohort after closing its $2.2 million seed in May of that year. Heart’s grown to around fifty employees and shows no signs of slowing down.

“Aviation is difficult, and we want to build a plane that doesn’t reinvent the wheel,” Forslund said. “[We’re] just focusing on building an aircraft that’s electric, that’s safe, that’s efficient, and that’s reliable and it’s something that airlines can find profitable in operating.”

If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief.

Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Previously, you could limit who could reply to tweets when they were created, but you couldn’t go in and change your selection after the fact.

On Twitter, you don’t always have a sense of what kind of tweets will attract unwanted attention until it’s too late. The new feature makes the option to limit replies to people you follow or only people mentioned in a tweet much more useful, particularly because the mute button doesn’t always cut it.

Twitter added the option to limit replies last August to boost “meaningful conversations” on the social network and to help people feel safer from harassment when they tweet. Product researcher Jane Manchun Wong first spotted the feature’s expansion in June.

On a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Retail Zipline founder Melissa Wong and Emergence Capital investor Lotti Siniscalco joined Managing Editor Jordan Crook to walk attendees through Zipline’s Series A deck.

Interestingly, the conversation revealed that Wong declined an invitation to do a virtual pitch and insisted on an in-person meeting.

“She was one of the few or maybe the only CEO who ever stood up to pitch the entire team,” said Siniscalco.

“She pointed to the screen projected behind her to help us stay on the most relevant piece of information. The way she did it really made us stay with her. Like, we couldn’t break eye contact.”

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

Beyond Wong’s pitch technique, this post also examines some of the key “customer love” metrics that helped Zipline win the day, such as CAC, churn rates and net promoter score.

“In retrospect, I really underestimated the competitive advantage of coming from the industry,” said Wong. “But it resulted in the numbers in our deck, because I know what customers want, what they want to buy next, how to keep them happy and I was able to be way more capital-efficient.”

Read our recap with highlights from their conversation, or click though to watch a video with their entire chat.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Investors don’t expect the US startup funding market to slow down

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

Global venture capital reached $156 billion in Q2 2021, a YOY increase of 157%. A record number of unicorns found their feet during the same period and valuations rose across the board, report Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm in today’s edition of The Exchange.

Even if round counts didn’t set all-time highs, “the general vibe of Q2 venture capital data was clear: It’s a great time for startups looking to raise capital.”

Anna and Alex are interviewing VCs in different regions to find out why they’re feeling so generous and optimistic. Today, they started with the following U.S.-based investors:

• Amy Cheetham, principal, Costanoa Ventures
• Marlon Nichols, founding managing partner, MaC Venture Capital
• Vanessa Larco, partner, New Enterprise Associates
• Jeff Grabow, venture capital leader, EY US

Despite the hype, construction tech will be hard to disrupt

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

The construction industry might seem like a sector wanting innovation, Safe Site Check In CEO and founder David Ward writes in a guest column, but there are unique challenges that make construction firms slow to adapt to new technology.

From the way construction projects are funded to complicated local regulations, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for the construction industry’s tech problems.

Construction tech might be appealing to investors, Ward writes, but it must be “easy to use, easy to deploy or access while on a job site, and improve productivity almost immediately.”

3 analysts weigh in: What are Andy Jassy’s top priorities as Amazon’s new CEO?

Image Credits: AP Photo/Isaac Brekken/John Locher

Now that he’s stepping away from AWS and taking over for Jeff Bezos, what are the biggest challenges facing incoming Amazon CEO Andy Jassy?

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller reached out to three analysts to get their take:

• Robin Ody, Canalys
• Sucharita Kodali, Forrester
• Ed Anderson, Gartner

Amazon is listed second in the Fortune 500, but it’s not all sunshine and roses — maintaining growth, unionization, and the potential for antitrust regulation at home and abroad are just a few of his responsibilities.

“I think the biggest to-do is to just continue that momentum that the company has had for the last several years,” Kodali says. “He has to make sure that they don’t lose that. If he does that, I mean, he will win.”

The most important API metric is time to first call

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

Publishing an API isn’t enough for any startup: Once it’s released, the hard work of cultivating a developer base begins.

Postman’s head of developer relations, Joyce Lin, wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch based on the findings of a study aimed at increasing adoption of APIs that utilize a public workspace.

Lin found that the most important metric for a public API is time to first call (TTFC). It makes sense — faster TTFC allows developers to begin using new tools quickly. As a result, “legitimately streamlining TTFC results in a larger market potential of better-educated users for the later stages of your developer journey,” writes Lin.

This post isn’t just for the developers in our audience: TTFC is a metric that product and growth teams should also keep top of mind, they suggest.

“Even if your market is defined as a limited subset of the developer community, any enhancements you make to TTFC equate to a larger available market.”

Q3 IPO cycle starts strong with Couchbase pricing and Kaltura relisting

Image Credits: olli0815/iStock

Couchbase and Kaltura offered new filings Monday, with NoSQL provider Couchbase setting an initial price range for its IPO and Kaltura resurrecting its public offering with a fresh price range and new financial information.

“Both bits of news should help us get a handle on how the Q3 2021 IPO cycle is shaping up at the start,” Alex Wilhelm writes.

5 advanced-ish SEO tactics to win in 2021

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

Mark Spera, the head of growth marketing at Minted, offers SEO tips to help smaller sites stand out.

He writes in a guest column that Google’s algorithm “errs on the side of caution,” which leads the search engine to favor larger, more established websites.

“The cards aren’t in your favor, so you need to be even more strategic than the big guys,” he writes. “This means executing on some cutting-edge hacks to increase your SEO throughput and capitalize on some of the arbitrage still left in organic search. I call these five tactics ‘advanced-ish,’ because none of them are complicated, but all of them are supremely important for search marketers in 2021.”

One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes.

To wit, one common theme that came from our recent profiles of Expensify and NS1 is the centrality of file sharing (or, illegal file sharing if you are on that side of the fence) and internet infrastructure in the origin stories of the two companies. That’s peculiar, because the duo honestly couldn’t be more different. Expensify is an SF-founded (now Portland-based), decentralized startup focused on building expense reporting and analytics software for companies and CFOs. New York-based NS1 designs highly-redundant DNS and internet traffic performance tools for web applications.

Yet, take a look at how the two companies were founded. Anna Heim on the origins of Expensify:

To truly understand Expensify, you first need to take a close look at a unique, short-lived, P2P file-sharing company called Red Swoosh, which was Travis Kalanick’s startup before he founded Uber. Framed by Kalanick as his “revenge business” after his previous P2P startup Scour was sued into oblivion for copyright infringement, Red Swoosh would be the precursor for Expensify’s future culture and ethos. In fact, many of Expensify’s initial team actually met at Red Swoosh, which was eventually acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $18.7 million.

[Expensify founder and CEO David] Barrett, a self-proclaimed alpha geek and lifelong software engineer, was actually Red Swoosh’s last engineering manager, hired after the failure of his first project, iGlance.com, a P2P push-to-talk program that couldn’t compete against Skype. “While I was licking my wounds from that experience, I was approached by Travis Kalanick who was running a startup called Red Swoosh,” he recalled in an interview.

Then you head over to Sean Michael Kerner’s story on how NS1 came together:

NS1’s story begins back at the turn of the millennium, when [NS1 co-founder and CEO Kris] Beevers was an undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York and found himself employed at a small file-sharing startup called Aimster with some friends from RPI. Aimster was his first taste of life at an internet startup in the heady days of the dot-com boom and bust, and also where he met an enterprising young engineer by the name of Raj Dutt, who would become a key relationship over the next two decades.

By 2007, Beevers had completed his Ph.D. in robotic mapping at RPI and tried his hand at co-founding and running an engineered-wood-product company named SolidJoint Research, Inc. for 10 months. But he soon boomeranged back to the internet world, joining some of his former co-workers from Aimster at a company called Voxel that had been founded by Dutt.

The startup provided a cornucopia of services including basic web hosting, server co-location, content delivery and DNS services. “Voxel was one of those companies where you learn a lot because you’re doing way more than you rightfully should,” Beevers said. “It was a business sort of built out of love for the tech, and love for solving problems.”

The New York City-based company peaked at some 60 employees before it was acquired in December 2011 by Internap Network Services for $35 million.

Note some of the similarities here. First, these wildly different founders ended up both working on key internet plumbing. Which makes sense of course, since back two decades ago, building out the networking and compute capacity of the internet was one of the major engineering challenges of that period in the web’s history.

Additionally in both cases, the founding teams met at little-known companies defined by their engineering cultures and which sold to larger internet infrastructure conglomerates for relatively small amounts of money. And those acquirers ended up being laboratories for all kinds of innovation, even as few people really remember Akamai or Internap these days (both companies are still around today mind you).

The cohort of founders is fascinating. Obviously, you have Travis Kalanick, who would later go on to found Uber. But the Voxel network that went to Internap is hardly a slouch:

Dutt would leave Internap to start Grafana, an open-source data visualization vendor that has raised over $75 million to date. Voxel COO Zachary Smith went on to found bare metal cloud provider, Packet, in 2013, which he ran as CEO until the company was acquired by Equinix in March 2020 for $335 million. Meanwhile, Justin Biegel, who spent time at Voxel in operations, has raised nearly $62 million for his startup Kentik. And of course, NS1 was birthed from the same alumni network.

What’s interesting to me with these two companies (and some others in our set of stories) is how often founders worked on other problems before starting the companies that would make them famous. They learned the trade, built networks of hyper-intelligent present and future colleagues, understood business development and growth, and started to create a flywheel of innovation amidst their friends. They also got a taste of an exit without really getting the whole meal, if you will.

In particular with file sharing, what’s interesting is the rebellious and democratic ethos that came with that world back at the turn of the millennium. To work in file sharing in that era meant fighting the big music labels, overturning the economics of entire industries, and breaking down barriers to allow the internet economy to flourish. It attracted a weird bunch of folks — the exact kind of weirdness that happens to make good startup founders, apparently. It echos one of the key arguments of Fred Turner’s book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.”

Which begs the question then: what are the “file sharing” markets today that these sorts of individuals congregate around? One that seems obvious to me is blockchain, which has precisely that balance of rebelliousness, democratization, and technical excellence (well, at least some of the time!) And then there are the modern-day “pirates” today such as Alexandra Elbakyan who invented and has operated Sci-Hub to make the world’s research and knowledge democratized.

It’s maybe not the current batch of companies that we see which will become the next extraordinary unicorns. But watch the people who show up in the interesting places — because their next projects often seem to hit gold.