Author: azeeadmin

Microsoft has confirmed it’s buying RiskIQ, a San Francisco-based cybersecurity company that provides threat intelligence and cloud-based software as a service for organizations.

Terms of the deal, which will see RiskIQ’s threat intelligence services integrated into Microsoft’s flagship security offerings, were not disclosed, although Bloomberg previously reported that Microsoft will pay more than $500 million in cash for the company. Microsoft declined to confirm the reported figure.

The announcement comes amid a heightened security landscape as organizations shift to remote and hybrid working strategies.

RiskIQ scours the web, mapping out details about websites and networks, domain name records, certificates and other information, like WHOIS registration data, providing customers visibility into what assets, devices and services can be accessed outside of a company’s firewall. That helps companies lock down their assets and limit their attack surface from malicious actors.

Microsoft says that by embedding RiskIQ’s technologies into its core products, its customers will be able to build a more comprehensive view of the global threats to their businesses as workforces continue to work outside of the traditional office environment.

The deal will also help organizations to keep an eye on supply-chain risks, Microsoft says. This is likely a growing priority for many: an attack on software provider SolarWinds last year saw affected at least 18,000 of its customers, and just this month IT vendor Kaseya fell victim to a ransomware attack that spread to more than 1,000 downstream businesses.

Eric Doerr, vice president of cloud security at Microsoft, said: “RiskIQ helps customers discover and assess the security of their entire enterprise attack surface — in the Microsoft cloud, AWS, other clouds, on-premises, and from their supply chain. With more than a decade of experience scanning and analyzing the internet, RiskIQ can help enterprises identify and remediate vulnerable assets before an attacker can capitalize on them.”

RiskIQ was founded in 2009 and has raised a total of $83 million over four rounds of funding. Elias Manousos, who co-founded RiskIQ and serves as its chief executive, said he was “thrilled” at the acquisition.

“The vision and mission of RiskIQ is to provide unmatched internet visibility and insights to better protect and inform our customers and partners’ security programs,” said Manousos. “Our combined capabilities will enable best-in-class protection, investigations, and response against today’s threats.”

The acquisition is one of many Microsoft has made recently in the cybersecurity space in recent months. The software giant last year bought Israeli security startup CyberX in a bid to boost its Azure IoT business, and just last month it acquired Internet of Things security firm ReFirm Labs.

Elon Musk is testifying Monday morning in a lawsuit over Tesla’s 2016 acquisition of SolarCity, a $2.6 billion transaction that a group of shareholders allege was a “bailout” of the failing solar company. The shareholders are seeking repayment to Tesla of the cost to purchase SolarCity.

The suit, filed in the Delaware District Court in 2017, alleges that SolarCity was near bankruptcy at the time of the acquisition. Musk, who was the ailing company’s chairman of the board of directors and its largest stockholder, directly benefited from the transaction, as did some of his friends and family, the lawsuit alleges. SolarCity’s founders, Lyndon and Peter Rive, are Musk’s cousins.

SolarCity “had consistently failed to turn a profit, had mounting debt, and was burning through cash at an unsustainable rate,” the plaintiffs say. The suit goes on to note that the company had accumulated over $3 billion in debt in its ten-year history, nearly half of which was due for repayment before the end of 2017. The purchase by Tesla was approved by vote by 85% of shareholders.

Attorneys for Musk say that the acquisition was part of the CEO’s longer-term vision to transform Tesla into a transportation and energy company. In a blog post titled “Master Plan, Part Deux,” published to Tesla’s website around the time of the deal’s closing, Musk says that combining SolarCity and the electric vehicle startup was key to realizing his vision of combining Powerwall (Tesla’s home and industry battery storage product) and solar roof panels.

A Model X stood ready for inspection by attendees at the Kauai solar storage facility launch. Tesla acquired SolarCity in November 2016. 

In his testimony Monday, Musk said Tesla was forced to shift focus away from its solar business to meet production deadlines for the Model 3 sedan, the Washington Post’s Will Oremus tweeted from outside the courtroom. USA Today reporter Isabel Hughes, also at the courtroom, tweeted that Musk blamed the pandemic for poor performance of the company’s solar division. He was being questioned by attorney for the plaintiffs Randall Baron, whom Musk called “a shameful person” at a 2019 deposition.

Musk’s lawyers say that he recused himself from board discussions and negotiations relating to the acquisition – but the plaintiffs maintain that the recusal was “superficial.” A primary question for the court will be whether Musk exerted undue influence over the transaction, and whether he and other board members concealed information relating to the transaction from shareholders.

The other board members named in the suit – Robyn Denholm, Ira Ehrenpreis, Antonio Gracias, Kimbal Musk and Stephen Jurvetson – settled for $60 million last year, plus $16.8 million in legal fees and expenses, paid for by insurance. The trial, with Musk as the sole defendant, was postponed a year due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The trial is expected to last ten business days. The Delaware Court of Chancery, where the suit is being heard, does not have a jury; instead, the case will be heard by judge Vice-Chancellor Joseph Slights III. Even if Slights finds that the deal was improper, he could order Musk to pay far less than the $2.6 billion that Tesla paid for SolarCity at the time.

The Amazon roll-up play — where one company creates economies of scale by buying up and consolidating multiple smaller third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon’s marketplace — continues to be a strong e-commerce trend, and in the latest development, one of the hopefuls in this space is announcing a major injection of capital to fuel its own place in the field.

Elevate Brands, a New York- and Austin-based startup that acquires and runs third-party Amazon merchants, has picked up $250 million in funding, money that it will be using both to continue investing in its technology, as well as to buy up more small businesses.

Elevate is already profitable, with 25 brands currently in its stable, many of which also have come to Elevate with patents for their products, CEO and founder Ryan Gnesin told TechCrunch. The plan will be to continue to enhance the systems it has in place for evaluating potential M&A and analyzing the landscape overall — today its algorithms use some 100 million data points, it says, to find suitable acquisition targets — and to continue building out other organizational efficiencies.

Elevate’s funding is coming as a mix of debt and equity — quite standard for these e-commerce businesses that are raising huge rounds to go after the roll-up opportunity — with backers including a number of individuals and investors with track records in fintech and e-commerce. They include FJ Labs, Novel TMT, Adam Jacobs (who had founded The Iconic in Australia), the founders of buy now, pay later business QuadPay, Intermix (acquired by Gap) founder Khajak Keledjian, Ron Suber (of YieldStreet and MoneyLion), and more. No valuation is being disclosed.

It’s estimated that there are some 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon today, with some 1 million sellers joining the platform in 2020 alone. Thrasio — one of Elevated’s larger consolidator-competitors — believes that there around 50,000 of them are making $1 million or more annually in sales. Elevate estimates that the Amazon marketplace, currently valued at $300 billion, will double in the next five years.

Unsurprisingly, all that has led to a number of companies like Elevated racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity to consolidate the most promising of these businesses. Their rationale: the founders and management of these third-party sellers may lack the appetite to stay with their businesses for the longer-term, or they may lack the capital to scale to the next level; so consolidating these businesses to leverage investments in technology for better market analytics, marketing, manufacturing and supply chains is the logical solution.

Given the size of the market opportunity, that’s led to a lot of investment. Thrasio has raised nearly $2 billion — in both debt and equity — for its efforts; Heyday recently raised $70 million from General Catalyst; The Razor Group in Berlin raised $400 million. Others with huge war chests include Branded; Heroes; SellerX; Perch; Berlin Brands Group (X2); Benitago; Latin America’s Valoreo and emerging groups out of Asia including Rainforest and Una Brands.

Elevate’s pitch to the market is that it’s a little different from the rest of the roll-up pack, in that started out as one of the millions of third-party sellers itself.

“We started selling at the end of 2016, testing the waters by selling a few private label products,” Ryan Gnesin, the CEO and founder of Elevated, told TechCrunch in an interview. That gave the company an early look at how to handle supply chains in manufacturing, and to think about how to differentiate its products from similar ones that are sold alongside them on Amazon. By 2017, Elevate was managing some 8,000 SKUs under that model.

That shifted in 2018 to a wholesale model, he said, reselling established brands on Amazon. It ran into trouble multiple times in that period, with Amazon shutting it down three times under suspicion of running counterfeit activities. 

“We got caught up in an algorithm because we were scaling so quickly,” he said. “They assumed we were doing something wrong.” All of that helped Elevate learn how to navigate the waters more adeptly, with the first shut down taking three months to fix, but the second only one month, and the third a mere 24 hours. Eventually, in 2019, the company decided to take what it had learned and apply it to a wider range of brands, which it would pick up by way of acquisition.

“We began as third-party merchants and so we truly relate to them,” he said. “We didn’t just wake up and start buying Amazon businesses. This is what we are in our core, operators first. Anyone can buy a business, but the ones who can grow them are the most successful. That is our long-term view.”

Companies that become the target of roll-up acquirers are an interesting lot. As Gnesin describes it, in many cases the businesses Elevate talks to were built as side-hustles, and so when they take off, the founders are just as happy to pass them on to someone else for a decent exit than they are to stay the course. This is one reason why some of the acquisitions end up staying confidential, he said. Another is that the sellers are simply getting on, looking to retire, and don’t have anyone to pass the business on to. Other times, this is just how entrepreneurs work. “If they make $5 million in a sale to Elevate, they will keep back $4 million for themselves, and use $1 million to start their next business,” he said.

As for target companies, Elevate right now doesn’t focus on any specific product categories as other roll-up players might, although that may change in the future as the company gets more focused. What is a priority, however, is intellectual property — which to me is notable, given what sometimes feels like a genuine lack of differentiation when you look for products on Amazon.

“We have preferences for businesses with patents, since those tend to be more differentiated,” he said. From there, it goes to those that have strong traction and brand pull. “When a product is doing well on Amazon, there is an enormous amount of data there, and so you tend to have copycats. We look for business that can maintain a competitive position, adding new variations and taking that to other marketplaces. And all of that important in the building of communities. If you can build it that gives you an additional competitive advantage.”

Acquisition valuations vary, he added, but on average are around 4 times a company’s Ebitda, but might go as high as 5 times or as low as 2.5x, depending on how competitive bidding is. Elevated’s acquisitions typically are already making between $2 million and $3 million in sellers’ discretionary earnings, he added.

The Amazon roll-up play — where one company creates economies of scale by buying up and consolidating multiple smaller third-party merchants that sell their goods via Amazon’s marketplace — continues to be a strong e-commerce trend, and in the latest development, one of the hopefuls in this space is announcing a major injection of capital to fuel its own place in the field.

Elevate Brands, a New York- and Austin-based startup that acquires and runs third-party Amazon merchants, has picked up $250 million in funding, money that it will be using both to continue investing in its technology, as well as to buy up more small businesses.

Elevate is already profitable, with 25 brands currently in its stable, many of which also have come to Elevate with patents for their products, CEO and founder Ryan Gnesin told TechCrunch. The plan will be to continue to enhance the systems it has in place for evaluating potential M&A and analyzing the landscape overall — today its algorithms use some 100 million data points, it says, to find suitable acquisition targets — and to continue building out other organizational efficiencies.

Elevate’s funding is coming as a mix of debt and equity — quite standard for these e-commerce businesses that are raising huge rounds to go after the roll-up opportunity — with backers including a number of individuals and investors with track records in fintech and e-commerce. They include FJ Labs, Novel TMT, Adam Jacobs (who had founded The Iconic in Australia), the founders of buy now, pay later business QuadPay, Intermix (acquired by Gap) founder Khajak Keledjian, Ron Suber (of YieldStreet and MoneyLion), and more. No valuation is being disclosed.

It’s estimated that there are some 5 million third-party sellers on Amazon today, with some 1 million sellers joining the platform in 2020 alone. Thrasio — one of Elevated’s larger consolidator-competitors — believes that there around 50,000 of them are making $1 million or more annually in sales. Elevate estimates that the Amazon marketplace, currently valued at $300 billion, will double in the next five years.

Unsurprisingly, all that has led to a number of companies like Elevated racking up hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and equity to consolidate the most promising of these businesses. Their rationale: the founders and management of these third-party sellers may lack the appetite to stay with their businesses for the longer-term, or they may lack the capital to scale to the next level; so consolidating these businesses to leverage investments in technology for better market analytics, marketing, manufacturing and supply chains is the logical solution.

Given the size of the market opportunity, that’s led to a lot of investment. Thrasio has raised nearly $2 billion — in both debt and equity — for its efforts; Heyday recently raised $70 million from General Catalyst; The Razor Group in Berlin raised $400 million. Others with huge war chests include Branded; Heroes; SellerX; Perch; Berlin Brands Group (X2); Benitago; Latin America’s Valoreo and emerging groups out of Asia including Rainforest and Una Brands.

Elevate’s pitch to the market is that it’s a little different from the rest of the roll-up pack, in that started out as one of the millions of third-party sellers itself.

“We started selling at the end of 2016, testing the waters by selling a few private label products,” Ryan Gnesin, the CEO and founder of Elevated, told TechCrunch in an interview. That gave the company an early look at how to handle supply chains in manufacturing, and to think about how to differentiate its products from similar ones that are sold alongside them on Amazon. By 2017, Elevate was managing some 8,000 SKUs under that model.

That shifted in 2018 to a wholesale model, he said, reselling established brands on Amazon. It ran into trouble multiple times in that period, with Amazon shutting it down three times under suspicion of running counterfeit activities. 

“We got caught up in an algorithm because we were scaling so quickly,” he said. “They assumed we were doing something wrong.” All of that helped Elevate learn how to navigate the waters more adeptly, with the first shut down taking three months to fix, but the second only one month, and the third a mere 24 hours. Eventually, in 2019, the company decided to take what it had learned and apply it to a wider range of brands, which it would pick up by way of acquisition.

“We began as third-party merchants and so we truly relate to them,” he said. “We didn’t just wake up and start buying Amazon businesses. This is what we are in our core, operators first. Anyone can buy a business, but the ones who can grow them are the most successful. That is our long-term view.”

Companies that become the target of roll-up acquirers are an interesting lot. As Gnesin describes it, in many cases the businesses Elevate talks to were built as side-hustles, and so when they take off, the founders are just as happy to pass them on to someone else for a decent exit than they are to stay the course. This is one reason why some of the acquisitions end up staying confidential, he said. Another is that the sellers are simply getting on, looking to retire, and don’t have anyone to pass the business on to. Other times, this is just how entrepreneurs work. “If they make $5 million in a sale to Elevate, they will keep back $4 million for themselves, and use $1 million to start their next business,” he said.

As for target companies, Elevate right now doesn’t focus on any specific product categories as other roll-up players might, although that may change in the future as the company gets more focused. What is a priority, however, is intellectual property — which to me is notable, given what sometimes feels like a genuine lack of differentiation when you look for products on Amazon.

“We have preferences for businesses with patents, since those tend to be more differentiated,” he said. From there, it goes to those that have strong traction and brand pull. “When a product is doing well on Amazon, there is an enormous amount of data there, and so you tend to have copycats. We look for business that can maintain a competitive position, adding new variations and taking that to other marketplaces. And all of that important in the building of communities. If you can build it that gives you an additional competitive advantage.”

Acquisition valuations vary, he added, but on average are around 4 times a company’s Ebitda, but might go as high as 5 times or as low as 2.5x, depending on how competitive bidding is. Elevated’s acquisitions typically are already making between $2 million and $3 million in sellers’ discretionary earnings, he added.

Hardware is hard. You can browse the archives of this site and come up with dozens of bold attempts to make new consumer electronics gadgets work — some of them very close to home. But, like all startups, most hardware companies run into the hard core grind of turning atoms into something worth buying. 

To commemorate the hardness of hardware, idea factory/art house MSCHF is releasing a set of 5 Dead Startup Toys as vinyl figurines that you can buy for $39.99 each or $159.99 for the set. It bills these as ‘iconic failed startups’ and the sales site offers a brief history of the rise and fall of each endeavor. They range from products that never really existed like the Theranos minilab to poorly timed early movers like Jibo to exercises in over-engineering like Juicero. 

Given that I have spent much of my career absorbing and trying to understand the difficult and complicated process of bringing consumer hardware to market, I love these things. There could be a lens of malice here, but I choose not to see it that way. Fraud is fraud and the people behind Theranos and debacles like the Coolest Cooler have or will see the business end of the legal system. 

But big visions and hardware dreams are not always so clearly pocketed into the hole of ‘failure’. Sometimes the hardware works but the supply chain doesn’t. Sometimes the vision is sound but the product is just too early. There are any number of reasons products fail — but (in as much as they were actually real) you often have to give it up for the teams of people and visionaries that wanted a thing to exist in the universe and dragged it kicking and screaming to that point. And off the cliffs.

The figures themselves are really well done, with crisp stamping and accurate detailing with readable text and nicely printed logos. Some of them are articulated as well, and accessorized. The Coolest Cooler gets its infamous blender and the Juicero has a removable (proprietary of course) ‘fresh veg’ pouch. The quality on these is quite high overall, I’d rank them up with some of the better novelty toys I’ve bought over the years — it’s not phoned in, much like the Cooler’s feature set.

The packaging, too, is quite impressive, each gets a customized box and the big set of all of them comes in a bigger rack box. Each one also comes with a ’cause of death’ on the back that tells you why each venture went under. MSCHF went the lengths to make this a pretty premium ‘toy’ drop, which is only fitting given that it’s a monument to physical products. 

As with much of MSCHF’s work, there’s an element of ‘wait, is this legal’ as well, because there are likely a bunch of holes that the IP connected to these products fell into but some of those holes could still have legal entities attached. But that element of danger is what has made many of its projects resonate so far so I don’t think they’re worried. 

After all, none of these products have the sign of the beast on them. Physically, anyway.

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Hardware is hard. You can browse the archives of this site and come up with dozens of bold attempts to make new consumer electronics gadgets work — some of them very close to home. But, like all startups, most hardware companies run into the hard core grind of turning atoms into something worth buying. 

To commemorate the hardness of hardware, idea factory/art house MSCHF is releasing a set of 5 Dead Startup Toys as vinyl figurines that you can buy for $39.99 each or $159.99 for the set. It bills these as ‘iconic failed startups’ and the sales site offers a brief history of the rise and fall of each endeavor. They range from products that never really existed like the Theranos minilab to poorly timed early movers like Jibo to exercises in over-engineering like Juicero. 

Given that I have spent much of my career absorbing and trying to understand the difficult and complicated process of bringing consumer hardware to market, I love these things. There could be a lens of malice here, but I choose not to see it that way. Fraud is fraud and the people behind Theranos and debacles like the Coolest Cooler have or will see the business end of the legal system. 

But big visions and hardware dreams are not always so clearly pocketed into the hole of ‘failure’. Sometimes the hardware works but the supply chain doesn’t. Sometimes the vision is sound but the product is just too early. There are any number of reasons products fail — but (in as much as they were actually real) you often have to give it up for the teams of people and visionaries that wanted a thing to exist in the universe and dragged it kicking and screaming to that point. And off the cliffs.

The figures themselves are really well done, with crisp stamping and accurate detailing with readable text and nicely printed logos. Some of them are articulated as well, and accessorized. The Coolest Cooler gets its infamous blender and the Juicero has a removable (proprietary of course) ‘fresh veg’ pouch. The quality on these is quite high overall, I’d rank them up with some of the better novelty toys I’ve bought over the years — it’s not phoned in, much like the Cooler’s feature set.

The packaging, too, is quite impressive, each gets a customized box and the big set of all of them comes in a bigger rack box. Each one also comes with a ’cause of death’ on the back that tells you why each venture went under. MSCHF went the lengths to make this a pretty premium ‘toy’ drop, which is only fitting given that it’s a monument to physical products. 

As with much of MSCHF’s work, there’s an element of ‘wait, is this legal’ as well, because there are likely a bunch of holes that the IP connected to these products fell into but some of those holes could still have legal entities attached. But that element of danger is what has made many of its projects resonate so far so I don’t think they’re worried. 

After all, none of these products have the sign of the beast on them. Physically, anyway.

[gallery ids="2176106,2176121,2176107,2176105,2176096,2176086,2176090,2176099,2176072,2176079,2176066,2176068,2176071,2176053,2176051,2176058"]

I was 4 years old when I started playing what I’ve come to think of as “the game.” It was dressing-up time at school, and, as I ran over to a costume box, my teacher grabbed me by the shoulders. Right up in my face, she admonished: “That’s the girls’ box — the boys’ stuff is over there.”

I was taken aback; I didn’t understand what I’d done wrong. But I remember thinking: “Oh! There are rules to how we live together in the world.” Right then and there, I started conforming to the parameter of the game that so many of us operate by: the game that gives us unwritten codes on what is acceptable and how to behave — at school, in work or in society at large.

This game meant I spent years dialing down my “gayness,” even after I came out in my 20s, and the impulse was particularly acute at the early stage of my career. With each new meeting or business deal, I was constantly preempting what parts of me were “OK”’ or what might put people off. Just how much gay was too much?

In some ways, then, the endemic “brogrammer” culture in tech — the industry I call home — is no great surprise to me. When everyone is busy filtering their core identity, sanding down the edges to fit the collective mold, it’s inevitable that minority voices will be pushed out. Follow this picture to its natural conclusion and Silicon Valley — the home of bold disruptors, the armada of innovation — is reduced to a narrow few.

In many ways, Pride Month and the celebrations we’ve just seen are the antidote to this hegemony. Pride, with its rainbow symbolism, is a cornucopia of all that is free, true and uninhibited. With Pride Month drawn to a close, it’s my greatest hope that we can use its particular kind of open-minded energy to activate deeper change.

Show up for your team first

I truly love Pride and the meaningful action that goes with it, but it can’t be denied that some brands are venturing into the territory of window dressing. “Performative activism,” whereby companies mobilize the Pride flag for marketing purposes without necessarily making tangible changes in their own backyards, is on the rise. So too are the businesses that pay lip service to Pride from one side of their mouth while covertly supporting politicians behind anti-transgender legislation on the other.

If you are a leader who’s really committed to diversity in the workplace, it stands to reason that you look within to help your own team first. How can you create a culture where employees can be present in the fullness of themselves — regardless of gender, race, sexuality or even incidental things like taste in clothes or music?

According to a 2019 study by the Yale School of Public Health, an estimated 83% of those who identify as lesbian, gay or bisexual keep their sexuality hidden from all or most of the people in their lives.

This inhibition is magnified in the workplace, where it is woven into the fabric of myriad discriminatory behaviors that are particularly prominent in tech. Almost 40% of LGBTQ tech employees polled by anonymous workplace chat app Blind say they’ve witnessed homophobic discrimination and harassment at work.

Annual diversity reports show that Big Tech companies employ far fewer women and underrepresented minorities than other industries, too. This is a sector that routinely labels people from nonmajority culture groups as “diversity hires,” doling out discrimination in everything from pay to promotions — as reported by thousands of personal experiences shared under the hashtag #SiliconValleySoWhite. The same industry is also hardwired to marginalize women, says Emily Chang, the Bloomberg Technology anchor whose book, “Brotopia,” lifts the lid on Silicon Valley’s culture of machismo.

These aren’t easy issues to solve, but I believe authenticity has an important part in the solution. It’s about calling time on that game that I used to play. When I finally learned that I could show up as I pleased at work and not worry about how people judge me, the freedom was so sweet I could practically taste it. After years of faking it without fully realizing it — in a draining, relentless loop — I was able to be the person and CEO I wanted to be. The more familiar I became with California’s tech scene, and the farther up the ladder I progressed, the more confident I became to be me.

You shouldn’t have to wait until you run a company for the permission to express your full self, however. As the research shows, the price paid for not doing so reaches far beyond personal freedom alone. Though we’ve made steps with important conversations around diversity in recent years, the world we work in is still, overwhelmingly, one-dimensional. It’s full of people not able or willing to reveal the genuine, hi-def version of who they are.

The power of listening and shared vulnerability

If we, as tech leaders, are unable to roll our sleeves up and dig deep on the issue of authenticity, we have little hope of chipping away at the “brogrammer” attitude that seems all too pervasive in our industry.

Not only does this kind of climate engender unsaid fear, fatigue and anxiety, it also affects the bottom line. Research is clear on the fact that happy employees are more productive, while companies with more diverse management teams have greater profitability, creativity and problem-solving abilities. Having the freedom to be your authentic self at work is a conduit to success and fulfillment.

So, how can tech CEOs and management get to this place? In my mind, a dual-sided approach is called for. First, efforts to harness authentic expression have to be enacted as policies. Leaders must give their teams direct responsibility for helping employees to bring their full selves to work. Help make your people accountable for an inside effort allowing all voices in your organization to be heard.

In GumGum’s case, this includes the formation of a STRIDE (Seeking Talent Representation Inclusion Diversity & Equity) Council. Made up of employees from all divisions, locations and levels of seniority across the company, council members make tangible recommendations to improve diversity and inclusivity in the company as part of their paid daily roles.

Unconscious bias training is also vital for empowering authentic expression in the workplace. If I walked down the street in glitter shorts and a crop top, everyone around me would have some kind of reaction to my chosen outfit — regardless of whether they’d admit it. Building awareness of subconscious judgments like this is the first step to reining them in, and creates understanding of how bias inevitably impacts decision-making at work.

Second, the quest for business authenticity lies with CEOs and senior management and their ability to lead by example. I think today’s cancel culture has made leaders hypersensitive about the need to keep it together, to toe the line with their behavior, to be professional and not make mistakes.

Professionalism has its time and a place, of course, but I’ve always made it a point to be as open as possible as a CEO — to shine a light over every element of my personality, even the aspects that other people may judge or find less desirable. My determination to do this comes directly from the hidden identity that I used to struggle with. The fear I felt over being gay is now my fuel to showing my true self. By doing so, I aim to give those around me permission to do the same.

No one really wants their tech company to breed a bro culture where only one type of person can thrive. But it’s not enough to simply say that. You have to start by showing that it’s OK to be different, to turn up in every shade of gray. I have a penchant for flamboyant fashion, for example, so I don’t think twice about attending a Zoom meeting in a baby blue fedora. That’s just how I express myself as a CEO.

Showing up like this involves an element of fear, and I think it’s important to be open about that, too. As CEOs, we should share our vulnerabilities, our struggles with identity, the secret parts of ourselves that we’re tempted to keep masked away. This includes owning up to failures — CEOs are only human, and that humanity should be put on a pedestal if authenticity is the goal.

People need to feel that their vulnerabilities are heard without judgment. Whether they’re in an interview or taking on a new project, one of my favorite questions to ask employees is simply, “What are you afraid of?”

We all have fears, and by answering that question, you get to access someone’s vulnerable side. They might be scared of failing, making the wrong decision or upsetting the apple cart in some way. Tapping into that emotion is a great way of giving people permission to be their full selves.

A turning point for tech

Pride Month is part of a wider narrative around acceptance and freedom of being. Companies that jump on the rainbow bandwagon without fully living those values aren’t only hypocritical — they’re also doing themselves a disservice. Pride isn’t a revenue opportunity, and even if it was, those brands that attach messaging to it without substance are missing a trick.

Beneath the LGBTQ+ Pride gift wrap lies a thousand work environments in urgent need of the values that the Pride movement espouses. Making those values a living, breathing part of everyday work life is no mean feat. But allowing people to untether from who they “should” be at work is a vital starting point for a change that is long overdue.

I know the shame of hiding my true self away, which is why I make every effort for others to avoid that experience. Nowadays, I show up at work as more myself than I’d ever dared in my younger years. In this one small act, I challenge my co-workers to follow suit. It’s only when, together, we embark on that exploration of what authenticity in business looks like that the endless game-playing can stop — and the real work gets underway.

Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic went to space (or the vicinity of space) in a PR-suffused event over the weekend. It was all rather twee, packed with maudlin riffs about childhood dreams and riddled with hero worship. And the stream kept stuttering while some of the planned vehicle-to-Earth communications failed.

The Exchange is continuing its look into Q2 venture capital results this week. If you’re a VC with a hot take on the numbers, we’re collecting comments and observations at alex.wilhelm@techcrunch.com. Use subject line “hot dang look at all this money.” Thanks! — Alex and Anna

But the launch accomplished what it set out to do: A few folks made it to into zero gravity after launching their rocket-powered space plane from a larger aircraft, flipping it around at the top of its arc so that its passengers could get a good view of our home while floating. Then it came back to the surface and, we’re sure, much champagne was consumed.

In the aftermath of the event, lots of folks are pissed. Complaints have rolled in, dissing the event and generally mocking the expense involved when there are other issues to manage. A sampling follows. Note that these are merely illustrative examples of a general vibe. I have precisely zero beef with anyone in the following tweets or articles:

And from the media side of things, this stood out today from the Tribune:

I disagree.

Sure, it’s maddening that Jeff Bezos’ new yacht will require a second boat so that he can have a mobile heliport on the go — his new boat has sails, so you can’t chopper to it — while the company that built his fortune churns through workers with abandon and squeezes its drivers so much that they have to piss in bottles due to scheduling constraints.

And, yes, Branson is annoying quite a lot of the time. He also owns an island and likes himself too much.

Gembah’s mission statement is a deceptively simple one. The Austin-based company says it’s looking to “democratize product innovation by drastically lowering barriers to entry for creation of new products.” In that respect, at least, it’s not so dissimilar from various startup initiatives that have arrived over the past decade and change, from crowdfunding to additive manufacturing.

The company’s product is a platform/marketplace designed to guide users through the product-creation process, promising results in “as little as 90 days.” The forum connects smaller business connect to factories, supply chain experts, designers, engineers, etc. to help speed up the process. Just ask anyone who has attempted to launch a hardware startup — these things can be massive difficult to navigate.

To help accelerate its own vision, Gembah has raised an $11 million Series A, led by local firm ATX Venture Partners along with Silverton, Flexport, Brett Hurt, Jim Curry and Dan Graham.

Image Credits: Gembah

It follows a $3.28 million seed led by Silverton announced in April of last year, bringing its total funding up to $14.75 million.

The company says the pandemic has actually been something of a boon for its business model, as hardware startups are looking toward a more online model – and something a bit closer to home than the traditional sales channels. The company says its revenue grew 500% in 2020 and is on track to triple revenues this year. It’s impressive growth in the face of some major supply chain issues that have impacted the industry during the past year and a half.

It currently has 300 active customers, though it was yet to achieve profitability — hence the new round. “Since most of our customers are e-commerce companies we benefited from the accelerated growth of e-commerce,” CEO and co-founder Henrik Johansson tells TechCrunch. “Supply chains have been impacted to some degree, but as the global supply chain gets more complex and many companies want to diversify outside of China, they need help to navigate that change, and Gembah can help with that transition.”

The funding will go toward increasing the company’s engineering team. At present, Gembah has 55 employees in the U.S, and 19 in other locations, including Asia and Mexico. The new headcount will be focused on growing the marketplace, supply chain workflow and machine-learning capabilities. Gembah will also look to grow its global network and make additional hires in marketing and UI/UX.

“Gembah is a true innovator poised to help businesses capitalize on the growth of global eCommerce,” ATX Venture Partners’ Chris Shonksaid in a statement. “The Gembah marketplace promises to unlock virtually unlimited entrepreneurial equity by enabling a whole new breed of creators to enter the market.”

Gurgaon-based mobile wallet service firm MobiKwik plans to raise up to $255 million in an initial public offering, becoming the latest Indian startup to explore the public markets.

The 12-year-old firm, which counts Sequoia Capital India and Abu Dhabi Investment Authority among its investors and has raised about $250 million to date, is targeting a valuation of about $1 billion in the IPO, according to two people familiar with the matter.

MobiKwik said its total income for the year that ended in March 2021 was about $40.5 million, down 18%, while its loss also shrank 12% to $14.9 million during the period.

MobiKwik’s move comes as a handful of Indian startups including Zomato and Paytm are working to list on stock exchanges.

This is a developing story. More to follow…