Author: azeeadmin

E-commerce platform Shopify announced this morning its one-click checkout service known as Shop Pay will become available to any U.S. merchant that sells on Facebook or Google — even if they don’t use Shopify’s software to power their online stores. That makes Shop Pay the first Shopify product offered to non-Shopify merchants, the company notes.

First introduced at its developer conference in 2017, Shop Pay is similar to other instant checkout solutions that offer an easier way to pay online by reducing the number of fields a customer has to fill out during the checkout process. The service remembers and encrypts the customer’s information, so consumers can check out with just a tap when shopping online and, as of recently, even pay for purchase in installments, thanks to a partnership with Affirm.

Shopify in February had expanded Shop Pay to Facebook and Instagram, in partnership with Facebook, but it only worked for existing Shopify merchants selling on those social platforms at the time. In May, Google announced at its I/O developer conference it was partnering with Shopify on an online shopping expansion that would give Shopify’s more than 1.7 million merchants the ability to reach customers through Google Search and other “shopping journeys” that began through other Google properties like Search, Maps, Images, Lens, and YouTube.

The company declined to share how many of its 1.7 million merchants are already available on Facebook or Google today, but said they are two of the most popular channels.

Following today’s announcement, other merchants will also have the option to adopt Shop Pay for their own Facebook or Google stores. While how many will actually do so is yet unknown, Shopify notes that every day 1.8 billion people log onto Facebook and a billion shopping sessions take place across Google.

The company also touted Shop Pay’s advantages, including its 70% faster checkout than a typical checkout offers, with a 1.72x higher conversion rate — meaning fewer abandoned charts.

For consumers, the advantage of using Shop Pay over a traditional checkout, beyond the speed, is its integration with Shopify’s mobile app, Shop, which organizes and tracks your online orders across merchants, including Amazon,  so you can see when orders are arriving or quickly ask questions and manage returns.

To date, the Shop app has tracked over 430 million orders, the company says.

Over time, the Shop app can also customize a feed including users’ favorite stores to point to other recommendations, including those from local merchants. Shopify confirmed that the Shop app will be able to track the Shop Pay-enabled orders from the non-Shopify merchants.

“Since launching, Shop Pay has set the standard for checkout experiences, facilitating more than $24 billion in orders,” noted Shopify VP, Carl Rivera, who heads Product for Shop. “According to studies, cart abandonment averages 70%, with nearly 20% occurring because of a complicated checkout process. Shop Pay makes that process fast and simple, and the expansion to all merchants selling on Facebook and Google is a mission-critical step in bringing a best-in-class checkout to every consumer, every merchant, every platform, and every device,” he added.

The expansion could be a notable challenge to other payment mechanisms, including PayPal, Venmo, Apple Pay, and those offered by the platforms themselves, thanks to Shopify’s growing traction with merchants — one analysis gives its platform a 23% market share in the U.S — combined with the popularity of the Shop app, now the No. 3 Shopping app on the App Store.

The news follows yesterday’s confirmation that Shopify has taken a significant stake in payments giant Stripe, the backbone of the Shop Pay service, as well as Shopify’s partner on merchant services, including bank accounts and debit cards.

Shopify says the Shop Pay service will be enabled for all U.S. merchants selling on Facebook in the “coming months,” and will roll out to all merchants on Google by late 2021.

Following a smattering of leaks, Sonos and Ikea just unveiled the newest addition to their three-year-old Symfonisk line of home speakers. As the name implies, the Picture Frame is a medium-size, flat-panel speaker that can either be mounted on a wall or sat on a shelf via kickstand.

As with the rest of the Symfonisk line, the product is designed to get out of its own way, and blend in its surroundings. It’s a direction much of the industry has gone in over the last several years, with fabric covers aimed at matching the surrounding décor and more or less fade into the background.

Image Credits: Ikea/Sonos

The Picture Frame form factor is another logical extension of this, with a design that doesn’t require clearing off desk space. The front grille is covered in either black or white, with a design created by artist Jennifer Idrizi, which Ikea notes was inspired by cymatics – a visualization of sound vibrations. Fitting and simple, though the company also offers a pair of replacement panels with different designs, at $20.

The Picture Frame itself is $199 – not cheap, exactly, but certainly not unreasonable – especially by Sonos hardware standards. It features built-in WiFi, connects with the rest of Sonos’ hardware and works with 100 different streaming services. There are volume and Play/Pause buttons built in and a number of small touches, like the ability to reconfigure the power cord placement, based on how the frame is positioned.

It’s will be available online and in Ikea stores starting a month from today. The Symfonisk line also includes a lamp speaker and a more traditional rectangular form factor, ranging between $100 and $200.

Waterloo-based SkyWatch was among the first startups to recognize that the key to unlocking the real benefits of the space economy lay in making Earth observation data accessible and portable, and now the company has raised a $17.2 million Series B to help it further that goal. Fresh on the heals of a partnership with Poland-based satellite operator SatRevolution, SkyWatch is now set to bridge the gulf between satellite startups and customers in a bigger way as it lowers the barriers to entry for new companies focused on high-tech spacecraft payloads.

The new round of funding was led by new investor Drive Capital, and included participation from existing investors including Bullpen Capital, Space Capital, Golden Ventures and BDC Ventures. SkyWatch CEO and co-founder James Slifierz told me that bringing Drive on was a major win for the Series B.

“Drive is a firm that has actually been researching the space industry for a few years now, and looking for an opportunity that would be their first space technology investment,” he said. “Not their first in the [GTA-Waterloo] area  they’re based out of Columbus, Ohio, made up of Silicon Valley veterans. They were a little early to the trend of believing that a majority of the really interesting and large opportunities would eventually evolve outside of the Bay Area and outside of New York City.”

SkyWatch definitely fits the bill, having built strong revenue pipeline for an Earth observation data platform that makes the information collected by the many observation satellites on orbit accessible to private industry, in a way that doesn’t require re-architecting existing systems or handling huge amounts of data in unfamiliar formats.

This fresh funding will help SkyWatch accelerate the rollout of its TerraStream product, a nw platform that the company developed to provide full-service data management, ordering, processing and delivery for satellite companies. This allows SkyWatch to not only make data collected by Earth observation satellites like those operated by SatRevolution accessible to customers — but also to source customers for those companies, too, effectively handling both sales and delivery, which many satellite startups born from a technical or academic background don’t start out equipped to tackle.

“My favorite analogy for TerraStream is it’s Shopify for space companies,” Slifierz said. “It takes away a lot of the complexity of going to market. So if you want to build an amazing shoe brand today, Shopify enables you to not have to worry about the logistics, and shipping, and the inventory management, the website, storefront and all that; it allows you to focus on the things that will build value in your company, which is the quality of your product, and your brand.”

He added that just like Shopify depends on the existence of a rich third-party ecosystem to support its platform, so does SkyWatch, and that ecosystem is only now reaching maturity after years of infrastructure development, including things like the proliferation of launch startups, ground station build out, data warehousing and more.

Ultimately, what SkyWatch provides is the ability to go to market “faster and more profitably,” Slifierz says, which is a major shift for hard tech satellite startups working on new and improved sensor capabilities, often spinning out of research labs at academic institutions.

“The strongest value proposition is that we give you instant access to hundreds of customers, which we’re growing at a very fast pace on the EarthCache [SkyWatch’s commercial satellite imagery marketplace] side. So in that way, we sort of joke, it’s like Shopify for space, but also integrated with the AWS marketplace.”

SkyWatch can also actually help identify demand, by providing satellite-side customers with real data to back up signals of what the market is actually looking for. Slifierz says that’s helped them advised partners on how to tweak their offering to meet a real need, which is beneficial in an industry where research and tech development often lead payload design, with actual demand as a somewhat secondary consideration.

Canada made headlines during U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration for its efforts to lure STEM workers north. Trump is gone now, but Canada hasn’t stopped trying to recruit talent from its neighbor — and one of the hottest fronts in this talent war is biotech.

For generations of Canadian engineers, coders and researchers, Silicon Valley’s better salaries and weather were a siren call. But four years of Trump’s anti-immigration rhetoric, policy and visa restrictions gave Canadian tech companies and governments a competitive advantage.

After Trump took office in 2016, Canada’s federal government boosted the tech ecosystems of cities like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver by creating a program to fast-track immigration. Canadian tech leaders climbed aboard with campaigns to tempt more workers north. In Quebec, the industry even persuaded Quebec’s notoriously immigration-shy provincial government to accept as many as 14% more newcomers.

The pandemic-driven exodus from Silicon Valley has sent large numbers of Canadian expatriates flocking home. The number of Canadians applying for the U.S. H-1B program has fallen dramatically, accelerating a decade-long trend.

Still, Canadian tech and political leaders remain concerned about the inbound flow of talent to key sectors like advanced manufacturing, clean tech and biotechnology. They’re pressing every button they can to chip away at long-held American advantages.

Much of the action is in biotech. COVID-19 has exposed Canada’s lack of vaccine manufacturing capacity, but the country has a vibrant biotech and life-sciences research sector, driven by an excellent university ecosystem and several thousand startup ventures doing cutting-edge research. Many of these firms have cashed in on the pandemic biotech investment boom, racking in a record amount of venture capital in 2020.

But while this influx has changed the funding landscape, many Canadian companies are still trying to reach scale. The Canadian tech ecosystem is full of talent but it hasn’t traditionally developed, recruited and retained enough of the senior people these firms need to develop into global powerhouses.

They don’t just need scientists — they need business leaders. A recent survey of Toronto-area hubs and ventures revealed that biomedical engineering, regenerative medicine and related firms are suffering significant shortages of senior executives, top managers and scientific specialists, who gravitate toward the better pay and opportunities of the U.S. industries.

At a recent summit of Canada’s Innovation Economy Council (IEC), which both our organizations belong to, industry leaders spoke of unfilled jobs in global regulatory affairs and business development, even chief medical officers. These are hybrid roles that require the kind of technical and business acumen forged from both academic training and progressive leadership roles in the workplace.

Canadian universities, hubs and venture-capital firms are reacting to this need by building specialized training institutes and programs. And scaling Canadian companies are trying to fill the gaps by using newly raised cash to recruit heavily in the U.S. and beyond, offering remote work and flexible work hours while striking partnerships and investigating untapped talent pools.

Against this backdrop, Canada’s federal government just delivered its first full budget in two years. It’s one of the most activist tech-spending plans the country has ever rolled out, showing how seriously the federal government is about building out advanced industries and creating STEM jobs at a time when global markets are moving away from the country’s traditional energy exports, natural resources and manufactured goods. The budget includes college research partnerships, hiring subsidies, grants, and support for incubators and hubs. Critically, there is also a $2.2 billion commitment for building a life-sciences talent pipeline.

Canadians have been broadly supportive of government spending to beat back COVID-19 and hasten the transition to a new economy. An IEC/Campaign Research poll conducted in early April found 3:1 public support for investments in postsecondary STEM education and similarly strong support for government investment in advanced manufacturing, including biotech. That’s just what it takes to compete with a neighbor 10 times your size.

It’s fair to say that Canada won’t drain the U.S. of all its research scientists and Big Pharma CEOs anytime soon. But with an influx of investment capital, a burgeoning tech ecosystem and a concerted policy effort to build, recruit and retain a self-sustaining talent ecosystem, it’s flying under the radar as a place the industry increasingly wants to be.

In other words, America, take note: Canada is actively working to attract your biotech talent.

Macrometa, the edge computing cloud and global data network for app developers, announced today it has raised a $20 million Series A. The round was led by Pelion Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors DNX Ventures (the Japan and US-focused enterprise fund that led Macrometa’s seed round), Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Partech Partners, Fusion Fund, Sway Ventures and Shasta Ventures.

The startup, which is headquartered in Palo Alto with operations in Bulgaria and India, plans to use its Series A on feature development, acquiring more enterprise customers and integrating with content delivery networks (CDN), cloud and telecom providers. It will hire for its engineering and product development centers in the United States, Eastern Europe and India, and add new centers in Ukraine, Portugal, Greece, Mexico and Argentina.

The company’s last round of funding, an $7 million seed, was announced just eight months ago. Its Series A brings Macrometa’s total raised since its was founded in 2017 to $29 million.

As part of the new round, Macrometa expanded its board of directors, adding Pelion general partner Chris Cooper as a director, and Pelion senior associate Zain Rizavi and DNX Ventures principal Eva Nahari as board observers.

Macrometa’s global data network combines a globally distributed noSQL database and a low-latency stream data processing engine, enabling web and cloud develops to run and scale data-heavy, real-time cloud applications. The network allows developers to run apps concurrently across its 175 points of presence (PoPs), or edge regions, around the world, depending on which one is closest to an end user. Macrometa claims that the mean roundtrip time (RTT) for users on laptops or phones to its edge cloud and back is less than 50 milliseconds globally, or 50x to 100x faster than cloud platforms like DyanmoDB, MongoDB or Firebase.

Macrometa co-founder and CEO Chetan Venkatesh

Since its seed round last year, the company has accelerated its customer acquisition, especially among large global enterprises and web scale players, co-founder and chief executive officer Chetan Venkatesh told TechCrunch. Macrometa also made its self-service platform available to developers, who can try its serverless database, pub/sug, event processing and stateful compute runtime for free.

Macrometa recently became one of two distributed data companies (the other one is Fauna) partnered with Cloudflare for developers building new apps on Workers, its serverless application platform. Venkatesh said the combination of Macrometa and Cloudflare Workers enables data-driven APIs and web services to be 50x to 100x faster in performance and lower latency compared to the public cloud.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated Macrometa’s business significantly, said Venkatesh, because its enterprise and web scale customers needed to handle the unpredictable data traffic patterns created by remote work. The pandemic also “resulted in several secular and permanent shifts in cloud adoption and consumption,” he added, changing how people shop, consume media, content and entertainment. That has “exponentially increased the need for handling dynamic bursts of demands for application infrastructure securely,” he said.

One example of how enterprise clients use Macrometa is e-commerce providers who implemented its infrastructure with their existing CDN and cloud backends to provide more data and AI-based personalization for shoppers, including real-time recommendations, regionalized search at the edge and local data geo-fencing to comply with data and privacy regulations.

Some of Macrometa’s SaaS clients use its global data network as a global data cache for handling surges in usage and keep regional copies of data and API results across its regional data centers. Venkatesh added that several large telecom operators have used Macrometa’s data stream ingestion and complex event processing platform to replace legacy data ingest platforms like Splunk, Tibco and Apache Kafka.

In a statement, Pelion Venture Partners, general partner Chris Cooper said, “We believe the next phase of computing will be focused on the edge, ultimately bringing cloud-based workloads closer to the end user. As more and more workloads move away from a centralized cloud model, Macrometa is becoming the de facto edge provider to run data-heavy and compute-intensive workloads for developers and enterprises alike, globally.”

Serial edtech entrepreneur David Blake, who co-founded Degreed and launched LearnIn, is living the dream of any book worm. He reads at least one book a week, talks to the authors behind it and unpacks his biggest questions around the subtlest of passages.

And it’s all thanks to his latest startup, BookClub, which first launched in September to bring author-led book clubs to readers. “With Degreed, it’s big, it’s enterprise and it’s structural. It brought a deep sense of fulfillment, it felt rigorous and challenging” he said. “BookClub has felt joyful, a lot of fun, and like a blessing in my life.”

The platform gives authors a chance to hold book groups, share exclusive video-based interviews and engage in questions readers might have. And months after announcing its existence and $6 million seed raise, BookClub is back to announce a $20 million Series A round, led by Signal Peak Ventures. Other investment firms that participated in the round include GSV Ventures, Maveron, Backstage Capital​ and Pelion Venture Partners​.

Blake often describes BookClub as “MasterClass meets Goodreads.” It’s fitting that he got the founders of both of those companies on his cap table as well, with Aaron Rasmussen, co-founder of MasterClass and founder of Outlier.org, and Otis Chandler, co-founder and previous CEO of Goodreads, joining the Series A round.

The capital comes as BookClub prepares to open its private beta, which includes thousands of readers, to the public by July. Along with opening up for business, BookClub is investing heavily in adding more authors to its platform. So far, there are 11 books featured on BookClub’s website from writers such as Emily Chang, Lara Prescott, Colin Bryar and Bill Carr.

Blake declined to give specifics for how many books are in production, but said that BookClub’s plan is to hit 200 books for its service by the end of 2021.

The startup is currently experimenting with two services to bring author-led discussions to readers. One service is that users can find a book and then click through videos as they progress through the book. When BookClub was recording with Emily Chang, the author of “Brotopia,” it produced eight to 12 hours of content, which ranges from Q&A to readings to behind-the-scenes musings on writing the book, Blake explained.

“A lot of that sounds simple, but in a lot of ways it is special in its own way,” Blake said. “If you grew up in most places in America, there weren’t New York Times best-sellers coming to your local indie bookstore and just doing readings…in a lot of ways, this is able to democratize a lot of what authors do to engage the big cities [on book tours] but for everyone else,” he said.

The other service is similar to Oprah’s Book Club, a long-existent discussion series where Oprah interviews a different author behind a book each month. BookClub’s version of this is picking an author to discuss their book, as well as a series of books with similar themes, in an interview-style format. For example, Barbara Corcoran is discussing her book, “Shark Tales,” as well as five other books in an entrepreneurship-featured club.

One limitation for BookClub is figuring out how to generate enthusiasm through its platform. Book clubs often start off with the best of intentions, but then fall apart due to lack of accountability or limited interest among members to invest in deeper conversations. The startup will have to find a way, beyond author appeal, to integrate excitement without being overly prescriptive in its prompts. Another limitation might be the authors themselves. Because the startup’s products only work with living authors, it is missing out on a chunk of classical text.

The company might need to figure out a different way to represent authors, the non-living or camera shy, to reach what Blake views as its ultimate goal.

“Right now, statistically, the chance that we’ve covered one of the books on your nightstand is pretty low,” he said. “We want to get there, fast.”

Founded in 2018, Scythe Robotics is emerging from stealth today by announcing an $13.8 million Series A raise. The round was led by Inspired Capital and features True Ventures, Zigg Capital and Lemnos. It brings the Boulder, Colorado-based landscaping robotics company’s total funding up to $18.6 million, including a $4 million seed, also led by True Ventures.

The startup’s first product is an autonomous mower, offered to customers through a Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) model. The method is becoming increasingly popular in the enterprise and industrial space, essentially offering clients robotics through a rental model that includes regular updates and maintenance. Interestingly, the company’s charging customers based on acres mowed.

The mower features eight HDR cameras and a variety of sensors designed to help avoid people, animals and various obstacles it might encounter on the job. Naturally, all of those sensors also come with a wealth of data collection aimed at — among other things — increasing the robot’s efficiency. Landscaping is a relatively low-hanging fruit for robotics. There’s certainly a lot to be said for automating the process for those with large swaths of land. Toro, notably, recently acquired Left Hand Robotics, and iRobot has announced its own (since delayed) robotic mower.

“To date, commercial landscape contractors haven’t had a technology partner who enables them to keep up with demand and to operate emissions-free. We are that partner,” said co-founder and CEO Jack Morrison in a release. “Our autonomous mower gives them the ability to grow their business, while staying green. It’s designed from the ground up to be an order of magnitude more reliable, more productive, and safer than any existing machine by incorporating state of the art autonomy with a rugged, all-electric design.”

Funding will go toward increasing headcount in its Colorado, Texas and Florida offices, R&D on further products and getting the mower in front of new customers.

The Covid-19 pandemic drove increased demand for mobile gaming, as consumers under lockdowns looked to online sources of entertainment, including games. But even as Covid-19 restrictions are easing up, the demand for mobile gaming isn’t slowing. According to a new report from mobile data and analytics provider App Annie in collaboration with IDC, users worldwide downloaded 30% more games in the first quarter of 2021 than in the fourth quarter of 2019, and spent a record-breaking $1.7 billion per week in mobile games in Q1 2021.

That figure is up 40% from pre-pandemic levels, the report noted.

Image Credits: App Annie

The U.S. and Germany led other markets in terms of growth in mobile game spending year-over-year as of Q1 2021 in the North American and Western European markets, respectively. Saudi Arabia and Turkey led the growth in the rest of the world, outside the Asia-Pacific region. The latter made up around half of the mobile game spend in the quarter, App Annie said.

The growth in mobile gaming, in part accelerated by the pandemic, also sees mobile further outpacing other forms of digital games consumption. This year, mobile gaming will increased its global lead over PC and Mac gaming to 2.9x and will extend its lead over home games consoles to 3.1x.

Image Credits: App Annie

However, this change comes at a time when the mobile and console market is continuing to merge, App Annie notes, as more mobile devices are capable of offering console-like graphics and gameplay experiences, including those with cross-platform capabilities and social gaming features.

Games with real-time online features tend to dominate the Top Grossing charts on the app stores, including things like player-vs-player and cross-play features. For example, the top grossing mobile game worldwide on iOS and Google Play in Q1 2021 was Roblox. This was followed by Genshin Impact, which just won an Apple Design Award during the Worldwide Developer Conference for its visual experience.

Image Credits: App Annie

The report also analyzed the ad market around gaming and the growth of mobile companion apps for game consoles, including My Nintendo, Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation App, Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox apps. Downloads for these apps peaked under lockdowns in April 2020 in the U.S., but continue to see stronger downloads than pre-pandemic.

Image Credits: App Annie

On the advertising front, App Annie says user sentiment towards in-game mobile ads improved in Q3 2020 compared with Q3 2019, but rewarded video ads and playable ads were preferred in the U.S.

Rocket Lab is developing two spacecraft based on its Photon platform to orbit Mars, studying the planet’s magnetosphere in order to gain a better understanding of the ways in which Mars’ climate has changed over time. The science mission was awarded through NASA’s Small Innovative Missions for Planetary Exploration (SIMPLEx) program, and will fly to Mars in 2024, aboard a yet-to-be-identified commercial lunch vehicle contracted by NASA as a rideshare rocket.

This is a noteworthy development for a few reasons, including that Rocket Lab will realize its earlier announced vision of using Photon as a platform for satellites that travel beyond Earth’s orbit. It’s also interesting because it will ostensibly mark the first decoupling of Rocket Lab’s launch and spacecraft services businesses.

Rocket Lab’s Photon is a satellite platform that includes the company’s Curie in-space propulsion system, and they’ll also be outfitted for this mission with star trackers and reaction wheels to make up a situational control system, as well as a deep space navigation system or way finding. The appeal of Photon is meant to be deep space exploration capability in a small, affordable and relatively low mass for launch package that could broaden access to interplanetary science for more organizations and institutions.

Next up for the Rocket Lab-supported Escapate mission that will use these two Mars-bound Photos is a design review in June, which will be followed up by a final confirmation review in July as a last check before the Photons are built, equipped and readied for their eventual flight.

Today, venture firm Andreessen Horowitz is officially launching its media property, called Future. I’m on vacation today but couldn’t resist covering this fascinating new project. 

The publication will initially focus on topics related to areas that the firm invests in but will expand over time using a mix of full-time staff, paid contributors and industry operators like founders, academics and entrepreneurs. And yes, they did get the dot com. 

The Future.com that is launching today is an MVP version of what the firm hopes the publication will be eventually, says Margit Wennmachers, Operating Partner, Marketing and Future at Andreessen Horowitz. 

The content will be created by a mixture of staff and outside contributors that run the gamut from big names to up-and-comers says Wennmachers. The publication will cover topics that they find compelling with a broad theme of ‘rational optimism’ — something that the firm feels there isn’t enough of in coverage of tech at large. 

This isn’t a news operation, Wennmachers says, and they will focus on future-focused informational and editorial content, rather than day-to-day tech occurrences. Though when the news dovetails with subject matter that they feel they have expertise to cover either from contributors, staff or A16z partners, there will be topical coverage.

The initial leadership staff includes Wennmachers, Editor in Chief Sonal Chokshi, Executive Editor Maggie Leung and Managing Editor Amelia Salyers. 

The contributors and topics that are set for launch sketch out an idea of the scope that Future is shooting for. A short list of some of them was provided, to give an impression:

• Betül Kaçar is a professor at the University of Arizona. She directs a NASA research consortium exploring the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the Universe. Betül is contributing to Future on paleobiology and how the past can help build the future.
• Dr. Vanessa Tolosa of Mavato Engineering LLC, an engineering consulting firm dedicated to helping research groups and startups develop neurotechnologies for medical applications. She is contributing to Future on the topic of Brain Computer Interfaces.
• Marvin Ammori, Chief Legal Officer of Uniswap Labs and advisor to the Harvard Law School Blockchain & Fintech Initiative. Marvin is writing the definitive Defi explainer for Future.
• Jade Raymond is a Canadian video game creator, best known for helping create the Assassin’s Creed and Watch Dogs franchises, and for building the Ubisoft Toronto and EA Motive Studios. Jade will contribute on the subject of big company IP, gaming, and creators
• Piers Kick of BITKRAFT on the metaverse and how crypto will enable it

The focus with the initial wave of establishing content will be to produce explainers, how-to content and cohort learning by experienced founders in and outside of the A16z portfolio.

“We want to write about stuff we know and that we invest in,” says Wennmachers. This includes topics like crypto, biotech, fintech and real-estate, which all have dedicated partners at the firm. 

They also want to bring in people who know an extremely technical space particularly well, something like nuclear energy, for instance. They will contextualize and explain these arenas for the hoped-for audience of ‘tech enthusiasts’ as well as founders and entrepreneurs. 

They’re not starting from zero, here. A16z already has a strong reputation for producing content via its popular podcast and company blog posts that outlines the intricacies of a nascent technology, especially those related to deep tech or coalescing out of research.

The firm is prepared to invest in this publication long-term, and they are prepared to take the time to set a baseline for success metrics, says Wennmachers. The success of the publication will be tracked on some hard and soft metrics related to engagement. Traffic to the site will be considered, for instance, but also whether the targeted audience is ‘sending us around’ or ‘talking about the topics we raise’, says Wennmachers. 

Metrics like time on page or whether people are finishing the articles or podcast episodes will take precedent. One big advantage that Future has over other publications in the tech space, Wennmachers admits, is that they don’t have to monetize. A16z will be footing the bill for the buildout and talent here. This, of course, allows more freedom to choose what kinds of metrics are a part of the success rubric.

Video isn’t initially a focus but eventually YouTube or other video platforms could be on the docket. 

The content, overall, is aiming to be action-oriented with information that is helpful in defining legislation, charting the course of your company or bringing a good point to your next meeting, says Wennmachers. Usability of information, basically, is a key sight line. 

Future will be writing ‘to tech people’ and to ‘the tech curious’. It will ideally, Wennmachers acknowledges, also help A16z win deals in the spaces where it demonstrates interest and understanding through publishing. The firm, she says, often wins deals at the intersection of two areas where they have expertise. Partners that specialize in biotech and consumer can come together, for instance, to support firms like Levels, which have a consumer-facing biotech footprint. Future can help to put those ideas out into the world, creating a sense that the firm knows what they’re talking about there and can add value.

Some other overall goals are to boost nascent tech communities like those around crypto and other edge tech endeavors. 

Future, says Wennmachers, should ideally provide content that doesn’t currently exist in the market that can be created from a ‘unique, interesting perch’ that the firm has. The audience, she says, is people who are curious, have an open mind and want to understand complex tech topics from the point of view of operators. People in consumer tech that want to cross-pollinate their ideas with deep tech arenas, for instance. With a sub-line of information about how new companies are built and grown.

The combination of full-time writers, paid contributors, entrepreneurs who probably have more ideas than days behind a pen and a wide array of external voices means that the editors have their work ahead of them. A voice will need to coalesce, as well as a reputation for signal and domain expertise. 

Future isn’t expected to win just because it’s backed by A16, though. 

“We have to win in the market,” Wennmachers acknowledges, “people’s attention is all over.”

Since Future is about, well, the future, I was curious whether they were pursuing any alternative structures. Co-ops, DAOs or distributed contribution systems that reflected the diaspora of talent out of the silos of traditional publishers and into other framing devices like Substack.

Not for now, says Wennmachers, as they want to establish Future as a thing that even exists and to make sure its voice is crisp. This will be a ‘traditional’ publication in all of the major ways that count, for now.

The MVP is launching today, and the team is willing to build in public, rather than continue to polish in private. Given the audience, that will likely attract some of the exact people that they want reading — as well as some of the expected critics.

Future launches into a very interesting time in media. There are a variety of different currents that are shifting the shorelines of publishing, renegotiating the relationships between individuals, organizations and audiences. At the same time, in tech, there is an increasing desire to control and shape the narrative around the next wave of world-altering technologies and companies without the involvement of the journalistic apparatus — or at least in counter to.

There is also a trend by media at large away from the same ‘rational optimism’ that Future is leaning into. Instead, the prevailing attitude seems to align more with ‘collective cynicism’. Many scalar entities in tech have enabled harm, therefore any similarly momentum-driven technologies and companies are to be viewed with a Precog’s eye for future crimes. 

How the media apparatus reacts to a publication like Future will probably say a lot about how the balance is currently being struck between narrative encapsulation and intellectual rigor. The media business is not easy, but the backing is here and the initial editorial hires say that they’re taking this endeavor pretty seriously.

There has already been chatter about conflict as it relates to the content being produced by efforts like Future — a huge deal for a journalistic enterprise where you are ostensibly acting as the avatar for the reader. But, if A16z is openly talking their own book with the content on Future then the conflict discussion is really already over. They have a point of view and it is going to be colored by their worldview, deal flow and network. End of story.

Whether the majority of media becomes conflicted ad nauseam and what that means is really another discussion.

I’d also look to see a lot of other firms scrambling to construct a media apparatus out of thin air — shout out to the comms strategists who will have figure out where to begin that discussion with their clients this week.

Whether you view Future as a marketing exercise, a necessary evolution or an immune reaction of the tech ecosystem, it’s doubtful that it will be boring. 

Ok, I’m out. I look forward to the hot takes.