Over the past five years, the Southeastern region, led by Atlanta, has gone from being “one of the best kept secrets” in tech, to a vibrant ecosystem teeming with a herd of the billion dollar tech businesses that are referred to in the investment world as “unicorns” (thanks to their supposed rarity).

In those five years venture capital investments surged to $2.1 billion in the region, with $1 billion invested in the last year alone, according to Lisa Calhoun, a partner with the Atlanta based investment firm, Valor Ventures.

It’s indicative of the entrepreneurial talent coming from the network of private and public schools across the region like Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama, Auburn, the University of Georgia, Vanderbilt, Emory, and the historically black colleges and universities like Morehouse, Spelman, and Xavier. And it’s also a sign of a reinvestment in local entrepreneurship — a decades-long campaign to turn Atlanta into the center of a hub-and-spoke network of startup cities that spans Miami to Atlanta, with stops in Birmingham, Nashville, New Orleans,

“Atlanta is what a next generation, global, post-Silicon Valley tech hub looks like. Our demographics are ten years ahead of the U.S.’s transformation into a majority minority society,” wrote Calhoun in an email. “With over 40% of the U.S. population in the Southeast, the greatest density of founders and executives of color, rafts of tech companies like AirBnB locating here, and our own legacy of top tech and talent, Atlanta sets the tone for what’s next. We have the growing, diverse population base all strong founders need to scale.”

There’s still a lot of work to be done for the region to establish itself as one of the next engines of economic return for the venture capital and investment business, though.

“The Southeast is 24% of the US GDP, but only accounts for 7% of the venture investment,” noted Blake Patton, the founder and general partner of the Atlanta-based investment firm, Tech Square Ventures. “With the recent momentum in the region, that is changing and investors are taking notice and backing local managers who in turn are investing the region’s best and brightest entrepreneurs.”

The Internet boom and bust in Atlanta

In the years after the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was a high-flying contender for the title of one of the next big startup hubs in the United States.

The Olympics had put the city on the world’s stage, and seeing the wave of activity, excitement, and investment that came with the advent of internet companies like Virginia’s America Online, Atlanta’s city council and mayor were making a push for the city to become a telecom and startup hub in the early days of the first Internet boom.

“Something happened in the mid-90s driven by the Olympics where Atlanta hit the map worldwide. It wasn’t just that we were a supply and logistics hub. In the late 90s as the dot-com boom really evolved, things happened underground that aren’t as transparent as they should be. Atlanta Gas Light had the largest dark fiber ring in the country surrounding Atlanta. That was built solely with the olympics in mind. We had Georgia Tech working on the next generation of aerospace, and they added computer engineering,” said Christy Brown, the founder of the Atlanta based non-profit Launchpad2X and a serial entrepreneur and executive with deep ties to the Atlanta ecosystem.  

Atlanta also had its fair share of early successes — high flying telecom and networking companies that were critical to the evolution of the first dot com era whose later years were either mired in scandal or who were acquired by much larger entities. These are companies like MCI Worldcom and Airtouch Cellular, which was gobbled up by Singular Wireless and would eventually become part of a restructured AT&T.

“There were all kinds of tech things happening in the city. A lot of these founders were getting venture on paper which evolved into the dot-bomb,” said Brown. “All of this was happening mid to late nineties, when the dot-bomb happened there was a lot of failure in the Atlanta area.”

The implosion of early internet companies that came with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000 reverberated through Atlanta’s tech ecosystem, erasing the early gains that companies made and setting the stage for a decade-long period of reconstruction punctuated by a few successes from holdouts that managed to make their way through the wreckage.

 

Through the lean years

One of those companies was MailChimp. Launched in 2001, in the early aftermath of the bursting of the tech bubble, the privately held email marketing startup was one of a number of projects at Ben Chestnut’s and Dan Kurzius’ web development firm.

The two men met at Cox Interactive Media to work on an early MP3 product. When that fizzled both men eventually lost their jobs and went into business together. They built MailChimp off of revenue, bootstrapping the business without venture capital in a model that many other tech founders in the area would seek to replicate.

A few years later, in 2003, another entrepreneur named John Marshall began installing internet hotspots at hospitality businesses, eventually expanding his Wandering WiFi service to include monitoring and managing other kinds of network infrastructure. This foray into startup land would eventually create another big Atlanta tech exit in AirWatch.

For the first six years MailChimp remained a side hustle, a product that the two co-founders continued to work on, but didn’t devote themselves to full time. It wasn’t until 2007, when the service hit 10,000 users, that the company became the full-time job for both founders.

Their once-scrappy startup turned them into billionaires. A 2018 Forbes profile put the company’s valuation at $4.2 billion on roughly $600 million in revenue.

If there was a starting gun for the Atlanta tech renaissance, it might be 2006, a few years before the global financial crisis and a time when the broader tech industry was finding itself a less financially precarious prospect for investors. Internet Security Systems, an Atlanta area dot-com darling that held an initial public offering in the late 90s sold to IBM for $1.3 billion that year.

Tom Noonan and Chris Klaus, the co-founders at Internet Security Systems, had an equally long road. What had started out as a company built when Klaus lived above Noonan’s garage in Atlanta in the mid-90s, morphed into a company pulling in $400 million in annual revenue before its acquisition by IBM.

As capital started flowing into Atlanta and the city regained some of its footing in the tech world, founders who had exited their companies began to reinvest money locally. And the city moved to create more events to foster entrepreneurship. 2006 saw the launch of Venture Atlanta, a conference designed to showcase early talent and startups coming from the region that served as a launchpad for several entrepreneurs that would shape the future of the city’s technology industry.

Setting a new scene

If 2006 was a big year for exits in Atlanta, it also proved to be the year that opened the floodgates on new entrepreneurial activity, which would give rise over the next decade to what’s now a thriving startup scene, pumping out a record number of billion dollar tech businesses.

It was the year that David Cummings and Adam Blitzer founded Pardot, a marketing and sales automation software developer that grew quickly and attracted the attention of big industry players like ExactTarget. It was also the year that Manhattan Associates executive Alan Dabbiere joined Marshall and Wandering WiFi became AirWatch, a company providing management and security tech for mobile enterprise networks.

Over the next few years MailChimp would become more active; Cloud Sherpas, founded by the entrepreneurs Michael Cohn and Sean O’Brien (who are now founders of the investment firm Overline Ventures) would launch and so would companies like the video streaming tech developer, ClearLeap (bought by IBM in 2015 and valued at over $110 million); the security company Damballa would launch (later acquired by Atlanta neighbor Core Security); and the service powering many of the major banks customer rewards programs, Cardlytics (now trading on the Nasdaq with a $4 billion market cap).

Buoyed by these emerging tech companies, other entrepreneurs would join the fray, with Kabbage (acquired for $850 million), Calendly (a $3 billion business as of this year) and the voice identification technology developer Pindrop (which raised $90 million back in 2018) emerging onto the scene at around the same time.

These companies set the table for what would become a buffet of startups focused primarily on payments and financial services, cloud-based business solutions, and internet security. Gone were the hardware heavy telecom companies and networking companies like Scientific Atlanta, whose business is compared to Hewlett Packard for having brought a high tech industry to the city in the 1950s — much like HP did in Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, a new generation of investor was moving into the Atlanta orbit, presaged by the 2006 launch of BIP Capital — an event that also proved meaningful for the city’s budding entrepreneurs.

Staking claims for Atlanta’s future

The rising tide of entrepreneurs coming out of Atlanta also served to revitalize the city’s moribund investment community. Hit hard by the bursting of the dot-com bubble, the Atlanta-area firms that managed to survive the crash began to look to later stage businesses and outside of the Atlanta tech ecosystem for startups to back, according to data from CrunchBase and several interviews with investors and founders.

Noro-Moseley Partners, for instance, is by far the most active investor hailing from Atlanta. Over it’s long history the firm has done over 123 deals according to Crunchbase, but in the last five years, data indicates only four investment from the firm were made into Atlanta-based companies.

By contrast, the arrivistes at BIP have been deploying capital and raising successively larger funds since they first came to town. Over the last five years the firm has invested in at least 15 Atlanta-area deals, and now, under the moniker of Panoramic Ventures, the firm is targeting a $300 million early stage fund to invest across the southeast and midwest.

“Traditionally, access to capital was challenging for founders in Atlanta and the Southeast. In the past, it was considered a disadvantage for a tech business to be based outside of the traditional innovation hubs [in] Silicon Valley or the Northeast because it was more difficult to secure investment capital. This was because the large funds were located inside the hubs and had plenty of opportunities right on their doorsteps for investment,” wrote Mark Buffington, the co-founder and chief executive of BIP Capital, in an email to TechCrunch. “While the traditional hubs are still key in terms of aggregate capital, the requirement for startups to also be inside the hubs has changed. Increasingly, venture funds are locating themselves in other areas of the country where innovation is occurring. At the same time, the amount of capital available from local and regional investors is growing, in large part due to the influx of dollars into the private markets.”

Another member of the new school of investors that’s changing Atlanta’s investment scene is Patton; whose work with Tech Square Ventures and Engage, the corporate venture capital investment firm and startup initiative harnessing the power of a number of the biggest companies in Atlanta, also galvanized entrepreneurship and the newfound interest in startup tech companies.

“The recent momentum in the region is driven by increased connectivity across the innovation ecosystem and a critical mass of entrepreneurs and talent coming out of the region’s many successful startups. With corporations focused on digital transformation and innovation, all large companies have to a degree become tech companies and that drives connectivity as talent moves across both startups and tech companies,” Patton said. “Perhaps our greatest strength is our diversity and being home to four leading HBCUs, and I hope in the next 5 years the Southeast will emerge as a leader in producing successful startups founded by diverse entrepreneurs and built with diverse teams. It’s not just a moral imperative – with half the nation’s black population, the Southeast must succeed in engaging under-served entrepreneurs to lead – and you can’t tackle diversity nationally without tackling it in the Southeast.”

Still, other ingredients were needed for the resurgence of startup activity in the city. These would be co-workings spaces like David Cummings’ launch of the Atlanta Tech Village in 2012; the continuing relevance of the Atlanta Tech Development Center; the Venture Atlanta conference and the co-working space around Hypepotamus — which remains the go-to publication for Southern startup activity.

Every entrepreneur and investor mentioned Cummings’ decision to reinvest in the city and launch the Tech Village near Atlanta’s tony suburb of Buckhead as one of the biggest sparks for the city’s renewed entrepreneurial fervor. Soon after Cummings sold Pardot he and David Lightburn established Atlanta Tech Village as a co-working spot for entrepreneurs. It attracted a number of new startup founders whose businesses would become the next wave of big startups. “When David Cummings sold Pardot he wanted a place for entrepreneurs to have community,” said one longtime player in the Atlanta tech community. “They would do these startup chow down lunches and really support entrepreneurs building businesses.”

And just as key was the longtime hub for Georgia Tech-affiliated startups, the Atlanta Tech Development Center, the entrepreneurs and investors noted. Venture Atlanta had a role to play as well, bringing investors from every corner of the country to the city to showcase top talent. Together with CreateX, and the Venture Atlanta program, the four initiatives and workspaces for early stage entrepreneurs planted a number of seeds that would soon blossom into companies like PartPic, Greenlight Financial (which is now worth $2.3 billion), Kabbage, FullStory and Pindrop.

A haven for diverse founders and investors

During those early days of the Atlanta startup ecosystem, there was one spot more welcoming than most for diverse and women-led founders — the co-working space and offices for Hypepotamus.

Serial entrepreneur Monique Mills was there. So was Jewel Burks Solomon, who sold her company, PartPic, to Amazon in 2016 and is now the Head of Google for Startups in the U.S.

“My first office was at Hypepotamus because they offered free space,” Burks Solomon recalled. “And at the time I didn’t have much money. Then when I raised some money the next major one was at ATDC — the state of Georgia’s incubator. They offered subsidized space and they had an entrepreneur in residence and they had a whole program to help Atlanta-based startups with some kind of technology.”

It was the Hypepotamus space, and subsequent venues like Opportunity Hub and The Gathering Spot that catalyzed the Black entrepreneurial community in Atlanta, according to several founders and investors.

And if the Hypepotamus space, carved out by National Builder Supply, was one of the catalysts, then the angel investor, Mike Ross, was the other.

“Mike has funded many successful Black-led startups in the Atlanta ecosystem and we wouldn’t be where we are today without him,” entrepreneur Candace Mitchell Harris told UrbanGeekz in a recent profile. “When many have faced the run around of false promises or flat out rejections, Mike confidently put his money in and pushed our founders further.”

Ross, a Morehouse College alumnus, who made his wealth as a consultant in the construction and contracting industry has backed Black founders and investors including: Luma, Partpic, Monsieur, Axis Replay, Myavana, TechSquare Labs, Opportunity Hub, and The Gathering Spot.

Investors like Paul Judge and entrepreneurs like Joey Womack, Barry Givens, and Mitchell Harris, all benefited from Ross’ investment largesse.

“Mike was the catalyst for our company’s success as our very first angel investor,” says Mitchell Harris, co-founder and CEO of beauty tech startup Myavana, told UrbanGeekz. “I still remember meeting him for the first time at the Black Founders Conference in June 2012, inquisitive and eager to get behind the movement that was beginning in Atlanta in the tech startup scene.”

And Ross blazed a trail for other investors like the Fearless Fund, a group of women investors led by Arian Simone, Ayanna Parsons, and Keshia Knight Pulliam, who launched their first fund in 2019, and Collab Capital, which launched last year (and is led by Burks Solomon, Justin Dawkins, and Barry Givens) — close to a decade after Ross first began investing.

“Right now women of color are the most founded but the least funded entrepreneurs,” Simone said. “Atlanta is a mecca of black entrepreneurship for us to have a venture capital and tech presence here.. I will charge the city of Atlanta and the state of Georgia and the banks that they need to back what we’re doing here.. It is needed.”

Not only is it needed, but it’s working. Of the 36 venture capital firms identified as part of TechCrunch’s research as having a focus on early stage investments in the Atlanta area, 41% met one or more of the following criteria: identification as having a diversity focus across investments, identification as having a diverse fund management team, or both, according to data from Crunchbase.

And through a sample size of 158 startups spanning Pre-Seed, Seed, or Series A in the Atlanta area, which were included in TechCrunch’s research, 48% met one or more of the following criteria: identification as having a sex-diverse founding team, identification has having a racially-diverse founding team, or both. In many instances, founding teams did not self identify, so the number of diverse founders may be greater than currently documented based on publicly available data.

As UrbanGeekz noted, about 25% of the employees in Atlanta’s tech industry are black. In San Francisco, by contrast, that figure is 6%.

 

 

We’ve been hearing how “data is the new oil” for more than a decade now, and in certain sectors, it’s a maxim that has more than panned out. From marketing and logistics to finance and product, decision-making is now dominated by data at all levels of most big private orgs (and if it isn’t, I’d be getting a résumé put together, stat).

So it might be a something of a surprise to learn that data, which could transform how we respond to the increasingly deadly disasters that regularly plague us, has been all but absent from much of emergency response this past decade. Far from being a geyser of digital oil, disaster response agencies and private organizations alike have for years tried to swell the scope and scale of the data being inputted into disaster response, with relatively meager results.

That’s starting to change though, mostly thanks to the internet of things (IoT), and frontline crisis managers today increasingly have the data they need to make better decisions across the resilience, response, and recovery cycle. The best is yet to come — with drones flying up, simulated visualizations, and artificial intelligence-induced disasters — what we’re seeing today on the frontlines is only the beginning of what could be a revolution in disaster response in the 2020s.

The long-awaited disaster data deluge has finally arrived

Emergency response is a fight against the fog of war and the dreadful ticking of the clock. In the midst of a wildfire or hurricane, everything can change in a matter of seconds — even milliseconds if you aren’t paying attention. Safe roads ferrying evacuees can suddenly become impassable infernos, evacuation teams can reposition and find themselves spread far too thin, and unforeseen conditions can rapidly metastasize to cover the entire operating environment. An operations center that once had perfect information can quickly find it has no ground truth at all.

Unfortunately, even getting raw data on what’s happening before and during a disaster can be extraordinarily difficult. When we look at the data revolution in business, part of the early success stems from the fact that companies were always heavily reliant on data to handle their activities. Digitalization was and is the key word: moving from paper to computers in order to transform latent raw data into a form that was machine-readable and therefore analyzable. In business, the last ten years was basically upgrading to version two from version one.

In emergency management however, many agencies are stuck without a version at all. Take a flood — where is the water and where is it going? Up until recently, there was no comprehensive data on where waters rose from and where they sloshed to. When it came to wildfires, there were no administrative datasets on where every tree in the world was located and how prone each is to fire. Even human infrastructure like power lines and cell towers often had little interface with the digital world. They stood there, and if you couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see you.

Models, simulations, predictions, analysis: all of these are useless without raw data, and in the disaster response realm, there was no detailed data to be found.

After years of promising an Internet of Things (IoT) revolution, things are finally internet-izing, with IoT sensors increasingly larding up the American and world landscape. Temperature, atmospheric pressure, water levels, humidity, pollution, power, and other sensors have been widely deployed, emitting constant streams of data back into data warehouses ready for analysis.

Take wildfires in the American West. It wasn’t all that long ago that the U.S. federal government and state firefighting agencies had no knowledge of where a blaze was taking place. Firefighting has been “100 years of tradition unimpeded by progress,” Tom Harbour, head of fire response for a decade at the U.S. Forest Service and now chief fire officer at Cornea put it.

And he’s right. After all, firefighting is a visceral activity — responders can see the fires, even feel the burning heat echoing off of their flesh. Data wasn’t useful, particularly in the West where there are millions of acres of land and large swaths are sparsely populated. Massive conflagrations could be detected by satellites, but smoldering fires in the brush would be entirely invisible to the geospatial authorities. There’s smoke over California — exactly what is a firefighter on the ground supposed to do with such valuable information?

Today after a decade of speculative promise, IoT sensors are starting to clear a huge part of this fog. Aaron Clark-Ginsberg, a social scientist at RAND Corporation who researches community resilience, said that air quality sensors have become ubiquitous since they are “very cheap [and] pretty easy to use” and can offer very fine-grained understandings of pollution — a key signal, for instance, of wildfires. He pointed to the company Purple Air, which in addition to making sensors, also produces a popular consumer map of air quality, as indicative of the potential these days for technology.

Maps are the critical intersection for data in disasters. Geospatial information systems (GIS) form the basis for most planning and response teams, and no company has a larger footprint in the sector than privately-held Esri. Ryan Lanclos, who leads public safety solutions at the company, pointed to the huge expansion of water sensors as radically changing responses to certain disasters. “Flood sensors are always pulsing,“ he said, and with a “national water model coming out of the federal government ,” researchers can now predict through GIS analysis how a flood will affect different communities with a precision unheard of previously.

Cory Davis, the director of public safety strategy and crisis response at Verizon (which, through our parent company Verizon Media, is TechCrunch’s ultimate owner), said that all of these sensors have transformed how crews work to maintain infrastructure as well. “Think like a utility that is able to put a sensor on a power line — now they have sensors and get out there quicker, resolve it, and get the power back up.”

He noted one major development that has transformed sensors in this space the last few years: battery life. Thanks to continuous improvements in ultra-low-power wireless chips as well as better batteries and energy management systems, sensors can last a really long time in the wilderness without the need for maintenance. “Now we have devices that have ten-year battery lives,” he said. That’s critical, because it can be impossible to connect these sensors to the power grid in frontier areas.

The same line of thinking holds true at T-Mobile as well. When it comes to preventative planning, Jay Naillon, senior director of national technology service operations strategy at the telco, said that “the type of data that is becoming more and more valuable for us is the storm surge data — it can make it easier to know we have the right assets in place.” That data comes from flood sensors that can offer real-time warnings signals to planners across the country.

Telecom interest — and commercial interest in general — has been critical to accelerating the adoption of sensors and other data streams around disasters. While governments may be the logical end user of flood or wildfire data, they aren’t the only ones interested in this visibility. “A lot of consumers of that information are in the private sector,” said Jonathan Sury, project director at the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “These new types of risks, like climate change, are going to affect their bottom lines,” and he pointed to bond ratings, insurance underwriting and other areas where commercial interest in sensor data has been profound.

Sensors may not literally be ubiquitous, but they have offered a window into the ambiguity that emergency managers have never had visibility into before.

Finally, there is the extensive datasets around mobile usage that have become ubiquitous throughout much of the world. Facebook’s Data for Good project, for instance, provides data layers around connectivity — are users connecting from one place and then later connecting from a different location, indicating displacement? That sort of data from the company and telcos themselves can help emergency planners scout out how populations are shifting in real-time.

Data, data, on the wall — how many AIs can they call?

Rivulets of data have now turned into floods of information, but just like floodwaters rising in cities across the world, the data deluge now needs a response all its own. In business, the surfeit of big data has been wrangled with an IT stack from data warehouses all the way to business intelligence tools.

If only data for disasters could be processed so easily. Data relevant for disasters is held by dozens of different organizations spanning the private, public, and non-profit sectors, leading to huge interoperability problems. Even when the data can be harmonized, there are large challenges in summarizing the findings down to an actual decision a frontline responder can use in their work — making AI a tough sale still today, particularly outside of planning. As Davis of Verizon put it, “now that they have this plethora of data, a lot of cities and federal agencies are struggling with how to use it.”

Unfortunately, standardization is a challenge at all scales. Globally, countries mostly lack interoperability, although standards are improving over time. Amir Elichai, the founder and CEO of 911 call-handling platform Carbyne, said that “from a technology standpoint and a standards standpoint, there is a big difference between countries,” noting that protocols from one country often have to be completely rewritten to serve a different market.

Tom Cotter, director of emergency response and preparedness at health care disaster response organization Project HOPE, said that even setting up communications between responders can be challenging in an international environment. “Some countries allow certain platforms but not others, and it is constantly changing,” he said. “I basically have every single technology communication platform you can possibly have in one place.”

One senior federal emergency management official acknowledged that data portability has become increasingly key in procurement contracts for technology, with the government recognizing the need to buy commercially-available software rather than custom-designed software. That message has been picked up by companies like Esri, with Lanclos stating that “part of our core mission is to be open and … create data and to share that openly to the public or securely through open standards.”

For all its downsides though, the lack of interoperability can be ironically helpful for innovation. Elichai said that the “lack of standards is an advantage — you are not buying into a legacy standard,” and in some contexts where standards are lacking, quality protocols can be built with the assumption of a modern data workflow.

Even with interoperability though, the next challenge becomes data sanitation — and disaster data is dirty as … well, something. While sensor streams can be verified and cross-checked with other datasets, in recent years there has been a heavy increase in the quantity of citizen-submitted information that has to be carefully vetted before it is disseminated to first responders or the public.

Bailey Farren, CEO and co-founder of disaster communications platform Perimeter, said that “sometimes citizens have the most accurate and real-time information, before first responders show up — we want citizens to share that with …government officials.” The challenge is how to filter the quality goods from the unhelpful or malicious. Raj Kamachee, the CIO of Team Rubicon, a non-profit which assembles teams of volunteer military veterans to respond to natural disasters, said that verification is critical, and it’s a key element of the infrastructure he has built at the organization since joining in 2017. “We’ve gotten more people using it so more feedback [and] more data [is] coming through the pipes,” he said. “So creating a self-service, a very collaborative approach.”

With quality and quantity, the AI models should come, right? Well, yes and no.

Sury of Columbia wants to cool down at least some of the hype around AI. “The big caveat with all of these machine learning and big data applications is that they are not a panacea — they are able to process a lot of disparate information, [but] they’re certainly not going to tell us exactly what to do,” he said. “First responders are already processing a lot of information,” and they don’t necessarily need more guidance.

Instead, AI in disasters is increasingly focused on planning and resilience. Sury pointed to OneConcern, a resiliency planning platform, as one example of how data and AI can be combined in the disaster planning process. He also pointed to the CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index and risk tools from FEMA that integrate different data signals into scalar values by emergency planners to optimize their contingency plans.

Yet, almost everyone I talked to was much more hesitant about the power of AI. As I discussed a bit in part one of this series regarding the disaster sales cycle, data tools have to be real-time and perfect every time given the lives that are on the line. Kamachee of Team Rubicon noted that when choosing tools, he avoids whiz-bang and instead looks at the pure utility of individual vendors. “We go high tech, but we prepare for low tech,” he said, empathizing that in disaster response, everything must be agile and adaptable to changing circumstances.

Elichai of Carbyne saw this pattern in his sales. There’s a “sensitivity in our market and the reluctance from time to time to adopt” new technologies he said, but acknowledged that “there is no doubt that AI at a certain point will provide benefits.”

Naillon of T-Mobile had similar views from the operator perspective, saying that “I can’t say that we really leverage AI very much” in the company’s disaster planning. Instead of AI as brain, the telecom company simply uses data and forecast modeling to optimally position equipment — no fancy GANs required.

Outside of planning, AI has helped in post-disaster recovery, and specifically around damage assessments. After a crisis transpires, assessments of infrastructure and private property have to be made in order for insurance claims to be filed and for a community to move forward. Art delaCruz, COO and president of Team Rubicon, noted that technology and a flourish of AI has helped significantly around damage assessments. Since his organization often helps rebuild communities in the course of its work, triaging damage is a critical element of its effective response strategy.

There’s a brighter future, other than that brightness from the sun that is going to burn us to a crisp, right?

So AI today is helping a bit with resilience planning and disaster recovery and not so much during emergency response itself, but there is certainly more to come across the entire cycle. Indeed, there is a lot of excitement about the future of drones, which are increasingly being used in the field, but there are concerns long term about whether AI and data will ultimately cause more problems than they solve.

Drones would seem to have an obvious value for disaster response, and indeed, they have been used by teams to get additional aerial footage and context where direct access by responders is limited. Kamachee of Team Rubicon noted that in the Bahamas on a mission, response teams used drones to detect survivors, since major roads were blocked. The drones snapped images that were processed using AI, and helped the team to identify those survivors for evacuation. He described drones and their potential as “sexy; very, very cool.”

Cotter of Project HOPE similarly noted that faster data processing translates to better responses. “Ultimately speed is what saves lives in these disasters,” he said. We’re “also able to manage more responses remotely [and] don’t have to send as many people downrange,” giving response teams more leverage in resource-constrained environments.

“I see more emergency management agencies using drone technology — search and rescue, aerial photography,” Davis of Verizon said, arguing that operators often have a mentality of “send a machine into a situation first.” He continued, arguing, “artificial intelligence is going to continue to get better and better and better [and] enable our first responders to respond more effectively, but also more efficiently and safer.”

With data flooding in from sensors and drones and processed and verified better than ever, disaster response can improve, perhaps even better than Mother Nature can galvanize her increasingly deadly whims. Yet, there is one caveat: will the AI algorithms themselves cause new problems in the future?

Clark-Ginsburg of RAND, perhaps supplying that typical RANDian alternatives analysis, said that these solutions can also create problems themselves, “technological risks leading to disaster and the world of technology facilitating disaster.” These systems can break, they can make mistakes, and more ominously — they can be sabotaged to increase chaos and damage.

Bob Kerrey, a co-chair of the 9/11 Commission, former senator and governor of Nebraska, and currently the board chairman of Risk & Return, a disaster response VC fund and philanthropy I profiled recently, pointed to cybersecurity as increasingly a wild card in many responses. “There wasn’t a concept called zero days — let alone a market for zero days — in 2004 [when the 9/11 Commission was doing its work], and now there is.” With the 9/11 terrorist attacks, “they had to come here, they had to hijack planes … now you don’t need to hijack planes to damage the United States,” noting that hackers “can be sitting with a bunch of other guys in Moscow, in Tehran, in China, or even your mother’s basement.”

Data is a revolution in the making for disaster response, but it may well cause a whole second-order set of problems that didn’t exist before. What is giveth is taketh away. The oil gushes, but then the well suddenly runs dry – or simply catches fire.

---

Future of Technology and Disaster Response Table of Contents

• Part 1: The most disastrous sales cycle in the world: The future of sales
• Part 2: Data was the new oil, until the oil caught fire: Data and Artificial Intelligence
• Part 3: Upcoming
• Part 4: Upcoming

---

This week, we welcome guest Hana Mohan to our podcast Found. Hana is the co-founder and CEO of MagicBell, a new startup she created with Josue Montano that just recently graduated from Y Combinator’s Winter 2021 cohort. MagicBell is a full-featured, plug-and-play notifications inbox aimed at developers who want to build one into their own product, but don’t want to have to build one themselves from scratch.

Hana’s experience as an entrepreneur spans multiple companies, including her last one which she grew to significant success in terms of annual revenue. She’s also a proud transgender woman, who underwent her transition mid-way through her existing history as a founder and entrepreneur. Hana talks to us about the challenges she faced taking on her transition in an industry where the focus is often exclusively on how hard you’re hustling and what you’re building next, and about her origin story as a founder coming from an environment where there weren’t necessarily many examples with similar life experience to look to for inspiration.

During our chat, Hana also shared lots of insight into YC, and what it provides founders, as well as perspective on what it was like going through the program during a global pandemic in a remote context. Finally, she offers some great context on finding your first investors and customers as a distributed team.

We loved talking to Hana, and we hope you love the episode. You can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Definitely leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email. Come back next week for yet another great conversation with a founder all about their own one-of-a-kind startup journey.

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. If you want it in your inbox every Saturday morning, sign up here. Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.

TechCrunch isn’t a public-market-focused publication. We care about startups. But public tech companies can, at times, provide interesting insights into how the broader technology market is performing. So we pay what we might call minimum-viable attention to former startups that made it all the way to an IPO.

Then there are the Big Tech companies. In the United States the list is well-known: Facebook, Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. And, in a series of results that could indicate a hot market for startup growth, they had a smashingly good first quarter of 2021. You can read our notes on their results here and here, but that’s just part of the story.

Yes, the Big Tech financial results were good — as they have been for some time — but lost amid the usual earnings deluge of numbers is how shockingly accretive Big Tech’s recent performances have proven for their valuations.

Microsoft fell as low as the $135 per-share range last March. Today it’s worth $252 and change. Alphabet traded down to around $1,070 per share. Today the search giant is worth $2,410 per share.

The result of the huge share-price appreciation is that Apple is now worth $2.21 trillion, Microsoft $1.88 trillion, Amazon $1.76 trillion, Alphabet $1.60 trillion and Facebook $0.93 trillion. That’s around $8.4 trillion for the five companies.

Back in July of 2017, I wrote a piece noting that their aggregate value had reached the $3 trillion mark. That became $4 trillion in mid-2018. And then in the next three years or so it more than doubled again.

Why?

Myles Udland, a reporter at our sister publication Yahoo Finance, has at least part of the puzzle in a piece he wrote this week. Here’s Udland:

And while it seems that almost every earnings story has sort of followed this same arc, data also confirms that this is not just our imagination: corporate earnings have never been this far out of line with expectations.

Data out of the team at Refinitiv published Thursday showed the rate at which companies were beating estimates and the magnitude by which they were beating expectations through Thursday morning’s results were the best on record.

So earnings are beating the street’s guesses more frequently, and at a higher differential, than ever? That makes recent stock-market appreciation less worrisome, I suppose. And it helps explain why startups have been able to raise so much capital lately in the United States, as they have in Europe, and why private-market investors are pouring so much capital into fintech startups. And it’s probably why Zomato is going public and why we’re still waiting for the Robinhood debut.

This is what a market feels like when the underlying businesses are firing on all cylinders, it appears. Just don’t forget that no business cycle is unending, and no boom is forever.

An insurtech interlude

Extending The Exchange’s recent reporting regarding fintech funding, and our roundup from last week of insurtech startup rounds, a few more notes on the latter startup niche, which can be broadly viewed as part of the larger financial technology world.

This time we’ll hear from Accel’s John Locke regarding his investments in The Zebra — which recently raised even more capital — and the insurtech space more broadly.

Asked why insurtech marketplaces like The Zebra have been able to raise so very much money in the last year, Locke said that it’s a mix of “insurance carriers […] finally embracing marketplaces and willing to design integrated consumer experiences with marketplaces,” along with more consumer “comparison shopping” and, finally, growth and revenue quality.

The Zebra, Locke said, is “still growing north of 100% at ~$120M+ revenue run-rate.” That means it can go public whenever it wants.

But on that matter, there has been some weakness in the stock market for some public insurtech companies. Is Locke worried about that? He’s neutral-to-positive, saying that his firm does not “think all the companies in the market will work but still thinks ‘insurtechs’ will take market share from incumbents over the next decade.” Fair enough.

And Accel is still considering more deals in the space, as are others. Locke said that the venture market for insurtech investments is “definitely more aggressive” this year than last.

Various and sundry

Closing today, a few notes on things that we didn’t get to that matter:

• Productboard closed a $72 million Series C. First, that’s a huge round. Second, yes, Tiger did lead the deal. Third, the product management software company has around 4,000 customers today. That’s a lot. Add this company to your two-years-from-now IPO list.
• Chinese bike-sharing startup Hello is going public in the United States. We are going to get back to this on Monday, but its F-1 filing is here. The company turned $926.3 million worth of 2020 revenues into $109.6 million in gross profit, and a net loss of $173.7 million in net losses. Yowza.
• Darktrace went public this week. I know of it because it sponsors an F1 team that I adore, but it enters our world today as a recent U.K.-listed company. And after Deliveroo went kersplat, the resounding success of the Darktrace listing could make the U.K. a more attractive place to list than it was a week ago.
• And, finally, drone delivery is, maybe, coming at last? U.K.-listed venture capital group Draper Esprit led the $25 million round into Manna, which wants to use unmanned drones in Ireland to deliver grub. “Manna sees a huge appetite for a greener, quieter, safer, and faster delivery service,” UKTN reports.

A long, weird week. Make sure to follow the second denizen of The Exchange’s writing team: Anna Heim. Okay! Chat next week!

Alex

My mom cuts to the chase when she is describing my beat to others. In her words, I cover companies like Uber before they become companies like Uber. And honestly? I can’t exactly disagree with the description. The best feeling in tech journalism is telling a story about a startup before it becomes a household name. As an early-stage reporter, I honestly bet a lot on the potential of a savvy edtech founder or creative marketplace play. And when I’m doing my job right, I point to the unique insight that will make the startup successful or challenged in the future.

On that note, one of my favorite renewed series at TechCrunch is an EC-1 (Extra Crunch subscription required), a story series that goes through the nitty-gritty of a startup’s story, from its original days to its pivots along the way. I’ve spent the past few months on one of these projects — and mine is coming out next week! In the meantime, you’ve read packages about StockX and Tonal, and our latest just came out: the Klaviyo EC-1:

• How Klaviyo transformed from a lifestyle business into a $4.15B email titan (2,600 words/10 minutes)
• How Klaviyo used data and no-code to transform owned marketing (3,000 words/12 minutes)
• Marketing in 2021 is emotional and not just transactional (2,200 words/9 minutes)
• Drama and quirk aren’t necessary for startup success (1,900 words/8 minutes)

Enjoy this long-form read and big thanks to Danny Crichton, my Equity co-host and managing editor here at TechCrunch, who has been managing and editing all of these projects.

In the rest of this newsletter we’ll get into All Raise data, the new Miami and a new lineup you don’t want to miss. Follow me on Twitter @nmasc_ for updates throughout the week.

All (aren’t) Raise(d)

All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the footprint of women founders and funders, has released its annual report for 2020. The whole thing is honestly worth a read, but we especially paid attention to how funding has dropped for female founders:

• Round sizes for women + non-binary founders were up to 49% lower than males
• 85% of venture funding goes to all-male teams
• 64% of VC firms still don’t have a single female partner
• Black + Latinx female founders receive only 0.64% of VC funding, a slight uptick from the year prior.

Here’s what to know: On Equity, we talked about how these abysmal metrics were both a predicted but still surprising effect of Zoom investing. This disconnect is the conversation no one has during an upmarket — and metrics are one way we can benchmark progress.

• Let’s talk about gaslighting and fundraising
• Men, don’t do this
• How to fundraise over Zoom more effectively
• Founders who don’t properly vet VCs set up both parties for failure

Internet is the new Miami

To quote Winnie CEO and co-founder Sara Mauskopf, “Internet is the new Miami.” The networks made online — either through the rise of meme culture or Substack spice — can be a competitive advantage in the world of investment, as two new funds this week showed us.

Here’s what to know: Ryan Hoover and Vedika Jain announced Weekend Fund 3, which will include a $1 million community raise. And Chief Meme Officer Turner Novak finally debuted Banana Capital’s debut fund launched with $9.99 million in funding.

Novak explained how being internet-first impacts his investments:

“It just kind of happens where [my investments] are people who understand the culture of the internet, to understand memes and understand wit and humor and appreciate that a little bit more,” he said. “Those are probably the people that are more naturally intuitive investments, so it definitely does skew that direction.”

While Novak didn’t share explicit targets or mandates around investment in diverse founders, he pointed to his track record at Gelt VC, in which 41% of capital went to woman CEOs. To date, 65% of Banana Capital’s portfolio founding teams include non-white founders and 50% of the teams include more than one gender.

• And in the little-known capital lender space, Shopify is using machine learning to lend money to startups. Shopify Capital has a nice strategic ring to it, no?

Around TechCrunch

• Announcing the Agenda for TC Sessions: Mobility 2021
• Sydney Thomas is coming to judge startups at Disrupt
• And, as this clip will tell you, we’re losing the Webby’s, so vote for Equity!

Across the week

Seen on TechCrunch

The AWS for blockchain

Atlassian launches a Jira for every team

CES will return to Las Vegas in 2022

Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

Seen on Extra Crunch

Hacking my way into analytics: A creative’s journey to design with data

How Brex more than doubled its valuation in a year

And finally

India is in crisis. It is devastating and heartbreaking to watch this unfold and impact our family and friends and colleagues and people. My colleague Manish Singh, who is based there, wrote up the different ways you can donate to help out.

I’ll end by quoting Singh:

With several major industries, including film and sports, going about their lives pretending there is no crisis, entrepreneurs and startups have emerged as a rare beam of hope in recent days, springing to action to help the nation navigate its darkest hours.

It’s a refreshing change from last year, when thousands of Indian startups themselves were struggling to survive. And while some startups are still severely disrupted, offering a helping hand to the nation has become the priority for most.

Until next week,

N

When Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan sat down with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska for the first high-level bilateral summit of the new administration, it was not a typical diplomatic meeting. Instead of a polite but restrained diplomatic exchange, the two sides traded pointed barbs for almost two hours. “There is growing consensus that the era of engagement with China has come to an unceremonious close,” wrote Sullivan and Kurt Campbell, the Administration’s Asia czar also in attendance, back in 2019. How apt that they were present for that moment’s arrival.

A little more than one hundred days into the Biden Administration, there is no shortage of views on how it should handle this new era of Sino-American relations. From a blue-ribbon panel assembled by former Google Chairman Eric Schmidt to a Politico essay from an anonymous former Trump Administration official that consciously echoes (in both its name and its author’s anonymity) George Kennan’s famous “Long Telegram” laying out the theory of Cold War containment, to countless think tank reports, it seems everyone is having their say.

What is largely uncontroversial though is that technology is at the center of U.S.-China relations, and any competition with China will be won or lost in the digital and cyber spheres. “Part of the goal of the Alaska meeting was to convince the Chinese that the Biden administration is determined to compete with Beijing across the board to offer competitive technology,” wrote David Sanger in the New York Times shortly afterward.

But what, exactly, does a tech-centered China strategy look like? And what would it take for one to succeed?

Tech has brought Republicans and Democrats uneasily together

One encouraging sign is that China has emerged as one of the few issues on which even Democrats agree that President Trump had some valid points. “Trump really was the spark that reframed the entire debate around U.S.-China relations in DC,” says Jordan Schneider, a China analyst at the Rhodium Group and the host of the ChinaTalk podcast and newsletter.

While many in the foreign policy community favored some degree of cooperation with China before the Trump presidency, now competition – if not outright rivalry – is widely assumed. “Democrats, even those who served in the Obama Administration, have become much more hawkish,” says Erik Brattberg of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Trump has caused “the Overton Window on China [to become] a lot narrower than it was before,” adds Schneider.

As the U.S.-China rivalry has evolved, it has become more and more centered around competing philosophies on the use of technology. “At their core, democracies are open systems that believe in the free flow of information, whereas for autocrats, information is something to be weaponized and stifled in the service of the regime,” says Lindsay Gorman, Fellow for Emerging Technologies at the German Marshall Fund. “So it’s not too surprising that technology, so much of which is about how we store and process and leverage information, has become such a focus of the U.S.-China relationship and of the [broader] democratic-autocratic competition around the world.”

Tech touches everything now – and the stakes could not be higher. “Tech and the business models around tech are really ‘embedded ideology,’’ says Tyson Barker of the German Council on Foreign Relations. “So what tech is and how it is used is a form of governance.”

What does that mean in practice? When Chinese firms expand around the world, Barker tells me, they bring their norms with them. So when Huawei builds a 5G network in Latin America, or Alipay is adopted for digital payments in Central Europe, or Xiaomi takes more market share in Southeast Asia, they are helping digitize those economies on Chinese terms using Chinese norms (as opposed to American ones). The implication is clear: whoever defines the future of technology will determine the rest of the twenty-first century.

That shifting balance has focused minds in Washington. “I think there is a strong bipartisan consensus that technology is at the core of U.S.-China competition,” says Brattberg. But, adds Gorman, “there’s less agreement on what the prescription should be.” While the Democratic experts now ascendant in Washington agree with Trump’s diagnosis of the China challenge, they believe in a vastly different approach from their Trump Administration predecessors.

Out, for instance, are restrictions on Chinese firms just for being Chinese. “That was one of the problems with Trump,” says Walter Kerr, a former U.S. diplomat who publishes the China Journal Review. “Trump cast broad strokes, targeting firms whether it was merited or not. Sticking it to the Chinese is not a good policy.”

Instead the focus is on inward investment – and outward cooperation.

Foreign policy is domestic policy

Democrats are first shoring up America domestically – in short, be strong at home to be strong abroad. “There’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy,” President Biden said in his first major foreign policy speech. “Every action we take in our conduct abroad, we must take with American working families in mind. Advancing a foreign policy for the middle class demands urgent focus on our domestic economic renewal.”

This is a particular passion of Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, who immersed himself in domestic policy while he was Hillary Clinton’s chief policy aide during her 2016 presidential campaign. “We’ve reached a point where foreign policy is domestic policy, and domestic policy is foreign policy,” he told NPR during the transition.

This is increasingly important for technology, as concern grows that America is lagging behind on research and development. “We’re realizing that we’ve underinvested in the government grants and research and development projects that American companies [need] to become highly innovative in fields like quantum computing, AI, biotechnology, etc,” says Kerr.

“Rebuilding” or “sustaining” America’s “technological leadership” is a major theme of the Longer Telegram and is the very operating premise of the report of the China Strategy Group assembled by Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, and the first chair of the Department of Defense’s Innovation Advisory Board. Those priorities have only become more important during the pandemic. It’s a question of “how do we orient the research system to fill in the industrial gaps that have been made very clear by the COVID crisis?” says Schneider of Rhodium.

Startups constantly talk about being mission-oriented, but it’s hard to take most of those messages seriously when the mission is optimizing cash flow for tax efficiency. However, a new generation of startups is emerging that are taking on some of the largest global challenges and bringing the same entrepreneurial grit, operational excellence, and technical brilliance to bear on actual missions — ones that may well save thousands of lives.

ClimateTech has been a huge beneficiary of this trend in general, but one small specialty has caught my eye: disaster response. It’s a category for software services that’s percolated for years with startups here and there, but now a new crop of founders is taking on the challenges of this space with renewed urgency and vigor.

As the elevator pitch would have it, disaster response is hitting hockey stick growth. 2020 was a brutal year, and in more ways than just the global COVID-19 pandemic. The year also experienced a record number of hurricanes, among the worst wildfire seasons in the Western United States, and several megastorms all across the world. Climate change, urbanization, population growth, and poor response practices have combined to create some of the most dangerous conditions humanity has ever collectively faced.

I wanted to get a sense of what the disaster response market has in store this decade, so over the past few weeks, I have interviewed more than 30 startup founders, investors, government officials, utility execs and more to understand this new landscape and what’s changed. In this four-part series on the future of technology and disaster response, to be published this weekend and next, we’ll look at the sales cycle in this market, how data is finally starting to flow into disaster response, how utilities and particularly telcos are dealing with internet access issues, and how communities are redefining disaster management going forward.

Before we get into all the tech developments in disaster response and resilience though, it’s important to ask a basic question: if you build it, will they come? The resounding answer from founders, investors, and government procurement officials was simple: no.

In fact, in all my conversations for this series, the hell of the emergency management sales cycle came up repeatedly, with more than one individual describing it as possibly the toughest sale that any company could make in the entire world. That view might be surprising in a market that easily runs into the tens of billions of dollars if the budgets for procurement are aggregated across local, state, federal, and international governments. Yet, as we will see, the unique dynamics of this market make almost any traditional sales approach useless.

Despite that pessimism though, that doesn’t mean sales are impossible, and a new crop of startups are piercing the barriers of entry in this market. We’ll look at the sales and product strategies that startups are increasingly relying on today to break through.

The sale from hell

Few will be surprised that government sales are hard. Generations of govtech startup founders have learned that slow sales cycles, byzantine procurement processes, cumbersome verification and security requirements, and a general lassitude among contract officers makes for a tough battlefield to close on revenue. Many government agencies now have programs to specifically onboard startups, having discovered just how hard it is for new innovations to run through their gauntlet.

Emergency management sales share all the same problems as other govtech startups, but then they deal with about a half dozen more problems that make the sales cycle go from exhausting to infernal hell.

The first and most painful is the dramatic seasonality of the sales in the emergency space. Many agencies that operate on seasonal disasters — think hurricanes, wildfires, winter storms, and more — often go through an “action” period where they respond to these disasters, and then transition into a “planning” period where they assess their performance, determine what changes are needed for next season, and consider what tools might be added or removed to increase the effectiveness of their responders.

Take Cornea and Perimeter, two startups in the wildfire response space that I profiled recently. Both of the teams described how they needed to think in terms of fire seasons when it came to product iteration and sales. “We took two fire seasons to beta test our technology … to solve the right problem the right way,” Bailey Farren, CEO and co-founder of Perimeter, said. “We actually changed our focus on beta testing during the [2019 California] Kincaid fire.”

In this way, disaster tech could be compared to edtech, where school technology purchases are often synchronized with the academic calendar. Miss the June through August window in the U.S. education system, and a startup is looking at another year before it will get another chance at the classroom.

Edtech might once have been a tougher sale to make in order to thread that three-month needle, but disaster response is getting more difficult every year. Climate change is exacerbating the length, severity, and damage caused by all types of disasters, which means that responding agencies that might have had six months or more out-of-season to plan in the past are sometimes working all year long just to respond to emergencies. That gives little time to think about what new solutions an agency needs to purchase.

Worse, unlike the standardized academic calendar, disasters are much less predictable these days as well. Flood and wildfire seasons, for instance, used to be relatively concentrated in certain periods of the year. Now, such emergencies can emerge practically year-round. That means that procurement processes can both start and freeze on a moment’s notice as an agency has to respond to its mission.

Seasonality doesn’t just apply to the sales cycle though — it also applies to the budgets of these agencies. While they are transpiring, disasters dominate the eye of the minds for citizens and politicians, but then we forget all about them until the next catastrophe. Unlike the annual consistency of other government tech spending, disaster tech funding often comes in waves.

One senior federal emergency management official, who asked not to be named since he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly, explained that consistent budgets and the ability to spend them quickly is quite limited during “blue sky days” (i.e. periods without a disaster), and agencies like his have to rely on piecing together supplementary disaster funds when Congress or state legislatures authorize additional financing. The best agencies have technological roadmaps on hand so that when extra funding comes in, they can use it immediately to realize their plans, but not all agencies have the technical planning resources to be that prepared.

Amir Elichai, the CEO and co-founder of Carbyne, a cloud-native platform for call handling in 911 centers, said that this wave of interest crested yet again with the COVID-19 pandemic last year, triggering huge increases in attention and funding around emergency response capabilities. “COVID put a mirror in front of government faces and showed them that ‘we’re not ready’,” he said.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, next-generation 911 services (typically dubbed NG911), which have been advocated for years by the industry and first responders, is looking at a major financing boost. President Biden’s proposed infrastructure bill would add $15 billion to upgrade 911 capabilities in the United States — funding that has been requested for much of the last decade. Just last year, a $12 billion variant of that bill failed in the Senate after passing the U.S. House of Representatives.

Sales are all about providing proverbial painkillers versus vitamins to customers, and one would expect that disaster response agencies looking to upgrade their systems would be very much on the painkiller side. After all, the fear and crisis surrounding these agencies and their work would seem to bring visceral attention to their needs.

Yet, that fear actually has the opposite effect in many cases, driving attention away from systematic technology upgrades in favor of immediate acute solutions. One govtech VC, who asked not to be named to speak candidly about the procurement process his companies go through, said that “we don’t want to paint the picture that the world is a scary and dangerous place.” Instead, “the trick is to be … focused on the safety side rather than the danger.” Safety is a much more prevalent and consistent need than sporadically responding to emergencies.

When a wave of funding finally gets approved though, agencies often have to scramble to figure out what to prioritize now that the appropriated manna has finally dropped from the legislative heaven. Even when startups provide the right solutions, scrying which problems are going to get funded in a particular cycle requires acute attention to every customer.

Josh Mendelsohn, the managing partner at startup studio and venture fund Hangar, said that “the customers have no shortage of needs that they are happy to talk about … the hardest part is how you narrow the funnel — what are the problems that are most meritorious?” That merit can, unfortunately, evolve very rapidly as mission requirements change.

Let’s say all the stars line up though — the agencies have time to buy, they have a need, and a startup has the solution that they want. The final challenge that’s probably the toughest to overcome is simply the lack of trust that new startups have with agencies.

In talking to emergency response officials the past few weeks, reliability unsurprisingly came up again and again. Responding to disasters is mission-critical work, and nothing can break in the field or in the operations center. Frontline responders still use paper and pens in lieu of tablets or mobile phones since they know that paper is going to work every single time and not run out of battery juice. The move fast and break things ethos of Silicon Valley is fundamentally incompatible with this market.

Seasonality, on-and-off funding, lack of attention, procurement scrambling, and acute reliability requirements combine to make emergency management sales among the hardest possible for a startup. That doesn’t even get into all the typical govtech challenges like integrating with legacy systems, the massive fragmentation of thousands of emergency response agencies littered across the United States and globally, and the fact that in many agencies, people aren’t that interested in change in the first place. As one individual in the space described how governments approach emergency technology, “a lot of departments are looking at it as maybe I can hit retirement before I have to deal with it.”

The strategies for breaking out of limbo

So the sales cycle is hell. Why, then, are VCs dropping money in the sector? After all, we’ve seen emergency response data platform RapidSOS raise $85 million just a few months ago, about the same time Carbyne raised $25 million. There are quite a few more startups at the earliest phases that have raised pre-seed and seed investment as well.

The key argument that nearly everyone in this sector agreed on is that founders (and their investors) have to throw away their private-sector sales playbooks and rebuild their approach from the bottom up to sell specifically to these agencies. That means devising entirely different strategies and tactics to secure revenue performance.

The first and most important approach is, in some respects, to not even start with a company at all, but rather to start learning what people in this field actually do. As the sales cycle perhaps indicates, disaster response is unlike any other work. The chaos, the rapidly changing environment, the multi-disciplinary teams and cross-agency work that has to take place for a response to be effective have few parallels to professional office work. Empathy is key here: the responder that uses paper might have nearly lost their life in the field when their device failed. A 911 center operator may have listened to someone perish in real-time as they scrambled to find the right information from a software database.

In short, it’s all about customer discovery and development. That’s not so different from the enterprise world, but patience radiated out of many of my conversations with industry participants. It just takes more time — sometimes multiple seasons — to figure out precisely what to build and how to sell it effectively. If an enterprise SaaS product can iterate to market-fit in six months, it might take two to three years in the government sector to reach an equivalent point.

Michael Martin of RapidSOS said “There is no shortcut to doing customer discovery work in public service.” He noted that “I do think there is a real challenge between the arrogance of the Silicon Valley tech community and the reality of these challenges“ in public safety, a gap that has to be closed if a startup wants to find success. Meanwhile, Bryce Stirton, president and co-founder of public-safety company Responder Corp, said that “The end user is the best way to look at all the challenges … what are all the boxes the end user has to check to use a new technology?”

Mendelsohn of Hangar said that founders need to answer some tough questions in that process. “Ultimately, what are your entry points,” he asked. “Cornea has had to go through that customer discovery process … it all feels necessary, but what are the right things that require the least amount of behavior change to have impact immediately?”

Indeed, that process is appreciated on the other side as well. The federal emergency management official said, “everyone has a solution, but no one asked me about my problem.” Getting the product right and having it match the unique work that takes place in this market is key.

Let’s say you have a great product though — how do you get it through the perilous challenges of the procurement process? Here, answers differed widely, and they offer multiple strategies on how to approach the problem.

Martin of RapidSOS said that “government does not have a good model for procuring new services to solve problems.” So, the company chose to make its services free for government. “In three years, we went from no agencies using our stuff to all agencies using our stuff, and that was based on not making it a procurement problem,” he said. The company’s business model is based on having paid corporate partners who want to integrate their data into 911 centers for safety purposes.

That’s a similar model used by MD Ally, which received a $3.5 million seed check from General Catalyst this past week. The company adds telehealth referral services into 911 dispatch systems, and CEO and founder Shanel Fields emphasized that she saw an opportunity to create a revenue engine from the physician and mental health provider side of her market while avoiding government procurement.

Outside of what might be dubbed “Robinhood for government” (aka, just offering a service for free), another approach is to link up with more well-known and trusted brand names to offer a product that has the innovation of a startup but the reliability of an established player. Stirton of Responder said “we learned in [this market] that it takes more than just capital to get companies started in this space.” What he found worked was building private-sector partnerships to bring a joint offering to governments. For instance, he noted cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Verizon have good reputations with governments and can get startups over procurement hurdles (TechCrunch is owned by Verizon Media, which is owned by Verizon).

Elichai of Carbyne notes that much of his sales is done through integration partners, referencing CenterSquare as one example. For 911 services, “The U.S. market is obviously the most fragmented” and so partners allow the company to avoid selling to thousands of different agencies. “We are usually not selling direct to governments,” he said.

Partners can also help deal with the problem of localism in emergency procurement: many government agencies don’t know precisely what to buy, so they simply buy software that is offered by companies in their own backyard. Partners can offer a local presence while also allowing a startup to have a nimble national footprint.

Another angle on partners is building out a roster of experienced but retired government executives who can give credibility to a startup through their presence and networks. Even more than in enterprise, government officials, particularly in emergency management, have to work and trust one another given the closely-coupled work that they perform. Hearing a positive recommendation from a close contact down the street can readily change the tenor of a sales conversation.

Finally, as much as emergency management software is geared for governments, private sector companies increasingly have to consider much of the same tooling to protect their operations. Many companies have distributed workforces, field teams, and physical assets they need to protect, and often have to respond to disasters in much the same way that governments do. For some startups, it’s possible to bootstrap in the private sector early on while continuing to assiduously develop public sector relationships.

In short, a long-term customer development program coupled with quality partnerships and joint offerings while not forgetting the private sector offers the best path for startups to break through into these agencies.

The good news is that the hard work can be rewarded. Not only are there serious dollars that flow through these agencies, but the agencies themselves know that they need better technology. Tom Harbour, who is chief fire officer at Cornea and formerly national director of fire management at the U.S. Forest Service, notes that “These are billions of dollars we spend … and we know we can be more efficient.” Government doesn’t always make it easy to create efficiency, but for the founders willing to go the distance, they can build impactful, profitable, and mission-driven companies.

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020.

Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches 3.7 hours of live TV per day, but now spends four hours per day on their mobile devices.

Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re also a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus. In 2020, investors poured $73 billion in capital into mobile companies — a figure that’s up 27% year-over-year.

This week we’re looking at the launch of Apple’s ATT, the Facebook and Spotify team-up and the latest from the EU’s antitrust investigation against Apple.

This Week in Apps will soon be a newsletter! Sign up here: techcrunch.com/newsletters

Top Stories

Here Comes ATT

Apple’s public debut of App Tracking Transparency, or ATT, is the news of the week and possibly of the year. Through a small pop-up message asking users if the app can track them, Apple has disrupted a multibillion-dollar adtech industry, altered the course of tech giants like Facebook and drawn possible lawsuits and antitrust complaints, all in the name of protecting consumer privacy. Apple does believe in privacy and user control — you can tell that from the way the company has built its technology to do things like on-device processing or permissions toggles that let people decide what their apps can and cannot do.

But Apple will also benefit from this particular privacy reform, too. Its own first-party apps can collect data and share it with other first-party apps. That means what you do in apps like the App Store, Apple News, Stocks and others can be used to personalize Apple’s own ads. And the company is prepared to capitalize on this opportunity too, with the addition of a new ad slot on the App Store (in the Suggested section on the Search tab.) If it wants to roll out more ads over time to other businesses — perhaps, those podcasts it got newly interested in after Spotify did? Or in its streaming TV service or fitness solution? Perhaps the ads it sells in Apple News? — then it would have access to valuable data it could use. Oh and the next time you open the App Store or Apple News, you won’t be bothered with one of those pesky warnings! Nope — that’s only for third-parties, a very important distinction! If you want to turn off Apple’s own ability to track you across its growing number of apps, that’s at the VERY bottom of iOS’s Privacy Settings.

We heard you like Spotify, so we put Spotify in your Facebook app

Facebook and Spotify expanded their partnership this week. The companies had earlier announced their plans to make it easier for Facebook users to stream music and podcasts from the Facebook app. On Monday, this integration began rolling out in the form of a miniplayer experience that allows Facebook users to stream from Spotify through the Facebook app on iOS or Android.

The feature is available to both free and paying Spotify users and will allow them each to hear the full song or podcast episode being shared. However, free users will then be moved into “shuffle” mode if they continue to listen after the song plays.

What’s interesting about this integration is that it’s not actually streaming Spotify through Facebook. The miniplayer activates and controls the launch and playback in the Spotify app — which is how the playback is able to continue even as the user scrolls on Facebook or if they minimize the Facebook app altogether. This gives the appearance of Facebook doing the streaming. (Songs on social! Cue Myspace vibes!)

Spotify says users can’t upgrade to Spotify Premium from the miniplayer directly, so there’s no rev share there. It’s also paying the royalties on streams, as usual. But it’s getting massive distribution through Facebook, driving signups and repeat usage, while Facebook gets a way to keep users on its app longer. Win-win. Not coincidentally, both companies now share a common enemy with Apple, whose privacy-focused changes are impacting Facebook’s ad business and whose investments in Apple Music and Podcasts are a threat to Spotify.

Weekly News

Platforms: Apple

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) fined Apple $12.1 million for alleged app market abuse, saying Apple gave its own products a competitive advantage.

The EU is charging Apple for its anticompetitive behavior this week, nearly two years after Spotify filed its first complaint about the App Store and Apple Music. The European Commission last year opened its antitrust investigation into Apple’s business, which is also now under fire in the U.S. for similar matters.

On Friday, the European regulators stated that Apple has “abused its dominant position” in the distribution of music streaming services on the App Store, and called it a “monopoly.” The EU doesn’t think Apple should be able to force developers to use its own in-app purchase mechanism nor should it be able to restrict them from telling users where else they can pay — like the developer’s own website, for example.

Spotify founder Daniel Ek seemed happy with the news:

Apple, however, did not:

Apple is correct in pointing out that Spotify has built a massive business — which to be fair, was built both on and off the App Store. But it’s claiming a pretty big hand in that. The EU’s belief, meanwhile, is that Spotify might have been even more successful if Apple hadn’t imposed the restrictions it did, and that other smaller, streaming competitors are being harmed, too, but don’t have the power to speak up.

Now that ATT is live, Apple warns developers that it will ban apps from its App Store that offer rewards to users that enable tracking. (But seeing how the App Store is being policed as of late [or not], it seems there could be a dark market established for this sort of thing.)

The Apple-Epic trial is set to start next week. Witnesses include Epic CEO Tim Sweeney and COO Daniel Vogel, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft Xbox executive Lori Wright, Adrian Ong from Match Group and other current and former Apple execs, including Matt Fischer (App Store VP), Michael Schmid (head of game biz dev for App Store) and Craig Federighi, Eddy Cue, Scott Forstall, Eric Gray, and Phil Schiller, plus many others.

Platforms: Google

Google says it’s updating its Google Play policies for app developers to improve app quality and discoverability. Now banned is keyword stuffing in the app’s title for ASO purposes. Titles will now be limited to 30 characters and can’t use keywords that imply store performance, or promotion in the icon, title or developer name. Icons that mislead users will also be banned. Emoticons and emoji can also no longer be used. The company is additionally cracking down on preview assets to ensure they accurately represent the game or app and give users enough information to make a decision to download. They can’t use words like “free” or best” either, and must be localized and legible.

Adtech

Advertisers told The WSJ that Apple’s ATT gives Apple’s own advertising system a competitive advantage. The adtech industry, which is reeling from Apple’s changes to tracking — it’s giving users the ability to opt-out of being tracked — is making the point that there’s something in it for Apple, too, when ATT goes live.

German advertisers filed an antitrust complaint over ATT, saying the changes will negatively affect their industry with up to a 60% fall in ad revenue. Nine industry associations were behind the complaint, representing other tech giants, like Facebook, and publisher Axel Springer.

Facebook warned investors of “increased ad targeting headwinds in 2021” during its earnings call this week, mainly because of the new version of iOS and its launch of ATT. It also sent a memo to advertisers that detailed how ATT would restrict the availability of ad targeting and analytics tools, and impact audience engagement.

Augmented reality

Apple updated its Clips app (ver 3.1) to allow users to scan spaces using the LiDAR Scanner on iPhone 12 Pro and iPad Pro models in order to apply video effects to their recordings.

Fintech

Google Pay announced a series of updates for its recently revamped payments app, which include new options for grocery savings, paying for public transit and categorizing your spending. With its redesign, the app is being positioned as a key way for brands and businesses to reach customers with offers at a time when Apple is cracking down on third-party tracking.

MetaMask, the Ethereum wallet app and browser extension, said its MAUs grew 5x since October 2020 to reach 5 million monthly active users.

Social

Facebook turns Instagram toward the Clubhouse threat. The company this week announced Instagram Live users could now mute their mics and turn off their videos, which gives the live experience a more casual — and yes, Clubhouse-like, appeal.

Social networking app for women, Peanut, adds live audio rooms. The feature is somewhat like Clubhouse, but without a “stage” or clout-chasing and with topics that appeal to women.

Snapchat now has more Android users than iOS, the company noted during earnings. In Q1 2021, Snapchat reached 280M DAUs, up 22% YoY.

TikTok said it’s opening a “transparency center” in Europe that will allow outside experts to see how TikTok approaches content moderation and recommendations, as well as security and privacy. The company opened a center like this in the U.S. last year following censorship allegations.

TikTok formally announced its new CEO and COO, in a strategic reorg. ByteDance’s CFO Shouzi Chew will now also become CEO of TikTok. Vanessa Pappas, who has served as interim CEO after Disney vet Kevin Mayer’s departure, will take the role of TikTok COO, and continue with her current responsibilities.

Messaging

Telegram says it will add group video calls next month. It has also now added the ability for merchants to natively accept credit card payments in any chat through integrations with eight third-party providers, including Stripe, as well as scheduled voice chats, mini profiles for voice chats and new web versions.

Facebook disclosed there are now 1 million businesses using WhatsApp’s “click to WhatsApp” ads, and announced a new feature that will allow businesses to turn items in the WhatsApp Business Catalogs into Facebook or Instagram ads, saving steps.

Streaming & Entertainment

Pandora finally has an iOS home screen widget. What took it so long? The widget comes in three sizes and lets users view and play as many as seven of their most-recently played songs, albums, stations, playlists or podcasts.

The Bally Sports app, which is replacing Fox Sports GO, has now arrived. The app offers livestreamed games, tracks scores, states and standings, and offers game previews and highlights from games.

Dating app S’More is pivoting to become more of a “lifestyle brand” by adding a new feature called S’More TV which will stream dating-related interviews with celebs, like WWE and reality TV stars. The video content could then serve as a conversation starter — something Tinder has done in the past with its interactive series “Swipe Night.”

Clubhouse partners with the NFL for draft week programming. This is the first sports partnership for the audio app and saw the NFL creating a series of draft-themed rooms throughout the week.

Spotify says it will rename Locker Room service (the live audio app and Clubhouse rival it just acquired) “Spotify Greenroom.” The company told investors live audio could mean more than spoken word content — it could also include early previews of new albums, too.

Spotify redesigns “Your Library.” The new version ditches the big tabs at the top for “Music” and “Podcasts” each with their own subsections, for a scrollable horizontal row that places all the content sections on one screen. These work as dynamic filters, allowing you to narrow down your searches. There’s also a grid view available and better sorting options.

Health & Fitness

Uber is offering its app to allow customers to schedule their COVID-19 vaccine appointments at nearby Walgreens in the U.S. Uber had previously introduced free and discounted rides to vaccine appointments with the goal of getting essential workers inoculated.

Security

A popular Android app for writing JavaScript code, DroidScript, had its Google advertising suspended and was then removed from the Google Play Store for ad fraud. The founder of the nonprofit DroidScript.org behind the app asked Google for an explanation and got no response, he said. The app was used by over 100K developers, students and professionals.

Researchers said that hundreds of preinstalled apps on Android devices would have access to a log on users’ phones where the sensitive contract tracing information was stored. Google didn’t offer a reward payout for the finding, saying that system logs haven’t been readable by unprivileged apps since the early days of Android.

Funding and M&A

Mobile bank Current raised $220 million in Series D funding after growing its user base to nearly 3 million. The funding was led by a16z and tripled Current’s valuation from the end of last year to now $2.2 billion.

Teen banking app Step raised $100 million in Series C funding led by General Catalyst, after growing to 1.5 million users in six months post-launch. The company also announced Steph Curry as an investor.

Kid-focused fintech Greenlight raised $260 million in Series D funding, doubling its valuation to $2.3 billion. Its round was also led by a16z, which backed Greenlight’s rival, Current.

Vivid Money raised $73 million in Series B funding (€60 million) led by Greenoaks to build a European financial super app.

Snap acquired 3D mapping developer Pixel8earth for $7.6 million. The small team will build out tools that will work with Snapchat’s location-based augmented reality experiences.

Kaia Health raised $75 million in Series C funding led by an unnamed growth equity fund for its digital therapeutics service that offers virtual therapy via an app for musculoskeletal conditions, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and osteoarthritis.

Family tracking app Life360 will acquire wearable location device Jiobit for $37 million. The figure is primarily in stock and debt, but if Jiobit can maintain its existing triple growth rates over the next two calendar years following the deal’s close, the deal price could increase to $54.5 million. The wearable will be added to Life360’s service to allow tracking of those without phones, including pets.

Zynga, via its subsidiary Rollic, acquired Uncosoft, the Turkish game developer behind the hit title High Heels, which has been downloaded over 60M times since its January debut, thanks in part, to TikTok. Deal terms were not available.

Montreal-based Botpress raised $15 million in Series A funding from Decibel and Inovia Capital to help developers build more conversational apps.

Downloads

OnMail

The makers of a popular email app Edison Mail have now launched another email app, OnMail. This new iOS app is designed to solve more difficult email problems, like handling overloaded inboxes and mail that spies on you. The app will automatically block tracking pixels (read receipts), suggest emails to unsubscribe from, index your entire history for faster searches, stop ad targeting, and more. Like Basecamp’s Hey, users can also decide who can or cannot enter their inbox, too. And when you want to see your promotions, they’re provided in a visual feed that’s more engaging.

The service, which is also available on the web, works with OnMail email addresses, as well as other accounts like those from Microsoft, Google and others. It will later introduce an Android app, calendar support, Yahoo and Microsoft Exchange support, and two-factor. The company says your name and email is never shared, but it does use anonymized data as part of its Edison Trends (digital commerce) research — users are opted in, but an opt out is available.

There’s an old saw from Mark Twain about how truth is stranger than fiction, and I think it’s fair to say we’ve lived through a very strange reality this past year. With all the chaos and change, we’re led to a foundational question: what’s the purpose of speculative fiction and its adjacent genres of science fiction and fantasy when so much of our world seems to already embody the fantastical worlds these works depict?

So I got our occasional fictional columnist Eliot Peper and the author of Veil, the three part Analog Series and other speculative fiction novels on the Gmail for an epistolary conversation on digesting 2020, the meaning of speculative fiction, and the future of art.

This conversation has been lightly edited and condensed.

Danny Crichton: I’m curious about the future of speculative fiction. We just went through a devastating year with the pandemic and a number of major climate disorders – the types of events that are among the fodder for this genre. How do you keep speculating when reality always seems to catch up with the amygdala of our imaginations?

Eliot Peper: Current events are a painful reminder that unlike fiction, reality needn’t be plausible. The world is complex and even the wisest of us understand only a tiny sliver of what’s really going on. Nobody knows what comes next. So while it may feel like we’re living in a science fiction novel, that’s because we’ve always been living in a science fiction novel. Or maybe speculative fiction is more real than so-called realist fiction because the only certainty is that tomorrow will be different from today and from what we expect. Depicting a world without fundamental change has become fantastical.

As a writer of speculative fiction, I’m an enthusiastic reader of history. And in reading about the past to slake my curiosity and imagine possible futures, I’ve learned that the present is exceedingly contingent, fascinating, and fleeting. For me, speculative fiction is less about prediction than it is about riffing on how the world is changing like a jazz musician might improvise over a standard. Accuracy only happens by mistake. The most interesting rendition wins because it makes people think, dream, feel. And thanks to technological leverage, to a greater and greater extent people are inventing the future – for better and for worse.

So I’m not worried about reality catching up with speculative fiction because speculative fiction is rooted in the human experience of reality. Every black swan event is simply new material.

Crichton: So this gets at a challenge that I think blurs the line between realist and speculative fiction and makes these works so hard to categorize. To me, the reality of the pandemic isn’t the black swan that a novel virus could take hold across the planet (after all, pandemics are actually quite common in history), but rather the black swan of the completely shambolic response that we witnessed, one that was not at all well-coordinated.

If I were designing a speculative fiction scenario, I don’t think I could come up with “we develop a cure extremely rapidly thanks to the progress of medical science, but the general day-to-day response of people is to massively inflate the death totals through their own actions.” When I think speculative, I think spectacular — something exceptional, but this particular black swan shows the power of the mundane actions of our lives to influence the course of events.

Peper: Speculative fiction is all about asking “what if?” What if a lone astronaut got stranded on Mars? What if genetic engineers resurrected dinosaurs and stuck them in an amusement park? What if we are all living in a simulation? The question that sparked my latest novel, Veil, is “what if a billionaire hijacked the climate with geoengineering?” These questions are hooks. They capture the imagination and pique curiosity. That’s all well and good, but it’s only a starting point.

To pay off a speculative setup, you need to keep the dominos falling as second-, third-, and fourth-order effects ripple out through the story. Momentum builds. Progressive complications tighten the ratchet. Unexpected reversals fling the reader forward. If an earthquake flattens San Francisco in your story, it’s easy to imagine potential physical consequences: the Bay Bridge collapsing, BART flooding, the power going out, gas leaks, fires, etc. It’s less obvious but at least as important to imagine the potential social consequences: Do people risk their lives to rescue their neighbors or fight over limited emergency supplies? How do the governor and the president respond given their particular personalities, incentives, and constituencies? How might such an event rework the social fabric of the Bay Area? (Also, crucially, where is Dwayne Johnson?) How people respond to events is integral to how events play out.

Published in April 2020, Lawrence Wright’s The End of October does an eerily good job extrapolating the messy, cascading social and political reactions to a global pandemic. Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos depicts an apocalyptic scenario driven by such mundane, shambolic human shortsightedness that it feels nearly absurd enough to be realistic. While some science fiction overindexes technological change, Ada Palmer’s brilliant Terra Ignota series imagines the cultural, political, and sociological aspects of a fictional future with extraordinary rigor. So often, human behavior is the X-factor that transforms and amplifies the impacts of the original scenario, shaping a new world in the process.

This hints at a deeper question though: What is fiction for?

When I write fiction, I am not trying to accurately depict or anticipate reality. I’m trying to create an experience, to take the reader on a journey that is compelling, surprising, and fulfilling. Even though part of the fun might be extrapolating a scenario rooted in a particularly intriguing facet of the real world, success isn’t getting things right. Success is a reader turning pages deep into the night to find out what happens next in a story they can’t put down and won’t soon forget.

Neil Gaiman likes to say that fairy tales are more than true – not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten. When it comes to speculative fiction, I love stories that reveal a deep emotional truth or illuminate an underlying force shaping the course of history even if they are wildly but entertainingly wrong about literal details. That doesn’t mean that striving for technical accuracy is bad, just that it isn’t always the point. The point might instead be to make you think, to make you feel, to make you imagine how the world might be different.

Crichton: So on that last point, I’m curious how you think about imagination and its power for change. Obviously, art has had a sustained and powerful impact on the imagination of people throughout history, and there are often artistic antecedents to large societal, cultural, and political changes. Part of its power historically though, at least from my perspective, was its rarity and its ability to surprise.

Today, we are just subsumed in imaginative worlds, from video games to movies to streaming television shows to books and graphic novels and on and on. If you read time-use studies, Americans are awash in imaginative contexts for potentially a majority of their waking hours. I feel like I’ve been increasingly seeing this gap between the extreme breadth of imagination available in our art, but the extreme narrowness for change in our daily lives. Is that a threat to the ability of art to provoke change? Is speculation still an activity that can lead to action?

Peper: Speculation is part of what it means to be human. Before we make a choice, we imagine the possible consequences. We simulate potential futures in daydreams before committing to them in reality. Our mental projections are often wrong, but they are also often useful. For better and for worse, thought experiment is foundational to our internal lives. This individual dynamic scales to the human collective: Imagining a better future is the first step toward building one.

Art is a vehicle for imagination. A filmmaker codifies their vision in a movie that others can watch and, in watching, exercise their respective imaginations – sometimes even sparking new creative endeavors that spin off into yet more projects that together form what we call culture. Technology has made more movies, books, songs, poems, photos, paintings, comics, podcasts, and games available and accessible to more people than ever before. Imagined worlds are an integral part of the real world as we experience it, layering meaning and possibility onto actual events. We are all interpreting reality for each other all the time, transforming it in the process. The increasing density and intensity of that process is the result of a growing population that is knitting itself together ever more tightly along ever more dimensions.

But technology hasn’t just made new artistic mediums possible and changed the ways in which people make, discover, and experience art. Technology amplifies the impact of human choices. Hippocrates couldn’t have invented an mRNA vaccine, Genghis Khan couldn’t have pressed a button to initiate a nuclear apocalypse, and Odysseus had to build his Trojan Horse out of wood instead of code.

Our tools give us superpowers our ancestors never imagined and the consequences of our decisions scale accordingly. Because technical ingenuity is morally neutral, technological development ratchets up the stakes for timeless questions of human agency – what does it mean to live a good life, to contribute to the greater good, to be a good ancestor? This is the moral geography to which artists offer diverse, imperfect, contradictory, and occasionally invaluable maps. So in a certain sense, the more technology empowers us, the more we need art.

Startup life, especially in the early innings, is nothing short of hectic. Who wouldn’t love a clone or two to help get everything done? Well, we can’t clone you, but we can give you more time to sign up and save on a pass to TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising on July 8-9.

We’re extending the early bird deadline to Friday, June 4 at 11:59 pm (PT). Sweet! That should help calm the cray-cray and save you $100 on admission to our virtual two-day bootcamp experience. Of course, you don’t need to wait. Buy your pass now while it’s top-of-mind and feel the joy of having one less task on your to-do list.

Not familiar with TC Early Stage? It’s specifically designed to help new startup founders learn essential entrepreneurial skills to build a successful startup. We tap the very best experts in the startup ecosystem, and they deliver actionable insights you can put in place now, when you need them most.

At TC Early Stage 2021, top-tier investors, veteran founders and respected subject-matter experts will lead highly interactive sessions on topics ranging from fundraising and marketplace positioning to growth marketing and content development. Get answers to your burning questions.

Here’s just one example. Rebecca Reeve Henderson, founder and CEO of Rsquared Communication, will hold forth on how to create an effective earned media strategy for your startup. Talk about an essential skill. Want more examples?

• Mike Duboe, general partner at Greylock will share the latest growth trends in consumer and B2B technology.
• Sarah Kunst, founding partner at Cleo Capital, will focus on best practices and offer solid advice on how to get ready to fundraise.

We’re announcing more speakers every week, and we’ll share the event agenda soon, so stay tuned.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place on July 8-9, and now you have an extra month to save $100. Calm the cray-cray and take one important, business-building task of your to-do list. Buy your early-bird pass to TC Early Stage 2021 before June 4. We can’t wait to see you there!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.