Author: azeeadmin

When you’re just starting out building your company, there’s obviously a lot that can go wrong. Especially if you’re a first-time founder (but even if you’re an experienced serial entrepreneur), it can be hard to spot the potential pitfalls that might lead you astray before you even really get rolling. That’s why we’re thrilled to have Fuel Capital General Partner Leah Solivan joining us at TechCrunch Early Stage — Operations and Fundraising on April 1 and 2 for a discussion about how to avoid making some of the biggest mistakes early in your founding journey.

Solivan brings her keen insight as an early-stage investor who has invested in and helped many early-stage companies spanning consumer tech, marketplaces, hardware and retail — but also her eight years of experience leading TaskRabbit, the startup she founded and led to a successful exit when it was acquired by IKEA in 2017. Between her time as an operator building a successful business and raising more than $50 million in venture funding, and her nearly four years investing and helping other founders build companies with Fuel, Solivan has unparalleled perspective on how to avoid common company-building problems early on.

Fuel CapitalGeneral Partner Leah Solivan. Image Credits: Meg Messina

At TC Early Stage this year, our two-day virtual event focused on entrepreneurs turning their startup dreams into reality, we’re focusing on both operations and fundraising, with a variety of top speakers ranging from investors, to accelerator managers, to subject-matter experts in key roles that startups need to invest in early on. The fully virtual event will include not only virtual panel discussions and interviews like our chat with Solivan, but also plenty of networking and opportunities for audience participation with our world-class speakers and guests.

The Atlanta area is getting a new incubator for startups working with 5G technology courtesy of T-Mobile and Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the companies announced today.

It’s an expansion of the T-Mobile Accelerator program and part of the big carrier’s efforts to boost 5G innovation.

Located in the Atlanta-adjacent exurb of Peachtree Corners’ technology development park, which is already equipped with T-Mobile’s 5G services, the incubator will help developers build and test 5G use cases including autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial drone applications, mixed reality training and entertainment, remote medical care and personal health, the company said.

Startups working with the 5G Connected Future program will work directly with folks at T-Mobile’s accelerator, Georgia Tech and Curiosity Lab, an initiative in the Peachtree Corners campus.

“In addition to the normal startup concerns, entrepreneurs in the 5G space face a unique set of challenges such as regulatory issues at the state and local levels, network security, and integration testing,” said ATDC Director John Avery.

Peachtree Corners’ setup may help folks navigate that rollout. As part of its involvement, ATDC will offer programing, recruit and evaluate startups, and hire staff to manage the vertical in Peachtree Corners, the organization said.

“This collaboration is a great opportunity for ATDC and Georgia Tech, the city of Peachtree Corners and Curiosity Lab, and T-Mobile, a Fortune 50 company, to create a unique collection to work with these companies, refine their ideas into scalable companies, and bring these solutions to market more quickly,” Avery said.

Such a partnership underscores “Georgia Tech’s commitment to enabling tomorrow’s technology leaders, which remains as strong as when ATDC was founded 41 years ago,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research. “Innovation cannot take place in a vacuum, which is why entrepreneurs and startups require the knowledge and resources provided through partnerships such as ours.”

Massachusetts-based Locus Robotics today announced a $150 million Series E. The round, led by Tiger Global Management and Bond, brings the firm’s total to around $250 to date, and values the robotics company at $1 billion. Locus is notable for a more modular and flexible solution for automating warehouses than many of its competitors (see: Berkshire Grey). The company essentially leases out robotic fleet for organizations looking to automate logistics.

“We can change the wings on the plane while it’s flying,” CEO Rick Faulk tells TechCrunch. Basically no one else can do that. Companies want flexible automation. They don’t want to bolt anything to the floor. If you’re a third-party logistics company and you have a two, three, four-year contract, the last thing you want to do is invest $25-$50 million to buy a massive solution, bolt it to the floor and be locked into all of this upfront expense.”

The company currently has some 4,000 robots deployed across 80 sites. Roughly 80% of its deployments are in the U.S., with the remaining 20% in Europe. Part of this massive funding round will go toward expanding international operations, including a bigger push into the EU, as well as the APAC region, where it presently doesn’t have much of a footprint.

The company will also be investing in R&D, sales and marketing and increasing its current headcount of 165 by 75 in the coming year.

The pandemic is clearly a driver in interest around this brand of automation, with more companies looking toward robotics for help.

“COVID has put a spike in the growth of online ordering, clearly, and that spike is probably a four to five year jump,” says Faulk. “If you look at the trend of e-commerce, it’s been on a steady upward tick. It was about 11% last year and COVID put a spike up to 16/17%. We think that genie’s out of the bottle, and it’s not going back any time soon.”

The funding round also points to a company that seemingly has no desire to be acquired by a larger name, akin to Kiva Systems’ transformation into Amazon Robotics.

“We have no interest in being acquired,” the CEO says. “We think we can build the most and greatest value by operating independently. There are investors that want to invest in helping everyone that’s not named ‘Amazon’ compete.”

We’re only two weeks away from TC Sessions: Justice 2021, a virtual conference focused on making diversity, equity, inclusion and labor as integral to tech as data, software engineers, startups and venture capital.

Join your global community on March 3 for a day packed with presentations, panel discussions and fireside chats with the top social justice warriors, leaders and innovators in tech today. Just look at this speaker lineup. As always, we’ll have ample time for networking so you can connect and discover new people and new opportunities to change the world.

We believe accessibility and inclusion starts at home, which is why you can get a TC Sessions: Justice pass for $5. Here are just a few of the outstanding presentations on tap — be sure to read the TC Sessions: Justice 2021 agenda. We have a few surprises and more speakers in store, so check back in the coming weeks to see what’s new.

Meeting of the Minds: Diversity and inclusion as an idea has been on the agenda of tech companies for years now. But the industry still lacks true inclusion, despite best efforts put forth by heads of diversity, equity and inclusion at these companies. We’ll seek to better understand what’s standing in the way of progress and what it’s going to take to achieve real change. Wade Davis (Netflix), Bo Young Lee (Uber).

Identifying and Dismantling Tech’s Deep Systems of Bias: Nearly every popular technology or service has within it systems of bias or exclusion, ignored by the privileged but obvious to the groups affected. How should these systems be exposed and documented, and how can we set about eliminating them and preventing more from appearing in the future? Mutale Nkonde (AI for the People), Haben Girma (disability rights lawyer) and Safiya Umoja Noble (author of “Algorithms of Oppression”).

Demystifying First-Check Fundraising with First-Check Investors: There are so many ways to finance your startup that don’t include Y combinator or a traditional fund. In this stacked panel, founders will hear how to leverage unconventional communities and resources to get the first dollars they need to execute. Brian Brackeen (Lightship Capital), Astrid Scholz (Zebras Unite), Sydney Thomas (Precursor Ventures).

You’ll also get to meet some of the diverse early-stage startup founders participating in the TechCrunch Include program and watch them deliver their best pitch in a live feedback session.

TC Sessions: Justice 2021 takes place on March 3. Buy your pass and spend the day listening to and learning from the people leading the charge for meaningful change in tech.

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Justice 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Gravy, a startup helping subscription-based businesses recover failed payments, has raised $4.5 million in Series A funding for its specialized combination of technology and a human workspace that works to reacquire customers lost to what’s known as “involuntary churn.” That means the customer didn’t choose to end their subscription, but — for any one of hundreds of possible reasons — their credit card payment failed.

Typically, subscription-powered businesses attempt to correct this issue with technology — like sending automated emails, for example. Gravy, however, has developed a different solution that pairs its U.S.-based retention specialists with technology that alerts them to the failed payments. It then sells this whole system as a package to clients who use Gravy as an extension of their own workforce.

The new funding round — Gravy’s first institutional money — was led by Birmingham-based Arlington Family Partners, one of the few family offices in the southeast. It’s also one with a personal connection to Gravy co-founders, CEO Casey Graham and Chief of Staff, Renee Weber, as it managed their earnings from a prior acquisition.

Gravy, in fact, actually got its start at that earlier business, The Rocket Company, a coaching and resource provider for churches, which exited to a private equity group, Ministry Brands.

“We spent two years fixing [the problem of failed payments] in the last company and created a tech-enabled solution where we leveraged actual human beings to win back failed payments for subscriptions. And by doing that, we got a 5x offer higher than the initial offer because we fixed the failed payment problem,” Graham notes.

He first assumed other subscription businesses were doing the same, but later discovered that many were not. Instead, they tended to use automated means to address the problem, which would only recoup about 15% to 20% of the failed payments.

These tech-only solutions don’t work as well because customers often dismiss automated emails from companies, Graham says. However, customers do respond to personal outreach — but that’s something many new and fast-growing businesses can’t afford as they’re investing more heavily in growth and scale.

Gravy offers them a middle ground between automation and hiring in-house. Companies contract with Gravy on a subscription basis by paying a flat fee, tiered based upon transaction volume. This fee ranges from $997 on the low end to $8,000 on the high end. Gravy then integrates with the client’s own payment products and processor, their subscription manager and any other solutions they may use for managing subscriptions — like Stripe, Braintree, Recurly, Keap (Infusionsoft) and others. It even sets up a Gravy channel on the company’s Slack in order to better communicate with company staff.

The end result is that Gravy’s team feels like a part of the business itself, not some contract workforce.

Once established, Gravy’s team will use email and text, per the client’s preferences, to personally reach out to customers with failed payments to try to get their card information updated. Because it’s operating closely with the client, the specialists can also offer things like “stay bonuses” and other deals that could help bring back a customer who may not have otherwise bothered to return. During COVID, for example, Gravy also offered additional options, like the ability for the customer to skip several months along with other more personalized options to meet the customer’s specific needs.

“When we’re onboarding [a client], we create an empathetic script of three different responses, or opportunities for us to negotiate with the customer to win that customer back,” Graham explains. This works because of the human component — people know when they’re talking to a real person and not an automated script, he says.

Image Credits: Gravy

Since its founding in 2017, Gravy has scaled to over 300 clients, whose businesses may be as small as $200,000-$250,000 in revenue up to $100 million in annual revenue from subscriptions. These clients either operate in the B2B space — like B2B content subscriptions or tech education and certification, for example — or in the B2C space. In particular, Gravy is leveraged by a number of “box” subscription services (which offer to ship a box of products to a customer’s home) and B2C education and online courses.

To date, Gravy has processed over 6 million failed payments and has won back $175 million in failed payment subscriptions. The company is now on a mission to return $1 billion in failed payments by 2023. Gravy is also expected to pass $1 million in MRR this year, Graham says.

Notably, Gravy’s retention specialists aren’t “gig workers” or contractors — they’re full-time employees with benefits. And they can be employed from anywhere, which Graham says is a competitive advantage.

Though technically an Atlanta-area startup, Graham and Weber live 50 miles north of downtown Atlanta.

“I live on a farm, and we were told we were at a disadvantage because we weren’t in the middle of the Atlanta tech scene,” Graham says. “But the reality is, it became a huge advantage for us because our strategy has been to recruit the best people in small towns across the United States. Besides, he adds, “Slack is our headquarters.”

This strategy has allowed Gravy to also employ several military family members, who often have a hard time finding consistent work because they have to move regularly. That leads them to often take gig work instead of full-time jobs.

Image Credits: Gravy

“The gig economy — those companies are not committed to those people. They don’t care about them, or if they work or not. It’s a gig,” Graham says. “Gravy is committed to them on salaries, benefits … that’s something we’re super proud of.” He says Gravy’s salaries start at $55,000.

With the new funding, Gravy plans to expand its team of 83 to about 150 by year-end, expand its client acquisition efforts and further invest into its product. Longer term, he believes Gravy could also help businesses with other needs, including voluntary churn, for starters, and even customer service and customer success in the future.

The solution to the world’s climate change problems could be under our feet, as soil has the potential to store more than three times the amount of carbon in the atmosphere But about 45% of the Earth’s soil is used for agriculture, and most farmland has lost up to 30% of its carbon from unsustainable land management practices.

To turn agricultural land into a thriving carbon sink, farmers need to be able to manage it by shifting to regenerative agriculture practices like reducing tillage, planting cover crops and increasing crop rotations and biodiversity. But you can’t manage something until you can measure it, and that’s where Yard Stick comes in. 

“Soil sequestration can be a really powerful carbon removal technology,” said Chris Tolles, CEO of Yard Stick. “But only if we’ve got really high-quality science and technology helping us measure it.”

Quantifying regenerative agriculture is a challenge, and measuring soil carbon is no exception. The traditional method, dry combustion, requires a lot of leg work. Scientists trudge across acres of land digging up soil samples and mail them thousands of miles to a lab where another scientist burns the soil to calculate the carbon. 

“That is not scalable for obvious reasons,” Tolles said. “We need a measurement technology that can release that bottleneck.” 

Yard Stick hopes to be that technology — a hand-held soil probe to measure carbon soil levels onsite. The Massachusetts-based startup was founded out of the Soil Health Institute using a $3.25 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy program. This funding exists to specifically help pro-social technology solutions come to market.   

Four soil experts — Dr. Christine Morgan, chief scientific officer of the Soil Health Institute; Kevin Meissner, a mechanical/electrical engineer who was previously the co-founder/CTO of carbon removal startup Charm Industrial; associate professor at the University of Nebraska, Yufeng Ge; and Alex McBratney from the University of Sydney — combined their research and expertise to create a probe that uses spectral analysis, resistance sensors, machine learning and agricultural statistics to measure and calculate the amount of carbon in an area of soil. Tolles is tasked with bringing the product out of the academic world and into the commercial market. 

The probe is attached to a hand-held drill. The small camera on its tip is tuned to capture the specific wavelengths reflected off of organic carbon using VisNIR spectrometry. Resistance sensors use the force needed to drill the probe into the ground to calculate the density of the soil. With those two inputs, plus a few complicated algorithms and statistical analyses, Yard Stick can calculate the amount of carbon in the ground without ever digging up a sample and mailing it to a lab to be burned.

Image Credits: Yard Stick

“One, we can take samples way faster. Number two, the cost is dramatically lower,” Tolles said. “And what that means, three, you’ll get a more accurate measurement of your carbon stock because our technology is so much cheaper and easier, that you can dramatically increase your sampling density.”

Yard Stick is currently working with a few large food companies engaged in regenerative agriculture pilot programs with farms across the United States. Yard Stick doesn’t plan to sell directly to farms. Instead, it works with project developers like these companies. Yard Stick is using these connections to verify its probe is as reliable as the traditional gold standard of carbon soil measuring and to introduce its product and service to farmers. Yard Stick plans to sell a data measurement service, not the hardware itself. 

“None of our customers want to own a spectrometer,” Tolles said. “They don’t know what to do with one even if we made it idiot simple.” 

Yard Stick sends its people out to take the measurements and then provides reports to farmers and other stakeholders that put the data in context, charging per acre. At some point Tolles hopes the device will be simple enough that anyone with a bit of training can use the probe so the number of Yard Stick employees isn’t a rate-limiting factor.

By 2022, Yard Stick hopes to be measuring 200,000 acres using a few thousand probes.

With more data and just as importantly more data sharing, we can begin to turn the ship around on climate change. But data is a sensitive business to be in. 

“We want to acknowledge the limitations of late-stage capitalist worldviews, which don’t often incentivize sharing,” Tolles said. “There’s a real tragic risk here that the information is so valuable that everybody wants to keep it to themselves and the benefits of soil carbon marketplaces only accrue to the same giant industrial agricultural corporations that have had it for so long.”

A few other early-stage companies are also trying to bust open the market for soil carbon, including LaserAg, which works in laboratories instead of in the fields, and CloudAgronomics, which uses satellites for remote measurement of soil health. But Yard Stick’s main competitor is every farm out there that isn’t measuring and managing their carbon stores, which, according to Tolles, is 99.9% of farms.

“Our mission is to avoid catastrophic climate change,” Tolles said. “So I think we’re inclined to be very pro-competitor.” 

Blockchain.com has announced that it has raised a $120 million funding round. The company develops a popular cryptocurrency wallet as well as an exchange, an explorer and more.

Moore Strategic Ventures, Kyle Bass, Access Industries, Rovida Advisors, Lightspeed Venture Partners, GV, Lakestar, Eldridge and other unnamed investors participated in today’s funding round. Overall, the company has raised more than $190 million since its creation.

Originally named Blockchain.info, the company started off as a blockchain explorer. An explorer lets you enter the hash of any transaction that occurs on the bitcoin blockchain to get more information about the amount, fees, number of confirmations as well as the wallet addresses of the sender and the receiver. Over time, explorers started adding support for more blockchains and more types of data.

Blockchain.com then built an open-source bitcoin wallet — it now supports more cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. The company’s wallet is a noncustodial wallet, which means that you’re in control of your private keys. Other noncustodial wallets include Coinbase Wallet, Argent, ZenGo, etc.

Many crypto users choose to buy bitcoins on an exchange and leave them on the exchange account. In that case, you don’t control the wallet as the exchange takes care of keeping your crypto assets safe for you. Custodial wallets include Coinbase.com, Binance, Kraken, etc.

There are some advantages and disadvantages with each solution. If an exchange gets hacked or somebody gets your login information through phishing, your assets aren’t safe on a custodial wallet.

If you lose your private key, you can’t access your noncustodial wallet. Blockchain.com and other noncustodial wallet providers have found ways to mitigate the risk of losing access to your wallet by backing up some information.

More recently, Blockchain.com has launched its own exchange so that wallet users can trade assets more easily. It now also offers services to institutional investors so that they can get started with cryptocurrencies. Services include order executions, custody, lending, OTC transactions, etc.

Blockchain.com has also shared some metrics. People have created 65 million wallets on the company’s website or using the mobile apps. Since 2012, 28% of bitcoin transactions have been sent or received by a Blockchain.com-managed wallet.

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

My fiancé is in the U.S. on an H-1B visa, which is set to expire in about a year and a half.

We were originally planning to marry last year, but both he and I want to have a ceremony and party with our families and friends, so we decided to hold off until the pandemic ends. I’m a U.S. citizen and plan to sponsor my fiancé for a green card.

How long does it typically take to get a green card for a spouse? Any tips you can share?

— Sweetheart in San Francisco

Dear Sweetheart:

Congratulations! It’s so wonderful to hear you’re planning to take the next step with your beloved. I understand wanting to wait to have a big wedding and party. However, to avoid the risk that your husband-to-be will have to leave the U.S., I recommend that you get married in a civil ceremony as soon as possible and immediately file for a green card.

Be sure to check out the podcast that my law partner, Anita Koumriqian and I posted on the ins and outs of applying for a fiancé visa (if your fiancé is living outside of the U.S.) or a marriage-based green card.

If your husband has already been sponsored for a green card by his employer and he’s only waiting for his priority date to become current, his employer might be able to renew his H-1B visa beyond six years, which would mean he won’t have to leave the U.S. while he waits for either green card to come through. Keep in mind that due to COVID-19 restrictions and an increase in filings, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is facing significant delays in processing all immigration cases. Currently, USCIS may take more than a year to process marriage-based green card petitions.

To answer your second question, here are my tips for getting a marriage-based green card for your soon-to-be husband:

Ask for employer support

Given that your fiancé’s employer could benefit by retaining him without going through (or needing to complete) the lengthier and more costly process for an employer-sponsored green card, your fiancé should ask his company to cover the legal and filing costs for the marriage-based green card. Your fiancé’s employer will also probably still have to submit an H-1B visa renewal on his behalf.

For a good-faith marriage, marriage-based green cards generally are quicker, less document-intensive and less expensive than getting an employer-sponsored green card. If your fiancé is from India or China, he would face a substantially longer wait for an employee-based green card due to the annual numerical and per-country caps.

There are no numerical or per-country caps on marriage-based green cards for immediate relatives. Because of this, you will be able to file Form I-130 (Petition for Alien Relative), which establishes your relationship to your spouse, and Form I-485 (Application to Register Permanent Residence or Adjust Status) for the green card at the same time (concurrent filing).

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

Hire an immigration attorney

Filing a petition to sponsor a spouse for a green card sounds straightforward, but it requires more than just filling out the appropriate forms. Many couples come to us after going it alone and running into problems or getting denied.

Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open-source project that aims to make it easier for developers to build event-driven, distributed cloud-native applications, hit its 1.0 milestone today, signifying the project’s readiness for production use cases. Microsoft launched the Distributed Application Runtime (that’s what “Dapr” stand for) back in October 2019. Since then, the project released 14 updates and the community launched integrations with virtually all major cloud providers, including Azure, AWS, Alibaba and Google Cloud.

The goal for Dapr, Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich told me, was to democratize cloud-native development for enterprise developers.

“When we go look at what enterprise developers are being asked to do — they’ve traditionally been doing client, server, web plus database-type applications,” he noted. “But now, we’re asking them to containerize and to create microservices that scale out and have no-downtime updates — and they’ve got to integrate with all these cloud services. And many enterprises are, on top of that, asking them to make apps that are portable across on-premises environments as well as cloud environments or even be able to move between clouds. So just tons of complexity has been thrown at them that’s not specific to or not relevant to the business problems they’re trying to solve.”

And a lot of the development involves re-inventing the wheel to make their applications reliably talk to various other services. The idea behind Dapr is to give developers a single runtime that, out of the box, provides the tools that developers need to build event-driven microservices. Among other things, Dapr provides various building blocks for things like service-to-service communications, state management, pub/sub and secrets management.

Image Credits: Dapr

“The goal with Dapr was: let’s take care of all of the mundane work of writing one of these cloud-native distributed, highly available, scalable, secure cloud services, away from the developers so they can focus on their code. And actually, we took lessons from serverless, from Functions-as-a-Service where with, for example Azure Functions, it’s event-driven, they focus on their business logic and then things like the bindings that come with Azure Functions take care of connecting with other services,” Russinovich said.

He also noted that another goal here was to do away with language-specific models and to create a programming model that can be leveraged from any language. Enterprises, after all, tend to use multiple languages in their existing code, and a lot of them are now looking at how to best modernize their existing applications — without throwing out all of their current code.

As Russinovich noted, the project now has more than 700 contributors outside of Microsoft (though the core commuters are largely from Microsoft) and a number of businesses started using it in production before the 1.0 release. One of the larger cloud providers that is already using it is Alibaba. “Alibaba Cloud has really fallen in love with Dapr and is leveraging it heavily,” he said. Other organizations that have contributed to Dapr include HashiCorp and early users like ZEISS, Ignition Group and New Relic.

And while it may seem a bit odd for a cloud provider to be happy that its competitors are using its innovations already, Russinovich noted that this was exactly the plan and that the team hopes to bring Dapr into a foundation soon.

“We’ve been on a path to open governance for several months and the goal is to get this into a foundation. […] The goal is opening this up. It’s not a Microsoft thing. It’s an industry thing,” he said — but he wasn’t quite ready to say to which foundation the team is talking.

This morning I covered three funding rounds. One dealt with the no-code/low-code space, another focused on the OKR software market and the last dealt with a company in the consumer investing space. Worth a combined $420 million, the investments made for a contentedly busy morning.

But they also got me thinking about startup niches and competition. Back in the days when inside rounds were bad, SPACs were jokes and crypto a fever dream, there was lots of noise about investors who declined to place competing bets in any particular startup market.

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This rule of thumb still holds up today, but we need to update it. The general sentiment that investors shouldn’t back competing companies is still on display, as we saw Sequoia walk away from a check it put into Finix after it became clear that the smaller company was too competitive with Stripe, another portfolio company.

But as startups get more broad and stay private longer, the space into which VCs can invest may narrow — especially if they have a big winner that stays private while building both horizontally and vertically (like Stripe, for example).

Does that mean Sequoia can’t invest elsewhere in fintech? No, but it does limit their investing playing field.

Which is dumb as hell. Nothing that Sequoia could invest in today is really going to slow Stripe’s IPO, unless the company decides to not go public for a half-decade. Which would be lunacy, even for today’s live-at-home-with-the-parents startup culture that leans toward staying private over going public.