Author: azeeadmin

The world has spent most of 2020 adapting to ever-changing guidelines and restrictions (with no end in sight, even as the vaccines start to roll out). Board meetings are quickly increasing in their significance to foster consistent and vital interactions as an organization. It’s essential for companies to capitalize on the essential time together during these uncertain times.

While we might look like the Brady Bunch while sharing a Zoom window, are you actually communicating more like the family from “Succession?”

Are your meetings organized? Do people talk over one another? Do you usually run over time? Are you giving people time to digest information?

As we move into 2021 and Q1 meetings are being put onto calendars, take some time to modernize how you conduct your board meetings.

Having served on public company boards, growth-stage businesses and Series A startups, an observation I have made in boards that are later stage are more about financial analysis and governance. Whereas earlier-stage board discussions hinge more on product strategy, key partnerships, sharing best practices to help develop founders as executives and important hiring decisions.

Since the nature of the discussions is more, let’s call it … creative in earlier-stage businesses, where the focus is on where they’ve been particularly impacted by reduced bandwidth for collaboration while meeting remotely.

As said best by Mike Maples and paraphrased by Jeff Bonforte — there are only four things a board really needs to consider:

• Has the market changed since we last met? If so, did it affect us negatively or positively?
• Has the team changed? For better or worse?
• Has our position in the market changed?
• Can we do what we said we would?

Collecting data around those points is the job. In the meeting, the team can add color.

Remember the board works for you, so be sure to put them to work. Sharing materials with participants about three days ahead of time tends to be the best. Any later and they may not get enough time to digest, send earlier and the information might be out of date by the time you meet. It’s most common to format as a deck, but lately I’m seeing more written format and even magazine-style.

The number one request I get from early-stage companies is “help find me more customers.”

Other common requests are “help me find or land this type of talent, help me with industry benchmarks for this type of business deal or compensation structure, connect me to people that have experience with X so I can learn ways we could structure our process.” It’s helpful to put these asks in the materials you send ahead because sometimes board members might not be able to react quickly and now “homework” comes up spontaneously in the discussions.

Another purpose of these meetings is to build working relationships so when strategic decisions need to be made, board members are used to working together. Sometimes it is a forum for executives to gain exposure to board members and for board members to have the opportunity to evaluate and provide input on executives. For that reason execs are often invited to participate in certain discussions.

Like the product person who presents a roadmap or a market analysis, the head of sales should give color on pipeline and competitive deals, the marketing person may lead a discussion on ABM or channel marketing tactics, the engineering lead might ask for feedback on their metrics versus other companies, etc. Generally, CEOs also bring forth an interesting topic to have a discussion, such as channel strategy, market mapping/sizing, hiring plan and related issues.

Logistics

As far as logistics, we reserve two hours in calendars but we try to hit 90 minutes. I suggest something like this for a 90-minute session:

Building off TechCrunch’s coverage of the recent 500 Startups demo day, we’re back today to talk about some favorites from three more accelerator classes. This time we’re digging into Techstars’ latest three accelerator classes.

What follows are four favorites from the Techstars’ Boston, Chicago and “workforce development” programs. As a team we tuned into the accelerator live pitches and dug into recordings when we needed to.

As always, these are just our favorites, but don’t just take our word for it. Dig into the pitches yourself, as there’s never a bad time to check out some super-early-stage startups.

Four favs from Techstars Boston

Everyday Life

• What: A platform that wants to make life insurance flexible and personalized.
• Why we like it: The insurtech wave, from auto insurance to home insurance, has underscored the need for more consumer-friendly plans. Life insurance still feels like an untapped part of the equation, and Everyday Life wants to use technology to make the process cheaper and simpler.
  The founding team says that there’s solid interest in life insurance amid the coronavirus pandemic, which amounts to a $20 billion market opportunity.
  
  

We take an in-depth look at TikTok usage in Russia, Facebook’s Oversight Board looks beyond Facebook and Sesame Workshop backs an edtech fund. This is your Daily Crunch for February 11, 2021.

The big story: TikTok becomes a political battleground in Russia

Russia has a small but fast-growing and vocal group of TikTok users. And while activity has been largely apolitical in the past, a battle appears to be brewing between the government and young activists who support the anti-corruption, anti-Putin politician Alexei Navalny.

“Before Navalny’s return, Russian TikTok was all about dancing, pranks and post-Soviet trash aesthetics,” said food blogger Egor Khodasevich. “All of a sudden, political videos have started to appear across all categories — humor, beauty, sport.”

The tech giants

Facebook Oversight Board says other social networks ‘welcome to join’ if project succeeds — The Facebook Oversight Board has only been operational for a short time, but the nascent project is already looking ahead.

Apple launches a new AR experience tied to ‘For All Mankind’ — Even for those of you who aren’t fans of the Apple TV+ show, the app is still noteworthy as another sign of Apple’s interest in AR.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood’s pain is Public’s gain as VCs rush to give it more money — The San Francisco-based fintech aims to give people the ability to invest in companies using any amount of money, with a focus on community activity over active trading.

Goldman Sachs and Sesame Workshop pour money into this edtech firm’s newest fund — Reach Capital III is a $165 million investment vehicle.

Reduct.Video raises $4M to simplify video editing — The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

As more insurtech offerings loom, CEO Dan Preston discusses Metromile’s SPAC-led debut — Metromile began trading as a public company yesterday.

Commercializing deep tech startups: A practical guide for founders and investors — Deep tech startups go through a different evolution cycle than a typical B2B or B2C company.

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

Everything else

Racial disparity in Chicago cops’ use of force laid bare in new data — This rare apples-to-apples comparison supports the idea that improving diversity in law enforcement may also improve the quality of policing.

A webcam app left thousands of user accounts exposed online — The database in question belonged to Adorcam, an app for viewing and controlling several webcam models.

Top 100 subscription apps grew 34% to $13B in 2020, share of total spend remained the same — A growing part of app spend took the form of subscription payments last year, according to a new report from Sensor Tower.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

The Facebook Oversight Board has only been operational for a short time, but the nascent project is already looking ahead.

In a conversation hosted by the Carnegie Endowment Thursday, Oversight Board co-chair and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt painted a more expansive vision for the group that could go beyond making policy decisions for Facebook.

The board co-chair said that if the project proves to be a success, “other platforms and other tech companies are more than welcome to join and be part of the oversight that we will be able to provide.”

Thorning-Schmidt emphasized that a broader vision for this kind of moderation body would happen well in the future, but the board’s current mission was to move away from policy decisions getting made in a “closed box” at the company.

“Until now, content moderation was basically done by the last person at Facebook or Twitter as we have seen — either Mark Zuckerberg or the other platform directors,” Thorning-Schmidt said.

“For the first time in history, we actually have content moderation being done outside one of the big social media platforms. That in itself… I don’t hesitate to call it historic.”

Those comments may capture broader aspirations for Facebook’s Oversight Board, which refers to itself only as the “Oversight Board” without an explicit reference to Facebook on its website.

Throughout the panel, those involved with the Oversight Board defended the project. The group has come under criticism from skeptics wary that its origins with Facebook make real autonomy from the company impossible.

“A lot of people want to immediately dismiss the Oversight Board and look for something new,” Oversight Board Head of Communications Dex Hunter-Torricke said.

Hunter-Torricke, who spent four years working on the Facebook executive communications team and served as a speechwriter for both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, also hinted at a more expansive vision for the board.

“This is a model that we’re testing here to see if this is the kind of institution that can have an impact in one sphere of Facebook and the content moderation challenges they face,” Hunter-Torricke said. He added that the board intends to “evolve and grow” using what it learns from handling Facebook moderation cases.

“… As we build up our expertise and our body of experience in dealing with Facebook I expect there will be more capabilities that come onto the board,” Hunter-Torricke said. “We are on a journey. It’s not something [where] we necessarily know the final destination yet but we are looking to test this model and refine it further.”

TechCrunch reached out to the Oversight Board to ask if the group sees its future as an external governing body for social networks beyond Facebook.

Facebook’ Oversight Board is currently facing the hugely consequential case of whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump, who was removed from Facebook after inciting the violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol in early January.

Five of the group’s 20 members will evaluate the Trump case, though the board will not disclose which members evaluate which cases. Once the five reach their decision, the broader board must pass the decision in a majority vote. The board’s verdict is expected within the next two months.

The Facebook Oversight Board’s most prominent Trump critic, legal scholar Pamela Karlan, left her role at the board to join the Biden administration last week and won’t be involved in the decision. Karlan testified at Trump’s first impeachment hearing, arguing that Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses.

The board is accepting comments on the Trump case through Friday in an effort to consider “diverse perspectives” in its decision process.

On Thursday, former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos signed onto a public letter urging the Oversight Board to keep Facebook’s decision to remove Trump in place. “Without social media spreading Trump’s statements, it seems extremely unlikely these events would have occurred,” the comment’s authors wrote.

“There no doubt will be close calls under a policy that allows the deplatforming of political leaders in extreme circumstances. This was not one of them.”

Knife Capital, a South African venture capital firm, is raising a $50 million fund for startups looking to raise Series B financing. With Knife Fund III called the African Series B Expansion Fund, the firm seeks to directly invest in the aggressive expansion of South African breakout companies. It also plans to co-invest in companies across the rest of Africa.

The first fund, known as Knife Capital Fund I or HBD Venture Capital, was a closed private equity fund managed by Eben van Heerden and Keet van Zyl. The firm offered seed capital to startups. It also generated significant exits from its portfolio — VISA acquisition of fintech startup Fundamo, and orderTalk’s acquisition by UberEats come to mind.

In 2016, the VC firm launched its current 12J offering with Knife Capital Fund II. The fund (KNF Ventures) which invests primarily in Series A stage has eight startups in its portfolio. Last year the firm told TechCrunch of its intention to extend the Fund II and open to new investors. The plan was to give startups access to networks, money and expansion opportunities.

“We want to help South African and African companies internationalize,” said co-managing partner Andrea Bohmert at the time. A testament to its cause, one of its portfolio companies, DataProphet, raised $6 million Series A to expand into the U.S. and Europe.

Bohmert tells TechCrunch that the third fund aims to address the critical Series B funding gap that has characterised the venture capital asset class in South Africa, resulting in businesses not reaching full potential or exiting too early.

“Lately, we see an increase in companies able to raise $2 million to $5 million funding rounds. And while the companies are operating within their home country, in our case South Africa, such amounts take you far due to the local cost structure,” Bohmert says. “However, once these companies start gaining international traction and need to build an infrastructure outside of their home country, they need to raise significant amounts to afford so. There are currently hardly any South African VC funds, perhaps other than Naspers Foundry, that can write checks of $5 million or more and are willing to deploy them to finance the externalization of South African companies into larger markets.”

As a result, Bohmert argues that Africa has become an incubator for international VCs who can write these checks but cannot provide the local support most of these companies still need. Likewise, there are instances where international investors actively search for local co-investors in South Africa to invest in a round, and not finding one might blow the chances of them going further with the investment. This is the gap Knife Capital intends to fill by launching this fund, Bohmert says.

“We want to be the local lead investor of choice for South African technology companies looking to internationalise, co-investing with international investors who can lead the Series B discussion and further.”  

This week, Knife Capital secured $10 million out of the 50 from Mineworkers Investment Company (MIC), a South Africa-based investment firm. The commitment positions MIC as an anchor investor to the fund alongside other local and international investors.

Nchaupe Khaole, the CIO at MIC, explained that the move to change the way local institutional investors approach venture capital investment has been in MIC’s pipeline for a while. And by partnering with Knife Capital, this idea can begin to materialize.

“Our commitment brings to the table the investment, along with many of our strengths as an experienced player. One of which is our ability to influence the companies within our portfolio to partner with us and effect real, tangible change to the South African economy. We are delighted to be a key catalyst in the success of this funding round,” he said.

As per other details, Knife Capital aims for a first close by May and a final close by the end of the year. Most of its participation will be co-investing, and the idea is to that in 10 to 12 companies.

“For All Mankind: Time Capsule” is a new augmented reality app created by Apple to promote the upcoming second season of “For All Mankind,” which premieres on February 19 on Apple TV+.

Even for those of you who aren’t fans of the the show — which tells the story of an alternate history in which the Soviet Union beat the United States to the Moon, leading to an extended space race in the ’70s and beyond — the app is still noteworthy as another sign of Apple’s interest in AR, even beyond the reports that it’s working on AR glasses.

“Time Capsule” takes place during the decade-long gap between seasons one and two, tracing the relationship between Danny Stevens and his parents, the astronauts Gordo and Tracy Stevens. Users who download the free iOS app will be able to interact with a variety of objects — such as a mixtape and an Apple II computer — that illustrate the family relationship.

“Time Capsule” walks users through a linear experience with between 45 and 60 minutes of content, but it sounds like it’s also designed to support further exploration and additional visits. You’ll be able to check “D-mail” and play a text adventure game on the computer, and if you’ve got an Apple device with a LiDAR scanner (such as an iPhone 12 Pro, iPhone 12 Pro Max or iPad Pro) you can use a virtual slide projector to project Danny’s family photos onto your own walls.

“For All Mankind” producer Ben McGinnis said the app was created in parallel with the show’s second season, with the creative team working with Apple to figure out “which objects were best for getting the story across,” and offering feedback as the actual AR objects were developed.

Creator and executive producer Ron Moore added that he’s excited about the possibility of giving fans new ways to explore the show’s world and characters, especially since writers on the show often create far more material than what ends up on screen.

“Part of the promise of this technology is that a fan of any show, by definition, usually wants to know more about it, more about the characters,” Moore said.

In this case, “For All Mankind”‘s team had written things like love letters and newscasts that are only seen briefly on-screen. They could then be used in the app, along with additional material by Stephanie Shannon, a writer on the show. The key, Moore said, is to “play fair by the audience that just wants to show up.”

“You can certainly watch ‘For All Mankind’ on-air without the AR stuff,” he added. “But if you do the AR stuff first, it enriches your experience.”

Public.com, a social-focused free stock trading service, is nearing the close of a Series D just two months after raising a $65 million Series C, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The San Francisco-based fintech aims to give people the ability to invest in companies using any amount of money, with a focus on community activity over active trading. It competes with Robinhood, M1 Finance, and other American fintech companies that offer consumers a way to invest in equities with low or zero fees.

Public.com apparently got a flurry of investor interest over the past couple of weeks after Robinhood found itself in hot water and essentially raised $3.4 billion in a matter of days to help get itself out of a mess. 

That new capital came at a challenging time for the unicorn, which could pursue an IPO this year. And some investors reportedly want a piece of rival Public.com’s pie.

One source told TechCrunch that many of those offering term sheets believe there could be “a mass exodus from Robinhood” and want a way to capture that value.

Public recently shook up its business model, moving from generating revenue from order flow payments, a key way that Robinhood monetizes, to collecting tips from users in exchange for executing their orders. Payment for order flow, or PFOF, has become a touchstone in the debate surrounding low-cost trading platforms, and how users may pay for their transactions if not in direct fees.

Investors betting on Public, then, would be placing a wager on not merely future user growth, but the startup’s ability to monetize effectively in the future. 

The sources for this story were granted anonymity due to the sensitivity of the discussions.

Public grew quickly in 2020, expanding its user base by a multiple of 10 since the start of the year.

Co-founder Leif Abraham told TC’s Alex Wilhelm in December that the company’s growth has been consistent instead of lumpy, expanding at around 30% each month. The co-founder also stressed that most of Public’s users find its service organically, implying that the startup’s marketing costs have not been extreme, nor its growth artificially boosted.

We don’t know yet  how much Public is raising in its Series D, or who all is investing. Public has not responded to multiple requests for comment. VC firm Accel – which led its Series A, B and C rounds – also declined to comment. But we’ll definitely report details as we get them.

Demetrius Curry has spent the last couple years chasing a dream.

His startup, College Cash, allows brands to petition users to create photo and video marketing content highlighting their product or service, with the wrinkle being that content creators are paid by the brands in the form of credits that go directly towards paying down their student loan debt. This model awards the brands involved a level of social good will and tax benefits.

The Dallas area founder was inspired to tackle student loan debt crisis after talking with his daughter about the prospect of eventually paying down her own loan debt. Curry has spent the past two years building out the nascent platform, tracking down brand partners, navigating accelerator programs, enticing users and pounding the pavement to find investors that are willing to bet on his vision.

College Cash has raised $105,000 to date, and is hoping to eventually wrap the funding into a $1 million seed round.

Filling out the round has been its own challenge for Curry who has struggled at times to find opportunity, even among historic levels of capital flowing into the startup ecosystem, a distinction that has been less noticeable for black founders that still make up just a small percentage of VC allocation. In the aftermath of last summer’s protests against police brutality, a number of venture capital firms issued statements decrying institutional racism and pledging to back more underserved founders, spinning up new programs for diverse founders.

Demetrius Curry, CEO of College Cash

While Curry says he appreciates the scope of the problem and the good intentions of those making the statements, he believes that venture capital networks still have a lot to learn about what being an “underserved” founder means and that plenty of the existing efforts feel like “lip service.” He says that even as Silicon Valley continues to idolize dropouts from prestigious universities, stakeholders have less interest in recognizing the accomplishments of founders who fought their way through poverty or found opportunity in geographies where opportunities are harder to come by.

“You can’t look for something different if you’re looking in the same places,” Curry tells TechCrunch. “When you look at the topic of ‘underserved founders,’ it’s not only a skin color thing, it’s also about where they came from and what they’ve been through.”

Curry says that it can be frustrating to compete for early stage opportunities when investors aren’t willing to meaningfully adjust their parameters. Of particular frustration to Curry has been navigating the world of “warm introductions” to even get a foot in the door for programs meant for diverse founders, or applying for early stage programs geared towards the “underserved” only to be told that they weren’t far enough along to qualify.

“Think about how much we had to go through to even get in the room with you,” Curry says. “I’ve sold plasma to pay a web hosting fee, nothing is going to stop me.”

College Cash’s mission of expanding opportunities for people struggling to manage their student loan debt is personal to Curry who saw his life turn around after going back to school.

Decades ago, fresh out of the military, Curry said he had a random conversation with a stranger while eating at a Hardee’s — the discussion about what more he wanted from life ended up pushing him to to go back and get his GED and later a business degree. What followed was a career in finance that eventually led towards his recent entrepreneurial pursuits with College Cash.

The platform is firmly an early-stage venture at the moment, but Curry has big ambitions he’s building toward. His next effort is building out a College Cash tipping integration with gig economy platforms, with the aim that users of those platforms could ultimately opt to tip a worker and route that money directly towards paying down that person’s student loan debt.

Curry says the team at College Cash has been working with a “national gig economy platform” to run a pilot of the integration and has run focus groups showing that users are more likely to tip when they know that money goes towards erasing loan debt.

Video collaboration startup Frame.io unveiled a new technology today that it calls Frame.io Camera to Cloud.

Michael Cioni, the startup’s global senior vice president of innovation, explained that while consumers expect to instantly upload video footage to the cloud, professional film and TV productions still rely on hard drives.

There’s a good reason for that: Those productions use much higher-quality footage, which means that the files are enormous. But Frame.io gets around that by uploading “proxy” footage that’s not nearly so bandwidth intensive.

It can, in fact, be uploaded on an LTE connection, as the Frame.io team demonstrated for me by shooting brief footage that was accessible a few seconds later from a computer on the other side of the country.

Cioni said this means the editing process no longer has to wait on the movement of hard drives: “We take this linear process and make it parallel.”

Image Credits: Frame.io

Footage uploaded through Camera to Cloud can then be edited in Frame.io, but the technology is also integrated with popular editing software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere. And because the proxy footage has the same timecodes and metadata as the original, any edits can be synchronized once you receive the drives.

In addition, Camera to Cloud allows production members on and off the set to view footage from their computer, iPhone or iPad, as soon as it’s shot.

“The moment that you hit stop [on the camera], wouldn’t it just be great to pull the footage up on your phone, because you want to see what you shot?” said Frame.io CEO Emery Wells. “You can’t do that right now on a professional set. There’s person whose job it is to do that, there are playback monitors all over the set and everybody watches playback at the same time.”

And while the company started to develop this technology before the pandemic, Wells said, “It turns out there’s even more of a need for this now, when fewer people can be on sets.”

In fact, the technology was already used during the production of the pandemic movie “Songbird,” The movie was filmed last summer, and by using Camera to Cloud, producers who were not allowed on the set (due to new safety protocols) could still keep up with the footage.

Camera to Cloud works on existing devices like the Teradek CUBE 655, Sound Devices 888 and Scorpio recorders, which can be attached to compatible cameras from Arri, RED and Sony. It’s available at no additional charge to paying Frame.io subscribers.

“It’s our prediction that by the end of the decade, everybody shooting audio, video and whatever, they’re going to shoot into the cloud,” Cioni said.