Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Women founders who exhibit in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020, this opportunity’s designed with you in mind. Don’t miss your chance to meet with — and pitch to — accelerators focused on women entrepreneurs. We partnered with cela to bring accelerators to Disrupt, and they’re here to pre-interview candidates for their upcoming virtual cohorts.

Our female founder focused (say that three times fast) accelerator session takes place next week. Here’s all the 411 you need to know to participate.

A Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package is your ticket to any or all of our accelerator sessions. And, of course, to the bountiful opportunities that come from introducing your startup to thousands of Disrupt attendees across the globe.

Date: September 9

Time: 1 p.m. – 3 p.m. (PT)

Accelerator focus:

The first three accelerators listed below work with female-identifying founders only. The fourth looks for pre-seed startups without much traction — more idea stage than scale stage. If you and your startup fit these descriptions, review the accelerator websites below. If you’re interested in scheduling a meeting — and you meet the program’s requirements — sign up on CrunchMatch.

Participating accelerators:

She Gets Sh!t Done is an industry agnostic virtual accelerator for female entrepreneurs who want the power to choose their path to scaling profitable $1m+ businesses. You’ll find application requirements here.

Halo Incubator, a unique incubator devoted exclusively to women founders, was created to provide special guidance and resources with the goal of exponentially increasing the number of women-led businesses. You’ll find application requirements here.

Global Startup Ecosystem’s Her Future Summit is the world’s first digital personal branding career accelerator for women. You’ll find application requirements here.

Startup Boost Pre- Accelerator, a global tech startup pre-accelerator, works with great early stage entrepreneurs to prepare them for accelerator programs, seed investment and revenue through a six-week part-time program. You’ll find application requirements here.

It’s time to grab every opportunity to drive your business forward, and these two offer ginormous benefits. Exhibit in Digital Startup Alley. Act fast, ticket sales end Friday.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The National Football League naming Postmates as its very first on-demand food delivery partner.

In this context, a partnership means a multi-year sponsorship, which also makes Postmates a sponsor of the Super Bowl. And as the season kicks off with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Houston Texans, Postmates  a teaming up with the Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes’ (through his foundation 15 And The Mahomies) and the Texans’ Deshaun Watson, with each quarterback arranging for meal delivery to frontline health workers in their opponent’s home town.

This seems like a particularly appropriate year for a food delivery partnership, since most fans will be watching games from their home, rather than at a stadium or their local sports bar, as the NFL’s vice president of business development Nana-Yaw Asamoah noted in a statement.

“Fans will be watching NFL football this season from their couch more than ever before, so teaming up with Postmates as the first official on-demand food delivery partner of the NFL was a perfect combination,” Asamoah said.“We’re excited for Postmates to bring an NFL experience directly to our fans’ doorsteps throughout the season and around the year.”

Postmates previously partnered with individual Major League Baseball teams, including the Dodgers and the Yankees. The food delivery company is also being acquired by Uber, in a deal that’s expected to close next year.

Before the pandemic, more than 40% of new internet users were children. Estimates now suggest that children’s screen time has surged by 60% or more with children 12 and under spending upward of five hours per day on screens (with all of the associated benefits and perils).

Although it’s easy to marvel at the technological prowess of digital natives, educators (and parents) are painfully aware that young “remote learners” often struggle to navigate the keyboards, menus and interfaces required to make good on the promise of education technology.

Against that backdrop, voice-enabled digital assistants hold out hope of a more frictionless interaction with technology. But while kids are fond of asking Alexa or Siri to beatbox, tell jokes or make animal sounds, parents and teachers know that these systems have trouble comprehending their youngest users once they deviate from predictable requests.

The challenge stems from the fact that the speech recognition software that powers popular voice assistants like Alexa, Siri and Google was never designed for use with children, whose voices, language and behavior are far more complex than that of adults.

It is not just that kid’s voices are squeakier, their vocal tracts are thinner and shorter, their vocal folds smaller and their larynx has not yet fully developed. This results in very different speech patterns than that of an older child or an adult.

From the graphic below it is easy to see that simply changing the pitch of adult voices used to train speech recognition fails to reproduce the complexity of information required to comprehend a child’s speech. Children’s language structures and patterns vary greatly. They make leaps in syntax, pronunciation and grammar that need to be taken into account by the natural language processing component of speech recognition systems. That complexity is compounded by interspeaker variability among children at a wide range of different developmental stages that need not be accounted for with adult speech.

Changing the pitch of adult voices used to train speech recognition fails to reproduce the complexity of information required to comprehend a child’s speech. Image Credits: SoapBox Labs

A child’s speech behavior is not just more variable than adults, it is wildly erratic. Children over-enunciate words, elongate certain syllables, punctuate each word as they think aloud or skip some words entirely. Their speech patterns are not beholden to common cadences familiar to systems built for adult users. As adults, we have learned how to best interact with these devices, how to elicit the best response. We straighten ourselves up, we formulate the request in our heads, modify it based on learned behavior and we speak our requests out loud, inhale a deep breath … “Alexa … ” Kids simply blurt out their unthought out requests as if Siri or Alexa were human, and more often than not get an erroneous or canned response.

In an educational setting, these challenges are exacerbated by the fact that speech recognition must grapple with not just ambient noise and the unpredictability of the classroom, but changes in a child’s speech throughout the year, and the multiplicity of accents and dialects in a typical elementary school. Physical, language and behavioral differences between kids and adults also increase dramatically the younger the child. That means that young learners, who stand to benefit most from speech recognition, are the most difficult for developers to build for.

To account for and understand the highly varied quirks of children’s language requires speech recognition systems built to intentionally learn from the ways kids speak. Children’s speech cannot be treated simply as just another accent or dialect for speech recognition to accommodate; it’s fundamentally and practically different, and it changes as children grow and develop physically as well as in language skills.

Unlike most consumer contexts, accuracy has profound implications for children. A system that tells a kid they are wrong when they are right (false negative) damages their confidence; that tells them they are right when they are wrong (false positive) risks socioemotional (and psychometric) harm. In an entertainment setting, in apps, gaming, robotics and smart toys, these false negatives or positives lead to frustrating experiences. In schools, errors, misunderstanding or canned responses can have far more profound educational — and equity — implications.

Well-documented bias in speech recognition can, for example, have pernicious effects with children. It is not acceptable for a product to work with poorer accuracy — delivering false positives and negatives — for kids of a certain demographic or socioeconomic background. A growing body of research suggests that voice can be an extremely valuable interface for kids but we cannot allow or ignore the potential for it to magnify already endemic biases and inequities in our schools.

Speech recognition has the potential to be a powerful tool for kids at home and in the classroom. It can fill critical gaps in supporting children through the stages of literacy and language learning, helping kids better understand — and be understood by — the world around them. It can pave the way for a new era of  “invisible” observational measures that work reliably, even in a remote setting. But most of today’s speech recognition tools are ill-suited to this goal. The technologies found in Siri, Alexa and other voice assistants have a job to do — to understand adults who speak clearly and predictably — and, for the most part, they do that job well. If speech recognition is to work for kids, it has to be modeled for, and respond to, their unique voices, language and behaviors.

Peloton and DoorDash probably don’t seem to have much in common, but the connected fitness platform and food delivery app have both built massive service businesses that are touching millions. We’re amped to announce that Peloton co-founder/CTO Yong Feng and DoorDash cofounder/CTO Andy Fang are joining us at TechCrunch Disrupt in September for a wide-ranging conversation around how to build a service marketplace.

Feng co-founded Peloton in 2012 with Graham Stanton, Hisao Kushi, John Foley and Tom Cortese. Since building their way through multiple iterations of their connected bike and treadmill, the company has expanded into new verticals housed inside its digital subscription. Amid the pandemic, Peloton’s subscriber base has exploded and the company’s stock price has shot up as well as gyms have been forced to close their doors.

Fang co-founded DoorDash in 2013 with Tony Xu, Stanley Tang and Evan Moore. DoorDash confidentially filed for a public offering earlier this year, but delayed its IPO because of COVID-19. The food delivery company has raised a whopping $2.5 billion in funding, reaching a valuation of $16 billion this summer as food delivery became an even more regular part of consumer habits amid the pandemic.

We’ll ask the pair about how they got started and where they focused attention early-on as they aimed to build global brands that revamped massive industries.

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.”

“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie:

I am a software engineer and have been looking at job postings in the U.S. I’ve heard from my friends about J-1 Visa Training or J-1 Research.

What is a J-1 status? What are the requirements to qualify? Do I need to find a U.S. employer willing to sponsor me before I apply for one? Can I get a visa? How long could I stay?

—Determined in Delhi

Dear Determined:

Thank you for your questions! Companies can work with external sponsors to host and employ some types of J-1 visitors. The J-1 visa is an attractive option for both participants and employers since there is no cap or lottery. There is no country of origin limit on the number of J-1 visas that are issued each year. J-1s are issued year-round. The application process is more straightforward than an H-1B. Relatively straightforward. J-1 visas are open to a wide range of occupations and talent, as well as education and experience levels.

Few electric cars made a bigger splash than the new Porsche Taycan. As President and CEO of Porsche Cars North America Klaus Zellmer has the tall order of bringing the electric sedan to America and selling it against Tesla on Tesla’s home turf. He also oversees Porsche’s digital assets in the U.S. market namely the customer portal My Porsche and a digital sales platform — a critical test in the era of Covid-19.

We invited Zellmer to speak at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility due to his unique positioning inside Porsche. He’s well-suited to speak on a variety of topics critical to founders, engineers, and venture capitalists within the mobility space.

Many see Porsche well positioned to be a key player in electric vehicles and the Taycan is just the start. As CEO of Porsche Cars North America Zellmer can speak directly to the challenges and opportunities facing automakers and startups alike in the North American market.

Likewise, as the President and CEO of Porsche Digital, Zellmer has deep insights into the user experience expectations of today’s drivers including online sales. As Covid-19 continues to strain retail, dealerships are feeling strains as well. More customers are turning to online dealerships — something Zellmer can speak directly to.

Porsche Digital launched its first US-based operations in Silicon Valley in 2017 and later expanded to Atlanta in 2019. When writing about the Atlanta opening in 2019, TechCrunch writer Darrell Etherington noted that Porsche maintains facilities in global hubs of tech talent and speculated that the company uses these facilities for attracting engineering talent and potential acquisitions of complementary early-stage companies.

We hope you can join our talk with Zellmer at TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility 2020. The event is virtual this year, therefore making it more accessible to attendees from around the world. Zellmer joins other mobility executives including Bryan Salesky of Argo AI, Peter Rawlinson of Lucid Motors, and Tekedra Mawakana of Waymo.

Electric vehicles, dock-less scooters, autonomous trucks, ride-hailing apps and the AI that fuels them all — it’s a world of transportation that even a visionary like Leonardo Da Vinci could scarcely imagine. On October 6-7, modern-day visionaries from around the world will gather virtually for TC Sessions: Mobility 2020.

This is your chance to channel your inner Da Vinci and save $100 in the process. Early-bird pricing ends in just three days — buy your pass before the deadline expires on September 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

We’re excited about a new event this year — Pitch Night. If you’d like to be considered for one of only 10 spots in this competition, submit an application here before September 15.

We’ll choose 10 early-stage mobility startups to deliver a one-minute pitch to a panel of judges on the night of October 5. Only five will move on to the final round to pitch again the following day, October 6, live from Mobility 2020’s Main Stage. We’re talking exposure to thousands of attendees, press, industry leaders and VCs.

If you want to succeed, you need to stay on top of the latest trends in mobility, and that’s no small order in a fast-moving industry. Here are just two examples of the many speakers and topics we have to keep you informed. Check out the event agenda here.

The Road to the All-Electric Air: Just weeks after Lucid Motors unveils its long-anticipated all-electric luxury Air sedan, we’ll sit down with CEO Peter Rawlinson to discuss the challenges of building a car company and assembling that first production vehicle as well as plans for the future.

Building an AV Startup: Ike co-founder and chief engineer Nancy Sun will share her experiences in the world of automation and robotics, a ride that has taken her from Apple to Otto and Uber before she set off to start a self-driving truck company. Sun will discuss what the future holds for trucking and the challenges and the secrets behind building a successful mobility startup.

CrunchMatch, our AI-enhanced platform, makes connecting with attendees and expanding your network easier and faster. It also helps you stay organized and on schedule. When you register for Mobility 2020, simply answer a few quick questions about your business preferences and you’ll be automatically registered for CrunchMatch — and you’ll receive an email telling you how and when to access the platform.

Early bird pricing disappears on September 11 at 11:59 p.m. (PT). Buy your pass now and save. We think Da Vinci would approve.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

When startup entrepreneurs think about going public, they typically think about gearing up for an initial public offering (IPO). Going public via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), commonly referred to as a reverse merger process, is another route that’s becoming more popular and is also worth considering.

When Manish Patel, one of Shift’s board members, first suggested that I learn about SPACs back in 2019, I had no clue what he was talking about.

Now, just over a year later, we’ve almost completed Shift’s SPAC process. I hope that what we’ve learned from our experience is useful for other CEOs and founders considering a SPAC.

Shift announced its SPAC in June 2020 and is expected to complete the process of going public later this year. Here are a few of the things you and your team might want to get in order if you’ve decided that a SPAC might be a fit for you and your business:

Be prepared to become a SPAC expert

SPACs have been around for a number of years, but they have become en vogue in recent months, especially given how well the public markets have held up in the COVID-19 era. Even still, don’t expect others to understand the SPAC process right off the bat.

If you go the SPAC route, you’ll need to become an expert at financial engineering. When we first started the process, I had to spend a lot of time educating our investors and team about how SPACs work and their validity. So I’ve had to come to the table with examples of when SPACs have worked and why, with a lot of data to back up my claims. Keep in mind that going through a SPAC will likely be a new process for all of them too. Even if you’ve been through a successful IPO process, you’ll still need to educate yourself — the SPAC process and the IPO process are completely different.