Category: UNCATEGORIZED

What do you get when you combine six early-stage startup founders with a panel of top VCs and savvy TechCrunch editors? It’s Pitchers & Pitches, a rapid-fire pitch competition with a hefty side of advice to turn your 60-second pitch into a key that unlocks opportunity.

Grab a snack, bring your questions and tune-in to our pre-Disrupt 2020 masterclass tomorrow, September 2, at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT. You can register here. We randomly chose six startups — all exhibitors in Digital Startup Alley — to throw their best pitch. Our esteemed judges (we’ll name all the names in a moment) will critique each one and offer tips to sharpen what is arguably an entrepreneur’s most essential tool.

Get ready to take copious notes. Free advice from experts — the kind who hear pitches for a living — doesn’t come along every day, and chances are you can apply much of what you hear to your own pitch. Plus, the viewing audience decides which startup delivered the best pitch.

You can’t have a competition without a prize, and this one’s pretty nifty. The winning startup scores a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.

Hannah Webb, CEO of Findster Technologies, winner of the first Pitchers & Pitches session, dishes on the result of her P&P experience.

“Disrupt and Digital Startup Alley haven’t even officially started yet, and we’ve already seen great benefits. cela introduced us to multiple accelerators in the NYC area and one is a perfect fit for our company’s situation.”

Now without further ado, the panel of judges waiting to be impressed includes two top VCs — Konstantine Buhler, Partner at Sequoia Capital and Anne Gifford, Investor at Tusk Ventures and two pitch-savvy TechCrunch editors — Anthony Ha and Darrell Etherington.

As for the early-stage startups taking the mound, they are:

• Allthenticate
• Healthiby
• Identomat
• Kaoshi
• Smart EpiGenetX
• Tapwow

Join us for the next Pitchers & Pitches — tomorrow, September 2 at 4 p.m. ET / 1 p.m. PT. Listen, learn and turn your pitch into a key that opens doors to opportunities at Disrupt 2020 — and beyond.

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

As the first sales hire at Cloudflare, I learned firsthand from both our high growth and my own mistakes how to build a world-class sales team. Early hires are the cultural cornerstones of an organization. As Vinod Khosla described the initial hires at Sun Microsystems, “Initial hiring is way more important than you think because of its multiplicative effect. So, it’s worth taking a little longer when you hire those people.”

The first sales hire will set the best practices, cultural tone and is responsible for making sure each subsequent new sales hire succeeds. For this reason, it is important that startups look to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, when they bring on their first sales team member. If the first sales hire is a “coin-operated” mercenary whose priority is to overachieve quota and is a great solo player, they may be more competitive than collaborative. In contrast, if the first hire is a missionary who cares more about evangelizing the product and is a team player, they will naturally enable the next set of hires to succeed.

Hiring the missionary

There is an overwhelming amount of declarative advice on how to make your first sales hire: They should have experience selling at an early-stage company, tenure in that company to a much larger team (five to 50 employees, or $100,000 to $10 million ARR), they’ve sold at your price point, overachieved quota consistently (beware of this one. Quota overachievement can be a false positive and may be the result of a fruitful territory, a comp plan where quotas were too low or selfish “me-first” behavior.), etc. What you should look for are missionaries, and they exhibit two key qualities: resourceful ingenuity and team-based behavior.

Missionaries are resourceful team players

At early-stage startups, there is more work to do than people to do it. These are resource-constrained environments where roles go beyond job descriptions and are “jack-of-all-trades” positions. This first sales hire is not an ordinary sales gig. It requires a missionary with a deep interest in the technology who wants to evangelize the product. The resourceful missionary must have an enterprising mindset to build their own sales collateral, a clever approach for testing pricing, a passion for the product technology and an ability to navigate the organization so engineering and product teams can hear the voice of the customer.

While resourceful skills are needed to test out different sales motions, the most important quality the missionary must have is a team-first attitude to share those learnings with colleagues. As the missionary, and the subsequent missionary hires, are developing a repeatable process they are engaging in novel intellectual work; this is not routine execution. When someone develops better messaging, or discovers a new use case, the goal is to spread that expertise so overall collective intelligence and team performance increases. If that operational know-how becomes siloed and an individual optimizes for themselves, instead of the team, the organization loses.

Want to save $100 on your pass to TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Silly question, right? Of course, you do. Here’s the thing. You have just four days left to buy in at the lowest price. Knock this easy task off your to-do list and buy your pass before the early-bird savings disappears on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Now congratulate yourself on being both a savvy startupper and a savvy shopper.

The expanded all-virtual Session runs October 6-7 and, obviously, it will look and feel very different from last year’s live event. But the content, the experts, the connections and the opportunities remain as real and plentiful as ever.

Engage with experts during interactive breakout sessions, hear top mobility founders, investors, movers and shakers in both one-on-one interviews and moderated panel discussions. Cast your eyes upon the event agenda to see just some of the speakers and the topics they’ll tackle — we’ll add more in the coming weeks.

One big advantage to this all-virtual Session is global reach. Whether you’re in Europe, Africa, Australia, South America or another region in the U.S., you can learn about the latest trends, meet and connect with attendees, expand your network and discover new opportunities — without stepping foot in Silicon Valley.

“TC Sessions: Mobility exceeded my expectations in terms of useful content. Every panel discussion I attended, every interaction I had was relevant to my work or to my daily life, because we don’t stop living at 5 p.m.” — Jens Lehmann, technical lead and product manager, SAP.

“Attending TC Sessions: Mobility helps us keep an eye on what’s coming around the corner. It uncovers crucial trends so we can identify what we should be thinking about before anyone else.” — Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

Pro Tip 1: Want to bring your team to cover more ground and discover even more opportunities? Take advantage of our group discount when you book four or more passes.

Pro Tip 2: This one’s for the up-and-coming generation of mobility visionaries — grab a budget-friendly student pass here and start expanding your career network with mobility’s best and brightest. Just $50 (a $145 savings) until prices go up.

Let’s review, shall we? TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 takes place on October 6-7, but early-bird pricing ends in just four days — on September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) to be precise. Be savvy. Buy your pass today and save $100.

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

The world of retail has been absolutely rocked by the coronavirus pandemic. Stores closed across the country, and at the same time, online sales went through the roof. Direct-to-consumer brands, many of whom are masters of both online and brick-and-mortar channels, experienced unprecedented change in a matter of weeks and months.

To unpack all of this and much more, we’ll be joined by Fabletics co-CEO Don Ressler and actor Kevin Hart, who partnered on Fabletics mens line this year, at Disrupt 2020 this September 14-18.

Fabletics was founded back in 2013 and has taken a truly tech-first approach to D2C activewear, particularly when it comes to in-store sales. The company used heat maps in store to better understand foot traffic and interest in products, and even had iPads stationed in each dressing room to let users browse while they try on, or call an associate over for help.

The company, cofounded by Kate Hudson, has an interesting marketing advantage over some of its competition in the form of the cofounder herself, who posts Fabletics products on social media on a regular basis.

The athliesure space is incredibly hot, particularly in the wake of the coronavirus, which has encouraged people to put their dress clothes in the back of the closet and get cozy at home.

Ressler has a long history in the ecommerce space, selling his business FitnessHeaven.com to MySpace parent company Intermix Media in 1997. He stayed on at Intermix through its sale to News Corp. for more than $670 million. He also cofounded Alena Media and skincare brand Hydroderm, which have collectively raised more than $100 million and generated more than $1 billion in sales.

Kevin Hart, which you may definitely recognize from Jumanji, The Upside, and dozens of stand-up specials, led the launch of Fabletics Males, the menswear line from the company. He said that most mens activewear lines try to intimidate their customers into overpaying for tech they don’t want, and that Fabletics Males takes a different approach.

Alongside his work with Fabletics, Hart has also dabbled in tech investment, writing checks for Hungry (connecting independent chefs with customers for catering) and Run The World (a virtual events startup).

We’ll talk to Ressler and Hart about the upheaval across the D2C space in the wake of the pandemic, how the company thinks about competition, and what’s next for Fabletics. We’ll also chat with Hart about the tech trends he’s most interested in and his general investment thesis.

Disrupt 2020 goes down September 14 to September 18 with an outstanding lineup of speakers and plenty of opportunities to network and make connections. Get your front row seat to see this panel live with a Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package. We’re excited to see you there.

Apple and Google are continuing to make good on their planned roll-out of exposure notification technology for helping with COVID-19 contact tracing efforts. The two partners are introducing new tools that make it much easier for public health authorities to implement digital exposure notification, without the need for developing and maintaining their own individual apps. Apple makes this possible via the iOS 13.7 system update, out today, while Google is implementing it with an automatically-generated application on Android 6.0 and up coming later this month, a workaround required because of the very different method through which it manages system services and OS updates.

This change in the way the technology works means that users won’t have to actually download and install a dedicated app created by the public health authority (PHA) in their jurisdiction to participate. Instead, you’ll receive a notification that provides information supplied by your local health authority about the exposure notification system and what it does, from which you can choose to opt-in. On iOS, that’ll mean installing a provisioning profile, while on Android, it’ll result in that auto-generated app, which is installed via the Google Play store. Apple and Google clarified that Exposure Notification Express co-exists with existing dedicated PHA apps, rather than replacing it.

“PHAs using Exposure Notifications Express do not need to develop or maintain their own apps,” the companies explained in a press release. “Instead, they can simply provide Apple and Google with information about how to reach the PHA, guidance for residents, and recommendations on potential actions. Through an easy-to-use interface, PHAs provide their name, logo, criteria for triggering an exposure notification and the materials to be presented to users in case of exposure. Apple and Google will use this information to offer a fully operational Exposure Notifications System on behalf of and under the control of the PHA, to both iOS and Android users.”

Local health authorities will still have to elect to participate, and customize the text and messaging delivered to users in their regions when the receive this notification and onboarding info, but they’ll no longer have to develop and distribute their own applications in order to set up a digital exposure notification system based on the combined Apple/Google tech to supplement their contact tracing efforts. The health authority will also be responsible for determining how they calculate exposure risk, which is what they were able to do with dedicates apps, too. That’s huge, since while Apple and Google note that 20 countries globally have already introduced apps based on their API, and 25 U.S. states are “exploring” use of the system, with six states having launched apps so far, making this a system level feature with a lower technical barrier to entry on the developer/health agency side should help expedite roll-out.

To start, Apple and Google say they expect DC, Maryland, Nevada and Virginia will be the first to implement Exposure Notification Express sometime soon, with others likely to follow. The companies also said they’re working with the U.S. Association of Public Health Laboratories on a national key server that will effectively allow users to have exposure tracking work across state lines when they’re traveling out of their home health agency district.

There has been a lot of misinformation circulating about contact tracing requiring a threshold of 60% or higher adoption to be effective; that’s based on a misinterpretation of an Oxford study published earlier this year. The researchers behind the study subsequently clarified that in fact, any level of contact tracing, as aided by apps that support digital contact tracing, has a positive effect on reducing the spread of COVID-19, as well as resulting deaths.

The system includes the same privacy protections that Apple and Google have provided throughout, which means your location information is not collected or connected to any exposure notifications. Instead, the tech uses a randomly-generated key to track when and where a device has come into Bluetooth range with other devices also using the software. It maintains a log of these random identifiers, and checks against reported confirmed diagnoses (also fully anonymized) to see if there has been any exposure risk – as determined by the definition of exposure in terms of duration and distance as established by each region’s governing public health authority.

Back in early July, TechCrunch covered the Envision Accelerator. The program was put together by a group of students and recent graduates, often with some early venture capital experience, to help give some young startups a boost, and to shake up industry diversity metrics at the same time.

Now on the other side of their first batch’s official program and into its investor week, Envision shared a number of statistics regarding that first cohort, and talked about plans for its second.

What I appreciate about the Envision group is that by simply going out and making their own accelerator, they have shown that it is possible to attract a diverse group of startups to a program. How diverse? Let’s find out.

The Envision cohort

According to data provided to TechCrunch by Annabel Strauss and Eliana Berger from the Envision team (more on them here, if you’re curious), 17 companies made it into the first group. Of those 17 companies and their founding teams, around one-third of founders were black, around one in five were Latinx and more than 75% had a female founder.

Those are impressive metrics, frankly, especially when we consider what other groups have managed in recent sessions. Envision’s founders also skew young, not a surprise, given that the effort was effectively students making a program for their fellow students, with a three-to-one bias in favor of undergrads versus graduate students.

We’ll list the participating companies with links to their sites below, as per usual with this sort of accelerator roundup.

But, before we do, a few notes on how the first batch went down. When we last talked about Envision, they were still fundraising to pull together more capital to give to their selected companies. The idea was to provide $10,000 in equity-free capital, along with an eight-week program of lectures, networking and hands-on help from the Envision collective and a group of advisors.

According to Strauss and Berger, Envision was able to raise all the money that it needed to provide funding to its selected companies, though not every team picked up the full $10,000, with the duo noting that the amount varied based somewhat on need.

It will not be clear for a bit if the companies that went through Envision’s maiden class manage to raise more capital, scale, and become success. But for the Envision team itself, round one went well enough that a second effort is just around the corner.

And when it comes to that second push — or class, really — Envision remains in a hurry. After putting together its initial cohort while building its own organization on the fly, the group is going to kick off its second batch in October, giving it slim breathing room between cohorts.

There’s a reason for the haste, however. First, Envision wants to add two weeks to its programming, bringing the accelerator to a total of 10 weeks to include more training, and to fit that into the current semester, October was the kickoff month. Strauss and Berger noted that some students are taking leave during the first semester of this academic year.

More on Envision itself when we hear more on how the first batch did in attracting investor interest.

Here are the companies from batch one:

• Adora: Adora is a personalized, digital campus visit platform that makes compelling visits accessible to everyone.
• Devie: Devie is a parent coaching app that guides parents through challenges in a personal, accessible and actionable way.
• Forage: Forage is a mobile application that provides real-time pricing at grocery stores so families can save money.
• Holdette: At Holdette, we make professional work wear with real pockets for women entering the workforce for the first time.
• Justice Text: Justice Text makes video evidence management software to produce fair outcomes in the criminal justice system.
• Klara: Klara is a data science platform transforming the way consumers discover skincare and haircare products.
• Mindstand: Mindstand helps leaders identify implicit bias, employee engagement and culture fit within their internal communications.
• MODE: MODE helps people discover and purchase clothes through a personalized, social shopping experience.
• Mylabox: Mylabox is a cross-border e-commerce marketplace enabling SMBs in LatAm to access high-quality overseas products.
• Nibble: Nibble is a platform solving food waste by helping restaurants sell excess meals and ingredients at a discount.
• Pareto: Pareto is building a library of quick-to-launch workflows that startups can deploy for operations as they scale.
• Schefs: Schefs is a platform for college students to facilitate and participate in themed conversations over a virtual meal.
• UrConvey: UrConvey is a safe app that makes it easy to ride share with people you know by harnessing your network.
• Vngle: Vngle is a decentralized grassroots news network bringing “various angles” of local reality coverage to news deserts.
• Wellnest: Wellnest is a joyful journaling app that increases mindfulness by prioritizing user experience, voice and insights.
• Winkshare: Winkshare is a secure messaging app designed for the modern relationship. Your relationship, your business.
• Yup: Yup rewards valuable opinions across the web. Rate anything, earn rewards for accuracy, and gain status.

TechCrunch is embarking on a major new project to survey the venture capital investors of Europe.

Our <a href=”https://forms.gle/k4Ji2Ch7zdrn7o2p6”>survey of VCs in Madrid & Barcelona will capture how the cities are faring, and what changes are being wrought amongst investors by the coronavirus pandemic.

We’d like to know how your city’s startup scene is evolving, how the tech sector is being impacted by COVID-19, and, generally, how your thinking will evolve from here.

Our survey will only be about investors, and only the contributions of VC investors will be included. (Please note, if you have filled the survey out already, there is no need to repeat).

The shortlist of questions will require only brief responses, but the more you want to add, the better.

You can fill out the survey here.

Obviously, investors who contribute will be featured in the final surveys, with links to their companies and profiles.

What kinds of things do we want to know? Questions will include which trends are you most excited by? What startup do you wish someone would create? Where are the overlooked opportunities? What are you looking for in your next investment, in general? How is your local ecosystem going? And how has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy?

Over the next few weeks, we will be “zeroing-in” on Europe’s major cities.

It’s part of a broader series of surveys we’re doing to help founders find the right investors. For example, here is the recent survey of London.

Not in Madrid or Barcelona? European VC investors can STILL fill out the survey, as we will be putting a call out to your city next anyway! The survey will cover almost every European country on the continent of Europe (not just EU members, btw), so just look for your country in the menu on the survey and please participate (if you’re a venture capital investor).

Thank you for participating. If you have questions you can email mike@techcrunch.com

A few months ago, Plaid unveiled Plaid Exchange, a product that helps financial institutions build and maintain an API that other developers can use. The company is iterating on that product and now updates account activity in near real-time.

Plaid is better known for its universal banking API that lets you connect an app or service with a bank account. For instance, it lets you connect your Cash App account with your bank account to retrieve bank account information.

With Plaid Exchange, the company is addressing the other part of the equation — banks and financial institutions. While the appeal of Plaid is that you can just use one API to connect with thousands of banks, it requires a ton of work on Plaid’s side to create those connectors.

Some banks already have a modern API while others just let you access your account from a website. Plaid relies on screen scraping for those banks, meaning that it reproduces the same clicks that you would do to access your bank account from your web browser.

Financial institutions can work with Plaid to implement a modern, token-based API. It is much more efficient, reduces load on the servers and opens up some new possibilities.

With today’s update, an app developer that uses Plaid to query your bank account will get instant transactions updates if the financial institution uses Plaid Exchange. For instance, Venmo could leverage that feature to notify you when your money has arrived on your bank account.

Branch is using Plaid Exchange. With instant account activity, their customers get better budgeting tools. Let’s see whether Plaid can manage to persuade big banks to use Plaid Exchange.

As a bank, you want to let your customers move money from a checking account to a savings account in seconds. But customers expect the same experience with other financial services.

If banks and financial institutions can’t provide a reliable and fast API, the next generation of adults who are considering opening an account will choose a challenger bank and skip financial institutions that don’t provide real-time data altogether.

Ravi Shankar Prasad, India’s IT, and Law and Justice minister has accused Facebook India’s leadership team of suppressing the reach of pages that support and promote right-leaning ideology, in what is the latest turn of events for the social giant in its biggest market by users where it has also been accused of playing favoritism to Prasad’s ruling party.

In a letter to Facebook co-founder and chief executive, RS Prasad wrote that he has learned that ahead of the general elections last year, social giant’s India management team, in a “concerted effort”, deleted or substantially reduced the reach as well as “provided no recourse or right of appeal to pages” that were supportive of the right-of-centre ideology.

“The above documented cases of bias and inaction are seemingly a direct outcome of the dominant political beliefs of individuals in your Facebook India team,” the minister wrote in the letter, without elaborating those cases. He said the ruling, right-of-centre Bharatiya Janata Party wrote “dozens of emails” to Facebook management team and received no response.

Prasad also accused some unnamed Facebook employees of abusing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior ministers of BJP “on record.”

He characterized this alleged behaviour as “problematic.” “It is doubly problematic when the bias of individuals becomes an inherent bias of the platform. And it is unacceptable when political biases of individuals impinger on the freedom of speech of millions of people,” he added.

Prasad’s letter today comes as Ankhi Das, a top level Facebook executive in India, has been accused of showing support to Narendra Modi before he was elected as Prime Minister in 2014 and disparaging the opposition party, Indian National Congress.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Das had also opposed applying the company’s hate-speech rules to a member of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party because she worried taking any punishing actions would hurt the company’s business prospects in India.

Politicians from both the sides have slammed Facebook for playing favoritism in India. In the letter, Prasad characterized these reporting to be based on “selective leaks” by some Facebook employees to “portray an alternative reality.”

On Tuesday, local newspaper Indian Express reported that ahead of last year’s polls, BJP flagged a list of 44 pages opposed to the party, claiming they were “in violation of expected standards” and carried posts “not in line with facts.’ At least 14 of those pages are no longer on the platform. The report claimed that Facebook India team was responsive to BJP officials.

In January, Amazon announced a new feature would allow Alexa users to pay for their gas at the pump using voice commands via Echo Auto and other Alexa-enabled mobility devices. Today, the company says the feature is now live at over 11,500 Exxon and Mobil gas stations across the U.S., allowing customers to say “Alexa, pay for gas,” to begin the payment process.

Amazon teamed up with Fiserv to help power the transactions by activating the pump and facilitating the token generation to ensure a secure payment experience. However, the transactions themselves will be processed through Amazon Pay, which uses the same payment information stored in the customer’s Amazon account.

At launch, Amazon says the feature will work across Alexa-enabled devices, like Echo Auto, as well as in Alexa-enabled vehicles, and even through the Alexa app for iOS and Android.

To get started, customers can say, “Alexa, pay for gas,” and Alexa will then confirm the  station location, pump number, and then activate the pump.

The feature may not be either faster or easier than simply inserting your payment card at the pump directly, but it can be useful in some situations. Because you can remain in the car until the pump is authorized, the option is a nice perk for cold, winter days. It could also be appreciated by women and others who are wary of being alone at the pump, like when getting gas at night or in unfamiliar surroundings. In the pandemic era, it means more time social distancing from the customer on the other side of the pump, too, and reduces your interactions with the pump itself.

Unfortunately, Alexa can’t pump your gas for you yet — you still have to do that yourself.