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It’s time again to start warming up your pitching arm. Our next Pitchers & Pitches session takes place next week on September 2. Register today!

Pitchers & Pitches sessions combine critique and competition with a focus on helping early-stage startup founders create an iron-clad, 60-second pitch. Here’s how it works. Everyone is welcome to attend, but only founders exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley at Disrupt 2020 will be invited to pitch.

We’ll feature five startups from Digital Startup Alley to present their best, rapid-fire pitch to a panel of experts. Previous P&P judges have featured leading VCs including Monique Idlett, Jess Morris Jr., Sydney Thomas and Curtis Rodgers. Who better than top VCs to provide constructive feedback on your pitch? They’ll help you cut to the chase and present the essential information in the best possible light.

The viewing audience will choose which of the five startups presented the best pitch, and that lucky team will win a consulting session with cela, a company that connects early-stage startups to accelerators and incubators that can help scale their businesses.

Listen to what the winner of our first Pitchers and Pitches session, Hannah Webb, CEO of Findster Technologies, says about her experience.

“Disrupt and Digital Start Up 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.”

Even if you don’t get to pitch, you still get to benefit. Take that top VC advice and apply it to your own business to make your pitch a more effective tool. You need a pitch that impresses, that opens doors and starts conversations. This is a rare opportunity to get advice from the very people you want to attract.

Here are even more reasons to attend Pitchers & Pitches.

• Get familiar with the new virtual Disrupt platform before it goes live in September
• Watch and interact with the pitch-off event on the virtual main stage
• Meet and video network with other attendees
• Connect with the five pitchers in their virtual booth in the startup expo

The next Pitchers & Pitches takes place next week on September 2 at 1pm PT / 4pm ET – Register to see all of the action today. And while you’re at it get your Disrupt Digital Startup Alley Package.so you can start to reap all of the benefits of Disrupt 2020 right away! Get warmed up and ready to throw the first pitch!

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

Old-school approaches to marketing were often described as “spray and pray.” Marketers would launch a massive campaign in as many places as possible and hope that something worked.

More customers would show up, so it would appear that something had in fact worked.

But nobody could be sure exactly what that something was.

When we can’t predict what will have an impact, we need campaigns that cover all the bases, and those campaigns are consequently huge. They take a long time to create, are expensive to launch and come chock full of risk.

If a spray-and-pray campaign is a total failure (and we don’t have to go far to find examples of those), it’s quite possible an entire year’s worth of marketing budget has just been wasted.

Instead, marketers need to take a page from lean product development and begin creating Minimum Viable Campaigns (MVCs). Rather than wait until a massive multichannel launch is perfect, we can incrementally release a series of smaller, targeted, data-driven campaigns.

Over time these MVCs coalesce to look and act much like a Big Bang-style campaign from the spray-and-pray days, but they’ve done so in a much more data-driven and less risky way.

What exactly is an MVC?

Just as with a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), it can be easy to misunderstand the real definition of an MVC. It’s not something thrown together with no regard for brand standards or strategic goals, and it’s not a blind guess.

Instead, a good MVC represents the smallest amount of well-designed work that could still achieve some of the campaign’s goals. Before we have any chance of figuring out what that looks like, we need to know the ultimate goal of the bigger campaign or initiative. If we don’t know this, we can’t possibly measure the effectiveness of the MVC.

The expression “it takes a village” easily applies to building a successful mobility startup, especially in uncertain and tumultuous times. It also takes opportunities, and you’ll find plenty of those at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 (Oct. 6-7). Even better — you can bring your entire village, increase your opportunity potential and save money with our group discount. Win-win-ka-ching!

When you book four or more tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility, you’ll trim $25 off the price of each pass — but only if you buy them before the deadline: Sept. 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT). Prices go up September 5.

The two-day conference focuses on every aspect of mobility and transportation — autonomy, micro-mobility, AI-based mobility applications, investment, regulatory issues, battery technology and more. Learn from the leading experts about the current state of the industry and what trends — and which players — will shape its future.

You and your village can divide and conquer — gather the latest intel, network to build essential connections and engage in the kinds of conversations that lead to lasting partnerships. What you learn can shift the way you think about your goals. Here’s what two team members from FlashParking had to say about their experience.

“We left TC Sessions: Mobility with a good vision of how the space will evolve over the next three to five years. It will help us position our company and understand how to think about strategy and partnerships going forward.” — Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

“TC Sessions: Mobility isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

CrunchMatch — our free business matchmaking platform — makes networking in a virtual venue easier. Answer a few quick questions, and the AI-powered tool helps you find, connect and schedule 1:1 video calls with the kinds of people you need to grow your business. Looking for investors? Check. Need a developer? Can do. Want to add new startups to you portfolio? CrunchMatch covers all the bases.

We haven’t touched on the great speakers we have on tap or explored the TC Sessions Mobility 2020 agenda. Peruse it at your leisure, but don’t dawdle. Buy your group discount passes by September 4 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT) and save. Opportunity calls, and it’ll take a village to take advantage of all of them.

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

Launching a company, even in the best of times, is one of the most challenging exercises a person can go through. In an economic recession, it can seem downright impossible. But founders across the country, and indeed across the globe, are in the midst of that process as I write.

They aren’t the first. Alexa von Tobel, founder of LearnVest and founding partner at Inspired Capital, publicly launched her fintech startup in 2009, and founded it in May of 2007. In that span of time, Lehman Brothers went under — in December of 2008.

The company was launched in the midst of the worst economic downturn in at least three generations (current circumstances notwithstanding). We briefly chatted with von Tobel about this in a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, but the topic deserved much more exploration. Von Tobel was gracious enough to talk to us again, and gave us her advice and insights on what it means, and what it takes, to launch a business in the midst of economic uncertainty.

Write it down

Von Tobel says that one of the most important exercises in forming LearnVest — a company that was acquired for $375 million by Northwestern Mutual — was writing out a business plan. It was 75 pages, and by no means a formal document. Rather, the LearnVest business plan was a brain dump of everything von Tobel could possibly think of as it relates to her idea.

“It was nothing beautiful and by no means a work of art,” said von Tobel. “But it was valuable to put it together and walk through this blueprint of all the big questions, all the concerns. How would the customer feel? How big was the market? What was the competition? I even drew up a product plan of how I would roll it out. It was a budget, looking at how much money we think we need to get up and running.”

This business plan also included the areas in which von Tobel felt she was not an expert. She wanted a clear expression of her own strengths and weaknesses built into the business from its very inception.

von Tobel had never written a formal business plan before. She had taken a few business classes at Harvard Business School, but didn’t see the exercise as preparation for publication, but rather her own personal space to develop a product and business.

“It was a macro, more thoughtful plan that allowed me to understand where things were positioned,” said von Tobel. “Perfect is the enemy of good enough. You don’t have to be perfect, but you have to do enough that you have a really clear sense of the picture and a really clear sense of the cracks.”

Eliminate risk

“I’m more optimistic about startups today than I was a year ago,” said Roelof Botha, Sequoia partner and head of the firm’s U.S. business in an episode of ECL. “I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company.”

The pandemic has crippled our economy, and ushered in an era of uncertainty. But it has also catalyzed the greatest acceleration of change the world has ever seen. Entire industries — several of them, in fact — have sprung forward by at least five years, if not a decade.

The opportunity is there. Small startups, nimble companies, have the chance to capitalize on that change. Von Tobel saw the same opportunity back in 2008. She had been working on her 75-page business plan for LearnVest while attending Harvard Business School.

In December of 2008, she was on the elliptical machine at her gym when a breaking news announcement flashed across the TV: Lehman Brothers has gone under.

It was at this moment that she decided to drop out of Harvard and go full speed with LearnVest.

Most people are not willing to take a huge risk in a moment of global panic. But von Tobel hadn’t just been mulling LearnVest in her spare time, musing about it to herself for a year. She had written it all down, and in the process, eliminated as much risk as possible.

“I grew up as a diver in high school and then in college, and diving is a risky sport,” said von Tobel. “You can hit the board, you can fall, you can smack the water. Diving is a good analogy for entrepreneurship because it’s about hypertraining and getting prepared. The first time you ever jump off the board, you hope that you’ve done everything you needed to by that point to de-risk it so that nothing catastrophic would happen.”

Not only did those 75 pages de-risk von Tobel’s entrepreneurial journey, but the steps outlined within that business plan added an extra level of security that allowed her to drop out of school and take the plunge. For example, she had already identified and signed on a lawyer and some accountants. She had set aside her own personal savings for the initial push. She had drawn out prototypes.

“I had been taking these microsteps for a year that made it feel more real,” said von Tobel. “Step by step, I was de-risking into the place where I could make that decision to drop out of school.”

Set milestones

Part of the de-risk process included setting clear milestones, both for the business and for von Tobel personally. She focused on one month at a time. The first month was a business plan, and the next month was a prototype of the website, and the following month was conducting hundreds of customer interviews.

“That’s a very linear way to think about it, but it’s helping build conviction on the idea and figure out what the problems are,” said von Tobel.

She also built out a financial plan for herself, understanding fully that she needed psychological safety in order to have the time and space to do it right.

“I literally had a number of months planned out,” said von Tobel. “I told myself that, if by this date — at the time it was about nine months out — I haven’t gotten to a place where I can get anything working, then that’s when I’ll turn into a pumpkin and Cinderella has to leave the ball. The gig is over.”

She clarified that she never had plans to be super strict about that timeline — if something started clicking in that final six weeks, then she was willing to extend her timeline. But she said that the exercise was productive, giving herself a format around how to process her own progress.

“I took every day with full force, full focus, full energy, full commitment.”

Don’t rebuild the wheel

She also stressed the importance of innovating where it makes sense, as opposed to trying to start from scratch with every facet of the business.

Within the 75-page plan, a section was dedicated fully to competitors. Many of them no longer exist. She also outlined the major incumbents in the financial space, like Fidelity and Schwab. She listed the good and bad about all of them.

“You can literally model the product after what works,” said von Tobel. “You don’t have to rebuild the wheel. If certain parts of a business work, you can use that. If seven companies are all doing the same thing, it has been proven that thing works.”

She explained that the ability to resist rebuilding the wheel is a very important trait because there is so much out there that entrepreneurs can reuse.

“Then you have to figure out where you can fundamentally change the model.”

Disrupt and delight

The concept for LearnVest seems obvious today. Financial planning for everyone, including educational online content, 24/7 support, and at an affordable price point. But back in 2008 that wasn’t the case.

Von Tobel not only spent a lot of time thinking about how to disrupt financial planning based on target demographic, but how to delight that customer base.

“I was a really big Amazon user,” said von Tobel, describing how frictionless and easy the process of shopping online was. She read product development books like “The Purple Cow” by Seth Godin and realized the importance of the “wow” factor. “Spending your life’s work wowing somebody around a financial plan was a challenging thing to do, but it was almost what made it special, that it was such a hard thing to do. I don’t think very many people cared to wow somebody around their wallet at that moment. It wasn’t an area of delight that everybody was running after. So I said, ‘Let’s go bring delight to your wallet.'”

Again, many of these “delightful” features seem straightforward today, but they weren’t in 2008, and certainly not in the financial realm. This included super transparent pricing, with no hidden fees, and 24/7 customer service. Von Tobel recalled that banks, at the time, were pushing out ads that said they were open from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sundays.

“The plan had a section around customer expectations, and in a user’s retail life, they were going digital and mobile and things were getting easier, across delivery and ordering products and even invitations have all gone online,” said von Tobel. “And yet your wallet is still literally walking into the bank.”

On the one hand, von Tobel had a list of all the things that had proven to work for the big banks and financial planning institutions. On the other, she had her own list of disruptive, delightful features around pricing, product, business model.

“What does it feel like to the customer?” asked von Tobel. “I literally wrote in words how I want them to feel when they use the product. I went through the mindset of the customer and how they would feel as they open a LearnVest financial plan. Then, we looked at the business model and how we could make money.”

She added that it wasn’t all perfectly clear from day one, but she listed out all the ways the company could generate revenue, and over time whittled them away as she determined which models were viable and which ones weren’t.

Invite (some) criticism

Perspective is everything. No matter how great an idea is, it needs to be inspected from every angle. Von Tobel understood this and built a team of advisors. To be clear, these weren’t board advisors and they didn’t hold any formal title at the company. Rather, they were a group of people who had, over the years, earned von Tobel’s trust and respect.

“I went to the five smartest people in my life and asked to borrow 45 minutes of their time,” said von Tobel. “I asked them not to just tell me two things they love. I really gave them the psychological space to be critical, and I listened to the criticism. When three smart people say the exact same thing, it’s probably something you really need to think more about and dive into more.”

She said that it wasn’t until after this process that she felt ready to build a team and fundraise.

But there’s a flip side to inviting criticism. Von Tobel stressed the importance of understanding the line between not being immune to feedback but also not allowing 400 different voices into your head. Listening to every naysayer out there could make it tough to get out of bed in the morning, she said.

If one person brings up a piece of feedback that no one else has repeated, it’s probably fine to ignore it.

“If you have 400 voices in your head, you’re not going to have a clear vision of your own,” said von Tobel. “It’s about having the right voices and the right feedback. I say this with incredible humility: You have to learn how to get good feedback, and for me that will be a lifelong pursuit.”

Build a team

The final thing that von Tobel looked at was building a team.

“Who do I know from my network that would come and join this?,” she recalled. “Who could I recruit? In what areas do I not know anybody?”

Through the process of writing down her own strengths and shortcomings, and more importantly, looking at what the culture of LearnVest should be, she was able to start building out a deck.

She’s shared a few of the slides from that deck with TechCrunch, which you can find below.

The slide deck was really a distillation of the 75-page business plan that started it all, and that took about a year to develop.

[gallery ids="2036459,2036460,2036461"]

Become an expert

As she went into fundraising, von Tobel felt confident. That confidence didn’t come from ego, founded or unfounded, but rather preparation. She had done the work, just as she did with her diving career in high school and college, to feel like an expert in her field.

Not only had she talked to the smartest people in her life, but she had been talking to experts within the industry, learning each day about the missed opportunities, the parts that were lacking.

“You have to have a really clear point of view, and truly become an expert,” said von Tobel. “The day I felt confident to go fundraise was once I felt so informed that when a VC pushed back and said ‘I don’t like this’ or ‘What about this part?’, I could come back and say ‘I really appreciate your thoughts on that but after talking to these three experts and reading these books, I respectfully disagree for these reasons.’ That was a pretty important moment.”

She reiterated that this has absolutely nothing to do with arrogance. It’s about preparation and being informed.

“I always say, ‘How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Practice. Practice. Practice.'”

Build with passion

Von Tobel and I ended our conversation focusing on the most important piece of advice she has for founders.

She narrowed it down to one thing: Build with passion.

“Whether you’re founding a company during a recession or during normal times, don’t ever build something that you don’t want,” said von Tobel, adding that building something you truly want and believe lets you wake up each morning and feel a moment of energy. She said you should come alive.

“Building a company is a labor of love, and the deeper you get in, the bigger the challenges are,” she said. “More stress gets put on your shoulders. You develop calluses and toughness. If you don’t really love the idea, you’re going to be so miserable that it’s almost impossible to be successful.”

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death and widespread protests for racial justice, a number of venture capitalists made public statements about wanting to improve diversity in the tech industry — and more specifically to fund more diverse founders.

Their comments are certainly worth applauding, but actual change is a lot harder. And if it comes at all, it will take time. In the meantime, how can Black founders navigate a tech and venture capital industry where they have historically been underrepresented, overlooked and worse?

To answer that question, we’ll bring three Black founders together at Disrupt 2020 from September 14-18 who can speak directly about their experience raising funding and launching startups.

One of our speakers, Michael Seibel, is now funding startups himself as partner and CEO of startup accelerator Y Combinator. Before that, however, he was co-founder and CEO at Justin.tv (which became game streaming giant Twitch) and then at its spinoff Socialcam (which was acquired by Autodesk). So he can talk about both sides, as both a founder and investor.

Joining Seibel will be two YC startup founders — Reham Fagiri of furniture marketplace AptDeco and Songe LaRon of barbershop software maker Squire. We’ll talk to all three of them on the Extra Crunch stage, getting as specific and tactical as possible about what black founders can expect and what steps they can take to succeed.

Learn more at Disrupt 2020, which runs from September 14-18. Buy the Disrupt Digital Pro Pass or if you’re an early stage founder a Digital Startup Alley Exhibitor Package today and get access to all the interviews on our main stage, workshops over on the Extra Crunch Stage where you can get actionable tips as well as CrunchMatch, our free, AI-powered networking platform. As soon as you register for Disrupt, you will have access to CrunchMatch and can start connecting with people now. Use the tool to schedule one-on-one video calls with potential customers and investors or to recruit and interview prospective employees.

Nerdwallet, which provides resources for people looking for a new credit card, loan, insurance or other financial product or just financial advice, is making a move today to spearhead a move into international markets. The startup is acquiring Know Your Money, a Norwich-based startup that provides a similar range of comparison and information tools geared at people who live in the UK.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Nerdwallet said. Know Your Money will become Nerdwallet’s first operation outside of the US and will spearhead the company’s efforts for further international expansion under international general manager Megan Tedford.

The deal underscores the quiet growth of the San Francisco-based startup, which now has 160 million users. It last raised money in 2015 — $100 million ($69 million in equity, and the rest in a credit note) — at a valuation of about $520 million. It hasn’t updated that number since, but has been profitable and has no plans to raise more funding for the moment. Investors include IVP, RRE Ventures, iGlobe Partners and Silicon Valley Bank.

Nerdwallet has also expanded significantly since that time, and currently makes more than $150 million annually in revenues. For some more context, Nerdwallet competes directly with companies like Credit Karma (which has 100 million users and was acquired by Intuit earlier this year for $7.1 billion), Credit Sesame (which last year estimated that it’s valued at around $1 billion), along with a number of other marketplaces that both provide advice and financial content, as well as cost comparison services to weigh up the relative costs of different offers for various financial products.

Nerdwallet describes Know Your Money as the UK’s largest comparison site, with some 5 million consumers and 1.2 million businesses using its products last year in the past year, which include looking for and opening bank accounts, getting loans and arranging mortgages, and getting insurance.

“We’re looking forward to joining forces with NerdWallet and building on the fantastic work our team has done helping consumers learn about, evaluate and compare financial products,” said Jason Tassie, who co-founded Know Your Money with John Ellmore, in a statement. “Working with NerdWallet will help us accelerate our existing growth plans, expanding our content library, tools and guides to offer users more support in financial decision making. Know Your Money and NerdWallet are perfectly aligned in their goal of empowering people to make better, more-informed financial decisions.”

Tedford said that the whole process of finding and negotiating with Know Your Money started ahead of the pandemic but was essentially carried out over Zoom with travel all but completely halted in February of this year — a strange circumstance but one everyone has learned to live with.

That pandemic may not have spurred this deal but has underscored where the opportunity might be for both companies, as consumers are increasingly carrying out more of their financial lives online but also hoping to be more fiscally in control as economies totter and fall into recession.

“The pandemic has created a surge in demand for financial guidance and products in areas like refinance and investing — we’ve seen record visits to our site in these areas this year. Expansion to the UK is an important step towards our vision of a world where every consumer makes financial decisions with confidence,” said Tim Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of NerdWallet, in a statement. “Consumers are looking for a greater level of help, and with Know Your Money, we want to be there providing the guidance to as many people, across as many topics and in as many places as possible. Know Your Money has done a fantastic job helping consumers find and compare financial products and we’re looking forward to accelerating that work through this partnership.”

Billion dollar natural disasters are on the rise in the United States, according to CNBC. Even as I write, a hurricane is making landfall in Louisiana while wild fires rage in northern California. And those are just the big disasters.

There were more than 1.3 million fires in the United States in 2018, and nearly three out of every five deaths related to a house fire happened in a house where there was no smoke alarm or it didn’t function properly.

Harbor, a company that just closed on a $5 million seed round, wants to make users more prepared.

The product, which will launch in October, aims to gamify the process of doing everyday preparation for disasters. Using publicly available data from agencies like NOAA, FEMA, and USGS, as well as land maps and building codes to pinpoint individual household risk, Harbor takes a look at the user’s location and the general state of their home to determine types of risks to that individual user and their property.

From there, the platform curates a weekly checklist for the user to stay prepared, whether it’s keeping track of the amount of water on hand (for those in the path of hurricane season) or checking the battery levels and functionality of a smoke alarm.

“For us, it’s not about buying a go bag,” said CEO Dan Kessler. “It’s about doing the things you need to be to be prepared. Your plan is a heck of a lot more important than your bag. Your bag is also important, but without the planning it’s completely pointless. The problem is a lot of people, especially right now with the wildfires happening are saying ‘I don’t have a go bag,’ and they buy one for $50 on Amazon. But they are not any more prepared at that moment as they were before they bought the bag.”

Not only does harbor want to help users prepare for disasters, including curated product recommendations around preparedness equipment, but also helps guide them through the disaster itself and the aftermath, offering step by step instructions based on the specific situation.

Though harbor hasn’t launched the product publicly, the company is prepared with a two-fold business model which includes ecommerce and a freemium subscription plan for the app itself.

The sole investor in the $5 million round was 25madison, a NY-based venture studio that incubates and funds companies from inception. 25madison brought on Dan Kessler, a former Headspace executive, as CEO in January. Kessler brought on Eduardo Fonseca as Chief Technology Officer, who previously served as CTO of GoodRx.

In total, harbor is made up of a team of ten employees, and the company declined to share any states around diversity and inclusion on the team, saying “Dan and the team are very proud that the makeup of women and underrepresented groups is above tech industry averages, including the advisory board.”

The advisory board includes a number of notable experts in the disaster space, including former administrator of FEMA Brock Long, current senior fellow for climate change policy at the Council on Foreign relations Alice Hill, and professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and CNN national security analyst (who served as Assistant Secretary at the DHS) Juliette Kayyem, among others.

One of the nice things about virtual events is you can essentially hold as many as you’d like. It’s one thing to ask people to fly across the country or world to attend and another entirely to get them to tune into a livestream for an hour.

On September 1 at 10AM ET, Samsung will be holding an “Unpacked Part 2,” focused on the Galaxy Z Fold 2. The second-gen foldable got a little face time during the recent Note 20 event, but a new phone, watch, headphones and tablet ate up most of the alotted time.

Honestly, we already know a fair bit about the foldable, which largely seeks to address the numerous shortcomings of the original. For starters, there’s a reinforced screen. The hinge has also been upgraded to prohibit debris from falling behind the display. These (along with a protective layer that looked removable) are the chief reasons for various reports of screen damage with the original. I ended up damaging my own replacement unit, due to the fragile screen.

This event appears to be the one Samsung had originally planned to occur at IFA. The company ultimately pulled out of the Berlin-based trade show seemingly over COVID-19 related concerns. I have to imagine it’s going to be a more truncated event than the last Unpacked, unless Samsung has some additional hardware to reveal.

The foldable is set to go up for preorder the same day as event, though ship date and pricing have yet to be revealed since Samsung needs to save something for the presser. Most signs point to a similar price point as its $2,000 predecessor.

We’re big believers in second chances here at TechCrunch, and that’s great news for early-stage founders who didn’t apply to compete in the Startup Battlefield during Disrupt 2020 (September 14-18). Your second chance comes in the form of two Wild Card entries to the world’s most legendary startup competition.

Want a shot to head-to-head with some of the best new startups from around the world? Go buy a Digital Startup Alley Package and exhibit your standout startup to thousands of Disrupt 2020 attendees. TechCrunch editors will designate two outstanding early-stage startups from Digital Startup Alley as Wild Card entries.

You’ll have just a few days to prepare before you join the other Startup Battlefield competitors and deliver a six-minute pitch and demo to a panel of judges — top-name VCs and technologists. You’ll also answer a Q&A after your pitch. If you make it through to round two, you’ll do it all again to a fresh set of experts.

The prize? Massive exposure to media and investors (whether you win or not), glory in the form of the Disrupt Cup and $100,000 in sweet, equity-free cash.

Pro tip: Exhibit in Digital Startup Alley and you’re eligible for a Wild Card slot — even if you applied to Startup Battlefield but didn’t make it into the final cohort. You came so close — don’t pass up your second chance!

Exhibiting in Digital Startup Alley by itself is a win-win proposition. Introduce your tech and talent to thousands of people around the world, expand your network, build partnerships, attract investors, build your customer base and increase your brand recognition.

“I met so many industry experts — manufacturers, marketers, engineers — I even met people interested in investing in my company. Fostering these relationships over the long term will help my company scale and help me grow as an innovator.” — Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap.

Buy a Digital Startup Alley Package, hang your shingle in Startup Alley and get ready to connect with the influential people who can help you build your business. Believe in second chances — you just might earn a Wild Card entry to Startup Battlefield and take a page out of RecordGram’s playbook. They rode the Wild Card to total victory as Battlefield champs. Go for it!

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

Salesforce launched in 1999, one of the early adherents to what would eventually be called SaaS and cloud computing. On Tuesday, the company reached a huge milestone when it surpassed $5 billion in revenue, putting the SaaS giant on a $20 billion run rate for the first time.

Salesforce revenue has been on a firm upward trajectory for years now, but when the company reached $10 billion in revenue in November 2017, CEO Marc Benioff set the goal for $20 billion right then and there, and five years hence the company beat that goal pretty easily. Here’s what he said at the time:

“In fact as the fastest growing enterprise software company ever to reach $10 billion, we are now targeting to grow the company organically to more than $20 billion by fiscal year 2022 and we plan to do that to be the fastest enterprise software company ever to get to $20 billion,” Benioff said at the time.

There are lots of elements that have led to that success. As the Salesforce platform evolved, the company has also had an aggressive acquisition strategy, and companies are moving to the cloud faster than ever before. Yet Salesforce has been able to meet that lofty 2017 goal early, while practicing his own unique form of responsible capitalism in the midst of a pandemic.

The platform play

While there are many factors contributing to the company’s revenue growth, one big part of it is the platform. As a platform, it’s not only about providing a set of software tools like CRM, marketing automation and customer service, it’s also giving customers the ability to build solutions to meet their needs on top of that, taking advantage of the work that Salesforce has done to build its own software stack.

Bret Taylor, president and chief operating officer at Salesforce says the platform has played a huge role in the company’s success. “Actually our platform is behind a huge part of Salesforce’s momentum in multiple ways. One, which is one thing we’ve talked a lot about, is just the technology characteristics of the platform, namely that it’s low code and fast time to value,” he
said.

He added, “I would say that these low code platforms and the ability to stand up solutions quickly is more relevant than ever before because our customers are going to have to respond to changes in their business faster than ever before,” he said.

He pointed to nCino, a company built on top of Salesforce that went public last month as a prime example of this. The company was built on Salesforce, sold in the AppExchange marketplace and provides a way for banking customers to do business online, taking advantage of all that Salesforce has built to do that.

The acquisition strategy

Another big contributing factor to the company’s success is that beyond the core CRM product, it brought to the table way back in 1999, it has built a broad set of marketing, sales and service tools and as it has done that, it has acquired many companies along the way to accelerate the product road map.

The biggest of those acquisitions by far was the $15.7 billion Tableau deal, which closed just about a year ago. Taylor sees data fueling the push to digital we are seeing during the pandemic, and Tableau is a key part of that.

“Tableau is so strategic, both from a revenue and also from a technology strategy perspective,” he said. That’s because as companies make the shift to digital, it becomes more important than ever to help them visualize and understand that data in order to understand their customer’s requirements better.

“Fundamentally when you look at what a company needs to do to thrive in an all-digital world, it needs to be able respond to [rapid] changes, which means creating a culture around that data,” he said. This enables companies to respond more quickly to changes like new customer demands or shifts in the supply chain.

“All of that is about data, and I think the reason why Tableau grew so much this past quarter is that I think that the conversation around data when you’re digitizing your entire company and digitizing the entire economy, data is more strategic than it ever was,” he said.

With that purchase, combined with the $6.5 billion MuleSoft acquisition in 2018, the company feels like it has a way to capture and visualize data wherever it lives in the enterprise. “It’s worth noting how complementary MuleSoft and Tableau are together. I think of MuleSoft as unlocking all your enterprise data, whether it’s on a legacy system or a modern system, and Tableau enables us to understand it, and so it’s a really strategic overall value proposition because we can come up with a really complete solution around data,” Taylor said.

Capitalism with some heart

Benioff was happy to point out in an appearance on Mad Money Tuesday that even as he has made charity and volunteerism a core part of his organization, he has still delivered solid returns for his shareholders. He told Mad Money host Jim Cramer, “This is a victory for stakeholder capitalism. It shows you can do good and do well.” This is a statement he has made frequently in the past to show that you can be a good corporate citizen and give back to your community, while still making money.

Those values are what separates the company from the pack says Paul Greenberg, founder and principal analyst at 56 Group and author of CRM at the Speed of Light. “Salesforce’s genius, and a large part of the reason I don’t expect any serious slowdown in that extraordinary growth, is that they manage to align the technology business with corporate social responsibility in a way that makes them stand out from any other company,” Greenberg told TechCrunch.

Yesterday’s numbers come after Q12021 in which the company offered softer guidance as it was giving some of its customers, suffering from the impact of the pandemic, more financial flexibility. As it turns out, that didn’t seem to hurt them, and the guidance for next quarter is looking good too: $5.24 billion to $5.25 billion, up approximately 16% year over year, according to the company.

It’s worth noting that while Benioff pledged no new layoffs for 90 days at the start of the pandemic, with that time now ending, the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the company was planning to eliminate 1000 roles out of the organization’s 54,000 total employees, while giving those workers 60 days to find other roles in the company.

Getting to $20 billion

Certainly getting to that $20 billion run rate is significant, as is the speed with which they were able to achieve that goal, but Taylor sees an evolving company, one that is different than the one it was in 2017 when Benioff set that goal.

“I would say the reason we’ve been able to accelerate is through organic [growth], innovation and acquisitions to really build out this vision of a complete customer [picture]. I think it’s more important than ever before,” he said.

He says that when you look at the way the platform has changed, it’s been about bringing multiple customer experience capabilities together under a single umbrella, and giving customers the tools they need to build these out.

“I think we as a company have constantly redefined what customer relationship management means. It’s not just opportunity management for sales teams. It’s customer service, it’s eCommerce, it’s digital marketing, it’s B2B, it’s B2C. It’s. all of the above,” he said.