Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Porsche is rolling out a less expensive subscription plan in four U.S. cities as the German automaker experiments with different pricing and products in an effort to expand its customer base.

Porsche now has three plans, or tiers, that are all housed under its newly rebranded Porsche Drive vehicle subscription program. This new plan, called Porsche Drive-single vehicle subscription, squeezes in between two other existing tiers.

The most robust plan is Porsche Drive – Multi-Vehicle Subscription, which offers customers the ability to swap through a variety of vehicles on a monthly basis. The multi-vehicle plan costs $2,100 or $3,100 a month, depending on whether the customer wants access to its high-performance models like the 911. Then there’s Porsche Drive – Rental, which as the name indicates, offers shorter-term rentals. The price of the rental depends on the vehicle and starts at about $245 daily for the Macan to $2,415 for weekly use of a 911.

The new single-vehicle plan is less expensive than the multi-vehicle plan, but that doesn’t mean it’s cheap. The single-vehicle plan starts at $1,500 a month for the Macan and pops all the way up to $2,600 a month for the Porsche 911. All of the plans require a $595 activation fee unless a customer commits to the single-vehicle plan for at least three months.

Notably, no amount of money will get customers access to the all-electric Porsche Taycan. It’s the one vehicle not available in any of the plans.

This middle tier single-vehicle subscription program will be offered to customers in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix and San Diego. Customers who opt for this plan will have access to a single Porsche model for one or three months, beginning September 25. Like the other Porsche Drive programs, the monthly fee for the single-vehicle plan covers the vehicle, delivery, insurance and service.

The subscription program, formerly known as Passport, was first launched in 2017 in Atlanta. During the pilot, the average subscription has been about four months. The most common reason customers suspended their membership was because of extended travel plans, according to the company. The initial aim was to build a new customer base of Porsche owners by offering a product that was flexible. It attracted enough interest that Porsche expanded the program to several other important U.S. markets, such as Phoenix and San Diego. Now, it’s pushing into Los Angeles.

“If California were a country, it would be our fifth-largest market in the world. After bringing Porsche Drive to San Diego last summer, Los Angeles was an obvious choice to allow customers to experience a variety of Porsche sports cars and SUVs at the touch of an app. Now, in addition to our Porsche Experience Center Los Angeles track, LA residents or those visiting LA have another way to enjoy a Porsche,” said Klaus Zellmer, president and CEO of PCNA.

Porsche contends that data shows the subscription program has been successful. The company said 80% of participants have been new to Porsche, many are younger than the average age for current Porsche buyers or lessees and more than one-third enroll for at least four months. Porsche said it added the single-vehicle option based on data that show some members prefer to stay in one model instead of switching vehicles.

COVID-19 is proving to be a massive driver for robotics investments — and for good reason. Robots don’t call in sick, and they’re far less likely to be disease vectors than their human counterparts. Companies attempting to keep the lights on during this and potential future pandemics are no doubt taking a serious looking at ways to automate their work forces.

Anecdotally, I’ve been seeing an uptick in interest and raises, particularly the warehouse and logistic categories. Amazon’s successful embrace of a growing robotic workforce has no doubt been an inspiration for companies large and small, and VCs are certainly sitting up and taking notice of the phenomenon.

This week, XYZ Robotics is benefiting, announcing a $17 million Series A+. The round comes courtesy of Source Code Capital, Gaorong Capital and Morningside Capital. XYZ says it will be using the money for research and development, biz dev and scaling up its operational capabilities. The round brings the company’s total funding up to $27 million. Those are some pretty impressive totals for a company founded as recently as May 2018.

We visited the company’s humble Massachusetts offices this year to chat with the company about their pick-and-place tech. XYZ is one of countless companies working to perfect the technology, differentiating itself with its vision system and a dexterous system of swappable grippers that can be replaced on the fly.

Netflix’s children’s programming library continues to grow, and its latest is one of its best original offerings yet – Emily’s Wonder Lab, a TV series hosted by engineer, space expert and Emmy-nominated TV science host Emily Calandrelli. The new show’s first season of 10 episodes is now available to stream in its entirety, and each sub-15 minute episode focuses on STEAM topics and experiments that kids can do with their parents at home.

I spoke to Calandrelli (who, I should note, we were lucky enough to have as a past contributor at TechCrunch) about her new show. Wonder Lab is the realization of a show concept that she’s been pitching for years, and she explained why the time – and Netflix – was right for it to come to life now.

“I’ve been wanting to bring science to younger kids for a while now,” says Calendrelli, who has hosted Exploration Outer Space on Fox for older youth viewers for years. “Netflix recently said that they wanted to work with us, and we developed this concept together with Netflix. It’s all about me being myself – there’s no acting involved. This is me being myself, and kids being their curious selves, and and in each episode I do one larger-than-life experiment, and then one at home experiment for the viewers to be able to do with materials they have around their home.”

The episodes are short, but they pack in a lot of information – and even though it’s programming designed for pre-school aged kids, Emily’s Wonder Lab doesn’t talk down to kids like you might see in a lot of other programming aimed at the same demographic.

“We do not shy away from the science in the episode – I will always try to put in more science than mostTV Hollywood producers will allow,” Calandrelli explained. “Netflix was actually very, very cool with just being like, ‘Yeah, you can, you can talk about anything you want, go ahead.’ As long as we explain it in a way that you don’t need to understand anything coming in, and just explain it in a way that a kid would understand, it made it into the show. I was very thankful, because some of the feedback we had gotten in the past from other networks, who we pitched similar shows to, was that it was just too science-y for their audience – which is frustrating feedback to get when you think that we really need a lot more science appreciation in the next generation.”

Calandrelli also points out that though the timing was coincidental, the show is actually really great as a resource for people doing their best to keep their kids learning, and spending their time in creative pursuits. The show’s format is all about setting up an educational premise, and then providing all the guidance you need to perform an experiment at home that demonstrates the theory at work, using readily available household goods.

While the show came about in part because of Calandrelli’s work on Bill Nye’s Netflix original show Bill Nye Saves The World, Calandrelli says that one of the best parts of bringing it to life has been how open Netflix has been to working with her vision. That’s a markedly different experience from what she encountered when shopping earlier versions of the show around to other networks, she says.

“In previous pitch meetings with large science networks, I’ve often gotten the feedback that the people who watch science shows are predominantly male,” she told me. “So in these pitch meetings, the feedback I often get is, unfortunately, ‘Our audience is primarily male, and so they won’t be able to relate to a female host’ – that’s the reason that I’m given for why they don’t want my show. So to have a platform like Netflix be excited to have a female host a science show on their network really feels like a win.”

Gig Workers Collective, a gig worker-activist group led by Instacart shoppers, is asking Instacart to provide disaster relief to workers impacted by natural disasters.

The demands come at a time when several parts of California are engulfed in flames. The three biggest fires, the LNU Lightning Complex, SCU Lightning Complex and CZU Lightning Complex, have collectively destroyed 1,225 structures and claimed the lives of five people, according to the San Francisco Chronicle’s fire tracker.

In light of the wildfires and other anticipated climate change-related disasters, Instacart workers want the company to provide disaster pay at a daily rate equal to the average rate of daily pay, including tips, over the previous 30 days for each day Instacart’s operations are shutdown. Additionally, GWC wants Instacart to shut down its operations in markets where a city has declared a state of emergency or issued evacuations.

“Thousands of gig workers in California alone have been displaced, or seen the demand for their services dwindle in the face of natural disasters,” GWC wrote on Medium today. “Instacart can unilaterally shut down operations without paying its impacted workforce a dime, leaving displaced workers to fend for themselves. It is shameful that a company that became profitable for the first time during the pandemic off of the backs of its workers, has abandoned those very same workers during their time of need.”

These demands come shortly after Instacart agreed to distribute $727,985 among some San Francisco-based Instacart workers as part of a settlement pertaining to health care and paid sick leave benefits.

This group of workers also argues Instacart workers should be classified as employees, which would make them entitled to certain benefits, like paid sick leave, health care, unemployment benefits and more.

TechCrunch has reached out to Instacart for comment. We will update this story if we hear back.

Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev recently sparked controversy when he told the New York Times that lower participation in equity markets by younger Americans “ultimately contributed to the sort of the massive inequalities that we’re seeing in society.”

In his 2015 book “The Economics of Inequality,” Thomas Piketty argues that when the growth rate of invested capital outpaces the growth of GDP (and the average per-capita earnings), income inequality will increase. Where Vlad Tenev missed the mark is neglecting to note that while participation in equity markets is key to building wealth, a prerequisite to investment is having capital to invest in the first place.

Structural changes (including access to affordable health care, job training, higher wages, expanding infrastructure, and other public policy initiatives) are necessary to combat systemic inequality. But innovations in fintech can supplement these policies by providing tools that can give people access to wealth-building investment opportunities at the individual level. While these advancements aren’t a substitute for the macro forces necessary to bring societal change, they can help provide one opportunity to remove barriers individuals have faced.

The age of fintech and the millennial investor

Despite recent controversy around the zero-commission stock trading revenue model, fintech investment apps have given retail investors unprecedented access to the stock market. This is especially true for younger investors, who lag behind other generations in terms of expected wealth.

Popular fintech apps like Acorns, Public and Robinhood have created a niche for millennials and Gen Z retail investors looking to begin investing in the stock market. Since the pandemic hit, Robinhood alone has acquired more than six million first-time investors, with an average age of 31.

Similar trends are emerging in other asset classes that have traditionally not been accessible to retail investors. For example, according to EY, real estate crowdfunding investments have doubled to more than $8 billion since 2016. Commercial real estate in the U.S. was valued at around $16 trillion in 2018. That’s about half the size of the U.S. stock market during the same time period.

Real estate is a critical asset class for wealth building: Approximately 90% of millionaires have made their money from investments in real estate. This can partly be explained by the fact that the asset class is so siloed: Historically, only wealthy investors could access these opportunities.

A few fintech companies have emerged in the real estate space in attempts to widen access to the asset class, but to-date none have truly opened up the market to the everyday investor.

Lowering the cost of participation

So what does this mean? If everyone can access real estate investment opportunities, can they all become millionaires? Probably not. But if circumstances allow anyone to access the tools and educational resources to achieve financial stability, then acquiring wealth becomes much more plausible.

Financial literacy and access are key components in the establishment of stable financial footing. Also important is eliminating many of the costs associated with being in the lower earning brackets — often referred to as the “poverty tax.”

An industry-wide push toward commission-free trading is a prime example of fintech removing these costs of participation. A $10 trade fee on a $100,000 trade is nominal, yet that $10 becomes significant for a share purchase of $100; you would need a 20% gain just to cover your transaction costs. Yet the zero-commission and fractional share models haven’t seen widespread adoption in real estate investment markets.

Of all traditional asset classes, real estate remains one of the costliest to participate. The adoption of zero-commission and low-cost share models have the greatest potential to echo what is happening in the stock market: Opening doors to everyday investors.

What’s next?

It’s only a matter of time before we see the junction of real estate and fintech take shape.

This is one area where technology can make a material difference. According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, fintech solutions like algorithmic lending reduce some of the barriers that have made it difficult, historically, to purchase a home.

The study found that leading fintech products don’t completely solve the problem, given the deeper underlying systemic issues. However, they do reduce rate disparities by more than a third.

As these companies open up new investment opportunities and reduce the buy-in costs, we will hopefully see a greater share of wealth being accumulated by those who create the value that underlies equity investments: everyday Americans.

Based on the history of limited access and the current absence of investment opportunities, it’s a fair argument that exposure to new wealth-building tools and financial literacy — in a tech-powered, millennial-friendly way — can help solve the barrier-to-entry problem and open up access to more stable investments.

With over 24 million users across Stash, Acorns and Robinhood — many of them overlapping — there’s no shortage of interest in tech-enabled investing. The average Acorns investor, for instance, is 29 years old and makes $50,000 a year — a far cry from the accredited investor’s minimum salary of $200,000.

Don’t be surprised to see these new investors seek out holdings in alternative assets like real estate, energy and more. It’s all about access, quality of offerings, education and user experience.

Fintech founders often like to overstate the level of social good their products can bring. We, as two real estate fintech founders, believe that we can help individuals on a person-by-person micro level, but larger structural change outside of tech is also necessary if we want to see real, widespread improvement. It goes without saying that tech alone won’t change deeply embedded structures, but it sure can open a lot of doors.

Robinhood founder Vlad Tenev recently sparked controversy when he told the New York Times that lower participation in equity markets by younger Americans “ultimately contributed to the sort of the massive inequalities that we’re seeing in society.”

In his 2015 book “The Economics of Inequality,” Thomas Piketty argues that when the growth rate of invested capital outpaces the growth of GDP (and the average per-capita earnings), income inequality will increase. Where Vlad Tenev missed the mark is neglecting to note that while participation in equity markets is key to building wealth, a prerequisite to investment is having capital to invest in the first place.

Structural changes (including access to affordable health care, job training, higher wages, expanding infrastructure, and other public policy initiatives) are necessary to combat systemic inequality. But innovations in fintech can supplement these policies by providing tools that can give people access to wealth-building investment opportunities at the individual level. While these advancements aren’t a substitute for the macro forces necessary to bring societal change, they can help provide one opportunity to remove barriers individuals have faced.

The age of fintech and the millennial investor

Despite recent controversy around the zero-commission stock trading revenue model, fintech investment apps have given retail investors unprecedented access to the stock market. This is especially true for younger investors, who lag behind other generations in terms of expected wealth.

Popular fintech apps like Acorns, Public and Robinhood have created a niche for millennials and Gen Z retail investors looking to begin investing in the stock market. Since the pandemic hit, Robinhood alone has acquired more than six million first-time investors, with an average age of 31.

Similar trends are emerging in other asset classes that have traditionally not been accessible to retail investors. For example, according to EY, real estate crowdfunding investments have doubled to more than $8 billion since 2016. Commercial real estate in the U.S. was valued at around $16 trillion in 2018. That’s about half the size of the U.S. stock market during the same time period.

Real estate is a critical asset class for wealth building: Approximately 90% of millionaires have made their money from investments in real estate. This can partly be explained by the fact that the asset class is so siloed: Historically, only wealthy investors could access these opportunities.

A few fintech companies have emerged in the real estate space in attempts to widen access to the asset class, but to-date none have truly opened up the market to the everyday investor.

Lowering the cost of participation

So what does this mean? If everyone can access real estate investment opportunities, can they all become millionaires? Probably not. But if circumstances allow anyone to access the tools and educational resources to achieve financial stability, then acquiring wealth becomes much more plausible.

Financial literacy and access are key components in the establishment of stable financial footing. Also important is eliminating many of the costs associated with being in the lower earning brackets — often referred to as the “poverty tax.”

An industry-wide push toward commission-free trading is a prime example of fintech removing these costs of participation. A $10 trade fee on a $100,000 trade is nominal, yet that $10 becomes significant for a share purchase of $100; you would need a 20% gain just to cover your transaction costs. Yet the zero-commission and fractional share models haven’t seen widespread adoption in real estate investment markets.

Of all traditional asset classes, real estate remains one of the costliest to participate. The adoption of zero-commission and low-cost share models have the greatest potential to echo what is happening in the stock market: Opening doors to everyday investors.

What’s next?

It’s only a matter of time before we see the junction of real estate and fintech take shape.

This is one area where technology can make a material difference. According to a study from the University of California, Berkeley, fintech solutions like algorithmic lending reduce some of the barriers that have made it difficult, historically, to purchase a home.

The study found that leading fintech products don’t completely solve the problem, given the deeper underlying systemic issues. However, they do reduce rate disparities by more than a third.

As these companies open up new investment opportunities and reduce the buy-in costs, we will hopefully see a greater share of wealth being accumulated by those who create the value that underlies equity investments: everyday Americans.

Based on the history of limited access and the current absence of investment opportunities, it’s a fair argument that exposure to new wealth-building tools and financial literacy — in a tech-powered, millennial-friendly way — can help solve the barrier-to-entry problem and open up access to more stable investments.

With over 24 million users across Stash, Acorns and Robinhood — many of them overlapping — there’s no shortage of interest in tech-enabled investing. The average Acorns investor, for instance, is 29 years old and makes $50,000 a year — a far cry from the accredited investor’s minimum salary of $200,000.

Don’t be surprised to see these new investors seek out holdings in alternative assets like real estate, energy and more. It’s all about access, quality of offerings, education and user experience.

Fintech founders often like to overstate the level of social good their products can bring. We, as two real estate fintech founders, believe that we can help individuals on a person-by-person micro level, but larger structural change outside of tech is also necessary if we want to see real, widespread improvement. It goes without saying that tech alone won’t change deeply embedded structures, but it sure can open a lot of doors.

One of the areas of autonomous driving technology with the most potential to have a near-term and dramatic impact remains trucking: There’s a growing lack of drivers for long-haul routes, and highway trucking remains a relatively uncomplicated (though still very challenging) type of driving for AV systems to tackle.

Many companies are pursuing the challenge of autonomous trucking, but TuSimple and Waymo are leading the pack. TuSimple CTO Dr. Xiaodi You, who co-founded the company in 2015, and Waymo’s Boris Sofman, who leads the company’s autonomous trucking engineering efforts, will both join us at TC Sessions: Mobility on our virtual stage. The event takes place October 6-7, and we’re excited to hear from these two technology leaders working at the forefront of the industry.

TuSimple has accomplished a lot since its debut five years ago, including recently laying the groundwork for a U.S.-wide network of shipping routes in partnership with UPS, Xpress, food service supply company McLane and Penske Truck Leasing. The company is also seeking a sizable new funding round to help it scale, while actively testing with regular routes between Arizona and Texas.

Waymo, which originated at Google as that company’s self-driving car project before spinning out under parent entity Alphabet, adding self-driving trucks to the list of technologies it’s developing in 2017. Sofman joined in 2019, when Waymo hired on much of the engineering talent from his prior company, smart toy robotics maker Anki. Sofman’s resume also includes developing off-road autonomous vehicles, which likely comes in handy as Waymo seeks to roll out testing of its autonomous long-haul trucks across Texas and New Mexico.

In case you’re wondering, this won’t just be one long webinar. We have some technical tricks up our sleeves that will bring all of what you’d expect from our in-person events, from the informative panels and provocative one-on-one interviews to the networking and even a pitch-off session. While virtual isn’t the same as our events in the past, it has provided one massive benefit: democratizing access.

If you’re a startup or investor based in Europe, Africa, Australia, South America or another region in the U.S., you can listen in, network and connect with other participants here in Silicon Valley.

Get your tickets for TC Sessions: Mobility to hear from Bryan Salesky, along with several other fantastic speakers from Porsche, Waymo, Lyft and more. Tickets are just $145 for a limited time, with discounts for groups, students and exhibiting startups. We hope to see you there!

When Snowflake filed its S-1 to go public yesterday, it wasn’t exactly a shock. The company which raised $1.4 billion had been valued at $12.4 billion in its last private raise in February. CEO Frank Slootman, who had taken over from Bob Muglia in May last year, didn’t hide the fact that going public was the end game.

When we spoke to him in February at the time of his mega $479 million raise, he was candid about the fact he wanted to take his company to the next level, and predicted it could happen as soon as this summer. In spite of the pandemic and the economic fallout from it, the company decided now was the time to go — as did 4 other companies yesterday including J Frog, Sumo Logic, Unity and Asana.

If you haven’t been following this company as it went through its massive private fund raising process, investors see a company taking a way to store massive amounts of data and moving it to the cloud. This concept is known as a cloud data warehouse as it it stores immense amounts of data.

While the Big 3 cloud companies all offer something similar, Snowflake has the advantage of working on any cloud, and at a time where data portability is highly valued, enables customers to shift data between clouds.

We spoke to several industry experts to get their thoughts on what this filing means for Snowflake, which after taking a blizzard of cash, has to now take a great idea and shift it into the public markets.

Pandemic? What pandemic?

Big market opportunities usually require big investments to build companies that last, that typically go public, and that’s why investors were willing to pile up the dollars to help Snowflake grow. Blake Murray, a research analyst at Canalys says the pandemic is actually working in the startup’s favor as more companies are shifting workloads to the cloud.

“We know that demand for cloud services is higher than ever during this pandemic, which is an obvious positive for Snowflake. Snowflake also services multi-cloud environments, which we see in increasing adoption. Considering the speed it is growing at and the demand for its services, an IPO should help Snowflake continue its momentum,” Murray told TechCrunch.

Leyla Seka, a partner at Operator Collective, who spent many years at Salesforce agrees that the pandemic is forcing many companies to move to the cloud faster than they might have previously. “COVID is a strange motivator for enterprise SaaS. It is speeding up adoption in a way I have never seen before,” she said.

It’s clear to Seka that we’ve moved quickly past the early cloud adopters, and it’s in the mainstream now where a company like Snowflake is primed to take advantage. “Keep in mind, I was at Salesforce for years telling businesses their data was safe in the cloud. So we certainly have crossed the chasm, so to speak and are now in a rapid adoption phase,” she said.

So much coopetition

The fact is Snowflake is in an odd position when it comes to the big cloud infrastructure vendors. It both competes with them on a product level, and as a company that stores massive amounts of data, it is also an excellent customer for all of them. It’s kind of a strange position to be in says Canalys’ Murray.

“Snowflake both relies on the infrastructure of cloud giants — AWS, Microsoft and Google — and competes with them. It will be important to keep an eye on the competitive dynamic even although Snowflake is a large customer for the giants,” he explained.

Forrester analyst Noel Yuhanna agrees, but says the IPO should help Snowflake take on these companies as they expand their own cloud data warehouse offerings. He added that in spite of that competition, Snowflake is holding its own against the big companies. In fact, he says that it’s the number one cloud data warehouse clients inquire about, other than Amazon RedShift. As he points out, Snowflake has some key advantages over the cloud vendors’ solutions.

“Based on Forrester Wave research that compared over a dozen vendors, Snowflake has been positioned as a Leader. Enterprises like Snowflake’s ease of use, low cost, scalability and performance capabilities. Unlike many cloud data warehouses, Snowflake can run on multiple clouds such as Amazon, Google or Azure, giving enterprises choices to choose their preferred provider.”

Show them more money

In spite of the vast sums of money the company has raised in the private market, it had decided to go public to get one final chunk of capital. Patrick Moorhead, founder and principal analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy says that if the company is going to succeed in the broader market, it needs to expand beyond pure cloud data warehousing, in spite of the huge opportunity there.

“Snowflake needs the funding as it needs to expand its product footprint to encompass more than just data warehousing. It should be focused less on niches and more on the entire data lifecycle including data ingest, engineering, database and AI,” Moorhead said.

Forrester’s Yuhanna agrees that Snowflake needs to look at new markets and the IPO will give it the the money to do that. “The IPO will help Snowflake expand it’s innovation path, especially to support new and emerging business use cases, and possibly look at new market opportunities such as expanding to on-premises to deliver hybrid-cloud capabilities,” he said.

It would make sense for the company to expand beyond its core offerings as it heads into the public markets, but the cloud data warehouse market is quite lucrative on its own. It’s a space that has required a considerable amount of investment to build a company, but as it heads towards its IPO, Snowflake is should be well positioned to be a successful company for years to come.

Founders are encouraged, incentivized and pressured to begin transacting with customers as quickly as possible to drive growth and revenue. But making legal mistakes early in the game can create costly liabilities down the road.

That’s why we invited James Alonso from Magnolia Law and Adam Zagaris from Moonshot Legal to join us at TechCrunch Early Stage to give us a 360 overview of the legal side of running a startup. We’ve shared highlights from their presentations below, along with a video of the entire panel discussion.

Corporate law 101 for startup founders

James Alonso gave us a presentation on company formation and getting funding. Maybe you’ve already created your startup, but if you’re still working on your own and don’t have any clients or employees yet, these tips are essential before you get your startup off the ground.

When you’re setting up a new company, it forces you to have a discussion about capital structure — who owns shares, how many shares and what kind of shares. There isn’t a single way to design a company on this front and we’ll look at some options later in this article. And because you’re starting a startup, you want to structure your company in a way that makes future financing easy.

Setting up a company also lets you put your IP in a single entity that you’re sharing with other shareholders. “One of the key things you’re doing when you’re forming a company is assigning the IP related to that company into a single entity that holds it all,” Alonso said.

Each year, LinkedIn tracks the top emerging jobs and roles in the U.S.

The top four roles of 2020 — AI specialist, robotics engineer, data scientist and full-stack engineer — are all closely affiliated with driving forward technological innovation. Today, we’d like to recognize number five on the list, without which innovation in any domain would not be possible: the site reliability engineer (SRE).

We see the emergence of site reliability engineers not as a new trend, but one closely coupled with the theme of DevOps over the last decade. As coined, it was supposed to be something that you do and not something that you are. However, as time has passed, DevOps has found its way into roles and titles, often replacing “application production support” or “production engineering.”

What we are seeing now and predicting into the future is the rise of site reliability engineer as a title relating to the practice of DevOps and better describing the work to be done. At the time of our writing, there are more than 9,000 open roles for SREs on LinkedIn, a number that is only growing.

Software focused on helping engineers ensure reliability and uptime isn’t a new phenomenon, and the market has supported numerous billion-plus dollar exits, including companies like AppDynamics and Datadog . Nonetheless, we see an impending tipping point in tooling catering to the SRE persona across their entire workflow. We’ll discuss why the market is taking off and share our view of the landscape and the many inspired founders building technology to transform the practice of reliability — a foundational block for innovation across every industry.

Why now?

• The service is the product: As more applications have moved to being delivered as a service, moving from the realm of IT to SaaS, the service itself has become the product. Anything delivered as a service must keep an eye toward the old, basic concept of customer service. This shift began at the application layer (e.g., Salesforce, Workday, ServiceNow) and over time has spread to infrastructure layer software (e.g., Datadog, HashiCorp) and has even impacted on-prem software. As Grant Miller, CEO at Replicated, put it further, “Traditional on-prem software vendors have transitioned away from delivering binary executables (.jar, .war, .exe, etc.) and expecting their customers to set up the necessary components manually. Now, vendors are leveraging Kubernetes as the substrate to deliver a much more automated and reliable experience to their customers, and redefining what ‘on-prem software’ traditionally meant.”