Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Most gamers may not view Apple as a games company to the same degree that they see Sony with PlayStation or Microsoft with Xbox, but the iPhone-maker continues to uniformly drive the industry with decisions made in the Apple App Store.

The company made the news a couple times late this week for App Store approvals. Once for denying a gaming app, and the other for approving one.

The denial was Microsoft’s xCloud gaming app, something the Xbox folks weren’t too psyched about. Microsoft xCloud is one of the Xbox’s most substantial software platform plays in quite some time, allowing gamers to live-stream titles from the cloud and play console-quality games across a number of devices. It’s a huge effort that’s been in preview for a bit, but is likely going to officially launch next month. The app had been in a Testflight preview for iOS, but as Microsoft looked to push it to primetime, Apple said not so fast.

The app that was approved was the Facebook Gaming app which Facebook has been trying to shove through the App Store for months to no avail. It was at last approved Friday after the company stripped one of its two central features, a library of playable mobile games. In a curt statement to The New York Times, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said, “Unfortunately, we had to remove gameplay functionality entirely in order to get Apple’s approval on the stand-alone Facebook Gaming app.”

Microsoft’s Xbox team also took the unusually aggressive step of calling out Apple in a statement that reads, in-part, “Apple stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. And it consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content.”

Microsoft is still a $1.61 trillion company so don’t think I’m busting out the violin for them, but iOS is the world’s largest gaming platform, something CEO Tim Cook proudly proclaimed when the company launched its own game subscription platform, Apple Arcade, last year. Apple likes to play at its own pace, and all of these game-streaming platforms popping up at the same time seem poised to overwhelm them.

There are a few things about cloud gaming apps that seem at odds with some of the App Store’s rules, yet these rules are, of course, just guidelines written by Apple.  For Apple’s part, they basically said (full statement later) that the App Store had curators for a reason and that approving apps like these means they can’t individually review the apps which compromises the App Store experience.

To say that’s “the reason” seems disingenuous because the company has long approved platforms to operate on the App Store without stamping approval on the individual pieces of content that can be accessed. With “Games” representing the App Store’s most popular category, Apple likely cares much more about keeping their own money straight.

Analysis from CNBC pinned Apple’s 2019 App Store total revenue at $50 billion.

When these cloud gaming platforms like xCloud scale with zero iOS support, millions of Apple customers, myself included, are actually going to be pissed that their iPhone can’t do something that their friend’s phone can. Playing console-class titles on the iPhone would be a substantial feature upgrade for consumers. There are about 90 million Xbox Live users out there, a substantial number of which are iPhone owners I would imagine. The games industry is steadily rallying around game subscription networks and cloud gaming as a move to encourage consumers to sample more titles and discover more indie hits.

I’ve seen enough of these sagas to realize that sometimes parties will kick off these fights purely as a tactic to get their way in negotiations and avoid workarounds, but it’s a tactic that really only works when consumers have a reason to care. Most of the bigger App Store developer spats have played in the background and come to light later, but at this point the Xbox team undoubtedly sees that Apple isn’t positioned all that well to wage an App Store war in the midst of increased antitrust attention over a cause that seems wholly focused on maintaining their edge in monetizing the games consumers play on Apple screens.

CEO Tim Cook spent an awful lot of time in his Congressional Zoom room answering question about perceived anticompetitiveness on the company’s application storefront.

The big point of tension I could see happening behind closed doors is that plenty of these titles offer in-game transactions and just because that in-app purchase framework is being live-streamed from a cloud computer doesn’t mean that a user isn’t still using experiencing that content on an Apple device. I’m not sure whether this is actually the point of contention, but it seems like it would be a major threat to Apple’s ecosystem-wide in-app purchase raking.

The App Store does not currently support cloud gaming on Nvidia’s GeForce platform or Google’s Stadia which are also both available on Android phones. Both of these platforms are more limited in scope than Microsoft’s offering which is expected to launch with wider support and pick up wider adoption.

While I can understand Apple’s desire to not have gaming titles ship that might not function properly on an iPhone because of system constraints, that argument doesn’t apply so well to the cloud gaming world where apps are translating button presses to the cloud and the cloud is sending them back the next engine-rendered frames of their game. Apple is being forced to get pretty particular about what media types of apps fall under the “reader” designation. The inherent interactivity of a cloud gaming platform seems to be the differentiation Apple is pushing here — as well as the interfaces that allows gamers to directly launch titles with an interface that’s far more specialized than some generic remote desktop app.

All of these platforms arrive after the company already launched Apple Arcade, a non-cloud gaming product made in the image of what Apple would like to think are the values it fosters in the gaming world: family friendly indie titles with no intrusive ads, no bothersome micro-transactions and Apple’s watchful review.

Apple’s driver’s seat position in the gaming world has been far from a wholly positive influence for the industry. Apple has acted as a gatekeeper, but the fact is plenty of the “innovations” pushed through as a result of App Store policies have been great for Apple but questionable for the development of a gamer-friendly games industry.

Apple facilitated the advent of free-to-play games by pushing in-app purchases which have been abused recklessly over the years as studios have been irresistibly pushed to structure their titles around principles of addiction. Mobile gaming has been one of the more insane areas of Wild West startup growth over the past decade and Apple’s mechanics for fueling quick transactions inside these titles has moved fast and broken things.

Take a look at the 200 top grossing games in the App Store (data via Sensor Tower) and you’ll see that all 199 of them rely solely on in-app micro-transaction to reach that status — Microsoft’s Minecraft, ranked 50th costs $6.99 to download, though it also offers in-app purchases.

In 2013, the company settled a class-action lawsuit that kicked off after parents sued Apple for making it too easy for kids to make in-app purchases. In 2014, Apple settled a case with the FTC over the same mechanism for $32 million. This year, a lawsuit filed against Apple questioned the legality of “loot box” in-app purchases which gave gamers randomized digital awards.

“Through the games it sells and offers for free to consumers through its AppStore, Apple engages in predatory practices enticing consumers, including children to engage in gambling and similar addictive conduct in violation of this and other laws designed to protect consumers and to prohibit such practices,” read that most recent lawsuit filing.

This is, of course, not how Apple sees its role in the gaming industry. In a statement to Business Insider responding to the company’s denial of Microsoft’s xCloud, Apple laid out its messaging.

The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great business opportunity for all developers. Before they go on our store, all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines that are intended to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to developers.

Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone and iPad users over the web through Safari and other browsers on the App Store.

The impact has — quite obviously — not been uniformly negative, but Apple has played fast and loose with industry changes when they benefit the mothership. I won’t act like plenty of Sony and Microsoft’s actions over the years haven’t offered similar affronts to gamers, but Apple exercises the industry-wide sway it holds, operating the world’s largest gaming platform, too often and gamers should be cautious in trusting the App Store owner to make decisions that have their best interests at heart.

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Timothy Bouré and his co-founder Geoffrey Lucks were both near broke when they moved to Dallas to join the first accelerator they entered after forming VenoStent, a company that aims to improve outcomes for dialysis patients.

Failed dialysis surgeries occur in roughly 55% to 65% of patients with end-stage renal disease, according to the company. Caring for these patients can cost the Medicare and Medicaid Services system roughly $2 billion per year — and Bouré and Lucks believed that they’d come up with a solution.

So after years developing the technology at the core of VenoStent’s business at Vanderbilt University, the two men relocated from Nashville to South Texas to make their business work.

Bouré had first started working on the technology at the heart of VenoStent’s offering as part of his dissertation in 2012. Lucks, a graduate student at the business school was introduced to the material scientist and became convinced that VenoStent was on the verge of having a huge impact for the medical community. Five years later, the two were in Dallas where they met the chief of vascular surgery at Houston Medicine and were off to the races.

A small seed round in 2018 kept the company going and a successful animal trial near the end of the year gave it the momentum it needed to push forward. Now, as it graduates from the latest Y Combinator cohort, the company is finally ready for prime time.

In the interim, a series of grants and its award of a Kidney XPrize kept the company in business.

The success was hard won, as Bouré spent nearly three sleepless nights in the J-Labs, Johnson and Johnson’s  medical technology and innovation accelerator in Houston, synthesizing polymers and printing the sleeve stents that the company makes to keep replace the risky and failure-prone surgeries for end stage kidney disease patients.

The key discovery that Bouré made was around a new type of polymer that can be used to support cell growth as it heals from the dialysis surgery.

In 2012, Bouré stumbled upon the polymer that would be the foundation for the work. Then, in 2014, he did the National Science Foundation Core program and started thinking about the wrap for blood vessels. Through a series of discussions with vascular surgeons he realized that the problem was especially acute for end stage renal disease patients.

Already the company has raised $2.4 million in grant funding and small equity infusions. and the KidneyX Prize from the Department of Health and Human Services and the American Society of Nephrology. VenoStent was one of six winners.

“It’s part of this whole ongoing effort by the executive office to improve dialysis,” said Bouré. “[They are] some of the most expensive patients to treat in the world… Basically the government is highly incentivized to find technologies that improve patient’s lives.”

Now the company is heading into its next round of animal testing and will seek to conduct its first human trials outside of the United States in 2021.

And while the company is focused on renal failure first, the materials that Bouré has developed have applications for other conditions as well. “This can be a material for the large intestine,” says Bouré. “It has tunability in terms of all its properties. And we can modify it for a particular application.”

 

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that TikTok and Twitter have held talks about a potential merger, even as the video sharing company defends itself against President Donald Trump’s pressure to force the sale of the business or potentially ban it.

As the internationally distributed video streaming version of Chinese technology developer Bytedance’s social media app, TikTok has amassed a global user of avid consumers for its short form videos, including at least 100 million users in the US.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and Bytedance have had preliminary talks about a merger of TikTok’s US operations with the publicly traded social media company. The Journal noted that Microsoft remains the front-runner for TikTok’s business in the US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and that a potential tie-up with Twitter would just be for TikTok’s North American business.

Any Twitter bid for Bytedance’s TikTok business would likely have to bolstered by additional investors, since TikTok is valued anywhere between $15 billion and $50 billion dollars — far too big a bite for Twitter, which has a market capitalization of $29 billion.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order that would force the sale of TikTok’s US operations or face being banned. So Bytedance has to find a buyer before Sept. 15, or shut the business down in the US.

So far, Twitter and Microsoft are the only reported bidders for Bytedance’s business, but others could emerge. And there’s the potential that any sale could be scuttled by lawsuits challenging the President’s executive order.

On Saturday, National Public Radio reported that TikTok is planning to do just that. The company will reportedly argue that the executive order from the President didn’t follow due process, and that its underlying argument that TikTok poses a national security threat is baseless, according to NPR.

Some prominent figures in the technology industry, like Bill Gates, are also questioning the process by which Bytedance is being forced to sell its business.

“[Having] Trump kill off the only competitor, it’s pretty bizarre,” Gates said in an interview with Wired. “[The] principle that this is proceeding on is singly strange. The cut thing, that’s doubly strange.”

If Twitter, were, by some miracle, to acquire TikTok’s US operations, it would add a huge additional pillar to the company’s business and permanently reshape the social media landscape. It would add a massive new user base and change the demographics of the company’s user base.

The irony of such a deal shouldn’t be lost on longtime tech watchers, who will remember that Twitter had the opportunity to become TikTok if it hadn’t killed the short form video streaming service, Vine.

TikTok, the video-sharing app that’s moved to the center of the economic conflict between the US and China, is planning to challenge the executive order issued by President Donald Trump that would force the sale or ban the service in the United States.

According to a report from National Public Radio yesterday, TikTok could file a federal lawsuit challenging the order as soon as Tuesday. The lawsuit is expected to be filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of California, where TikTok has its American headquarters.

TikTok will challenge the constitutionality of the ban and its underlying claims that the video sharing service represents a national security threat to the country, according to NPR’s report.

TikTok did not respond to a request for comment at the time of publication.

On Thursday, the President signed executive orders that put a 45-day deadline on American companies to unwind their business relationships with TikTok’s parent company, Bytedance, and with WeChat, the messaging service owned by Chinse tech giant, Tencent.

TikTok had already laid out its opposition to the executive order when news first broke that the President had signed it.

As TechCrunch reproted, the company said the order was “issued without any due process” and would risk “undermining global businesses’ trust in the United States’ commitment to the rule of law.” The mechanisms the White House wants to use to ban the app include the International Emergency Economic Powers Act and the National Emergencies Act. But claiming that the operations of a subsidiary of a foreign business on US soil constitutes a national emergency is highly unprecedented.

Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which was passed during the Iran hostage crisis in 1976, the President has sweeping authority to issue tariffs and suspend economic relationships with other companies.

Any challenge to the executive order needs to come soon, because Bytedance, TikTok’s parent company is also looking at how to unwind its US operations through a sale.

After the President’s executive order was announced, Microsoft said in a statement that it was in talks with Bytedance about acquiring TikTok.

Micrsofot said:

“Following a conversation between Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and President Donald J. Trump, Microsoft is prepared to continue discussions to explore a purchase of TikTok  in the United States. Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury.”

Analysts and bankers have said that TikTok’s US business could be worth anywhere from $20 billion to $50 billion, thanks to the company’s user base of over 100 million customers in the US, according to reports in Fortune.

And other bidders are emerging for TikTok’s US business as well. According to The Wall Street Journal, TikTok has also engaged in preliminary discussions with Twitter over a possible combination.

The first season of “The Umbrella Academy” had its flaws, but empathetic portrayals of its seven superhero siblings (all adults bearing the emotional scars of an upbringing under their strict adoptive father Reginald Hargreeves) more than made up for its meandering plot.

In season two, which recently launched on Netflix, the Umbrella Academy has been transported to Dallas in the early 1960s, where the Hargreeves must once again try to repair their familial bonds while also averting a nuclear apocalypse — an apocalypse that they themselves may be causing.

Once again, the show takes a while to get good, with early episodes that keep our heroes apart and take a few too many digressions into the world of the JFK assassination and Jack Ruby. But once the Umbrella Academy is reunited — and especially after they get a chance to confront a younger version their father — the story moves full speed ahead to a spectacular and moving finale.

We have plenty of praise for the show and its delightful musical numbers on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, and even get a little choked up when recapping the final episode. And before we get to our review, we discuss the news that Disney will be releasing “Mulan” on Disney+ next month, for an additional price of $29.99.

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Intro
0:36 “Mulan” discussion
18:03 “Umbrella Academy” review
40:20 “Umbrella Academy” spoiler discussion

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter for your weekend enjoyment. It’s broadly based on the weekday column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free. And it’s made just for you. You can sign up for the newsletter here. 

With that out of the way, let’s talk money, upstart companies and the latest spicy IPO rumors. 

(In time the top bit of the newsletter won’t get posted to the website, so do make sure to sign up if you want the whole thing!)

BigCommerce isn’t worried about its IPO pricing

One of the most interesting disconnects in the market today is how VC Twitter discusses successful IPOs and how the CEOs of those companies view their own public market debuts.

If you read Twitter on an IPO day, you’ll often see VCs stomping around, shouting that IPOs are a racket and that they must be taken down now. But if you dial up the CEO or CFO of the company that actually went public to strong market reception, they’ll spend five minutes telling you why all that chatter is flat wrong.

Case in point from this week: BigCommerce. Well-known VC Bill Gurley was incensed that shares of BigCommerce opened sharply higher after they started trading, compared to their IPO price. He has a point, with the Texas-based e-commerce company pricing at $24 per share (above a raised range, it should be said), but opened at $68 and is worth around $88 on Friday as I write to you.

So, when I got BigCommerce CEO Brent Bellm on Zoom after its debut, I had some questions. 

First, some background. BigCommerce filed confidentially back in 2019, planned on going public in April, and wound up delaying its offering due to the pandemic, according to Bellm. Then in the wake of COVID-19, sales from existing customers went up, and new customers arrived. So, the IPO was back on.

BigCommerce, as a reminder, is seeing growth acceleration in recent quarters, making its somewhat modest growth rate more enticing than you’d otherwise imagine.

Anyhoo, the company was worth more than 10x its annual run-rate at its IPO price if I recall the math, so it wasn’t cheap even at $24 per share. And in response to my question about pricing Bellm said that he was content with his company’s final IPO price. 

He had a few reasons, including that the IPO price sets the base point for future return calculations, that he measures success based on how well investors do in his stock over a ten-year horizon, and that the more long-term investors you successfully lock in during your roadshow, the smaller your first-day float becomes; the more investors that hold their shares after the debut, the more the supply/demand curve can skew, meaning that your stock opens higher than it otherwise might due to only scarce equity being up for purchase.

All that seems incredibly reasonable. Still, VCs are livid. 

Market Notes

The Exchange spent a lot of time on the phone this week, leading to a host of notes for your consumption. And there was a deluge of interesting data. So, here’s a digest of what we heard and saw that you should know:

• Fintech mega-rounds are heating up, with 28 in the second quarter of 2020. Total fintech rounds dipped, but it appears that the sky is still pretty much afloat for financial technology startups.
• Tech stocks set new records this week, something that has become so common that the new all-time highs for the Nasdaq didn’t really create a ripple. Hell, it’s Nasdaq 11,000, where’s our gosh darn party?
• Axios’ Dan Primack noted this week that SPACs may be raising more money than private equity at the moment, and that there were “over $1 billion in new [SPAC] filings over past 24 hours” on Wednesday. I’ve given up keeping tabs on the number of SPACs taking place, frankly.
• But we did dig into two of the more out-there SPACs, in case you wanted a taste of today’s market.
• The Exchange also spoke with the chief solutions officer of Rackspace, Matt Stoyka, before its shares had started to trade. The chat stressed post-COVID-19 momentum, and the continuing cloud transition of lots of IT spend. Rackspace intends on lowering its debt load with a chunk of its IPO proceeds. It priced at $21, the lower-end of its range, so it didn’t get an extra debut check. And as the company’s shares are sharply under its IPO price today, there was no VC chatter about mispricing, notably. (That stuff only tends to crop up when the results bend in a particular direction.)
• I also chatted with Joshua Bixby, the CEO of Fastly this week. The cloud services company wound up giving back some of its recent gains after earnings, which goes to show how the market is perhaps overpricing some public tech shares. After all, Fastly beat on Q2 profit, Q2 revenue, and raised its full-year guidance — and its shares fell? That’s wild. Perhaps the income it generates from TikTok was concerning? Or perhaps after racing from a 52 week low of $10.63 to a 52 week high of over $117, the market realized that Fastly could only accelerate so much.

Whatever the case, during our chat Fastly CEO Joshua Bixby taught me something new: Usage-based software companies are like SaaS firms, but more so.

In the old days, you’d buy a piece of software, and then own it forever. Now, it’s common to buy one-year SaaS licenses. With usage-based pricing, you make the buying choice day-to-day, which is the next step in the evolution of buying, it feels. I asked if the model isn’t, you know, harder than SaaS? He said maybe, but that you wind up super aligned with your customers. 

Various and Sundry

To wrap up, as always, here’s a final whack of data, news and other miscellania that are worth your time from the week:

• TechCrunch chatted with Intercom, which recently hired a CFO and is therefore prepping to go public. But then it said the debut is at least two years away, which was a bummer. The company wrapped its January 31, 2020 fiscal year with $150 million ARR. It’s now much larger. Go public!
• The Zenefits “mafia” raised a lot, and a little this week. “Mafia” is a terrible term, by the way. We should come up with a new one.
• Danny Crichton wrote about SaaS revenue securitization, which was cool.
• Natasha Mascarenhas wrote about learning pods, which aren’t super germane to The Exchange but struck me as incredibly topical to our current lives, so I am including the piece all the same.
• I spoke with the CEO of Wrike this week, noodling on his company’s size (over $100 million ARR), and his competitors Asana and Monday.com. The whole cohort is over $100 million ARR each, so I might turn them into a post next week entitled “Go public you cowards,” or something. But probably with a different title as I don’t want to argue with 17 internal and external PR teams about why I’m right.
• The Exchange also chatted with VC firms M13 (big on services, various domestic office locations, focus on consumer spend over time) and Coefficient Capital (D2C brand focused, super interesting thesis) this week. Our takeaway is that there is more juice, and focus on the more consumer-focused side of VC than you’d probably expect given recent data. 

We’ve blown past our 1,000 word target, so, briefly: Stay tuned to TechCrunch for a super-cool funding round on Monday (it has the fastest growth I can recall hearing about), make sure to listen to the latest Equity ep, and parse through the latest TechCrunch List updates.

Hugs, fistbumps, and good vibes, 

Alex

Moft is a clever company that makes clever products. For a while there, I was sporting their laptop stand. It was a head-turner when I used to unfold it during meetings — back when we used to do those in-person. The truth is, I ended up having to tear it off the bottom. It lasted fine for a while, but the heat from the bottom of my MacBook ultimately melted it into a gooey mess. It was fun while it lasted.

Ultimately, I do think that was a design flaw. But even so, Moft its one of those companies you want to see succeed and continue making interesting products that buck the traditional models of most accessory makers. I’m not sure I would purchase the convertible standing desk, for instance, but I’m glad it exists.

The Moft Carry Sleeve, on the other hand, is a bit more my speed. It’s yet another convertible stand from the company, but for starters, it’s one that doesn’t require any adhesive, so that’s a big point in its favor right there. Instead of relying on the sticky stuff, the convertible sleeve functions similarly to a number of origami tablet cases currently on the market. Basically it uses a combination of foldable corners and magnets to snap into different shapes.

Honestly, I think I dig it. As a laptop sleeve, it’s a little too bulky for my tastes. It’s a bit big for my backpack. But the build quality is surprisingly nice. It’s built of a realistic vegan faux leather that is more sustainable, scratch resistant and water resistant than the real thing. All good news. There’s a card slot and a little stretch neoprene rubber slot for expandable storage.

The case converts into a stand with a couple of folds, propping the laptop up at either a 15 or 25-degree angle, with a little “flap limiter” up front that keeps it from sliding too far forward. The company claims it can support weight up to 22 pounds. I’ve not tried, but my 15-inch MacBook seems all right so far. I guess we’ll see for sure when I start traveling again.

After all, the company’s name is an acronym for Mobile Office for Travelers. Clearly not a ton of business for that at the moment, but it’s already scored $300,000 on the Carry Sleeve Indiegogo, so there’s still interest, none the less.

Editor’s note: Get this free weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use by email every Saturday morning (7am PT). Subscribe here.

They say business needs certainty to succeed, but new tech startups are still getting funded aggressively despite the pandemic, recession, trade wars and various large disasters created by nature or humans. But before we get to the positive data, let’s spend some time reviewing the hard news — there is a lot of it to process.

TikTok is on track to get banned if it doesn’t get sold first, and leading internet company Tencent’s WeChat is on the list as well, plus Trump administration has a bigger “Clean Network” plan in the works. The TikTok headlines are the least significant part, even if they are dominating the media cycle. The video-sharing social network is just now emerging as an intriguing marketing channel, for example. And if it goes, few see any real opening in the short-form video space that market leaders aren’t already deep into. Indeed, TikTok wasn’t a startup story since the Musical.ly acquisition. It was actually part of an emerging global market battle between giant internet companies, that is being prematurely ended by political forces. We’ll never know if TikTok could have continued leveraging ByteDance’s vast resources and protected market in China to take on Facebook directly on its home turf.

Instead of quasi-monopolies trying to finish taking over the world, those with a monopoly on violence have scrambled the map. WeChat is mainly used by the Chinese diaspora in the US, including many US startups with friends, family and colleagues in China. And the Clean Network plan would potentially split the Chinese mobile ecosystem from iOS and Android globally.

Let’s not forget that Europe has also been busy regulating foreign tech companies, including from both the US and China. Now every founder has to wonder how big their TAM is going to be in a world cleaved back the leading nation-states and their various allies.

“It’s not about the chilling effect [in Hong Kong],” an American executive in China told Rita Liao this week about the view in China’s startup world. “The problem is there won’t be opportunities in the U.S., Canada, Australia or India any more. The chance of succeeding in Europe is also becoming smaller, and the risks are increasing a lot. From now on, Chinese companies going global can only look to Southeast Asia, Africa and South America.”

The silver lining, I hope, is that tech companies from everywhere are still going to be competing in regions of the world that will appreciate the interest.

Startup fundraising activity is booming and set to boom more

A fresh analysis from our friends over at Docsend reveals that startup investment activity has actually sped up this year, at least by the measure of pitchdeck activity on its document management platform used by thousands of companies in Silicon Valley and globally (which makes it a key indicator of this hard-to-see action).

Founders are sending out more links than before and VCs are racing through more decks faster, despite the gyrations of the pandemic and other shocks. Meanwhile, many startups shared that they had cut back hard in March and now have more room to wait or raise on good terms. Docsend CEO Russ Heddleston concludes that the rest of the year could actually see activity increase further as companies finish adjusting to the latest challenges and are ready to go back out to market.

All this should shape how you approach your pitchdeck, he writes separately for Extra Crunch. Additional data shows that decks should be on the short side, must include a “why now” slide that addresses the COVID-19 era, and show big growth opportunities in the financials.

SaaS founders could transcend VC fundraising via securitized debt

“In one decade, we went from buying licenses for software to paying monthly for services and in the process, revolutionized the hundreds of billions spent on enterprise IT,” Danny Crichton observes. “There is no reason why in another decade, SaaS founders with the metrics to prove it shouldn’t have access to less dilutive capital through significantly more sophisticated debt underwriting. That’s going to be a boon for their own returns, but a huge challenge for VC firms that have been doubling down on SaaS.”

Sure, the market is sort of providing this with various existing venture debt vehicles, and by other routes like private equity (which has acquired a taste for SaaS metrics this past decade). Danny sees a more sophisticated world evolving, as he details on Extra Crunch this week. First, he sees underwriters tying loans to recurring revenues, even to the point that your customers could be your assets that the bank takes if you go bust. The trend could then build from there:

Part two is to take all those individual loans and package them together into a security… Imagine being an investor who believes that the world is going to digitize payroll. Maybe you don’t know which of the 30 SaaS providers on the market are going to win. Rather than trying your luck at the VC lottery, you could instead buy “2018 SaaS payroll debt” securities, which would give you exposure to this market that’s safer, if without the sort of exponential upside typical of VC investments. You could imagine grouping debt by market sector, or by customer type, or by geography, or by some other characteristic.

Help the startup scene in Beirut

Beirut is home to a vibrant startup scene but like the rest of Lebanon it is reeling from a massive explosion at its main port this week. Mike Butcher, who has helped connect TechCrunch with the city over the years, has put together a guide to local people and organizations that you can help out, along with stories from local founders about what they are overcoming. Here’s Cherif Massoud, a dental surgeon turned founder of invisible-braces startup Basma:

We are a team of 25 people and were all in our office in Beirut when it happened. Thankfully we all survived. No words can describe my anger. Five of us were badly injured with glass shattered on their bodies. The fear we lived was traumatizing. The next morning day, we went back to the office to clean all the mess, took measurements of all the broken windows and started rebuilding it. It’s a miracle we are alive. Our markets are mainly KSA and UAE, so customers were still buying our treatments online, but the team needed to recover so we decided to take a break, stop the operations for a few days and rest until next Monday.

How to build a great “revenue stack”

Every business has been scrambling to figure out online sales and marketing during the pandemic. Fortunately the Cambrian explosion of SaaS products began years ago and now there are many powerful options for revenue teams of all shapes and sizes. The problem is how to put everything together right for your company’s needs. Tim Porter and Erica La Cava of Madrona Venture Group have created a framework for how to build what they call the “revenue stack.” While most companies are already using some form of CRM, communications and agreement management software generally, each one needs to figure out four new “capabilities.” What they define as revenue enablement, sales engagement, conversational intelligence and revenue operations.

Here’s a sample from Extra Crunch, about sales engagement:

Some think of sales engagement as an intelligent e-mail cannon and analysis engine on steroids. While in reality, it is much more. Consider these examples: How can I communicate with prospects in a way that is both personalized and efficient? How do I make my outbound sales reps more productive and enable them to respond more quickly to leads? What tools can help me with account-based marketing? What happened to that email you sent out to one of your sales prospects?

Now, take these questions and multiply them by a hundred, or even a thousand: How do you personalize a multitouch nurture campaign at scale while managing and automating outreach to many different business personas across various industry segments? Uh-oh. Suddenly, it gets very complicated. What sales engagement comes down to is the critical understanding of sending the right information to the right customer, and then (and only then) being able to track which elements of that information worked (e.g., led to clicks, conversations and conversions) … and, finally, helping your reps do more of that. We see Outreach as the clear leader here, based in Seattle, with SalesLoft as the number two. Outreach in particular is investing considerably in adding additional intelligence and ML to their offering to increase automation and improve outcomes.

Around TechCrunch

Hear how working from home is changing startups and investing at Disrupt 2020

Extra Crunch Live: Join Wealthfront CEO Andy Rachleff August 11 at 1pm EDT/10am PDT about the future of investing and fintech

Register for Disrupt to take part in our content series for Digital Startup Alley exhibitors

Boston Dynamics CEO Rob Playter is coming to Disrupt 2020 to talk robotics and automation

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‘Made in America’ is on (government) life support, and the prognosis isn’t good

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5 VCs on the future of Michigan’s startup ecosystem

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After Shopify’s huge quarter, BigCommerce raises its IPO price range

#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

As ever, I was joined by TechCrunch managing editor Danny Crichton and our early-stage venture capital reporter Natasha Mascarenhas. We had Chris on the dials and a pile of news to get through, so we were pretty hyped heading into the show.

But before we could truly get started we had to discuss Cincinnati, and TikTok. Pleasantries and extortion out of the way, we got busy:

• E-commerce and fintech stay hot as Square reported big earnings, Shopify and Etsy do well, and more. We tied this to recent VC results in the fintech space, which saw a record number of $100 million rounds in Q2. There were some signs of weakness elsewhere, but the general state of things in tech is surprisingly hot, given the pandemic and recession.
• Gumroad founder Sahil Lavingia has a new seed fund that he built in collaboration with AngelList.
• D2C women’s-health startup Stix raised a $1.3 million seed round.
• Quantum-computing startup Rigetti raised a $79 million Series C.
• Rippling raised $145 million at an eye-popping $1.35 billion valuation; the company’s last value, set a year ago, was $270 million.
• AgentSync put together a $4.4 million seed round to help bring APIs to insurtech.
• Turning away from funding to some neat product news, India-based Statiq is building a bootstrapped EV-charging network.
• And as we wrapped, the Byju’s-WhiteHat Jr. deal was neat, JIO is soaking up a huge amount of Indian VC, and Natasha’s latest piece on learning pods had us arguing about what things are worth.

It was another fun week! As always we appreciate you sticking with and supporting the show!

Nearly eight years ago, Hamet Watt and Stacy Spikes launched MoviePass, the subscription-based movie ticketing service that captured the minds and dollars of investors and brought thousands of cinephiles a too-good-to-be-true deal for all-you-can watch movie passes.

Watt, who came to MoviePass as an entrepreneur in residence at True Ventures, previously founded the brand and product placement startup NextMedium and also spent time as a board partner at Upfront Ventures. Now, the serial entrepreneur and startup investor is combining his two career paths under the auspices of Share Ventures.

“It’s what I feel like I’ve been put here to do,” says Watt. “I love solving problems with design and entrepreneurship. I wasn’t fully scratching the itch as an investor by itself.”

With $10 million in financing from a slew of investors including Upfront Ventures, Alpha Edison, the general partners and founders of True Ventures, and a Korean family office, Share Ventures will look to launch between two and four companies per year.

Watt says that the new studio will focus on what he calls “human performance”. The businesses will use a blend of technology and human interaction to create services targeting fitness, nutrition, and mental health, according to Watt.

Share Ventures’ initial focus will be on two main areas, the future of living and the future of working. Within those two areas, the company will focus on developing businesses that enable the development of individual purpose, mental and physical enhancement, and personal and professional growth, according to Watt. And

For Watt, the studio model represents the next iteration of startup investing. “We think the studio is going to lead the way,” he says.

Rather than invest in companies and management teams that are unknown quantities, Watt thinks the studio will be able to create discrete companies much faster in the same way that companies today iterate on new products and services.

“We have aggregated tools into a company building stack,” says Watt. “These are tools that are usable that third parties have developed and internal tool stacks.”

Watt says Share Ventures will operate as a holding company with pooled equity shared across the employees at the company. “As we work on portfolio companies and build out dedicated teams, there’s a generous pool to incentivize talent.”

In some ways, the model isn’t that different from Bill Gross’ idealab, the Pasadena, Calif.-based incubator company that’s a few miles up the road from Share Ventures Los Angeles home base. Another inspiration is @Ventures, the dot-com era company that built a number of different portfolio companies. “Our investors are getting founders takes in all the companies that we build,” Watt says.

The company has ten people on staff to help build its first slate of companies.

Watt began talking to investors in 2018 about the idea and spent the bulk of 2019 trying to build out its first few companies.

“We run a lot of experiments, we generate a lot of ideas,” Watt says. “The number of shots on goal that we’re taking before we launch a company is significant.”

There’s a certain kind of panic that at some point gets us all.

You just got to work but did you leave the oven on at home? The gut-punch “call me ASAP” message from your boss but now they’re not answering their phone. Or that moment you unexpectedly see your camera light flash on your computer and you realize you’re suddenly in a video call with a ton of people you don’t know.

Yes, that last one was me. In my defense it was only slightly my fault.

I got a tip about a new security startup, with fresh funding and an idea that caught my interest. I didn’t have much to go on, so I did what any curious reporter did and started digging around. The startup’s website was splashy, but largely word salad. I couldn’t find basic answers to my simple questions. But the company’s idea still seemed smart. I just wanted to know how the company actually worked.

So I poked the website a little harder.

Reporters use a ton of tools to collect information, monitor changes in websites, check if someone opened their email for comment, and to navigate vast pools of public data. These tools aren’t special, reserved only for card-carrying members of the press, but rather open to anyone who wants to find and report information. One tool I use frequently on the security beat lists all the subdomains on a company’s website. These subdomains are public but deliberately hidden from view, yet you can often find things that you wouldn’t from the website itself.

Bingo! I immediately found the company’s pitch deck. Another subdomain had a ton of documentation on how its product works. A bunch of subdomains didn’t load, and a couple were blocked off for employees only. (It’s also a line in the legal sand. If it’s not public and you’re not allowed in, you’re not allowed to knock down the door.)

I clicked on another subdomain. A page flashed open, an icon in my Mac dock briefly bounced, and the camera light flashed on. Before I could register what was happening, I had joined what appeared to be the company’s morning meeting.

The only saving grace was my webcam cover, a proprietary home-made double layer of masking tape that blocked what looked like half a dozen people from staring back at me and my unkempt, pandemic-driven appearance.

I didn’t stick around to explain myself, but quickly emailed the company to warn of the security lapse. The company had hardcoded their Zoom meeting rooms to a number of subdomains on their company’s website. Anyone who knew the easy-to-guess subdomain — trust me, you could guess it — would immediately launch into one of the company’s standing Zoom meetings. No password required.

By the end of the day, the company had pulled the subdomains offline.

Zoom has seen its share of security issues and forced to change default settings to prevent abuse, largely driven by greater scrutiny of the platform as its usage rocketed since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.

But this wasn’t on Zoom, not this time. This was a company that connected an entirely unprotected Zoom meeting room to a conveniently memorable web address, likely for convenience, but one that could have left lurkers and eavesdroppers in the company’s meetings.

It’s not much to ask to password-protect your Zoom meetings, because next time it probably won’t be me.