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Ready to do everything in your power to keep your startup on track for success — and keep more of your hard-earned currency in your wallet? Listen up. Early-bird pricing on passes to Disrupt 2020 ends in less than two weeks. Buy your pass before the bird expires on July 31 at 11:59 p.m. PT, and you’ll save up to $300.

Disrupt 2020 will occur on September 14 -18 — five full days of exploration, exhibition, education and connection. No matter your role in the startup universe, you’ll see innovative technologies, learn new skills, discover new resources, share ideas and network with people who can help your business move to the next level and beyond. And it all happens on a global scale.

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Reflect, a member of Y Combinator Summer 2020 class, is building a tool to automate website and web application testing, making it faster to get your site up and running without waiting for engineers to write testing code, or for human testers to run the site through its paces.

Company CEO and co-founder Fitz Nowlan says his startup’s goal is to allow companies to have the ease of use and convenience of manual testing, but the speed of execution of automated or code-based testing.

“Reflect is a no code tool for creating automated tests. Typically when you change your website, or your web application, you have to test it, and you have the choice of either having your engineers build coded tests to run through and ensure the correctness of your application, or you can hire human testers to do it manually,” he said.

With Reflect, you simply teach the tool how to test your site or application by running through it once, and based on those actions, Reflect can create a test suite for you. “You enter your URL, and we load it in a browser in a virtual machine in the cloud. From there, you just use your application just like a normal user would, and by using your application, you’re telling us what is important to test,” Nowlan explained.

He adds, “Reflect will observe all of your actions throughout that whole interaction with that whole browser session. And then from those actions, it will distill that down into a repeatable machine executable test.”

Nowlan and co-founder Todd McNeal started the company in September 2019 after spending five years together at a digital marketing startup near Philadelphia, where they experienced  problems with web testing first-hand.

They launched a free version of this product in April, just as we were beginning to feel the full force of the pandemic in the U.S, a point that was not lost on him. “We didn’t want to delay any longer and we just felt like, you know you got to get up there and swing the bat,” he said.

Today, the company has 20 paying customers, and he has found that the pandemic has helped speed up sales in some instances, while slowing it down in others.

He says the remote YC experience has been a positive one, and in fact he McNeal couldn’t have participated had they had to show up in California as they have families and homes in Pennsylvania.  He says that the remote nature of the current program forces you to be fully engaged mentally to get the most out of the program.

“It’s just a little more mental work to prepare yourself and to have the mental energy to stay locked in for a remote batch. But I think if you can get over that initial hump, the information flow and the knowledge sharing is all the same,” he said.

He says as technical founders, the program has helped them focus on the sales and marketing side of the equation, and taught them that it’s more than building a good product. You still have to go out there and sell it to build a company.

He says his short-term goal is to get as many people as he can using the platform, which will help them refine their ability to automate the test building. For starters, that involves recording activities on-screen, but over time they plan to layer on machine learning and that requires more data.

“We’re going to focus primarily over the next six to 12 months on growing our customer base — both paid and unpaid — and I really mean that we want people to come in and create tests. Even if they  [use the free product], we’re benefiting from that creation of that test,” he said.

A few days ago, Ilan Abehassera and Carlos Diaz announced Diaspora Ventures, their new VC fund.

The duo plan to invest in French founders who have a global mindset: They might be based in France and willing to relocate to the U.S., in the U.S. already or they might be starting a remote company from day one.

According to Diaz and Abehassera, French engineers and product designers have the right mindset to tackle hard problems, but they don’t necessarily have access to funding or talent in the U.S. The partners came up with the idea for Diaspora Ventures at the end of April, but in just a couple of months, they went from zero to closing their first investment deal.

To move quickly, they took advantage of AngelList’s Rolling Venture Funds, a new type of fund completely managed by AngelList. Kima Ventures, Breega, Alexis Bonillo, Christophe Courtin, Salomon Aiach, Frédéric Laluyaux and others have already invested $3 million in Diaspora Ventures.

As the name suggests, the fund is always raising, so the list will become longer and the total amount of capital raised will grow over time. With this new format, venture funds could become a sort of subscription product.

I talked with Ilan Abehassera about AngelList Rolling Venture Funds to understand how it works. The interview was edited for clarity and brevity.

TechCrunch: What is Diaspora Ventures?

Ilan Abehassera: Over the past few years, we’ve talked with a lot of French VC funds and we realized that French funds don’t really know how to finance French entrepreneurs in the U.S.

Image Credits: Diaspora Ventures

As soon as we had this idea in April, we started raising right away. We put together a pitch deck with the investment thesis, we sent it to a few people. We didn’t know if we would be able to raise right in the middle of the COVID-19 crisis. Some of them told us that it wasn’t the right time. But enough people said yes that we decided to go forward and created the fund with AngelList.

Can you describe how AngelList Rolling Venture Funds work?

Those funds are evergreen funds. AngelList has already been creating funds — think about it as funds as a service. I had already been using AngelList’s Venture Funds for my previous fund that was called Avrhm Capital. I made around 15 investments through this small fund. But it was a traditional fund. You decide on the size of the fund, you raise and then you can start investing.

Amazon today announced a slew of new features for developers who want to write Alexa skills. In total, the team released 31 new features at its Alexa Live event. Unsurprisingly, some of these are relatively minor but a few significantly change the Alexa experience for the over 700,000 developers who have built skills for the platform so far.

“This year, given all our momentum, we really wanted to pay attention to what developers truly required to take us to the next level of what engaging [with Alexa] really means,” Nedim Fresko, the company’s VP of Alexa Devices & Developer Technologies, told me.

Maybe it’s no surprise then that one of the highlights of this release is the beta launch of Alexa Conversations, which the company first demonstrated at its re:Mars summit last year. The overall idea here is, as the name implies, to make it easier for users to have a natural conversation with their Alexa devices. That, as Fresko noted, is a very hard technical challenge.

Photographer: Andrew Burton/Bloomberg via Getty Images

“We’re observing that consumers really want to speak in a natural way with Alexa,” said Fresko. “But using traditional techniques, implementing naturalness is very difficult. Being prepared with random turns of phrase, remembering context, carrying over the context, dealing with oversupply or undersupply of information — it’s incredibly hard. And if you put it in a way and create a state diagram, you get bogged down and you have to stop. And then, instead of doing all of that, people just settle for ‘okay, fine, I’ll just do robot robotic commands instead.’ The only way to break that cycle is to have a quantum leap and the technology required for this so skilled developers can really focus on what’s important to them.”

For developers, this means they can use the service to create sample phrases, annotate them and provide access to APIs for Alexa to call into. Then, the service extrapolates all the path the conversation can take and makes it work, without the developer having to specify all of the possible turns the conversation with their skills could take. In many respects, this makes it similar to Google’s Dialogflow tool, though Google Cloud’s focus is a bit more on enterprise use cases.

“Alexa Conversations promises to be a breakthrough for developers, and will create great new experiences for customers,” said Steven Arkonovich, founder of Philosophical Creations, in today’s announcement. “We updated the Big Sky skill with Alexa Conversations, and now users can speak more naturally, and change their minds mid-conversation. Alexa’s AI keeps track of it, all with very little input from my skill code.”

For a subset of developers — around 400 for now, according to Fresko — the team will also enable a new deep neural network to improve Alexa’s natural language understanding. The company says this will lead to about a 15 percent improvement in accuracy for the skills that will get access to this.

“The idea is to allow developers to get an accuracy benefit with no action on their part by just changing the underlying technology and making our models more sophisticated, we’re able to provide a lift in accuracy for all skills,” explained Fresko.

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Another new feature that will likely get a lot of attention from developers is Alexa for Apps. The idea here is to enable mobile developers to take their users from their skill on Alexa to their mobile apps. For Twitter, this could mean saying something like ‘“Alexa, ask Twitter to search for #BLM,” for example, and the Twitter skill could then open the mobile app. For some searches, after all, seeing the results on a screen and in a mobile app makes a lot more sense than hearing them read aloud. This feature is now in preview and developers can apply for the preview here.

Another new feature is Skill Resumption, now available in preview for U.S. English, which basically allows developers to have their skill sit in the background and then provide updates as needed. That’s useful for a ridesharing app, for example, that can then provide users with updates on when their car will arrive. These kinds of proactive notifications are something that all assistant platforms are starting to experiment with, though most users have probably only seen a few of those in their daily usage so far.

The team is also launching two new features that should help developers with getting their skills discovered by potential users. This remains a major problem with all voice platforms and is probably one of the reasons why most people only use a fraction of the skills currently available to them.

The first of these launches is the beta of Quick Links for Alexa, now in beta for U.S. English and U.S. Spanish, which allows developers to create links from their mobile apps, websites or ads to a new user interface that allows them to launch their skills on a device. “We think that’s going to really help folks become more reachable and more recognized,” said Fresko.

The second new feature in this bucket is the name-free interactions toolkit, now in preview. Alexa already had the capabilities to launch third-party skills whenever the system thought that a given skill could provide the best answer for a given question. Now, with this new system, developers can specify up to five suggested launch phrases (think “Alexa, when is the next train to Penn Station?”). Amazon says some of the early preview users have seen interactions with their skills increase by about 15 percent after adapting this tool, though the company is quick to point out that this will be different for every skill.

Among the other updates are new features for developers who want to build games and other more interactive experiences. New features here include the APL for audio beta, which provides tools for mixing speech, sound effects and music at runtime, the Alexa Web API for Games, to help developers use web technologies like HTML5, WebGL and Web Audio to build games for Alexa devices with screens, and APL 1.4, which now adds editable text boxes, drag and drop UI controls and more to the company’s markup language for building visual skills.

Dexterity emerged from stealth this week to announced its full-stack solution aimed at creating collaborative robotics systems. The hardware-software system is designed for a variety of different tasks, including bin picking and box packing, targeted at warehouse fulfillment and logistics needs.

Image Credits: Dexterity

The Bay Area-based startup has already built up significant support from the investment world, with $56.2 million raised to date, from a long list of backers, including Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Obvious Ventures, Pacific West Bank, B37 Ventures, Presidio (Sumitomo) Ventures, Blackhorn Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures and Stanford StartX.

Image Credits: Dexterity

The company was founded back in 2017 as an extension of CEO Samir Menon’s Stanford thesis, described by Dexterity thusly, “Menon worked on a control theory framework to describe how the human brain controls and coordinates the body, which serves as a model to distill human skill into mathematical programs that control robots in a graceful human-like manner.”

Part of the company’s appeal appear to be the versatility of the robotics, which are designed to work alongside their human counterparts and operate collaboratively. Among the early adopters for the system are unnamed an unnamed “global food manufacturer,” “ a worldwide package delivery provider” and Japan’s Kawasaki Heavy Industries.

Dexterity says it’s also seen a boost from the push for essential services during the COVID-19 pandemic, like so many others in the robotics and automation fields, stating that its systems have been involved with the shipping of “half a million units of packaged food.”

Facebook’s messaging app is adding new privacy controls, the company announced this morning. Initially, this will include today’s launch of App Lock for iOS, which allows users to lock access to their private chats by way of the device’s built-in security mechanisms, including Touch ID and Face ID. A second privacy feature, which involves new controls over your inbox and calls, will arrive soon.

The company was recently spotted testing App Lock in the wild, but it had not yet fully rolled out. Instead, Facebook said in June App Lock was only being offered to a small percentage of Messenger users on iOS.

The feature is now available to all users on iPhone and iPad, Facebook says.

To use it, you’ll look for a new option within Messenger’s Privacy Settings. This is the same area where you find controls that allow you to mute stories or block users.

Facebook plans to roll out App Lock to Android in the near future.

Image Credits:

The upcoming messaging privacy controls, meanwhile, will be similar to those available on Instagram, where you can configure through settings who is allow to message you. In Facebook Messenger’s case, the controls will let you choose which people are allowed to message your inbox directly and which will go to your Message Requests folder, instead. This could help people keep their Messenger inbox more private for friends and family only.

You’ll also be able to set you can’t message you at all or call you.

Facebook says it’s also testing more private message requests features that won’t require you to view an image from someone new when deciding how to respond, block, report or ignore their message. This is similar to the existing feature on Instagram and WhatsApp that will blur incoming images from people you don’t know.

The company says it has not yet started testing these controls, but will soon.

We’ve all had annoyingly memorable experiences with websites — websites that invite you to subscribe to browser notifications or bombard you with pop-ups that ask for your email before you’ve even had a chance to look around. That’s no way to do customer service. Yet many brands still use these lead capture tactics, ones that often permanently turn off would-be customers.

The principle that underlies these tactics makes sense; brands want the chance to communicate with those visitors more personally on a channel like email. But a gap most brands never bridge is the one between how personal they want to get with a website visitor and how personal they are in their initial interaction with that visitor.

In my experience as a marketer, there are few better ways to bridge that gap than a thoughtful implementation of messenger tools, those chat bubbles many big brands use to offer real-time customer support.

Implementing this strategy alone has allowed me to help my clients recover millions of dollars in what would have been lost revenue — more than $5 million for a local dentistry I’ve worked with. Here’s how it works, starting with where to deploy it.

Picking candidate pages through observing user flow and bounce rates

When picking pages for where to deploy messenger tools, the one principle to keep in mind is that you don’t want to offer customer support to those who don’t need it. So every time I implement messenger tools, I think about four key customer segments:

1. A recurring website visitor — potentially an existing customer.
2. Website visitors who have no interest in the product or service.
3. Website visitors who have feature-related questions.
4. Website visitors who are on the fence about buying a product or service offering.

Sometimes it’s obvious which category a website visitor falls into; for instance, someone who clicks on your client login portal is obviously already a customer and someone who rapidly clicks off your site is obviously not interested in your offering. But for most other users, it’s a lot less clear. That’s where heat map software used in tandem with Google Analytics could be tremendously helpful in mapping user behavior to a profile.

In a recent article, I covered all of the reasons you might be tempted to hold a highly concentrated position in your company stock as a tech founder and how it fits into your portfolio. I then followed up with a rundown on why resisting diversification is generally a bad idea and the subconscious biases that hold us back from selling.

So now that you understand the benefits of diversification and have taken inventory of your portfolio, what is the most effective way for you to move forward? I will share with you what to keep in mind before selling, how to decide when to sell, and strategies to execute sales such as options, exchange funds, prepaid variable forward contracts, qualified small business stock and tax considerations. Now, let’s take a deep dive into strategic approaches to take as a shareholder and important tax implications to consider.

Keep in mind: Lockups and blackout periods

Most tech companies that IPO have a 180-day lockup period that prevents insiders, employees and VC funds from selling immediately. There is usually language that also prohibits hedging with derivatives (options) during that period. Lockups are intended to help prevent insider trading and provide the company with additional post-IPO price stability.

It is also important to abide by the company’s blackout periods, which prohibit transactions during more share-price-sensitive times, such as earnings or material nonpublic information releases.

Concentrated stock strategies

Ad hoc selling — This is the most straightforward and involves the outright sale of your shares. However, this can be difficult for various reasons such as selling restrictions, the perception by others that you are unloading stock and many psychological biases that act as internal mental obstacles.

Scheduled selling — Selling all your stock at once could be both emotionally challenging and tax-inefficient. Scheduled selling involves the selling of a set number of shares over a specific period. This selling strategy can help by spreading the tax impact over a few years. It also provides an advantage from a psychological standpoint since the plan is determined upfront, then mechanically executed.

As an example, a founder might plan to sell 500,000 shares over 18 months. The founder is comfortable selling quarterly, which equals six selling periods of 83,333 shares per quarter. In a scenario where a founder is subject to blackout periods, a 10b5-1 trading plan can be implemented and set on autopilot. The company may even allow you to sell your shares during blackout periods with a 10b5-1 trading plan. See the example of scheduled selling below.

Image Credits: Keystone Global Partners

Hedging with options — Multiple hedging strategies can be implemented to protect your downside; however, some of the more common approaches used are the protective put and the protective collar. Below are basic examples of how these strategies are executed, for illustrative purposes.

Image Credits: Keystone Global Partners

• Protective put: Buying protection against the downside.
• Collar: Give up some upside to limit some downside.

Each strategy allows the owner to continue holding the stock while providing some downside protection against a stock’s decline. However, these strategies are not tax-efficient and are complicated, so working with an expert is essential. Both puts and certain types of collars would have been extremely expensive to implement during the recent market crisis because market volatility is a factor in options prices. See the below chart of the VIX (volatility index) during peak crisis. However, in some instances, these strategies can make sense.

Spotify this morning announced a global, multi-year licensing agreement with Universal Music Group, which secures the label’s catalog for streaming rights but also signs it on to be an early adopter of Spotify’s future products and provide feedback to Spotify’s development team as those products are being built.

Deal terms were not disclosed, but “multi-year” agreements like this would last at least two years, if not three.

The agreement brings on Universal to Spotify’s “two-sided marketplace” — a term Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has been using for years to describe the company’s overall strategy. Essentially, its plan to generate revenue not only from the service’s paying subscribers and advertising, but also from the artists and labels who pay for tools to reach those music fans.

Under this umbrella, Spotify this year introduced the launch of Marquee, a tool for promoting new releases which delivers a full-screen, sponsored recommendations to both free users and paid subscribers during release week and beyond. These Marquee-led campaigns reportedly cost a minimum of $5,000, according to confidential documents Rolling Stone acquired late last year.

Of course, Spotify’s efforts to sell marketing tools only work if Spotify can convince labels to use them. During negotiations with labels earlier this year, Bloomberg reported things on that front were not going well. The three major labels were balking at Spotify’s efforts to get them paying for more tools for advertising their artists’ music in the Spotify app, which complicated negotiations. In a nutshell, the labels view the tools as just new ways for Spotify to cut into the labels’ royalty payments — and perhaps, not even all that necessary, as Spotify offers some free promotion of new music today.

There were other concerns as well, including those from indies who felt the ability to promote music would be only available to those with the most money. The majors also feared a promotional “war” of sorts could be started, where they would each have to continually up their spend in order to get their own artists to the top of Spotify’s charts.

Spotify’s ability to close a deal with Universal, in this context, is significant, as it indicates Spotify has managed to gain support for its two-sided marketplace concept from a key figure in the industry. And not only will Universal likely agree to use these tools, pushing Spotify’s revenue higher, it will also help Spotify design them by guiding the process with its feedback.

Where this deal leaves Spotify’s artists themselves is far less clear. Spotify used to market its tools to musicians and indies as a way to help them better compete against the majors, after all. It even once tested a tool that would allow artists to upload their tracks directly to Spotify’s platform. The negative reaction from the majors — Universal included — led Spotify to cancel those plans. And now that music giant will have even more of a say in what Spotify does next.

“With this agreement, UMG and Spotify are more aligned than ever in our commitment to ensuring the entire music ecosystem thrives and reaches new audiences around the globe,” said Sir Lucian Grainge, Chairman and CEO of Universal Music Group, in a statement. “Given our commitment to innovation and early adoption of music technologies, and Spotify’s leadership in the development of forward-thinking tools, our new partnership will provide our artists with new and powerful opportunities to connect with fans on Spotify’s growing platform. Working together, our teams will expand and accelerate our collaborative efforts to deliver artist-focused initiatives, strategic marketing campaigns and new offerings to provide exciting new experiences for fans worldwide.”

Daniel Ek, Chairman & CEO of Spotify, said, “From their early experimentation with Marquee, to testing new experiences like Canvas, Universal Music Group has been an important partner in helping to shape the development of our marketing tools. With today’s announcement, we will expand on this level of early stage innovation and further strengthen our partnership and shared vision for helping advance artists at all stages of their careers,” he continued.

“We’ve said all along, the goal of our Marketplace strategy is to harness Spotify’s ability to connect artists with fans on a scale that has never before existed and bring new opportunities to the industry. Together, we look forward to reinvesting in and building new tools and offerings for artists around the world.”