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Startup founders have a million things to worry about every day.

Finding product-market fit, great talent and and a sustainable plan for constant growth are top of mind, but perhaps most importantly, they need to keep the lights on, whether it’s by raising venture capital or managing cash flows while bootstrapping.

The flip side to thinking about fundraising and growth, however, is skipping ahead to the final chapter — whether that involves M&A, an IPO or perhaps a bankruptcy, eventually all startups come to an end.

Instead of thinking about an exit while in the final throes, founders need to strategically lay the groundwork, even if it is potentially years away. Here’s how.

On the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF, we had a deep conversation on what founders should do to prepare for an exit with Jess Lee of Sequoia, who sold her startup Polyvore to TechCrunch parent company Yahoo; Justin Kan, who sold Twitch to Amazon and now runs legal startup Atrium; and Mike Marquez, the founding managing director of boutique investment bank Code Advisors.

The good news is that the primary requirement for exiting a startup is really the same work that a founder has to focus on: building a great business. “The best way to sell your company is to actually build a good company,” said Kan, since no acquirer is looking to buy damaged goods.

But even if you are building a solid business, that’s not nearly enough to get a transaction done some time down the line. One consistent piece of advice from the group was that founders should be thinking about an exit much more regularly, even if they are steadfastly opposed to one. That means identifying key relationships that will make an M&A possible and working to build and maintain those relationships.

“I thought about it too late,” Lee said about her time running Polyvore . “The same way you build relationships with investors, you should spend at least a little bit of time building relationships with partners who could become potential acquirers.”

Kan elaborated further. “I think that in the beginning, your responsibilities as a founder is just to find product-market fit [and] work on your product,” he said. “And then once you have a product that people want, you want to figure out how to get it in the hands of more people, and that’s when it starts to become really valuable to know everyone in your market and then adjacent markets.”

Far from being a completely separate task from the other duties of being a CEO, connecting with potential acquirers often has benefits for growing a company in the first place.

Announced this summer at IFA in Berlin, LG’s G8X ThinQ offers yet another take on the folding/dual-screen phenomenon. Rather than the outright foldable display of the Samsung Galaxy or the dual-screen of the forthcoming Microsoft Surface Duo, the device sneaks in additional screen real estate through an accessory.

Available here in the States starting November 1, the G8X ThinQ will arrive as a bundle with the LG Dual Screen accessory, starting at the extremely reasonably price of $699. Using a USB-C connector, the combo offers up a number of different dual-screen experiences, including a standard two screen, a game pad, and a keyboard, working a a sort of mini-laptop.

Early reviews and hands on have been a bit mixed. Given the nature of the product, there’s unsurprisingly a pretty sizable gap between the two screens. That rules out some of the primary folding phone case uses like movie watching. Honestly, the setup seems a bit more like an attempt to appeal to the growing interest in foldables without actually fully committing to the form factor. 

LG certainly seems to have the resources to go all-in a foldable, but the category still has a long way to go in terms of proving itself. And honestly, the early Galaxy Fold hiccups and Huawei Mate X delays aren’t exactly helping speed things along.

Still, there’s something to be said for the ability to go either single or dual screen, depending on the day and the use case. The Fold leaves something to be desired when closed. It’s a thick device with a tiny front screen. The G8X ThinQ certainly offers more in terms of flexibility. Plus the specs aren’t at all bad for the price, including a Snapdragon 855, 6GB of RAM and a 4,000mAh battery.

Medium is announcing significant changes to its Partner Program, where subscribers pay for access to exclusive content, and the revenue gets split with writers.

The biggest change is that writers will now be compensated based “primarily” on reading time, rather than claps. In a post, Medium’s Emma Smith describes reading time as “a closer measure of quality and resonance with readers.” After all, it reflects the interest and behavior of all readers, not “not just the ones who remember to .”

According to Smith’s post, Medium has now paid out more than $6 million total to 30,000 writers.

When CEO Ev Williams explained the partner model to me shortly after it launched in 2017, he described it as an evolving formula that incorporated claps and reading time, but now it sounds like reading time has won out as the metric that matters.

“We believe in reading time because it represents the core value that our readers receive from Medium,” Smith writes. “It may not be a perfect measure of value, but we find that it’s a powerful proxy.”

To be more specific, Smith says Medium is measuring and determining compensation based on active reading time, so if someone keeps the window open when they step away for a few minutes, that shouldn’t count.

Smith also says Medium is looking at reading time in two ways — there’s the more straightforward measurement of “how long members spend reading your story” (this include readers who find your story and subscribe in the next 30 days), but also the percentage of their total reading time that members spend on your stories, which is meant to “support authors who write about unique topics and connect with loyal readers.”

In addition to changing the way earnings are calculated, Medium is also changing the frequency with which they’re calculated, from weekly to daily. And the reader data that Medium shares with writers will include “new metrics to explain your earnings.”

Despite all these changes, Smith notes that claps aren’t going away, and that they still matter: “Claps will remain a great way for readers to support stories they love. When your readers clap, they’ll boost your stories to a wider audience. And as more people read, you’ll earn.”

As designers grow both in sheer numbers and within the hierarchy of organizations, design tool makers are adapting to their evolving needs in different ways. Figma, the web-based collaborative design tool, is taking a note from the engineering revolution of the early aughts.

“What if there were a GitHub for designers?” mused Dylan Field, early on in the lifecycle of Figma as a company. Today, that vision is brought to life with the launch of Figma Community. (Figma Community is launching in a closed beta for now.)

In a crowded space, with competitors like Adobe, InVision, Sketch and more, Figma differentiates itself on its web-based multiplayer approach. Figma is a design tool that works like Google Docs, with multiple designers in the same file, working alongside one another without disrupting each other.

But that’s just the base level of the overall collaboration that Figma believes designers crave. Field told us that he sees a clear desire from designers to not only share their work, whether it’s on a portfolio webpage or on social media, as well as a desire to learn from the work of other designers.

And yet, when a creative shares a design on social media, it’s just a static image. Other designers can’t see how it went from a blank page to an interesting design, and are left to merely appreciate it without learning anything new.

With Figma Community, designers and even organizations can share live design files that others can inspect, remix and learn from.

Individual designers can set up their own public-facing profile page to show off their designs, as well as intra-organization profile pages so other team members within their organization can learn from each other. On the other hand, organizations can publicly share their design systems and philosophy on their own page.

For example, the city of Chicago has set up a profile on Figma Community for other designers to follow the city’s design system in their own materials.

As far as remixing design files goes, Figma is using a CC4 license, which allows for a remix but forces attribution. That said, Field says the company is using this closed beta period to learn more about what the community wants around different license types.

Community is free and is not meant to drive revenue for the company, but rather offer further value to designers using the platform.

“It’s early,” said Dylan Field. “This is just the scaffolding of what’s to come. It’s the start of a lot of work that we’re going to be doing in the area of collaboration and community.”

Figma has raised a total of $83 million from investors like Index, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins and Grelock, according to Crunchbase.

European launch provider Arianespace announced some exciting news regarding its ambitions for the Moon at the International Astronautical Congress today. Arianespace CEO Stéphane Israël revealed on stage that its forthcoming space launch vehicle, the Ariane 6, will aim to deliver the first rideshare mission to the Moon in four years.

”By 2023 we are ready to offer the first ride share mission to the Moon with Ariane 6 and we are contemplating the first public and private customers for that launch,” he said during a fireside discussion on stage at the event.

This rideshare mission will be able to transport up to 8.5 tons of cargo, and deliver that to direct lunar transfer orbit. Israël said that while it currently in Arianespace’s planning scope to transport crew aboard their spacecraft, they could delivery landers and orbiters aboard the Ariane 6, which would set the stage for crew missions to follow – including potentially NASA’s Artemis program.

Ariane 6 is a two-stage medium-heavy lift launch system currently in development by Arianespace, under the direction of the European Space Agency. It’s aiming to have its first test flights next year, which makes the 2023 target for its first lunar orbit mission with paying customer cargo on board ambitious.

If Ariane 6 can make that target, however, it could become a crucial transport mechanism for any long-term attempts to not only ensure we can get crew to the Moon, but establish a working infrastructure and stay there, with humans spending long spans of time there living, working and researching.

Roku is beefing up its advertising business with the acquisition of Boston-based dataxu, a demand-side platform that will allow marketers to plan, buy and optimize their video ad campaigns that run on Roku’s devices and services. The deal, a mixture of cash and stock, is for $150 million and has been approved by each company’s board of directors. It’s expected to close in the fourth quarter.

The deal is meant to help Roku further grow its suite of tools for advertisers, at a time when its platform business is a larger contributor to Roku’s bottom line compared with hardware sales. The company today has over 30.5 million active users who watch via Roku’s OS either on Roku streaming media players or Rokus TV.

With the addition of dataxu, Roku will be able to provide advertisers with a data-drive solution they can use plan and buy their ad spend across Roku’s platform. The deal will also bring in dataxu’s experienced team,  which includes talent in software engineering, data science, and analytics.

In announcing the deal, Roku noted that the market for over-the-top advertising will continue to expand as the cord-cutting race heats up. Today, advertisers send over $70 billion on traditional TV. Over-the-top viewing accounts for only 29% of TV viewing, but has so far only captured 3% of TV ad budgets. With more consumers adopting streaming, automated solutions will help to unlock those additional TV ad dollars, Roku believes.

“TV advertising is shifting toward OTT and a data-driven model focused on business outcomes for brands,” said Anthony Wood, chief executive officer at Roku, in a statement. “The acquisition of dataxu will accelerate our ad platform while also helping our content partners monetize their inventory even more effectively,” he said.

Mozilla today announced that its Enhanced Tracking Protection feature for Firefox, which launched in July (and became the default in September), has now blocked a total of over 450 billion third-party tracking requests from the thousands of companies that try to track you as you browse the web. That’s a big number, but with today’s launch of Firefox 70, Mozilla is also giving you a personalized dashboard that tells you how often Firefox blocked third-party cookies, social media trackers, fingerprinting tools and cryptominers.

Privacy protection is on by default, in the ‘standard’ setting, so you don’t have to do anything special to protect yourself. If you want to tinker with the settings, though, and don’t mind it if the occasional site breaks, you can also opt for a stricter default and custom settings.

The report isn’t exactly front and center in the user experience (though Mozilla tells me it points new users to it in its onboarding workflow). To find it, you have to click on the shield icon in the URL bar. That’s where you find all of the info about the current site you’re on, as well as a link to your privacy report.

The report itself is pretty basic and only covers a single week. The data doesn’t sync between machines and you can’t dig any deeper into which companies are trying to track you, for example. Still, it’s a nice reminder of how many companies are trying to track you.

The report page also features links to Mozilla’s Firefox Monitor, which can alert you when one of your email accounts appears in a breach, and Lockwise, its password management and syncing service. With today’s update, Lockwise is also getting a password generator and an integration with Firefox Monitor.

Mozilla clearly knows that privacy, at least for the time being, is what differentiates its browser from the competition, especially Chrome. While Google’s Chrome team has to figure out ways to protect its users while working inside a company that makes most of its revenue from online advertising, Mozilla doesn’t need to worry about this at all. So while the Chrome team is trying to figure out how to make major changes to the underlying tracking infrastructure while preserving Google’s revenue stream, Firefox and its brethren can opt for pretty strict default settings. It still remains to be seen whether the majority of users actually cares about tracking, but for now, this gives Firefox a clear advantage in this area.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has put an end to the deceptive marketing tactics of Devumi, a company that sold fake indicators of social media influence — like Twitter followers, retweets, YouTube subscribers and views, and more — which was also the subject of a 2018 investigation by The New York Times into the world of social media fraud. The FTC says it reached a $2.5 million settlement with Devumi’s owner and CEO German Calas, Jr., which requires the first $250,000 to be paid, with the rest deferred unless it’s discovered that Calas has misrepresented his financial situation.

According to the Times’ investigation, Devumi had made millions selling fake social media influence to celebrities, businesses or anyone else who wanted to appear more popular online. The company at the time of the report had operated a stock of at least 3.5 million bots (automated accounts), and had sold its customer base over 200 million Twitter followers, combined.

Unlike early and more basic bot armies, Devumi’s accounts were made to resemble real people — they would have the same names, photos, hometowns, and other personal details of real Twitter users, including minors.

The FTC says Devumi wasn’t limited to selling Twitter influence, however. In addition to its website Devumi.com, it also operated TwitterBoost.co, Buyview.co, and Buyplans.co, and sold influence across Twitter, Vine, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and SoundCloud.

Its customer base included actors, athletes, musicians, writers, and other social media celebs or high-profile individuals like motivational speakers, law firm partners, investment professionals, and more.

The company had filled more than 58,000 orders for fake Twitter followers, more than 4,000 orders for fake YouTube subscribers, over 32,000 sales of fake YouTube views, and more than 800 fake LinkedIn followers — the latter to marketing, advertising, and PR firms, as well as software companies, banking, investment and other financial service firm, HR firms, and others.

All this allowed the customers to commit deceptive acts and practices, in violation of the FTC Act.

The FTC’s order imposes a fine of $2.5 million against Mr. Calas, representing the amount he was paid by Devumi or its parent company. He must pay $250,000 of that fine and the remaining amount is suspended unless he’s found to have misrepresented his financial status. (Devumi had shut down last year, in the wake of a probe by the NY Attorney General’s office.)

The Commission voted 5-0 in favor of the proposed final order. 

In a similar case, the FTC also took action against Sunday Riley Modern Skincare, LLC (Sunday Riley Skincare) and its CEO, Sunday Riley, which misled consumers by posting fake reviews of the company’s products on a major retailer’s website, at the CEO’s direction. It also failed to disclose that the reviewers were company employees.

The company sold its cosmetics on Sephora, which was where the fake reviews were posted. When Sephora identified the fake reviews as by the company IP address, the employees were directed to use a VPN.

The FTC ordered the company to halt the illegal activity by way of an administrative order but did not fine them. The Commission was more split on this one, voting 3-2 in favor of the Sunday Riley consent order. (The dissenters believed the punishment should have been harsher, and have a monetary component.)

“Dishonesty in the online marketplace harms shoppers, as well as firms that play fair and square,” said Andrew Smith, Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in a statement. “Posting fake reviews on shopping websites or buying and selling fake followers is illegal. It undermines the marketplace, and the FTC will not tolerate it,” he said.”

In the broader world of fake influence, companies like Devumi only played a small role. It’s been estimated there were as many as 48 million Twitter bots back in 2017, according to one study. But that number may have been too low. Twitter itself said it wiped 70 million fake accounts from its site just last year.

Meanwhile, Instagram removed fake follows, likes and comments from users’ accounts last November, and threatened accounts that used services to buy their way to influence. Facebook says it removed 2.2 billion fake accounts in Q1 2019. YouTube, at one point in 2013, was half bot traffic — and some employees were worried the ratio would flip in the bots’ favor, a prospect they called “the inversion.”

In fact, studies have found that less than 60% of the web traffic is human, and sometimes, the majority is from bots.

Although Devumi is gone, there are still plenty of places to buy social media influence, so it’s not clear how much of a deterrent the FTC action will be in the grand scheme of things.

Following a crowdfunding campaign that raised an impressive $1 million earlier this year, Sphero’s STEM/STEAM kit RVR is now on sale. Announced back in February as part of the Colorado company’s first-ever Kickstarter campaign, RVR presents a bit of a change for Sphero in a number of key ways.

For starters, it’s a move away from the remote control ball design that has defined the majority of its projects since the Orbotix days. RVR is a four wheel system — and more than that, in keeping with Sphero’s relatively recent focus on education, aimed at helping kids learn languages like Python and JavaScript.

It’s also designed to help teach some of the fundamentals of robotics. Though, as Sphero notes, it’s still drivable right out of the box, with minimal assembly required. Beyond that, users can hook in third party boards like Raspberry Pi and Arduino through the USB port, along with products from the recently acquired LittleBits.

“When we launched RVR on Kickstarter earlier this year, we were blown away by the response,”co-founder and Chief Creative Officer. Adam Wilson said in a release “Our community of makers, developers, and teachers all rallied around RVR to make it a huge success even before they could get their hands on one. RVR has significantly extended our reach to makers of all ages, and of all coding abilities. We can’t wait to see what everyone creates with RVR.”

The system starts at $250 through Sphero’s online shop and select retailers.

Koio, the high-end sneakers brand led by Chris Wichert and Johannes Quodt, has today raised an additional $6 million in Series A funding, bringing total Series A funding to $9 million. The round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from existing investors Acton Capital Partners and Brand Foundry, among others.

The direct-to-consumer product was started when Wichert and Quodt got sick of spending so much on their high-end leather sneakers.

Koio designs their shoes in-house, and does all its manufacturing in Italy in a factory shared with Chanel. The average shoes on Koio go for about $250. 

The startup sells primarily through its own sales channels, either via its online channels or at its pop-ups/brick-and-mortar locations. Of all its direct sales, 60 percent come from the web with the remaining 40 percent coming from retail stores.

About 10 percent of overall sales come from partnerships with other retailers, including J.Crew’s Madewell and Nordstroms.

Part of Koio’s philosophy is to focus on the day-to-day life of its customers.

“We see in our community that the lines between professional life and personal life and all the other worlds you’re a part of are blurring with no clear delineation between the two,” said Quodt. “To us, this means our customers don’t know how the day is going to shape up as they hustle. They may run into an old friend who wants to go to dinner or a business partner, leading to an impromptu meeting. We have started with shoes that are well designed, comfortable and durable, but in the end we want to offer different kinds of products that will compliment that lifestyle.”

Quodt wouldn’t confirm what the next product in the portfolio might be, but did say that it’ll likely be in the small leather goods category.

He did, however, disclose his plans on how to use the funding. Priority one is to add more unique designs to its shoe lineup to offer a complete product portfolio to customers. Second, the company wants to invest in R&D to ensure it’s using the best materials, with the best construction, to ultimately become the best fitting and most comfortable luxury shoe brand in the world.

Koio also wants to take a hard look at its brick-and-mortar retail strategy and move into bigger, more prominent locations in its strongest cities. The company currently has six stores across New York, San Francisco, Chicago and Miami.

Finally, Koio plans on using the funding to further scale up its operational team and other departments in the company to be able to better handle demand.