Category: UNCATEGORIZED

What’s the lesson of WeWork?

Here’s a startup that has been a darling of Silicon Valley investors for years, whose offices and CEO have been stunningly painted across the covers of major trade magazines and strategically deployed across major tech conference stages, including our very own. At its peak, the company commanded a valuation of tens of billions of dollars and was supposed to be on course for the stratosphere, joining companies like Google and Facebook.

And then it all came crashing down, in literally a handful of days.

It’s easy to point to WeWork’s potentially 75%+ valuation drop, its looming layoffs, the firing of its CEO, and the seeming compression of a whole heck of a lot of investors and employee equity as a sordid disaster tale of capitalism, and venture capitalism in particular. VCs — none more so than Masayoshi Son at SoftBank — constantly overbought, oversold, and overcommitted to a company that had pretty much no business fundamentals whatsoever.

So what’s the lesson of WeWork for venture capital? In a word, nothing.

Venture capitalism is about investing in bold bets with huge, outsized returns. It’s meant to be risk-adjusted, both at the valuation scale but also at a portfolio scale. VCs should be buying equity at the right price to take into account every individual startup’s risk profile while also constructing a portfolio that selects each of those risks for the best overall return.

For WeWork, much of those dollars were driven by SoftBank’s Vision Fund, which seemed to double down again and again on the company, even at loggerheads with its own limited partners. The Vision Fund made a bet, seemingly with reasonable access to internal information, and that bet turned out to be wrong.

But a bet it was.

Many bets in venture turn out to be duds. Sometimes you lose some of your money. Sometimes you lose all of it.

And then sometimes you make it in spades. SoftBank’s Son once invested $20 million into a fledging Chinese ecommerce company called Alibaba. That stake is worth around $100 billion today, excluding an $11 billion stock sale a few years ago that was recognized on SoftBank’s financials earlier this year.

This is the math that Son sees in venture: 111,000,000,000 / 20,000,000 = 5,550x. There is no other asset class on the planet that will turn a dollar into thousands of dollars like venture capital.

WeWork’s woes don’t change this base formula. Nor does the continual drop of Wag, which received $300 million from the Vision Fund and looks to be going through tough challenges.

In any portfolio, there are going to be losses. The infamous J-curve in venture, where losses materialize far faster than gains in the early years of a fund, is alive and well — even at the growth stage.

And WeWork isn’t even dead yet — it still has cash, and it will rebuild. Will it be the largest startup turnaround in history? Possibly. Could it go straight to bankruptcy? Sure. Will the Vision Fund make money? Well, it really depends on that preference stack and a thousand other variables to be determined in the coming weeks, months, and years.

It’s all so early. My guess is that we still have about five years to go before we really start to get sufficient information to evaluate the Vision Fund’s ambitions.

Along this line thoughI don’t think I just need to defend venture capitalism though, but capitalism itself.

Matt Stoller, who has made it his mission to target big companies including Big Tech, summarizes the WeWork situation as emblematic of “counterfeit capitalism,” a system of founding story myths and fake growth charts underwritten by venture capitalists trying to build long-term, sustainable monopolistic companies using predatory pricing to kill off competitors.

Yet, that narrative totally misses the point of what capital does, and what investment means. Very, very few companies (venture-backed or not) are profitable from day one. Opening a restaurant requires buying equipment and signing a lease well before any customer walks in through the front door. Ditto for software startups, which need to actually build software before a user will pay for it. Capital investment is the bridge between plans to execution and launch.

The question is how long should a company be unprofitable to goad sales and drive revenues? A decade or two ago, it used to be that companies needed to be profitable to IPO. But why? Why precisely then should a company slow down its investment and clean up its cash flows? Why not earlier? Why not later?

In fact, something great has happened in the last few years in the credit markets: at least some investors are increasingly positioning their portfolios for growth rather than cash flows. They are willing to wait for profits, sometimes for years.

Or, in other words, more and more investors are thinking long-term about the ultimate potential worth of a business.

WeWork could be profitable today. It could shutter its most recently opened locations, condense down to a handful of locations in major cities, and roll around in its positive cash flow. Of course the Vision Fund understands this. But why lock in small gains today when there is so much more potential lurking out there?

We should be cheering this behavior, and not castigating it, even if WeWork itself might turn out to be a dud. The lesson of this whole saga isn’t that capitalism isn’t performing. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite: (venture) capitalism is performing better than ever to invest in future, long-range growth.

Across the political, social and economic stage, women’s issues are finally receiving heightened attention and priority.

There are more women than ever seeking political office; funding for female-founded startups is reaching record levels (even if they still have a long way to go to reach gender parity); a sizable cohort of female-founded and led companies have achieved billion-dollar unicorn valuations; and several women-led companies, including PagerDuty, The RealReal, and Eventbrite, have entered the public markets with successful IPOs.

What’s driving so much positive change?

Clearly, broadened awareness of gender and power issues, largely due to #MeToo, as well as an increase in the number of female investors, thanks to groups like All Raise, are all contributing catalysts. In addition, women now outnumber men in college, a majority of American moms are in the workforce, and in 40 percent of households those women are the breadwinners. But it’s more than that; I believe that there’s a profound generational shift afloat, and that this first wave of female-led unicorns is just the tip of the NASDAQ iceberg.

Unlike previous generations who may have either looked at self-investment as self-indulgence or who simply didn’t have the resources or technology available to make supplementary investments in themselves, today’s badass millennial women are unapologetic about their desire to invest in their own success and well-being. Determined to succeed without compromising their values or physical and mental wellness, these uber-empowered millennial women are making viable a new generation of startups to help them realize their dreams and feel comfortable in their skin. I refer to this economic wave as She-conomy 2.0.

For decades now there have been tech companies, which I refer to as She-conomy 1.0, catering to traditional and homogeneous identities of women primarily as shoppers and caregivers. In contrast, these new modern She-conomy 2.0 brands address latent, historically unmet, often un-discussed and under-served needs that speak to the multitude of other facets of our identities.

These companies have less to do with what women buy and more to do with their willingness to invest in themselves — in their careers and in their physical and emotional health and well-being. They are seeking and are willing to pay for products and services that help them advance their careers, feel comfortable about their bodies, and provide the physical and emotional support they’re seeking.

Women are taking control of their careers and supporting each other.

More than two decades ago, when I had my first child, I joined a mom’s group at Stanford Hospital. We were all working moms trying to juggle career and motherhood. It was a truly challenging time for each of us. The group provided such helpful support that we met every Monday evening for five years until our kids were in kindergarten. Why Mondays? Because Mondays are especially hard for working parents, marking yet another week in search of balance. We realized that meeting on Monday evenings provided us with the support we needed to make it through the work week. Perhaps even more critically, it gave us something about Mondays to look forward to.

There’s something incredibly empowering about experiencing a major transition like a new job or new parenthood as part of a cohort. Sheryl Sandberg famously sought to institutionalize this kind of support for working women with her non-profit Lean In. It has dramatically raised awareness around working women’s struggles. However, individual Lean In group leaders are usually volunteers running these sessions on the side while working and shouldering life’s endless list of other responsibilities.

Now a new generation of organizations is offering this support — for a fee. As for-profit organizations, they’re doing so in a scalable, consistent and reliable way. Women don’t have to worry about whether the organizer will be able to carve out time to orchestrate a meeting because doing so is the organizer’s job. Chief, Declare, The Assembly*, The Wing and The Riveter are all examples of companies that are growing and thriving because they’re offering valuable space, support and services that women are willing to pay for. Most of these organizations initially targeted millennials, but women of all generations are benefiting and participating.

Women are changing the narrative around previously taboo topics and promoting inclusiveness and acceptance of oneself.

It wasn’t long ago that mannequins, much like cover models, only came in one size. Now mainstream brands not only sell broader offerings; they increasingly showcase them in magazines, catalogs, stores and the runway. For example, Nike’s flagship store in London featured both plus-sized mannequins and para-sport mannequins for people with physical and intellectual abilities, and Rhianna’s new inclusive lingerie line regularly presents both plus-size and pregnant models.

Millennials (like all of us) don’t want to feel shamed; they want to feel empowered and beautiful. Instead of settling for frumpy, ill-fitting clothing or outdated product design, millennials are using their social media megaphones to tell the market what they want. Traditional companies like Victoria’s Secret have moved at a molasses-like pace to evolve from treating women as objects of fantasy to celebrating their right to feel great about themselves. Their antiquated practices have created the opportunity for new startups to create brands centered on body positivity. Some companies are filling largely underserved market needs by catering exclusively to larger and specialty sizes, and others are addressing previously taboo topics like body hair, which also contribute strongly to feelings around body positivity. Eloquii offers extended clothing sizes, Ruby Ribbon* and Third Love provide a wide sizing range of under garments and bras, and Fur addresses body hair and grooming.

Women are dedicating more attention to their own health and relationships.

Self-help books have been around for ages, but tech is paving the way for a new generation of services to provide guidance and support that are more convenient and targeted. At the same time, women are increasingly willing to discuss health issues that were previously taboo, like menstruation, menopause and perimenopause, fertility, and depression. Advancements in technology are making health-related self-care more accessible from the convenience of our wristbands and phones. Meanwhile, people are spending a disproportionate amount of their wealth on health, making the entire healthcare industry ripe for disruption.

All of these factors are making femtech big business. Countless new companies are helping women take more active control of their sexual health, including birth control and STI testing (Pill Club and Nurx), period tracking (Flo Health), fertility and egg freezing (Kind Body and Carrot Fertility), menopause (Rory, Genneve), postpartum depression and miscarriage (Maven) and even our relationships (Relish* and Bumble). In addition, no shortage of femtech companies are addressing period care, such as Lola, Cora, The Flex Company, Thinx, and Sustain Natural.

These companies are only viable because so many women — beginning with millennials but expanding out to the rest of us — are now willing and able to invest in themselves. United across a shared mission of female empowerment and inclusivity, She-onomy 2.0 is making it more realistic than ever to empower us to advance our careers, feel good about ourselves and stay healthy. Hats off to the badass millennial women leading this charge; we’re all better off professionally, emotionally and even physically thanks to you!

*Denotes portfolio company for Trinity Ventures

Let us connect some dots. Five years ago, Facebook acquired VR pioneers Oculus for $2 billion. This week, it snapped up neural-interface pioneers CTRL-Labs for somewhere north of $500 million, and announced that its own massively multiplayer VR shared universe Horizon will launch early next year.

Oculus became (somewhat creepily named) Facebook Reality Labs, headed by Andrew Bosworth, one of the company’s first 15 engineers, who also headed the company’s transition from desktop to mobile advertising. It doesn’t take much imagination to see that he’s now in charge a much more interesting, and longer-term, transition: from the World Wide Web to whatever lies beyond.

Their big multibillion-dollar bet, the vision floating in Mark Zuckerberg’s crystal ball, is clearly that this new frontier is “cyberspace,” to use William Gibson’s term, or “the Oasis,” to borrow from READY PLAYER ONE, a copy of which was once issued to every new Oculus employee. Virtual reality, in other words, and/or maybe “mixed reality,” which combines our real world with virtual artifacts.

I can see your eyes rolling already. I admit mine are twitching skywards as well. AR/VR, like nuclear fusion and Brazil, have been the future for so long that it’s become a little hard to take that future seriously. Neuromancer was published in 1984. Jaron Lanier demo’d the first real VR headset and motion capture wearable, the EyePhone and DataGlove, more than thirty years ago. No wonder the notion of a shared global VR space increasingly feels like a retro-future.

But to Zuck’s credit, the path to change here is obvious and therefore plausible: use gaming as the bridge. Create the world’s first and best massively multiplayer online VR game. (The theory being it will be more immersive, and therefore more compelling, than Magic Leap’s mixed reality.) Use Facebook’s power, scale, and wealth to bring gamers in until there’s a thriving community of many million monthly users.

Then, transition to the larger vision, of VR slowly supplanting the Web itself; replace laptops with headsets, phones with overlays on smart glasses, and keyboards with neural interfaces. Not all at once, but bit by bit, as the Horizon gameworld gradually, over a period of years, becomes a platform for socializing and messaging and work as well as play. Then the Internet’s denizens won’t just visit Facebook’s web site, or launch its app; instead they will, literally if virtually, live in Facebook’s walled garden.

Is that vision more than a little creepy? You betcha. Is it one that’s likely to come to fruition? Well, no, I wouldn’t say likely. But I’ll concede it has a chance, one sufficiently nonzero, and sufficiently potentially spectacularly lucrative, that Facebook’s ongoing multibillion-dollar bet makes sense. Lucrative in terms of both money and implicit power. Like I said: more than a little creepy.

Of course this isn’t Facebook’s only vision of the future. It’s just one of their bets. Another is to essentially pivot from social-media advertising to messaging and transactions. You have to grudgingly admire their willingness to explore abandoning their current fantastically successful business model in favor of the untried and untested. Anything to disrupt the innovator’s dilemma.

Will this bet pay off? Will Facebook Horizon, plus VR and neural interfaces, be the gateway to “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions,” to quote William Gibson? While the odds are against it, it still seems to have a better chance than anything else on our collective horizon.

Hey everyone. This is Week-in-Review, where I give a heavy amount of analysis and/or rambling thoughts on one story while scouring the rest of the hundreds of stories that emerged on TechCrunch this week to surface my favorites for your reading pleasure.

Last week, I talked about how streaming networks were undoing their advantages and making way for a renewed era of piracy.

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The big story

In the startup world, moral relativism seems to be a guiding force. But in order for this system to work, you need some sort of north star for wrongdoing. That can be hard to find though, so often missteps from Uber or Facebook of some other startup are said to be drowning in nuance and plagued by numerous stakeholders.

But, thankfully, there’s Juul, a company that’s website is devoted to its values so that its real world impact doesn’t have to be.

This week, the startup’s CEO stepped down and was replaced by a Big Tobacco exec, a truly fitting development for a company that has long tried to maintain a moral high ground based on the alternative facts of the reality at hand. Things aren’t looking too good for Juul these days, but it’s not because the startup had a come to Jesus moment on its own, it’s because the White House and FDA are pissed and threatening to pull a nuclear option and ban flavored cartridges, which account for 80% of Juul’s sales.

Why? Because Juul’s fruity flavors were heading straight into teenagers’ hands, because they were too good not to traffic, addictive, some might say. Over the course of last year, high school student use of tobacco surged 38% thanks to a 78% surge in e-cigarette use, according to a report by the CDC. That, aligned with some unfortunately-timed mystery vaping disease possibly caused by counterfeit THC cartridges, has plunged the company into a regulatory crisis and Altria into into an identity crisis.

In December of last year, Altria bought 35% of Juul for $12.8 billion, in a deal that valued the startup at $38 billion. Following the deal, employees got massive bonuses, divvying up $2 billion in Altria cash, in large part to lessen the sour taste of a deal with Big Tobacco.

In the deal’s aftermath, then-CEO Kevin Burns tried to soften the optics, “We understand the controversy and skepticism that comes with an affiliation and partnership with the largest tobacco company in the US. We were skeptical as well,” he wrote in a statement. “But over the course of the last several months we were convinced by actions, not words, that in fact this partnership could help accelerate our success switching adult smokers.”

The deal was a hail mary for Altria, and one that increasingly appears to be heading to a receiver-less end zone. In the past five months, Altria has seen its share price slide 30 percent to a five-year low, largely as its redemption bet on Juul has faded as the regulatory environment has shifted in an extremely hostile direction. This all leads to this week, when the Burns stepped down as CEO and was replaced by Altria exec K.C. Crosthwaite.

In the case of Juul, the mission may have differed from the reality at hand, but it always made for a great story, a good one for execs and investors and recruiters and marketers and engineers and interns to tell when their ethics were called into question, but eventually the charade lifts and you get to see that the soul of your startup isn’t so metallic, sleek and full of Silicon Valley ideals, it’s just a different kind of tar black.

Send me feedback
on Twitter @lucasmtny or email
lucas@techcrunch.com

On to the rest of the week’s news.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• TechCrunch’s Galaxy Fold gets damaged after one day
  TechCrunch escaped a busted Galaxy Fold unit the first time around, though other reviewers’ issues led to a lengthy delay and a product rethinking, but in reviewing our “new-and-improved” Galaxy Fold unit, we suffered a damaged screen after just over one full day with the device. We were pretty generous in noting the things that it could have been the cause, but at the end of the day you shouldn’t have to handle your $2,000 smartphone with kids’ gloves. Read more here.
• Amazon launches more Alexa devices
  Amazon’s annual event — where they toss a bunch of Alexa-enabled junk into the wild — has come! Alexa glasses and Alexa rings, Alexa Echos and glow-y orb things. See them all here.
• Facebook is officially preparing to ditch like counts (in Australia)
  Facebook is ready to make a big change to how users see other people’s content, hiding how many likes posts have received in a test taking place in Australia. Read more here.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. Facebook gives the politicians of the world a free pass:
   [Facebook promises not to stop politicians’ lies and hate]

2. Apple gives keyboard apps a bit too much access:
   [Apple says a bug may grant ‘full access’ to third-party keyboards by mistake]

Our biggest event of the year is right around the corner and we’re bringing in some of the most important figures in the tech industry. Here’s who’s coming to Disrupt SF 2019.

• Ellen Pao, Tracey Chou and Harry Glaser are coming to Disrupt
• Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden talking scooters at Disrupt SF

In addition to taking in the great line-up of speakers, you can roam around Startup Alley to catch the more than 1,000 companies showcasing their products and technologies. And of course the Startup Battlefield competition that launched the likes of Dropbox, Cloudflare and Mint will once again be one of the biggest highlights of Disrupt SF.

Sign up for more newsletters in your inbox (including this one) here.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk delivered an update about Starship, the company’s nest generation spacecraft, which is being designed for full, “rapid reusability.” Musk discussed the technology behind the design of Starship, which has evolved somewhat through testing and development after its original introduction in 2017.

Among the updates detailed, Musk articulated how Starship will be used to make humans interplanetary, including its use of in-space refilling of propellant, by docking with tanker Starships already in orbit to transfer fuel. This is necessary for the spacecraft to get enough propellant on board post-launch to make the trip to the Moon or Mars from Earth – especially since it’ll be carrying as much as 100 tons of cargo on board to deliver to these other space-based bodies.

These will include supplies for building bases on planetary surfaces, as well as up to 100 passengers on long-haul planet-to-planet flights.

Those are still very long-term goals, however, and Musk also went into detail about development of the current generation of Starship prototypes, as well as the planned future Starships that will go to orbit, and carry their first passengers.

The Starship Mk1, Mk2 and the forthcoming Mk3 and Mk4 orbital testers will all feature a fin design that will orient the vehicles so they can re-enter Earth’s atmosphere flat on their ‘bellies,’ coming in horizontal to increase drag and reduce velocity before performing a sort of flip maneuver to swing past vertical and then pendulum back to vertical for touch-down. In simulation, as shown at the event, it looks like it’ll be incredible to watch, since it looks more unwieldy than the current landing process for Falcon boosters, even if it’s still just as controlled.

Musk also shared a look at the design planned for Super Heavy, the booster that will be used to propel Starship to orbit. This liquid-oxygen powered rocket, which is about 1.5 times the height of the Starship itself, will have 37 Raptor engines on board (the Starship will have only six) and will also feature six landing legs and deployable grid fins for its own return trip back to Earth.

In terms of testing and development timelines, Musk said that the Starship Mk1 he presented the plan in front of at Boca Chica should have its first test flight in just one to two months. That will be a flight to a sub-orbital altitude of just under 70,000 feet. The prototype spacecraft is already equipped with the three Raptor engines it will use for that flight.

Next, Starship Mk2, which is currently being built in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at another SpaceX facility, will attempt a similar high altitude test. Musk explained that both these families will continue to compete with each other internally and build Starship prototypes and rockets simultaneously. Mk3 will begin construction at Boca Chica beginning next month, and Mk4 will follow in Florida soon after. Musk said that the next Starship test flight after the sub-orbital trip for Mk1 might be an orbital launch with the full Super Heavy booster and Mk3.

Musk said that SpaceX will be “building both ships and boosters here [at Boca Chica] and a the Cape as fast as we can,” and that they’ve already been improving both the design and the manufacture of the sections for the spacecraft “exponentially” as a result of the competition.

The Mk1 features welded panels to make up the rings you can see in the detail photograph of the prototype below, for instance, but Mk3 and Mk4 will use full sheets of stainless steel that cover the whole diameter of the spacecraft, welded with a single weld. There was one such ring on site at the event, which indicates SpaceX is already well on its way to making this work.

This rapid prototyping will enable SpaceX to build and fly Mk2 in two months, Mk3 in three months, Mk4 in four months and so on. Musk added that either Mk3 or Mk5 will be that orbital test, and that they want to be able to get that done in less than six months. He added that eventually, crewed missions aboard Starship will take place from both Boca Chica and the Cape, and that the facilities will be focused only on producing Starships until Mk4 is complete, at which point they’ll begin developing the Super Heavy booster.

In total, Musk said that SpaceX will need 100 of its Raptor rocket engines between now and its first orbital flight. At its current pace, he said, SpaceX is producing one every eight days – but they should increase that output to one every two days within a few months, and are targeting production of one per day for early in Q1 2019.

Because of their aggressive construction and testing cycle, and because, Musk said, the intent is to achieve rapid reusability to the point where you could “fly the booster 20 times a day” and “fly the [starship] three or four times a day,” the company should theoretically be able to prove viability very quickly. Musk said he’s optimistic that they could be flying people on test flights of Starship as early as next year as a result.

Part of its rapid reusability comes from the heat shield design that SpaceX has devised for Starship, which includes a stainless steel finish on one half of the spacecraft, with ceramic tiles used on the bottom where the heat is most intense during re-entry. Musk said that both of these are highly resistant to the stresses of reentry and conducive to frequent reuse, without incurring tremendous cost – unlike their initial concept, which used carbon fibre in place of stainless steel.

Musk is known for suggesting timelines that don’t quite match up with reality, but Starship’s early tests haven’t been so far behind his predictions thus far.

The right advice at the right time can make all the difference for your company. So this year at Disrupt SF (Oct. 2-4), we’re going to try to help startup founders get an extra level of insight. We’re hosting a set of workshops with experts in fundraising, growth and hiring, where attendees can submit questions and materials ahead of time and potentially talk with them live at the event.

Fundraising: Top seed investors Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures) and Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund) will join Russ Heddleston, CEO of DocSend, to do a pitchdeck teardown session. Fill out this form to send them your deck for consideration. More details here.

Growth Marketing: Leading growth marketer Asher King Abramson will be critiquing startup marketing assets with a focus on Facebook and Instagram. More details here.

Hiring:  Immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn will be helping you with the ins and outs of the immigration process, and how to think about it from a founder and investor perspective. More details here.

If they use your pre-submitted deck, assets or questions, we’ll give you a free ticket to any TechCrunch event next year.

These tracks are based on the interest we’ve seen from subscribers to our Extra Crunch membership service for cutting-edge startup knowledge. Abramson and Alcorn are also on our list of Verified Expert service providers, where we showcase the people that startups recommend to us.

But to get this invaluable feedback, you’ll need to have a pass to attend Disrupt SF. Sign up to get your pass to attend today.

Too far away to attend in SF? For folks who are considering attending our Disrupt Berlin conference on 11-12 December, you can look forward to a similar offering. 

 

 

Where does tech end and media begin? It can be hard to find the dividing line, particularly as tech companies move into the media business, and as big Hollywood blockbusters are increasingly created on computers.

So even though TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF event (happening next week!!) is ostensibly a tech conference, we’ll have plenty of big names from the worlds of media and entertainment onstage to discuss the changing landscape.

On day one, those names include Joseph Gordon Levitt, who you may know as an actor in films like “Inception” and “500 Days of Summer,” but who also founded the creative collaboration platform HitRecord, which raised a $6.4 million Series A earlier this year.

We’ll also be joined by actor Will Smith and director Ang Lee to discuss their new movie “Gemini Man,” in which Lee utilized cutting-edge computer effects to create a younger version of his star.

From the tech industry, we’ll have Neal Mohan, chief product officer at YouTube, who can discuss the video platform’s ongoing challenges, and how YouTube can balance its commitment to openness with growing pressure to battle hate speech and misinformation.

And while 5G will probably the main focus of our interview with Verizon CEO Hans Vestberg and Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan, we here at TechCrunch (which is owned by Verizon Media) are certainly interested in hearing about the company’s digital media plans.

Meanwhile, if you’re more interested in the nitty gritty of developing a media strategy, we’ll have a panel on that very subject on our Extra Crunch stage, with speakers including MakeLoveNotPorn’s Cindy Gallop and Brooke Hammerling of Brew PR.

Then on day two, we’ll turn our attention to one of the fastest-growing media categories, esports. 100 Thieves is a big player in this space — combining streaming content, competitive esports and apparel — and we’ll talk to the company’s founder Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag (a pro gamer himself), along with co-owner Scooter Braun (who also manages Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande).

Our Extra Crunch programming on that day will also include a session that’s all about future of digital media, which will be sponsored by publisher engagement company Spot.im.

Finally, on day three, we’ll be joined by YouTube star and “Queen of Shitty Robots” Simone Giertz. While the conversation will likely focus on her latest robotic and hardware creations (including her crowdfunded Every Day Calendar), Giertz is a remarkable case study in how someone can build an enormous following and business on digital media platforms.

We’ll also have an Extra Crunch session about brand-building — Brooke Hammerling will be sharing more of her knowledge, and she’ll be joined by Bumble VP of Marketing Chelsea Cain Maclin and Character co-founder/creative director Ben Pham.

Disrupt SF will take place from October 2 to 4 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Browse the full agenda and buy your tickets.

EC Editorial Announcements

TechCrunch Disrupt SF is this week: join us on the Extra Crunch stage

TechCrunch’s biggest event of the year is happening this coming week at the brand-new Moscone North convention center in SF. We have wall-to-wall programming on our inaugural Extra Crunch stage, where audience members can ask questions to our panelists on topics as diverse as growth marketing, recruiting, fundraising, legal quandaries, and more.

If you want to join but haven’t bought your ticket, remember that all Extra Crunch annual subscribers get 20% off our tickets by emailing extracrunch@techcrunch.com. And if you can’t join, we will have synopses of some of the EC panels coming out in the following weeks.

Transfer your Extra Crunch Brex Reward points to JetBlue

A while back, we added an Extra Crunch member benefit where all EC members can receive 100,000 Brex Rewards points if they sign up for a new Brex account. Now, those points can also be transferred to JetBlue, perhaps for those fancy Mint seats between New York and SF. We are going to continue to add new member benefits, so do let us know if you have any interesting ideas or want to partner with us.

Follow our new @extracrunch Twitter handle

Finally, we now have a new Twitter handle for Extra Crunch: @extracrunch. We will be retweeting all EC articles on the handle, and later on, will be exploring other ways to engage with members through Twitter. Follow us!

Inside the venture capital recruiting process

Top venture capital partner recruiter (among other verticals) Dan Miller of True Search describes what it takes to become an investor these days at a VC firm:

If you are interviewing for operating roles in companies in parallel to interviewing with VC firms, you will get multiple offers (probably quite good ones) in the former category before you’ve made it far in the latter. It is exceedingly common in the VC Partner searches I run to find out that an excellent candidate has multiple strong offers in Product roles from big tech companies and hot startups, for example, before they’ve made it halfway through a VC interview process.

This Week in Apps: AltStore, acquisitions and Google Play Pass

TechCrunch’s apps maven Sarah Perez is starting a new, occasional series on the most important developments in the app world along with her analysis of what’s taking place. This week, she explores AltStore, a new type of app store, iOS 13 adoption trends, an App Annie acquisition, and five or so other stories:

SpaceX is all set to deliver an update on the status of its Starship program, courtesy of CEO Elon Musk. Musk will provide new info about “the design and development of Starship” at 7 PM CDT (8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT) tonight, live from the company’s Boca Chica rocket assembly facility in South Texas.

The likely backdrop for the update will be the Starship Mk1 orbital prototype, the second flight-testing vehicle SpaceX has produced in its development of Starship. The first, Starhopper, accomplished its mission of testing two low-altitude, limited duration flights – a key step that sets the stage for longer, high-altitude sub-orbital testing by this Mk1 prototype. The Mk1 will use three Raptor engines initially (and up to six eventually) while the snub-nosed Starhopper used only one.

So far, we know based on past SpaceX presentations that the company is aiming to use Starship and its forthcoming Super Heavy launcher to deliver fully reusable space transportation, capable of bringing cargo and crew to the Moon, Mars and beyond. Starting at 7 PM CDT, we’ll find out what’s next for the company on the path toward that long-term goal.

SpaceX is set to show off its Starship Mk1, an orbital-scale prototype of the spacecraft it eventually plans to use to attain its goal of fully reusable commercial spaceflight. Starship is the key ingredient not only to fully reusable launch and cargo vehicles for serving commercial clients; it’s also the next most important step in SpaceX and Elon Musk’s audacious plan to get humans to Mars and sow the seeds that will help us become an interplanetary species.

Starship Mk1 is the evolution of the first flight vehicle that SpaceX used to test technologies for Starship – the Starhopper, a stub-top cylinder that basically just provided a way to test one of the Raptor engines in two, low-altitude ‘hop’ flights. The Starhopper’s mission may be over, but it’s still in Boca Chica, Texas, sitting out just behind the Starship Mk1 and just a mile or less from the end of the road and the Gulf.

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Starship Mk1 is a towering structure in person, and its gleaming, high-polish shell can be blinding in the South Texas sun when there’s no cloud cover. The final effect is like a 1950s science-fiction pulp novel cover made real, with a scale that’s hard to understand even standing directly in front of the thing and seeing workers busy putting the final touches on the rocket’s exterior ahead of SpaceX’s update event tonight.

When I arrived on the ground in Brownsville, I made the short drive out to SpaceX’s assembly site for the Mk1 in the small community of Boca Chica. It was well after sunset, but the roughly 180-foot tall structure was lit up by a number of floodlights, as crews continued to work on interior welds and other parts of the final assembly. Notably, about half the structure had its shiny, glossy outer finish, while the rest remained rougher looking – something which would change by morning.

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Tall construction cranes lifted workers to the parts of the spacecraft they were working on, including a few ports dotting the surface which are large enough for a person to crawl through, even though they appear small relative to the rocket’s overall size. The top nose cone of the Starship Mk1 was still attached to a crane at this point, too, before that supporting structure was removed sometime before morning.

Returning the next day, the Starship was more easily visible from afar – I spotted it about 10 miles out. The shining stainless steel structure was much shinier than the night before, looking more like a complete and finished spacecraft. The bottom wings near the base were connected to the body with cladding that increases aerodynamics – while the top fins were attached at only a couple of points. Both sets of fins will move rapidly during entry and landing in order to control stability of the spacecraft, which is a key ingredient in its ability to reflow multiple times.

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Workers were still busy in the morning putting the final touches on the rocket, including working on placing the top cap on to the very tip of the nose cone. The domed tip was actually rounded, not pointy, which is probably better for helping bleed off drag when the rocket is making its way back to Earth.

The final structure is indeed incredibly impressive. The scale, as mentioned, is hard to grasp, which is why I tried to capture as many shots as possible with people in frame to give a sense of Starship’s overall size. Remember, too, that this is just the top portion of what will eventually be SpaceX’s Starship launch system, which will include the Super Heavy booster to deliver extra thrust for carrying large cargo to orbit. The base of the Starship Mk1 alone is roughly 30 feet in diameter, which is about half the size of the largest semi-trailer transport trucks on the road.

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SpaceX’s event today isn’t just about revealing this rocket – Starship Mk1 is actually really easy to access via public road, and you can get surprisingly close. But it’ll probably get another round of spit and polish prior to tonight’s update from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk . And we’ll hear lots more about next steps for the Starship program, including timelines for its first suborbital tests (which will involve flying to above airline cruising speed) and which could start quite soon. Plus, we might hear more about Musk’s more ambitious goals for Starship, including super-fast upper atmosphere passenger flights, and its first forays to planets beyond our own.

We’ll have updates live as they happen here on TechCrunch, and the event should start at around 7 PM CDT (8 PM EDT/5 PM PDT).