Vivaldi has long billed itself as a browser for advanced users who want to be able to customize their browser to their heart’s content. With that mission, it managed to get a foothold in the desktop market, but until now, the browser company co-founded by Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, didn’t have a presence on mobile. That’s changing today with the launch of Vivaldi for Android, which retains the browser’s look, feel and speed without getting bogged down in trying to bring all of its myriad features to mobile.
For the most part, I like to use the same browser on desktop and mobile, simply to keep my bookmarks in sync (and Vivaldi says it doesn’t use Google’s servers to sync, in case you’re worried about being tracked). For the longest time, that was one of the reasons why I always switched away from Vivaldi on the desktop again, despite the fact that the browser is essentially made for a user like me. With the mobile version, I think that’ll change.
The overall browser experience is pretty straightforward. I appreciate the fact that the Vivaldi team put all of the standard UI features (backwards, forward, tab switcher and URL/search) at the bottom. You can still use the address bar at the top of the screen and the menu, too, of course, but in this age of giant screens, I appreciate a browser that can be used with one hand for much of the time.
As far as features go, Vivaldi covers all the bases, with speed dials and bookmarks, some advanced tab management features that aren’t usually available on mobile, including the ability to clone tabs, and a screenshots feature that lets you capture either the full page or just the visible area. If you regularly use different search engines, you can also use Vivaldi’s shortcuts in the address bar (think ‘d’ for DuckDuckGo, for example). There’s also a reader view and pretty much everything else you expect from a modern mobile browser.
One area where I’d like to see a bit more work from Vivaldi in general, both on mobile and desktop, is tracking protection. That’s been a focus for Firefox in many of its recent releases and even Microsoft’s new Chrome-based Edge browser is offering the ability to block trackers by default. Vivaldi, at least in its current form, doesn’t yet any tracking protection by default. That’s not much of an issue on the desktop, where you can easily install an extension, but on mobile, I’d like the company to do a bit more.
Overall, Vivaldi on Android is a worthwhile contender. It’s fast and easy to use — and if you’re already using Vivaldi on the desktop, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you’re not, it’s still worth a shot and may just get you to try the desktop version, too.
Vivaldi has long billed itself as a browser for advanced users who want to be able to customize their browser to their heart’s content. With that mission, it managed to get a foothold in the desktop market, but until now, the browser company co-founded by Opera’s former CEO Jon von Tetzchner, didn’t have a presence on mobile. That’s changing today with the launch of Vivaldi for Android, which retains the browser’s look, feel and speed without getting bogged down in trying to bring all of its myriad features to mobile.
For the most part, I like to use the same browser on desktop and mobile, simply to keep my bookmarks in sync (and Vivaldi says it doesn’t use Google’s servers to sync, in case you’re worried about being tracked). For the longest time, that was one of the reasons why I always switched away from Vivaldi on the desktop again, despite the fact that the browser is essentially made for a user like me. With the mobile version, I think that’ll change.
The overall browser experience is pretty straightforward. I appreciate the fact that the Vivaldi team put all of the standard UI features (backwards, forward, tab switcher and URL/search) at the bottom. You can still use the address bar at the top of the screen and the menu, too, of course, but in this age of giant screens, I appreciate a browser that can be used with one hand for much of the time.
As far as features go, Vivaldi covers all the bases, with speed dials and bookmarks, some advanced tab management features that aren’t usually available on mobile, including the ability to clone tabs, and a screenshots feature that lets you capture either the full page or just the visible area. If you regularly use different search engines, you can also use Vivaldi’s shortcuts in the address bar (think ‘d’ for DuckDuckGo, for example). There’s also a reader view and pretty much everything else you expect from a modern mobile browser.
One area where I’d like to see a bit more work from Vivaldi in general, both on mobile and desktop, is tracking protection. That’s been a focus for Firefox in many of its recent releases and even Microsoft’s new Chrome-based Edge browser is offering the ability to block trackers by default. Vivaldi, at least in its current form, doesn’t yet any tracking protection by default. That’s not much of an issue on the desktop, where you can easily install an extension, but on mobile, I’d like the company to do a bit more.
Overall, Vivaldi on Android is a worthwhile contender. It’s fast and easy to use — and if you’re already using Vivaldi on the desktop, it’s a no-brainer. Even if you’re not, it’s still worth a shot and may just get you to try the desktop version, too.
DHL has expanded its DHL Africa eShop business to 13 additional markets, upping the presence of the global shipping company’s e-commerce platform to 34 African countries.
DHL href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/04/11/dhl-launches-africa-eshop-app-for-global-retailers-to-sell-into-africa/">went live with the digital retail app in April, bringing more than 200 U.S. and U.K. sellers — from Neiman Marcus to Carters — online to African consumers.
Africa eShop operates using startup MallforAfrica.com’s white label fulfillment service, Link Commerce. Similar to MallforAfrica’s model, the arrangement allows Africa eShop users to purchase goods directly from the websites of any of the app’s global partners.
This week’s expansion is the second for DHL’s Africa eShop, after adding 9 markets in May.
Here are Africa eShop’s latest additions: Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Guinea, Lesotho, Namibia, Niger, Sudan, Togo, and Zimbabwe.
MallforAfrica CEO Chris Folayan points to the novelty of online sales in many of Africa eShop’s new markets.
“For some of these countries no one has really tapped into e-commerce the way we’re tapping into it, with an ability to buy online and also buy online directly from places like Macy’s or Amazon,” he told TechCrunch on a call.
Payment methods include local fintech options, such as Nigeria’s Paga and Kenya’s M-Pesa. DHL Africa eShop leverages the shipping giant’s existing delivery structure on the continent, through its DHL Express courier service.
To add some context, someone with a mobile phone and bank account in, say, Niger can now use DHL’s app to shop at Macys.com and have anything from designer sneakers to kitchenware shipped to their doorstep in Central-Africa.
DHL Africa eShop is also offering incentives to entice first-time digital consumers.
“We will be launching with a promo, buy any 5 items from over 100 retail partners and get a $20 flat shipping fee. This is DHL’s way of showing they are dominant in shipping and eCommerce in Africa.”
As TechCrunch highlighted this spring, the launch and expansion of DHL’s MallforAfrica supported platform is creating a competitive scenario with e-commerce unicorn Jumia.
Jumia is Africa’s most visible e-tailer and operates consumer retail and online service verticals in 14 African countries. Headquartered in Lagos, the company raised more than $200 million in an NYSE IPO this April.
DHL launched the Africa eShop product the day before Jumia went public and made its first country expansion only weeks after.
There’s a brewing business debate on which platform is best positioned to capture a larger share of a projected $2.1 trillion in consumer spending (10% online) expected in Africa by 2025.
Then there’s the question of who’s largest. DHL Africa eShop touts itself as “Africa’s Largest Online Shopping Platform.” Jumia said, “We believe that our platform is the largest e-commerce marketplace in Africa,” in its SEC F-1 filing.
On the prospect of going head to head with Africa’s best funded e-commerce company, Chris Folayan is somewhat circumspect.
“We’re note focused on competing with Jumia, but in a way it’s starting to happen as a result of our expansion and growth,” he said.
Two main spectators in a MallforAfrica, Jumia match up could be the big global e-commerce names.
Italian startup Freeda Media has raised a $16 million Series B round. Existing investor Alven is leading the round, with Endeavor Catalyst, UniCredit and others also participating. UniCredit is also granting the company a debt facility of $3 million.
The company has managed to attract millions of followers on Instagram, Facebook and other social media platforms. It runs short videos, quick interviews and articles. In other words, Freeda wants to create a social version of Elle, Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, Cosmopolitan or Man Repeller.
Freeda is currently live in Italy, Spain and South America. The company currently has 5 million women engaging with their content every day. It reaches 80% of Italian and Spanish women aged 18-34 every month.
On Instagram in particular, the startup says that it is the first female media brand in the world with 100 million interactions in 2019 alone:
With today’s founding round, the goal is clearly on international expansion. The startup is opening an office in London and plans to launch in the U.K. and other English-speaking markets. There are currently 160 people working for Freeda.
The company is still mostly focused on branded content to monetize its audience. But Freeda wants to expand beyond this revenue stream with a new direct-to-consumer brand. You can expect to be able to buy Freeda-branded products starting in 2020.
The series of tariffs imposed by the United States on Chinese goods has impacted both U.S. and China-based Amazon vendors, but U.S. sellers are taking a bigger hit to their sales, according to data from cross-border e-commerce analytics company SellerMotor. The gap has widened since the round of tariffs on Chinese goods announced in the summer of 2018 by the Trump administration.
Founded in 2016, SellerMotor provides data and ad analytics about Amazon and an automation platform for sellers. For its research, the company analyzes data from 568 million SKUs, or almost all the active products and brands on Amazon’s U.S. site.
For this particular data set, SellerMotor analyzed 480,000 SKUs from Chinese sellers and 17.9 million from U.S. sellers.
In July 2018, a U.S. tariff on $34 billion in Chinese goods went into effect. That month, Chinese vendors’ sales grew 174% year-over-year, while U.S. sellers saw a 124% increase. As the tariff war between China and the U.S. intensified that summer, however, U.S. and China-based both sellers saw their growth stall, with U.S. sellers coping with a bigger impact, as shown in the graph below from SellerMotor. In September 2018, when the U.S. placed a 25% tariff on $50 billion in Chinese goods, plus a 10% tariff on $200 billion in Chinese goods, U.S. sellers saw their year-over-year sales growth slow down to 54%, compared Chinese sellers’ sales growth of 111%.
According to SellerMotor’s data, U.S.-based Amazon sellers have seen their year-over-year monthly sales decrease every month since November 2018. By March 2019, when a 25% tariff was placed on $250 billion in Chinese goods, Chinese vendors’ year-over-year sales grew by 61%, but U.S. sellers saw their sales decrease by 3%.
While many U.S.-based Amazon sellers also get their supplies from China, Chinese sellers have better control over their supply chain and closer relationships with their suppliers (in some cases, even equity partnerships), allowing them more flexibility, SellerMotor COO Sibao Chen tells TechCrunch. These deeper ties give vendors the leeway to negotiate things like smaller batches of products when necessary. As the tariff war forces smaller competitors out of the market, having more control over the supply chain lets these sellers quickly step into the gaps they leave behind. “Whoever is quick to grab these fragments will become even larger in size, because the market is there and that can help with growth momentum for the largest companies,” Chen says.
Chen adds that the way many Chinese e-commerce sellers organize their operations may also give them an edge over U.S. sellers. The company currently has about 60,000 clients in China and launched in the U.S. in June.
“I have been talking to a lot of U.S. and Chinese clients and the way that these Chinese clients are organized is that usually for each product group. So if there is an electronics company selling iPhone charging cables and also headsets, each of these product groups would probably have two to five people running the thing, like a mini-company, and they are organized, incentivized and almost completely independent within their group and given a lot of autonomy,” Chen says. “This is a very common form of organization within the Chinese retail and e-commerce industry and this is something we believe could have given them an edge in terms of the speed that they react to external impacts such as the tariffs.”
French startup Spendesk has raised another $38.4 million Series B round with existing investor Index Ventures leading the round. The company has raised $49.4 million (€45 million) over the years.
Spendesk is an all-in-one corporate expense and spend management service. It lets you track expenses across your company, empower your employees with a clear approval process and simplify your bookkeeping.
The service essentially works like Revolut or N26, but for corporate needs. After you sign up, you get your own Spendesk account with an IBAN. You can top up that account and define different sets of policies.
For instance, you can set payment limits depending on everyone’s job and define who’s in charge of approving expensive payments. After that, everyone can generate virtual cards for online payments and get a physical card for business travel.
When you’re on the road, you can pay directly using Spendesk just like any corporate card. If you have to pay in cash or with another card, you can take a photo of the receipt from the Spendesk mobile app and get your money back.
Many Spendesk users also leverage the service for other use cases. For instance, you can define a marketing budget and let the marketing team spend it on Facebook or Google ads using a virtual card.
You can also track all your online subscriptions from the Spendesk interface to make sure that you don’t pay for similar tools. If you hire freelancers, you can also upload all your invoices to the platform, export an XML with your outstanding invoices and import it to your banking portal.
Spendesk tries to be smarter than legacy expense solutions. For instance, the company tries to leverage optical character recognition (OCR) to match receipts with payments, autofill the VAT rate, etc.
With today’s funding round, the company plans to open offices in Berlin and London, add more currencies and develop new features. Over the past year, the company went from 20 employees to 120 employees. There are now 1,500 companies using Spendesk in Europe.
Rohan Malhotra and Arjun Malhotra left their jobs in London and Silicon Valley to explore opportunities in India in late 2013. A year later, the brothers launched Investopad to connect with local startup founders and product managers and built a community to exchange insight. Somewhere in the journey, they wrote early checks to social-commerce startup Meesho, which now counts Facebook as an investor, Autonomic, which got acquired by Ford, and HyperTrack, among others. Now the duo is ready to be full-time VCs.
On Monday, they announced Good Capital, a VC fund that would invest in early-stage startups. Through Good Capital’s maiden fund of $25 million, the brothers plan to invest in about half a dozen startups in a year and provide between $100,000 to $2 million in their Seed and Series A financing rounds, they told TechCrunch in an interview last week.
“Through Investopad, we helped startup founders raise money, provided guidance, and helped them find customers. We did a ton of events, and learned about the market,” said Arjun, who worked at Capricorn Investment Group and also acted in 2014 blockbuster Bollywood title “Highway.”
Investopad’s first fund portfolio stands at a gross IRR of 138.3% and nine of its 12 investments have realised returns, with every dollar invested already returned, the brothers said.
One example of such startup is the social-commerce startup that has amassed over 2 million users who are engaging with the platform to sell products across India.
In a statement, Vidit Aatrey, cofounder and CEO of Meesho, said, “Rohan and Arjun were our earliest investors. They have a phenomenal global network of entrepreneurs, operators and investors. They helped us early on with introductions to such people; who brought not only capital but, more importantly, valuable operational inputs which helped us learn quickly and find product-market fit faster. While we’ve grown from 2 people to over 1,000+ at Meesho, they remain close confidants!”
Good Capital will focus on investing in startups that are building solutions that address users who have come online in India for the first time in the last two years, they said.
“We don’t have laser-focus on a particular sector,” said Rohan, who previously worked as a sports agent in the talent management business. “Our primary focus is to help startups that are taking a bottom-up approach.”
The VC fund has completed its first close of $12 million from Symphony International Holdings, a host of European family offices, and a number of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.
Sundeep Madra, CEO of Ford X, and Yogen Dalal, Partner Emeritus at the Mayfield Fund and founder of Glooko, and Dinesh Moorjani, Managing Director of Comcast Ventures and founder of Hatch Labs and Tinder, will serve as advisors to Good Capital.
“Rohan and Arjun have a unique ability to identify trends and bring together founders and investors to go after the unique problems that India needs to have solved. They operate with a sense of urgency and innovation which is a major key at the seed-stage.” said Madra, who has invested in companies such as Uber and Zenefits.
The fund has also set up an investment committee whose members are Sanjay Kapoor, former CEO of Airtel and now a senior advisor at BCG, Rahul Khanna, formerly a managing partner at Cannan Partners and now founder of Trifecta Capital, and Kashyap Deorah, a serial entrepreneur who is currently building HyperTrack.
Good Capital has also already made two investments: SimSim, a video-based e-commerce platform that is trying to replicate the experience consumers have in offline stores, and Spatial, a cross-reality platform that allows people to collaborate through augmented reality. Garrett Camp, a founder of Uber and Expa, and Samsung Next have also invested in Spatial.
The VC fund is also interested in funding business-to-business startups, though they say these startups would ideally be building solutions for overseas markets. “There we are generally targeting makers, developers and designers, rather than solving problems for heavy-duty sales businesses.”
The arrival of Good Capital should help the Indian startup community, which today has to rely on a handful of VC funds that invest in early stage startups. “Conventionally, funds have targeted the top of the pyramid by exploring visible opportunities and replicated US companies and models,” said Moorjani in a statement.
“In contrast, Good Capital’s first principles thinking applied to India’s larger economy, which is coming online at scale with a supporting ecosystem for the first time, has been refreshing to see. The team is beyond talented.,” he added.
Even as Indian tech startups raised a record $10.5 billion in 2018, early-stage startups saw a decline in the number of deals they participated in and the amount of capital they received.
Early-stage startups participated in 304 deals in 2018 and raised $916 million in funds last year, down from $988 million they raised from 380 rounds in 2017 and $1.096 billion they raised from 430 deals the year before, research firm Venture Intelligence told TechCrunch.
As for Investopad, the brothers said they have hired a number of people who will now continue its operation.
The promise of flying cars has become an idea more synonymous with the tech world’s shortcomings than its exciting potential, but today one of the startups that has been focused on actually trying to make small, airborne vehicles a reality is announcing a fundraise and says it’s on track for a commercial launch in two to three years.
Volocopter, which has been building drone-like autonomous electric flying taxis for its own (as-yet unlaunched) urban commercial passenger transportation service — the latest model is its two-passenger VoloCity announced earlier this summer — has closed €50 million ($55 million) in funding led by Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Ltd, the Chinese automotive company that owns Volvo, Lotus and a number of other car brands. There are also plans for another significant tranche of money underway, likely to be closed later this year.
In this latest round, Geely is investing alongside other unnamed new and existing investors in the Bruchsal, Germany-based company. Previous backers include Intel and Daimler, the German car giant that owns Mercedes and a number of other brands.
Rene Griemens, Volocopter’s CFO, said in an interview that the German company intends to use the funding to continue working on its taxi R&D; meeting safety and other regulatory requirements for its small taxi vessels (which seat two); working other upcoming models such as those that can transport cargo; and business development around commercial launches.
Indeed, part of this latest investment is paving the way for future business: Geely and Volocopter will be working on a joint venture to bring the Volocopter and its “Urban Air Mobility” concept to China.
While there is no commercial airtaxi or other “flying car” services in existence today in any urban area, the market for hopefuls is a crowded one, with the likes of Lilium, Kitty Hawk, eHang, Uber, and many others building completely new styles of aircraft and hoping to play a role in offering short-range flights as an affordable alternative to road-based transportation. (Blade, an airtaxi service of sorts, is offering more conventional helicopters and other vessels in its limited launch for executives.)
“Urban mobility needs to evolve in the next few years to meet rising demand,” said Florian Reuter, CEO of Volocopter, in a statement. “With our Volocopter air taxis, we are adding a whole new level of mobility in the skies.”
Among its many potential competitors, Volocopter has been one of the more prolific when it comes to building and testing its drone-like vehicles, most recently in Helsinki where it became the first autonomous VTOL — vertical take-off and landing — aircraft to operate in the same airspace as other commercial aircraft.
Details on how Volocopter’s service would operate are still — pardon the expression — up in the air, but Griemens said that while Volocopter would own the aircraft, it would likely partner with local operators to help run the service. The average price of each aircraft, he noted, may be akin to a small helicopter, but operations would likely be one-fifth to one-quarter of the price. While initial rides would be expensive, between five and 10 years, they estimate the price would come down to the cost of a taxi ride on the ground.
“The goal was always to democratize flying,” he said.
Its first launch markets are likely to be Singapore, Dubai — where it has a partnership with the city — and an unspecified large European city. That could be somewhere in its home market of Germany, or Helsinki, but just as equally London, where the company has been engaging with city officials on what an airtaxi service could look like. (It’s also part of a new experimental ‘sandbox’ launched by the UK’s Civil Aviation Authority to test out technology related to air-based transportation and travel.)
But even with regulatory frameworks in place, delays can come in many forms. This isn’t even the first time that Volocopter has predicted commercial services in “two to three years.”
Nevertheless, startups like Volocopter represent a credible version of the future of transportation, so for companies like Geely, Daimler and Intel, which still have large legacy businesses, investing in and working with Volocopter gives them a shot at playing a key role (and having a financial stake) in that market.
“Geely is transitioning from being an automotive manufacturer to a mobility technology group, investing in and developing a wide range of next-generation technologies,” said Li Shufu, Geely’s chairman, in a statement. “Our joint venture with Volocopter underlines our confidence in Volocopter air taxis as the next ambitious step in our wider expansion in both electrification and new mobility services.”
Geely already works with Volocopter’s investor Daimler — which has been a prolific investor in next-generation transportation services — on ride-sharing services in the country.
HackerOne, the seven-year-old, San Francisco-based company that mediates between hackers and companies interested in testing their online vulnerabilities, has raised $36.4 million in Series D funding that brings the company’s total funding to date to $110 million.
The deal was led by Valor Equity Partners, which was joined by the company’s earlier investors, including Benchmark, New Enterprise Associates, Dragoneer Investment Group and EQT Ventures.
The company says it now works with more than 1,500 customers that use the company to help find critical security weaknesses so they can address them before players with nefarious intentions find and exploit them. Among the list of companies that pay for its help are Google, Intel, Airbnb, Alibaba, General Motors, and the U.S. Department of Defense.
As we reported late last month, HackerOne is also working with Facebook and its partners on the Libra cryptocurrency project; specifically, it’s developing a bug bounty program for applications built on its blockchain.
With data breaches becoming an everyday occurrence for all kinds of businesses — often caused by flaws in payment systems but also sometimes the simple result of poor cyber hygiene — it’s no surprise that HackerOne, along with competitors like Synack and BugCrowd, are becoming more central to many more companies.
With more outfits under attack than ever before, the rewards that hackers can earn is also on the rise. While each client determines what it will pay for a job, with more complicated issues typically promising higher bounties (HackerOne refers to each task as “piece work”), the average bounty Hacker One paid for critical vulnerabilities has increased to $3,384 in the last year, a 48% increase over the prior year’s average.
The company meanwhile says that six hackers on its platform have now earned more than $1 million each in lifetime earnings. The first of these, a 19-year-old, self-taught hacker from Argentina, became the first person to earn more than $1 million in bounty awards from HackerOne back in March. He has reported more than 1,670 valid unique vulnerabilities to companies, including Verizon Media Company, Twitter, WordPress parent Automattic.
Since then, five more hackers have joined the million-dollar club, says HackerOne.
HackerOne works with hundreds of thousands of individuals in service to its customers. At an event hosted by this editor a couple of years ago, HackerOne CEO Marten Mickos suggested that a fair number are teenagers, too. Said Mickos at the time: “Some [of the hackers we work with] are teenage boys and girls today, and they’ll write us and say their life has changed. They bought an apartment for their mother, or they bought a motorbike for themselves. They show up on social media in their HackerOne hoodies. That’s their identity. It’s shaping them into respectable, contributing citizens who take responsibility for the world. It’s amazing to see how these young people stand up when we adults have been screwing up this world.”
Alice Lloyd George is an early stage investor based in New York and the host of Flux, a series of podcast conversations with leaders in frontier technology.
In the latest episode of Flux podcast I sit down with Matthew Cauble the co-founder of Kin Euphorics, a functional beverage company that aims to reduce stress and boost bliss. Matthew was previously the co-founder of YC-backed startup Soylent. He shares tales from the company’s early days and describes how they made one of the largest pivots in YC history, from building software-defined radios to meal-replacement shakes.
Matthew explains why Soylent resonated and we get into co-founder Rob Rhinehart’s latest interest in space settlement and the Mars industry event he hosted in the Mojave. Matthew shares why he became interested in wellness, how he’s applying lessons learned at Soylent to building the Kin product, and why he believes that strong companies often look like new social movements. We get into the beverage’s formula that includes nootropics and adaptogens, and what it means to challenge a ritual as ancient as alcohol.
An excerpt of our conversation is published below. Full transcript on Medium.
ALG: Matt is the co-founder and president of Kin Euphorics, a New York based company. Welcome.
MC: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
ALG: So I actually don’t know a ton about your background before what you’re doing now. You were one of the founders and COO of Soylent is that right?
MC: That’s right.
Soylent now also sells solid meal replacement bars
ALG: I don’t know how much our listeners know about Soylent. Let’s presume not too much. There was a couple of articles when Soylent came out that said things like, “This is The End of Food” [the New Yorker] or called it “a contrarian food replacement company.” And it’s been a huge success, selling drinkable meals to initially time-crunched Silicon Valley workers. Now the market’s much bigger. You moved from liquids to solids. A lot of the buyers and consumers of it initially thought about maximizing efficiency as one of the reasons they go for the product. I’ve checked the numbers and there’s a strong community — about 35,000 active Reddit folks in the Soylent community which is amazing. And it’s now a nationwide product. It’s available not only on the e-commerce channels where you started, but also in retail locations like 7-Eleven and Walmart.
MC: It’s in Walmart. That’s the best thing.
ALG: That’s crazy.
MC: The dream.
ALG: And it didn’t start as a food or supplement company. You guys started as cell phone towers?
MC: Wireless networks.
ALG: That seems like a large pivot and interesting journey for the company.
MC: Paul Graham said it was the biggest pivot in YC history. So when Rob and I were in college he was working on building these software defined radios —
ALG: You met in college.
MC: We met freshman year of college.
ALG: Where did you go?
MC: We went to Georgia Tech. Rob is from Atlanta. I’m actually from Arizona. But my grandfather and my uncle went to Georgia Tech. I knew I wanted to leave the West Coast and that I wanted to go somewhere else. And Georgia Tech is an amazing school for what I was studying.
ALG: Incredible technical school.
MC: It’s great. Yeah. I wanted to develop an engineering skill set. I wanted to meet people that were working in technology. I didn’t want to be in a major city but I wanted to be somewhere that felt like a city. Georgia Tech is in downtown Atlanta. It’s absolutely beautiful. Rob and I met freshman year. We were in the same fraternity. If you’ve ever met Rob, he’s one of the most fun people who has some of the best ideas of what to do late at night.
ALG: What was the first time you met Rob do you remember?
Rob Rhinehart
MC: The first image I have of Rob is him wearing pants that didn’t quite touch his ankles. But he had extreme confidence. Rob’s a pretty tall guy and he was just coming out of high school.
ALG: So not intentionally cropped pants.
MC: No not at all. I don’t think any of us were expecting to wear pants that day and it happened to be just a day where we had to dress up and so everyone threw something together. But Rob just has this great presence and confidence and he’s a witty, smart person. I love that about him. So we got along from day one and had a lot of adventures throughout college. When we got to the end we realized we wanted to start companies and take risks out of school. Seeing that we didn’t really need any money and didn’t have much responsibility and we had this dream of building something that changed the world. That’s when we got into Y Combinator and moved out to California to work on these wireless networks using software defined radios.
ALG: How did you decide to build wireless networks, what was the conversation?
MC: Rob was thinking about it. He was taking a network class. He was taking a social entrepreneurship class. I took that same social entrepreneurship class. We were thinking about what was something we could bring to the rest of the world. Not just serving customers in the United States, but places in Africa or South America. Developing nations that are getting wealthy. The Internet is the thing. Everyone wants internet. Rob wanted to build a network that people could use in Africa and in rural areas. We also saw an opportunity to build the next AT&T using next wave technology.
ALG: I mean when you look at the NPS for the existing providers, the AT&Ts, they’re pretty low scores. There’s room there. But it does require quite a lot of CAPEX.
MC: Insane CAPEX. The idea was using wireless we could get around a lot of that CAPEX. There was development in the TV networks coming offline opening up this huge amount of space for us to send information across the airwaves that used to be used for ABC and NBC back in the day, which could now be used for people to get internet. And instead of having to set up these like hard network infrastructure we could set up radios and antennas across different houses and apartments and businesses.
ALG: So Paul Graham loved the idea and said come to YC?
MC: I think they were surprised at how audacious these 22 year olds were with this idea. When we went into the interview, typically YC is fast talking, high pressure. But they were laid back and just stricken by this concept of building a software defined radio to make a wireless network. They wanted it to happen. They invested in us because they just thought it was the craziest idea they’d heard.
ALG: So this was when? Summer of?
MC: 2012. We started in Y Combinator May of 2012. We were living down in Silicon Valley. We had this old rundown house. The pool turned into an algae pool. One of our roommates studied bio at Harvard and we would joke about how this algae should be used for something, that we should turn it into something. But what could we possibly do with it. And while we were working 24 hours a day on this network and studying —
ALG: Like, could we use it to power the software defined radio in some way?
MC: Yeah haha. Could we turn this into energy? Could we maybe just encode information in the algae and send it out to people? It actually turned around pretty quickly to talking about bio and synthetic biology and food. Because one of our roommates Dave ended up being a co-founder of Soylent.
ALG: Got it. So it was accidental that you were living in this house together?
Rob Rhinehart, Matt Cauble, David Renteln, John Coogan
MC: It was. So John and Dave the other two co-founders of Soylent showed up one day. They were in another incubator and just needed a cheap place to live. They walked in and they took a look at the place. I told them the price and they said, when can we move in? I said right now. They said great, all of our stuff is outside in the car. And they moved in that day. We all got along because we just had that attitude of, let’s get this done, keep moving, make decisions and keep pushing forward. We loved talking about our projects, the projects that we thought were interesting, as well as just hanging out. We were good friends. We’re really friends.
ALG: At what point did you decide to move over to Soylent, which I guess is a reference to the novel by Harry Harrison?
MC: Harry Harrison. Yeah. Which is “Make Room Make Room” and the ominous food company in there is called Soylent. They make a bunch of different products and one of them is Soylent Green, which in the book is just meant to be the most efficient food source. It was sensationalized in the movie with Charlton Heston to be made from people. Almost every food company talks about how “people are the key ingredient.” So Soylent was very on the nose about it, food companies are all about people and Soylent just went for it.
“Soylent Green” the 1973 thriller starring Charlton Heston
ALG: Kind of a wink reference.
MC: Big wink yeah. We just brought it to the top. So we got to Soylent by dropping the wireless network project, moving to San Francisco, and opening ourselves up to any new idea possible. We were humbled by that point. But fortunate to have some money left over from the initial Y Combinator investment. We spent the time developing whatever we could and getting it out there. And Rob started looking at food. He read a book about food and nutrition and biochemistry. He started experimenting. He formed this whole plan to spend a month eating only these raw nutrients in a slurry.
ALG: So it was partly for yourselves that you decided to build the product?
MC: It was for Rob. Rob built this product.
ALG: I’ve got this image of you guys sitting in your house in San Francisco making mulch.
MC: Well house is a loose term, we’re talking about a one bedroom apartment.
ALG: OK. And I guess it was a lot of iterating, self-testing, queasy stomachs? I talk a lot about frontier markets and early adopters on the podcast. How did you make that jump to thinking people are going to want to buy this?
MC: In the summer during Y Combinator, we had this fun discussion about R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.” Do you know what “Trapped in the Closet” is?
ALG: No.
MC: It’s this hip hop opera. One of the most interesting, wild things that’s probably ever been released. We listened to the first five episodes, laughed about it and saw that there was a way to describe graph theory through “Trapped in the Closet.” Because it’s about all these different relationships people are having and then cheating on each other basically. So Rob created this graph theory explanation in a blog post that reached Hacker News. It got about 150 upvotes and garnered him a bunch of followers on his blog, which he continued to develop content for. Then he pushed out a post about Soylent, about his experience on no food and how he had a miracle experience where he had so much more energy, was very active, had a lot of confidence, was able to study and read. All the things that he ever wanted he was getting out of this experiment that he ran. I think he just had a critical audience that understood. It spoke to them. It sounded interesting. It started going viral on Hacker News and Facebook almost immediately. Rob came in a day after he released his blog post, sat down and said, I think people want this product. He knew that because he had 4000 e-mails or something crazy. A ton of emails in his inbox people from all over the country asking him to give them the Soylent.
MC: I don’t think anyone was bold enough to say they stopped eating food. People think too hard about how do you sell a story to the customer. Rob had this beautiful way of thinking about it — well, this is replacing my food. I was eating food and now I’m not eating food right. Now I’m eating this thing that I’m calling Soylent.
ALG: So it’s pretty simple. We don’t have to sell this in a complicated way. We know people want it. Let’s just make it and sell it.
MC: It’s not even that we know people want it. It’s — I know I want it. I know I had a great experience. I’m going to tell the truth. And truth is one of the best sales things you can possibly have. So Rob just saw. If you read that blog post it’s just dripping with truth and emotion and real experience that people related to. It’s one of those ideas that people are like, I thought about this too. I never want to clean my dishes. I don’t like going to the store. I don’t like having to think about my nutrition. This makes total sense for me.
ALG: So the early adopter there was, I don’t say workaholics, but folks who wanted to focus on other things and minimize the amount of effort or calculation that goes into, where’s my next meal coming from?
MC: That’s right. What we learned is that food, 80 percent of the time is for fuel. It’s for that ability to go to work, to do meetings, to hang out with people in a productive way. Then there are the times that are romantic with your family, with your significant others, sharing stories over fires. Those are great times to have traditional food. But Soylent is the perfect food to have whenever you’re busy.
ALG: I always associated it with going to Mars. Though it might be quite heavy actually come to think of, as its a liquid. But in terms of what are we going to use to fuel ourselves as humans on the way to Mars. I always thought that that was one of the things behind Soylent. I actually saw Rob at this event in LA in the desert run by SynbioBeta. It was called Betaspace. It was 100 founders, folks from NASA, SpaceX who were getting together to discuss colonizing Mars, or industries that could be viable now with revenue that could be generated now that can also be used on Mars. Rob was a big part of sponsoring that —
Coverage of the Betaspace event in April 2019 [LA Times]
MC: It was on his land.
ALG: There was a ritual, a ritual around destroying old tech. I guess Rob now is looking a lot at Mars. And you are helping to build this new company here in New York called Kin Euphorics. I’d love you to explain what it is. We also have it here in the studio and I have never tried it.
Kin bottle — $39 per bottle. Kin spritz — $24 for a 4 pack.[Shop]
MC: I think we should start off by pouring glasses. Then we can talk about it.
ALG: OK great. Because I wanted to see if over the course of the conversation I might feel some effects.
MC: Yeah. We’ll have a good conversation at least. Let’s go ahead and open it and pour some drinks. Have a proper social conversation. Break the ice.
ALG: I don’t know if this is technically allowed in the studio but —
MC: There’s no booze in it. We don’t need a license or anything for this. We can serve this anywhere we want. Are you gonna try it straight? Let’s try it straight and do some tasting notes.
ALG: So I’m doing a wine sniff, are you supposed to do that.. [sloshes drink] Wow.
MC: What does it remind you of.
ALG: Well I’m from England where we have a lot of herbals and liqueurs. Everything from Ribena, to lime juice, to elderflower cordial. That’s what we drink at home. What does this remind me of? There are some herbal notes. But it’s strong and light at the same time.
MC: That’s right. We made it so you can mix it pretty easily into whatever you want.
ALG: I want to say some licorice or spices?
MC: Yeah there’s licorice in there. You nailed it. It’s inspired by Campari. When I first started thinking about this problem of alcohol and hangovers and social drinking I was in Italy drinking a lot of Campari spritzes.
ALG: I love Campari. Though they do give you a bit of a hangover. I’m drinking this straight now. So I’m going to mix in —
MC: Let’s mix in some tonic water. Which one do you want. Do you want this. Angostura, do you want this one?
ALG: So you got the idea for Kin in Italy?
MC: Well backing up, I left Soylent in 2016 and our accountant introduced me to my co-founder Jen. At the time she was working on a wellness company. We had a great conversation about why are people who are looking for health and wellness still drinking. When you have a wellness event people are still serving wine. One of the easiest things you can do to be healthy is just not drink. But that isn’t exactly true because it’s hard to have any social life if you’re not drinking. It’s very difficult, especially in New York City, to live and meet people and expand your career if you’re not going out to bars and restaurants and drinking at least wine. I thought that was an interesting problem.
Alcohol volumes have been declining in the U.S. [Source: WSJ]
And I continued traveling, went around South America went to Europe. My first interest was in curing hangovers. As I started looking into the effects of hangovers and what happens when we process alcohol, I realized it has become a big problem. Like wow this is something that we’re doing and we’re not even thinking about it. It’s a leading cause of cancer, it kills people every year. It’s got all these downsides. But there’s also this beautiful side to it, this ritual, this social connection, this gathering side. When I got back from traveling I started thinking about what I wanted to work on next. I called up Jen and said, hey let’s go ahead and try to make something that takes down alcohol. Or at least replaces alcohol for that social benefit.
ALG: Wow.
MC: We spent about a year working on different formulas. We were looking into, what is it that people actually want when they drink. We came to this realization that people want to feel something and they want to feel it with other people in a ritual.
ALG: But it could be a different feeling than what we currently experience?
MC: Yes. We want to be taken out of our current mode, which I think is stress. We’re typically stressed out right now. We want to feel a little less stressed. We want to think about something other than work. So what are different compounds that people are taking if they have high anxiety, if they’re socially awkward, if they can’t sleep, if they’re lethargic —
ALG: You didn’t just want to dose Xanax into some kind of mixer?
MC: Haha no.
ALG: The whole of New York is on that anyway.
MC: Yes we’re finding out there’s a lot of people with drug interactions. Start making a drink that offers these effects and people will tell you immediately if they’re taking anything else. We’ve found out that a lot of people in York City are medicating.
ALG: I think everyone’s medicating based on the data I’ve seen. I might be the only person I know that’s not on Xanax or one of those. Let’s talk about the ingredients. If you go on the website you talk about how it’s “euphorics for humankind.” Essentially it’s botanical spirits. Based on the compounds you’ve got in here, including adaptogens and nootropics, you say that you’ll experience a “rise” within maybe 15 minutes of drinking. We’re about 10 minutes in. I’m waiting for that rise. I’m generally excited so I might just rise anyway.
MC: I can tell. You have the anticipation. Placebo is gonna be real for you.
ALG: I know. I’m excited. I want it to work. And it says it might last one hour. It’s supposed to “adapt to what our bodies need to balance our hormonal response to stress, which is to reach a homeostasis.” I guess what you’re getting at is cellular balance? What is the rationale behind that?
MC: Euphorics, that word actually means to come into health. It’s a Greek word that means to come into yourself. To come into your true self. Which is homeostasis. That feeling of euphoria is to not only give you that rise and give you that feeling of awake and less stress but also to actually heal you. So the ingredients that we put in there — Rodeola is is the main root in the current formula that has been used in ayurvedic Eastern medicine for a long time in order to balance out stress and cortisol levels. So if your cortisol is too high it’ll bring it down, if it’s too low it actually bring it up. I think most people right now have cortisol levels that are too high as we feel like we’re being attacked all the time. We balance that out with other ingredients like B vitamins that help replenish your neurotransmitters. We put in Citicoline, which increases oxygen flow to your cells. We put in L-tyrosine which is a precursor to dopamine. 5-HTP is a precursor to serotonin. And hibiscus, which has been used in the Middle East for a long time to increase blood flow and lower blood pressure. So before you start drinking booze your brain is firing dopamine in anticipation of that drug. Your body has that relaxing, the shoulders drop, you feel chilled out. What we decided to do with Kin instead was put in the precursors for dopamine. So what you’re feeling instead of just anticipation, you’re actually feeling like a nourishment of dopamine, that increased amount from the drink itself.
ALG: A lot of this ties to neurochemistry. I messaged my friend who’s a neuroscientist this morning, he loves this stuff. I asked, “what do you think of adaptogens and nootropics?” He said, “well they’re not mainstream scientific terms, they’re more marketing speak. But if these guys do invent the magic brain cocktail I want to start using it immediately.” I feel like that’s the general attitude of people right now. There’s some skepticism that it actually works but everyone wants it to work.
MC: That’s right. If you look at alcohol it can’t make any claims about what it does. If you look at all of its marketing and what it is, it’s purely situational. It’s purely aspirational. We have a similar problem to solve. What we’re trying to get people into is this whole new way of drinking with their friends. And there isn’t a ton of science about nootropics or adaptogens. It’s a lot of anecdotal and a lot of experiential. Fortunately in this age of social media people are willing to talk about it openly. So we have those channels open for people to call us and to talk about their experiences.
Other estimates put the nootropics market at $6 billion by 2024, expanding at a CAGR of 17.9% from 2016 to 2024 [Source]
ALG: So the wellness industry over the last two years it grew 13 percent. It’s now a four trillion dollar industry of which $700 billion is about eating and nutrition. You’re probably in that booming category. Nootropics is about $1.3 billion now and estimated to be $6 billion by 2024 and that’s not even anything proven. There’s nothing scientific in there. It’s fascinating to watch that market growing. There’s a lot of cultural and social trends driving it regardless of any science underneath it.
MC: People just want to live longer. People want to live longer and be healthy. We’ve seen the effects of being unhealthy on a lot of the population and people in our own families. We’re so educated now. We have ambitions and we want to make things. We want to create. We say that Kin is about uniting creators and if you have a brain you’re a creator. What nootropics and health and wellness is about at the end of day, is not just making yourself feel good. It’s about doing good. Doing things that you want to do. Having the energy and the time to do it. If we can be what your friend called it, “the brain cocktail the future,” if we can be that platform for people to go out at night or throughout the day. Be together and have something that gives that that effect and that feeling and that drives more creation. Then we’re changing humanity. We’re actually pushing people forward.
ALG: It’s exciting. You could change the trajectory. We’ve been drinking alcohol for —
MC: Eight thousand years.
The discovery of late Stone Age beer jugs shows that intentionally fermented beverages existed at least as early as the Neolithic period, 10,000 years ago. Wine clearly appeared in Egyptian pictographs around 4,000 BC and wine samples from Greece date to the same period. [Source]
ALG: Quite a long time. There hasn’t been much change to that.
MC: No. It’s crazy to think about how the rise of civilization, the rise of laws, the rise of agriculture — all coincide with this discovery of alcohol. Looking around you can see how it affects behavior. And if behavior is what drives culture, then how much of an impact has alcohol had on who we are today?
ALG: It’s fascinating to think that we’re on the cusp of these alternative ideas that are starting now. You’re obviously in the food and beverage space so you have been thinking about these things for a long time. You probably saw the Beyond Meat IPO recently. They set their IPO at $25 and it’s now at $146 dollars. That’s a 480% gain since the IPO — crazy.
MC: I love Beyond Meat, just on the record. I also love Impossible. We are so fortunate that there is so much money, interest and competition going into this. We win at the end of the day.
ALG: Yes. They’re the first one to IPO and they’re at a market cap of $9 billion that’s about 70% of the market cap of Campbell’s which is $13 billion. And Campbell’s does 100x the revenue of Beyond Meat.
MC: People are excited about the future. It’s like Tesla and cars. These companies that are offering the promise of the future, of how we’re gonna live on Mars. That’s what people want to invest in right now. There’s that pent up optimism for how we can change ourselves. Beyond is a great example of that.
ALG: What’s fascinating is that both times — with Soylent and now with with Kin — you identified early adopter groups. What do you see as the similarities, what have you learned from speaking to a passionate, engaged, forward-thinking initial consumer?
MC: With Soylent Rob was the perfect fit for the initial market, which was people living in San Francisco. People in tech. Rob is a software engineer. He knows how to speak the language of software and he applied that language to food. That got people that typically thought about bits and bytes to think about their calories and proteins. Rob did a great job of hitting that initial market. We were able to start there and grow out. And now it’s in Walmart. It’s all over the country and people know what Soylent is for the most part.
With Kin, actually my co-founder and I realized that the initial market would be women in urban cities, that are in the workforce, building their careers, starting their own businesses, creating their own channels. My co-founder is the perfect face and CEO for this company, because she speaks to them so well. She comes from wellness. She comes from helping people heal. She’s also a fun, lively person. So we realized early on that the market was going to be this group of women that she is a part of. When thinking about new markets I don’t think I’m the person that can lead them. I’m humble and I look for the the person that’s the right person to lead the group, to start a movement. At the end of the day a great company looks a lot like a social movement. It looks a lot like a MLK or Gandhi. Companies are like new social movements that you should be looking for.
ALG: You’re starting a religion.
MC: You could say that.
ALG: Interesting that most of your followers are women so far.
MC: Yes we’re about 70 percent women, split between New York and Los Angeles, which is who we’ve been focused on. People looking for that new alternative. When we talk to our customers they say, “I’ve been looking for this for years and I have never had this option. I’m just so grateful.” You want to hear customer feedback of gratefulness to the point where you cry. We got that at Soylent. We’re getting that now with Kin. At the end of the day that’s what makes you wake up in the morning. A real person telling you how much love you’re giving them. That’s what everyone should be trying to do right.
ALG: How do you feel about building this company in New York. Why New York?
MC: New York is the most social place on earth. People are out and about all the time.
ALG: So if you could crack the alcohol industry here, the nightlife and social customs and get togethers, then you could crack it anywhere?
MC: Yeah. The saying is if you can make it here you can make it anywhere. I think socially that’s very true. New York is the perfect place. There’s a ton of fashion. A ton of creators. Tons of art in New York City across a lot of different industries. If Kin can be the main drink for people in these creative industries in New York City it’s just going to spread to other places.
ALG: Is there a presumption that the LA wellness folks are going to adopt this super fast anyway?
MC: I haven’t even thought about LA wellness people. They have so many options out there. LA has so many options.
ALG: It’s interesting that you don’t have CBD in it.
MC: We tried. We actually tried to put CBD in. It just doesn’t make sense. No one’s figured out what CBD is yet. No one has actually said this is what it does for you.
ALG: There’s no neurochemistry in it.
MC: No. It seems to be some sort of anti-inflammatory on the level of an Ibuprofen. There are benefits to that but it’s not nearly the benefits that people are talking about so far. That being said I think people have had real experiences on CBD and that’s great for them too.
