Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Welcome to this transcribed edition of The Operators. TechCrunch is beginning to publish podcasts from industry experts, with transcriptions available for Extra Crunch members so you can read the conversation wherever you are.

The Operators features insiders from companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, and WeWork sharing their stories and tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

This week’s edition features Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, Andy Yasutake, and Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management, Jared Thomas.

Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech companies in the world, has millions of hosts who trust strangers (guests) to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who trust strangers (hosts) to provide a roof over their head. Carta, a $1 Billion+ company formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software, with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users entrust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

In this episode, Andy and Jared share with Neil how companies like Airbnb, Carta, and LinkedIn think about customer service, how to get into and succeed in the field and tech generally, and how founders should think about hiring and managing the customer support. With their experiences at two of tech’s trusted companies, Airbnb and Carta, this episode is packed with broad perspectives and deep insights.

Neil Devani and Tim Hsia created The Operators after seeing and hearing too many heady, philosophical podcasts about the future of tech, and not enough attention on the practical day-to-day work that makes it all happen.

Tim is the CEO & Founder of Media Mobilize, a media company and ad network, and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Tim is an early-stage investor in Workflow (acquired by Apple), Lime, FabFitFun, Oh My Green, Morning Brew, Girls Night In, The Hustle, Bright Cellars, and others.

Neil is an early-stage investor based in San Francisco with a focus on companies building stuff people need, solutions to very hard problems. Companies he’s invested in include Andela, Clearbit, Kudi, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Solugen, and Vicarious Surgical.

If you’re interested in starting or accelerating your marketing career, or how to hire and manage this function, you can’t miss this episode!

The show:

The Operators brings experts with experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc. to share insider tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 5, we’re talking about customer service. Neil interviews Andy Yasutake, Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, and Jared Thomas, Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management.

Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to the Operators, where we talk to entrepreneurs and executives from leading technology companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Carta about how to break into a new field, how to build a successful career, and how to hire and manage talent beyond your own expertise. We skip over the lofty prognostications from venture capitalists and storytime with founders to dig into the nuts and bolts of how it all works here from the people doing the real day to day work, the people who make it all happen, the people who know what it really takes. The Operators.

Today we are talking to two experts in customer service, one with hundreds of millions of individual paying customers and the other being the industry standard for managing equity investments. I’m your host, Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage in downtown San Francisco.

Joining me is Jared Thomas, head of Enterprise Relationship Management at Carta, a $1 billion-plus company after a recent round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Carta, formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users trust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

Also joining us is Andy Yasutake, the Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products at Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech startups today. Airbnb has millions of hosts who are trusting strangers to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who are trusting someone to provide a roof over their head. The number of cases and types of cases that Andy and his team have to think about and manage boggle the mind. Jared and Andy, thank you for joining us.

Andy Yasutake: Thank you for having us.

Jared Thomas: Thank you so much.

Devani: To start, Andy, can you share your background and how you got to where you are today?

Yasutake: Sure. I’m originally from southern California. I was born and raised in LA. I went to USC for undergrad, University of Southern California, and I actually studied psychology and information systems.

Late-90s, the dot com was going on, I’d always been kind of interested in tech, went into management consulting at interstate consulting that became Accenture, and was in consulting for over 10 years and always worked on large systems of implementation of technology projects around customers. So customer service, sales transformation, anything around CRM, as kind of a foundation, but it was always very technical, but really loved the psychology part of it, the people side.

And so I was always on multiple consulting projects and one of the consulting projects with actually here in the Bay Area. I eventually moved up here 10 years ago and joined eBay, and at eBay I was the director of product for the customer services organization as well. And was there for five years.

I left for Linkedin, so another rocket ship that was growing and was the senior director of technology solutions and operations where I had all the kind of business enabling functions as well as the technology, and now have been at Airbnb for about four months. So I’m back to kind of my, my biggest passion around products and in the customer support and community experience and customer service world.

Microsoft’s GitHub today launched the beta of a new version of GitHub Actions with full continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capabilities built right into the service. General availability is planned for November 13.

The company also today announced that it now has more than 40 million developers on its platform.

Ten months ago, GitHub launched Actions, its workflow automation platform. Developers could already take actions to trigger all kinds of events and use that to build custom CI/CD pipelines. At launch, the GitHub team stressed that Actions allowed for building these pipelines, but that it was a lot more than that. Still, developers were obviously quite interested in using Actions for CI/CD.

“Since we introduced GitHub Actions last year, the response has been phenomenal, and developers have created thousands of inspired workflows,” writes GitHub CEO Nat Friedman in today’s announcement. “But we’ve also heard clear feedback from almost everyone: you want CI/CD! And that’s what we’re announcing today.”

With this updated version of Actions, developers can now build, test and deploy their code on any platform and run their workflows in containers or virtual machines. Developers also can test multiple versions of their applications in parallel thanks to a new feature called “matrix builds,” which lets you, for example, test three different versions of Node.js on Linux, Windows and MacOS at the same time. Because GitHub Actions are defined in a basic YAML file, making those changes is only a matter of adding a few lines to the file.

Supported languages and frameworks include Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android and iOS. Actions is also integrated with the GitHub Package Registry.

As the application is built, you also get live logs streamed to the Action console, and it’s easy to link to any line in a log file to discuss issues with the rest of your team.

These new features are available for free during the beta and will remain free for all public repositories.

Actions for GitHub Enterprise Server will launch next year and will include a hybrid option that will allow you to keep the code in a private data center and still use GitHub to orchestrate the workflows.

“GitHub Actions is the democratization of CI/CD and software automation. Developers can write workflows reacting to any GitHub platform event and reference open-source GitHub Actions — reusable pieces of code — to supercharge their software lifecycle the same way they are used to writing application code,” said Max Schoening, GitHUb’s senior director of Product Design. “It truly is community-powered CI/CD with a pricing model that works for everyone.”

With this launch, GitHub is now also competing more directly with some of the CI/CD startups that have built businesses on top of the platform. That’s likely to create a bit of friction.

“GitHub has made a commitment to keeping their platform open to all partners, but only time will tell,” CircleCI CEO Jim Rose said in a statement. “Ultimately, developers are smart and will choose the best, most powerful tools available on the market, and we’re confident that that’s where CircleCI will continue to be. […] With more than nine years of data and experience on how teams move from idea to delivery, CircleCI is the leader in CI/CD and we are confident we have the best solution for developers.”

I expect that Rose’s comment will echo that of other CI/CD players, though it’s also worth noting, as Rose did, that Actions can be integrated with other continuous integration services to allow developers to trigger builds on their platforms. These providers can also make their own Actions available on GitHub.

“We see GitHub actions as complementary to what Codefresh does. It’s an additional way that users can leverage Codefresh to build robust pipelines in a scalable way. One interesting thing is that GitHub followed our lead in how they architected Actions. You can actually use GitHub actions as steps inside a Codefresh pipeline. So you see, we’re actually very aligned,” said Dan Garfield, the chief technology evangelist at CI/CD platform Codefresh. “Developers can find the Codefresh action right on GitHub!”

When I asked GitHub about this, Schoening provided the following statement: “GitHub and our community believe in choice and an open ecosystem. That is something we take seriously and build into everything we do. GitHub Actions lets developers integrate with all their existing tooling, mix and match new developer products, and hook into all parts of the software lifecycle, including existing CI/CD partners.”

Apple Music launched its data dashboard for musicians more than a year ago. Today, the company is taking that product — Apple Music for Artists — out of beta, and adding some new features in the process.

For one thing, it’s no longer a web-only product, because Apple is releasing an iPhone app. On both web and iOS, Apple Music for Artists allows musicians and their teams to see how often a song has been played, how many listeners it’s reaching and how many times it’s been purchased.

There’s also an “insights” section designed to highlight noteworthy data at any given moment, like how the first week of a new song compares to the first weeks of previous songs, or when the popularity of a song is spiking, or if they’ve hit a big milestone like 1 million plays.

Apple is also introducing data from Shazam, the music-recognition app it acquired last year. The idea is to capture listener behavior that’s very different from seeking out an artist or a specific song — it’s more about a moment of spontaneous connection, when you hear a song and think, “Whoa, what’s this?” (This also provides a window to behavior beyond Apple Music listeners.)

One of the goals is to give musicians the data they need to actually guide their decisions. For example, they might see that a song that’s not many plays compared to their big singles, but it’s doing surprisingly well on Shazam — so maybe it’s time to shift promotion.

And the data is also browsable by city, on a map. So if someone’s planning a tour, they can use this to data to choose which cities or visit, or to find the correct venue size in a given market.

Apple says all the data (including Shazam data) goes back to the launch of Apple Music in 2015. Any artist can claim their account for free.

Heads up all you enterprising enterprise software startuppers. You have only 24 hours before the price goes up on tickets to TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019. Save $100 and join us in San Francisco on September 5 — along with some of the industry’s top founders, CEOs, investors and technologists. Buy your early-bird ticket before 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9.

Enterprise is, without doubt, Silicon Valley’s 800-pound gorilla. No other startup category is as large, rich or competitive. In this day-long conference, we tackle the big topics and separate hype from reality. Artificial intelligence? Check. Cloud, Kubernetes, security and privacy, marketing automation, quantum? Yes. Investors, founders, and acquisition-hungry big enterprise companies? Tons of opportunity to network efficiently via CrunchMatch? Yeah, all that and more in 20 main-stage sessions — plus separate speaker Q&As and breakout sessions. Check out the day’s agenda.

Here’s a quick example of the type of programming you can expect.

Does the recent Capital One data breach have you up nights worried about the cost and consequences of cyberattacks? Don’t miss TechCrunch editor Zack Whittaker’s interview with Martin Casado (Andreessen Horowitz), Emily Heath (United Airlines) and Wendy Nather (Duo Security) in a session called, Keeping the Enterprise Secure.

Enterprises face a litany of threats from both inside and outside the firewall. Now more than ever, companies — especially startups — have to put security first. From preventing data from leaking to keeping bad actors out of your network, enterprises have it tough. How can you secure the enterprise without slowing growth? We’ll discuss the role of a modern CISO and how to move fast… without breaking things.

Looking for more ways to save or boost your ROI? Look no further. Buy four or more tickets at once and save 20% with the group discount. And, with every ticket you buy to TC Sessions: Enterprise, you’ll score a free Expo Only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF on October 2-4.

TC Sessions: Enterprise takes place on September 5, and if you want to save $100, you have just 24 hours left to act. The $249 early-bird ticket price remains in play until 11:59 p.m. (PT) on August 9. Buy your ticket now and save.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

The space race is back on, but this time it’s closer to home: A number of U.S. companies are vying to become the first to return Americans to crewed launches, after an eight year hiatus marked by the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. Lockheed Martin is one of that very small group, through its partnership with Boeing on the United Launch Alliance, and through its development of the Orion crew capsule, which ticked off an important checkbox in July when it was confirmed complete and ready for mission prep.

Lockheed Martin is at the center of it all, no matter which way you slice it, and that’s why it’s great news that CEO Marillyn Hewson will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 in San Francisco to talk all about her company’s work with NASA, their progress on bringing back America’s crewed launch capabilities, and their designs on the Moon and beyond.

Even after Orion flies with astronauts aboard for the first time, which is currently set to happen sometime next year, Lockheed Martin has yet more ambitious plans – including developing an “early Gateway” to precede the full-scale Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway that NASA aims to install orbiting the Moon to provide a more permanent base of operations for long-term lunar operations.

Lockheed Martin has been in the space business since the 1950s, but private and commercial interest in space has changed a lot in the ensuing fifty years. We’ll talk about what the growing commercial interesting low-Earth orbit and beyond, and the increasing number of launch and service providers, means for Lockheed and its evolution.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 to October 4 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Tickets are available at an early-bird rate here.

Considering its unparalleled success, it was only a matter of time before a Brex copycat emerged.

Ramp Financial, a new startup led by Capital One-acquired Paribus founders Eric Glyman and Karim Atiyeh (pictured), has raised $7 million, TechCrunch has learned. The capital came from Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, BoxGroup’s Adam Rothenberg and Coatue Management, a hedge fund that recently launched a $700 million early-stage investment vehicle.

Ramp Financial, Founders Fund, BoxGroup and Coatue Management declined to comment.

Ramp Financial is in the very early stages of product development, though we’re told, “It’s the same as Brex .” Other details available on the new startup, which raised on a pre-money valuation of $25 million, according to sources, are slim. Even its name may be subject to change.

Brex, founded in 2017 by a pair of now 23-year-olds, created a corporate charge card tailored for startups. The Y Combinator graduate doesn’t require cardholders to submit Social Security numbers or credit scores, granting entrepreneurs a new avenue to credit and method of protecting their credit scores. Brex’s software also expedites the time-consuming expense management, and accounting and budgeting processes for employees. Quickly, it has become essential to the company-building process in Silicon Valley.

It helps that VCs are wild for Brex. The startup has raised more than $300 million in VC funding in only two years. Most recently, it closed a $100 million round led by Kleiner Perkins at a valuation of $2.6 billion.

Given Brex’s rapid growth and the uptick in venture capital investment in challenger banks, or new financial services competing with incumbent financiers, we’re guessing Ramp Financial didn’t have a tough time pitching VCs. Plus, its founders Glyman and Atiyeh have a clear track record of success.

The duo previously built Paribus, a startup acquired by Capital One roughly one year after launching onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2015. Paribus, which raised just over $2 million from Slow Ventures, General Catalyst, Greylock and others before the M&A transaction, helps online shoppers get money back when prices drop on items they’ve purchased. Terms of Capital One’s acquisition were not disclosed.

Paribus is also a graduate of Y Combinator, completing the startup accelerator in the summer of 2015.

Aside from both completing Y Combinator, the founders of Brex and Ramp Financial share connections to the PayPal mafia. Rabois, a general partner at Founders Fund, was an executive at the business in the early 2000s. PayPal co-founders Peter Thiel and Max Levchin are Brex investors.

Make way for another antitrust investigation into big tech. Step forward Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), which has opened an official probe of Apple — following a complaint lodged in March by security company Kaspersky Labs.

Kaspersky’s complaint to FAS followed a change in Apple’s policy towards a parental control app it offers, called Kaspersky Safe Kids. Discussing the complaint in a blog post the security firm says Apple contacted it in 2017 to inform it that the use of configuration profiles is against App Store policy, even though the app had been on Apple’s store for nearly three years without it raising any objections. 

Apple told Kaspersky to remove configuration profiles from the app — which it says would require it to remove two key features that makes it useful to parents: Namely, app control and Safari browser blocking.

It also points out that the timing of Apple’s objection followed Apple announcing its Screen Time feature, in iOS 12 — which allows iOS users to monitor the amount of time they spend using certain apps or on certain websites and set time restrictions. Kaspersky argues Screen Time is “essentially Apple’s own app for parental control” — hence raising concerns about the potential for Apple to exert unfair market power over the store it also operates by restricting competition.

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment on the FAS investigation. The company referred Reuters to a statement it made in April about its policy towards parental control apps, following other complaints.

In the statement Apple says it removed several such apps from the App Store because they “put users’ privacy and security at risk” — calling out the use of what it described as “a highly invasive technology called Mobile Device Management” (MDM).

But Kaspersky claims its app does not, and never did, use MDM.

Following complaints and some press attention to Apple’s parental control apps crackdown), the company appears to have softened its stance on MDM for this specific use-case — updating the App Store Review Guidelines’ to allow using MDM for parental controls in limited cases.

Kaspersky also says that the Apple Developer Enterprise Program License Agreement “clarifies that the use of MDM-profiles and configuration profiles in applications for home users is only possible with the explicit written consent of Apple”.

However it argues that Apple’s updated rules and restrictions still “do not provide clear criteria allowing the usage of these profiles, as well as information on meeting the criteria, which is needed for obtaining written consent from Apple to use them”. Hence it’s not willing to drop its complaint yet.

It says it’s also continuing to prepare to file an antitrust complaint over the same issue in Europe — where a separate competition-related complaint was recently filed against Apple by the music service Spotify.

Kaspersky says now that only official written confirmation from Apple — of “the applicability of the new p.5.5. “App Store Review Guidelines” for Kaspersky Safe Kids for iOS” — will stay its complaint.

Russia’s FAS has shown itself to be relatively alacritous at handling big tech antitrust complaints — most notably slapping Google with an order against bundling its services with Android back in 2015, a few months after local search giant Yandex had filed a complaint.

It took the European Union’s competition regulator several more years before arriving at a similar conclusion vis-a-vis Google’s competition-blocking Android bundling.

The US Navy is turning to YouTube creators for help in finding technical recruits.

Captain Matt Boren, the chief marketing officer at US Navy Recruiting Command, told me that in that while past recruiting efforts have focused on TV and other traditional media, that’s no longer the best route to reach the post-millennial generation.

“For our audience now, if they want to find something, they’re using the search engine on YouTube,” Boren said. “We had to be where our audience was.”

So the Navy worked with its agencies MLY&R and Wavemake, along with Google, to identify YouTube creators with a focus on science, technology and math, then invited those creators to highlight different technical roles and environments. Specifically, Kevin Leiber (a.k.a. Vsauce2) filmed aboard a nuclear submarine, Jake Koehler (a.k.a. Dallmyd) worked with an explosives specialist and William Osman talked to a cybersecurity team.

“We gave the creators a great deal of free rein,” Boren added. “We didn’t want to come off as the Navy trying to buy their loyalty … We wanted to give them the opportunity to spend time in a work environment so they can understand and relate to them and really [convey] that to their audience.”

While the “Sailor Vs.” series (launching today) only involves three YouTube creators, Boren said he’s open to experimenting with more influencer marketing campaigns in the future, especially since those broader media-consumption trends aren’t going away.

And that’s all happening as the Navy is facing significant recruiting challenges — Boren estimated that it needs to fill 50,000 roles this year (though highly technical roles only make up a small percentage of that total).

Gaming continues to grow in popularity, with esports revenue growing 23 percent from last year to top $1 billion in 2019.

But the metrics by which talent is evaluated in gaming, and the methods by which gamers can train to better hone their craft, are varied and at times non-existent. That’s where StateSpace, and specifically the company’s gaming arm Klutch, come into play.

In 2017, Statespace launched out of stealth with their first product, Aim Lab. Aim Lab is meant to mimic the physical rules of a game to give gamers a practice space where they can improve their skills. Moreover, Aim Lab identifies weaknesses in a player’s gameplay — one person might struggle with their visual acuity in the top left quadrant of the screen, while another might have trouble spotting or aiming at targets on the bottom right side of the screen — and allows gamers to focus in on their weaknesses to get better.

Today, the company has announced a $2.5 million seed funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Expa, Lux Capital and WndrCo. This brings the company’s total funding to $4 million.

Alongside growing Aim Lab, which is on track to soon reach 1 million users, one of the company’s main goals is to create a standardized metric by which gamers’ skills can be measured. In football, college athletes and NFL coaches have the Scouting Combine to make decisions around recruiting. This doesn’t necessarily take into account stats like yardage or touchdowns, but rather the raw skills of a player such as 40-yard sprint speed.

In fact, Statespace has partnered with the Pro Football Hall of Fame for ‘The Cognitive Combine’, becoming the official integrative medicine program cognitive assessment partner of the organization. Statespace wants to create a similar ‘combine’ for gaming.

The hope is that the company can offer this metric to publishers, colleges and esports orgs, giving them the ability to not only evaluate talent, but to better serve casual users through improved matchmaking and cheat detection.

“We want to go a level beyond your kill:death ratio,” said cofounder and CEO Dr. Wayne Mackey. Those metrics greatly depend on factors like who you’re playing with. You won’t always be matched against players who are on an even keel with you. So we want to look at fundamental skills like hand eye coordination, visual acuity, spatial processing skills, and working memory capacity.”

[gallery ids="1866281,1866282,1866283"]

Klutch has partnered with the National Championship Series as the official FPS training partner for 2019. NCS has majors for both CS:Go and Overwatch, two of the biggest competitive FPS games in the world. The company is also partnering with top Twitch streamers and Masterclass to create The Academy.

Academy users will be able to get advanced tutorials from streamers like KingGeorge (Rainbox Six Siege), SypherPK (Fortnite), Valkia (Overwatch), Drift0r (CoD), and Launders (CS:GO).

Obviously, gaming is a major part of Statespace’s business model. But the skeleton of the technology has a number of different applications, particularly in medicine. Statespace is currently in the research phase of rolling out an Aim Lab product that is specifically focused on helping people who have had strokes recover and rehabilitate.

Statespace wants to use the funding to build out the team and expand the Klutch Aim Lab platform beyond Steam to mobile and eventually console, with Xbox prioritized over PlayStation, as well as launching the Academy.

David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, the creators and showrunners of HBO’s adaptation of “Game of Thrones,” have found a new home.

Netflix has signed a multi-year film and TV pact with the writer-producers; according to The Hollywood Reporter, the deal is worth $200 million. This follows expensive Netflix deals with other high-profile showrunners, including Ryan Murphy ($300 million) and Shonda Rhimes ($100 million).

Benioff and Weiss are a bit different, in that their reputation rests on a single show. But then, the Obamas didn’t have much of a TV résumé either — and of course, “Game of Thrones” is the hit show of the past decade, with record ratings for HBO and a record number of Emmy nominations for the final season. (Basically, no one in Hollywood is interested in your finale complaints.)

It will likely be several years before this deal actually leads to new content on Netflix, with Benioff and Weiss tied up writing and producing a trilogy of Star Wars movies for Disney. (The first is scheduled for release in 2022.)

On the other hand, this deal means we won’t be seeing the pair’s controversial HBO series about an alternate American history where slavery continues.