Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Esteemed venture investor-turned-professional coach Jerry Colonna has worked with a long list of top CEOs and renowned executive teams.

In his new book, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up (available now), Jerry explores the tension between traditional leadership practices and personal happiness that faces many founders today. Jerry discusses how strong leadership and happiness can coexist if we can “reset our goals and reconnect with our deepest selves and with each other.”

TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos will be sitting down with Jerry for an exclusive conversation on Wednesday, July 3rd at 11:00 am PT. Jerry, Connie and Extra Crunch members will dive into key takeaways from Jerry’s book, the advice he gives to young executives, his experience in the Valley, and what’s exciting him most with young entrepreneurs today.

Tune in to join the conversation and for the opportunity to ask Jerry and Connie any and all things related to leadership, management, venture and personal happiness.

To listen to this and all future conference calls, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free.

Female founders, what questions would you ask if you could spend 30 minutes picking the brain of a leading female VC? Your opportunity to find out awaits at Disrupt SF 2019 on October 2-4. We’ve partnered with All Raise — a startup non-profit with a mission to accelerate your success — to host a day-long AMA (“ask me anything”) event. Apply here by July 19 for a chance to get your burning questions answered.

Here’s how the All Raise AMA works. The event takes place on October 3 in a designated area within Startup Alley, the Disrupt expo floor. Over the course of the day, approximately 100 women founders will participate in one of at least 30 scheduled mini-AMA sessions.

In each 30-minute AMA, three founders will meet with one of the All Raise community’s VCs. You’ll have the opportunity to ask in-depth questions about the next raise, key hires, the competition or other key topics. Leave your pitch in your pocket — this is a rare opportunity to dig deep and glean crucial information from some of the best investors around.

Who can participate in the All Raise AMA? U.S.-based women founders who have raised at least $250,000 in a Seed, A or B round. All Raise gives special consideration to founders from underrepresented groups (e.g. Black, Latinx or LGBTQIA women).

All Raise will review the applications and reply to founders by August 16. Acceptance is based on availability for session spots, investor fit with industry sector and company stage, as well as demand for certain categories.

If you’re tapped to participate, simply buy any pass to Disrupt SF (including Expo Only), and you’re in the door. Then keep an eye peeled for an email from All Raise with your scheduled AMA appointment time on October 3.

Don’t miss this rare opportunity to learn from some of the most successful women VCs in the industry and network with other intrepid women entrepreneurs. Those 100+ spots won’t last long. Apply to the All Raise AMA event before the July 19 deadline, and we’ll see you in San Francisco!

If you are interested in sponsoring this event or exhibiting at Disrupt San Francisco 2019, fill out this form to get in contact with our sales team.

SEO has been around for decades, but it’s still one of the most important growth channels for early-stage startups. Factorial Digital is a growth marketing agency based in NYC that specializes in search and startups. Co-founder Corey Eulas shares his philosophy for growth marketing and how his distributed team collaborates with companies across a variety of verticals.

On Factorial Digital’s process

“Discovery is incredibly important to us. We want to know your backstory, internal processes, what strategies worked and didn’t work in the past, etc. After gathering those details, we’ll do a deep dive to learn more about your business and market category. In our first conversation, we want to identify quick wins, so we’ll propose three ideas that we can try right away. That means we’re starting to deliver value on day one.”

Advice to founders

“I always challenge founders by asking: What if the channel changes? What if consumers stop using it? What if the ad policies change? What if the costs just double and become too prohibitive? What do you do at that point? You’d have to start from scratch. We encourage founders to run marketing strategies in parallel to growth, and to never be complacent about growth because there’s always somebody who is coming right behind you.”

Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup growth marketing agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already. 

Interview with Factorial Digital Founder Corey Eulas

Yvonne Leow: How did you get into the game of growth, and why did you decide to start Factorial Digital?

Corey Eulas: It all started at a pretty young age. I was building websites and as I was trying to find ways to generate passive income, I gradually gravitated towards the affiliate marketing space. I learned about all of the different channels that can be used to acquire more people to visit your website, and I found it to be pretty fascinating and exciting.

Later in my career, I worked at a startup in NYC with my now co-founder Sasha Dagayev, and our team was often frustrated by the digital marketing agencies we partnered with. It seemed like there was a huge opportunity to deliver deep expertise and high-touch service – especially given the incredible people I was surrounded by. And that’s what we strive for today.

You can’t go to an enterprise conference these days without talking containers — and specifically the Kubernetes container management system. It’s no surprise then, that we’ll do the same at our inaugural TC Sessions: Enterprise event on September 5 in San Francisco. As we already announced last week, Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie and Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes will join us to talk about the past, present and future of containers in the enterprise.

In addition, we can now announce that two other Kubernetes co-founders will join us: Google principal software engineer Tim Hockin, who currently works on Kubernetes and the Google Container Engine, and Microsoft distinguished engineer Brendan Burns, who was the lead engineer for Kubernetes during his time at Google.

With this, we’ll have three of the four Kubernetes co-founders on stage to talk about the five-year-old project.

Before joining the Kuberntes efforts, Hockin worked on internal Google projects like Borg and Omega, as well as the Linux kernel. On the Kubernetes project, he worked on core features and early design decisions involving networking, storage, node, multi-cluster, resource isolation and cluster sharing.

While his colleagues Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda decided to parley their work on Kubernetes into a startup, Heptio, which they then successfully sold to VMware for about $550 million, Burns took a different route and joined the Microsoft Azure team three years ago.

I can’t think of a better group of experts to talk about the role that Kubernetes is playing in reshaping how enterprise build software.

If you want a bit of a preview, here is my conversation with McLuckie, Hockin and Microsoft’s Gabe Monroy about the history of the Kubernetes project.

Early Bird tickets are now on sale for $249 and students can grab a ticket for just $75. Book your tickets here before prices go up.

You can’t go to an enterprise conference these days without talking containers — and specifically the Kubernetes container management system. It’s no surprise then, that we’ll do the same at our inaugural TC Sessions: Enterprise event on September 5 in San Francisco. As we already announced last week, Kubernetes co-founder Craig McLuckie and Google’s director of product management for Kubernetes will join us to talk about the past, present and future of containers in the enterprise.

In addition, we can now announce that two other Kubernetes co-founders will join us: Google principal software engineer Tim Hockin, who currently works on Kubernetes and the Google Container Engine, and Microsoft distinguished engineer Brendan Burns, who was the lead engineer for Kubernetes during his time at Google.

With this, we’ll have three of the four Kubernetes co-founders on stage to talk about the five-year-old project.

Before joining the Kuberntes efforts, Hockin worked on internal Google projects like Borg and Omega, as well as the Linux kernel. On the Kubernetes project, he worked on core features and early design decisions involving networking, storage, node, multi-cluster, resource isolation and cluster sharing.

While his colleagues Craig McLuckie and Joe Beda decided to parley their work on Kubernetes into a startup, Heptio, which they then successfully sold to VMware for about $550 million, Burns took a different route and joined the Microsoft Azure team three years ago.

I can’t think of a better group of experts to talk about the role that Kubernetes is playing in reshaping how enterprise build software.

If you want a bit of a preview, here is my conversation with McLuckie, Hockin and Microsoft’s Gabe Monroy about the history of the Kubernetes project.

Early Bird tickets are now on sale for $249 and students can grab a ticket for just $75. Book your tickets here before prices go up.

Uber is taking another step to more fully integrate micromobility into its core services. Today, Uber is now showing JUMP bikes, scooters and Lime scooters in the main map you see when you first open up the Uber app in Atlanta, Ga. and San Diego, Calif.

This is the first time Uber has so prominently displayed a third party’s services within its own app. Uber has offered apps through its partner Lime for a few months now, but this is the first time it’s so prominently displayed. Additionally, Lime has added Uber branding to its scooters in these cities. This comes about one year after Uber and Lime officially partnered together.

“The hope is that people are aware of all the options they have and they can choose the best option for them,” Uber Head of New Mobility Platform Billy Guernier told TechCrunch.

With new mobility offerings displayed more prominently, Guernier expects to see some of the usage shift from cars to bikes and scooters. When Uber added JUMP bikes to the app in San Francisco, for example, Guernier said the company saw “real movement from the rides business to the new mobility business.”

Down the road, the plan is to roll out this feature more broadly but there’s no timeline on when that will be.

Uber is taking another step to more fully integrate micromobility into its core services. Today, Uber is now showing JUMP bikes, scooters and Lime scooters in the main map you see when you first open up the Uber app in Atlanta, Ga. and San Diego, Calif.

This is the first time Uber has so prominently displayed a third party’s services within its own app. Uber has offered apps through its partner Lime for a few months now, but this is the first time it’s so prominently displayed. Additionally, Lime has added Uber branding to its scooters in these cities. This comes about one year after Uber and Lime officially partnered together.

“The hope is that people are aware of all the options they have and they can choose the best option for them,” Uber Head of New Mobility Platform Billy Guernier told TechCrunch.

With new mobility offerings displayed more prominently, Guernier expects to see some of the usage shift from cars to bikes and scooters. When Uber added JUMP bikes to the app in San Francisco, for example, Guernier said the company saw “real movement from the rides business to the new mobility business.”

Down the road, the plan is to roll out this feature more broadly but there’s no timeline on when that will be.

Oh, Bixby. Samsung made big promises and some key acquisitions ahead of its launch. But the company’s smart assistant got off to a rocky start and has had trouble making a name for itself in amongst a sea of competitors ever since. 

Third-party integration has long been one of the categories in which Samsung has promised to truly distinguish Bixby. Back in November, the company announced that it would finally be opening the assistant up to third-party developers with the release of Bixby Developer Studio. Those developers finally began to deliver on the promises of the company’s Viv Labs acquisition.

The launch of Bixby Marketplace is the next step in the process. Now vendors can make their Bixby integrated services (or “capsules”) available to users. The store opens today in the U.S. and Spain, launching with a handful of key apps, including Google Maps, Spotify, iHeartRadio, NPR and Yelp.

That’s a good start, but attracting a critical mass of developers is always the hard part of getting these things off the ground. On the upside, Bixby’s already available on a LOT of devices, when you factor in all of Samsung’s flagships from the last few years. And that number is slowly but surely growing as the company integrates it into additional appliances, TVs and the like. Though the company hasn’t done itself any favors with the still MIA Galaxy Home speakers.

Spotify is shutting down a program that allowed indie artists to upload their own music to the streaming service, the company announced today. The new upload tool was first introduced in beta testing in September 2018, offering U.S. artists an easy way to add tracks and their accompanying metadata to Spotify with just a few clicks. Now, artists are being given until the end of the month to transition to another distributor, and will only be paid for streams on their uploaded content through July 2019.

The company, in its announcement of the shutdown, says its energies are better focused on the development of features and tools that are unique to Spotify — like tools for playlist submission, for example, or upgrades to its Spotify for Artists dashboard, which is used by over 300,000 creators.

Meanwhile, Spotify believes that music distribution is best handled by partners. This mirrors some artist feedback — that it didn’t make sense to upload directly to Spotify, then have to turn to another distribution tool to get their work on other services.

We confirmed with the company there were a few hundred artists who had actually uploaded music to the beta, and a few hundred more that had been invited to the test but hadn’t yet uploaded. And all those who had used the Direct Upload Beta did have to use another distribution service to get their music on other platforms.

Another possible complication is that Spotify announced an investment in distribution service DistroKid after the launch of the upload beta. DistroKid supports cross-platform uploads to Spotify, as well as iTunes, Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon, Google Play, Tidal, iHeartRadio, YouTube, Deezer, and others. At the time of the deal, Spotify said it planned to integrate its Spotify for Artists dashboard with DistroKid. That would cause overlap and redundancy with its own, in-house upload tool.

That integration hasn’t yet occurred, but it’s still in the works, we’re told. Spotify isn’t saying when the integration will go live, however.

Spotify is pointing artists participating in the beta to other distributors, including preferred partners DistroKid, CD Baby, and EmuBands. The beta upload tool itself will shut down on July 30, 2019. No more invites are being offered, and artists will only be paid on July 2019 streams. The final payment takes place on August 28, 2019. Other details are being offered in an FAQ.

In addition to the official announcement, Spotify is sending out emails to the beta participants with discounts on switching to other distributors which may include either a free first year of service or free first release.

“We’re working with our distribution partners to help make this transition as simple as possible for the artists who uploaded music through the beta,” the company said via its announcement. “Thank you to the artists who participated in our upload beta. We’re incredibly proud to have played a small part in the music they released. Spotify wouldn’t be what it is today without artists and labels who are willing to collaborate with us to build a better experience for creators and listeners.”

After raising $21 million in 2017 for a late-stage pivot from mobile TV to set-top-box-free IPTV services for the home, MobiTV is announcing another large growth round. The company — an early mover in building services to stream broadcast TV on mobile devices (it was established in 1999) — has raised $50 million more to continue building momentum, in part by expanding internationally.

MobiTV today has deals in place with 90 cable and other TV operators, covering 2 million people, with its MobiTV Connect services — providing access to 350 channels including those from A+E Networks, AMC Networks, Crown Media Family Networks, C-SPAN Networks, Disney and ESPN Media Networks, SHOWTIME, and Viacom — making it possible to add new channels by way of apps — no need for a set-top box, with customers instead either using existing streaming devices such as a Fire TV stick, Roku or Apple TV; or their smart TVs.

“Our vision of creating leading edge video experiences and technology in a unique, cost-effective manner has allowed MOBITV to win business faster than anyone else in the industry… since we first launched the platform in 2016,” said Charlie Nooney, MOBITV Chairman and CEO, in a statement. “We continue to demonstrate our ground-breaking approach to addressing operator challenges as they upgrade their pay TV offering in an increasingly competitive marketplace.”

The funding comes from existing investors Oak Investment Partners and Ally Financial, along with investment from Cedar Grove Partners. We’re trying to find out the valuation. For some context, in 2017, its valuation was  between $400 million and $500 million, according to figures from PitchBook and also what sources told us.

The set-top box has developed as a cornerstone to how many pay-TV services work today: emerging at a time when TV sets were very limited in terms of their functionality — they were not designed for hundreds of channels that could be added and removed depending on what your subscription plan offered — they took on a key role for pay TV providers in the struggle for “customer ownership”: the set-top box ensured that would-be channel owners could only connect with viewers by going through pay TV providers.

But fast forward to today, and those set-top boxes have become a millstone for anyone but the very largest providers (and maybe the biggies, too, but it’s notable that the reference customers noted by MobiTV are not the Comcasts of the world, but companies like Citizens Fiber, Windstream, and EPB).

Set-top boxes can have technical faults, they are expensive, and they go out of date in terms of their functionality. The latter is an important point, because the rise of streaming and over-the-top services have completely transformed how consumers get their TV content today. They now have options for cord-cutting — that is, bypassing pay TV providers altogether — by getting channels and on-demand content over the Internet, and linking that through to their TVs to watch.

MobiTV’s technology was originally built for mobile phones, and as such bypassed the set-top box from day one. While broadcast TV viewing on mobile never became a mass-market phenomenon (people watch on-demand on mobiles, and some might watch broadcast streams, but mainly it’s for short pockets of time rather than the main, default screen people use). Then the team, led by Nooney, spotted the opportunity to bring the same technology to larger screens.

The promise of set-top-box-free pay TV services gives the operators a wider array of channels and potentially more flexibility in how they are provisioned. At the same time, a solution like MobiTV’s potentially lowers the total cost of ownership for providers by removing the need for the set-top boxes.

That’s not to say that some of its customers are not using both. Here, they can provide a certain set of channels directly through those boxes, with another set that are offered on top of that.

“We believe in MOBITV’s superior consumer experience and know that being the only true TVaaS commercially deployed solution in North America has differentiated their positioning in the marketplace,” said Bandel Carano, Managing Partner, Oak Investment Partners, in a statement. “They have reinvented pay TV by providing operators a platform that allows consumers to use their streaming devices or SmartTV, while eliminating the requirement of a STB – without completely alienating it! This leaves room for everyone to evolve and future-proof their cable offering at a pace comfortable for both operators and consumers.”