Author : zebethcontrol

Maro’s new app looks to help schools screen kids for depression and anxiety • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 22, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Maro, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Maro has developed a platform that helps families and schools navigate tough conversations about mental health. The company, which exhibited as part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt, launched its first product, Maro Parents, in 2020. Now, the company is gearing up to launch Maro for Schools next week to help schools screen students for anxiety and depression, with parental consent. Based in Tennessee, the startup was founded by Kenzie Butera Davis, who had originally planned to get Maro into schools to start helping children dealing with mental health issues. However, these plans were halted due to the start of the pandemic in 2020 as schools had to pivot online. Maro then decided to bring its platform into homes through the Maro for Parents app. Among other things, the app includes digital modules and an AI-powered bot to help parents discuss difficult topics with their children. Although Maro for Schools is officially launching next week, the company says 350 schools have already signed up to screen 100,000 students across 40 states for anxiety and depression. The program will be accessible via an annual subscription fee, but the company did not disclose the price. With the upcoming launch of Maro for Schools, the platform aims to provide teachers with accessible lesson plans around mental health. Maro for School also gives teachers access to resources regarding sex education, drug abuse and more. The platform also allows for streamlined communication between teachers and counselors, as teachers may be the first ones to detect if a child could benefit from help. If a counselor believes that a child requires additional care, Maro will connect them with referral partners who are doing virtual care. Maro for School doesn’t conduct virtual care, instead its purpose is to identify at-risk children early and then connect them with virtual care teams. “We’ve created a platform to screen children and then refer them to clinical teams that will facilitate and provide the care for the child,” Maro chief medical officer Tariq Chaudry told ZebethMedia. “We’re basically acting as a marketplace for pediatric development and mental health. We don’t want to be directly in therapy because we don’t want to dilute our company.” The launch of Maro for School comes the same month that the U.S. Preventive Series Task Force had recommended screening for anxiety in children between the ages of 8-18. Maro is in the midst of raising a $1.5 million pre-seed round and plans to use the investment to expand its current 11-person team and build out its product further. Maro anticipates closing the round within the next quarter.

Jasper’s robots assemble fresh meals for nearby apartment dwellers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Jasper, Robotics & AI, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

After attempting to sell its tech to large food service companies, cooking automation startup Jasper has shifted to direct-to-consumer. In a recent conversation, CEO Gunnar Froh told ZebethMedia about the pivot and gave a general update on the company, a member of this year’s Battlefield 200 at Disrupt 2022. When Gunnar founded Jasper several years ago (as YPC Technologies) with human-robot interaction expert Camilo Perez Quintero, their motivation was primarily to save time on cooking. After developing robotics technologies to automate cooking processes, they opted for a business-to-business go-to-market approach, hoping to sell their platform to food suppliers and service vendors. But the company never gained the corporate traction Gunnar and Quintero hoped it would. The company pivoted a few months ago, rebranding to Jasper and adopting what Gunnar calls a “cooking as a service” model. Jasper now runs robotic kitchens in or next to residential high rises, charging residents a subscription fee plus the cost of ingredients for meals. “Having good meals at home is expensive or time consuming. Food delivery is highly inefficient — restaurants or ghost kitchens prepare meals worth a few dollars and then pay someone to ship them across town. While most customers aren’t aware of this, about half of their dollars are spent on platform fees and delivery costs,” Gunnar told ZebethMedia. “By running robotic kitchens in or next to residential high rises, Jasper eliminates labor and delivery inefficiencies to offer residents freshly prepared gourmet meals at the cost of home cooking. Jasper meals are plated on porcelain which allows its clients to cut up to a third of their household waste.” Jasper’s robotics tech platform, which assembles food according to a set menu. Food automation startups are having a moment, as recently evidenced by Chipotle’s investment in Miso Robotics’ tortilla chip-making robot. It’s no surprise — labor shortages and increasingly costly ingredients make food-prepping robots an attractive proposition. In 2020, Karakuri landed $8.4 million for its automated canteen to make meals. Last May, Chef Robotics raised $7.7 million with the goal of helping automate certain aspects of food preparation. A few months later, salad chain Sweetgreen bought kitchen robotics startup Spyce, and this past summer Makeline secured $24 million for its robot that automatically assembles bowl lunches. Jasper competes more directly with Los Angeles-based Nommi, who supplies autonomous food kiosks to real estate and college campus partners. But Gunnar asserts that Jasper’s platform is able to prepare a wider range of menu items (ranging in cost from $1.20 to $16.90), including cod with steamed potatoes, paprika cream chicken and desserts like sticky toffee pudding. “We use machine learning for task scheduling and the dispensing of ingredients. We intend to also add it to enable the experience of a personal chef,” Gunnar sad. “The same way that Spotify can predict what music you like, Jasper will predict what meals our customers would like to eat … No other food robotics company we are aware of can currently serve customers at home the way Jasper does as no other system can prepare a menu as versatile as ours.” Jasper says it ran multiple trials in a residential midrise over the past year and over the past month launched Jasper in six apartment buildings. To date, only about 231 customers have ordered food from Jasper via the company’s ordering platform. But in a sign investors are pleased with current progress, Jasper has raised $3.5 million from backers including Toyota Ventures. Image Credits: Jasper In a statement via email, Toyota Ventures’ founding managing director Jim Adler said: “Toyota Ventures made an early investment in Jasper because we got excited by the team’s vision of bringing fresh cooking, exciting menus, and high food quality close to consumers. They’ve been focused on how best to serve customers daily meals at home. They have impressive early traction that’s been driven by recent labor shortage in the restaurant industry and growing consumer demand for affordable food options. It’s a bit of a perfect storm for Jasper which is creating a huge opportunity for the company to improve the way we eat every day.” Gunnar says the goal is to reach $2.5 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) as it prepares to raise $7 million in additional capital. Jasper, which employs 13 people (a number Gunnar anticipates increasing to 15 by the end of the year), has a current ARR of “less than” $100,000. “We just launched Jasper in multiple buildings over the past few weeks and will ramp up revenue,” Gunnar said. “This funding will further increase automation in our processes to get to a revenue per man-hour of $167.”

Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ is the priciest digital album Tencent has sold • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in China, Media & Entertainment, music streaming, Spotify, Tencent, tencent music, tencent music and entertainment, tmeNo Comments

Taylor Swift’s latest album “Midnights” has dropped, and it might be setting a new standard for China’s digital music industry. Within a day of its release, the 13-track album, priced at 35 yuan or $4.83, has racked up nearly 200,000 copies on Tencent’s QQ, one of the largest music streaming platforms in China. While $4.83 doesn’t seem much — the album starts at $11.99 on the artist’s own online store — it’s the highest price ever set for digital albums in the market, which could indicate two things: the upstream cost of making albums has risen, or Chinese users are increasingly willing to pay for online music. China’s digital music industry has taken quite a different route from the Western one. For a long time, music piracy was rampant across online and offline media, so streaming platforms like QQ came up with a variety of perks to get people to foot the bill. A lot of QQ Music’s paid users are in effect signed up for bundle deals that give them access to other Tencent-affiliated products, such as video streaming, manga, or membership to Tencent-backed JD.com’s online mall. Subscribers get all sorts of value-added services within QQ Music’s platform as well, such as hi-fi streaming, access to online concerts, and customized app layouts. It’s hard to say whether the $4.83 pricing is the new pricing norm or simply a reflection of the fandom for Swift in China. After all, the American artist is one of the few foreign celebrities who reach 10 million followers on Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. So far only Jay Chou, the mandopop (Mandarin pop music) king whose songs are known to everyone from my generation, has matched Swift’s pricing power at 30 yuan per album copy. In the wake of Beijing’s crackdown on internet monopolies, Tencent’s bargaining power on licensing deals might have weakened. For years, Tencent Music Entertainment, the firm’s music arm, bled money on securing exclusive rights from UMG, Warner Music, and Sony Music Entertainment. That’s no longer the case. Swift’s latest digital release is also available through QQ Music’s archrival NetEase Music, for instance. The good news is an increasing number of users are paying for Tencent’s music offerings, though the penetration rate remains modest. In Q2, TME reported 82.7 million subscribers across its three music streaming apps, up 25% year-over-year; a total of 593 million people use these services every month, meaning only 14% of them are paying. In comparison, 188 million, or 43%, of Spotify’s 433 million users are premium subscribers in Q2. Spotify also has a more profitable product. Looking strictly at their music services (TME is a more profitable business overall thanks to its more lucrative live streaming platform that lives off virtual gift sales), Spotify’s premium average revenue per user (premium ARPU) from Q2 was €4.54 ($4.48). TME’s average revenue per paying user (ARPPU) was 8.5 yuan or $1.17.

Aidar Health aims to provide physicians with consistent patient vitals • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Aidar Health, Battlefield 200, Biotech & Health, MouthLab, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022No Comments

Sathya Elumalai was finding it hard to manage his mother’s health after she was diagnosed with four chronic conditions. Rather than guess her health status for the day, he decided to co-found Aidar Health, to get that information directly and reliably. In founding Aidar, Elumalai also created and launched MouthLab, a device it claims tracks 10 key health parameters in under a minute. The company is part of the Battlefield 200 at ZebethMedia Disrupt 2022. “For a car you have this check engine light that helps you to say, now it’s time for you to take your car [to a] dealer or mechanic to get it fixed. Similarly, our device acts as a as a way to monitor your health every day, to provide a more holistic view of an individual’s health,” Elumalai said. “So if there is any abnormalities, or any changes in that health from their baseline, the device can alert and inform the user about those changes, and what can they do to help manage their health. Or use the same data to communicate with their physician or caregivers to better assess the health condition or changes or deviations in health at the very early stage.” A user holds the iPhone-sized device and puts their mouth on the mouthpiece, breathes normally and positions their hands on the device as instructed. The company claims MouthLab will record temperature, respiration rate, pulse rate, blood pressure, respiration pattern, heart rate, heart rate variability, ECG, spirometry (i.e. lung function) and oxygen saturation. Data is collected from sensors across the device from saliva, breathing, hand pulse and lips to read the body’s parameters. In a world where digital and remote care has become the new norm thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, physicians have often had to go off what their patients say, which is a good starting point but not sufficient for long term care. Although tests and labs are done eventually there hasn’t been an efficient way to track a patient’s vitals at home. Aidar Health was able to garner Class II FDA 510(k) clearance earlier this month. The clearance states the device may pose some moderate risk to users but allows the company to introduce the product for commercial distribution and market it. It is unclear what risks the clearance was referring to. According to the company, the device has gone through three clinical trials and is embarking on a study in partnership with the VA Health System. Today, there are over 800 active users of MouthLab and Aidar Health, using it for remote vitals monitoring, chronic care management, and other home health services — as well as “real-world evidence generation efforts with life science companies,” Elumalai said (the latter presumably meaning taking part in studies). “The device is being used for Remote Physiological Monitoring (RPM), Chronic Care Management (CCM), Hospital at Home (H@H) services with health systems and digital biomarker development, digital companion, and real-world evidence generation efforts with life science companies,” Elumalai told ZebethMedia. The Maryland-based company says they are HIPAA compliant, by using their own LTE/cellular network cloud. Once data is collected it is sent to users via the mobile app and then sent to physicians through Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, an API for electronic health records. The company has decided to run on a subscription-based model, which costs $50-80 per patient per month. Users are provided MouthLab, access to the web and mobile apps, and physicians can collect vitals and analytics. Depending on the usage of the service, pricing can vary. “It’s hard to really decipher what patients are really going through,” Elumalai said. “But a device like this, before we even get hold of a physician to telemedicine, we can get the data to them instantly. So they get a full snapshot of the patient medical history, a longitudinal analysis of the data for the past few days.”

Amazon says OEMs won’t build their smart TVs due to ‘concern that Google would retaliate’ • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

To get a roundup of ZebethMedia’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here. Christine is in an airport lounge and Haje is perched on the corner of a cafe bench, as the ZebethMedia team is in transit post-Disrupt today. We miss our work besties already (💯) and are hung over (metaphorically and literally) from an overabundance of wonderfulness this week. Enjoy Daily Crunch, and see y’all next week! Oh, and we know we mentioned this yesterday, but a good thing deserves to be repeated: A huge congrats to Minerva Lithium and their $100,000 Startup Battlefield win! — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Holding back: Manish has some news from Amazon, which is saying that some hardware vendors are choosing not to form television partnership agreements with the delivery giant over fear of retaliation from Google. Get ready for a price hike: YouTube Premium is planning to raise prices — by $5 in some cases — for subscription plans in more countries, including the U.S., the U.K., Canada and Argentina, Ivan reports. What goes up must come down: Another one by our fabulous colleague Manish, who reports that shares of the Indian logistics company fell to an “all-time low” after reporting a not-so-svelte growth report. Startups and VC Draymond Green, the two-time Olympic gold medalist and professional basketball player for the Golden State Warriors, says he’s working with well-known investors involved in the tech space. That wasn’t a massive secret — Green has historically been quite public about his investments, like SmileDirectClub — but until ZebethMedia Disrupt, he hadn’t previously named his go-to investing partners, nor made explicit that he’s not planning to start a fund himself, Kyle reports. You can see all of Draymond’s chat (including some interesting conversation about that video that’s been floating about) with Brian. When Parker Conrad founded Rippling in 2016, the HR company initially focused on the process of onboarding employees. It has since evolved, Mary Ann reports. Yesterday, at ZebethMedia Disrupt, Rippling unveiled what Conrad describes as the “biggest launch” of his career — its new global payroll product. You know the drill — five more, count ’em! No, seriously, count ’em. We’re very tired today and may have miscounted. Dear Sophie: How can I launch a startup while on OPT? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/ZebethMedia Dear Sophie, I’m an international student in the U.S. in F-1 status. I will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science this May and plan to apply for OPT. I want to launch a startup. Can I do that with OPT? What options would I have after OPT to continue growing my company? — Forward-Looking Founder Three more from the TC+ team: ZebethMedia+ is our membership program that helps founders and startup teams get ahead of the pack. You can sign up here. Use code “DC” for a 15% discount on an annual subscription! Big Tech Inc. What do you say to the company that has nearly everything? Well, Google doesn’t think it has everything when it comes to its presence in India and had some choice words for some of the country’s regulators. In response to yesterday’s $162 million fine, Google fired back at India’s competition regulators, saying that the order is a “major setback for Indian consumers and businesses” and that it “opens serious security risks for Indians who trust Android’s security features.” Manish has more. We also can’t ignore this juicy piece of…💩that came in yesterday. With Elon Musk’s deal to acquire Twitter now seemingly approaching the end, Taylor reports that layoffs at the social media giant might now be larger than originally expected. She writes that cuts at Twitter could be up to 75%. For those counting at home, that is like 5,600 people. Not cool. And we have four more for you:

Podcast app Pocket Casts goes open source • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, Automattic, Media & Entertainment, open source, Pocket CastsNo Comments

Popular podcast platform Pocket Casts has released its mobile clients under an open source license. WordPress parent company Automattic acquired Pocket Casts last July, having been acquired by a group of public radio companies, including NPR, back in 2018. Pocket Casts is one of the most popular “podcatcher” apps outside the big tech ecosystems of Google, Apple, and Spotify, allowing users to search and subscribe to podcasts for free, with premium features such as desktop apps available for a fee. It perhaps should come as little surprise that Automattic has elected to push the Pocket Casts app code onto GitHub, given that Automattic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg is a huge proponent of open source — and WordPress is among the top open source projects on the planet. By making Pocket Casts open source, this means that anyone can access the code, fix bugs, create new features, and even fork it to build their own competing service on top of the Pocket Cast codebase. The Android and iOS apps are available now under a Mozilla Public License 2.0, a copyleft license that stipulates all derivative projects or modifications have to be released under the same license.

How Zette plans to let people access paywalled news with a single monthly subscription • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in Apps, Battlefield 200, Disrupt, Media & Entertainment, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, ZetteNo Comments

A new startup wants to help online media outlets make money by making it easier for consumers to access paywalled content without being locked in to multiple subscriptions. Demoing as part of the Battlefield 200 cohort at TC Disrupt this week, Zette is trying to achieve something that others before have tried. Since the dawn of time (well, at least since the advent of the web), digital media businesses have sought new ways to make money. While traditional newspapers and magazines’ path to monetization was relatively straightforward, insofar as they charged money for a physical product (usually filled with paid advertising), the online sphere has had to flirt with a multitude of models, from advertising and events, to — increasingly, it seems — paywalls. But while paywalls promise clear and predictable income, it’s a difficult model to scale outside of the major outlets such as the New York Times. People don’t want (or can’t afford) dozens of subscriptions, but that doesn’t mean that they’re unwilling to pay something to access individual articles if they’re given the option to do so. There are already subscription-based services such as Apple News+, which bundles stories from hundreds of publications, and pay-per-article alternatives such as Blendle, which allow publications to charge microtransactions to read one-off articles. Zette sits somewhere in the middle, charging a monthly $9.99 subscription for access to 30 articles from its partner publications, though it is also dabbling with different pricing plans for those who want to purchase more credits. However, if the user doesn’t consume their credits in a given month, this doesn’t roll over to the next month — everything resets. The story so far Zette was founded out of San Francisco in 2020 by former Forbes reporter Yehong Zhu, and after raising some $1.7 million in seed funding last year, the company is officially arriving in private beta this week for waitlist members, ahead of an anticipated public launch early next year. For now, Zette has inked deals with New Scientist, Forbes, McClatchy, Boone Newspapers, and Haaretz, with plans to bolster this by “hundreds” more in the coming year. So, how does it all work? Well, the user downloads and installs a browser extension, signs up for a Zette account and subscription, and when Zette detects a paywall on a partner website, it invites the user to unlock the article by paying a single credit. Zette in action Image Credits: Zette The company said that it’s also considering allowing users to roll over some of their credits, though with a time limit on when they need to be used by. Perhaps the crucial point worth noting here is that in contrast to something like Apple News+, rather than serving as an aggregator, Zette’s pitch to publishers is that it enables them to retain relationships with their readers, given that their content remains on their own website. “Publishers control the display and messaging of their content, unlike within Apple News’ ecosystem,” Zhu said. “Readers can open an article from anywhere — Twitter, Facebook, Google, iMessage, Slack, the news websites themselves — and still use Zette to unlock the article.” Zette will be focusing on the U.S. market exclusively at first, but it has aspirations to launch in international markets too. “We’re an American company focusing first on U.S. readers,” Zhu said. “We’re investing heavily in marketing and growth, especially as it pertains to getting younger readers — Gen-Zs and millennials — on board.” Business model There are, perhaps, some flaws with this type of model. The benefit of subscribing to a publication directly is that while you might not enjoy everything in it, you will probably find some articles that you like. With a subscription-based, pay-per-article model, you don’t know whether you’re going to like it before committing credits to the cause. On top of that, you might not stumble upon 30 paywalled articles in a given month that you want to read. So for a $10 monthly payment, it’s possible that some subscribers simply won’t get value from it. There are some elements of Blendle’s model which make more sense. There is less pressure on the reader to consume a set number of monthly articles, as it’s built around single microtransactions — put money in your account, and use it whenever you want. But while that may be a more consumer-friendly model, it doesn’t necessary benefit the publication or the company behind the technology. According to Zhu, this type of business model merely encourages “sporadic use rather than sustained readership,” ultimately leading to higher churn and poor monetization. “We also believe that consumers tend to not enjoy the experience of having to put a dollar and cents value on each article they want to read,” Zhu continued. “This causes them to feel ‘nickel and dime-d’. For this reason, Zette took inspiration from video games, where you buy bundles of ‘virtual coins’ up front for in-app purchases: we replace money with credits to distance the customer from the feeling of making a purchase. This makes each transaction low-friction, and also makes it easier to top up on credits every month. We believe that a microtransactions-like experience on the frontend, recurring revenue on the backend, is the best of both worlds.” Moreover, while there are benefits to a traditional news subscription, vis-à-vis readers can consume everything from sports and politics in a single publication, not everyone wants to read a newspaper cover to cover. “Traditional news subscriptions serve one audience very well: heavy readers,” Zhu said. “These are readers who hit paywalls often enough and frequently enough that they decide to become paying patrons of a single outlet. The majority of online readers are light readers: they browse around for news, they only want to read one article at a time so they can’t justify the cost and inconvenience of signing up for a subscription, they’re relatively brand agnostic, they’re price sensitive, and they are largely looking for a diversity of content, rather than just getting all their news

Black startup founders raised just $187 million in the third quarter • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in black founders, EC DEI, EC venture capital, funding, Startups, Venture, venture capitalNo Comments

The amount of capital raised by Black entrepreneurs continues to decrease. The latest Crunchbase numbers show that Black founders raised $187 million in Q3, a staggering decline from the nearly $1.1 billion they received in Q3 2021 and a sizable drop from the $594 million the cohort raised in Q2. Black founders raised just 0.12% of the $150.9 billion deployed in Q3. Within that, Black women raised 49% of all the capital allocated to Black founders in Q3, according to Crunchbase, pacing the number at around $91.63 million. To grab crumbs, it’s good, at least, to see that Black men and women appeared to receive nearly equal amounts of funding this quarter, even though the number they split is appalling. Frankly, there are homes worth more than $187 million. Adam Neumann raised more in one round than all Black founders could in one quarter. Adele is worth $220 million. However, these numbers are not necessarily surprising. ZebethMedia reported investors often retreat to their networks amid economic downturns, taking fewer risks on minorities. “When the venture capital industry catches a cold, underrepresented founders catch pneumonia.” Tiana Tukes, investor, Colorful VC Perhaps this is best exemplified by the fact that the capital raised by Black founders this Q3 is roughly on par with the $180 million allocated to the cohort in Q3 2020. However, Black founders were able to raise that $187 million from just 32 deals, compared to 2020, when it took 93 deals to hit $180 million. In total, Black founders have raised a little more than $2 billion in venture capital this year, a decrease from the stunning $4.72 allocated in the record-breaking year that was 2021.

5 cloud investors illustrate the various paths ahead for startups • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in cloud cost optimization, cloud infrastructure, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC investor survey, Enterprise, enterprise startups, investor survey, StartupsNo Comments

Cloud cost optimization startups have become ubiquitous, and they’ve found a friendly ear among enterprise clients looking to cut costs amid the downturn. But should younger startups similarly scrutinize their cloud spend? According to several cloud investors, startups should prioritize building over optimization — unless it’s going to save them a big chunk of money. Boldstart Ventures partner Shomik Ghosh summed it up succinctly: “In early product or go-to-market stages, optimizing cloud spend should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible.” We’re widening our lens, looking for more investors to participate in ZebethMedia surveys, where we poll top professionals about challenges in their industry. If you’re an investor and would like to participate in future surveys, fill out this form. While founders shouldn’t lose sleep over cloud costs at the early stages, they should still carefully ponder other expansionary decisions, like cloud marketplaces, before foraying out. Himself an entrepreneur, angel investor Anshu Sharma noted that using cloud marketplaces as a distribution channel has pros and cons, and shouldn’t perhaps be done from Day 1 because “it can commoditize your offering.” Quiet Capital founding partner Astasia Myers concurred, saying startups should focus on finding product-market fit first. “We encourage startups to consider cloud marketplaces once they have found product–market fit, not before,” she said. “To successfully leverage cloud marketplaces, a solution’s product marketing, value proposition, and return on investment need to be clear while exhibiting a fast time to value, which happens post-PMF.” However, because of how fast things are moving, startups can explore marketplaces earlier than they could: “Historically we saw startups join cloud marketplaces at Series D+. Now we are starting to see companies consider it post Series B.” Founders should also remember that startups are destined to become bigger, and should therefore plan ahead. “It’s always important to select a technology stack that is available in all major cloud providers and that is as elastic as possible to support those migrations should they be needed (using Kubernetes is a great example of allowing for that),” Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner at Team8 said. To find out what cloud-related advice investors are giving startups these days, we spoke with: Shomik Ghosh, partner, Boldstart Ventures Liran Grinberg, co-founder and managing partner, Team8 Tim Tully, partner, Menlo Ventures Astasia Myers, founding partner, Quiet Capital Anshu Sharma, angel investor and co-founder & CEO, Skyflow Shomik Ghosh, partner, Boldstart Ventures Founders are looking to cut costs amid the downturn. How important is it for startups to optimize their cloud spend in the early days? It depends on what is meant by “early days”. In early product or go-to-market (GTM) stages, optimizing cloud spend should be the last thing on a founder’s mind besides utilizing as much cloud resource credits as possible. Finding product-market fit, engaged users, and understanding the end-user workflow and how the product is essential to these users is the most important area founders need to focus on. As the company starts to have a few million in ARR, then it starts to make sense to manage cloud spend more closely to improve gross margins and therefore the bottom line (net cash burn or free cash flow). Major cloud providers often lure startups with free credit, but they also charge data egress fees later on. As cost optimization becomes a bigger consideration than ever, how consequential are early stage decisions on choosing a cloud provider? I think picking a cloud provider at the early stage based on cost is missing the forest for the trees. I know some founders who, in the early days, switch cloud providers to keep utilizing free credits. This may be possible when there are only a few people on the team, but as the team gets bigger, everyone needs to learn and relearn documentation, APIs, and UIs, which has a bigger hidden “cost” than any money being saved. Cost optimization is not just the size of the bill at the end of the month. It’s also the velocity of the team’s product development, downtime avoided, developer experience to allow teams to move faster, etc. All of these points should be top of mind when choosing a cloud provider at the early stages. What are the pros and cons of using a multi-cloud setup instead of building on top of a single public cloud? As a company scales, teams become a bit more focused on functional areas. In the early days, everyone does everything, but as the team scales, you have not just a backend infra team but inside of that, a database team, a security team, an ML team, a QA team, etc. Multi-cloud can help get the benefits of best-of-breed tooling from each cloud provider. In the early stages of a startup’s life, it is most important to go from 0 to 1. Astasia Myers, founding partner, Quiet Capital For example, Google BigQuery may be better for some use cases than Redshift or Azure Synapse, while AWS may have the best infra management tooling. The trade-off, of course, is having to make all those tools across platforms interoperable, and the major cloud providers are not exactly incentivized to do this. This is where startups come in, and by focusing on making one product the best, they can work across platforms and integrate easily (i.e. Snowflake can be used across any major cloud provider). When should a startup consider going on-prem, if at all? Would you advise AI/ML startups any differently? In terms of terminology, I think on-prem should also be called “modern on-prem,” which Replicated coined, as it addresses not just bare metal self-managed servers, but also virtual private clouds. The most common reason startups should consider modern on-prem is for dealing with sensitive data, which especially occurs in regulated industries (healthcare, financial services, or pharma). The scope of what is considered sensitive is growing over time with regulations though, so it’s something more startups need to be aware of. A lot of

PLG and enterprise sales, SaaS pricing strategy, OPT options • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 21, 2022Posted in cloud infrastructure, EC roundup, immigration law, Product-led growth strategy, Startups, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

After staging our first ZebethMedia Disrupt in San Francisco in three years, Slack is much quieter than usual this morning. My colleagues are flying home to cities as far flung as Taipei, Paris and London; I just took a streetcar home, which should keep my expense report simple. Moscone Center did not look like we’re experiencing a downturn in tech: the Expo Hall and demo booths were buzzing, and attendees were networking with enthusiasm in the hallways (are business cards making a comeback?). Full ZebethMedia+ articles are only available to membersUse discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription Next week, I’ll share a recap of the panel I moderated, “Taking the BS out of your TAM.” In a conversation with Kara Nortman (Upfront Ventures), Aydin Senkut (Felicis Ventures) and Deena Shakir (Lux Capital), we explored the many mistakes first-time founders make when calculating the size of their market, and pinned down the information investors are actually looking for. Everyone had actionable insights to share, and more than one attendee stopped me in the hallways afterwards to let me know how much they appreciated our frank discussion. If you don’t want to wait for my recap, you can watch a video of the panel right now. Thanks again to everyone who participated! Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, ZebethMedia+@yourprotagonist 2023 VC predictions: Finding an exit from the ‘messy middle’ Eric Tarczynski, managing partner and founder of Contrary Capital, says we are entering a “messy middle” era for venture capital: “Companies can no longer raise $5 million to $10 million seed rounds with nothing but a deck and the assumption that revenue multiples will skyrocket beyond historical norms,” he writes in a TC+ guest post. Looking ahead to 2023, Tarczynski foresees an environment where “the VC landscape has started to bifurcate,” as “slow M&A activity and no IPOs” and “good companies in ‘safe’ industries” temper investor expectations. Read this before you reprice your SaaS product because of the downturn Image Credits: Richard Drury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Many startups are lowering their prices in an attempt to retain customers and reduce churn during the downturn. “But is that actually helpful advice for SaaS founders?” asks Torben Friehe, CEO and co-founder of Wingback. “As far as I can see, it isn’t for most.” Instead of being reactive, Friehe says SaaS startups should instead revisit their ideal customer profile and revise their messaging. “This adverse economic climate may actually be a time when you have more leverage and can demand higher prices for your product.” Dear Sophie: How can I launch a startup while on OPT? Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/ZebethMedia Dear Sophie, I’m an international student in the U.S. in F-1 status. I will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in computer science this May and plan to apply for OPT. I want to launch a startup. Can I do that with OPT? What options would I have after OPT to continue growing my company? — Forward-Looking Founder The Great Migration and the next 10-year cycle in cloud Image Credits: Tim Robberts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Now that the public cloud market has undergone a correction after years of growth, will seasoned workers look for greener pastures at smaller companies? According to Andy Stinnes, general partner at Cloud Apps Capital Partners, we’re entering a decade-long cycle that will spark a Great Migration of talent. “The answer is clear once you think about it,” he says. “Companies are extending cash runways, and cloud leaders are feeling that pain as they lay off parts of their teams and face even more work and pressure.” How to combine PLG and enterprise sales to improve the funnel and drive bottom-line growth Image Credits: Richard Drury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images Products and services that sell themselves sound great, but product-led growth (PLG) startups still launch marketing campaigns and hire sales teams. Combining PLG with traditional sales-led growth efforts can raise retention and acquisition to the next level, says Kate Ahlering, chief revenue officer at Calendly. In this TC+ guest post, Ahlering lays out multiple strategies that will help teams implement a “hybrid GTM strategy,” which includes suggestions for leveraging PLG data and optimizing success metrics.