Venture

Amazon expands music catalog from 2M to 100M songs for Prime subscribers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, 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. The discussion is on in the newsroom as to whether folks are eager to pay between $8 and $20 per month for their blue checks on Twitter. Alex’s take was particularly sharp… “Not in the mood to finance your vanity project,” indeed. — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Startups and VC TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured $110 million in growth financing from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions, Christine reports. How’s this for some dodgy rhymes: Prepare to amortize: Inflation may spell doom for R&D tax expensing Image Credits: Fancy/Veer/Corbis (opens in a new window) / Getty Images The U.S. federal government has made R&D tax credits available for decades, but a major change set to take place this year will impact startups across the board. Previously, R&D expenditures could be expensed up front, but now “those expenses will need to be amortized over 5 years in the case of domestic research, and 15 years for foreign research,” according to tax attorney Andrew Leahey. Because so many startups “incur the bulk of their R&D costs in their first year of operation,” many could wait “the equivalent of a lifetime” to recover those expenses. High inflation has stalled efforts to repeal the amortization requirement, so Leahey shares several tactics companies can use “to prepare for the possibility of the rule coming into effect.” 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. As always, we have all the Twitter news that’s fit to post. We promise to keep it to a minimum today because there is other fantastic news to share. However, we do want to point out that Elon Musk likes to work out his thought process in tweet form now, so news is changing as the wind blows. Here’s what you need to know today: Musk continues to talk up his plans for Twitter Blue and ad-free news articles (both by Ivan), while Amanda reports on the company’s chief customer officer Sarah Personette, who resigned today. The move is quite surprising, given that she tweeted positively about a conversation with Musk last week. Meanwhile, over at Mastodon, things are happening, Sarah writes. And we have five more for you:

Unicorns face 5-1 odds as they wait for public markets to warm • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Earlier today, The Exchange dug into changing investor sentiment regarding growth and profitability. A new report looking at cloud and software companies from Battery Ventures ran the math on how investors are rewarding faster growth from less unprofitable companies — dare we say, profitable companies? — with the data indicating that, at least for now, growth is no longer enough to maximize corporate value. For startups busy stacking new revenue with minimal burn, the situation is good news. For companies that raised while money was cheap — and sitting on huge valuations predicated on yesteryear’s valuations — the news that profitability is in vogue again is far from welcome. Many unicorns are likely now trapped between changing investor preferences and a general compression of the value of software companies. Why? Because many a unicorn was minted during the 2020-2021 era on the back of quick revenue growth more than anything else. And, as revenue multiples stretched to the sky during that time period, a great number of startups reached the $1 billion valuation threshold — or a multiple thereof — on the back of small, if quickly expanding, top line. If revenue multiples have come down, that’s bad news for unicorns. If revenue multiples have come down and growth is losing comparative luster to profits, high-burn unicorns that were once valued more for something else are doubly bound by changing market conditions. Even worse, Battery points out a few difficult facts about just how many unicorns might be able to go public in the coming years compared to how many unicorns there are in the market today. There’s a lining of good news in the data for truly standout startups. But for the bog-standard unicorn, there’s more than just storm clouds on the horizon. Why is the math bad? In the last 10 years, Battery counts 200 software companies that went public. In contrast, the venture firm counts more than 1,000 new unicorns minted over the same time frame. That’s a 5-1 ratio of IPOs to new billion-dollar companies.

2022 R&D tax prep, social media for founders, managing remote teams • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in EC roundup, Enterprise, Startup Accelerator, Startups, Tax law, tech layoffs, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

As director of Techstars’ startup pipeline, Saba Karim spends much of his time touting the ways entrepreneurs can benefit by joining an accelerator. But is it the right choice for every founder? After he posted a thread on Twitter offering several rationales explaining why some should definitely avoid them, I invited him to adapt it for a TC+ guest post we published yesterday. “Keep in mind that funding will solve your money problems, but it won’t solve everything else,” he writes. Full ZebethMedia+ articles are only available to membersUse discount code TCPLUSROUNDUP to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription “You’ll still need to figure out how to acquire customers, find the best talent, build an incredible product, assemble a great advisory board and get to product-market fit.” His article confirms a suspicion I’ve long harbored: many entrepreneurs pursue accelerators so they can gain access to investors, score free publicity, or receive positive reinforcement for their idea. But none of those are determining factors for success. “If you’re not living and breathing your startup, you’re going to struggle anyway,” says Karim. If you have information, knowledge or experience to share that could help early-stage startup founders, investors and workers make better decisions, please review our submission guidelines and drop us a line. Thanks very much for reading, Walter ThompsonEditorial Manager, ZebethMedia+@yourprotagonist These founders landed early checks by being savvy about social media (L-R) Connie Loizos, Silicon Valley Editor, ZebethMedia, Nik Milanović, Founder, This Week in Fintech; General Partner, The Fintech Fund, Joshua Ogundu, CEO, Campfire and Gefen Skolnick, Founder, Couplet Coffee. Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan/Getty Images for ZebethMedia Is there a correlation between being extremely online and a founder’s ability to fundraise? According to three entrepreneurs Connie Loizos spoke with at ZebethMedia Disrupt, a social media presence that blends aspects of your business and personal lives can “make it easier to connect with investors and customers.” Nik Milanović (founder, This Week in Fintech), Gefen Skolnick (founder, Couplet Coffee) and Josh Ogundu (CEO, Campfire) talked about the benefits and downsides of using TikTok, Twitter and other platforms to build authentic personal and business brands. “I even tweeted yesterday that it was kind of not a good day as a founder, and it was really nice and people engaged with that,” said Skolnick. “I don’t believe in constantly showing that things are good. Some days things are just not good.” How to effectively manage a remote team during wartime Image Credits: Anna Fedorenko / Getty Images “There are a lot of studies about crisis management on the web, but none of them tell us how to manage a company during times of war,” according to Alex Fedorov, CEO and founder of Ukrainian startup OBRIO. Prior to Russia’s invasion, “our company had never seen a real crisis,” he writes in a post that presents the six methods his company used to maintain continuity while protecting workers. “Training to manage stress, anxiety and personal finances will help your employees build the needed knowledge and respond to tough situations.” 3 founders discuss how to navigate the nuances of early-stage fundraising Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images Founders who have raised funds for early-stage startups in the last year have generally had an easier time than people seeking Series A money (or later). Then again, “easy” is such a relative term. At ZebethMedia Disrupt, Rebecca Szkutak spoke to three entrepreneurs to learn more about how they adjusted their expectations and tactics as they approach investors during a downturn: Amanda DoAmaral, co-founder and CEO, Fiveable Arman Hezarkhani, founder, Parthean Sarah Du, co-founder, Alloy Automation Prepare to amortize: Inflation may spell doom for R&D tax expensing Image Credits: Fancy/Veer/Corbis (opens in a new window) / Getty Images The U.S. federal government has made R&D tax credits available for decades, but a major change set to take place this year will impact startups across the board. Previously, R&D expenditures could be expensed upfront, but now, “those expenses will need to be amortized over 5 years in the case of domestic research, and 15 years for foreign research,” according to tax attorney Andrew Leahey. Because so many startups “incur the bulk of their R&D costs in their first year of operation,” many could wait “the equivalent of a lifetime” to recover those expenses. High inflation has stalled efforts to repeal the amortization requirement, so Leahey shares several tactics companies can use “to prepare for the possibility of the rule coming into effect.” Remote work is here to stay. Here’s how to manage your staff from afar Image Credits: Kelly Sullivan / Getty Images Before the pandemic, most startup workers had the same experience on their first day: set up a new laptop, fill out some onboarding paperwork, then start gathering intel on the best places to grab lunch near the office. Now that so many teams are hybrid or fully remote, companies are learning the importance of fostering company culture and community from day one, a topic Rebecca Bellan delved into at ZebethMedia Disrupt with three experienced managers: Adriana Roche, chief people officer, Mural Deidre Paknad, CEO and co-founder, WorkBoard Allison Barr Allen, angel investor, Trail Run Capital “The biggest learning for us over the last three years was that it’s very difficult to really build expertise in a domain or a subject through Zoom,” said Paknad. How our startup made it through 2 recessions without relying on layoffs Image Credits: Aaron Black (opens in a new window) / Getty Images So far this year, about 45,000 tech workers have been laid off. If that’s hard to visualize, imagine a sold-out Mets game at Citi Field in New York City. Cutting staff is standard operating procedure during a downturn, but Sachin Gupta, who leads sales, marketing and general operations for HackerEarth, says his company has weathered two recessions without resorting to mass firings. “At any given time, our staff portfolio operates at about 90% of what we consider ideal,” he says. “Think of this like the distance

Are investors really paying more for profits than growth today? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in battery ventures, cloud, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Newsletter, EC venture capital, Enterprise, Startups, The Exchange, VentureNo Comments

What’s better: growing quickly or making lots of money? The answer, in startup terms, is both. But because there is a natural tension between growth (which usually comes with incremental costs, often in advance of new revenues) and profitability (allowing revenue to further extend its coverage of operating costs), most startups lean more on the growth side of the equation. It’s not hard to understand why. Venture investors provide capital that often greatly exceeds a startup’s revenue base, allowing the company to hire and market aggressively — and build, we hasten to add — in hopes of far-larger future scale at the cost of near-term profitability. The tradeoff between growth and profitability is often detailed in the so-called Rule of 40. Indeed, the rubric that combines a growth metric (measured in year-over-year terms) and a profitability result (measured in percent-of-revenue terms) in hopes of the sum meeting or exceeding 40 has generated derivative metrics for companies of a particular age or segment. The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on ZebethMedia+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday. Naturally, the Rule of 40 is not something that applies to, say, pre-revenue startups hoping to raise a pre-seed round. It’s a metric that applies to startups that are generating revenues at a sufficient scale to make the numbers reasonable; no one cares if you can meet the Rule of 40 while tripling your revenue from $1 to $3 per year, but if you are expanding your revenues from $1 million to $3 million per year, the rule is likely something you’ll be measured against. Now that venture markets are in retreat and public markets have been revalued, there’s been some push for startups to change their posture, trading some growth now for smaller deficits. A flight to quality, some call it. We’d call it a rebalancing away from quicker growth and staggering losses toward merely rapid growth and less cash burn. Battery Ventures recently dropped a new report (the “State of the OpenCloud 2022”) that includes some fascinating data on the profit/growth conversation. It’s something that we’ve touched on repeatedly here at ZebethMedia as both venture investors and their public-market cognates have shaken up their valuation models.

Retirable secures $6M to plan retirement for those without millions in savings • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Fintech, retirement planning, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Retirement plans are usually made by people who feel they can actually quit their jobs at a certain age and have enough money to maintain their lifestyle. But what about those who don’t? Several fintech startups are tackling this problem, including Retirable, which believes that retirement planning should be just as easy to get even if you won’t ever have millions of dollars set aside. The New York-based startup describes itself as a “first-of-its-kind holistic” approach to retirement planning. Building off of a 2019 study by TransAmerica Center that found only one in five workers has a written retirement strategy, the company provides similar offerings to other retirement planning companies: a dedicated advisor and products and services for investing, planning and spending. But that’s where co-founder and CEO Tyler End says the similarities end: not only is it focused on lower net-worth individuals, but it also went all in on retirement “decumulation.” It does this by allocating an individual’s assets into three buckets: cash, stability and growth. The client can see what their income is in real time and how much is safe to spend each month. It also applies this same logic to investments and is working on a debit card that gives cash back into savings. The company offers a free consultation to Americans aged 50 years and older and prices its service at 0.75% on the first $500,000 of managed assets, and nothing after that. End said that translates into roughly 63 cents for every $1,000 managed, which is lower than comparable advisory services. Retirable’s asset allocation dashboard. Image Credits: Retirable “Big players might offer call centers to have somebody help you with your account, but we’re the only ones giving you a dedicated advisor that you can trust that will work with you on your plan that is fiduciary, meaning no commissions,” End told ZebethMedia. “You see a lot of people start with a mission similar to ours of helping everyone, but when people are incentivized to sell, they generally drift in the direction of higher net worth.” End founded the company in 2019 with Ian Yamey and Brian Ramirez, and together with their 15 employees, Retirable built proprietary technology that has designed more than 50,000 retirement plans. A month ago, the company launched its investment management and paycheck products and has started matching its customers with planners. Retirable also grew its revenue by over 25% month over month. Today, the company announced $6 million in additional venture-backed seed funding to give the company $10.7 million in total investment to date. The round was led by Primary and included Vestigo Ventures, Diagram, Portage and Primetime. End said the new funding will be used to accelerate the development of the debit card, continue to grow the advisor team and add new distribution channels, for example, working with Medicare agents, tax planners and estate planners. “One of the interesting things about this demographic is that some people spend way too much way too early,” he added. “When you’re really active in retirement, spending fluctuates as you age. What this debit card does is give both the consumer and the advisor insight into spending amounts and where the money is being spent. Then from that, we can offer discounts on top of savings. It’s a first-of-its-kind of product.”

TouchBistro bakes CAD$150M into restaurant management tech recipe • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Francisco Partners, restaurant management, TouchBistro, VentureNo Comments

TouchBistro, an iPad-based restaurant management platform, secured CAD$150 million, or $110 million, in growth financing from Francisco Partners to accelerate its growth, expand its product pipeline and make some strategic acquisitions. It’s been a while since we checked in with the Toronto-based company, which was founded by Alex Barrotti and Geordie Konrad back in 2010. We first profiled the company in 2014 when it raised $1.5 million in funding and was processing around $500 million in transactions from more than 1,000 merchant clients. Both Barrotti and Konrad no longer manage the day-to-day operations of the company, having brought in Samir Zabaneh in 2021 and naming him CEO and chairman. The global pandemic was tough on restaurants, especially those that did not have capabilities to take online orders or manage deliveries. In an email interview, Zabaneh said that much of the adoption of cloud-based technology came during the pandemic so that restaurants could improve the guest experience while also helping their operations as labor shortages and food cost increases have inundated the industry. “We feel this restaurant industry trend is here to stay and the adoption of technology will only continue to increase,” he told ZebethMedia. Indeed, the global restaurant management software market size is forecasted to reach $14.7 billion by 2030. To adapt to those changes, TouchBistro integrated both marketing and customer relationship management capabilities into its suite of tools within the past two years while also increasing its cloud offerings, Zabaneh said. TouchBistro itself was not immune to some of that. The Globe and Mail reported in 2021 that the company’s “growth rate fell from about 50% to roughly 10% in 2020. It lost about a tenth of its customers, and hundreds more asked for a break in fees. It laid off 131 employees and introduced features such as virtual gift cards and online takeout and delivery options to help restaurants stay afloat.” However, it seems the company fought back to now serve over 16,000 restaurant customers to help them increase profitability and efficiency, while improving overall customer experience. TouchBistro has deployed more than 64,000 of its terminals that provide automated online ordering, menu and delivery management, contactless payments, marketing and customer engagement tools. It is also processing over $13 billion in payments annually, The company also acquired TableUp in 2020, a move in which Zabaneh said “became the foundation for our guest engagement, loyalty and marketing tools.” The company also offered online ordering at no cost to its customers while they couldn’t offer in-person dining. “While we are proud of our leadership position in Canada, we also expanded our distribution throughout the United States, where we have built a substantial business,” he added. “We integrated with key partners to provide our customers with best-in-class and complementary solutions, all integrated together on a single platform.” In total, the company has raised around CAD$430 million to date. Zabaneh declined to reveal TouchBistro’s valuation. Meanwhile, seeing the amount of technology adoption by the restaurant industry, the company felt it was the right time to accelerate its growth, he added. In addition to that, the new funding will be deployed into technology development, introducing new value-added and other integrated tools and to complete more strategic acquisitions. “Raising the capital from Francisco Partners provides us with the capital we need to achieve our strategic objectives, while adding deep domain expertise in technology and payments that will be invaluable as we continue this journey,” Zabaneh said. “Our vision is to become one of the most complete end-to-end restaurant management platforms, deliver best in class customer experience and help our customers be successful.”

Meet Crowd.dev, an open source user-led growth platform for fostering developer communities • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in Community-led growth, crowd-dev, open source, Social, Startups, VentureNo Comments

Community-led growth (CLG) has emerged as a popular mechanism for driving business, as companies strive to foster an ecosystem of fervent users that draws in new customers organically, serves as a support network for millions, and bangs a company’s drum completely off its own volition. Businesses such as Stripe, Slack, Canva, Notion, and Figma have grown substantially off the back of their respective communities, which in turn has led to a slew of new technologies dedicated to helping such businesses harness their fanbase, unearth their biggest advocates, and keep that CLG flywheel spinning. Investors have taken note, too: in the past year alone we’ve seen companies such as Commsor raise a $50 million Series B; Common Room secure $52 million; Threado draw in a $3.1 million seed round; and, more recently, Talkbase raise $2 million to power user-led growth for any company. Now, another new company has entered the community-led growth fray with a slightly different approach to the existing players, one focused on developer communities and with open source at its core. Founded out of Berlin in 2021, Crowd.dev brings together data from myriad developer communities including GitHub, Discord, Slack, Twitter, DEV, and Hacker News, and serves up analytics and workflow automations on top of this aggregated data. For example, a developer tool company might want to understand its users better and build relationships both with them and their employers to hone their product and find a better product-market fit. This might involve gathering and viewing all direct and indirect feedback in a single interface, or using one of Crowd.dev’s premium tools such as Eagle Eye which leans on natural language processing (NLP) to identify community discussions ripe for engagement. Crowd.dev: Eagle Eye app Image Credits: Crowd.dev To help take things to the next level, Crowd.dev has just raised €2.2 million ($2.2 million) in a pre-seed round of funding led by Seedcamp and Lightbird, with participation from Possible Ventures, Angel Invest, and a handful of angel backers. On top of that, the German startup has open-sourced its core platform, a move that goes some way toward differentiating itself in an increasingly crowded space. But first, it’s worth considering why developer-focused firms might need a dedicated platform to steer their community-led growth efforts, given that the incumbents can already be used for any community of users — including developers. Verticals Crowd.dev CEO and cofounder Jonathan Reimer argues that the word “community” has a broad gamut of connotations, and could mean anything from from social media influencers to online learning groups. Ultimately, a “one-size-fits-all” approach doesn’t work — a company laser-focused on attracting developers will probably need different tools to a company seeking to attract creators or crypto fans. “There has been hype around community, but also disappointment regarding new tools made to make community-building easier,” Reimer explained to ZebethMedia. “I have tried [existing] tools at previous jobs and was never satisfied as they didn’t match my use-case. Similar to CRMs (customer relationship management software), we believe there will be a verticalization in the community software space. We’re the first going in the developer space.” This “verticalization” is important in terms of building a platform that people actually want to use. In the case of Crowd.dev, which is aiming to create a product that suggests actions that a user can take based on developer community data, specializing in this way allows it to better tailor its product and “build more reliable model,” as Reimer puts it, for example in terms of detecting feedback or evaluating sentiment. “Achieving this for all kinds of communities at the same time would be incredibly hard,” Reimer said. “Developer communities have astonishing similarities, and especially for open source communities, we have access to a ton of historical training data.” Crowd.dev analytics Image Credits: Crowd.dev The open source factor Open source communities have long played a fundamental role in driving adoption of software, which is partly why a growing number of companies choose to make their products available under an open source license. If developers are able to tinker with software themselves with minimal friction, contribute some code, and even add new features, they are more inclined to use the software in their places of work — and thus, they are more inclined to convince their employers that it’s worth paying for premium features on top of the open source product. And this is the main driving force behind Crowd.dev’s focus on open source development communities, and its reasons for open-sourcing its own platform. “We believe that an essential tool for developer-focused, open source companies — as community management is — should be open source itself,” Reimer said. Transitioning to an open source platform may hold other benefits, too. For example, enterprises seeking greater transparency and control over their data can host Crowd.dev on their own infrastructure, and then pay Crowd.dev to unlock access to unlimited users and integrations. Or companies can elect to pay for the hosted incarnation of Crowd.dev, which includes a basic free tier in addition to more advanced enterprise plans. In its short lifespan so far, Crowd.dev claims a fairly impressive roster of customers such as The Linux Foundation and Microsoft, a company that has increasingly embraced open source over the past eight years after a somewhat frosty attitude toward community-driven software in years previous. Reimer said that Microsoft uses Crowd.dev to operate Flatcar Linux, a Linux distribution for container workloads it now operates after acquiring developer Kinvolk back in in 2021. “They use Crowd.dev mainly to analyze community members’ engagement, spot relevant stargazers on GitHub, and create reports,” Reimer said. In truth, Microsoft and its big tech ilk won’t be typical users, due to the fact that most of Crowd.dev’s target customers will be smaller companies seeking growth. But still, it’s an indication of the mindshare that Crowd.dev has managed to secure so far, with “several hundred organizations” joining the company’s beta product since March this year. “Eighty percent of our users are companies between Seed and Series B that see community

SpaceX set to launch two spacecraft tomorrow aboard Falcon Heavy rocket • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Daily Crunch, Startups, 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. Last week was a hell of a week in startup news, and Henry wrote a particularly good summary of everything that went down, including Elon Musk’s Twitter purchase, Meta’s troubles, and a minute of silence for self-driving cars. — Christine and Haje The ZebethMedia Top 3 Flying chonk goes wheeeeeee: While we were all distracted by Elon Musk’s other pet project, SpaceX launched a Falcon Heavy rocket for the first time in three years. Aria has more. Swipe right for utter chaos: Glitch or not, Instagram has some ‘splaining to do. A number of users woke up this morning to suspended accounts. We adore Aisha’s headline, “Instagram is giving Twitter a run for its money as the most chaotic social network today.” We concur. Circle of friends: Egyptian fintech Money Fellows banked $31 million in new funding to, what Tage describes as, “digitizing money circles,” which is where people essentially save and borrow together as a group. Startups and VC Politician turned venture capitalist Bradley Tusk recently spoke at a ZebethMedia Live event on how startups should approach regulation, in a session called “How to launch a startup into a regulated market.” Dibbs CEO and co-founder Evan Vandenberg joined Tusk in the conversation. The event is embedded here and is both free and very worth watching. Invygo, a startup operating in UAE and Saudi Arabia, has raised $10 million in its Series A funding as it works to scale its car rental service in the region. The Middle East–based startup has raised $14.3 million to date, Ivan reports. And, as ever, there’s a handful of additional stories. Just 4 this time — there were 5, but then a PR person decided to move the embargo for a story that was already published, and Haje got all salty and grumpy about it. 6 reasons why you shouldn’t join an accelerator Image Credits: Richard Drury (opens in a new window) / Getty Images As director of Techstars’ startup pipeline, Saba Karim devotes much of his time touting the many ways entrepreneurs can benefit by joining an accelerator. But is it the right choice for every founder? “Keep in mind that funding will solve your money problems, but it won’t solve everything else,” he says. “You’ll still need to figure out how to acquire customers, find the best talent, build an incredible product, assemble a great advisory board and get to product-market fit.” 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. Darrell writing that Mark Zuckerberg should drop all that metaverse nonsense and “make a new Twitter” makes us want to respond with “bite your tongue!” But really, as he puts it, “Cloning the features of its rivals” is something Meta is good at, plus it has the best chance at also replicating user base and monetary worth. It’s unlikely Zuck will take the bait, but never say never. It’s indeed a Twitter world, and we just live in it. First, Devin writes that Elon Musk just dissolved Twitter’s board of directors, making him now the sole owner; then Ron followed up with what Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor can do now that he isn’t on the board. Sarah reports on Twitter Blue’s troubles, namely that the subscription service is feeling blue that it is not bringing in more green. Meanwhile, Amanda writes about what happens if Twitter starts charging for that little blue checkmark, and Natasha L reports that Musk might be trying to bring back Vine. Over the weekend, Rebecca wrote about layoffs at the company. Don’t worry, there was plenty of other news: Mind cleanse: To get all that Twitter out of your mind, try your hand at Google’s new doodle game. Have you ever watched your child play Snake.io and wondered, “Will I like that?” Well, Google got into the Halloween spirit with today’s doodle, where you get to be a ghost and collect spirit flames while playing with friends or random people, Aisha writes. The heat is on: Amazon to delist top seller Appario on India marketplace after some retailers allege that sellers got preferential treatment, Manish reports. We’ve got a ticket to ride: WhatsApp users in Bengaluru can now buy train tickets via QR code, Jagmeet reports. Bed, Bath & Breach: Bed, Bath & Beyond confirms a data breach that happened when a hacker gained access to an employee’s hard drive, Carly writes. Query that data: Ron reports on Pinecone’s new vector database that can handle hybrid keyword-semantic searches.

Third Nature targets $35M fund • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Climate, climate fund, decarbonization, ocean tech, Third Nature, VentureNo Comments

With a glitzy vision of tackling some of “the biggest planetary challenges,” Third Nature is out to raise $35 million for its first VC fund, ZebethMedia has learned. Third Nature has secured at least $2.8 million so far, per a regulatory filing. It joins a wave of relatively new, environmentally-focused funds that are driving the current climate-tech boom. While introducing Third Nature earlier this year, founder Jason Ingle argued that “simply decarbonizing our economy won’t restore planetary health.” In a blog, he laid out his take on something broader, which he called “earth systems investing” in an apparent nod to earth system science. Ingle did not respond to a request for comment on his plans, however the firm’s website indicates it will back businesses that focus on the climate crisis and other interrelated threats to life as we know it, such as ocean acidification and biodiversity loss. Third Nature participated in AlgiKnit’s $13 million series A earlier this year, alongside fast-fashion giant H&M and Collaborative Fund. AlgiKnit makes yarn with giant kelp; the startup aims to help shrink the textile industry’s carbon footprint. Third Nature may have an especially broad raison d’etre, but its scope overlaps with plenty of other climate-minded investors, including Boston’s Propeller and Paris-based Satgana. But unlike Propeller, which is working with the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and climate scientist Dr. Julie Pullen, Third Nature hasn’t announced any noteworthy partnerships or advisors to date. Before Third Nature, Ingle co-founded Closed Loop Capital, which backed firms like Beyond Meat and farm software developer Conservis. Ingle is based in Philadelphia, according to LinkedIn.

These founders landed early checks by being savvy about social media • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 31, 2022Posted in Campfire, couplet coffee, EC TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, Social, TechCrunch Disrupt 2022, VentureNo Comments

On first blush, founders building a coffee brand, a social networking app, and a fintech-focused venture fund wouldn’t appear to have much in common. But at ZebethMedia Disrupt, the founders, together on stage, credited their early success in raising venture capital to their use of social media platforms. It’s an interesting and increasingly necessary ingredient. While one founder, Nik Milanović, who launched a small fintech-focused media company and an associated venture fund, happens to enjoy the kind of profile that VCs tend to notice (Stanford grad, biz dev experience at Google, white), the checks the other two founders raised are something of a statistical anomaly. Gefen Skolnick, the founder of coffee brand Couplet Coffee, is a woman; just 2.4% of venture dollars flowed toward women-led companies in 2021. For a Black founder like Josh Ogundu, whose app Campfire invites users to create and share 30-second audio stories associated with pictures on their phones, the odds of getting a check were an even more abysmal 1.3% in 2021. (For Latin and Black women founders, the chances of receiving venture funding in 2021 were closer to zero.) Though Ogundu and Skolnick made the point that going to esteemed schools and logging time at brand-name companies helped even the playing field (he attended both Michigan State and the University of Southern California and had a stint at TikTok; she attended UCLA and worked at Tesla, among other internships), all three suggested that savvy use of social media can do more than make it easier to connect with investors and customers — it can keep a founder and their brand relevant and accessible, too.