Month: December 2019

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1. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is taking over as CEO of Alphabet

Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin announced that Google CEO Sundar Pichai will be replacing Page as the CEO of parent company Alphabet. In addition, Brin is stepping down from his role as Alphabet’s president.

Rather than framing this as a departure, the pair suggested that they’ve “never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there’s a better way to run the company” and that they remain “deeply committed to Google and Alphabet for the long term, and will remain actively involved as Board members, shareholders and co-founders.”

2. Plex launches a free, ad-supported streaming service in over 200 countries

Although there are plenty of similar offerings on the market, what makes Plex’s new streaming service unique is its broad availability — unlike many competitors, Plex has structured its deals in order to stream content outside the United States.

3. Toyota leads $50M investment in autonomous shuttle startup May Mobility

May Mobility has 25 autonomous low-speed shuttles spread out between Detroit; Grand Rapids, Michigan; and Providence, Rhode Island. As part of the deal, Toyota has picked the startup as one of its “autonomous driving providers for future open platforms.”

4. Progressive VCs and private equity are using tech and analytics to revolutionize investing

HOF Capital’s David Teten says private equity and venture capital investors are copying their counterparts in the hedge fund world by trying to automate more of their jobs. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

5. Kustomer raises $60M for its omnichannel-based CRM platform

The New York-based company has been on a growth tear and has raised more than $161 million in the last 18 months. CEO Brad Birnbaum said the valuation is now “definitely above $500 million,” but he declined to be more specific.

6. Instagram still doesn’t age-check kids. That must change.

Josh Constine argues that user growth at all costs is no longer acceptable: It’s time for Instagram to step up and assume responsibility for protecting children, even if that means excluding them. (In fact, after this post was published, Instagram announced that it would in fact require birth dates from all new users.)

7. Reddit’s monthly active user base grew 30% to reach 430M in 2019

The most-upvoted post this year referenced Reddit’s fundraise from China’s Tencent, which led Reddit’s $300 million Series D. Users were concerned at the time the investment would lead to Chinese censorship, leading them to flood the site with images that would be forbidden in China.

Source: Tech Crunch

Nintendo today noted that the Switch just had its best-ever sales week in the States. Over the course of Thanksgiving week, the three-year-old console moved more than 830,000 units. That brings the system up to a combined 17.5 million units in the U.S., by Nintendo’s count. It’s pretty impressive momentum for a mature console.

Back in late October, the Switch hit the 15 million mark in the States. It continues to sit atop the console sales charts posted by analytics firms like NPD. The numbers, of course, were juiced by both the upcoming holidays, the addition of the new, lower-priced Switch Lite and various Black Friday offers that bundle in things like a free copy of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.

The system is expected to get another major boost outside of the U.S., with a forthcoming launch in China. Nintendo is teaming up with Tencent to deliver the system to a potentially massive market at around $300 a pop. Pre-orders in the country opened today, with sales starting on December 10, along with a trio of Mario titles.

As of late-September, the system has sold in excess of 40 million units globally — a healthy upgrade from its lukewarmly received predecessor, the Wii U, which only managed to move 13.5 million in its lifetime. The Switch still has some catching up to do with the eight-year-old 3DS, which has sold 75.5 million units globally. 

Source: Tech Crunch

YouTube is warning creators they may see their subscriber numbers decline this week as the result of a purge that will remove closed accounts from YouTube metrics. Closed accounts could refer to those that were willingly shut down by users or those that YouTube shut down for policy violations — like spam or abuse, for example.

The company informed creators of the possible loss of subscribers via a message on its Help site community forum, Twitter feed, as well as through a notification on YouTube Creator Studio, its dashboard for channel management.

It explains that a purge like this is routine and a part of YouTube’s ongoing efforts to ensure the site stays free from spam and abuse. But while the removals may lead to a creator’s subscriber numbers dropping, YouTube says this shouldn’t have an impact on a channel’s watch time.

Creators who are affected by the purge will see the changes to subscriber accounts appear in their YouTube Analytics for December 3 through December 4. To view the exact numbers of closed accounts that are removed from a channel, creators have to click on the “See more” menu in YouTube Analytics, then select “Closed Accounts” from “Subscription Source.”

Purges like this are not popular with most creators because subscriber numbers determine whether or not they become eligible for certain monetization tools, like channel memberships or merch shelf, for instance. It’s also a factor as to whether creators can join the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). For smaller creators just nearing the 1,000-subscriber threshold for entry into YPP, even a small drop in subscriber counts can impact their ability to monetize.

For that reason, many smaller creators are asking fans to double-check to ensure they’re still subscribed as they believe purges like this remove legitimate accounts from their fan base, not just spam and closed accounts.

According to social media posts from creators, the impacts of the purge seem to vary wildly by channel. Some only report losing a few subscribers, others say they lost thousands.

This isn’t the first time YouTube has purged subscribers. Last December, it warned creators it would be removing a significant number of spam accounts over a two-day period, which would lead to large declines in subscriber numbers.

Source: Tech Crunch

Back in February, we wrote that Postscript “wants to be the Mailchimp for SMS.” Now they’ve raised $4.5 million to help get it done.

This round was led by Accomplice, and backed by Kayak co-founder Paul English, Wufoo co-founder Kevin Hale, Klaviyo co-founder Andrew Bialecki, Drift co-founder Elias Torres, Front co-founder Mathilde Collin and Podium co-founders Eric Rea and Dennis Steele. The Postscript team is currently made up of 14 people.

Postscript is meant to help e-commerce companies — specifically Shopify shops, currently — connect with their existing customers over SMS. Their Shopify plugin lets store owners run SMS marketing campaigns with customers who’ve opted in, have two-way conversations with users who respond and analyze the data to figure out what’s working.

Got a new product hitting the shelves and want to let your most frequent customers know first? Plug the message into Postscript’s dashboard, tell it what segment of your customer base you want to receive it and send away. Their analytics backend will tell you how many people received it, how many actually clicked through and how much revenue you pulled in from those clicks.

If a customer types out a text and responds, it’ll pop up in the backend like a support ticket. Shop owners and employees can respond and have direct conversations, answer questions and close out the ticket through the dashboard — or they can automatically pipe them into services like Zendesk or Zapier.

But what about spam? Our text message inboxes tend to feel like the last refuge from the overwhelming onslaught of marketing messages that have ruined e-mail; do we really want shops pinging our phones directly every time they’ve got a new pair of pants?

It seems like Postscript is pretty mindful of this, and is building things in a way that limits just how “spammy” anyone on the platform can be — partly because (as we’ve seen with e-mail) flooding users with unwanted messages ensures that messages just don’t get opened, and partly because SMS is much more tightly regulated than many other messaging protocols. Under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) in the U.S., for example, SMSing marketing messages to someone without an explicit opt-in can get the company nailed with fines of thousands of dollars per text.

As Lucas Matney wrote in February:

The opt-in process for phone communications is already a bit more codified in the U.S., and as companies attempt to stay in the good graces of GDPR for fear of the EU god, it might be more likely they tread carefully.

As such, everything is opt-in, and easily opted out of if a user changes their mind. It also helps, of course, that sending SMS isn’t free for the companies. Each SMS you send to a customer who doesn’t care is money wasted — so there’s interest on all sides on limiting messages to just the folks who actually want them.

Postscript pricing varies depending on how many messages a shop is looking to send each month. Paid plans start at $50 a month for 1,500 SMS, climbing up to $2,000 per month for 83,000 messages — after that, they ask shops to reach out for a custom plan. Postscript co-founder Alex Beller tells me the company currently has around 530 paying customers, each spending anything from $50 per month to “the mid five figures.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Three months after Goldman Sachs lent $100 million to Mexican fintech Konfio, SoftBank has invested another $100 million into the financial services company. The investment confirms Reuters’ August report that SoftBank was in advanced talks with the startup — now one of the most heavily funded fintechs in Mexico. 

SoftBank is continuing to expand its Mexican portfolio, which now includes used car buying platform Kavak and payments startup Clip. Aside from Mexico, SoftBank has primarily focused its $5 billion Latin America fund on Brazil — and recently marked its entry into Argentina with an injection into financial services company Uala in a $150 million investment co-led by Tencent. 

As traditional banks shy away from small to medium-sized business loans in Mexico, Konfio’s credit underwriting service provides a faster alternative. Konfio uses a data-first approach to enable fast credit assessment for SMBs looking to grow their businesses. The service can disburse credit in a one-day turnaround, as opposed to locking users into a traditional months-long approval process that can often require collateral. 

Meanwhile, if you’re a startup gathering massive amounts of data on Latin America’s growing middle class, SoftBank might be interested in your growth funding. The Japanese conglomerate seems to want to know everything it can about Latin America’s consumer spending habits, mobile usage and personal banking user behavior.

Watch Konfio founder and CEO David Arana’s panel at TechCrunch’s São Paulo event here.

Source: Tech Crunch

When the storied venture firm Sequoia likes a deal, it will sometimes not only lead one of its financing rounds but fund it exclusively — no matter how that impacts earlier investors. Given the firm’s powerful brand, it’s hard to complain (too much), even if it means that earlier backers see their stakes diluted.

Such looks to be the case with Dolls Kill, an eight-year-old, San Francisco-based online boutique for “misfits” and “miss legits,” that began selling platform shoes and other club-type clothing and has apparently grown like a weed, alongside the festivals that its customers attend, from Burning Man to Coachella.

The company has just raised $40 million in Series B funding from Sequoia, and when we talked yesterday with cofounder and CEO Bobby Farahi about the deal — which brings Dolls Kill’s funding to roughly $60 million — he said there was “no room” for earlier backers, including the consumer-focused venture firm Maveron.

He quickly added that the company’s board members — specifically Maveron partner Jason Stoffer, along with former Hot Topic CEO Betsy McLaughlin — have been instrumental in helping the company “think through growth while maintaining authenticity.”

It’s easy to appreciate enthusiasm around the brand, which employs around 400 people, has retail stores in both San Francisco and L.A., and sells its own clothes under an array of different labels, as well as sells the clothing of third parties whose aesthetic happens to fit that of Dolls Kill at any particular moment in time.

As says Farahi, “Right now there’s a resurgence in ’90s fashion, but in another year, we could move on to other third-party brands that we believe will resonate with our customers.”

Fahari doesn’t break out how much of the company’s clothing is made by the startup itself — in China and the U.S., among other “international” locations, according to Fahari. He shies from sharing many metrics at all, in fact. But the company, whose counter culture approach began at the fringes of society, has seemingly gone mainstream as young shoppers increasingly ditch logos and increasingly look to express who they are through what Farahi calls  their “inner IDGF.”

Adds Farahi, “The macro world changed a lot to give us a lot of tailwinds.”

Dolls Kill also has — for now, at least — a deep connection to its customers. The company has three million Instagram followers and earlier this year, when the brand toured an ice cream truck filled with a particular combat boot called the Billionaire Bling Boot to more than 30 U.S. cities, customers “four blocks long” waited in line to buy them, says Fahari.

In another creative twist, it opened its L.A. location –which looks more like a nightclub — to shoppers at midnight on Black Friday and it stayed open the following 24 hours.

Sequoia — which reached out to the company directly — told Farahi that it had looked at a lot of fashion brands and “they said we believe you’re the next generation-defining brand, the way The Gap was in the ’80s,” recounts Fahari. “I think they see the company not just as a brand but also a movement.”

Certainly, Sequoia’s Alfred Lin — who as Zappos’s COO helped grow the company into the giant that Amazon acquired in 2009 — understands such things given the famously strong early emphasis at Zappos on company culture and growing while remaining true to its early employees and customers.

As for the name Dolls Kill, the brand was the idea of Fahari’s wife and cofounder Shoddy Lynn, who liked the “dichotomous words, one very soft and one very hard,” says Fahari, explaining that while “the brand is very girly, these girls aren’t taking shit from anybody.”

Adds Fahari, “And the domain was available.”

Source: Tech Crunch