Month: March 2021

Multi-asset investing and trading platform and Robinhood competitor eToro announced Tuesday it will go public via a merger with SPAC FinTech Acquisition Corp. V in a massive $10.4 billion deal.

Once the transaction closes sometime in the third quarter, the combined company will operate as eToro Group Ltd. and is expected to be listed on the Nasdaq exchange.

The 14-year-old Israeli company was founded on a “vision of opening up capital markets.” It launched its platform in the U.S. just over two years ago and has seen rapid growth as of late. Last year, eToro said it added over 5 million new registered users and generated gross revenues of $605 million, representing 147% year over year growth. In January alone, the company added over 1.2 million new registered users and executed more than 75 million trades on its platform. That compares to 2019 when monthly registrations averaged 192,000 and 2020, when they grew to 440,000.

eToro said its platform is capitalizing on a number of secular trends such as the rise of digital wealth platforms, growing retail participation and mainstream crypto adoption. The company no doubt benefitted from the recent rise in retail investment interest, and in consumer investment apps and services specifically, which resulted from the so-called ‘meme stock’ activity that began with Redditors trading GameStop stock in order to frustrate institutional short-sellers.

The platform, which spans “social” stock trading and cryptocurrency exchange, in November 2019 acquired Delta, the crypto portfolio tracker app. eToro claims to be one of the first regulated platforms to offer cryptoassets. Its platform is regulated in the U.K., Europe, Australia, the U.S. and Gibraltar.

The transaction includes commitments for a $650 million common share private placement from leading investors including ION Investment Group, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Third Point LLC, Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC and Wellington Management. The overall $10.4 billion implied equity value of the merger arrangement includes an implied enterprise value for eToro of $9.6 billion.

eToro currently has over 20 million registered users across 100 countries, and its social community is rapidly expanding due to the growth of its total addressable market, supported in part by secular trends such as the growth of digital wealth platforms and the rise in retail participation.

It expects to receivedapproval from FINRA for a broker dealer license, with plans to launch stocks in the U.S. in the second half of 2021. In a written statement, FinTech V chairman Betsy Cohen said that its sponsor platform Fintech Masala seeks out companies “with outsized growth, effective controls and excellent management teams.”

“eToro meets all three of these criteria,” she added. “In the last few years, eToro has solidified its position as the leading online social trading platform outside the U.S., outlined its plans for the U.S. market, and diversified its income streams. It is now at an inflection point of growth, and we believe eToro is exceptionally positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.”

Source: Tech Crunch

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digital adoption in a way that no one could have ever anticipated, and as more people conduct more services online and via mobile devices, businesses have had to work even harder to validate users and security. One company working to serve that need, Socure — which uses AI and machine learning to verify identities — announced Tuesday that it has raised $100 million in a Series D funding round at a $1.3 billion valuation.

Given how much of our lives have shifted online, it’s no surprise that the U.S. digital identity market is projected to increase to over $30 billion by 2023 from just under $15 billion in 2019, according to One World Identity. This has led to skyrocketing demand for the services provided by identity verification companies. 

The founding team set out on a mission to be able to verify 100% of “good IDs” in real-time while “completely eliminating” identity fraud across the internet.

Historically, Socure has been focused on the financial services industry, but it plans to use its new capital to further expand into “every consumer-facing vertical” including online gaming, healthcare, telco, e-commerce and on-demand services.

The startup’s predictive analytics platform applies artificial intelligence and machine-learning techniques with online/offline data intelligence (from email, phone, address, IP, device, velocity and the broader internet) to verify that people are, in fact, who they say they are when applying for various accounts.

Today, Socure has more than 350 customers including three top five banks, six top 10 card issuers, a “top” credit bureau and over 75 fintechs such as Varo Money, Public, Chime and Stash.

In 2020, Socure grew its customer base by over 85% year over year and expanded its workforce by over 50% to about 240 people today.

Accel led Socure’s latest financing, which included participation from existing backers Commerce Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, Flint Capital, Citi Ventures, Wells Fargo Strategic Capital, Synchrony, Sorenson, Two Sigma Ventures and others. 

The round comes less than six months after the company raised $35 million in a round led by Sorenson Ventures, and brings the New York-based company’s total raised to $196 million since its 2012 inception.

Socure founder and CEO Johnny Ayers says his company’s identity management products can help B2C enterprises achieve know-your-customer (KYC) auto-approval rates of up to 97%. This means that financial institutions can more easily capture fraud, for example, via Socure’s single API. The company also claims that by more easily verifying thin-file (those without much credit history) and young consumers, it can help reduce the underbanked population.     

The pandemic and resulting shutdowns resulted in a massive demand for trusted digital identity, Ayers believes.

“This growth tracks with a larger trend marked by the broad migration of businesses to accept applications and onboard new customers online, with many companies accelerating their transformation from digital-first to digital-only,” he told TechCrunch.

Overall fraud attempts among Socure’s existing customer base nearly doubled in the second quarter of 2020 — with certain segments seeing rises as high as 150%, according to Ayers.

“These instances did not involve actual fraud but instead were flagged by Socure as suspicious and blocked prior to inflicting damage,” he said.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to also enhance its product offering as it continues to develop patents. 

Accel partner Amit Jhawar will join Socure’s board as part of the funding round.

In a blog post, Jhawar described Socure as “a purpose-built solution designed to handle the wave of new online users because its machine learning models have learned from every identity it has already seen.”

As former COO at Braintree and general manager at Venmo, Jhawar knows a thing or two about the importance of identity verification, especially in the financial services space.

He wrote: “I knew immediately that the Socure solution would be a game-changer because the solution can be used in every step of the customer lifecycle, from account creation to login to transaction.”

Socure also has hinted that it has an IPO in its future.

In a written statement, Ayers said: “We are incredibly grateful for the chance to innovate and partner to solve this problem with some of the greatest companies in the world and are energized for the opportunities that lay ahead for Socure, especially as we make our march to a potential IPO.”

Via email, he told TechCrunch that the company will “potentially” look at public markets in 2022 or 2023, when it feels “the time is right for the business.”

The story was updated post-publication with live comments from Socure

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Early Stage is the premier “how-to” event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear firsthand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product-market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in — there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE at checkout to get 20% off tickets right here.

Source: Tech Crunch

Dutchie, a nearly four-year-old, Bend, Oregon company that charges cannabis dispensaries a monthly fee to create and run their websites, process their orders and track what needs to be prepped for pick up, has raised $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.7 billion valuation. That’s roughly eight times the valuation the company was assigned last August, when it closed on $35 million in Series B funding.

Why the massive jump in so short a period? Aside from general frothiness in startup investing, Dutchie just acquired two companies, Greenbits and Leaflogix, that will enable it to become even more of an all-in-one tech platform for its customers. Dutchie isn’t disclosing how, or how much, it paid for either outfit, but the two concerns — which make enterprise resource planning and point-of-sale software, respectively — are being folded into Dutchie along with their collective 150 employees, effectively doubling the size of Dutchie, which now employs 300 people altogether.

Dutchie is also benefiting from some fairly strong tailwinds. In addition to a lockdown that has driven many new users to cannabis, five more states voted to legalize recreational marijuana in the November elections, and the federal government, which still categorizes marijuana as an illegal Schedule I drug and has thus denied cannabis companies access to commercial banking and insurance, appears closer to decriminalizing marijuana than any administration previously.

Given the way the company is evolving, and regulations are evolving, we talked with Dutchie co-founder and CEO Ross Lipson yesterday about whether Dutchie eventually begins to sell directly to consumers, rather than work with dispensaries. Once people no longer have to pay cash to the brick-and-mortar shops to which Dutchie sends them, will those outfits become less necessary?

Lipson insists they will not. While online orders have soared over the last year for obvious reasons and more shoppers grow accustomed to the ease of picking out products virtually, Lipson says that, “Longer term, this is a retail-first model. The nature of this industry lends itself to a hyperlocal model largely because of the way that plants are cultivated and processed, so I believe retail will remain intact and continue to be successful.”

We’ll see. In the meantime, Dutchie has $200 million more dollars from top backers to develop new products — including discovery and education tools —  and to begin to expand internationally, says Lipson.

Tiger Global Management led its newest round, joined by Dragoneer and DFJ Growth, two firms that are just now making their first forays into cannabis-related investing.

Dutchie’s earlier investors Casa Verde Capital, Thrive Capital, Gron Ventures and former Starbucks CEO and founder Howard Schultz also participated.

Asked if becoming publicly traded could be next for Dutchie as investor interest in the industry rises, Lipson says that Dutchie is right now “focused with what’s on our plate.”

As for any discussions with special purpose acquisition companies that might want to take the outfit public through a merger, Lipson says it “isn’t engaged in those talks right now,” but adds that the company will “weigh out the business opportunities as they come. We look at how does this decision bring value to the dispensary and the customer. If it brings value, we’d embark on that decision.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle. Perhaps no one knows this as well as Sean Lane, co-founder and CEO of Olive, a company whose software completes so many tedious administrative healthcare tasks for hospitals that it is currently valued by investors at $1.5 billion.

Somewhat amazingly, the nearly nine-year-old company raised $380 million of the $445 million it has raised altogether just last year. In fact, Olive is now growing so fast, and clicking along so well, that Lane just raised $50 million in funding last month for a second startup that uses Olive’s same tech platform. He’s CEO of that startup, called Circulo, too.

It’s impressive. It also took Lane around 28 big and small pivots to build the kind of high-growth, fast-scaling businesses that he always wanted to create — moves he’s going to discuss with us at TechCrunch’s upcoming two-day, all-virtual TC Early Stage event coming up April 1 and 2.

The idea: to save other founders from having to undergo the same anguishing twists and turns by sharing what he learned along his own path.

Lane had some help. Specifically, he has long credited one of his early investors, Mark Kvamme of Drive Capital, for helping identify a big opportunity amid of sea of smaller opportunities. As Lane told the outlet Columbus CEO a few year ago, before meeting Kvamme, he had a nice life in Baltimore, with a house on the water with his wife. Lane, who was once a U.S. Air Force and National Security Administration intelligence officer, was angel investing, co-running a tech incubator and had co-founded a company called CrossChx to link fingerprints to electronic medical records.

A chance encounter with Kvamme, a Silicon Valley VC who had moved to Columbus, would change everything. To wit, after Lane talked with him about his endeavors in Baltimore, as well as having bigger ambitions to create an “internet of healthcare,” Kvamme persuaded Lane to abandon his various projects, relocate to Columbus and focus entirely on a newer, better CrossChx.

That’s now looking like a smart bet by Kvamme, who wrote CrossChx — later renamed Olive — its first check. But even with Kvamme’s support, Olive’s success hardly happened overnight. Lane has said he met with plenty of resistance as he tried and scrapped numerous products. As with many growing startups that veer in a new direction, there were painful layoffs. He also eventually parted ways with his co-founder, Brad Mascho, who left the company in late 2017 in an apparent cloud of exhaustion. He’d “worked his butt off for a good four years,” as Lane told Columbus CEO.

It’s many of these tough points in Olive’s trajectory — and particularly those product pivots — that we’ll be talking about in a few short weeks at our upcoming event. Indeed, for those who’ve struggled with their own ambitions, or their own product roadmaps, or who’ve wondered what they could be doing better or smarter or faster to grow their own companies, this is one conversation that should not be missed.

Even better, our talk with Lane is just one part of a two-day event exploring the many aspects of early-stage startups — check out the entire agenda line up here.

It’s coming up fast, so be sure to grab your ticket to TC Early Stage on April 1-2 — and, by the way, you can save $100 or more when you get the dual-event ticket for both our April and July events. The latter is coming up July 8 and 9. You can learn more here.

 

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Source: Tech Crunch

Kelauni Jasmyn, general partner at the new Black Tech Nation Ventures, can explain her aims for the new firm quite succinctly: “The goal is to get more Black people funded.”

That’s something Jasmyn has been working on already with Black Tech Nation, a Pittsburgh-based organization that supports Black entrepreneurs with education, content, community and more. Now she’s tackling the funding size of the equation more directly by raising a $50 million first fund with her fellow GPs Sean Sebastian and David Motley.

“We’re really at the beginning of something brand new, that I think will be historic and offer a literal economic shift for the Black community in building generational wealth,” Jasmyn said. “We get to be the ones who mold the foundation of that.”

Sebastian is a partner at Birchmere Ventures, a seed fund also based in Pittsburgh, while Motley is co-founder of BlueTree Venture Fund and African American Directors Forum. Sebastian also suggested that he and Motley are involved partly to enable a “transfer of knowledge” that will empower a new generation of Black investors, starting with Jasmyn.

Motley, meanwhile, suggested that this is an effort to take “take the Black Tech Nation platform and combine it with the Birchmere platform.” He recalled speaking to Jasmyn for the first time at Sebastian’s urging and immediately responding, “Sean, this is the real deal.”

All three of BTNV’s partners emphasized that while the fund has a social mission, they’re also focused on financial returns. 

“We are no different than any other fund just because you put a specific community around it,” Jasmyn said. “You shouldn’t expect any less valuable returns. We just happen to have the advantage of untapped potential.”

The fund will make seed and Series A investments, and Motley said they’re focused on software startups — which could be software as a service, B2B or B2B2C. These ideas can be pre-revenue and even pre-product, but they need to be “scalable and lend themselves to significant value creation.”

Sebastian added that although BTVN is based in Pittsburgh, they’ll look at investments across the country, particularly entrepreneurs that come from outside Silicon Valley.

I wondered whether the fund’s financial goals could, at times, conflict with the more inclusive approach of Black Tech Nation, but the partners countered that the for-profit fund and nonprofit organization can actually complement each other. Motley said that Black Tech Nation “gives us more opportunities to say yes,” while Jasmyn suggested that if the venture fund has to turn someone down, she can still tell them, “Scoot over across the street [to Black Tech Nation] and maybe we can revisit this another time.”

Source: Tech Crunch

From distributed homes in Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, England, inBalance Research is joining Y Combinator as it looks to accelerate its business as the oracle for independent energy providers, utilities and market makers.

Selling a service it calls Delphi, the very early-stage startup is hoping to provide analysis for power producers and utilities on the demand forecasts of energy markets.

The orchestration of energy load across the grid has become a more pressing issue for utilities around the country after witnessing the disastrous collapse of Texas’ power grid in response to its second “once-in-a-century” storm in the last decade.

 

“If we want to address the solution long term, it’s a two-part solution,” said inBalance co-founder and chief executive, Thomas Marge. “It’s a combination of hardware and software. You need the right assets online and you need the right software that can ensure that markets operate when there are extreme market shocks.”

Prices for electricity change every 15 minutes, and sometimes those pries can fluctuate wildly. In some places, even without the weather conditions that demolished the Texas grid and drove some companies out of business, prices can double in a matter of hours, according to inBalance.

That’s what makes forecasting tools important, the company said. As prices spike, asset managers of finite responsive resources such as hydro and storage need to decide if they will offer more value to the market now or later. Coming online too early or too late will decrease the revenue for their clean generation and increase peak prices for consumers.

The situation is even worse, according to the company, if storage and intermittent renewables come online at the same time. That can create downward price pressure for both the storage and renewable assets, which, in turn, can lead to increased fossil fuel generation later the same day, once cleaner sources are depleted.

The software to predict those pressures is what inBalance claims to provide. Marge and his fellow co-founders, Rajan Troll and Edwin Fennell have always been interested in the problems associated with big data and energy.

For Marge, that began when he worked on a project to optimize operations for wind farms during a stint in Lexington, Mass.

“Fundamentally we’re a data-science solution,” said Marge. “It’s a combination of knowing what factors influence every single asset on every single market in North America. We have a glimpse into how those assets are going to be working one day before to one hour before in order to do price forecasting.” 

So far, one utility using the company’s software in the Northeast has managed to curb its emissions by 0.2%. With a focus on renewables, inBalance is hoping to roll out larger reductions to the 3,000 market participants that are also using its forecasting tools for other services. Another application is in the work inBalance is conducting with a gas peaker plant to help offset the intermittency of renewable generation sources.

The reduction in emissions in New England is particularly impressive given that the company only began working with the utility there in December. Given its forecasting tools, the company is able to provide a window into which assets might be most valuable at what time — including, potentially, natural gas peaking plants, hydropower, pumped hydropower (basically an energy storage technology), battery or flywheel energy storage projects and demand response technologies that encourage businesses and consumers to reduce consumption in response to price signals, Marge said.

Already, six companies have taken a trip to see the Delphi software and come away as early users. They include a global renewable asset manager and one of the top 10 largest utilities in the U.S., according to Marge.

“We use machine learning to accurately forecast electricity prices from terabytes of public and proprietary data. The solution required for daily power system stability is both hardware — like storage and electric vehicle charging — and the software required to optimally use it. inBalance exists to be that software solution,” the company said in a statement. 

Source: Tech Crunch

It’s a busy day in IPO-land: Olo has raised its IPO range and DigitalOcean is giving us a first look at what it may be worth when it debuts.

That Olo raised its IPO price is not a huge surprise, given the software company’s rapid growth and profits. In the case of DigitalOcean, we have more work to do as its approach to growth is a bit different.

Let’s explore both companies’ pricing intervals through our usual lens of revenue multiples, market comps and general SaaS sass. We’ll do this in alphabetical order, which puts the cloud infra company up first.

DigitalOcean’s IPO price range

According to its S-1/A filing, DigitalOcean expects its IPO to price between $44 and $47 per share. The price range is a coup for the company’s private investors, who as recently as the company’s 2020 Series C paid about $10.59 each for the company’s shares. Andreessen Horowitz is going to do very well, having led the company’s Series A at a per-share price of just more than $2. IA Ventures, which led DigitalOcean’s seed round, according to Crunchbase, paid just $0.26 per share back in the 2012-2013 time frame. That’s going to convert well.

In valuation terms, the company’s simple share count post-IPO will be 105,303,340, or 107,778,340 if its underwriters purchase their option. At $44 to $47 per share, DigitalOcean is worth $4.72 billion to $5.07 billion, including shares designated for its underwriters.

The company’s fully diluted valuation is higher. At midpoint, Renaissance Capital estimates DigitalOcean’s diluted valuation is $5.6 billion. That works out to a little under $5.8 billion at $47 per share.

Taking a look at DigitalOcean’s Q4 2020 revenue of $87.5 million, the company closed last year on a run rate of $350 million. Or a revenue multiple of 14.5x at the upper end of its nondiluted valuation, and around 16.5x at the upper bound of its diluted worth.

Source: Tech Crunch

You might think that Clubhouse is the final word on audio-centric social networks, but a San Francisco startup called Swell is launching its own iOS and Android app focused on voice conversations.

The big difference: While conversations on Clubhouse all happen in real-time — meaning that you’ve got to listen live or miss it all (at least for now) — Swell is focused on asynchronous comments. In other words, users post a standalone audio clip that can be up to five minutes in length (with an accompanying image and links), then other users can browse, listen and leave their own audio responses in their own time.

Swell supports audio-only group chats and private conversations, as well as public “Swellcasts” — think of a bite-sized podcast, or a Clubhouse-style conversation that’s structured more like a comment thread than a free-for-all. Users can also promote their public posts through their own pages on the Swellcast website.

Swell is led by husband-and-wife team Sudha Varadarajan and Arish Ali, who previously founded e-commerce company Skava and sold it to Infosys.

Varadarajan (the startup’s CEO) described the app as an attempt to “democratize” audio content creation, with no special equipment or serious production required, and allowing users to talk about anything. (In one example, the Swellcaster was outside talking about their front lawn.)

At the same time, she suggested that the app was created less as a response to Clubhouse and more as a general antidote to social media, where the pair saw increasing polarization and fewer genuine conversations.

Audio is hardly immune to ranting and anger — just look at talk radio. But Varadarajan suggested that making the posts asynchronous doesn’t just make it easier for listeners to catch up; it also improves the quality of the conversation: “People really think about what they’re going to say.”

She added that the company is determined to avoid any ad-based business models and instead make money by charging for premium tools and Swellcasts.

Until now, Swell has only been open to a small group of users. Today it’s launching more broadly, in advance of its session tomorrow at the virtual SXSW, “Voice is transforming our online presence. Why?”

Source: Tech Crunch

Hello friends, and welcome to Week in Review.

Last week, I talked a bit about NFTs and their impact on artists. If you’re inundated with NFT talk just take one quick look at this story I wrote this week about the $69 million sale of Beeple’s photo collage. This hype cycle is probably all the result of crypto folks talking each other up and buying each other’s stuff, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be lasting impacts. That said, I would imagine we’re pretty close to the peak of this wave, with a larger one down the road after things cool off a bit. I’ve been wrong before though…

This week, I’m interested in a quick look at what your kids have been talking about all these years. Yes, Roblox.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

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The big thing

Roblox went public on the New York Stock Exchange this week, scoring a $38 billion market cap after its first couple days of trading.

Investors rallied around the idea that Roblox is one of the most valuable gaming companies in existence. More than Unity, Zynga, Take-Two, even gaming giant Electronic Arts. It’s still got a ways to go to take down Microsoft, Sony or Apple though… The now-public company is so freaking huge because investors believe the company has tapped into something that none of the others have, a true interconnected creative marketplace where gamers can evolve alongside an evolving library of experiences that all share the same DNA (and in-game currency).

The gaming industry has entered a very democratic stride as cross-play tears down some of the walls of gaming’s platform dynamics. Each hardware platform that operates an app store of their own still has the keys to a kingdom, but it’s a shifting world with uncertainty ahead. While massive publishers have tapped cloud gaming as the trend that will string their blockbuster franchises together, they all wish they were in Roblox’s position. The gaming industry has seen plenty of Goliath’s in its day, but for every major MMO to strike it rich, it’s still just another winner in a field of disparate hits with no connective tissue.

Roblox is different, and while many of us still have the aged vision of the image above: a bunch of rudimentary Minecraft/Playmobile-looking mini-games, Roblox’s game creation tools are advancing quickly and developers are building photorealistic games that are wider in ambition and scope than before. As the company levels-up the age range it appeals to — both by holding its grasp on aging gamers on its platform and using souped-up titles to appeal to a new-generation — there’s a wholly unique platform opportunity here: the chance to have the longevity of an app store but with the social base layer that today’s cacophony of titles have never shared.

Whether or not Roblox is the “metaverse” that folks in the gaming world have been hyping, it certainly looks more like it than any other modern gaming company does.

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Other things

Apple releases some important security patches
It was honestly a pretty low-key week of tech news, I’ll admit, but folks in the security world might not totally buy that characterization. This week, Apple released some critical updates for its devices, fixing a Safari vulnerability that could allow attackers to run malicious code on a user’s unpatched devices. Update your stuff, y’all.

TikTok gets proactive on online bullying
New social media platforms have had the benefit of seeing the easy L’s that Facebook teed itself up for. For TikTok, its China connection means that there’s less room for error when it comes to easily avoidable losses. The team announced some new anti-bullying features aimed at cutting down on toxicity in comment feeds.

Dropbox buys DocSend
Cloud storage giants are probably in need of a little reinvention, the enterprise software boom of the pandemic has seemed to create mind-blowing amounts of value for every SaaS company except these players. This week, Dropbox made a relatively big bet on document sharing startup DocSend. It’s seemingly a pretty natural fit for them, but can they turn in into a bigger opportunity?

Epic Games buys photogrammetry studio
As graphics cards and consoles have hit new levels of power, games have had to satisfy desired for more details and complexity. It takes a wild amount of time to create 3D assets with that complexity so plenty of game developers have leaned on photogrammetry which turns a series of photos or scans of a real world object or environment into a 3D model. This week, Epic Games bought one of the better known software makers in this space, called Capturing Reality, with the aim of integrating the tech into future versions of their game engine.

Twitter Spaces launches publicly next month
I’ve spent some more time with Twitter Spaces this week and am growing convinced that it has a substantial chance to kneecap Clubhouse’s growth. Twitter is notoriously slow to roll out products, but it seems they’ve been hitting the gas on Spaces, announcing this week that it will be available widely by next month.

Seth Rogen starts a weed company
There’s a lot of money in startups, there’s really never been a better time to get capital for a project… if you know the right people and have the right kind of expertise. Seth Rogen and weed are a pretty solid mental combo and him starting a weed company shouldn’t be a big shock.

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Extra things

Some of my favorite reads from our Extra Crunch subscription service this week:

Coupang follows Roblox to a strong first day of trading
“Another day brings another public debut of a multibillion-dollar company that performed well out of the gate.This time it’s Coupang, whose shares are currently up just over 46% to more than $51 after pricing at $35, $1 above the South Korean e-commerce giant’s IPO price range. Raising one’s range and then pricing above it only to see the public markets take the new equity higher is somewhat par for the course when it comes to the most successful recent debuts, to which we can add Coupang.” More

How nontechnical talent can break into deep tech
“Startup hiring processes can be opaque, and breaking into the deep tech world as a nontechnical person seems daunting. As someone with no initial research background wanting to work in biotech, I felt this challenge personally. In the past year, I landed several opportunities working for and with deep tech companies.“ More

Does your VC have an investment thesis or a hypothesis?
“Venture capitalists love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading…” More

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Once more, if you liked reading this, you can get it in your inbox from the newsletter page, and follow my tweets @lucasmtny.

Source: Tech Crunch