Month: May 2021

The global tech sector is booming, and as technologies like cloud and AI accelerate their growth, the demand for tech talent outpaces supply globally. Specifically, the U.S. tech sector has seen unprecedented growth in recent years, with four tech firms reaching a $1 trillion market cap by the beginning of 2020 — all of which have seen double-digit growth since achieving a 13-digit valuation pre-pandemic.

One of the major factors in the growth and adoption of tech in the U.S. is the increasing focus on software as a service and broader digital transformations across industry sectors, which have accelerated due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, there is an insatiable appetite for quality tech talent in the U.S., with projections showing an 11% increase by 2029 from 2019 numbers, which amounts to over half a million new jobs.

Given that the U.S. produces only about 65,000 computer science graduates, there is a vast deficit in the tech talent market, which materialized as over 900,000 unfilled IT and related positions in 2019 alone. The problem is so vast that more than 80% of U.S. employers stated that recruiting for tech talent is a top business challenge, according to a survey by top HR consulting firm Robert Half.

Demand increasing for Mexican tech talent

Mexico’s tech talent can help to fill the gaps left in a hypercompetitive U.S. market for tech workers. Unlike the U.S., 20% of Mexican college graduates have relevant engineering degrees, amounting to over 110,000 per year, far surpassing the U.S. in technical talent. Investors and tech firms have noticed and are increasing operations in Mexico.

Some have referred to the cities of Monterrey and Guadalajara as the “Silicon Valley of Latin America,” and while their tech sectors are also seeing tremendous growth, the pace falls short of Mexico’s talent production, leading to a surplus of highly trained and capable individuals in the tech sector. The cost of higher education in Mexico is far less than in the U.S., so we’re likely to see that talent surplus grow in the coming years.

Under current conditions, the U.S. has an incredible opportunity to capitalize on the surplus of tech talent in Mexico. Because tech jobs are more scarce than in the U.S., the cost of talent in Mexico is considerably less than in the U.S. or in Canada. In general, talent in Mexico can be two to three times cheaper than in the U.S. while still delivering outstanding quality and specialized experience.

More so than other Latin American countries, Mexico has the experience and economy to support a robust tech talent export ecosystem. In fact, Mexico City’s concentrated market is larger than the sum total of every other Spanish-speaking country in Latin America. Specifically, Mexico’s IT outsourcing industry has been growing at an annual rate of 10%-15% and is now considered the third-largest exporter of IT services.

What’s more, the U.S./Mexico relationship is seeing a refresh after several tumultuous years. With Mexico ranked No. 1 among U.S. trade partners, the political and economic mechanisms for investments and partnerships are in place. Technology leaders such as Cisco and Intel have already set up shop in Mexico, demonstrating confidence in the country’s ability to support tech and economic growth.

The benefits of proximity

Mexico provides a number of benefits that make drawing from its talent surplus easier and more efficient. For one, Mexico’s time zones align with those in the U.S., enabling real-time collaboration at times that work best for both parties. Compare this to the time difference in India, which is over 12 hours ahead of California’s Silicon Valley.

Beyond the time difference, there are also many cultural similarities that make working with Mexico the clear choice for IT outsourcing. For example, the U.S. is home to more than 41 million native Spanish speakers, and plus over 12 million bilingual Spanish speakers, making the U.S. the second-largest Spanish-speaking country after Mexico. While difficult to quantify, the number of consumer and cultural exports from Mexico to the U.S. also helps to build familiarity and solidarity between the two countries, which can only improve an already healthy relationship.

New geopolitical considerations favor U.S.-Mexico ties

The steady progression of America’s tech sector is now seen as a strategic priority at the federal level. Meanwhile, public and private sector decision-makers are more interested than ever in conducting business under favorable trade treaty terms with friendly governments amid a new climate of geopolitical uncertainty.

As the U.S. tech sector continues its explosive growth, technology companies in the U.S. will need to seek alternative means to supplement its in-demand tech workforce. Rather than turning to countries undergoing increased regulatory scrutiny, or distant talent bases requiring significant business travel, business leaders are looking to geographically close, diplomatically friendly nations. U.S. companies are finding Mexico’s status as a key business partner and strategic ally to be a massive value driver.

By 2030, the middle-class population in Mexico is expected to reach 95 million, placing it in the top 10 countries with the highest share of global middle-class consumption. As the middle class rises, so will companies to meet their consumer needs, and, as such, Mexico’s own tech sector will grow and require significantly more tech talent, reducing or potentially eliminating Mexico’s talent surplus.

This is evidenced by the uptick in Mexico-based technology companies, such as Mexican used-car startup Kavak, which recently hit a $4 billion valuation. Amid an exciting backdrop of skyrocketing tech valuations and potential, the U.S. tech sector should look to Mexico as a key growth market and technology partner. The time is now for the U.S. to tap into the surplus of quality tech talent in Mexico.

Source: Tech Crunch

Apple last month unveiled its plans for paid podcast subscriptions in a newly redesigned Apple Podcasts app. Now, it’s introducing a new program that will help podcast creators grow their subscriber base: affiliate marketing. The company’s “Apple Services Performance Partner Program,” which already exists to help market other Apple services like Apple TV, Apple News, and Apple Books, is today expanding to include paid podcasts.

The new program — “Apple Services Performance Partner Program for Apple Podcasts” (whew!) — will be open to anyone, though the company believes it will make the most sense for publishers and creators who already have an audience and a number of marketing channels where they can share these new affiliate links. When users convert by clicking through one of the links and subscribe to a premium podcast, the partner will receive a one-time commission at 50% of the podcast subscription price, after the subscriber accumulates their first month of paid service.

So, for example, if a paid podcast was charging subscribers $5 per month, the commission would be $2.50. This commission would apply for every new subscriber that signed up through the affiliate channel, and there’s no cap.

Podcast creators can also use the affiliate links to promote their own paid programs, which would allow them to generate incremental revenue.

While anyone can apply to join the affiliate program, there is an approval process involved. This is mainly about keeping spammers out of the program, and ensuring that those signing up do have at least some marketing channels where they can distribute the links. The sign-up form asks for specific criteria — like how many channels are available and how the partner intends to use them to promote the affiliate links, among other things.

The program will be made available to anyone in the 170 countries and regions where paid podcasts subscriptions are being made available.

Once approved and signed in, affiliate partners will gain access to an online dashboard where they can create links (i.e. shortened URLs) much like any other affiliate program. They can also create multiple URLs for an individual podcast to make it easier to track how well different channels are performing. The URLs can be posted on their own, tied to a “Listen on Apple Podcasts” badge, or can be made available as a QR code. The latter may make more sense when live events return, as it could be printed on signage or in flyers that were distributed during a live taping, for example. It could also be used in other sorts of advertising, including both print and digital.

Though premium podcasts already existed, until more recently that often involved paying a podcaster directly to access a private RSS feed. Smaller services like Stitcher also used subscriptions to provide paying customers with a series of perks, like ad-free listening and exclusive content. The new efforts by both Apple and Spotify are focused on wooing creators to their platforms, where they’ll take a cut of the subscription revenues. Spotify is waiving its 5% fee for the first two years, while Apple is employing its usual model of 30% in year 1 that drops to 15% in year two.

While people can begin to enroll in the new affiliate program starting today, paid podcasts aren’t actually launching until later this month, per Apple. When they do, those enrolled in the affilate program will be able to create links and begin earning commissions on subscriptions.

Source: Tech Crunch

Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), the venture arm of the 37-year-old private equity firm Bain Capital, announced this morning that it has $1.3 billion more smackers to invest across two funds, a $950 million fund for seed and Series A deals and a $350 million fund for growth-stage opportunities. That amount is up slightly from late 2018, when the outfit announced $1 billion across two funds.

While the outfit is backed by all the usual suspects, including endowments and pension funds, it’s worth noting that around $130 million of that capital comes from investors and other employees inside of Bain, whose contributions typically make up 10% of a fund. (Investors at other firms like Sequoia are big investors in their funds, too.)

More important, of course, is where the capital will be spent. According to partners Sarah Smith and Aaref Hilaly, the focus remains very much on enterprise startups, where the team likes to jump in early and build up a big position. (Some of its biggest bets in terms of dollars invested right now include the text message marketing company Attentive, currently valued at $2.2 billion, and the in-memory database company Redis Labs, valued at $2 billion.)

Interestingly, BCV is also investing directly in a lot of emerging managers, 50 of whom BCV has already backed in order improve the diversity of ideas and startups that it gets to see at the earliest stages.

It’s all part of the firm’s continuing evolution, says the outfit, which got its start in 2001 on the East Coast and was designed initially to fund Series B and older companies but has evolved to fund mostly West Coast- and, to a smaller degree, New York-based startups that are just getting off the ground.

To underscore the shift, says Hilaly, BCV wrote checks to 42 companies last year and 37 of them were either seed-stage or Series A-stage startups and the “vast majority were pre-revenue.”

Asked if competition at the later-stage drove the firm to seek out more nascent deals, Hilaly notes that competition at every stage is intense right now and argues that BCV’s current team composition — Hilaly spent seven years at Sequoia and earlier founded a company himself; Smith spent a collective seven years at Quora and Facebook; partner Enrique Salem was a former president and CEO of Symantec, for example — makes it most impactful at the company formation stage, when founders are still getting the fundamentals down.

As for why the organization needs such a massive fund to back such young companies, it’s a reflection of the changing market, both partners suggest. Not only do firms need to be able to provide the capital that entrepreneurs need to grow at a faster clip than ever before, but it’s becoming increasingly important for venture outfits to support the ecosystem — including as a competitive edge.

For some firms, that support comes in the form of scout programs that empower operators and founders to write checks to friends who are starting companies.

For BCV, it means committing an undisclosed but “material” amount of capital to emerging seed-fund managers. So far among the managers it has backed is Bobby Goodlatte of Form Capital of Miami, who we talked with recently (see below); Maren Bannon of London-based January Ventures; Ryan Hoover of Weekend Fund; Scribble Ventures, run in part by husband-and-wife duo Elizabeth and Kevin Weil; and Noemis Ventures in New York.

Smith says that BCV is “really excited about this program because it’s great for founders, who have more choice than ever as they’re getting started. It’s also helping on-ramp a broader group of investors into the venture ecosystem, which is something I’m personally passion about as I care about diversity of thought.”

Those newer funds — 17% of which are run by Black general partners and 21% of which are run by women —  also help BCV to stay atop the latest enterprise trends, she adds, saying that in addition to checks, BCV helps make limited partner introductions for managers to help get them off the ground. (BCV does not ask for any information rights beyond what the firms’ other limited partners receive.)

As for where BCV will be funneling the rest of its new capital, Smith says that BCV has always been — and remains — thesis driven, and that much of what interests the firm right now is application software infrastructure, health tech investing, e-commerce-enabled enterprise tech, and fintech, including crypto, which has become a growing area of intrigue.

Some of the firm’s related deals include the crypto lending startup BlockFi and Digital Currency Group, the parent company behind the popular Grayscale Bitcoin Trust.

BCV has also invested in “a few tokens,” says Hilaly, “but that’s not the major focus,” he adds.

In the meantime, BCV — which is writing checks as small as several hundred thousand dollars to upwards of $100 million in companies — is also keeping an eye on the trends that continue to reshape the venture industry, including, right now, bigger and faster deals.

“It’s unprecedented,” observes Hilaly of what’s happening in the market, even while he’s not surprised by it. “My general feeling is that venture is not so unlike startups, and every firm has to just reinvent itself every five or 10 years because the ecosystem around it is changing so much.

“You can complain about competition,” he continues, “but the reality is competition just forces you to be better.” Certainly, he says, “You have to you have to be on your game to a greater extent than ever before or there’s just no way a sensible founder would pick you.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Approaching institutions to raise capital for your venture capital or private equity fund is relatively transparent, but what if you’re targeting family offices and high-net-worth individuals? I see five innovative new methods for raising capital that emerging managers such as Versatile VC are using, which I’ve ranked in roughly descending order of popularity:

1. Join online communities and virtual conferences where investors participate.
2. Use a platform that helps other investors access your fund.
3. Generally solicit under the 506(c) designation.
4. Launch a rolling fund.
5. Crowdfund from retail investors into your general partnership.

Will Stringer, CEO of Chisos, feels most family offices won’t respond to cold outreach. “You need to build a true relationship with family office investors or other general partners that can make warm intros to family office decision-makers,” he says. “Family offices, more than any other allocator, rely on trust. [It’s] not always the case (and always changing), but today it’s still the majority.”

The obvious solution therefore is to get in touch with your friends who have earlier raised or pitched to the family offices. You may also find professional intermediaries who are willing to make an introduction to family offices.

That said, the five methods I outline below may be faster and more efficient.

Join online communities and virtual conferences where investors participate

To meet other VCs (some of which may become LPs), among your options are Confluence, Gen Z Mafia, InnovatorsRoom (European focus) and TechAviv (Israeli focus). To find others, see: How to find the right online communities. I maintain a proprietary database of the communities I’ve found most valuable, which I share with other members of the Versatile team.

These venues allow you to efficiently get in front of many pre-qualified investors and follow up with those who seem like a tight fit. Unsurprisingly, the best online communities are limited strictly to LPs. Ideally, you’d partner with an anchor/friendly LP who can pass the word on your fund to other potential investors.

In general, at virtual conferences, I recommend first fill out your online profile with all possible keywords and your photo. Side-channeling is powerful and is the equivalent of going into a corner at a conference and talking privately. Look up the profiles of all the people attending a conference or in an online community and send the relevant folks a customized message introducing yourself.

This is one of the primary advantages of virtual events versus traditional face-to-face conferences, where people do not conveniently wear a hat with their LinkedIn profile visible.

Source: Tech Crunch

You may not be familiar with the term “dark patterns” but the manipulative design phenomenon is ubiquitous in the apps and services we use every day.

Dark patterns nudge consumers to make choices that enrich companies, usually at their own expense. That can look like misleading wording that leads someone to sign their personal data away or a hidden button that results in a renewed subscription they’d probably rather cancel.

If you run across a sketchy dark pattern design, you can now report it on Darkpatternstipline.org, a dedicated site hosted by Consumer Reports. The new tip line is a joint project from the EFF, PEN America, Consumer Reports and Access Now, among other digital rights advocates.

Collecting dark pattern reports is an effort that could actually have teeth now, thanks to new laws taking aim at the manipulative design practice.

In March, California modified its landmark privacy law, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), to ban dark patterns in tech’s own backyard. “These protections ensure that consumers will not be confused or misled when seeking to exercise their data privacy rights,” California Attorney General Xavier Becerra said of the new regulations.

Even Congress is worried about dark patterns. In 2019, a bipartisan bill called the DETOUR Act sought to outlaw user interfaces “obscuring, subverting, or impairing user autonomy” for large companies with more than 100 million users. While that legislation didn’t go anywhere, coercive design choices are one of the many concerns that lawmakers have on their radar as they seek to implement new federal regulations for big tech companies.

For the tip line’s creators, flagging concerns for the regulators shaping tech policy is a priority. “If we want to stop dark patterns on the internet and beyond, we first have to assess what’s out there, and then use these examples to influence policymakers and lawmakers,” EFF Designer Shirin Mori said.

“We hope the Dark Patterns Tip Line will help us move towards more fair, equitable, and accessible technology products and services for everyone.”

Source: Tech Crunch