Month: July 2021

Off the Grid is a mainstay of the San Francisco culinary scene. The event company, founded by Matt Cohen in 2010, created neighborhood pop-up festivals centered around entrepreneurial food trucks. It was part of the vanguard in the food truck movement, designed to open a path to restaurants for a new generation of ambitious and diverse chefs with inventive ideas around food and the people who enjoy it.

Off the Grid’s food festival in Fort Mason, San Francisco. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Over the years, the festivals grew to extreme popularity (I remember more than once trying to go and realizing that others have way more patience to wait in line than I do), and Off the Grid itself increasingly expanded into catering for events. “[I] built my career on the idea that food is a source of comfort at all different times,” Cohen said.

Well, we do live in different times, don’t we?

The first inklings of a change for the company started back in 2017, when wildfires like those in Sonoma and Napa swept across California. Frontline firefighters, operating at times in remote areas of the state, were often forced to eat what the military dubs MREs or Meals Ready-to-Eat.

Cohen and his team saw an opportunity. “For a long time in emergency response, people thought about food as calories, not necessarily about allowing local food businesses to sustain themselves,” he said. He noted that MREs are almost universally bland, and that the meals are typically ordered in bulk from outside the state. Could Off the Grid connect the dots by having local restauranteurs cook meals while Off the Grid supplied the logistics to get them to the frontlines?

Those 2017 fires were the first time the company forayed into helping first responders and victims, and Off the Grid along with its restauranteurs supplied an estimated 20,000 people with meals that year. “[We] got an understanding of the market landscape in emergency response,” he said.

Those first trials were accelerated dramatically in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic swept across California and the rest of the world. Suddenly, delivered meals were the only means for restaurants to connect to their communities, and the frontlines were no longer in the foothills where the fires were, but everywhere all the time.

Off the Grid worked with its restaurant partners to scale up food delivery to frontline workers and victims during the pandemic and wildfire season last year. Image Credits: Off the Grid

Off the Grid doubled down on its pivot, seeing an opportunity to provide solace to people at a time of terrible tragedy. “People don’t think of food being delivered during emergencies as delicious, [since] the reality is that people are happy to just have anything to eat,” Cohen said. “But then, delicious food can be a real comfort when the rest of their lives are disrupted.” Over the course of the pandemic, Off the Grid facilitated the delivery of 1.3 million meals with a “rotating list of options, so people can constantly be delighted,” targeting customers ranging from temporary shelters to immunocompromised consumers residing at home.

In addition to giving customers delectable options, the model also helped sustain the local food scene that Off the Grid had spent years growing through its programs. Cohen said the company sees these links as a key tool for building resilient communities, particularly as climate change continues to ravage California and much of the rest of the world.

Last year’s punctuated growth forced the startup to scale up quickly. Food safety and health regulations vary from county to county, which meant that as it delivered meals throughout the greater Bay Area and the rest of California, Off the Grid had to develop scalable processes to handle the paperwork and logistics. That technology is now forming the basis for the next phase of its business as Off the Grid enters its second decade in operation.

“[There are a lot of] unique aspects of food service in particular, licensing, and permitting, and insurance, and the less sexy things that allows us to operate,” Cohen said. With those logistics increasingly systematized, 2021 is going to be an even more ambitious year for the company.

Off the Grid CEO and founder Matt Cohen. Image Credits: Off the Grid

“We actually have been working with the state and the Red Cross to identify 39 counties in the state of California that are at relatively high risk for fire danger, and on-board 200 restaurants … so that in the event there is a fire, we can access them and activate them,” he said. Today, roughly half the company is focused on its emergency response programs.

That doesn’t mean its food festivals will go away. It has reopened its smaller venues in places like Levi’s Plaza near SF’s Coit Tower in North Beach, and it intends to restart its larger festivals as safety guidelines allow. But emergency response is a new, enduring mission for this mission-oriented company. “We’re definitely going to continue to do this as long as there is a need,” Cohen said.

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook just announced plans to pay content creators more than $1 billion by the end of next year through new bonus programs designed to keep creatives plugged into its app ecosystem. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the new funding to “reward creators for great content” on his Facebook page.

The company will pay creators through a series of new bonus initiatives across Facebook and Instagram which are “seasonal, evolving and expanding over time.” The bonus programs will have a dedicated hub within the Instagram app later this summer and in the Facebook app later this year.

The company will offer the first new bonuses to creators making videos on Facebook with in-stream ads enabled. Facebook is also expanding bonuses through its Stars system, which invites viewers to send streamers tips in exchange for fan perks. Creators making videos or livestreaming games will be eligible for monthly bonuses based on how many viewers send them payments via Stars through October.

Instagram will introduce its own bonuses, which will be invite-only to begin with. Within the next few weeks, U.S. creators can collect a one-time bonus for enabling IGTV ads. Other bonuses will reward creators for making Reels, Instagram’s answer to TikTok’s short-form video success, and for hitting certain milestones in Instagram Live.

Facebook’s foray into creator payments is just the latest effort to jump-start TikTok competitor products with cold hard cash. Snapchat hands out $1 million each day to the most popular videos in its short-form video product Spotlight. YouTube has its own $100 million fund for YouTube Shorts, the company’s own TikTok clone.

TikTok itself launched a $200 million creator fund last year, though the app doesn’t seem to have much to worry about (yet, anyway). According to data from SensorTower, TikTok just surpassed 3 billion global downloads. The only other apps to have crossed that milestone are WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram — all owned by Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

If you’re tired of sending brilliant takes into the Twitterverse only to be met with wave after wave of reply guys, a new Twitter feature could give you some relief.

Starting today, anyone on Twitter will be able to adjust who can reply to individual tweets after they’ve been sent. Previously, you could limit who could reply to tweets when they were created, but you couldn’t go in and change your selection after the fact.

On Twitter, you don’t always have a sense of what kind of tweets will attract unwanted attention until it’s too late. The new feature makes the option to limit replies to people you follow or only people mentioned in a tweet much more useful, particularly because the mute button doesn’t always cut it.

Twitter added the option to limit replies last August to boost “meaningful conversations” on the social network and to help people feel safer from harassment when they tweet. Product researcher Jane Manchun Wong first spotted the feature’s expansion in June.

Source: Tech Crunch

One of the great things about editing all of our deep-dive EC-1 startup profiles is that you start to notice patterns across successful companies. While origin stories and trajectories can vary widely, the best companies seem to come from similar places and are conceived around very peculiar themes.

To wit, one common theme that came from our recent profiles of Expensify and NS1 is the centrality of file sharing (or, illegal file sharing if you are on that side of the fence) and internet infrastructure in the origin stories of the two companies. That’s peculiar, because the duo honestly couldn’t be more different. Expensify is an SF-founded (now Portland-based), decentralized startup focused on building expense reporting and analytics software for companies and CFOs. New York-based NS1 designs highly-redundant DNS and internet traffic performance tools for web applications.

Yet, take a look at how the two companies were founded. Anna Heim on the origins of Expensify:

To truly understand Expensify, you first need to take a close look at a unique, short-lived, P2P file-sharing company called Red Swoosh, which was Travis Kalanick’s startup before he founded Uber. Framed by Kalanick as his “revenge business” after his previous P2P startup Scour was sued into oblivion for copyright infringement, Red Swoosh would be the precursor for Expensify’s future culture and ethos. In fact, many of Expensify’s initial team actually met at Red Swoosh, which was eventually acquired by Akamai Technologies in 2007 for $18.7 million.

[Expensify founder and CEO David] Barrett, a self-proclaimed alpha geek and lifelong software engineer, was actually Red Swoosh’s last engineering manager, hired after the failure of his first project, iGlance.com, a P2P push-to-talk program that couldn’t compete against Skype. “While I was licking my wounds from that experience, I was approached by Travis Kalanick who was running a startup called Red Swoosh,” he recalled in an interview.

Then you head over to Sean Michael Kerner’s story on how NS1 came together:

NS1’s story begins back at the turn of the millennium, when [NS1 co-founder and CEO Kris] Beevers was an undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in upstate New York and found himself employed at a small file-sharing startup called Aimster with some friends from RPI. Aimster was his first taste of life at an internet startup in the heady days of the dot-com boom and bust, and also where he met an enterprising young engineer by the name of Raj Dutt, who would become a key relationship over the next two decades.

By 2007, Beevers had completed his Ph.D. in robotic mapping at RPI and tried his hand at co-founding and running an engineered-wood-product company named SolidJoint Research, Inc. for 10 months. But he soon boomeranged back to the internet world, joining some of his former co-workers from Aimster at a company called Voxel that had been founded by Dutt.

The startup provided a cornucopia of services including basic web hosting, server co-location, content delivery and DNS services. “Voxel was one of those companies where you learn a lot because you’re doing way more than you rightfully should,” Beevers said. “It was a business sort of built out of love for the tech, and love for solving problems.”

The New York City-based company peaked at some 60 employees before it was acquired in December 2011 by Internap Network Services for $35 million.

Note some of the similarities here. First, these wildly different founders ended up both working on key internet plumbing. Which makes sense of course, since back two decades ago, building out the networking and compute capacity of the internet was one of the major engineering challenges of that period in the web’s history.

Additionally in both cases, the founding teams met at little-known companies defined by their engineering cultures and which sold to larger internet infrastructure conglomerates for relatively small amounts of money. And those acquirers ended up being laboratories for all kinds of innovation, even as few people really remember Akamai or Internap these days (both companies are still around today mind you).

The cohort of founders is fascinating. Obviously, you have Travis Kalanick, who would later go on to found Uber. But the Voxel network that went to Internap is hardly a slouch:

Dutt would leave Internap to start Grafana, an open-source data visualization vendor that has raised over $75 million to date. Voxel COO Zachary Smith went on to found bare metal cloud provider, Packet, in 2013, which he ran as CEO until the company was acquired by Equinix in March 2020 for $335 million. Meanwhile, Justin Biegel, who spent time at Voxel in operations, has raised nearly $62 million for his startup Kentik. And of course, NS1 was birthed from the same alumni network.

What’s interesting to me with these two companies (and some others in our set of stories) is how often founders worked on other problems before starting the companies that would make them famous. They learned the trade, built networks of hyper-intelligent present and future colleagues, understood business development and growth, and started to create a flywheel of innovation amidst their friends. They also got a taste of an exit without really getting the whole meal, if you will.

In particular with file sharing, what’s interesting is the rebellious and democratic ethos that came with that world back at the turn of the millennium. To work in file sharing in that era meant fighting the big music labels, overturning the economics of entire industries, and breaking down barriers to allow the internet economy to flourish. It attracted a weird bunch of folks — the exact kind of weirdness that happens to make good startup founders, apparently. It echos one of the key arguments of Fred Turner’s book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.”

Which begs the question then: what are the “file sharing” markets today that these sorts of individuals congregate around? One that seems obvious to me is blockchain, which has precisely that balance of rebelliousness, democratization, and technical excellence (well, at least some of the time!) And then there are the modern-day “pirates” today such as Alexandra Elbakyan who invented and has operated Sci-Hub to make the world’s research and knowledge democratized.

It’s maybe not the current batch of companies that we see which will become the next extraordinary unicorns. But watch the people who show up in the interesting places — because their next projects often seem to hit gold.

Source: Tech Crunch

Allan Jones dropped out of college and spent a decade learning how to run a startup. In 2016, that education resulted in the launch of Los Angeles-based Bambee, which helps small companies by acting as their HR department with the goal of keeping them in compliance with government rules and regulations.

But he found getting funded a challenge in spite of his background. He said that as a Black man, he had to move more carefully in the startup world.

“I think it came as part of the complexities of navigating a mostly white male ecosystem, a mostly straight cis white male ecosystem that either helps you create some skills that make you really effective at the job, or generates so much resentment that it becomes hard to be effective. […] I think that I was always one comment away from the opposite direction [I ended up going],” he explained.

Fortunately, that didn’t happen and he kept on climbing and gaining skills and single-handedly founded his own company, one which has reached Series B and raised $33 million, a significant amount of money for any startup, but particularly for a startup run by a Black founder.

A study published by Crunchbase in February found that VC firms distributed $150 billion in venture funding in 2020. Of that less than 1% or around $1 billion went to Black founders. That highlights just how difficult it has been for him to raise from such a limited pool of money in spite of having a great idea and the business skill and acumen to pull it off.

Jones got his start at the age of 20 at a startup called Helio, which targeted the youth market for multimedia services on mobile phones. It was eventually acquired by Virgin Mobile. He went on to run product at a couple of companies before landing as CMO at ZipRecruiter in 2013. He left that position after three years to launch Bambee in 2016.

In spite of all that experience, he felt that as a gay Black man in Silicon Valley that he was continually saddled with the label of ‘the kid with potential’, and not always taken as seriously as his straight white counterparts. “And I don’t think those intentions necessarily were bad, I think it was quite the opposite, which actually makes them almost worse because they were entrenched in a bias of how to characterize [my abilities].”

Jones launched Bambee, a startup that is going after SMBs with fewer than 500 employees, most of which are operating without an HR department, and could be out of compliance with federal mandates because they don’t have anyone in charge who is aware of the rules.

“Bambee aims to put an HR manager in every American small business. We’ve done so by building a model that allows you to hire one on our platform for $99 a month. So you pay us a flat fee and you get access to our platform and your own dedicated HR professional. […] She acts as your human resource manager and your human resource arm for your company. And our platform helps keep those companies compliant,” Jones explained.

Jones says that while he might not encounter direct bias as he builds his business, there is an unconscious bias that investing in Bambee could be riskier than investing in someone who fits the prototypical startup founder mold, and this is especially true in early-stage investing when investors are essentially betting on the entrepreneur.

“They take bets that they deem as a bit safer — entrepreneurs that look like a certain profile — white cis-gender males that come from Stanford and Harvard that match the profile of confidence and they have kind of built in an anti-bias determination around, so they automatically get the benefit of the doubt to those pedigrees, and those profiles,” Jones said.

He says that means that Black founders have to work that much harder to overcome those biases. Today Bambee has some decent metrics to show investors with revenue reaching tens of millions, growing 300% year over year with thousands of customers across all 50 states, according to Jones. With 100 employees, he plans to double that number by the end of this year.

Even with that, he says there are still barriers to entry he has to deal with. Even if it’s harder for investors to ignore the company’s numbers, he still sees a tendency to accentuate the negative.

“Building a great company with the deficit in belief in you that starts so early on in the venture process, the [obstacles] that you have to [overcome] to get here. It seems impossible with less than 1% of venture capital dollars going to Black founders, and it isn’t because Black founders don’t exist, it’s because the belief in us is not there at scale,” he said.

As Jones continues to build the company, he has learned to look for investors who believe in him and his vision for the company. If he senses that negativity from a potential investor, he moves on because he wants to work with people who want to help build the company and believe in it as much as he does. He says this won’t change when he goes to raise his C round, a stage few Black entrepreneurs reach.

“Is it going to be easier for me going forward? I don’t think so. I think the type of bias that I have to combat based on the class of entrepreneur I’m becoming, it starts to shift and change, and I’ve seen that in every round and I’m prepared for it in my Series C, as well.”

He says that the progress he’s made in the company and his belief in the business will help him find the right partners to continue on that journey, just as he has in previous rounds.

“We will navigate this […] and I think we’ll build a really great business, and ultimately the partners we discover along this journey will be the exact right ones who we were meant to.”

Source: Tech Crunch

API publishers among Postman’s community of more than 15 million are working toward more seamless and integrated developer experiences for their APIs. Distilled from hundreds of one-on-one discussions, I recently shared a study on increasing adoption of an API with a public workspace in Postman. One of the biggest reasons to use a public workspace is to enhance developer onboarding with a faster time to first call (TTFC), the most important metric you’ll need for a public API.

To understand a developer’s journey, let’s first take a look at factors influencing how much time and energy they are willing to invest in learning your technology and making it work.

• Urgency: Is the developer actively searching for a solution to an existing problem? Or did they hear about your technology in passing and have a mild curiosity?
• Constraints: Is the developer trying to meet a deadline? Or do they have unlimited time and budget to explore the possibilities?
• Alternatives: Is the developer required by their organization to use this solution? Or are they choosing from many providers and considering other ways to solve their problem?

Developer journey to an API

With that context in mind, the following stages describe the developer journey of encountering a new API:

Step 1: Browse

A developer browses your website and documentation to figure out what your API offers. Some people gloss over this step, preferring to learn what your tech offers interactively in the next steps. But judgments are formed at this very early stage, likely while comparing your product among alternatives. For example, if your documentation and onboarding process appears comparatively unorganized and riddled with errors, perhaps it is a reflection of your technology.

Step 2: Signup

Signing up for an account is a developer’s first commitment. It signals their intent to do something with your API. Frequently going hand-in-hand with the next step, signing up is required to generate an API key.

Step 3: First API call

Making the first API call is the first payoff a developer receives and is oftentimes when developers begin more deeply understanding how the API fits into their world. Stripe and Algolia embed interactive guides within their developer documentation to enable first API calls. Stripe and Twitter also use Postman public workspaces for interactive onboarding. Since many developers already use Postman, experiencing an API in familiar territory gets them one step closer to implementation.

Source: Tech Crunch