Month: August 2021

Political debate at work was not encouraged when I was training to be a doctor at the LAC+USC Medical Center in the early 2000s.

On the 13th-floor jail ward, we had a professional duty to care for drunk drivers and thieves just like any other patient and leave any opinions about criminal justice policy for their appropriate venues.

Medicine is not unique in this respect — we’re all better off when lawyers, soldiers and other public service providers place their duty to society over individual opinions.

Technology companies often aspire to fill similarly critical roles in society, but few have internalized the separation between professional duty and personal opinion. I have seen this firsthand as the founder of a tech company that serves a wide range of organizations, including amateur to collegiate and professional sports, occupational health and a growing roster of military commands.

During the last presidential administration, a handful of colleagues questioned whether serving the military was consistent with our mission of helping the world move better. Over the past few years, this stigma toward military work has roiled some of the largest companies in Silicon Valley, sometimes leading to contract cancelations, non-renewal pledges and a noticeable chilling effect toward work involving the United States military.

Partnerships between technology companies and the military are nothing new, but rarely have they attracted as much controversy as they do today. These partnerships were the norm throughout the 20th century, yielding war-winning technologies — like microwave radar, GPS and ARPANET — that pulled double-duty in peacetime as the building blocks of our modern connected world.

Military contracts have been traditionally viewed in Silicon Valley as a win-win — for the nation’s military superiority and for a company’s bottom line. Moonshot projects backed by the federal government’s financial resources also represented some of the most interesting workarounds for product-minded technologists.

That relationship has been knocked off its bearings over the past several years, with employees at Microsoft, Google and Amazon, among other companies, seeking to distance themselves from all federal projects due to the revulsion of the previous administration’s policies. But with new leadership in Washington, companies and tech workers need to determine if the stigma against military work will become permanently ingrained or limited to one chapter in an evolving relationship.

Before looking forward, one common misconception is worth correcting from the previous administration about the tension between employees and the military. Recent research challenges the notion that anti-military views are universal among the tech workforce.

In a survey conducted between late 2019 and early 2020, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology found that less than a quarter of AI professionals view Pentagon work in a negative light, and 78% consider it a positive or neutral.

Companies that are open to pursuing opportunities with the Department of Defense should consider several advantages and differences between commercial and government clients.

Federal contracts are generally distinguished by large dollar amounts, low profit margins and long periods of performance. This can appeal to VC-backed companies that are valued based on revenue, and the unique structure of government contracts brings a welcome complement to the lucrative but highly volatile work in B2B and B2C markets. Blending the two extremes produces a stronger whole, not unlike mutual funds that balance stocks and bonds.

Many founders fail to explore DOD opportunities because they do not want to be seen as engaging in the business of war. We encountered a version of this at Sparta Science with colleagues who conflated our work to support federal employees with a full endorsement of all government policy.

Reality is more nuanced. The DOD has an annual budget of more than half a trillion dollars and a workforce of 2.8 million. Only a portion of these individuals are directly engaged in warfighting, and they rely on great numbers of administrators and knowledge professionals to accomplish each mission.

The DOD has approximately 1.3 million active contracts at any given moment, spanning fields as diverse as healthcare, apparel, logistics and software licensing. The military is rightly described as a cross-section of the United States, and supporting those who serve is a Silicon Valley tradition, good business practice and the right thing to do.

Source: Tech Crunch

On this edition of the Gillmor Gang, Brent Leary shows off his new wireless adaptor for his live streaming studio. The result is a captivating view of his console as he switches between closeups and incoming feed from the rest of the Gang, all captured in a widescreen cinematic view. The underlying message is that live realtime video production has become accessible to virtually anyone as streaming becomes ubiquitous at the so-called citizen level.

Trailblazers like Brent and his CRMPlayaz partner in crime Paul Greenberg have been way out on the bleeding edge of this stuff; now we’re seeing something similar to what’s going on in the creator boom. Newsletters are becoming a baked in feature of the major social platforms, as is live audio streaming a la Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces. This week, Salesforce announced its Salesforce+ streaming network, and celebrated its completion of the Slack acquisition with several new enterprise spins on live audio (Huddles) and cross-company collaboration via Slack Connect.

Roll this up with the first wave of work from anywhere efforts to get back to school and the office, streaming as a service may be a key feature of the ongoing hybrid approach to fighting off the pandemic. The political struggle with vaccinations and masking seems destined for the long haul. How the tech community responds should be a more hopeful sign of progress. At the professional level, Disney and Scarlett Johannson are trading lawsuit threats as month-old contracts are ripped up. Newsletter deals are chasing a dwindling population of hit authors as the New York Times puts most of their star-driven publications behind the paywall. The more things transform, the more familiar they seem.

Even the Gang newsletter sports a link to Om Malik’s post on Nam June Paik, the experimental video pioneer. I was his TA at California Institute of the Arts, and “borrowed” his associate Abe’s 3 Sony black and white portapacks to film a Firesign Theatre writing session. Civilization ho.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, July 23, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.

Source: Tech Crunch

“I like to think of successful brand-building as creating a company that customers would be upset to separate from their identity,” growth marketing expert Julian Shapiro told us earlier this week. “For example, they’d cease to be the man with Slack stickers all over his laptop. Or the woman who no longer wears Nike shoes every day. And that bugs them.”

Shapiro comes from a technical background, as a repeat startup founder and open-source web developer. But these days, as the co-founder of growth education company Demand Curve and startup growth agency Bell Curve, he advocates telling your story by speaking from the heart. We interviewed him earlier this week to hear more about how he sees marketing in 2021.

Elsewhere on TechCrunch and Extra Crunch this week, we published guest columns about using influencers in early-stage brands, the global retail media spending trend and talked to Growth Folks, a growth marketing organization in India.

But first, here are a couple of the most recent recommendations from founders in our startup growth marketer survey. (If there’s a growth marketer that you’ve enjoyed working with, please tell us here.)

Marketer: Bili Sule, alGROWithm
Recommended by: Femi Aiki, Foodlocker
Testimonial: “Bili has a proven track record of driving growth, as the former vice president of Growth Marketing at Jumia Nigeria and as a senior growth consultant for Founders Factory Africa. She’s able to cut through the jargon/vanity metrics and has found a way to consistently and reliably engineer growth for us. What’s unique about Bili’s approach is that her strategy moves beyond just marketing. She is data driven and takes an iterative experimental approach to unlocking growth across various business pillars, from marketing to product and operations.”

Marketer: Jack Abramowitz
Recommended by: Marwen Refaat, GameFi
Testimonial: “Jack is incredibly talented at both growth hacking as well as building an automated growth engine. He has been tremendously helpful to our team.”

Building a growth community in India with Ayush Srivastava of Growth Folks: India is producing a huge, well-funded new generation of startups and increasing sophistication in growth marketing is one reason why. “Companies have started realizing the true importance of having a fully functional growth team and they have started acknowledging their one metric that matters as well,” Srivastava told us in a recent interview. “The growth marketers have also started setting up a lot of experiments and have taken a data-driven approach to solving a problem. Now, I see many startups going out of the box and putting in efforts to find new ways of acquisition. They haven’t restricted them to acquiring users via the traditional ways and that’s why you see so many ideas going viral so easily.”

(Extra Crunch) Early-stage brands should also unlock the power of influencers: Jonathan Martinez, an experienced growth marketer, breaks down influencer marketing. Martinez notes, “When reaching out to influencers, it’s a sheer numbers game in capturing their attention and pitching your brand, but there are myriad ways to increase response conversion.”

(Extra Crunch) What’s driving the global surge in retail media spending? Cynthia Luo, head of marketing at Epsilo, discusses what modern marketing is in 2021. Luo also talks about how businesses have had to adapt during the COVID-19 pandemic. Luo says, “As e-commerce turns into a dream marketing channel, reaping the benefits of retail marketing is only possible if the marketplace equips brands with the right tools and data sets.”

The art of startup storytelling with Julian Shapiro: Eric Eldon, Extra Crunch managing editor, spoke with Julian Shapiro, about how companies communicate with the public. Shapiro offered insights from his experience as an angel investor, “I’m interested in businesses with product-led growth, brand affinity moats and who get harder to compete with the larger they get.”

(Extra Crunch) Growth tactics that will jump-start your customer base: Jenny Wang, principal investor at Neo, gives insights on the challenges startups now face to launch their customer base and provides some tactics to help them do so. In this article, Wang discusses what the playbook was like five years ago and says, “ … it’s never been harder to corral eyeballs and hit a breakout adoption trajectory.”

Salesforce State of Marketing: Salesforce published a marketing report that uses data from a double-blind survey they conducted. The survey has five main chapters, “Marketers Embrace Change with Optimism,” “As Customers Go Digital, Marketing Steps Up,” “Collaboration Drives the Market-from-Anywhere Era,” “Marketing Is Spelled D-A-T-A” and “Metrics and KPIs Continue to Evolve.” When looking at digital channels, they mentioned that, “Even those digital channels that may have been classified as emerging in recent years are seeing mass adoption. Mobile messaging, for instance, is used by 69% of marketers, and nearly two-thirds of organizations use audio media like podcasts and streaming ads.” The report lists out the five “Most Valuable Marketing Metrics/KPIs” and looks ahead at “Digital Marketing Tactics.”

Is there a startup growth marketing expert that you want us to know about? Let us know by filling out our survey.

Source: Tech Crunch

Although older adults are one of the fastest-growing demographics, they’re quite underserved when it comes to consumer tech.

The global population of people older than 65 will reach 1.5 billion by 2050, and members of this cohort — who are leading longer, active lives — have plenty of money to spend.

Still, most startups persist in releasing products aimed at serving younger users, says Lawrence Kosick, co-founder of GetSetUp, an edtech company that targets 50+ learners.

“If you can provide a valuable, scalable service for the older adult market, there’s a lot of opportunity to drive growth through partnerships,” he notes.

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Image Credits: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

On Thursday, August 19, Managing Editor Danny Crichton will interview Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility,” on Twitter Spaces at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. UTC.

Singh Cassidy, founder of premium talent marketplace theBoardlist, will discuss making the leap into entrepreneurship after leaving Google, her time as CEO-in-Residence at venture capital firm Accel Partners and the framework she’s developed for taking career risks.

They’ll take questions from the audience, so please add a reminder to your calendar to join the conversation.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week! Have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Dear Sophie: Can I hire an engineer whose green card is being sponsored by another company?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

I want to extend an offer to an engineer who has been working in the U.S. on an H-1B for almost five years. Her current employer is sponsoring her for an EB-2 green card, and our startup wants to hire her as a senior engineer.

What happens to her green card process? Can we take it over?

— Recruiting in Richmond

3 lies VCs tell ourselves about startup valuations

Image Credits: Dmitrii_Guzhanin (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In a candid guest post, Scott Lenet, president of Touchdown Ventures, writes about the cognitive dissonance currently plaguing venture capital.

Yes, there’s an incredible amount of competition for deals, but there’s also a path to bringing soaring startup valuations back to earth.

For example, early investors have an inherent conflict of interest with later participants and many VCs are thirsty “logo hunters” who just want bragging rights.

At some point, “venture capitalists need to stop engaging in self-delusion about why a valuation that is too high might be OK,” writes Lenet.

‘The tortoise and the hare’ story is playing out right now in VC

Image Credits: Getty Images under a GK Hart/Vikki Hart (opens in a new window) license.

Aesop’s fable about the determined tortoise who defeated an arrogant hare has many interpretations, e.g., the value of perseverance, the virtue of taking on bullies, how an outsized ego can undermine natural talent.

In the case of venture capital, the allegory is relevant because a slow, steady and more personal approach generates better outcomes, says Marc Schröder, managing partner of MGV.

“We simply must take the time to get to know founders.”

What’s driving the global surge in retail media spending?

Image Credits: Getty Images under a jayk7 (opens in a new window) license.

As the pandemic changed consumer behavior and regulations began to reshape digital marketing tools, advertisers are turning to retail media.

Using the reams of data collected at the individual and aggregate level, retail media produce high-margin revenue streams. “And like most things, there is a bad, a good and a much better way of doing things,” advises Cynthia Luo, head of marketing at e-commerce marketing stack Epsilo.

New York City’s enterprise tech startups could be heading for a superheated exit wave

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

“We lied when we said that The Exchange was done covering 2021 venture capital performance,” Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm admit.

Yesterday, they reviewed a detailed report from NYC-based VC group Work-Bench on the city’s enterprise tech startups.

“New York City’s enterprise footprint is now large enough that it must be considered a leading market for the startup varietal,” Anna and Alex conclude, “making its results a bellwether to some degree.”

“And if New York City is laying the groundwork for a huge wave of unicorn exits in the coming four to eight quarters, we should expect to see something similar in other enterprise markets around the world.”

Disaster recovery can be an effective way to ease into the cloud

Image Credits: PM Images (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Given the rapid pace of digital transformation, nearly every business will eventually migrate some — or most — aspects of their operations to the cloud.

Before making the wholesale shift to digital, companies can start getting comfortable by using disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS). Even a partially managed DRaaS can make an organization more resilient and lighten the load for its IT team.

Plus, it’s also a savvy way for tech leaders to get shot-callers inside their companies to get on board the cloud bandwagon.

Regulations can define the best places to build and invest

Image Credits: PeopleImages (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

“The decisions of government, the broader legal system and its combined level of scrutiny toward a particular subject” can affect market timing and the durability of an idea, Noorjit Sidhu, an early-stage investor at Plug & Play Ventures, writes in a guest column.

There are three areas currently facing regulatory scrutiny that have the potential to “provide outsized returns,” Sidhu writes: taxes, telemedicine and climate.

VCs unfazed by Chinese regulatory shakeups (so far)

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

“China’s technology scene has been in the news for all the wrong reasons in recent months,” Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm write about the Chinese government’s crackdown on a host of technology companies.

“The result of the government fusillade against some of the best-known companies in China was falling share prices,” they write.

But has it affected the venture capital market? SoftBank this week said it would pause investments in China, but the numbers through Q2 indicate China is steadier than Alex and Anna expected.

Perform a quality of earnings analysis to make the most of M&A

Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images under a license.

If you’re a startup founder, odds are, at some point, you’ll raise a Series A (and B and C and D, hopefully), perform a strategic acquisition, and maybe even sell your company.

When those things occur, you’ll need to know how to do a quality of earnings (QofE) to maximize value, Pierre-Alexandre Heurtebize, investment and M&A director at HoriZen Capital, writes in a guest column.

He walks through a framework for thinking and organizing a QofE for “every M&A and private equity transition you may be part of.”

VCs are betting big on Kubernetes: Here are 5 reasons why

Image Credits: Getty Images under a akinbostanci (opens in a new window) license.

“What was once solely an internal project at Google has since been open-sourced and has become one of the most talked about technologies in software development and operations,” Ben Ofiri, the co-founder and CEO of the Kubernetes troubleshooting platform Komodor, writes of Kubernetes, which he calls “the new Linux.”

“This technology isn’t going anywhere, so any platform or tooling that helps make it more secure, simple to use and easy to troubleshoot will be well appreciated by the software development community.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Indian startups of all sizes are raising record amounts of investment funding this year and getting public exits, as we’ve been covering in recent months. To hear more about the growth behind the numbers we caught up with Ayush Srivastava, a co-founder of growth marketing group Growth Folks (and a growth marketer at Zynga by day).

The organization, which describes itself as “India’s largest community of growth enthusiasts,” began as in-person events for growth marketers across major cities, but made the jump to online networking during the pandemic. From there it began an online speaker series for its 1,300-some members, introduced more community networking groups and virtual events, and one-on-one mentoring.

In the interview below, part of our ongoing series profiling growth marketers around the world, he says India’s startup scene has quickly gotten more sophisticated about growth in recent years. Companies are centering high-quality user growth as a shared team goal, not as a side job, and are thinking more creatively about where and how to find users. “I am amazed at how the startups are focusing on tier two-three cities here in India. With the pace with which internet access has grown … they are making sure they are solving the problem faced by rural Indians as well. [I] just love the fact that proper solutions are being built in the right manner for the concerned pain point.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You describe Growth Folks as “India’s largest community of growth enthusiasts,” with more than 1,300 members. What does “growth enthusiast” mean to you, and how does that term define you?

The terms “growth” and “growth marketing” have picked up a lot in the last five years in the Indian startup ecosystem. All of a sudden there are more than a million heads who are interested to be a part of this circle or are already a part of this community. This had a positive impact as more and more people started to look at their growth problems and not only just promoting their business. For us, growth enthusiasts are everyone and anyone who is even one percent excited about how to grow a particular brand/service.

How did the focus and efforts of Growth Folks change during the pandemic for community engagement?

In the pre-COVID era, Growth Folks was heavily functional in the offline space. We used to manage and engage the community online but most of the efforts went in and success used to come from the offline activities that we used to organize. From December 2018 through the end of 2019, we organized more than 80+ offline events in nine cities of India. These events were previously panel discussions, industry talks or seminars followed by networking sessions.

[H]owever, once COVID came into the picture, our operations shifted completely online and I must say the shift was quite smooth but exciting for me. We started hosting biweekly online webinars with industry leaders and tried giving our community folks (and new attendees) a look and feel of the physical event in the form of this virtual gathering so that they feel connected.

Ever since lockdown began, we have done over 25+ events and have had speakers from companies like SEMRush, Baremetrics, Zynga, Indigo Airlines, Adjust, Myntra and many more. Not only this, we started a lot of interesting threads on our Facebook group to get people to engage more. Within the same period, we launched our website to give people an idea about all our services.

We made sure that we are having dedicated networking sessions after the webinars for people to interact with each other. In October 2020, we relaunched the online version of “Brunch Sessions” that we used to have in the pre-COVID times. These brunch sessions helped the fellow community people to come together on a single day and interact and chill with each other virtually. We started producing more online content knowing the fact that this could be a way to have a value add and it worked.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

Growth Folks is multifaceted, offering traditional growth marketing services as well as hosting a “growth hackathon” and community activities. What can a startup expect when working with Growth Folks? How is it different from existing services?

We have been virtually able to connect with so many people and we continue to do so … [W]e started something which is called “growth huddle.” It is a highly curated one-on-one mentorship session with a few of the best talents out there in the growth space. You can book your session and we will take you through the entire process to make sure that the session is right on point and you learn what you want, not what we want.

All of the mentors who were onboarded vary from experience level to expertise and provide the right set of guidance needed for individuals and startups to grow further. We also partnered with startups and companies for various online events to promote them and make sure that the right voice reaches out to the right set of people who matter to them — the Growth Folks. We have collaborated with companies like Adjust, Microsoft, Rocketium, Canva and many more and we have been able to make people learn the right things.

What are startups doing better now than ever before? In India? Around the world?

Companies have started realizing the true importance of having a fully functional growth team and they have started acknowledging their one metric that matters as well. The growth marketers have also started setting up a lot of experiments and have taken a data-driven approach to solving a problem. Now, I see many startups going out of the box and putting in efforts to find new ways of acquisition. They haven’t restricted them to acquiring users via the traditional ways and that’s why you see so many ideas going viral so easily. And all in different ways.

I see so many founders not restricting themselves to hiring just a growth marketer for leading all growth initiatives. Rather, they have spent time understanding the importance of it and have ended up building a full force growth team of marketers, PMs, tech people, designers, etc. I feel that is the best way to look at any growth problem statement.

I am amazed at how the startups are focusing on tier two-three cities here in India. With the pace with which internet access has grown … they are making sure they are solving the problem faced by rural Indians as well. [I] just love the fact that proper solutions are being built in the right manner for the concerned pain point.

Lastly, companies have started considering the importance of the entire customer experience more seriously than ever before. This is helping brands to grow via communities easily and create a strong brand presence.

Source: Tech Crunch

Way back in January 2020, Sonos sued Google over patent infringement. Today, the streaming speaker company scored an early victory with the U.S. International Trade Commission. A preliminary ruling penned by ITC chief administrative law judge Charles Bullock finds that Google infringed on five patents.

“Today the ALJ has found all five of Sonos’ asserted patents to be valid and that Google infringes on all five patents,” Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We are pleased the ITC has confirmed Google’s blatant infringement of Sonos’ patented inventions. This decision re-affirms the strength and breadth of our portfolio, marking a promising milestone in our long-term pursuit to defend our innovation against misappropriation by Big Tech monopolies.”

The finding is still very much early days for what’s likely to be an even more protracted battled battle between the two companies. Sonos’ complaint stems from Google’s own family of streaming speakers. Google entered the category, long dominated by Sonos, roughly four and a half years ago with the original Home speaker. The line now includes a number of products now listed under the Nest banner.

“Google has been blatantly and knowingly copying our patented technology,” Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said in a statement when the suit was initially filed. “Despite our repeated and extensive efforts over the last few years, Google has not shown any willingness to work with us on a mutually beneficial solution. We’re left with no choice but to litigate.”

Sonos noted similar issues with Amazon devices (Google’s chief competitor in the category) at the time, but the company opted to focus its time, money and resources on a battle with Google, instead.

Ultimately, Sonos is hoping to use the ITC to block the import of those smart speakers, along with other Google hardware, including the Chromecast and Pixels. Such a decision would be a massive hit to Google’s hardware ambitions. A final ruling isn’t expected until December 13, however, after which point a potential import ban would take 60 days to go into effect.

Source: Tech Crunch

After all the leaks and teases, Lamborghini has finally announced its new hybrid-engine Countach.

Thankfully, almost everything you need to know about the car is in its model designation: LPI 800-4.

The first part is short for Longitudinale Posteriore Ibrido, referencing how the powertrain is mounted lengthwise toward the back of the supercar and the fact that it’s a hybrid.

Meanwhile, the two numbers point to the approximately 802 horsepower the Countach’s V12 6.5-liter engine and 48-volt electric motor can output together, as well as the fact that it has four-wheel drive.

Lamborghini

All of that makes for one powerful car. The Countach can accelerate from zero to 60 miles per hour in less than three seconds and zero to 124 miles per hour in just under nine seconds. As for a top speed, you can push it to 221 miles per hour, and it has a maximum torque of 531 lb-ft.  

Lamborghini

Powering the Countach’s electric motor is a supercapacitor Lamborghini claims delivers three times more power compared to a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. The automaker says it mounted the electric motor directly to the gearbox to preserve the feeling of power transfer you get from a V12 engine.

Carbon fiber makes up most of the chassis and exterior of the Countach LPI 800-4. “It imagines how the iconic Countach of the 70s and 80s might have evolved into an elite super sports model of this decade,” Lamborghini says of the design, which is more reminiscent of the Aventador than its original namesake. Inside, you’ll find an 8.4-inch touchscreen display that includes CarPlay integration and a button labeled “Stile.” Pressing it “explains the Countach design philosophy to its privileged audience.”

Speaking of a privileged audience, Lamborghini will only make 112 units of the Countach LPI 800-4. The press release the automaker sent over doesn’t even mention a price tag. It seems Lamborghini is keen on looking forward, but the Countach was too important not to acknowledge with a limited run.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

Source: Tech Crunch