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Canva is now valued at $40 billion following a fresh capital injection of $200 million (USD) in a round led by T. Rowe Price. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Franklin Templeton, Sequoia Capital Global Equities, Bessemer Venture Partners, Greenoaks Capital, Dragoneer Investments, Blackbird, Felicis and AirTree Ventures.

This round solidifies Canva as one of the most valuable private software companies out there, and it also propels the Australian tech scene forward.

Cofounder and CEO Melanie Perkins and her team started working on Canva in 2012, and launched the product in 2013. The premise behind it was relatively simple, but the technology itself… not so much.

Canva allows anyone to design. Presentations, t-shirts, brochures, flyers… you name it. The first step in this is creating a truly simple user interface, where folks can simply drag and drop components into their designs, complete with hundreds of thousands of templates, without doing a lot of fine tuning. The second step is creating a massive library of content, from fonts to templates to imagery, gifs and videos. The third step is to make that product accessible to everyone, whether it’s a platform or device or language or price.

Going after everyone, instead of just designers, has proved incredibly fruitful for the company. To be clear, designers still use Canva to layout components they’ve designed in other products, such as Figma and Sketch, and Canva actually plays nicely with a variety of design software products. But Canva has no intention of going head to head with Figma, Adobe or Sketch.

Perkins described it with the example of a business card. Designers will create the components of a business card in their design platform of choice, and then layout the template for business cards in Canva, sharing that template with the entire organization. That way, when someone gets a title change or a new employee comes on, they can actually edit the card themselves without the help of a designer and send it to print.

TechCrunch asked Perkins why Canva hasn’t extended the platform more aggressively into the workflow of professional designers.

“We would like to replace PDF,” said Perkins. “Rather than people sending PDFs backwards and forwards between the designer and the client, designers can just create a template for organization use. It’s less important for us to absolutely excel at things like vector design because there are amazing programs on the market that may be there. We really want to focus on that collaboration piece.”

Though a bottoms-up enterprise strategy is relatively popular these days, Canva was an early master of the model. Canva launched as a free product, and over time the company introduced enterprise layers into the mix.

As of now, Canva has more than 60 million monthly active users across 190 countries, with big name companies on the enterprise plan. This includes Salesforce, Marriott International, PayPal and American Airlines. Canva expects to exceed $1 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2021. More than 500,000 teams are paying for the product in some capacity.

With a 2,000-person team, Canva will use the fresh funding to double its workforce in the next year.

Canva also shared its DEI numbers, with females representing 42 percent of the workforce. The company did not share any stats around people of color on the team.

Perkins explained to TechCrunch that a huge part of the company’s growth has to do with an obsession over creating a highly valuable free product.

“We intentionally make our free product extremely generous for a number of reasons,” said Perkins. “It’s critical both for our marketing and towards our mission of empowering people to design. But, as part of our marketing, it means that people are able to love the product, share it with their friends and family, and promote it on social media. And then that virality really rapidly fuels our growth.”

Alongside growing the team, Canva also has plans to further build out the product in the next year, launching website design soon. This will allow users to turn existing and new presentations and designs into a website, and even search for and buy a domain for that site.

Canva is also working on a new video editor and an offline mode.

Perkins says that Canva has two goals, and that each fuels the other. The first is to become one of the world’s most valuable companies, and the other is to do the most good that it can do.

The company has already joined the 1 percent pledge and has several efforts around being a force for good, including giving the premium product to more than 130,000 non-profits, allocating more than 45,000 volunteering hours each year, and launching Print One, Plant One, which is a project that plants a tree for every single print order placed through Canva.

With today’s funding announcement, cofounders Perkins and Cliff Obrecht are committing the vast majority of their own equity in the company (around 30 percent) to doing good in the world, with plans to do this through the Canva Foundation.

Perkins will be joining us at Disrupt to talk about the new funding, valuation, what’s in store for Canva, and share her broader thoughts on design as a category.

Source: Tech Crunch

President Biden made his latest nomination to the Federal Trade Commission this week, tapping digital privacy expert Alvaro Bedoya to join the agency as it takes a hard look at the tech industry.

Bedoya is the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown’s law school and previously served as chief counsel for former Senator Al Franken and the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law. Bedoya has worked on legislation addressing some of the most pressing privacy issues in tech, including stalkerware and facial recognition systems.

In 2016, Bedoya co-authored a report titled “The Perpetual Line-Up: Unregulated Police Face Recognition in America,” a year-long investigation that dove deeply into the police use of facial recognition systems in the U.S. The 2016 report examined law enforcement’s reliance on facial recognition systems and biometric databases on a state level. It argued that regulations are desperately needed to curtail potential abuses and algorithmic failures before the technology inevitably becomes even more commonplace.

Bedoya also isn’t shy about calling out Big Tech. In a New York Times op-ed a few years ago, he took aim at Silicon Valley companies giving user privacy lip service in public while quietly funneling millions toward lobbyists to undermine consumer privacy. The new FTC nominee singled out Facebook specifically, pointing to the company’s efforts to undermine the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act, a state law that serves as one of the only meaningful checks on invasive privacy practices in the U.S.

Bedoya argued that the tech industry would have an easier time shaping a single, sweeping piece of privacy regulation with its lobbying efforts rather than a flurry of targeted, smaller bills. Antitrust advocates in Congress taking aim at tech today seem to have learned that same lesson as well.

“We cannot underestimate the tech sector’s power in Congress and in state legislatures,” Bedoya wrote. “If the United States tries to pass broad rules for personal data, that effort may well be co-opted by Silicon Valley, and we’ll miss our best shot at meaningful privacy protections.”

If confirmed, Bedoya would join Big Tech critic Lina Khan, a recent Biden FTC nominee who now chairs the agency. Khan’s focus on antitrust and Amazon in particular would dovetail with Bedoya’s focus on adjacent privacy concerns, making the pair a formidable regulatory presence as the Biden administration seeks to rein in some of the tech industry’s most damaging excesses.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ford Motor has hired Mike Amend as its chief digital and information officer as the automaker seeks to expand into software, subscriptions and in-vehicle connectivity. Amend, who was president of Lowe’s Online for three years, will focus on Ford’s “use of data, software and technology” — all areas central to Ford’s new Ford+ strategy, the OEM said.

The hire is just the latest sign that Ford is serious about beefing up its digital offerings for customers, as the company seeks to pivot toward high-tech segments. The company calls this plan “Ford+,” which it unveiled earlier this year. Central to this plan is electric vehicles, which Ford wants to comprise around half of its global sales by 2030, as well as expanding into new sources of revenue via subscriptions and digital services.

To that end, Amend will oversee a number of teams, including Ford’s technology and software platform function and its global data insight and analytics section.

Amend isn’t Ford’s only recent hire of note. The automaker also recently poached Doug Field — the tech executive who was leading Apple’s special projects team, and who also led the development of the Model 3 at Tesla — as chief advanced technology and embedded systems officer. The two will work closely, along with chief of product Hau Thai-Tang, Ford said.

Amend’s career includes growing the online businesses of major retailers, including Lowe’s, The Home Depot and JCPenney. Ford’s interim chief information officer, Sakis Kitsopanidis, will continue to serve as director of integrated enterprise resource planning.

Source: Tech Crunch

I’ve met hundreds of founders over the years, and most, particularly early-stage founders, share one common go-to-market gripe: Pricing.

For enterprise software, traditional pricing methods like per-seat models are often easier to figure out for products that are hyperspecific, especially those used by people in essentially the same way, such as Zoom or Slack. However, it’s a different ballgame for startups that offer services or products that are more complex.

Most startups struggle with a per-seat model because their products, unlike Zoom and Slack, are used in a litany of ways. Salesforce, for example, employs regular seat licenses and admin licenses — customers can opt for lower pricing for solutions that have low-usage parts — while other products are priced based on negotiation as part of annual renewals.

Early pricing discussions should center around the buyer’s perspective and the value the product creates for them. It’s important for founders to think about the output and the outcome, and a number they can reasonably defend to customers moving forward. Of course, self-evaluation is hard, especially when you’re asking someone else to pay you for something you’ve created.

This process will take time, so here are three tips to smoothen the ride.

Pricing is a journey

Pricing is not a fixed exercise. The enterprise software business involves a lot of intangible aspects, and a software product’s perceived value, quality, and user experience can be highly variable.

The pricing journey is long and, despite what some founders might think, jumping headfirst into customer acquisition isn’t the first stop. Instead, step one is making sure you have a fully fledged product.

If you’re a late-seed or Series A company, you’re focused on landing those first 10-20 customers and racking up some wins to showcase in your investor and board deck. But when you grow your organization to the point where the CEO isn’t the only person selling, you’ll want to have your go-to-market position figured out.

Many startups fall into the trap of thinking: “We need to figure out what pricing looks like, so let’s ask 50 hypothetical customers how much they would pay for a solution like ours.” I don’t agree with this approach, because the product hasn’t been finalized yet. You haven’t figured out product-market fit or product messaging and you want to spend a lot of time and energy on pricing? Sure, revenue is important, but you should focus on finding the path to accruing revenue versus finding a strict pricing model.

Source: Tech Crunch

Grab a red Sharpie, circle September 20 on your calendar (ooh, how old school), and get ready to jump start your TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 networking experience. Sure, Disrupt’s “official” run is September 21-23, but why wait to meet other movers and shakers in your specific tech category?

We’re hosting a series of speed networking sessions to get your Disrupt kicked off on Monday, September 20. These events will take place in CrunchMatch, our AI-powered platform that helps you find and connect with attendees on your must-meet list.

Pro Tip 1: If you purchased a pass, you received an email with instructions on how to access CrunchMatch. Yeah, you did.

Pro Tip 2: You still have time to buy your Disrupt 2021 pass for less than $100. Look through the Disrupt agenda and see all the programming, events and opportunity waiting for you.

We love free swag, and we’re pretty sure you do, too. So, we’ll randomly select one participant from each networking session to receive a TC swag bag. W00t!

Here are the meet and greets happening at Disrupt – Choose your category and kickstart your connections.

• Peer-to-Peer: Investors Connect with your community of startup investors to share connections, insights and expertise.
• Peer-to-Peer: Early-Stage Founders Meet the founders also launching at Disrupt to share insights and grow your support network.
• The Full Stack: Meet the data analysts, engineers, hackers, data scientists, and software developers that power your tech.
• BIPOC & Women of Disrupt (and their allies) We invite all women and BIPOC (and all allies) attending Disrupt to join us for this roundup to inspire one another and grow your network.
• B2B 2 Connect: Are you working on products that make it easier for businesses to thrive? Meet and share ideas and others with the SaaS and Enterprise community.
• DNA/Tech:  Meet the scientists who are using technology and engineering to produce advancements in health and biology.
• Planet/Impact: Passionate about making an impact on our planet? Join this networking session focused on sustainability, greentech and cleantech projects.  
• Money Matters: Network with the power brokers changing the face of financial services, banking and crypto.
• Autonobot: Discover the builders automating our lives with robotics and hardware alongside the scientists creating the artificial intelligence that powers it all.
• The Station: Share insights with people pushing the boundaries of mobility including drone technology, autonomous vehicles, and transportation.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23, and these meet and greet sessions can help you hit the networking ground running. Make the most out of your TC Disrupt experience!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

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Source: Tech Crunch

If Gutenberg were alive today, he’d be a very busy angel investor.

With book sales booming during the COVID-19 lockdowns last year, the humble written word has suddenly drawn the limelight from VCs and founders. We’ve seen a whole cavalcade of new products and fundings, including algorithmic recommendation engine BingeBooks, book club startups like Literati and the aptly named BookClub, as well as streaming service Litnerd. There have also been exits and potential exits for Glose, LitCharts and Epic.

But the one company that has captured the imagination of a lot of readers has been Bookshop.org, which has become the go-to platform for independent local bookstores to build an online storefront and compete with Amazon’s juggernaut. The company, which debuted just as the COVID-19 pandemic was spreading in January 2020, rapidly garnered headlines and profiles of its founder Andy Hunter, an industrious publisher with a deep love for the reading ecosystem.

After a year and a half, how is it all holding up? The good news for the company is that even as customers are returning to retail including bookstores, Bookshop hasn’t seen a downturn. Hunter said that August sales this year were 10% higher than July’s, and that the company is on track to do about as many sales in 2021 as in 2020. He contextualized those figures by pointing out that in May, bookstore sales increased 130% year over year. “That means our sales are additive,” he said.

Bookshop now hosts 1,100 stores on its platform, and it has more than 30,000 affiliates who curate book recommendations. Those lists have become central to Bookshop’s offering. “You get all these recommendation lists from not just bookstores, but also literary magazines, literary organizations, book lovers, and librarians,” Hunter said.

Bookshop, which is a public-benefit corporation, earns money as all ecommerce businesses do, by moving inventory. But what differentiates it is that it’s fairly liberal in paying money to affiliates and to bookstores who join its Platform Seller program. Affiliates are paid 10% for a sale, while bookstores themselves take 30% of the cover price of sales they generate through the platform. In addition, 10% of affiliate and direct sales on Bookshop are placed in a profit-sharing pool which is then shared with member bookstores. According to its website, Bookshop has disbursed $15.8 million to bookstores since launch.

The company has had a lot of developments in its first year and a half of business, but what happens next? For Hunter, the key is to build a product that continues to engage both customers and bookstores in as simple a manner as possible. “Keep the Occam’s razor,” he says of his product philosophy. For every feature, “it’s going to add to the experience and not confuse a customer.”

That’s easier said than done, of course. “For me, the challenge now is to create a platform that is extremely compelling to customers, that does everything that booksellers want us to do, and to create the best online book buying and book selling experience,” Hunter said. What that often means in practice is keeping the product feeling “human” (like shopping in a bookstore) while also helping booksellers maximize their advantages online.

Bookshop.org CEO and founder Andy Hunter. Image Credits: Idris Solomon.

For instance, Hunter said the company has been working hard with bookstores to optimize their recommendation lists for search engine discovery. SEO isn’t exactly a skill you learn in the traditional retail industry, but it’s crucial online to stay competitive. “We now have stores that rank number one in Google for book recommendations from their book lists,” he said. “Whereas two years ago, all those links would have been Amazon links.” He noted that the company is also layering in best practices around email marketing, customer communications, and optimizing conversion rates onto its platform.

Bookshop.org offers tens of thousands of lists, which provide a more “human” approach to finding books than algorithmic recommendations.

For customers, a huge emphasis for Bookshop going forward is eschewing the algorithmic recommendation model popular among top Silicon Valley companies in lieu of a far more human-curated experience. With tens of thousands of affiliates, “it does feel like a buzzing hive of … institutions and retailers who make up the diverse ecosystem around books,” Hunter said. “They all have their own personalities [and we want to] let those personalities show through.”

There’s a lot to do, but that doesn’t mean dark clouds aren’t menacing on the horizon.

Amazon, of course, is the biggest challenge for the company. Hunter noted that the company’s Kindle devices are extremely popular, and that gives the ecommerce giant an even stronger lock-in that it can’t attain with physical sales. “Because of DRM and publisher agreements, it’s really hard to sell an ebook and allow someone to read it on Kindle,” he said, likening the nexus to Microsoft bundling Internet Explorer on Windows. “There is going to have to be a court case.” It’s true that people love their Kindles, but even “if you love Amazon… then you have to acknowledge that it is not healthy.”

I asked about whether he was worried about the number of startups getting funded in the books space, and whether that funding could potentially crowd out Bookshop. “The book club startups — they are going to succeed by putting books — and conversations about books — in front of the largest audience,” Hunter believes. “So that is going to make everyone succeed.” He is concerned though with the focus on “disruption” and says that “I do hope they succeed in a way that partners with independent bookstores and members of the community that exist.”

Ultimately, Hunter’s strategic concern isn’t directed to competitors or even the question of whether the book is dead (it’s not), but a more specific challenge: that today’s publishing ecosystem ensures that only the top handful of books succeed. Often dubbed “the midlist

problem,” Hunter is worried about the increasingly blockbuster nature of books these days. “One book will suck up most of the oxygen and most of the conversation or the top 20 books [while] great innovative works from young authors or diverse voices don’t get the attention they deserve,” he said. Bookshop is hoping that human curation through its lists can help to sustain a more vibrant book ecosystem than recommendation algorithms, which constantly push readers to the biggest winners.

As Bookshop heads into its third year of operations, Hunter just wants to keep the focus on humans and bringing the rich experience of browsing in a store to the online world. Ultimately, it’s about intentionality. “I really want people to understand that we are creating the future we live in with all of these small decisions about where we shop and how we shop and we should remain very conscious about how we deliberate about those,” he said. “I want Bookshop to be fun to shop at and not just a place to do your civil duty.”

Source: Tech Crunch

We live during a time of live, real-time culture. Telecasts, spontaneous tweetstorms, on-the-scene streams, rapid-response analysis, war rooms, Clubhouses, vlogging. We have to interact with the here and now, feel that frisson of action. It’s a compulsion: we’re enraptured by the dangers that are terrorizing whole segments of the planet.

Just this past month, we saw Hurricane Ida strike New Orleans and the Eastern Seaboard, with some of the fiercest winds in the Gulf of Mexico since Hurricane Katrina. In Kabul, daily videos and streams show up-to-the-minute horrors of a country in the throes of chaos. Dangers are omnipresent. Intersect these pulses to the amygdala with the penchant for live coverage, and the alchemy is our modern media.

Yet, watching live events is not living, and it cannot substitute for introspection of both our own condition and the health of the world around us. The dangers that sprawl across today’s headlines and chyrons are often not the dangers we should be spending our time thinking about. That divergence between real-time risks and real risks has gotten wider over time — and arguably humanity has never been closer to the precipice of true disaster even as we are subsumed by disasters that will barely last a screen scroll on our phones.

Toby Ord, in his prophetic book The Precipice, argues that we aren’t seeing the existential risks that can realistically extinguish human life and flourishing. So he has delivered a rigorous guide and compass to help irrational humans understand what risks truly matter — and which we need to accept and move on.

Ord’s canvas is cosmic, dating from the birth of the universe to tens of billions of years into the future. Humanity is but the smallest blip in the universal timeline, and the extreme wealth and advancement of our civilization dates to only a few decades of contemporary life. Yet, what progress we have made so quickly, and what progress we are on course to continue in the millennia ahead!

All that potential could be destroyed though if certain risks today aren’t considered and ameliorated. The same human progress that has delivered so much beauty and improvement has also democratized tools for immense destruction, including destructiveness that could eliminate humanity or “merely” lead to civilizational collapse. Among Ord’s top concerns are climate change, nuclear winter, designer pandemics, artificial general intelligence and more.

There are plenty of books on existential risks. What makes The Precipice unique is its forging in the ardent rationality of the effective altruism movement, of which Ord is one of its many leaders. This is not a superlative dystopic analysis of everything that can go wrong in the coming centuries, but rather a coldly calculated comparison of risks and where society should invest its finite resources. Asteroids are horrific but at this point, well-studied and deeply unlikely. Generalized AI is much more open to terrifying outcomes, particularly when we extend our analysis into the decades and centuries.

While the book walks through various types of risks from natural to anthropogenic to future hypothetical ones, Ord’s main goal is to get humanity to take a step back and consider how we can incorporate the lives of billions — maybe even trillions — of future beings into our calculations on risk. The decisions we make today don’t just affect ourselves or our children, but potentially thousands of generations of our descendants as well, not to mention the other beings that call Earth home. In short, he’s asking the reader for a bold leap to see the world in geological and astronomical time, rather than in real-time.

It’s a mission that’s stunning, audacious, delirious and enervating at times, and occasionally all at the same time. Ord knows that objections will come from nearly every corner, and half the book’s heft is made up of appendices and footnotes to deflect arrows from critics while further deepening the understanding of the curious reader or specialist. If you allow yourself to be submerged in the philosophy and the rigorous mental architecture required to think through long-termism and existential risks, The Precipice really can lead to an awakening of just how precarious most of our lives are, and just how interwoven to the past and future we are.

Humanity is on The Precipice, but so are individuals. Each of us is on the edge of understanding, but can we make the leap? And should we?

Here the rigor and tenacity of the argument proves a bit more elusive. There isn’t much of a transition available from our live, reality-based daily philosophy to one predicated on seeing existential risks in all the work that we do. You either observe the existential risks and attempt to mitigate them, or you don’t (or worse, you see them and give up on protecting humanity’s fate). As Ord points out, that doesn’t always mean sacrifice — some technologies can lower our existential risk, which means that we should accelerate their development as quickly as possible.

Yet, in a complicated world filled with the daily crises and trauma of people whose pained visages are etched into our smartphone displays, it’s challenging to set aside that emotional input for the deductive and reductive frameworks presented here. In this, the criticism isn’t so much on the book as on the wider field of effective altruism, which attempts to rationalize assistance even as it effaces often the single greatest compulsion for humans to help one another: the emotional connection they feel to another being. The Precipice delivers a logical ethical framework for the already converted, but only offers modest guidance to persuade anyone outside the tribe to join in its momentum.

That’s a shame, because the book’s message is indeed prophetic. Published on March 24, 2020, it discusses pandemics, gain-of-function research, and the risks of modern virology — issues that have migrated from obscure academic journals to the front pages. There really are existential risks, and we really do need to confront them.

As the last year has shown, however, even well-known and dangerous risks like pandemics are difficult for governments to build up capacity to handle. Few humans can spend their entire lives moored to phenomenon that happen once in 100,000 years, and few safety cultures can remain robust to the slow degradation of vigilance that accompanies any defense that never gets used.

The Precipice provides an important and deeply thought-provoking framework for thinking about the risks to our future. Yet, it’s lack of engagement with the social means that it will have little influence on how to slake our obsession for the risks right before us. Long-termism is hard, and TikTok is always a tap away.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord
Hachette, 2020, 480 pages

See Also

• The Vulnerable World Hypothesis by Nick Bostrom
• Normal Accidents: Living with High Risk Technologies by Charles Perrow

Source: Tech Crunch