Ideaforge

Growth marketing is often misconceived as a set of tactics when it’s much more: It is a process that startups need to put in place in their early days that will scale as their customer base and internal teams grow.

This is where British growth agency Ascendant shines, Robyn Weatherley, head of marketing at Thirdfort, let us know via our growth marketing survey. Ascendant’s consultants haven’t just helped the British legal tech startup execute growth tactics, she wrote: “They’ve helped us set up the framework to keep executing on those whether we are five, 50 or 500 people.” (If you too have growth marketers to recommend, please fill out the survey!)

We followed up on this recommendation by interviewing Ascendant co-founder Gus Ferguson and partner Alyssa Crankshaw for our ongoing series of growth marketer profiles. If you are in the U.K., you might know them from the TechLondon Slack community, or bumped into them pre-COVID at the OMN London events, the digital marketing meetups they co-organize. In the interview below, they share how they work with early-stage companies, including tactical planning and building out tools for marketers to use without taking up internal engineering resources.

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

Can you tell us about your background and how you came to work with startups?

Gus Ferguson: I’ve been a digital marketer for the last 15 or 16 years, and in 2009, I started one of the first content marketing agencies in the U.K. We did a lot of work with big travel brands, but the problem was that in big corporates, teams are in silos, so they weren’t able to take advantage of being at the forefront of marketing.

Gus Ferguson. Image Credits: Ascendant

I was based in East London and I started working with a couple of startups. It’s also around that time that I partnered up with Alyssa. But we were looking at startups being hampered by traditional marketing — because traditional marketers were bringing big corporate problems to startups, when their key strength is their nimbleness and their agility and their ability to adapt.

That’s when we started developing processes for basically building businesses from scratch — when you don’t have any historical data to base your marketing strategies on. We were saying to them: Don’t ask us for a 12-month plan, because it’s a waste of time. But because there was that mindset at the time, that’s just what people expected. So we were going in and saying: You need a broad three-month plan, maximum; then a one-month plan in detail, and ideally a two-week sprint.

What kind of clients does Ascendant work with?

Gus Ferguson: Thanks to the growth framework that we’ve built up over time, we can pretty much work with any new business where there’s no existing process for marketing. We work with fintech, healthcare and legal companies, e-commerce brands, and both B2C and B2B. So startups, but also startup-type businesses. For instance, we worked with corporate ventures like Canon and VCs like Forward Partners, which was really interesting learning, because we were working with earlier-stage businesses than we would normally.

One million in funding is our sweet spot for startups. The reason for that is that it costs money to bring experienced growth experts into business, and up to that point, I believe it is important for founders to understand growth themselves. Being able to understand how to do it at that early stage will create such a valuable foundation of audience centricity for that business moving forward. A lot of what we do is bringing audience centricity into product-focused businesses — and generally encouraging founders to think about why their audience should care that they’ve got a solution to their problem.

Right, “build it and they will come” is a mistake that founders make all the time! Could you give more details on how you help them?

Gus Ferguson: Generally we’ll look at whatever they have as a foundation, and at similar businesses, and we’ll create an initial growth model. We’ll start putting hypotheses in place as to which channels are going to be the most effective at hitting their short-term objectives if they have them ready. But often, part of the process is also defining which metrics matter for that business, and working out how to measure them.

We always start working with founders and sales, and generally before or with one first marketing hire in place. Part of our work is to come up with projected results based on their funnel, but very often, with product-centric businesses, it will be that funnel that’s missing. So we bring in a bit of funnel thinking to those businesses and get that in place.

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And then there’s all sorts of what we call framework building that needs to be in place before you can start doing more traditional campaign-based marketing. So we’ll start looking at the specific frameworks around data, and how to form an objective truth for that business, with a shared understanding of the key metrics. When nobody knows what the fundamental data framework of that business looks like, for instance, because of team turnover or silos, we’ll tighten that up and make sure that everything is functioning together so that things like marketing automation are possible.

It’s perhaps a bit surprising about siloed teams at an early stage; how big are the startups you work with?

Gus Ferguson: We start when they are small, but we keep our clients for a long time. So, for example, we worked with Elder, which is a health tech startup. When we started off with them, there were 12 people, and when we finished with them, there were hundreds of people. Soldo is another example: When we started the marketing team was one person, and by the time we left, they were spanning three floors at WeWork.

Our lifecycle ends at Series B, because at that point, all the frameworks will be in place and they’ll be bringing everything in-house. So that’s our happy ending when the clients get to huge Series B raises. And then we move on to the next one that needs our help to get there.

But to go back to your question, slips happen because these are very venture-backed companies with very high growth not just in customers but also in their internal teams. Everybody is doing everything, everybody is new at their jobs, and there aren’t very many internal processes, so there’s an element of chaos. That’s where the need for cross-functional teams grew from — to step out of everybody’s individual chaotic worlds and create an island of shared objectives and order.

Alyssa Crankshaw. Image Credits: Ascendant

Alyssa Crankshaw: It’s just important for us to make people communicate. We often end up actually becoming a reason for the whole team to talk to each other — because we are external, they see more value in these tasks that they wouldn’t do otherwise.

How does that work in practice?

Gus Ferguson: An example of that is the CMS system we are putting in place for one client that we’re working with at the moment, where salespeople use it, marketing people use it, customer services people use it — and those teams were fairly siloed beforehand.

We also know that probably one of the biggest barriers to growth is marketers being dependent on developers, which are such a rare resource. We address that by implementing marketing frameworks at a basic level of the business whereby marketers are able to at least control basic marketing operations directly.

But one of the most important processes that we bring in is the cross-functional team, with one stakeholder from each department. It means that there’s at least one person on each team who understands what the objectives are, and then people start problem-solving together.

Didn’t that become more difficult with COVID-19?

Gus Ferguson: Potentially it got easier with remote. Usually, we find one person on each team — generally the team’s leader — and we bring them as spokespersons into the cross-functional team. In a remote world, it’s actually easier because you can just all jump on Zoom calls.

Alyssa Crankshaw: Even before COVID, we weren’t the type of consultants who sit several days a week in their client’s office. We are problem-solvers across the company, and we’ve always done that, whether it was from our old office or remotely now.

Gus Ferguson: Our own model also proved exceptionally flexible when we needed it to be during the pandemic. We are a core team of three people, and we are working with a network of specialized freelancers — so instead of worrying about fixed overheads, we can have agreements with trusted partners and morph into whatever our clients need at that time. Because of the nature of startups, as I said earlier, it doesn’t make sense to have long-term plans for businesses where there’s such a high rate of change. And from an agency perspective, it means that what we’re doing one month is always very different from what we’re doing the next month.

Alyssa Crankshaw: It’s a conscious decision not to follow a traditional agency model, because it helps us be flexible and bring in the specialists when we need them, rather than just having to use that person that sits on your payroll just because you have them. It’s much more effective for everybody.

What’s a thing that people might not know about what you do?

Gus Ferguson: Growth marketing is a process; it’s really how I differentiate it from traditional marketing. A lot of people will say that growth marketing is the AARRR funnel, but is that really any different from traditional marketing? Not really. Maybe you’ve got a broader set of channels than a traditional marketer would focus on. But what’s really different is the process that gives our clients confidence that they’re doing the right thing, even if they’ve never done it before. Because that’s how you learn.

One of the challenges with doing something new for the first time, in a team of people who are also doing a new thing for the first time with no historical data, is that you quite often don’t even know how to frame that. If you don’t come from a growth marketing background, you don’t know how to even frame the problem, let alone fix it. This is why so much startup marketing is tactical rather than strategic, or even worse, tool-led. People think: “Oh, if I was using this tool, then all my problems would be solved,”  when, actually, you need to be able to create the hypotheses and understand the objectives that the hypotheses are answering.

Alyssa Crankshaw: We give our clients the roadmap, the foundation and the operational structure in which to run campaigns, retention, acquisition or whatever the target may be, which is huge for them. Because when creating everything from scratch, that’s where we often see a lot of overtesting. We love a good test — we’re both marketers — but we only like to test the big things. And sometimes when working with inexperienced people, we see a lot of new tests about the smallest things, which is a waste of time and resources. And there are some other things that are foundational, and you just know which they are if you are an experienced marketer and you have done this so many times in your life.

Source: Tech Crunch

Among Apple’s more recent social good initiatives is the Impact Accelerator, an effort launched about a year ago intended to find and elevate minority-owned small businesses taking on sustainability and climate change. The program now has its first 15 participants, gathered from all over the country for a three-month program and a shot at an Apple contract.

The Impact Accelerator is part of the company’s $100M Racial Equity and Justice Initiative, which is being divided between a number of efforts, some directly funding existing programs, some going to venture firms owned by people of color, and generally whatever the Initiative’s team thinks is a good investment.

These companies will take part in a three-month-long virtual program (the details are not discussed in Apple’s announcement post) and then will have the opportunity to become suppliers for Apple’s carbon neutral supply chain goals.

Apple profiles all 15 companies in this list, but here are five that caught my eye:

• Volt Energy Utility (Co-Founder: Gilbert Campbell III) – Developer of utility-scale solar projects with a focus on underserved communities.
• Bench-Tek (Founder: Maria Castellon) – A manufacturer of lab benches that focuses on using environmentally friendly materials.
• Vericool (Founder: Darrell Jobe) – Aims to make sustainable alternatives to Styrofoam and other packaging products, and makes a point of hiring formerly incarcerated folks.
• Oceti Sakowin Power Authority (Chairman: Lyle Jack) – Not a company per se, but an NGO formed by six Sioux tribes dedicated to developing renewable energy in the Midwest and on reservations.
• Mosaic Global Transportation (Founder: Maurice H. Brewster) – Supplies employee and event shuttles and other vehicles with an aim to replace gas-operated ones with EVs.

“The businesses we’re partnering with today are poised to become tomorrow’s diverse and innovative industry leaders, creating ripples of change to help communities everywhere adapt to the urgent challenges posed by climate change,” said Apple’s VP of Environment, Policy, and Social Initiatives, Lisa Jackson, in the announcement.

Source: Tech Crunch

Something strange is afoot in Brazil, and it promises great changes for how merchants get paid.

This the story of one regulator, the Brazilian Central Bank, and how it has taken center stage in creating a framework that will have far-reaching effects across merchants and fintechs in this fast-growing Latin American nation.

But first, some background: Unlike in the rest of the world, when a credit card is used for payment in Brazil, the merchant does not receive the funds owed to them all at once. Instead, nearly 50% of card sales are completed in monthly installments, leaving the sellers to manage a difficult cash flow process.

The most common solution for merchants is that they end up selling the remaining receivable at a discount — taking less than they are owed — in order to get their money sooner. And we’re not talking about a small-volume market: Some R$2 trillion (Brazilian Reais) in card transactions were processed in 2020.

Here’s what this looks like in practice: Let’s say Maria purchases a few articles of clothing from retailer Clothing Incorporated. When paying via her credit card at checkout, Maria can choose to pay in two to 12 installments. Maria decides to pay the balance of R$620 over six installments.

While Maria is happy with the products in hand, Clothing Incorporated is without the full payment — and for small merchants in particular, the difficulties associated with limited working capital can be acute. Clothing Incorporated can either wait the full six months to be paid, receiving payments from their merchant acquirer each month until they are paid in full, or they can choose to dramatically discount the amount they are owed and not have to wait the six months.

Let’s say Clothing Incorporated merchant acquirer is ExMarko — instead of receiving R$620 over six months (net of any merchant discount rates), they could receive R$520 within days after the purchase, with ExMarko pocketing the rest when it comes in. This comes at a steep cost of doing business to the merchant, with an implied annualized interest rate that sometimes can reach  ~70% — for a risk-free operation, since the acquirer is only liquidating earlier its own obligation to pay the merchant.

Source: Tech Crunch

Ford-owned micromobility company Spin has announced an integration with Google Maps. Now, users planning their trips in 84 cities, towns and campuses across the U.S., Canada, Germany and Spain will be able to view Spin’s electric scooters and bikes on the app while planning their trip.

Spin joins its top competition on the popular mapping app, Lime, which also recently announced an integration with transit planning app Moovit. We can expect to see further integrations of micromobility operators with mapping apps as shared mobility becomes part of the broader transit ecosystem.

A recent report from the North American Bikeshare & Scootershare Association on the state of the micromobility industry found that 50% of riders reported using shared mobility to connect to transit, and 16% of all micromobility trips were for the purpose of connecting to transit.

Similar to Lime, the Spin icon will now show up under Google Map’s bike section when planning a journey — only in the mobile app, not on the desktop. A user will see the nearest available Spin vehicle, how long it will take to walk to it, what the estimated battery range is and the expected arrival time if using the vehicle. Choosing that option will direct users to the Spin app to pay for and unlock the vehicle.

“With this integration, Spin is making it easier for millions of Google Maps users to easily incorporate shared bikes and scooters into their daily trips,” Ben Bear, CEO of Spin, said in a statement. “Our goal is to make it as low friction as possible for consumers to plan multi-modal journeys. It needs to be just as easy, and even more convenient to get around with bikes, buses, trains and scooters as it is with a personal car.”

Bear also said this collaboration with Google is Spin’s largest yet, and he teased “many more in the pipeline.” Spin is already integrated into platforms like Citymapper, Moovit, Transit and Kölner Verkehrs-Betriebe. This news comes not long after Spin announced it would be adding e-bikes to the mix and trying to capture market share with exclusive or semi-exclusive city partnerships. A major app integration such as this one could be a vote of confidence for Spin looking to partner with more cities in the future.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tinder announced this morning that in the “coming quarters,” users will be able to verify their ID on the app. This feature was first rolled out in Japan in 2019, where Tinder users must verify that they are at least 18 years old. Aside from places like Japan, where this is mandated by law, ID verification will “begin as voluntary,” Tinder wrote in a blog post.

ID verification will be free for all users, similar to its photo verification feature. According to a Tinder spokesperson, the company will also use ID verification to cross-reference data like the sex offender registry in regions where that information is accessible. Tinder already does this via credit card lookup when users sign up for a subscription. Per its terms of use, Tinder requires that users “have never been convicted of or pled no contest to a felony, a sex crime, or any crime involving violence, and that you are not required to register as a sex offender with any state, federal or local sex offender registry.”

The existing photo verification feature adds a Twitter-like blue check to a user’s profile, while ID verification will yield another distinct badge. That way, users can tell whether or not a potential date has confirmed their identity via photo verification, ID verification, both or neither.

“Creating a truly equitable solution for ID Verification is a challenging, but critical safety project and we are looking to our communities as well as experts to help inform our approach,” the company wrote.

While Tinder has made continued investments in safety features, free ID verification can only go so far — especially when voluntary, putting the onus on individual users to decide whether or not they feel comfortable meeting up with unverified users. But in March 2021, Match Group, the parent company to Tinder, announced its seven-figure contribution to the nonprofit background check company Garbo. Garbo’s background checks could help detect dating app users with a history of violence or abuse, but we have yet to see how that will be integrated into Tinder, and if users will be charged for access. Notably, Garbo conducts “equitable background” checks, meaning that it will exclude drug possession charges and minor traffic incidents on its platform, citing the way that these charges are disproportionately levied against vulnerable communities.

Though Tinder said it will not be using Garbo’s tech to power its ID verification tools, the company noted to TechCrunch that it will have more information to share about background checks via Garbo in the fall. Tinder didn’t share whether or not access to information from Garbo will be paywalled. At the time of the acquisition, Match Group said it would determine pricing — if it does choose to paywall this information — based on factors like user adoption, how many people want to use it and how many searches they want to perform.

Tinder’s investment in safety features is encouraging, but if left behind a paywall, impact may be limited. Match Group faced serious scrutiny in December 2019, when an investigation by Columbia Journalism Investigations (CJI) and ProPublica found that the company screened for sexual predators on Match, a paid service, but not on free apps like Tinder, OkCupid and PlentyofFish. At the time, a spokesperson for the company said, “There are definitely registered sex offenders on our free products.”

In January 2020, Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-IL) launched an investigation into user safety policies on dating apps, sending letters to Match Group, The Meet Group, Bumble and Grindr. He wrote, “Protection from sexual predators should not be a luxury confined to paying customers.” The following month, U.S. Representatives Ann Kuster (D-NH) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) wrote a letter to Match Group, signed by nine other representatives, stating their concern that Match Group doesn’t cross-reference user responses with sex offender registries.

Around the same time, Match Group made several moves to invest more deeply in user safety — for example, it acquired Noonlight in January 2020, which allows users in the U.S. to share who, when and where they’re meeting someone. In dangerous situations, users can discreetly trigger emergency services — Noonlight will first reach out to the user, then call 911 if necessary (Noonlight’s basic version is free, but some features like connecting to an Apple Watch, Google Home or Alexa are only available by upgrading to a $5 or $10 monthly plan). Features like these can be controversial due to concerns about police intervention, but might help some users feel a sense of security. But blocking offenders prior to signup could lessen the need for such intervention in the first place.

Source: Tech Crunch

The past decade has seen several structural changes in know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) regulations in Europe and globally. High-profile money laundering cases and the penetration of illicit funds into global markets have caught the attention of regulators and the public, and rightfully so.

The Wirecard scandal was a particularly salacious example, in which the investigation into widespread fraud revealed a chain of shell companies involved in illegal distribution of narcotics and pornography. Over at Danske Bank, some $227 billion was laundered through an Estonian subsidiary, going virtually unnoticed for nine years.

In the United States, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed an action against Ripple Labs and two of its executives, claiming they had raised over $1.3 billion through an unregistered, ongoing digital asset securities offering. That case is ongoing.

As regulators and financial institutions improve their understanding of these criminal practices, AML requirements have likewise been improved. But these adjustments have been an overwhelmingly reactive, trial-by-fire process.

To address the challenges of the fast-evolving blockchain ecosystem, the European Union has begun to introduce more stringent financial regulations that further bolster the regulatory system in order to improve licensing models. Many member states now regulate crypto assets individually, and Germany is leading the way in being the first to regulate cryptocurrencies.

These individual regulations clearly prescribe the pathway for crypto companies, outlining the requirements for obtaining and maintaining a financial license from the regulator. Compliance naturally boosts investor confidence and protection.

As these financial crimes and crypto itself evolves, so have regulatory bodies’ efforts to monitor, address and enforce restrictions. Internationally, the most prominent monitoring body is the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which outlines general guidance and determines best practices in anti-money-laundering practices and combating the financing of terrorism.

Although FATF is considered soft law, the task force sets the bar for workable regulations within crypto assets. Especially notable is FATF’s Recommendation 16, better known as the “travel rule,” which requires businesses to collect and store the personal data of participants in blockchain transactions. In theory, access to this data will enable authorities to have better oversight and enforcement of crypto market regulations. In other words, they’ll know exactly who is doing exactly what. Transparency is key.

The travel rule conundrum

FATF’s travel rule impacts two types of businesses: traditional financial institutions (banks, credit firms and so on) and crypto companies, otherwise known as virtual asset service providers (VASPs).

In its original incarnation, the travel rule only applied to banks, but was expanded to crypto companies in 2019. In 2021, many of the FATF member jurisdictions began to incorporate the travel rule into their local AML laws. This regulatory shift sent shockwaves through the crypto sector. The stakes of refusal are high: Failure to incorporate the travel rule results in a service provider being declared noncompliant, which is a major obstacle to doing business.

But, the travel rule is also a major hindrance that doesn’t take into account the novelty of crypto technology. It is problematic for crypto businesses to integrate due to the major amount of effort it poses when obtaining KYC data about the recipient and integrating it into day-to-day business.

In order for crypto businesses to obtain this information for outgoing payments, data would have to be provided by the client and would end up being virtually impossible to verify. This is highly disruptive to the crypto’s emblematic efficiency. Moreover, its implementation presents challenges regarding the accuracy of the data received by VASPs and banks. Also, it creates further data vulnerabilities due to additional data silos being created across the globe.

When it comes to international standardization measures rather than those isolated within certain communities, there is a wide gap between exclusively on-chain solutions (transactions that are recorded and verified on one specific blockchain) and cross-chain communication, which allows for interactions between different blockchains or for combining on-chain transactions with off-chain transactions that are conducted on other electronic systems, such as PayPal.

We must eventually find a halfway point between those with valid concerns about the anonymity crypto assets provide and those who see regulation as prohibitively restrictive on crypto. Both sides have a point, but crypto’s continued legitimacy and viability within the larger financial markets and industry is a net positive for all parties, making this negotiation nothing short of crucial.

Not anti-regulation, just anti-unworkable regulations

Ultimately, we need to regulate with efficacy, which necessitates legislation that is applicable specifically to digital assets and does not hinder the market without really solving any AML-related problems.

The already global nature of the traditional financial industry underscores the value of and need for FATF’s issuance of an international framework for regulatory oversight within crypto.

The criminal financial trade — money laundering, illegal weapons sales, human trafficking and so on — is also an international business. Thus, cracking down on it is, out of necessity, an international effort.

The decentralized nature of blockchain, which runs contrary to the central-server standard we know and use nearly everywhere, presents a formidable challenge here. Rules and regulations for traditional financial institutions are being implemented part and parcel onto crypto — a misstep and misunderstanding that ignores the innovation and novelty this economic ecosystem and its underlying technology entails.

Traditional forms of regulation from the fiat world do not reciprocally apply to every aspect of crypto nor to the fundamental nature of blockchain technology. However well intentioned they may be, because these imposed regulations are built on an old system, they must be adapted and modified.

The creation of fair restrictions on the technology’s use requires a fundamental understanding and cooperation within the limits and characteristics of those technologies. In traditional financial circles, the topic of blockchain is currently subject to more impassioned rhetoric than genuine understanding.

At the heart of the issue is the fundamental misunderstanding that blockchain transactions are anonymous or untraceable. Blockchain transactions are pseudo-anonymous and, in most circumstances, can offer more traceability and transparency than traditional banking. Illegal activity conducted on the blockchain will always be far more traceable than cash transactions, for example.

Technology with such immense potential should be made accessible, regulated and beneficial for everyone. Blockchain and digital assets are already revolutionizing the way we operate, and regulatory measures need to follow suit. The way forward cannot simply be delivering old-school directives, demanding obedience and doling out unfair punishments. There’s no reason a new way forward isn’t possible.

The end of the outlaw era

Activity can already be monitored through a collective database of users known to abide by international standards. This knowledge of approved users and vendors allows the industry to spot misconduct or malfeasance far sooner than usual, singling out and restricting illegitimate users.

By means of a well-thought-through tweaking of the suggested regulations, a verified network can collectively be built to ensure trust and properly leverage blockchain’s potential, while barring those bad actors intent on corrupting or manipulating the system. That would be a huge step forward in prosecuting international financial crimes and ensuring crypto’s legitimacy globally.

Crypto’s outlaw days are over, but it’s gained an unprecedented level of legitimacy that can only be preserved and bolstered by abiding with regulatory oversight.

That regulatory oversight can’t just be the old way of doing things copy-and-pasted onto blockchain transactions. Instead, it needs to be one that helps fight criminal activity, shores up investor confidence and throws a bone — not a wrench — to the very mechanics that make crypto a desirable financial investment.

Source: Tech Crunch

Pearson, a London-based publishing and education giant that provides software to schools and universities has agreed to pay $1 million to settle charges that it misled investors about a 2018 data breach resulting in the theft of millions of student records.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission announced the settlement on Monday after the agency found that Pearson made “misleading statements and omissions” about its 2018 data breach, which saw millions of student usernames and scrambled passwords stolen, along with the administrator login credentials of 13,000 schools, district and university customer accounts.

The agency said that in Person’s semi-annual review filed in July 2019, the company referred to the incident as a “hypothetical risk,” even after the data breach had happened. Similarly, in a statement that same month, Pearson said the breach may include dates of birth and email addresses, when it knew that such records were stolen, according to the SEC.

Pearson also said that it had “strict protections” in place when it actually took the company six months to patch the vulnerability after it was notified.

“As the order finds, Pearson opted not to disclose this breach to investors until it was contacted by the media, and even then Pearson understated the nature and scope of the incident, and overstated the company’s data protections,” said Kristina Littman, chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Cyber Unit. “As public companies face the growing threat of cyber intrusions, they must provide accurate information to investors about material cyber incidents.”

While Pearson did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement, Pearson agreed to pay a $1 million penalty — a small fraction of the $489 million in pre-tax profits that the company raked in last year.

A Pearson spokesperson told TechCrunch: “We’re pleased to resolve this matter with the SEC. We also appreciate the work of the FBI and the Justice Department to identify and charge those responsible for a global cyberattack that affected Pearson and many other companies and industries, including at least one government agency.”

Pearson said the breach related to its AIMSweb1.0 web-based software for entering and tracking students’ academic performance, which it retired in July 2019. “Pearson continues to enhance its cybersecurity efforts to minimize the risk of cyberattacks in an ever-changing threat landscape,” the spokesperson added.

Source: Tech Crunch

Roblox is using M&A to bulk up its social infrastructure, announcing Monday morning that they had acquired the team at Guilded that has been building a chat platform for competitive gamers.

The service competes with gaming chat giant Discord, with the team’s founders telling TechCrunch in the past that as Discord’s ambitions had grown beyond the gaming world, its core product was meeting fewer competitive gaming needs. Like Discord, users can have text and voice conversations on the Guilded platform, but Guilded also allowed users to organize communities around events and calendars, with plenty of specific functionality designed around ensuring that tournaments happened seamlessly.

The startup’s product supported hundreds of games, with specific functionality for a handful of titles, including League of Legends, Fortnite, CS: GO and, yes, Roblox. Earlier this year, the company launched a bot API designed to help nontechnical users build bots that could enrich their gaming communities.

Guilded had raised $10.2 million in venture capital funding to date according to Crunchbase, including a $7 million Series A led by Matrix Partners early last year. The company launched out of Y Combinator in mid-2017.

Terms of the Roblox deal weren’t disclosed. In an announcement post, Roblox detailed that the Guilded team will operate as an independent product group going forward. In a separate blog post, Guilded CEO Eli Brown wrote that existing stakeholders will be able to continue using the product as they have previously.

“Everyone – including communities, partners, and bot developers – will be able to keep using Guilded the same way you are now,” Brown wrote. “Roblox believes in our team and in our mission, and we’re going to continue to operate as an independent product in order to achieve it.”

Roblox has seen profound success and heightened investor attention in recent years as the pandemic has pushed more gamers online and brought more users into the fold, but that success has drawn the attention of competitors. In June, Facebook acquired a small Roblox competitor called Crayta, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg announcing just weeks ago that he planned to transform Facebook into a “metaverse” company, using a term many have come to associate closely with what Roblox has been building. Guilded represents an opportunity for Roblox to bring its user base deeper inside its own suite of products, creating a social infrastructure that keeps users engaged.

Source: Tech Crunch

After listening to others pitch me a few different job opportunities while still at Google in 2008, it became clear to me that I would make a better decision if I could fully explore the larger landscape of new companies emerging in Silicon Valley.

I had spent the last several years focusing on Google’s business outside the U.S., and I honestly felt out of touch with the startup world. Beyond my goal of becoming a CEO of my own company, I had two other ambitions: I wanted to help build a great consumer service that would delight people (potentially in e-commerce) and I wanted to build further wealth for myself and my family.

To better evaluate my options, I made the decision to quit Google first and find a way to study the wider ecosystem of companies before choosing where to go. Resolved to give myself a “blank slate” before making a final choice, I left Google when I was three months pregnant and joined Accel Partners, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm and an investor in my previous startup, in a temporary role as CEO-in-residence.

In the months that followed, I helped Accel evaluate investment opportunities across a wide variety of digital sectors, with a particular focus on e-commerce, taking the opportunity to study those companies I might join or think of starting from scratch.

On Thursday, August 19 at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. UTC

Managing Editor Danny Crichton will interview Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility,” on Twitter Spaces.

One of Accel’s key partners, Theresia Gouw, helped me brainstorm, joining my cadre of professional priests. We had known one another for over a decade (I originally met her as a young founder at Yodlee) and were at similar stages of our careers, so I knew she could identify personally with my career quandaries. Like me, Theresia was pregnant with her next child and at a similar life stage — yet another commonality.

Image Credits: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy

While at Accel, I spent a disproportionate amount of time testing my macro thesis that online shopping was about to explode in new ways. I had seen the rise of e-tailers at Google (many of these companies, such as eBay and Amazon, were Google’s largest advertisers at the time), but many of the leading e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zappos still had a utilitarian feel to them.

Meanwhile, new fashion and décor e-commerce sites such as Rent the Runway, Gilt, Houzz, Wayfair and One Kings Lane were popping up everywhere and growing rapidly. These sites sought to tap into a more aspirational and entertainment-oriented kind of shopping experience and move it online.

Expert investors like Accel and others were funding them, and my own observations suggested that this area would yield another big wave of online consumer growth. These lifestyle categories of shopping also appealed to me personally; I was the target customer for many of them.

I started to work on an idea for a new e-commerce service, a luxury version of eBay, while listening to the pitches of every e-commerce company that was looking for funding and talking to several that needed early-stage CEOs. I continued to listen to non-e-commerce pitches as well, simply to give myself a point of reference for evaluating online shopping opportunities.

At Yodlee and Google, I had been lucky enough to work with incredibly smart and talented people who shared my values, and I wanted to do the same at my next venture.

I wanted to work with great investors, too, and fortunately I had the ability either to work with Accel-funded companies, start my own or leverage other investor relationships I’d developed. I spent time with multiple company founders to try to discern who they were as leaders, in addition to what they were working on.

By this point in my career, I had a pretty clear idea of my own superpowers and values, so I looked to find companies that could make the most of my unique gifts and whose founders or senior leaders had strengths complementary to mine.

Specifically, I hoped to join a company with a very strong engineering and product management culture that needed a CEO with strategy, vision, business development, fundraising and team-building expertise. Applying these criteria, I turned down several opportunities at companies whose founders had skill sets too similar to mine, reasoning that this overlap might lead to conflict if I ever became CEO.

Finally, I used my time at Accel to think long and hard about the risks I would take in becoming a startup CEO and whether I could afford to fail. My biggest risk by far was ego- and reputation-related. Mindful of how precarious early-stage startups are, I feared that I would leave a successful role as a global executive only to suffer a very large and visible failure. But the more I thought about this, I faced this ego risk head-on and concluded that my reputation as an executive from Google would hopefully be strong enough to survive one failure if it came to that.

The personal risks of taking on a startup CEO role felt different but not greater than those associated with my job at Google. While I knew that serving as a first-time CEO while having another newborn at home (my son Kieran) would be immensely stressful, I would likely benefit from no longer traveling around the world for days and weeks on end and working across multiple time zones, as I had previously.

Last, I evaluated the financial risks of potential moves. Although my startup equity would have uncertain value for a long time, I judged this a risk worth taking, given how excited I’d feel to have more impact and responsibility as CEO. While I lost a large financial package in choosing to leave Google and switching to a startup salary, I could pay the bills at home while digging into my savings only slightly. Under these conditions, I was prepared to make the leap.

In early 2010, almost a year after I left Google, I finally found the right opportunity and decided to join fashion technology startup Polyvore as its full-time CEO. A precursor to Pinterest, Polyvore was based on the idea that women could “clip” online images to create fashion and décor idea boards digitally that were instantly “shoppable.”

Millions of young women (including influencers) were already using the service and loved it. The founding team was led by a rock star engineer, Pasha Sadri, along with three other product and technology folks he recruited from the likes of Yahoo and Google.

Pasha was known for his intelligence, and we had connected informally over the years for coffee, each time having great discussions about business strategy. In fact, Polyvore twice before had tried to recruit me to become its CEO, once when I was at Google and again when I departed that company in 2008. Back then, I’d spent a productive afternoon with the founding team, helping them think through their business model. I also knew Peter Fenton, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors and a leading funder of the company. Peter was the one who first introduced me to Polyvore and who continued afterward to passively court me.

Having spent so much time exploring my options from multiple angles, I was now poised to make a great decision. I felt convinced that e-commerce was starting its next wave of growth, and felt excited to be part of it.

Within that vision, Polyvore was among the companies best positioned to succeed, and I knew I could contribute in significant ways to building a service that would delight millions. I was impressed with the strengths of Polyvore’s founder and investors and anticipated that I would be able to complement their efforts nicely. Recognizing that my success as a startup CEO hinged on my relationships with the founder and board, I had also invested time to get to know them.

Meanwhile, I had faced my fear demons, taking financial risk but negotiating my offer aggressively to account for downside scenarios I imagined, and coming to grips with my ego risk. With all this work in place, I finally jumped.

After managing a multibillion-dollar profit and loss and leading a 2,000-person team at Google, I became the newly minted CEO of a 10-person fashion startup in February 2010.

As we tee up the bigger choices in our careers, we all face critical moments of decision. No choice we make will be perfect, and all the frameworks in the world won’t eliminate risk entirely. But we don’t need perfection or freedom from risk. We just need to take the next step.

By choosing thoughtfully, using all the tools at our disposal to maximize our upside and anticipate our downside, we can grasp the opportunities available to us while equipping ourselves to handle whatever challenges reality throws our way.

Excerpted from “Choose Possibility: Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail)’ by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Copyright © 2021 by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Published and reprinted by permission of Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.

Source: Tech Crunch