Showing posts with label TechCrunch. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TechCrunch. Show all posts

Friday, November 13, 2020

Bonus: An extra week to save on tickets to TC Sessions: Space 2020

When you’re laser-focused on reaching beyond the stars, it’s hard to remember more earthly, mundane tasks. That’s why we’re giving you an extra week to score early-bird savings to TC Sessions: Space 2020 (December 16-17). So, to all you harried, procrastinating visionaries: take a breath, relax a bit and buy your pass before November 20 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Join the two-day online conference to hear from and connect with the leading forces within the space industry. Learn how to secure grants for your space company, how and where the Air Force plans to spend $60 billion on R&D, what savvy space investors think and where they might place their bets. And that’s just the tip of the rocket.

Presentations range from asteroid mining, extra-planetary robotic research and the future of space exploration to human spaceflight, manufacturing in space and supply-chain issues. Here are just two stellar examples, and you’ll find many more in the event agenda. Start planning your time now.

Bridging Two Eras of Human Spaceflight: When Kathryn Lueders started working at NASA in 1992, it was the peak of the Space Shuttle era. As she begins her leadership of the Human Spaceflight Office this year, a new and exciting era is just beginning. Lueders will discuss the possibilities and challenges of the new systems and technologies that will put the first woman and the next man on the surface of the moon…and perhaps Mars.

Crafting the Kuiper Constellation: Amazon is set to create its own global constellation of LEO satellites — a very different type of gadget from what Amazon SVP of Device & Services Dave Limp is used to overseeing. He’ll tell us how Project Kuiper fits in with Amazon’s grand plans.

Looking for more ways to save? Bring the whole team with a group discount. Tickets cost $100 each — bring four team members and get the fifth one free. Discount passes for students cost $50, while current government, military and nonprofit employees pay $95. Plus, Extra Crunch subscribers get a 20% discount.

Step into a virtual spotlight and showcase your startup in our expo: An Early-Stage Startup Exhibitor Package ($360 gets you three tickets, digital exhibition space and the ability to generate leads). Bonus: Exhibiting startups each get five minutes to pitch live to attendees around the world.

As you reach for the stars, connect with the experts and opportunities at TC Sessions: Space 2020 to help make your galactic dreams a reality. You have an extra week. Now, breathe, relax and buy your early-bird pass before November 20 at 11:59 p.m. (PT).

Is your company interested in sponsoring TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

NextView Ventures closes its fourth fund with $89 million

NextView Ventures, a Boston-based venture capital fund, has raised an $89.6 million fund, according to SEC filings. The firm’s fourth fund, its largest to date, is oversubscribed, with early documents indicating a $70 million goal. The NextView Ventures team did not immediately respond to request for comment.

NextView Ventures was launched in 2010 by Rob Go, a former partner at Spark Capital; Dave Beisel, who clocked time at Venrock and Masthead Venture Partners; and Lee Hower, a former investor at Point Judith Capital. Melody Koh joined as a partner three years ago, and most recently, the fund brought on former journalist Leah Fessler as an investor.

The fund, which has offices in New York as well as Boston, invests in consumer and software-as-a-service enterprise startups at the pre-seed and seed stage. Its portfolio includes Ellevest, an investing platform for women; Grove Collaborative, a sustainable goods subscription platform; and ThredUp, which has confidentially filed for IPO. In April, NextView launched a virtual accelerator for startups to build a more robust pipeline for deal flow. The firm invested $200,000 for an 8% equity stake in a number of pre-seed and seed startups focused on “the everyday economy.

More Boston coverage

A hot Boston VC Summer

13 Boston investors reflect on COVID-19

Local accelerators provide a boon to area startups

Despite the pandemic, Boston’s startup scene has continued to attract record numbers in venture capital volume. In fact, according to PitchBook data, Boston-area startups raised more private capital during summer 2020 than they did in summer 2019, suggesting that the pandemic has been a boon to startups in aggregate.

More recently, my colleague Alex Wilhelm and I wrote about how the Boston area is growing its demographic footprint in venture capital. In Q3 2019, New England drove 9.3% of U.S. venture deals, and 10.3% of U.S. venture dollars. In Q3 2020, those numbers were 9.3% of U.S. venture deals, and 12.7% of U.S. venture dollars. The percentage change is notable, especially amid volatile times.

NextView’s new fund is yet another signal of the city’s ability to attract institutional investment. Its previous fund was raised in 2017 at a $50 million close.

Thursday, November 12, 2020

This fintech-focused VC firm just closed a $75 million debut fund; backers “came out of the woodwork”

It’s no secret that a massive digital transformation is happening within financial services companies and amid the growing number of non-financial outfits that are also adding financial products to their offerings.

Still, Sheel Mohnot, who was formerly a general partner at the fintech fund of 500 Startups, and Jake Gibson, co-founder of personal finance startup NerdWallet, were a little taken aback by investor interest in their fintech-focused early-stage venture firm, Better Tomorrow Ventures, or BTV.

The outfit just closed its debut fund with $75 million in capital commitments, exceeding their original $60 million target, and even one of their earliest investors, Michael Kim of Cendana Capital, expresses surprise. “Remarkably, they raised a lot of it during Covid,” says Kim.

We talked yesterday with the pair, who have already invested in 13 startups with the fund’s capital and, they say, led nine of those deals.

TC: The good news is you’re focused on fintech. The bad news is that fintech valuations are going through the roof right now. How do you compete in this kind of environment?

SM: It’s true. Everybody decided that what we’ve been talking about all along is in line with their beliefs too, after exits like Plaid and Credit Karma. Everybody became a fintech investor. And you’re right that that has led to an increase in valuations. To some extent that’s good, though. It’s meant that one of our companies has already had a pretty massive markup in part because of this phenomenon.

I also think we’re finding we’re able to win deals at better prices because we’re both founders. [Mohnot sold a company, FeeFinders, to Groupon 2012]. And all we do is fintech. So we tend to understand better what founders are building than generalist investors.

JG: I do think [these things] resonate in that we’ve been able to pay prices that we think make sense and to get the ownership we want. This isn’t the 4 on 16 game that others are playing (where VCs invest $4 million at a pre-money valuation and so own 20% of the company). I think all but one or two of our investments involve repeat founders who see the value of working with partners like us.

TC: How much ownership are you targeting for that first check — 10%?

JG: Right, 10%, though we’re really shooting for 12%.

TC: And will you turn to [special purpose vehicles] to maintain your stake if certain companies begin to gain traction?

JG: Yes, I’ve done quite a bit of SPVs in the past. I’ve invested in 90 companies as an angel investor and I think we’ve probably deployed more than $40 million between the two of us over the last five years leading up to BTV, including SPVs on top of angel investments. [Editor’s note: some of those earlier deals include Chipper Cash, Albert, Clear Cover, and Hippo.]

TC: What companies are in BTV’s portfolio? 

SM: None have been announced.

TC: Not one?!

SM: Nobody announces their seed rounds anymore. When I started my company, I wanted as much coverage as possible. I thought that was great for the company. Now founders don’t feel that way, with very few wanting to announce.

TC: But there are benefits to recruiting and getting on the radar or later-stage investors. Why eschew it altogether?

JG: Competition to some extent. They don’t want people to know what they’re working on because once you see a competitive seed round, you see a lot of other startups pop up to do the same thing. I also just think there’s not as much upside anymore to announcing, so most founders, when you’re seeing their seed round, it’s because they’re about to raise their Series A. The data you’re seeing in Pitchbook is typically six months [behind].

TC: Who are your investors?

SM: We have founders of fintech unicorns. We have a couple of fintech venture funds, fintech-focused GPs from later-stage funds, a few insurance companies, and Wall Street people who help us keep track on that side of the market, as well.

JG: We’re also backed by kind of a who’s who of fund of funds that back emerging managers: Cendana, Industry Ventures, Vintage [Investment Partners], Invesco.

TC: Did you know a lot of these investors before the pandemic shut down everything?

JG: Some, but we had to sell a lot of them cold over Zoom. We held a first close last December — that capital was from Cendana and individuals. We’d started conversations with other institutions at that point but everyone said it would take a while and that institutions won’t come until you raise your second fund, so we didn’t have high hopes that we’d get a lot of them on board.

In fact, when March and April hit, we figured we’d have to raise a smaller fund. But then things re-opened, people got back to work, and we were able to close institutions we’d started conversations with. Then people came out of the woodwork, because tech got hot fast but especially fintech, with all the IPO and M&A activity.  People said, ‘We want fintech exposure now, and we want to invest in a fintech-focused fund, and you’re the only game in town.’

TC: What do you need to see to write a check?

JG: Our thesis is that everything is fintech, so we invest across the board: payments, lending, banking, real estate, insurance, b2b, consumer — anything that’s ostensibly fintech. We think a lot of companies that aren’t typically fintech today will look like fintech later, with more and more tech platforms that get into financial services. We’re investing at the pre-seed and seed stage but also meeting with founders at the idea stage, sometimes to talk them out of starting another neobank. [Laughs.]

TC: Do you? Every time I wonder how many neobanks make sense in this world, an investor tells me that if only their startup can get .00001% of the market, they’ll have a multibillion company on their hands.

JG: No. Most will never figure out how to get profitable. A lot of investors like to argue that with neobanks, you lose money on every trade but you make it up in volume. Yet very few have a path to getting to positive economics. You need huge scale to get to profitability, and that means you have to spend a ton of venture capital on marketing. More, a lot are going after audiences that are already over-served by traditional financial products.

SM: The same is true for “Plaid for X” type companies. After the announcement of Plaid’s exit — or what we all thought was Plaid’s exit — we looked at five companies, many of them hitting on the same ideas and duking it out for the same customers.

TC: Will the fact that the DOJ is suing to block Plaid’s sale to Visa, citing Visa’s monopoly power, have a chilling effect?

JG: We haven’t seen that. A lot of people are discounting that complaint and thinking it will get out of this in the end via SPAC. The company was doing north of $100 million in revenue, and given where these businesses trade, Plaid could go public and see an amazingly successful outcome.

It’s not just Plaid, by the way. There are now 40 SPACs that are focused on fintech alone. Just think about the outcomes that have to happen in the next two years.

The U.S. government sends mixed messages about TikTok’s future

The fate of TikTok in the United States got even more confusing this week. The U.S. Justice and Commerce Departments sent conflicting messages today about TikTok’s future, which is now up in the air with the upcoming administration transition.

The Department of Commerce said Thursday it would abide by an injunction issued October 30 by the District Court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania that would have blocked TikTok from operating in the U.S. starting from today. In a statement, the department said it is complying with the court’s order and its prohibition against TikTok “HAS BEEN ENJOINED, and WILL NOT GO INTO EFFECT, pending further legal developments.”

But on the same day, the Justice Department appealed the Pennsylvania court’s ruling just as it was set to go into effect.

But wait! It gets even more convoluted: another court–the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington–just set new deadlines in December for ByteDance, TikTok’s Beijing-based parent company, and the Trump administration, to file documents in a case involving a divestment order that would force ByteDance to sell TikTok to continue operating in the U.S.

ByteDance reached an agreement with Oracle and Walmart in September, but the future of the deal is also uncertain.

The Justice Department’s appeal is part of a lawsuit filed against the U.S. government on September 18 by three TikTok creators, Douglas Marland, Cosette Rinab and Alec Chambers. Each has more than a million followers on TikTok, which has about 100 million users in the U.S., and argues that a ban would impact their ability to earn a living from brand collaborations on the app.

On Oct. 30, Judge Wendy Beetlestone issued an injunction against the U.S. government’s restrictions. In her ruling, Beetlestone wrote that the “government’s own descriptions of the national security threat posted by the TikTok app are phrased in the hypothetical.”

This case is separate from the one ByteDance filed against the U.S. government in a federal appeals court in Washington D.C. Earlier this week, ByteDance asked that court to vacate the U.S. order forcing it to sell the app’s American operations. ByteDance told TechCrunch in a statement that without an extension on the November 12 deadline, it “[had] no choice but to file a petition in court to defend our rights and those of our more than 1,500 employees in the U.S.”

The Commerce Department’s statement today, along with the Justice Department’s appeal and the new deadlines in the divestment case, underscore the confusion about the future of the Trump administration’s actions against TikTok after President-Elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20.

While some analysts believe the Biden administration may give Chinese tech companies that were targeted under the current administration, including Huawei and ByteDance, a chance to re-negotiate with the government, that may take second priority as Biden deals with domestic issues, including the resurgence of COVID-19 in the U.S.

More voting software FUD falls flat after Trump highlights dubious data

Reports that Dominion Software, which provides voting tabulation tools to about half the states in the U.S., “deleted” millions of votes have been soundly rebuffed after outgoing President Trump parroted numbers from a random internet forum.

Tweeting Thursday morning about baseless claims of election fraud, Trump cited OANN, a right-wing news outlet, which itself seemed to have found its numbers in a thread on pro-Trump Reddit knock-off thedonald.win. (The tweet was quickly wrapped in a warning that the contents are disputed.)

The anonymous person posting there claimed to have compared numbers from Edison Research, a company that does exit polls and other election-related measures, to those from Dominion, and come up with very different sums. The methods are not very well explained, nor are the results. It’s not really clear what is being compared to what and why, or for what reason this alleged fraud was published publicly by the company supposedly perpetrating it. No one has verified (if that’s the word) this analysis in any way.

In a comment to Politifact, Edison President Larry Rosin wrote that “we have no evidence of any voter fraud,” and that it pretty much has no idea what the purported analysis is referring to.

Dominion attracted attention earlier in the week when it seemed that a glitch had caused a number of votes to be registered for President-elect Joe Biden instead of Trump. But the miscount was immediately caught and found to be the result of human error. The company has dedicated a page to combating the misinformation around its software.

Politifact rated Trump’s claim “Pants on Fire,” calling it “ridiculous” for good measure. It’s worth noting that the tweet didn’t even state the numbers of the supposed fraud correctly.

There doesn’t seem to be any merit to the “analysis” at all, but it provides an excellent example of how people who are unfamiliar with how the voting apparatus works — which is to say almost everyone not directly involved — tend to find the software portion inherently untrustworthy.

Yet there is no way to count, tabulate and verify millions of ballots in hours or days after an election that does not rely heavily on private software tools, and it is in fact highly reliable and secure. The process of elections is bipartisan and extremely closely monitored.

Elections commissioners and state leadership have been unanimous in declaring the election a surprisingly smooth one considering the difficulties of holding one during a pandemic and with extremely high turnout both in person and by mail.

A major federal committee under the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security agency today called last week’s election “the most secure in American history… There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. We can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should too.”

Despite accusations from a dwindling number of highly placed individuals in the government, there has been no evidence presented that there was any significant voter fraud or other irregularities in last week’s election, which resulted in the victory of former vice president, now President-elect Joe Biden.

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

President-elect Joseph Biden reportedly plucks Revolution’s Ron Klain as new chief of staff

President-elect Joseph Biden has plucked Ron Klain, a longtime colleague and confidant and the current executive vice president of the venture capital firm Revolution, as his White House chief of staff, reports The New York Times. 

Klain was Biden’s chief of staff for two years during the Obama administration and left his post as chief of staff in 2011 to join Revolution, the firm founded by former AOL chief executive and founder Steve Case. Revolution did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If Klain makes his second entrance into the White House, Biden will be bringing on a chief of staff he’s known for more than 35 years. The duo first worked together in 1989, when the president-elect was a senator and Klain was a newly graduated law student from Harvard Law School. He most recently worked as the White House Ebola Response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, and helped as a debate advisor to President Obama and President Clinton, as well as nominees Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Klain’s appointment could pacify some of the presumed tension that could occur between startups and the government under the Biden-Harris administration. Biden has been vocal about pursuing aggressive regulation on the tech industry, which could negatively impact behemoths like Google, Apple and Facebook. Klain has spoken up (in TechCrunch!) about how regulatory hurdles could hinder key innovation in startup-land. Klain also helped lead efforts for Higher Ground Labs, an incubator and accelerator focused on politically-focused (and Democrat-loved) startups. While that likely wouldn’t impact Big Tech, it doesn’t hurt that, reportedly, one of Biden’s closest confidants will have a soft spot for startups.

 

 

President-elect Joseph Biden reportedly plucks Revolution’s Ron Klain as new chief of staff

President-elect Joseph Biden has plucked Ron Klain, a longtime colleague and confidant and the current executive vice president of the venture capital firm Revolution, as his White House chief of staff, reports The New York Times. 

Klain was Biden’s chief of staff for two years during the Obama administration and left his post as chief of staff in 2011 to join Revolution, the firm founded by former AOL chief executive and founder Steve Case. Revolution did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

If Klain makes his second entrance into the White House, Biden will be bringing on a chief of staff he’s known for more than 35 years. The duo first worked together in 1989, when the president-elect was a senator and Klain was a newly graduated law student from Harvard Law School. He most recently worked as the White House Ebola Response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015, and helped as a debate advisor to President Obama and President Clinton, as well as nominees Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

Klain’s appointment could pacify some of the presumed tension that could occur between startups and the government under the Biden-Harris administration. Biden has been vocal about pursuing aggressive regulation on the tech industry, which could negatively impact behemoths like Google, Apple and Facebook. Klain has spoken up (in TechCrunch!) about how regulatory hurdles could hinder key innovation in startup-land. Klain also helped lead efforts for Higher Ground Labs, an incubator and accelerator focused on politically-focused (and Democrat-loved) startups. While that likely wouldn’t impact Big Tech, it doesn’t hurt that, reportedly, one of Biden’s closest confidants will have a soft spot for startups.

 

 

Google says it plans to counter Japan's FTC over claims that it hobbles rivals in search; a source says Japan's FTC sent a cease-and-desist order to Google (Bloomberg)

Bloomberg : Google says it plans to counter Japan's FTC over claims that it hobbles rivals in search; a source says Japan's FTC s...