Sunday, August 30, 2020
Moto G9 to Go on First Sale in India Today
Tie-ups, tech will help us touch base in India, South Asia: Pine Labs CEO Amrish Rau
Study, work from home may light up festive online sales
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket Sunday that was historic for two reasons
-
Plenty of clouds remained Sunday when SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched. [credit: Trevor Mahlmann ]
As a strengthening low pressure system crossed the Florida peninsula on Sunday, weather conditions at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station were poor all day. There were intermittent showers and plenty of lightning.
By mid-morning, SpaceX had already canceled one launch from Florida, a mission carrying five dozen Starlink satellites. But the company held out hope for getting the second flight of a planned doubleheader off on Sunday evening, and by the time the clock ticked down on the SAOCOM-1B mission, weather conditions began to marginally improve.
At 7:18 pm ET (23:18 UTC) launch-site weather had only just turned green, so a thrice-used Falcon 9 first stage took off on its fourth flight. And a historic one it was as SpaceX launched a rocket for the 100th time, and flew a rare polar corridor mission from Florida for Argentina's space agency.
Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Profile of cloud database company Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman, hired sixteen months ago, as he takes his third startup public (CNBC)
Profile of cloud database company Snowflake's CEO Frank Slootman, hired sixteen months ago, as he takes his third startup public — - Frank Slootman is preparing to take Snowflake public 13 years after his first tech IPO, Data Domain, and eight years after his second, ServiceNow.
10 Berlin-based VCs discuss how COVID-19 has changed the landscape
A breeding ground for European entrepreneurs, Berlin has a knack for producing a lot of new startups: the city attracts top international, diverse talent, and it is packed with investors, events and accelerators. Also important: it’s a more affordable place to live and work when compared to many other cities in the region.
Berlin ranked 10th place in the 2019 Global Ecosystem Report, trailing behind only two other European cities: London and Paris. It’s home to unicorns such as N26, Zalando, HelloFresh and pioneers of the scene such as SoundCloud.
Top VCs include Earlybird, Point Nine, Project A, Rocket Internet, Holtzbrinck Ventures and accelerators such as Axel Springer Plug and Play Accelerator, hub:raum and The Family.
To get a sense of how the novel coronavirus has changed the landscape, we asked ten investors to give us an insight into their thinking during these pivotal times:
- Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, founding partner, La Famiglia
- Jorge Fonturbel, associate, Target Global
- Luis Shemtov, founding partner, Lunar Ventures
- Mike Lobanov, founding partner, Target Global
- Ludwig Ensthaler, founding partner, 468 Capital
- Mathias Ockenfels, partner, Speedinvest
- Axel Bard Bringéus, partner, EQT Ventures
- Eckhardt Weber, managing partner, Heal Capital
- Joerg Rheinboldt, managing partner, APX Axel Springer Porsche GmbH & Co. KG
- Christian O. Edler, partner, Christianedler.com
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, La Famiglia
What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally?
Generally, we believe in a future in which we can leverage technology to free up humans from repetitive and tedious work and to empower them to shift their focus to what they consider more meaningful and impactful: that is creative and interpersonal activities. Thus, we are excited about founders working towards that future and finding answers across multiple industries, such as manufacturing or logistics, across all working-classes, and across different eras – before, during and after COVID.
What’s your latest, most exciting investment?
One of the recent additions of our new fund is Luminovo, a Munich-based company that develops a solution in the electronics industry to reduce the time and resources needed to go from an idea to a market-ready circuit board.
Are there startups that you wish you would see in the industry but don’t? What are some overlooked opportunities right now?
So far, we have only scratched the surface of the kind of efficiency gains that can potentially be achieved – particularly in industries that were considered to be boring and sluggish in the past, such as insurance or logistics. Even small improvements driven by technology can have a massive direct impact on P&L.
What are you looking for in your next investment, in general?
In general, we love to back visionary founders in the seed-stage that tap into giant industries with a high potential for digitization across Europe and the US.
Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about?
COVID has sprung a myriad of companies in the communication and collaboration space into existence. While we believe in a future in which products and processes will be inherently remote-first, we will see a consolidation of that space that only allows for an oligopolistic market structure similar to how there is only one Zoom and Google Meet in the video communication space today.
How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
We have always considered ourselves as one of the few funds in Germany with a significant investment footprint both in Europe and the US. COVID has emphasized that we are able to invest entirely remotely and hence we will continue and even increase our activities across multiple hubs, such as Munich, Paris, or London.
Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not long-term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders?
Germany’s economy relies on wealthy traditional companies sitting on top of capital to be unlocked which new entrants can make use of. This has been true before 2020, and COVID will only demand more and accelerated innovation across these traditional industries ranging from automotive, manufacturing, to the chemical industry.
How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city?
Berlin and other German cities have consistently proven to develop and grow new leaders across multiple categories such as banking (N26), mobility (Flixbus and Lilium), or data analytics (Celonis). This is certainly driven by a mix of talents coming out of world-class educational institutions, the relative low cost of living in tech hubs, and large local incumbents with massive capital to invest and spend.
Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work?
While COVID has accelerated remote-first products and processes, we still believe that people will flock back to startup hubs such as Berlin or Munich, especially given the relatively low cost of living compared to other tech hubs like San Francisco. Nevertheless, we will continue to see an increasing number of companies scattered across multiple time zones building products that are inherently remote first, regardless where the general work environment will shift into.
Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times?
We are lucky in that our investment focus has been on sector verticals such as Logistics, Supply chain, manufacturing or the future of work, which have all captured significant tailwind from Covid.
How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?
While our investment strategy on a high level will not change, we are putting longer sales cycles into consideration as potential customers of our portfolio companies now are focusing on capital efficiency which also holds true for our founders. Thus, we advise them to focus on extending the runway both by increasing capital efficiency as well as taking on additional funding.
Are you seeing “green shoots” regarding revenue growth, retention or other momentum in your portfolio as they adapt to the pandemic?
As our economy is still in the midst of dealing with the effects of COVID, it is too early to tell, but we definitely see positive indications driven by efforts of portfolio companies that could adapt quickly and shipped features catered to the current needs. One example is Personio, which extended their HR offerings with features that solve the need of customers who shifted to short-time work.
What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two.
What gave me hope was the cohesion of the German economy that fought together for solutions and support during these difficult times. One positive example was the German Startup Association that helped achieve additional governmental financial aid for German SMEs.
Any other thoughts you want to share with TechCrunch readers?
Similar to how the past financial crisis allowed companies such as Stripe or Shopify to become ubiquitous parts of our daily life, these unprecedented times now will also give birth to new forms and shapes in which new ideas will grow into large businesses and we are excited to partner up with founders willing to take a bet on that future.
Jorge Fonturbel, Target Global
A look at autonomous boat tech as ocean research nonprofit Promare says it will unveil in September a fully autonomous ship called Mayflower with IBM as partner (Christopher Mims/Wall Street Journal)
A look at autonomous boat tech as ocean research nonprofit Promare says it will unveil in September a fully autonomous ship called Mayflower with IBM as partner — Driverless ships don't have to worry about crowded roads. And they don't need bunks—or toilets. — TEXT — 1 RESPONSE
Google Pixel 4a review—The simple, basic, reasonable Google phone
tktktk
-
The front of the 4a looks better than any other Google phone, no matter what the price. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]
The Pixel 4a sure has had a rough path to market. The leaks, rumors, and common sense all pointed to a Google I/O 2020 launch, but the coronavirus pandemic put a stop to that and every other major real-life gathering. Many were still hoping for an online launch, but Google ended up canceling two of its attempts at an I/O replacement event, the first due to logistics and the second out of respect for the nationwide protests against police brutality. The delay meant we had seen fully working prototypes five months before the actual release of the phone. Just like everyone else, the Pixel 4a has had a rough 2020.
Now that the Pixel 4a has finally arrived, it feels like it's built for the era. It's a cheap, functional, utilitarian design that arrives at a time when the economy is not doing so hot. This phone is just the cure for people who are sick of $1000 smartphones. You can do better, but for the price, the Pixel 4a is a great entry-level phone that won't leave you wanting for much.
Read 30 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Okta, which provides identity management service for companies, has been a big beneficiary of remote work during lockdown with its stock rising 106% since March (Nico Grant/Bloomberg)
Okta, which provides identity management service for companies, has been a big beneficiary of remote work during lockdown with its stock rising 106% since March — - Businesses, schools tap firm's tools to secure online access — McKinnon stays cautious on outlook as investors seek growth
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater
Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
Pigs in the matrix
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
https://ift.tt/3jy5M9r https://ift.tt/2DfqiMsWhat Does Walmart See in TikTok? Millions of Young Shoppers
A California wildfire nearly destroyed the historic Lick observatory
Enlarge / Lick Observatory (credit: Bill Dally | Getty Images)
On the morning of Sunday, August 16, freak summer thunderstorms rolled into the Bay Area, peppering the ultra-dry landscape with lightning, setting nearly 400 fires across Northern California. Ten miles to the north of the historic Lick Observatory, atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose, one such blaze was closing in, and fast: By Tuesday morning, the flames were 6 miles away. That night, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or Cal Fire, made the call to evacuate the facility’s 30-odd residents and staff members, save for the superintendent, Kostas Chloros, who’d stay on to coordinate the defense of one of the world’s most cherished observatories.
It was here that in 1969 astronomers made the first laser lunar ranging, calculating the precise distance to the moon. The observatory has helped scientists explore the structure of the universe, finding the masses of nearby galaxies, as well as black holes and quasars. Its Automated Planet Finder robotic telescope has been instrumental—literally and figuratively—in sniffing out the exoplanets that orbit distant stars.
Read 14 remaining paragraphs | Comments
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is neuroscience theater
Rock climb without fear. Play a symphony in your head. Superhuman vision to see radar. Discover the nature of consciousness. Cure blindness, paralysis, deafness and mental illness. Those are just a few the applications that Elon Musk and employees at his neuroscience company Neuralink, formed in 2016, believe that electronic brain-computer interfaces will one day bring about.
While none of these advances are close at hand and some are unlikely, in a “product update” streamed over YouTube on Friday, Musk, also the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Motors, joined staffers wearing black masks to discuss the company’s work towards an affordable, reliable brain implant which Musk believes billions of consumers will clamor for in the future.
“In a lot of ways,” Musk said, “It’s kind of like a Fitbit in your skull, with tiny wires.”
Although the online event was described as a product demonstration, there is as yet nothing that anyone can buy or use from Neuralink. (This is for the best since most of the company’s medical claims remain highly speculative.) It is, however, engineering a super-dense electrode technology that is being tested on animals.
Neuralink isn’t the first to believe brain implants could extend or restore human capabilities. Researchers began placing probes in the brains of paralyzed people in the late 1990s in order to show signals could let them move robot arms or computer cursors. And mice with visual implants really can perceive infrared rays.
Building on that work, Neuralink says it hopes to further develop such brain-computer interfaces (or BCIs) to the point where one can be installed in a doctor’s office in under an hour. “This actually does work,” Musk said of people who have controlled computers with brain signals. “It’s just not something the average person can use effectively.”
Throughout the event, Musk deftly avoided giving timelines or committing to schedules, including when Neuralink’s system might be tested in human subjects.
As yet, four years after its formation, Neuralink has provided no evidence that it can (or has even tried) to treat depression, insomnia, or a dozen other diseases that Musk mentioned in a slide. One difficulty ahead of the company is perfecting microwires that can survive the “corrosive” context of a living brain for a decade. That problem alone could take years to solve.
The primary objective of the streamed demo, instead, was to stir excitement, recruit engineers to the company (which already employs about 100 people) and build the kind of fan base that has cheered on Musk’s other ventures and has helped propel the gravity-defying stock price of electric car-maker Tesla.
Pigs in the matrix
In tweets leading up to the event, Musk had promised fans a mind-blowing demonstration of neurons firing inside a living brain—though he didn’t say of what species. Minutes into the livestream, assistants drew a black curtain to reveal three small pigs in fenced enclosures; these were the subjects of the company’s implant experiments.
The brain of one pig contained an implant, and hidden speakers briefly chimed out ring-tones which Musk said were recordings of the animal’s neurons firing in real time. For those awaiting the “matrix in the matrix,” as Musk had hinted on Twitter, the cute-animal interlude was different than hoped for. To neuroscientists, it was nothing new; in their labs the buzz and crackle of electrical impulses recorded from animal brains (and some human ones) has been heard for decades.
A year ago, Neuralink presented a sewing-machine robot able to plunge a thousand ultra-fine electrodes into a rodent’s brain. These probes are what measure the electrical signals emitted by neurons, whose speed and patterns are ultimately a basis for movement, thoughts and recall of memories.
In the new livestream, Musk appeared beside an updated prototype of the sewing robot encased within a smooth, white plastic helmet. Into such surgical headgear, Musk believes, billions of consumers will one-day willingly place their heads, submitting as an automated saw carves out a circle of bone and a robot threads electronics into their brains.
The futuristic casing was created by the industrial design firm Woke Studio, in Vancouver. It’s lead designer, Afshin Mehin, says he strived to make something “clean, modern, but still friendly-feeling” for what would be voluntary brain surgery with inevitable risks.
To neuroscientists, the most intriguing development shown Friday may have been what Musk called “the link,” a silver-dollar sized disk containing computer chips which compresses and then wirelessly transmits signals recorded from the electrodes. The link is about as thick as the human skull, and Musk said it could plop neatly onto the surface of the brain through a drill hole then be sealed with superglue.
“I could have a Neuralink right now and you wouldn’t know it,” Musk said.
The link can be charged wirelessly via an induction coil and Musk suggested people in the future would plug in before they go to sleep to power up their implants. He thinks an implant also needs to be easy to install and remove, so that people can get new ones as technology improves. You wouldn’t want to be stuck with version 1.0 of a brain implant forever. Outdated neural hardware left behind in people’s bodies is a real problem already encountered by research subjects.
The implant being tested by Neuralink on its pigs has 1,000 channels, and is likely to read from a similar number of neurons. Musk says his goal to increase that by a factor of “100, then 1,000, then, 10,000” to read more completely from the brain.
Such exponential goals for the technology don’t necessarily address specific medical needs. Although Musk claims implants “could solve paralysis, blindness, hearing,” as often what is missing isn’t ten times as many electrodes, but scientific knowledge about what electro-chemical imbalance creates, say depression, in the first place.
Despite the long list of medical applications Musk presented, Neuralink didn’t show it’s ready to commit to any one of them. During the event, the company did not disclose plans to start a clinical trial, a surprise to those who believed that would be Neuralink’s next logical step.
A neurosurgeon who works with the company, Matthew MacDougall, did say the company was considering trying the implant on paralyzed people, for instance to allow them to type on a computer, or form words. Musk went further: “I think long term you can restore someone full body motion.”
It is unclear how serious the company is about treating disease at all. Musk continually drifted away from medicine and back to a much more futuristic “general population device,” which he called the company’s “overall” aim. He believes that people should connect directly to computers in order to keep pace with artificial intelligence.
“On a species level, it’s important to figure out how we co-exist with advanced AI, achieving some AI symbiosis,” said Musk. “Such that the future of world is controlled by the combined will of the people of the earth. That might be the most important thing that a device like this achieves.”
How brain implants would bring about such a collective world electronic mind, Musk did not say. Maybe in the next update.
https://ift.tt/3jy5M9r https://ift.tt/2DfqiMsChina's New Tech Export Controls Could Give Beijing a Say in TikTok Sale
The week’s biggest IPO news had nothing to do with Monday’s S-1 deluge
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. (You can sign up for the newsletter here!)
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
The week’s biggest IPO news had nothing to do with Monday’s S-1 deluge
During Monday’s IPO wave I was surprised to see Asana join the mix.
After news had broken in June that the company had raised hundreds of millions in convertible debt, I hadn’t guessed that the productivity unicorn wouldn’t give us an S-1 in the very next quarter. I was contentedly wrong. But the reason why Asana’s IPO is notable isn’t really much to do with the company itself, though do take the time to dig into its results and history.
What matters about Asana’s debut is that it appears set to test out a model that, until very recently, could have become the new, preferred way of going public amongst tech companies.
Here’s what I mean: Instead of filing to go public, and raising money in a traditional IPO, or simply listing directly, Asana executed two, large, convertible debt offerings pre-debut, thus allowing it to direct list with lots of cash without having raised endless equity capital while private.
The method looked like a super-cool way to get around the IPO pricing issue that we’ve seen, and also provide a ramp to direct listing for companies that didn’t get showered with billions while private. (That Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz’s trust led the debt deal is simply icing on this particular Pop-Tart).
This brief column was going to be all about how we may see unicorns follow the Asana route in time, provided that its debt-powered direct listing goes well. But then the NYSE got permission from the SEC to allow companies to raise capital when they direct-list.
In short, some companies that direct-list in the future will be able to sell a bloc of shares at a market-set value that would have previously set their “open” price. So instead of flogging the stock and setting a price and selling shares to rich folks and then finding out what public investors would really pay, all that IPO faff is gone and bold companies can simply offer shares at whatever price the market will bear.
All that is great and cool, but as companies will be able to direct-list and raise capital, the NYSE’s nice news means that Asana is blazing a neat trail, but perhaps not one that will be as popular as we had expected.
The NASDAQ is working to get in on the action. As Danny said yesterday on the show, this new NYSE method is going to crush traditional IPOs, provided that we’re understanding it during this, its nascent period.
Market Notes
Look, this week was bananas, and my brain is scrambled toast. You, like myself, are probably a bit confused about how it is only finally Saturday and not the middle of next week. But worry not, I have a quick roundup of the big stuff from our world. And, notes from calls with the COO of Okta and the CEO of Splunk, from after their respective earnings report:
- China-based fintech giant Ant is super profitable and super big and super powerful and is going to have a mega-IPO that matters, even if it isn’t happening Stateside. (This has long been expected.)
- As I write to you, the TikTok saga is not yet over, but between the lawsuits and smokescreens and other crap, it appears that Microsoft and perhaps Walmart are the leading bidding duo. What a year.
- SPACs for real companies are happening, and Boston unicorn Desktop Metal is pushing ahead with one. This is an event to watch, and if it goes well we could see a bunch more in rapid-fire fashion.
- Speaking of which, here’s a run-down of all the companies that filed to go public on Monday. You are welcome, as that post was annoying to compile. (I jest, it was fun as hell.)
- Also this week, Y Combinator had a two-day Demo Day confab that we wrote a lot about. Sure, these are early-stage companies, but their ranks will generate some material winners. So catch up here, with that link containing our chat about the startups and directions to all our coverage.
- And for fun, here are some slightly deeper looks at Snowflake and Sumo Logic’s respective IPO filings, and a contrarian take on why Palantir has problems, but also some merit.
Over to our chats, starting with Okta COO and co-founder Frederic Kerrest:
- Okta had a good quarter. But instead of noodling on just the numbers, we wanted to chat with its team about the accelerating digital transformation and what they are seeing in the market.
- On the SMB side, Kerrest reported little to no change. This is a bit more bullish than we anticipated, given that it seemed likely that SMB customers would have taken the largest hit from COVID.
- Kerrest also told us some interesting stuff about how the wave of COVID-related spend has changed: “We actually have seen the COVID ‘go home and remote work very quickly’ [thing], we’ve actually seen that rush subside a little bit, because you know now we’re five months into [the pandemic], so they had to figure it out.”
- This is a fascinating comment for the startup world.
- Okta is big and public and is going to grow fine for a while. Whatever. For smaller companies aka startups that were seeing COVID-related tailwinds, I wonder how common seeing “that rush subside a little bit” is. If it is very common, many startups that had taken off like a rocket could be seeing their growth come back to Earth.
- And if they raised a bunch of money off the back of that growth at a killer valuation, they may have just ordered shoes that they’ll struggle to grow into.
And then there was new McLaren F-1 sponsor Splunk, data folks who are in the midst of a transition to SaaS that is seeing the firm double-down on building ARR and letting go of legacy incomes:
- I spoke with CEO Doug Merritt, kicking off with a question about his use of the word “tectonic” regarding the shift to data-driven decisions from Splunk’s earnings report. (“As organizations continue to adapt to tectonic societal shifts brought on by COVID-19, one thing is constant: the power of data to radically transform business.”)
- I wanted to know how far down the American corporate stack that idea went; are mid-size businesses getting more data-savvy? What about SMBs? Merritt was pretty bullish: “We’re getting to tectonic,” he said during our call, adding that before “it really was the Facebooks, the Googles, the Apples, the DoorDashes, [and] the LinkedIns that were using [Splunk].” But now, he said, even small restaurant chains are using data to better track their performance.
- Relating this back to the startup world, I’ve been curious if lots of stuff that you and I think is cool, like low-code business app development, will actually find as wide a footing in the market as some expect. Why? Because most small and medium-sized businesses are not tech companies at all. But if Merritt is right, then the CEO of Appian might be right as well about how many business apps the average company is going to have in a few years’ time.
And finally for Market Notes, my work BFF and IRL friend Ron Miller wrote about Box’s earnings this week, and how the changing world is bolstering the company. It’s worth a read. (Most public software companies are doing well, mind.)
Various and Sundry
We’re already over length, so I’ll have to keep our bits-and-bobs section brief. Thus, only the brightest of baubles for you, my friend:
- Y Combinator startups are focusing on revenue in this more uncertain world. Per The Information, the startup org has encouraged startups in its world to “focus on generating revenue” and how to juice enough cash from their operations to endure sans checks from private investors.
- Given the pace of private investments into certain startup niches today, it’s almost odd advice. But what is true for late-stage SaaS companies (very hot!) might not hold true for smaller YC companies that are focused on consumers.
- Natasha wrote about a particularly hot startup from this YC batch, so I reached out to a hot company from a prior batch, namely Tandem. But they didn’t want to talk on the record, so no news there. Alas.
- The Fastly deal is super cool and you should read more about it. As was this $300 million investment.
And with that, we are out of room. Hugs, fist bumps and good vibes,
New York City-based Current, which manages a consumer fintech platform, raised an $80M Series E at a $1.5B valuation led by Springcoast Partners (FinSMEs)
FinSMEs : New York City-based Current, which manages a consumer fintech platform, raised an $80M Series E at a $1.5B valuation led by Spr...
-
Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
-
The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
