Remitly launches Passbook, a neobank aimed at immigrants, to expand beyond money transfers

Last summer, the Seattle-based startup Remitly closed a $135 million round to go beyond money-transfer services into a wider range of financial products catering to its primarily-immigrant customer base.

Today, it’s taking the wraps off a new product that puts paid to that plan: it’s launching Passbook, a new bank aimed at immigrants that lets a person use any form of picture ID — whether it’s from the US or not — to sign up. The service is starting first in the US — Remitly’s biggest market today among its 15 “send from” countries and 40 “send to” countries. The long-term plan is to roll out Passbook anywhere that Remitly is active over time.

Aimed at the 44 million immigrants in the country that Remitly already targets with services to send money back to their home countries, the idea is to give them options to open and use bank accounts even if they are not in possession of Social Security numbers or other forms of US-originated identification, as long as they are living in the US, have another form of identification (for example a passport from another country), and in cases where the ID lacks an address, proof of where they live.

Passbook is tapping into a problem that extends into both developed and developing markets, where collectively some 1.7 billion people globally remain “unbanked,” with no access to bank accounts and therefore mostly off the financial grid, and therefore unlikely to have access to services like credit that can potentially help them improve their financial station in life.

Passbook is interesting not just because it’s addressing a gap in the market of financial services, but because of the timely subject matter.

The subjects of migrant workers, immigration, nationality — and how to best to handle the influx of new populations of people within a country’s borders coming for a variety of reasons — are all being hotly debated in the US and elsewhere. Large political shifts and platforms are being built and pivoting around how people view the movement of people.

But while those subjects get lots of attention in the media, in the halls of government, at the bar and around the proverbial dinner table, ironically the subject of those arguments — the people themselves — regularly get overlooked when it comes to building new services and calibrating tech to focus on them, two things that could clearly improve their individual lots and the economy as a whole. Immigrants globally represent some $1.3 trillion in wages and $900 billion in spending power annually.

“No-one should be excluded from banking and financial services,” said Matt Oppenheimer, the CEO and co-founder of Remitly, in an interview in London last week about Passbook.

Passbook is a logical expansion for Remitly because there is a strong overlap between the typical Remitly’s target customer, a country’s immigrant population, and those living in a country like the US who are underbanked.

Today many of the individuals who use money transfer services are immigrants, who use them to send money to family and friends in their “home” countries. Those immigrants, in turn, are the most likely US residents to lack social security numbers and other kinds of US-issued identification.

Up to now, that has made it harder for them to open bank accounts, since many banks in the US — in an effort to avoid risk, not because of a legal requirement — often require those US-originated identification documents to open the accounts in the first place.

But that opens an opportunity for a company like Remitly, which can use a banking service to expand its services funnel with its existing users — it has to date sent some $6 billion in funds on behalf of its users — and to open a new front in adding in other customers who may not already be using it for money transfer.

Since the main requirement is to satisfy “Know Your Customer” compliance, Remitly can do this using other documentation that a person is likely to have.

Remitly has set Passbook up like a typical challenger bank (these days often referred to as a “neobank”), in that it operates as a virtual, online-only bank with no physical office and has partnered with another banking partner called Sunrise that runs all the services under the hood and provides FDIC guarantees for deposits up to $250,000. On top of that, Remitly has worked in a number of features that it believes give customers not just a bank account, but one that has features specific to those that might appeal to its specific customer base.

That includes, in addition to basics like having an account into which money can be paid in and out, and having a Visa-based debit card to make cashless transactions, users getting the ability to “choose your flag” to personalise a card, no fees for transactions when the payment card is used abroad, no account maintenance fees, no overdraft fees, no ATM fees and no minimum balance.

As you would expect, Remitly will soon be adding in the ability to link the Passbook accounts to their money transfer feature to make the process more seamless, and presumably cheaper to entice more cross-service signups. No loans on the platform yet, but you can imagine credit, mortgages and other kinds of lending to make its way there over time as well.

Given the focus on immigrants as users, I asked Oppenheimer about the potential risk that they would be providing services to people who are in the US undocumented and potentially illegally, and wether that could pose problems for the company. He replied that the company is committed to protecting the privacy of its customers and since all that is needed is to satisfy KYC compliance, Remitly would never have information on a users’ immigration status one way or the other, leaving the question off the ledger altogether.

I also asked Oppenheimer where the company stands on funding. It has now raised just under $400 million, and for now is in no hurry to raise any more, he said. But when and if financing is added into the mix of services, you might imagine that will change again.


Source: Tech Crunch

Google Assistant now works with Tile to find your lost stuff

Google Assistant is today rolling out support for Tile’s Bluetooth tracker, designed to help you keep up with your often misplaced items — like your keys, purse, wallet, remote, and more. The new integration will allow Google Assistant users on any Nest device to ask questions like, “Hey Google, where is my purse?” They can instruct the Assistant to ring their device” by saying things like “Hey Google, make my backpack ring.”

Variations on these commands are also supported, like, “Hey Google, find my…” or “Hey Google, ring my…”

In addition, you can ask for the location of an item. If the item is in the house, the Assistant will return an appropriate location using Tile’s Bluetooth capabilities, by saying something like “your keys were last seen today at 9 PM near the Kitchen speaker.” If the item is out of Bluetooth range, the Assistant will instead return the item’s last known location, based on Tile’s location services.

 

Tile leverages its large network of Tile app users as a crowd-finding platform to help when items are missing. To date, the company has sold 22+ million Tile devices worldwide and is locating more than 5 million items per day across 230 countries.

Google announced its partnership with Tile back in September 2019, but had said at the time the feature would launch later that year.

The partnership arrives at a critical time for Tile’s business. Apple is reportedly preparing to launch a Tile competitor, possibly called AirTags, that integrates deeply with iOS. According to the latest forecast from well-known Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple in the first half of 2020 will introduce the product. But unlike Tile, Apple’s are ultra-wideband tags that promise greater accuracy than Bluetooth LE and Wi-Fi.

Evidence of Apple’s tags was already found in iOS 13 code, as well.

Apple’s plan to move into Tile’s business was one of the examples brought up in a recent congressional hearing about Apple’s anti-competitive practices. At the hearing, Tile general counsel Kirsten Daru commented on how hard it is to compete with Apple.

“You might be the best team in the league, but you’re playing against a team that owns the field, the ball, the stadium, and the entire league, and they can change the rules of the game at any time,” she said.

In this context, Tile’s move to partner with Google isn’t just about expanding its business — it’s also about saving it.

To take advantage of the new feature, you’ll need to set up your Tile to sync with the Google Home app.


Source: Tech Crunch

Byte tops a million downloads amid spam issues and content concerns

New short-form video app Byte, heralded as Vine’s successor, is off to a strong start despite its issues. The app, built by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann, brings back the six-second videos made popular by Vine which was shut down in late 2016 after Twitter’s acquisition of the popular video-sharing platform. According to new data from Sensor Tower, Byte’s launch has been well-received with over 1.3 million downloads during its first week alone. The U.S. delivered the bulk of these new installs, followed by Great Britain then Canada.

The U.S. contributed 912,000 downloads, or 70% of the installs, the report says. While Great Britain and Canada offered 7% and 6% of installs, respectively. The majority of Byte downloads were also on iOS, with 950,000 iOS downloads compared with 350,000 installs on Android.

App Annie’s numbers differed a bit, but also found that Byte topped 1 million total downloads on iOS and Android through Sunday, Feb. 2.

Sensor Tower’s new report compares Byte’s figures to Vine’s debut in January 2013, which only saw a total of 775,000 installs during its first week on iOS. However, that doesn’t mean Byte is soon to be a much more popular app than its predecessor.

For starters, the app market has grown over the years to include more users and more devices. In 2016, for example, only 2.5 billion users worldwide had smartphones. Now that number tops 3.5 billion. In addition, Vine launched as an unknown startup into a market that had yet to really embrace short-form. Byte, on the other hand, not only takes advantage of its association with Vine, it also arrives at a time when short-form video is now hugely popular thanks to Vine’s success and TikTok, the latter which became the No. 4 most-downloaded app of 2019.

Despite its solid launch numbers, Byte’s debut was not unmarred.

The app immediately saw massive comment spam as bots rushed to fill comment sections with follow requests (and follow for follows), including requests from pornbots. Byte’s early adopters also started snatching up coveted usernames — those belonging to real people, ranging from tech folks to celebs like Taylor Swift and other prominent figures like Trump, Bezos, Tiger Woods and others, Slate reported. The company quickly moved to acknowledge the problem and promised a cleanup was underway.

But that’s not Byte’s only issue. The app originally launched with a 12+ age rating, yet was immediately filled with adult humor alongside videos from obvious minors. Surfaced in Byte’s popular feed were videos with dick jokes and sexual humor, and problematic content including distasteful jokes about child abuse and coronavirus victims.

To give you a sense of Byte’s content, a perusal of the “Popular” feed on Friday surfaced a video featuring a teenaged-to-young adult boy joking “if you call me a slut in the comments one more time, I’m going to suck all your d***s.” Another teenaged-appearing boy joked about a prostate exam performed by his dad. A boy of a similar age asks if anyone had ever pooped into someone’s….and then the video cuts off.

It’s unclear if the boys in question are 18 or older, but seeing these — as well as so many other videos featuring dick jokes — followed by videos filmed by very young children was an uncomfortable experience.

The Popular feed also featured a video of a drone trying to fly a dildo into a sex doll. One video made light of child abuse, with a man viciously hitting the phone screen. The video is filmed from above, giving you the child’s perspective. The caption read: “when a child brings up a valid argument.”

Two other videos featured toddlers – one of a dad knocking the baby down, perhaps on purpose, as they played ball, only to later fall himself. Another depicted someone spraying a baby in the face with the kitchen sink nozzle, followed by the baby crying.

One video made fun of Chinese people dying from coronavirus. Another showed a teen smoking a joint, then hearing a siren and running.

Vine videos were strange and dumb in their own way, but the best weren’t typically crass or dirty. Think:  duck army, eyebrows on fleek, hate blockers, what are those, Squidward hits the dab, and so on.

Given the amount of adult humor, Byte’s lack of an age-gate and the app’s 12+ rating was concerning. (Byte updated to 17+ over the weekend. The above videos aren’t surfacing now. We know Apple was taking a look at its content).

Another potential concern was that a lot of Byte’s content was recycled from elsewhere — there were clips from YouTube, FunnyorDie, TV shows, and even TikTok — logo and all. Users also reposted Snapchat videos and memes from around the web.

With the changes to the age rating, it seems Byte may have been alerted to some of its more problematic content. Byte now puts a curated Spotlight feed at the top of its discovery page, where videos curation is improved.

The company on Friday also published the initial details on its Partner Program, touting the potential for revenue other platforms don’t provide.

TikTok, by comparison, hasn’t quite figured out how to monetize — its app has seen 1.65 billion downloads to date, but only grossed $176.9 million in 2019. However, TikTok’s elite are making names for themselves that allow them to grow their brand in other ways, including by directing users to other social channels like YouTube and Instagram, and even doing meet-and-greets with fans.

Whether a whole new world of Byte stars emerges remains to be seen.


Source: Tech Crunch

Daily Crunch: Hulu CEO steps down

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

1. Hulu restructures under Disney, CEO Randy Freer departs

Hulu CEO Randy Freer is stepping down from his role as part of a major restructuring of Disney’s streaming business. The move signals Disney’s plans to streamline its direct-to-consumer operations, which also include Disney+ and ESPN+.

Disney took control of Hulu last year following its acquisition of 21st Century Fox and a subsequent deal with the service’s other owner, NBCUniversal. However, the company had largely left Hulu alone to operate as usual — until now.

2. BlackBerry and TCL will end their handset partnership in August 2020

BlackBerry and TCL announced that they would end their four-year brand licensing and tech support partnership in August 2020, with TCL ceasing to make new models of BlackBerry handsets after that point.

3. Launch startup Skyrora successfully tests 3D-printed rocket engines powered by plastic waste

Skyrora’s rocket engines are novel not only in their use of 3D printing, but also because the fuel that powers them is developed from plastic waste — a new type of fuel called “Ecosene” the startup says makes its launch vehicles greener and more ecologically sound than the competition.

4. Apple News adds coverage of 2020 US presidential election, including guides to candidates, issues & news literacy

The coverage includes curated news, information and election data from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, NBC News, ProPublica, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today and others. The Apple News editorial team has also put together a series of curated guides, special features and other resources for readers from both sides of the political spectrum.

5. Nigeria is becoming Africa’s unofficial tech capital

Nigeria has become a magnet for venture capital, a hotbed for startup formation and a strategic entry point for Silicon Valley. Still, Jake Bright acknowledges that as a frontier market, there is volatility to the country’s political and economic trajectory. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. Watch this year’s tech-themed Super Bowl ads from Amazon, Google and more

Some of these ads come from tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, which have hired big stars to promote their products. Meanwhile, Dashlane found a fun way to remind viewers of the nightmare of life without a password manager, while Squarespace enlisted Winona Ryder to build a website on the platform.

7. This week’s TechCrunch podcasts

The latest full episode of Equity features a discussion of why Kleiner Perkins is investing its latest fund of $600 million at a rapid pace, while the Monday news roundup looks at the global market’s response to coronavirus fears. And over at Original Content, we review the Netflix cheerleading documentary “Cheer.”


Source: Tech Crunch

The case for cooperative tech startups

When Uber and Lyft went public, it wasn’t the drivers who got rich — it was the executives, investors and some early employees. In an era when it has become clear that tech executives and investors are frequently the only ones who’ll reap rewards for a company’s success, cooperative startups are getting more attention.

Depending on how it’s set up, a cooperative model offers workers and users true ownership and control in a company; any profits that are generated are returned to the members or reinvested in the company.

Co-ops aren’t new: The nation’s longest-running example is The Philadelphia Contributionship, a mutually owned insurance company founded by Benjamin Franklin in 1752. In 1895, the International Co-operative Alliance formed to serve as a way to unite cooperatives across the world. Some colleges have student-run housing co-ops where cleaning, food preparation and other responsibilities are shared. Today, there are many well-known large-scale co-ops, including outdoor recreation store REI, Arizmendi Bakery in San Francisco and Blue Diamond Growers, one of the world’s largest tree-nut processors.

What’s novel, however, is applying the co-op model to technology startups. Start.coop, an accelerator for cooperative startups, is just one group trying to facilitate that practice.


Source: Tech Crunch

Why VCs are dumping money into insurance marketplaces

Following our look at why so many startups are building OKR-focused software and why venture capitalists are pouring capital into their efforts, today we’re asking a similar question about insurance marketplace startups.

This month, Insurify raised a $23 million Series A that TechCrunch covered here. And even more recently, Gabi, a competitor, raised $27 million. The two rounds added up to $50 million for the insurance marketplace startup space in less than two weeks.

But there was more to come. Late in the wek, Policygenius, another participant in the space, added $100 million to its accounts. With that round, the total venture tally for insurance marketplace startups rose to $150 million for the month of January.

What the hell is going on, and why has so much been invested in the space recently? Let’s try to answer those questions by looking at who competes in the space, how much they have raised individually, and then unpack what has attracted all the fresh capital. Hint: As always, it’s about market size and economics.

Competition


Source: Tech Crunch

Justin Kan opens up (Part 2)

Justin Kan was talking about the systems in his life. The serial entrepreneur/founder, who recently announced a pivot and significant layoffs at Atrium, his latest venture, came to speak at last fall’s TechCrunch Disrupt in high-fashion black sweats and an extremely colorful pair of Nikes.

After Kan wrapped up his panel, we sat down for a wide-ranging and philosophical interview. And as we left off in part one of our conversation, Kan was explaining his self-described Buddhist philosophy of life.

But in the second part of our interview, I wanted to focus more on Kan’s thoughts about systems in society as a whole. There’s a difference, after all, between working mindfully to change oneself and doing so to change society. As we’ve seen with Adam Neumann, among others, there is a certain class of “spiritual” Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who use their platform in tech to assuage their own inner suffering — and perhaps gain influence by helping similarly influential people alleviate their own. WeWork, for example, cultivated associations with everything from Kabbalah to Deepak Chopra to mindful eating before the company melted under the heat of its own ethical challenges.

I don’t know that there is evidence to place Kan in the above category; maybe he is better understood as a legitimate, if unconventional, Big Thinker. But either way, it would be important to ask: What good is it when tech leaders like Kan seek a Buddhist alleviation of suffering, if the industries that sustain them are, at scale, currently creating enormous and very tangible suffering for countless millions of less fortunate people?


Source: Tech Crunch

Watch this year’s tech-themed Super Bowl ads from Amazon, Google and more

Many of the companies spending big bucks on today’s big game have already released their ads (or teasers for those ads) on YouTube. So if you’re curious about what how tech companies will be promoting themselves tonight, this is the roundup for you.

Some of these ads come from tech giants like Amazon and Facebook, who have hired big stars to promote their products. Meanwhile, Dashlane found a fun way to remind viewers of the nightmare of life without a password manager, while Squarespace enlisted Winona Ryder to build a website on the platform.

The Super Bowl also provides an opportunity for automotive companies like Hyundai to put new technology front-and-center in their marketing, and for SodaStream to take viewers into space. And while voice assistants don’t seem to be as big a theme as they were last year, at least we’re getting a killer robot, courtesy of Pringles and “Ricky and Morty.”

You can watch the ads in alphabetical order below. And I’ll update this post as more ads become available online.

Amazon

Audi

Dashlane

Facebook (teaser)

Google

Hyundai

Microsoft

Pringles

SodaStream

Squarespace

T-Mobile

TurboTax


Source: Tech Crunch

Week in Review: Ad Nauseam

Hey everyone, welcome back to Week in Review where I dive deep into a bit of news from the week or just share some thoughts and go over some of the more interesting stories of the week.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.


The big story

Don’t talk about the ads, the ads don’t exist.

Nobody sells ads anymore, Facebook doesn’t and Google especially doesn’t. Ads don’t look like ads, it’s all information. Last week, Google announced some changes to its web search results that wildly reduce the visibility of what results were stuck into the feed with ad spend.

Information becoming pay-to-play in your mental space should make people on the web feel passionate. People who boycotted Star Wars Battlefront II because micro-transactions could shift the tides should get equally pissed here. This decision seemed to move the needle in frustrating consumers, and on Friday, The New York Times reported that Google was taking another look at the design changes and rolling some elements back.

It was undoubtedly a small victory, but also showcased how just as ads have evolved alongside the web, there are limits to how fast those evolutions can come and modern web consumers still have breaking points.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

  • IBM’s head of cloud is taking over the whole company
    One of the week’s most surprising bits of news was that IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is set to be replaced in April as the head of the company. In just one more crystal clear indicator that the cloud is IBM’s future, senior vice president for Cloud and Cognitive Software Arvind Krishna will be taking the reins. Read more here.
  • Apple ordered to pay up nearly $1 billion
    There’s never a dull moment when it comes to Apple’s legal escapades. This week, the cards weren’t in the company’s favor as a judge ordered them to pay up big time in a patent infringement suit filed by the California Institute of Technology regarding the wireless chips in Apple’s products. Read more about Apple’s next moves in our coverage.
  • Facebook rolls out more privacy controls
    Facebook’s privacy reputation isn’t the greatest lately, this, despite Zuckerberg’s efforts to rebrand the social network with privacy at its core. Well, this week the company rolled out new controls meant to let users visualize and restrict how their activity off-Facebook is stored.. Read more here.

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription business had another great week of content. My colleague Romain Dillet talked a bit about the security dangers facing small startups and how founders can be more mindful of staying secure from the beginning.

Some essential advice for securing your small startup

“Jeff Bezos’ phone was hacked. And if the richest person in the world is vulnerable, chances are good that your startup could get hacked, too.

The good news is that, as a tiny company, you’re not a big target. But as soon as you hire your first employee, it’s time to think about adopting basic security practices to ensure that you’re less vulnerable. Nothing is perfectly secure on the internet, but you can mitigate risk…”

Sign up for more newsletters, including my colleague Darrell Etherington’s new space-focused newsletter Max Q, here.


Source: Tech Crunch

Startups Weekly: One Medical IPO raises unicorn hopes

Maybe ‘tech-enabled’ is good enough for public markets?

Everybody’s talking about revenues after WeWork, but maybe you still don’t need to have all the right numbers in place to achieve a strong IPO? That’s the initial takeaway Alex Wilhelm has after One Medical’s successful debut this week. One might think it looks like a tech-enabled unicorn, that doesn’t generate the recurring revenue and margins of a true tech-powered business.

But, the doctor-services provider closed up almost 40% on a somewhat ambitious price of $14 per share. It had raised $532.1 million during its time as a private company, with a fairly recent valuation of $1.71 billion. With its closing value of $19.50 per share today, One Medical is now worth $2.38 billion.

That’s despite gross margins under the 50% mark, deeply minority recurring revenue and 30% revenue growth in 2019 at best, as Alex noted on Extra Crunch Friday. It is now worth about 8.5x its trailing revenues.

“There are cash-generating SaaS companies that are growing only a bit more slowly that are trading for lower multiples,” he has previously observed. “I cannot see what makes the company — an unprofitable, only moderately growing upstart with non-recurring revenue — worth a SaaS multiple. Especially as its gross margins aren’t great and aren’t improving.”

Meanwhile, mattress-seller Casper, which also filed new information about its IPO plans this week, has numbers that aren’t all that different. But it’s just hoping to not take too big of a haircut on its last private valuation, Alex separately noted on EC.

Maybe public investors still care about a great story, despite the rough debuts of Blue Apron, SmileDirect, WeWork and a range of others? Certainly, One Medical’s work to improve medical care is laudable regardless of these questions (in fact, it won the Best Healthcare Startup Crunchie in 2013).

Stay tuned for more.

How acquirers look at your company

Let’s say the public markets are not for you, though, and instead you want to get acquired. Ed Byrne of Scaleworks looks at this both as a startup investor and, through a separate part of his company, as an acquirer, and has kindly provided a detailed explainer on Extra Crunch for startup founders.

Here are his key deciders from the purchaser perspective:

  1. Downside protection: Are we confident we are not going to lose money?
  2. Median: If we work hard, focus on good business operations and execute the low-hanging fruit, will we be able to grow this business enough to make a solid return (solid return being an increased valuation multiple from a higher revenue base)?
  3. Upside: If one of our category creation ideas pans out, and we succeed in winning a very targeted segment of the market, is there an opportunity for this business to be a real winner and provide outsized returns?

Buying and taking on someone else’s business is always a scary proposition — the unknown unknowns — but if you get comfortable with the fundamental of the company, acquisitions can be a real accelerator compared to the epic effort — and high risk — of starting from scratch.

Where top VCs are investing in travel, tourism and hospitality tech

Want to build the next Airbnb? In this week’s investor survey, Arman Tabatabai spoke to some of the most active and successful investors in travel-oriented industries today — the general mood is pretty positive, with M&A expected to help incumbents boost consumer-facing service quality, and new technologies cracking open more possibilities for companies of all sizes.

Respondents include:

A conversation with ‘the most ambitious female VC in Europe’

Starting a company in Europe? Want to? Here’s how Blossom Capital cofounder and long-time investor Ophelia Brown explains the opportunities in the region to Steve O’Hear.

Having now been in this ecosystem for so long, I think the inflection point is the number of successful high-growth companies that we’ve produced from Europe, be it Adyen, Spotify, Farfetch, Elastic and Klarna, where my [Blossom] partner Louise was as well, I think what it has really shown to people is that you can take risk at the early stage and build meaningful businesses from Europe. And I think that’s really encouraged a new next generation of entrepreneur. And Europe is changing its mindset that it’s okay to fail.

And I think the other shift is that now people are saying, “okay, well, I’m not going to move to the valley and trying to build my teams because talent is so competitive and so expensive over there, I want to build in Europe.” And then finally, the great engineering, design, product talent here and then being helped by funds like us to scale it at the beginning and early stages, and then going on to produce some really interesting things. I don’t think U.S. funds are coming over here because they see cheaper pricing and lower valuations. They’re coming over here because they are looking at markets and industries and finding the potential next best thing over in Europe.

Around the horn

SoftBank wants its on-demand portfolio to stop losing so much money (TC)

Tracking corporate venture capital’s rise over the past decade (EC)

True product-market fit is a minimum viable company (TC)

Gauging email success, invite-only app launches and other growth tactics (EC)

All eyes are on the next liquidity event when it comes to space startups (TC)

Essential advice for securing your small startup (EC)

Adding India to your business (TC)

#EquityPod

This week’s episode features Alex along with co-host Danny Crichton talking about:

  • Kleiner Perkins’ fast investment of a recent $600m round
  • Free Agency’s tech play for talent management
  • The huge round for “Ring for enterprise” Verdaka
  • Insurance startup funding trends
  • Updates on the on-demand wars
  • The latest in tech IPOs

Get Startups Weekly in your inbox every Saturday morning, just sign up here


Source: Tech Crunch