Twitter is testing better image previews and fewer cropped photos

Twitter says it’s running a test with a small subset of iOS and Android users to “give people an accurate preview” of what an image will look like without the trial and error that process involves now. As it stands now, the platform automatically crops images to make them display in a more condensed way in the timeline, where users often scroll through without clicking on an image preview. But that approach has created some problems.

The biggest one, historically, is that Twitter’s algorithm that decides which part of an image gets the focus was demonstrated to have baked-in racial bias. The algorithm prioritized white faces over Black ones in its image preview, even cropping out the former president of the United States in one person’s tests.

Twitter’s automatic image handling is also a hassle for photographers and artists, who generally prefer to have total control over how an image is presented. If the crop is off, that small misfire can be the difference between a photo attracting a ton of attention or getting ignored outright. It also ruins narrative tweets, as Twitter notes in its example of the tweet about a dog who is conspicuously absent from one of its crops.

It sounds like Twitter is also trying out showing more full images in the timeline. In tweets, Twitter’s Chief Design Officer Dantley Davis said that anyone testing the new image cropping system will find that most single image tweets in normal aspect ratios won’t get a crop at all, though super wide or super tall images will get a crop weighted around the center.

For photographers (present company included) tired of toggling between Instagram’s preference for portrait-oriented images and Twitter’s insistence on landscape crops, that’s good news too. As you can see in the sample image, the change could actually make Twitter a richer visual platform. That would likely mean more scrolling past images that take up multiple tweets’ worth of vertical space, but we’d be happy to trade the time spent clicking through images for a prettier Twitter timeline.


Source: Tech Crunch

Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the H-1B, O-1A and EB-1A?

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.


Dear Sophie:

I’m an entrepreneur who wants to expand my startup to the U.S. What are the benefits and drawbacks of various types of visas and green cards?

The ones I’ve heard the most about are the H-1B, O-1 and EB-1A.

— Intelligent in India

Dear Intelligent:

I’m happy to hear you’re considering the O-1A extraordinary ability visa and the EB-1A extraordinary green card! Individuals often assume they need to have won a Nobel Prize or some other major award or be well known in their field to qualify for either the O-1A or the EB-1A — and that’s simply not the case.

A composite image of immigration law attorney Sophie Alcorn in front of a background with a TechCrunch logo.

Image Credits: Joanna Buniak / Sophie Alcorn (opens in a new window)

“Particularly for folks from Asia, being a self-promoter is massively looked down upon. Humility is important,” says Navroop Sahdev, a pioneering economist and blockchain expert I recently interviewed for my podcast. Sahdev is founder and CEO of The Digital Economist, a Connection Science Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a partner at NextGen Venture Partners.

She spoke with me about her immigration journey to the United States, which included two H-1B visas, an O-1A visa and an EB-1A green card.

Here are the pros and cons of each visa and green card that you listed.

H-1B visa

Overall, the requirements for the H-1B specialty occupation visa are not as stringent as those for the O-1A visa and the EB-1A green card, which is why many employers sponsor international students who are on an F-1 visa and recently graduated or on OPT (Optional Practical Training) or STEM OPT for an H-1B.

Because demand for the H-1B far exceeds the annual supply of 85,000, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) holds a random lottery to determine who can apply for an H-1B. (That random lottery is slated to switch to a wage-based selection process next year.)


Source: Tech Crunch

Arist adds $2M to its seed round to grow its SMS-based training service

This morning Arist, a startup that sells software allowing other organizations to offer SMS-based training to staff, announced that it has extended its seed round to $3.9 million after adding $2 million to its prior raise.

TechCrunch has covered the company modestly before this seed-extension, noting that it was part of the CRV-backed Liftoff List, and reporting on some of its business details when it took part in a recent Y Combinator demo day.

Something that stood out in our notes on the company when it presented at the accelerator’s graduation event was its economics, with our piece noting that the startup “already [has] several big ticket clients and [says it] will soon be profitable.” Profitable is just not a word TechCrunch hears often when it comes to early-stage, high-growth companies.

So, when the company picked up more capital, we picked up the phone. TechCrunch spoke with the company’s founding team, including Maxine Anderson, the company’s current COO; Ryan Laverty, its president; and Michael Ioffe, its CEO, about its latest round.

According to the trio, Arist raised its initial $1.9 million around the time it left Y Combinator, a round that was led by Craft Ventures at a $15 million valuation. Following that early investment, the company’s business with large clients performed well, leading to it closing $2 million more last December. The founders said that the new funds were raised at a higher price-point than its previous seed tranche.

The second deal was led by Global Founders Capital.

The company’s enterprise adoption makes sense, as all large companies have regular training requirements for their workers; and as anyone who has worked for a megacorp knows, current training, while improved in recent years, is far from perfect. Arist is a bet that lots of corporate training — and the training that emanates from governments, nonprofits and the like — can be sliced into small pieces and ingested via text-message.

For that the company charges around $1,000 per month, minimum.

Arist did catch something of a COVID wave, with its founding team telling TechCrunch that pitching its service to large companies got easier after the pandemic hit. Many concerns better realized how busy their staff was when they moved to working from home, the trio explained, and with some folks suffering from limited internet connectivity, text-based training helped pick up slack.

We were also curious about how the startup onboards customers to the somewhat new text-based learning world; is there a steep learning curve to be managed? As it turns out, the startup helps new customers build their first course. And, in response to our question about the expense of that effort, the Arist crew said that they use freelancers for the task, keeping costs low.

Recently Arist has expanded its engineering staff, and plans to scale from around 11 people today to around 30 by the end of the year. And while Anderson, Laverty and Ioffe are based in Boston, they are hiring remotely. The startup serves global customers via a WhatsApp integration. So Arist should be able to scale its staff and customer base around the world effectively from birth. (This is the new normal, we reckon.)

What’s ahead? Arist wants to grow its revenues by 5x to 10x by the end of the year, hire, and might share if it wants to raise more capital around the end of the year.

Oh, and it partners with Twilio to some degree, though the group was coy on just what sort of discounts it may receive; the founding team merely noted that they liked the SMS giant and deferred further commentary.

All told, Arist is what we look for in an early-stage startup in terms of growth, vision and potential market scale — the startup thinks that 80% of training should be via SMS or Slack and Teams, the latter two of which are a hint about its product direction. But Arist feels a bit more mature financially than some of its peers, perhaps due to its price point. Regardless, we’ll check back in at the mid-point of the year and see how growth is ticking along at the company.


Source: Tech Crunch

Memes for sale

The creator of the Nyan Cat, Chris Torres, has organized an informal collection of meme originators – the creators or original popularizers of meme images — into a two-week-long auction of their works. Under the hashtag #memeconomy the creators of memes like Bad Luck Brian, Coughing Cat, Kitty Cat Dance, Scumbag Steve, Twerky Pepe and some others are finally finding a way to monetize the creation of genuine cultural phenomenons that have been used freely for decades.

They’re mostly being hosted on booming new crypto art and collectibles platform Foundation, which launched in February and has already hosted $6M in sales of over 1,000 NFTs. I have a lot to say about NFTs and can’t say them all here, but I found this project fascinating and wanted to note it. The fact is that memes are Internet art (sorry). They are unique creations that took elements of participatory and performance art and injected them into the veins of the internet. In many ways, they have millions of creators, as the original editions may have planted the seed but every use and permutation gave them additional strands of DNA, crafting their cultural importance upload by upload. They have let us express ourselves — our desire, disgust, joy and lust — when words just wouldn’t suffice.

These “originals” are made original by the act of them being minted on the blockchain by the original artists. I know, it’s a distinction that may seem slim when the same images can be had anywhere at any time, but that’s the beauty of the re-organization that is happening within all of DeFi and crypto at the moment. We are stripping out layers of commerce and communication that benefited only platforms and participants that took part in the origination and sale of art from the perspective of frameworks like the DMCA and DRM. Those relationships are being rethought. The recapture of value for works that have already been broadly distributed has been historically relegated to ‘licensing them for t-shirts’. And extremely rarely elevated to the level of fine art sale.

Now that we’re all living on the Internet, Internet art is just art. And so are memes.

That’s why it’s fascinating to see some of the people who have created things that have let so m​any of us express ourselves get paid.

One famous case of this, of course, is the Pepe and its creator Matt Furie. Though Furie’s attempts to redeem Pepe have focused on attempting to reclaim him from a legacy of racist and hateful memes, Pepe and his friends are a cool cast of characters and it would be heartening to see Furie reclaim them by minting them himself.

 

I spoke a bit to Torres about the project and why he got interested in it.

TC: Why did you decide to organize this informal schedule of meme NFTs?

Torres: The idea has always kind of been in the back of my mind since discovering the NFT universe. The idea of NFTs were always so attractive to me, a place where you can create your own original art and gain proper attribution for your work. Memes have always had a rough time on the Internet, because their creators are usually taken advantage of, and I have personally seen artists have their works stolen and monetized to the tune of millions of dollars without even proper credit. So the idea has always been down deep in my subconscious but this week things have really amped up enough to finally give me the power I need to make it happen!

TC: How did you get in contact with the creators?

Actually, they all contacted me! It’s unbelievable knowing I’m in direct contact with some fantastic iconic internet legends from the past. Some of these have existed solely as enigmas on the Internet, it’s great connecting with them. Things started with casual conversations with Bad Luck Brian, but then Trollface messaged me, then Me Gusta, then Kitty Cat Dance, then things just kept amping up.

TC: How has it felt to have your creation formally rewarded after spending so long in the cultural meme-ory?

It’s still very surreal, to be honest. The NFT community is full of very talented people with so many thoughts and ideas on how to build a better future for the crypto space. I’ve actually used this power for good this week by starting up #Memeconomy with all these talented meme creators and will be trying my hardest to get these guys the recognition they deserve.

TC: What excites you about NFTs and art?

The number one thing that’s kept me excited for NFTs is just knowing that it’s a perfect way to empower artists to take ownership of their own works. I’ve been hanging out in the Clubhouse chats, reading everything I can on Twitter, and just have been losing sleep being so enthralled by it all. Every day I wake up and there’s a new meta of NFTs out there. It’s cool to see all this artistic knowledge evolving in real time. I absolutely live off that energy, and it’s inspired me to be more creative than ever.

The world of NFTs is complex and fascinating and deserves a deeper look that looks at the economic, ecological and technical aspects. We’ve already hosted and written about various projects in the space. Stay tuned for more.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

4 ways startups will drive GPT-3 adoption in 2021

The introduction of GPT-3 in 2020 was a tipping point for artificial intelligence. In 2021, this technology will power the launch of a thousand new startups and applications. GPT-3 and similar models have brought the power of AI into the hands of those looking to experiment — and the results have been extraordinary.

Trained on trillions of words, GPT-3 is a 175-billion parameter transformer model — the third of such models released by OpenAI. GPT-3 is remarkable in its ability to generate human-like text and responses — in some respects, it’s eerie. When prompted by a user with text, GPT-3 can return coherent and topical emails, tweets, trivia and much more.

In 2021, this technology will power the launch of a thousand new startups and applications.

Suddenly, authoring emails, customer interactions, social media exchanges and even news stories can be automated — at least in part. While large companies are pondering the pitfalls and risks of generating text (remember Microsoft’s disastrous Tay bot?), startups have already begun sweeping in with novel applications — and they will continue to lead the charge in transformer-based innovation.

OpenAI researchers first released the paper introducing GPT-3 in May 2020, and what started out as some nifty use cases on Twitter has quickly become a hotbed of startup activity. Companies have been formed on top of GPT-3, using the model to generate emails and marketing copy, to create an interactive nutrition tracker or chatbot, and more. Let OthersideAI take a first pass at writing your emails, or try out Broca or Snazzy for your ad copy and campaign content, for instance.

Other young companies are harnessing the API to accelerate their existing efforts, augmenting their technical teams’ capabilities with the power of 175 billion parameters and quickly bringing otherwise difficult products to market with much greater speed and data than previously possible. With some clever prompt engineering (a combination of an instruction to the model with a sample output to help guide the model), these companies leverage the underlying GPT-3 system to improve or extend an existing application’s capabilities.

Sure, a text expander can be a useful tool for shorthand notation — but powered by GPT-3, that shorthand can be transformed into a product that generates contextually aware emails in your own style of writing.

As early-stage technology investors, we are inspired to see AI broadly, and natural language processing specifically, become more accessible via the next generation of large-scale transformer models like GPT-3. We expect they will unlock new use cases and capabilities we have yet to even contemplate.


Source: Tech Crunch

Techstars Music announces its 2021 class and a partnership with media company Quality Control

This morning Techstars Music is announcing 11 new companies that have joined its ranks, along with a partnership with Atlanta media house Quality Control.

While it’s easy to mentally bunch everything Techstars does together under the singular “Techstars” name, it’s actually made up of 40+ interconnected accelerator programs each with its own focus and portfolio. The majority of these are focused on a specific region — programs like Techstars Boulder, Boston, or LA. Others focus on a specific vertical or industry — like Sports, Space, or, in this case, Music.

So what all does that “Music” focus cover? It’s not just music creation tools, or apps for artists. As Techstars Music Managing Director Bob Moczydlowsky put it in a Q&A last year, “we don’t invest in music companies — we invest in companies solving problems for music.”

Their past portfolio includes Endel, which generates “personalized soundscapes” meant to help you focus or fall asleep faster, and Blink Identity, a company looking to replace the paper/digital concert ticket with facial recognition machines at the venue’s entrance.

The companies in the 2021 class, in alphabetical order:

555 Comic: Develops “virtual characters” and uses them to tell stories through social media (like the tweet above). Imagine one artist having multiple “personas”, with each genre they dabble in represented by a different character, each with an evolving backstory. (Fun trivia: the number five said aloud in Japanese sounds like “Go”; the Japanese company’s name is a play on “Go Go Go!”)

BlackOakTV: A subscription, on-demand video service focusing on content made by black creators. Currently costs $4.99 a month with apps available on most major platforms.

Creative Futures Collective: A networking/mentoring program aiming to “unearth the next generation of creative industry leaders from disenfranchised backgrounds” and connect them with jobs and paid internships.

Fave: A social platform meant to help connect an artist’s “superfans” with each other and allow them to compete to earn rewards from the artist.

HappsNow: a fully white-labeled ticketing platform meant to give artists/venues more control of the experience.

Holotch: Capture volumetric 3D video with off-the-shelf technology and stream it live. Imagine an artist capturing a performance live, and being able to watch them perform in your living room through augmented reality “holograms”.

Music Tech Works: A super simplified catalog and workflow for figuring out who owns the rights to a song and acquiring a license to use it.

Rares: A platform for investing in shares of particularly notable sneakers — think gameworn shoes, the hardest to find, or those that were never mass produced.

Remetrik: A software platform that aims to bring all of the (often labyrinthian) accounting involved with music royalties into one place in a simple and transparent way.

Volta Audio: A platform for artists to build immersive, evolving VR experiences in which they can perform live.

Westcott Multimedia: An automated advertising platform that looks for events related a music catalog (like, say, an artist’s birthday, or a song being played in the background of a viral video) and builds marketing campaigns around them.

Along with this latest class, Techstars Music is also announcing that it’s partnering with Quality Control, the media house behind Quality Control Music — best known as the label behind Migos, Lil Yachty, and Lil Baby. Quality Control joins Techstars Music as a “member” company (sort of like their equivalent to an LP, offering investment, helping to vet companies and mentoring them once they’re in); existing members include Amazon Music, AVEX, Bill Silva Entertainment, Concord, Peloton, Entertainment One, Right Hand Music Group, Royalty Exchange, Sony, and Warner Music Group.

Moczydlowsky tells me that Techstars Music alumni companies have raised over $105m since the first class in 2017, and that the group above has already raised over $3M ahead of its Demo Day in May.


Source: Tech Crunch

Epic Games buys photogrammetry software maker Capturing Reality

Epic Games is quickly becoming a more dominant force in gaming infrastructure M&A after a string of recent purchases made to bulk up their Unreal Engine developer suite. Today, the company announced that they’ve brought on the team from photogrammetry studio Capturing Reality to help the company improve how it handles 3D scans of environments and objects.

Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Photogrammetry involves stitching together multiple photos or laser scans to create 3D models of objects that can subsequently be exported as singular files. As the computer vision techniques have evolved to minimize manual fine-tuning and adjustments, designers have been beginning to lean more heavily on photogrammetry to import real-world environments into their games. 

Using photogrammetry can help studio developers create photorealistic assets in a fraction of the time it would take to create a similar 3D asset from scratch. It can be used to quickly create 3D assets of everything from an item of clothing, to a car, to a mountain. Anything that exists in 3D space can be captured and as game consoles and GPUs grow more capable in terms of output, the level of detail that can be rendered increases as does the need to utilize more detailed 3D assets.

The Bratislava-based studio will continue operating independently even as its capabilities are integrated into Unreal. Epic announced some reductions to the pricing rates for Capturing Reality’s services, dropping the price of a perpetual license fee from nearly $18,000 to $3,750. In FAQs on the studio’s site, the company notes that they will continue to support nongaming use clients moving forward.

In 2019, Epic Games acquired Quixel, which hosted a library of photogrammetry “megascans” that developers could access.

 


Source: Tech Crunch

Detail wants to turn your phone into a software-optimized camera app for live video

Meet Detail, a new startup working on an app for iOS and macOS so that you can turn your iPhone into a software-optimized camera for live video. The startup wants to make it easy to use the phone that you have in your pocket with the livestreaming platform that you already use, such as Zoom, Google Meet, Twitch, Hopin or YouTube Live.

Over the past year, if you have had to present something to a large audience over a livestream, chances are you’ve faced a few challenges. First, as Joanna Stern of the Wall Street Journal demonstrated, laptop webcams suck. There’s no way you’re going to look good with your computer.

Second, if you’re willing to invest some money, you can buy a ring light, a dedicated camera, a good microphone, etc. The issue is that it’s expensive. More importantly, it’s been really hard to buy some of this stuff as many remote workers have been looking for those devices.

Third, you might be good at teaching something, but not good at video production. Those are different skills and somehow people are telling you that you should know everything about white balance, anti-flickering and more.

As for Detail, the company wants to make it as easy as possible to go from zero to livestream. The best camera that you have is most likely the one in your pocket, right there on the back of your smartphone. For the past few years, computational photography has led to tremendous improvements when it comes to taking photos with your phone. But there’s still some work to do on the livestreaming front.

Detail founder Paul Veugen rightly points out that hosting a live video has become a commodity. But everything that happens before you send the video feed over the internet could be improved.

At first Detail is going to be an iPhone and Mac app that works hand in hand like Camo and EpocCam. There are going to be some easy-to-use settings to tweak color grades, add filters, etc. It’s going to be a more opinionated take on the smartphone-as-a-webcam movement.

Behind the scenes, the team is composed of some of the people that worked on Human, an app I started covering way back in 2013. Human was a passive fitness tracking app — you could set it up and get insights about how active you had been over the past few days. Essentially, it was like Apple’s activity rings before Apple introduced the Apple Watch. Human was acquired by Mapbox in 2016.

Detail raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by Connect Ventures. Hustle Fund, Alexander Ljung, Anke Huiskes, Arthur Kosten, Elodie and Tony Jamous, Hiten Shah, Janis Krums, Mart Kelder, Micha Hernandez van Leuffen, Othman Laraki, Omri Amir and Sten Tamkivi are also participating in the round.

As you can see, Detail is still in active development and the beta test is going to start soon. But it’s an intriguing app and I’m going to keep an eye on it to see how it pans out.

Image Credits: Detail


Source: Tech Crunch

Announcing the agenda for TC Early Stage – Operations & Fundraising

As an early-stage founder, how do you identify the right investors? Or know how to hire the best possible team to set up your company for growth? Should you bootstrap, and if so, how do you do it successfully? How do you nail virtual pitch meetings? What about product market fit? Board construction and good governance? How do you make sound financial decisions both for your company and yourself?

You’ve got questions. TechCrunch Early Stage will have answers for you on April 1 & 2.

At the virtual event, we’re bringing together some of the most seasoned operators in the fields of legal, recruiting, product, data security, and sales to help you find your way through a tactical quagmire to the bright light of success at the end of the tunnel.

Of course, the show will cover more than operational challenges. We also have many, many sessions around fundraising, from how to think about raising your Series A to how to get an investors attention.
If you’re in the midst of building a company, this show is worth making time for. Plus, audience members will be able to ask their own questions to our expert speakers in each and every breakout session.

Finding Your Product Market Fit with Sean Lane (Olive AI)

Olive AI founder and CEO is no stranger to the pivot. Hear how he practiced patience in the search for product market fit, how he knew it when he finally found it, and tactics he used to build on it.

Sponsored by Perkins Coie: Creating and Protecting IP Value in Connection with VC Financings

How do venture capital investors value formal Intellectual Property (IP) rights in connection with a decision to fund a technology or life sciences start-up? How do they conduct IP due diligence? How do investors and founders, post-funding, ensure their start-ups are pursuing an IP strategy that optimizes exit valuation for all? Perkins Coie partners Michael Glenn (Patent Prosecution) and Matt Oshinsky (Emerging Companies Venture Capital) will be joined alongside a seasoned venture capitalist to discuss these and other questions regarding safeguarding IP rights and maximizing the value of all technology development activities.

How to Get an Investor’s Attention with Marlon Nichols (MacVenture Partners)

Marlon Nichols is an expert in early-stage investments, having invested in countless successful ventures such as Gimlet Media, MongoDB, Thrive Market, PlayVS, Fair, Wonderschool and Finesse. Right now, there is more seed stage fundraising than ever before, and Marlon will speak on how to get noticed by investors, how to grow your business and how to survive in the crowded, competitive space of tech startups. He will provide insights on how to network, craft a great pitch and target the best investors for your success.

Sponsored by Mayfield: Scientist Entrepreneurs – Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies

Biology as technology will re-invent trillion dollar industries and enhance human and planetary evolution. In this session, two early-stage investors and company builders, Arvind Gupta and Ursheet Parikh, will be in conversation with a leading author and seed investor Po Bronson, Managing Director of IndieBio. They will share their playbook on scaling start-ups touching upon three seminal areas which influence trajectory – fundraising, hiring, and product design. Their insights will draw on their experience with companies including ingredients-as-service leader Geltor which raised a $91 million Series B in 2020, CRISPR platform Mammoth Biosciences whose dream team includes co-founder Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna, and Endpoint Health, started by the founding team of GeneWEAVE (acquired by Roche) and former YC Bio Partner Diego Rey, which is designing a new class of therapeutic products that focus on hospital conditions that kill as many people as cancer.

How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting with Melissa Bradley (Ureeka)

The rules of the pitch meeting have changed. Instead of traveling across the country, wasting time in planes, trains and automobiles, founders can take upwards of 30 meetings in a day from the comfort of their home. Entrepreneur and VC Melissa Bradley will outline how to make the most of that half hour on Zoom and lock in the next one.

Sponsored by Merus Capital: An M&A Playbook for Startup Founders: Lessons from Google and Microsoft

One of the most important decisions a founding team can make is when to consider selling the company to a strategic buyer. In this session, learn the tactics for approaching acquirors, avoiding common pitfalls and maximizing the likelihood of achieving an eye-popping valuation. Hear from Sean Dempsey, founding partner of Merus Capital who spent 10 years leading acquisitions for Google and Microsoft, and Dave Sobota, VP of Corporate Development at Instacart and former M&A leader at Google.

10 Things NOT To Do When You Are Starting a Company with Leah Solivan (Fuel Capital)

With voices across the internet giving their two-cents on how to run a great business. Fuel Capital’s Leah Solivan, who was CEO at TaskRabbit for 8 years, will share a list of things that a founder should NOT do. Avoid the pitfalls that could break your momentum, or worst case, your company and ask Solivan your own questions.

Sponsored by Dell for Entrepreneurs: Why Founders should adopt OKRs now?

Execution is key to a start-up’s survival and growth especially when it comes to fast-moving software and technology products. Being in the tricky intersection of investors, customers and employees, a founder needs to balance priorities, align teams and create a visionary product that works. Moreover, in this age of hyper feedback loops and changing business models, the founder has to be agile enough to absorb and quickly react to changes in the product roadmap and consumer needs. OKRs – a toolkit used majorly by engineering and product teams is more than relevant now for founders of all kinds to embrace. Join the session to learn the history of OKRs, what they are about, and witness case studies of successful real-life adoption.

How To Get Into An Accelerator with Neal Sales-Griffin (Techstars)

Accelerators provide an incredible launch pad for early stage startups, offering a built-in network, accessible advisors, and of course, capital. But first, you’ve got to be accepted. Hear Techstars Neal Sales-Griffin outline how to get into an accelerator and make the most of the experience.

Sponsored by Brainbase: Naming & Protecting Your Company’s Intellectual Property with Brainbase

You have an idea for a game-changing product or service – what do you call it? Once you’ve picked a name, how do you make sure nobody else is using it? Is the domain and Twitter handle available? Brainbase makes it easy for anyone to file a trademark without a lawyer, and instantly own your brand across all channels. In this session, Brainbase co-founder and CEO Nate Cavanaugh will explain the importance of owning your company’s trademark, both for brand protection and for fundraising due diligence.

4 Things To Think About Before Raising a Series A with Bucky Moore (Kleiner Perkins)

Founders looking to raise Series A capital know that it’s an entirely different ball game than seed stage funding. Hear Kleiner Perkins partner Bucky Moore outline the most important ways to mentally prepare for heading into Series A fundraising.

Sponsored by B Capital Group: Nailing the little things: How startups can achieve operational excellence from “Day one”

The early days of launching a company can be a whirlwind for founding teams as unexpected challenges and opportunities require flexibility, agility and speed. But implementing a few key operating best practices and processes early can be a crucial part of a startup’s success or failure when it prepares for rapid growth. Join partners from B Capital Group, a multi-stage global investor, to learn about the most important things you can do to set your startup up for success early in your journey, and what will be most important to investors as you raise your Seed, A and B funding rounds. Speakers include Howard Morgan, Chairman of B Capital Group and co-founder of First Round Capital, and Partners Karen Page (formerly of Box) and Gabe Greenbaum (formerly of Pritzker Group).

How to Build Your Early Team for Future Growth with Sarah Smith (Bain Capital Ventures)

More than your investors, or even you as a founder, your early employees will have a tremendous influence on the trajectory of your company. You hire them, and often times, they hire everyone else. Hear Bain Capital Ventures partner Sarah Smith talk through how to recruit a top-notch early team that sets your startup up for future growth.

Contracts, Cap Tables and other Legal Questions with Dawn Belt (Fenwick)

No matter the industry, your startup requires legal help. Whether it’s building out the cap table, writing up contracts, understanding the laws around hiring or simply feeling secure with a TOS. Whatever the question, Fenwick & West partner Dawn Belt has the answer.

Finance for Founders with Alexa von Tobel (Inspired Capital)

As a founder, you not only have to master your company’s finances, you also have to tackle your own personal finances. Managing your money as a founder comes with a unique set of questions (see: QSBS). Leveraging her expertise from LearnVest and as a Certified Financial Planner™, Alexa will share financial planning best practices so founders can remove this layer of stress from the pressure of building a business.

Leadership Culture and Good Governance with David Easton (Generation Investment Management)

David Easton is a growth-stage partner at Generation Investment Management with portfolio companies that include Asana, Andela, Gusto, and Docusign, among others. Easton will talk through how to choose your board and foster a leadership culture that keeps sustainable, good governance top of mind.

Building and Leading a Sales Team with Ryan Azus (Zoom)

Contrary to popular opinion, even the very best products don’t sell themselves. Salespeople do. Hear from Zoom’s Chief Revenue Officer, at the helm of the company’s sales team during the biggest period of growth of any software company ever, lay out how to build a stellar sales team.

The All-22 View with Eghosa Omoigui (EchoVC Partners)

Improving line of sight and dynamic field of play aperture is rarely discussed but hugely important. Great founders, operators and investors have an understanding of playbooks on both sides of the ball. We’ll talk through learnings and some ideas on how to build muscle memory and skillsets so that founders never lose perspective when it’s time to make a big decision.

And we’ll also have some great sessions from our partners too!

Creating and Protecting IP Value in Connection with VC Financings brought to you by Perkins Coie

How do venture capital investors value formal Intellectual Property (IP) rights in connection with a decision to fund a technology or life sciences start-up? How do they conduct IP due diligence? How do investors and founders, post-funding, ensure their start-ups are pursuing an IP strategy that optimizes exit valuation for all? Perkins Coie partners Michael Glenn (Patent Prosecution) and Matt Oshinsky (Emerging Companies Venture Capital) will be joined alongside a seasoned venture capitalist to discuss these and other questions regarding safeguarding IP rights and maximizing the value of all technology development activities.

Scientist Entrepreneurs – Scaling Breakout Engineering Biology Companies brought to you by Mayfield

Biology as technology will re-invent trillion dollar industries and enhance human and planetary evolution. In this session, two early-stage investors and company builders, Arvind Gupta and Ursheet Parikh, will be in conversation with a leading author and seed investor Po Bronson, Managing Director of IndieBio. They will share their playbook on scaling start-ups touching upon three seminal areas which influence trajectory – fundraising, hiring, and product design. Their insights will draw on their experience with companies including ingredients-as-service leader Geltor which raised a $91 million Series B in 2020, CRISPR platform Mammoth Biosciences whose dream team includes co-founder Nobel Laureate Jennifer Doudna, and Endpoint Health, started by the founding team of GeneWEAVE (acquired by Roche) and former YC Bio Partner Diego Rey, which is designing a new class of therapeutic products that focus on hospital conditions that kill as many people as cancer.

Using Fast Feedback to Make Higher-Confidence Decisions and Accelerate the Dev Process brought to you by UserTesting

We’ll discuss how to use fast feedback methodologies to make high-confidence product decisions based on objective customer data in real time, without slowing the dev process. Quickly diagnose problems, settle disputes, reduce the risk of rework, and iterate faster. This session will include real-world case studies.

An M&A Playbook for Startup Founders: Lessons from Google and Microsoft brought to you by Merus Capital

One of the most important decisions a founding team can make is when to consider selling the company to a strategic buyer. In this session, learn the tactics for approaching acquirors, avoiding common pitfalls and maximizing the likelihood of achieving an eye-popping valuation. Hear from Sean Dempsey, founding partner of Merus Capital who spent 10 years leading acquisitions for Google and Microsoft, and Dave Sobota, VP of Corporate Development at Instacart and former M&A leader at Google.

Why Founders should adopt OKRs now? brought to you by Dell for Entrepreneurs

Execution is key to a start-up’s survival and growth especially when it comes to fast-moving software and technology products. Being in the tricky intersection of investors, customers and employees, a founder needs to balance priorities, align teams and create a visionary product that works. Moreover, in this age of hyper feedback loops and changing business models, the founder has to be agile enough to absorb and quickly react to changes in the product roadmap and consumer needs. OKRs – a toolkit used majorly by engineering and product teams is more than relevant now for founders of all kinds to embrace. Join the session to learn the history of OKRs, what they are about, and witness case studies of successful real-life adoption.

Naming & Protecting Your Company’s Intellectual Property brought to you by Brainbase

You have an idea for a game-changing product or service – what do you call it? Once you’ve picked a name, how do you make sure nobody else is using it? Is the domain and Twitter handle available? Brainbase makes it easy for anyone to file a trademark without a lawyer, and instantly own your brand across all channels. In this session, Brainbase co-founder and CEO Nate Cavanaugh will explain the importance of owning your company’s trademark, both for brand protection and for fundraising due diligence.

Nailing the little things: How startups can achieve operational excellence from “Day one” brought to you by B Capital Group

The early days of launching a company can be a whirlwind for founding teams as unexpected challenges and opportunities require flexibility, agility and speed. But implementing a few key operating best practices and processes early can be a crucial part of a startup’s success or failure when it prepares for rapid growth. Join partners from B Capital Group, a multi-stage global investor, to learn about the most important things you can do to set your startup up for success early in your journey, and what will be most important to investors as you raise your Seed, A and B funding rounds. Speakers include Howard Morgan, Chairman of B Capital Group and co-founder of First Round Capital, and Partners Karen Page (formerly of Box) and Gabe Greenbaum (formerly of Pritzker Group).

This year, we’ve added a pitch-off on day 2 of TC Early Stage, showcasing interesting startups from a variety of sectors. All-star judges will give their feedback live. You don’t want to miss it! And if you’re interested in pitching, you can still apply to pitch by tomorrow, March 9.

Of course, TC Early Stage dual event ticket holders will get access to both events (April 1-2 and July 8-9) and have access to 2x the content that comes out of the event live or on demand. Plus, you can take advantage of additional savings with Early Bird pricing on dual event tickets until March 26!

Mercenary CEOs know all too well that this is about the most bang you can get for your buck. Period. Grab get your ticket now and save up to $100!

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Source: Tech Crunch

From electric charging to supply chain management, InMotion Ventures preps Jaguar for a sustainable future

Since InMotion Ventures, the independent investment and incubation initiative set up by Jaguar Land Rover, launched in 2016 the firm has focused on backing companies across the mobility space broadly. Its 15 active investments run the gamut from autonomous vehicles, to car insurance tech, to ride-sharing, and travel planning, but increasingly the firm is focusing its efforts on vehicle electrification and sustainable supply chains.

As the mobility market moves to embrace electrification, InMotion wants to make sure its portfolio is in the mix.

That’s evident from its most recent investment in Circulor, a company that monitors supply chains from raw material inputs to finished outputs with an eye toward sustainable sourcing.

As an OEM nowadays it’s increasingly important to have increasing transparency and visibility into how all of those materials have been sourced,” said the firm’s managing director, Sebastian Peck. Circulor already has a strong footprint in the automotive industry, Peck said, and is working with a major oil company on tracing the share of recycled plastics that have come from that provider. “It has applications across any industry.”

Jaguar Land Rover is also using Circulor’s technology to track a material that’s being used in the interior of one of the company’s vehicles, Peck said. The stealthy project hasn’t been publicly revealed yet, but the company has worked with a university and supplier to trace the material from its point of origin to the finished product.

Sustainable supply chains aren’t the only priorities Peck laid out in a recent interview with TechCrunch.

As the mobility market moves to embrace electrification, InMotion wants to make sure its portfolio is in the mix and Peck said it would be looking to make investments in a number of different areas around electric vehicles and batteries.

“We have looked at a number of companies who are developing new battery chemistries. We haven’t made an investment yet,” Peck said. “We don’t have a deep enough insight into the IP portfolios of the big battery suppliers to really be able to reliably benchmark those new chemistries. We have not had enough conviction to make an investment or back a particular company. From a value chain it is two or three steps away from us. It’s a space we’re looking at.”


Source: Tech Crunch