Ideaforge

Cosi Group, a Berlin-based startup offering an alternative to boutique hotels and managed short-stay apartments, is disclosing €20 million in new investment.

Backing the round is Vienna-based Soravia, a leading real estate group in German-speaking countries. Existing investors Cherry Ventures, e.ventures, Kreos Capital and Bremke followed on, along with a number of individual investors. They are described as including the founders of Flixbus, Travelperk, Comtravo and Cosi’s own founders.

Cosi says it will use the fresh capital to accelerate international expansion in Europe, implement a new brand and launch a “new strategic business unit” soon.

Originally described as a tech-enabled or “full-stack” hospitality service that competes with well-run boutique hotels or traditional local managed apartments, the company signs long-term leases with property owners, and then furnishes those apartments itself to “control” the interior design experience. It claims to have digitised, and where possible, automated its processes in order to scale and maintain quality of service throughout the guest journey, from initial contact to loyalty.

Christian Gaiser, CEO of Cosi, tells me the startup has not only been able to mitigate the pandemic — which has seen major restrictions in travel, including countries going into full lockdown — but actually thrive. That’s because Cosi was able to tap “new demand channels” that aren’t reliant on holiday travel or short business trips.

Described as “midstay” (guests that stay for one month or longer), examples include people who arrive in a city and need a home for one or two months until they find a longer-term apartment, citizens who need to get away from shared apartments (perhaps to be less at risk or to work from home), or families who are building or renovating a house that faces construction delays due to the pandemic.

“Thus, we were able to reach over 90% occupancy and managed to operate our locations on a cash-flow-positive scale,” adds the Cosi CEO. “Lesson learned for us: Even when almost all your demand channels dry out, you still can do a lot if you focus on what you can control. We simply activated new demand channels.”

In addition, he says the pandemic has accelerated a shift in demand preferences, seeing “big hotel bunkers” become less popular versus individual apartment style accommodations.

Meanwhile, Cosi has also seen a “massive boost in supply,” with lots of takeover opportunities in the hotel space, especially for underperforming hotel properties. And since office space demand has contracted dramatically, the company is receiving offers to convert office space for use as midstay accommodation.

“On the back of our strong COVID performance, we’ve built a lot of trust among the real estate community and receive more and more offers,” says Gaiser. “Prices for supply have fallen sometimes dramatically, depending on the city, due to these factors”.

To that end, Cosi currently has 750 units under contract, with 1,500 more under negotiation.

Adds the Cosi CEO: “Now is exactly the right timing to double down on Cosi’s growth from a long-term perspective. When everyone is scared/shocked, you can win big if you have a clear plan. Our investors bought into this plan, as we have demonstrated that our business model is resilient and we also have the capacity to navigate the ship both in good but also in rough waters.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Apple announced this morning it’s teaming up with Common Sense Media to curate a selection of kid-friendly podcasts in the U.S. in light of what appears to be growing interest in spoken-word entertainment among families. That interest, in part, may have been prompted by the pandemic and parents’ desire to reduce kids’ screen time for entertainment.

Via a new website at Apple.co/showsforkids (which launches Apple Podcasts), Apple has collaborated with Common Sense Media to group podcasts by age group as well as by theme. At launch, the collection features creators like Tinkercast, American Public Media, Gen-Z Media, Pinna, Tumble, Highlights, WNYC Studios, Rebel Girls and Nickelodeon, among others.

In addition to groups by age, there are also four thematic collections available: Common Sense Media Picks, which are all-time family favorites; One More!, which features mysterious tales and action-packed dramas; Kids Know Best, which feature shows picked by kids themselves; and Story Time, which are story-driven shows.

Image Credits: screenshot of Apple Podcasts

The site will be updated monthly to feature new and popular shows and to introduce timely collections around historical and cultural moments, like Women’s History Month or Back to School ideas, Apple says.

The company also notes the selection of shows is curated using the same sort of research-backed approach that Common Sense Media applies to other entertainment, like TV shows, movies, books, apps and games.

The launch follows Apple’s recent debut of an “Apple for Kids” website that helps parents set up devices for kids and learn about Family Sharing options, highlighting an increased interest in catering to the needs of families.

But unlike with kids’ use of Apple devices, the current market for kids’ podcasts is small — none of Apple’s top 100 podcasts are directed toward kids, for example.

However, industry experts believe the kids market may grow alongside the overall adult podcast market. Plus, as Morning Consult recently reported, the COVID-19 pandemic has helped drive new interest in the audio format as parents struggled to keep kids entertained at home.

Case in point: one leading kids’ podcast, “Wow in the World” by NPR, saw a 94% increase in downloads in the 13 weeks post-COVID compared with pre-COVID, the report said.

In another recent analysis, NPR’s 2020 Spoken Word Audio Report found that 15% of U.S. adults were now listening to children’s spoken word audio — an indication that many parents were already co-listening with kids. In addition, research from Kids Listen, a nonprofit advocacy group for kids’ podcasts, found that 89% of kids who listen to podcasts are ages 8 or under, Morning Consult pointed out.

Apple, it’s worth noting, has been rumored to be considering a new podcast subscription service to challenge Spotify, The Information reported year earlier this year. In the weeks since that report, Apple has seemingly begun to pay more attention to the format, having launched a new editorial franchise, Apple Podcasts Spotlight, to highlight interesting creators.

Adding kids’ programing could play into Apple’s future ambitions, perhaps, as 64% of parents who listen to podcasts said they’re likely to purchase a paid subscription to podcasts for their kids.

The new collection is live in the U.S. in Apple Podcasts.

Source: Tech Crunch

Deep science investor Lindy Fishburne cofounded the seed- and early-stage venture firm Breakout Ventures several years ago, after cofounding Breakout Labs within the Thiel Foundation back in 2011, and she has amassed a wide array of stakes in the process. Among her firm’s portfolio companies is Cortexyme, a company that aims to treat Alzheimer’s disease; the sustainable materials maker Modern Meadow; and Strateos, a company whose robotic cloud platform is remaking how lab work gets done.

We talked with Fishburne late this week about where — based on what she is seeing — we are in the arc of this pandemic. We also talked about why more of her investments, which once seemed like long shots, suddenly look like solid bets. Parts of our chat, below, have been edited lightly for length and clarity.

TC: We want to be excited about the progress being made in vaccinating Americans. Based on the conversations you’re having, what’s your sense of things?

LF: The acceleration of the vaccines is like nothing we’ve ever seen before in science, and now we really are down to the unsexy part of of the logistics of rolling them out. That’s clearly our biggest challenge. Then the next piece we’re going to have to confront is what happens when the world is vaccinated [at] very unequal levels and how people feel about travel and exposure and equity along those issues.

TC: Science has been the big story of the last year. Are you hearing from investors and potential syndicate partners who weren’t reaching out previously?

LF: Yes. The pandemic has brought the importance of investing in science into sharp relief. For the first time, we’re really seeing a whole set of what you would think of as traditional tech investors who read about the mRNA vaccine that Moderna coded in a weekend and who are starting to believe that we’re able to engineer biology and that it doesn’t feel like a craft process anymore.

TC: You talk about coding a vaccine. Are laboratories becoming less important in that scientists are able to do much more in simulation and, if so, what does that mean for human testing? Are we getting to a point where we don’t have to rely on human testing as much as we did in the past?

LF: That’s where we hope to get on the human testing piece. We’re not there yet. You may have read and heard about organs on a chip and growing organoids, where you can have a very small piece of liver that you’re able to test toxicity on [and] we’re doing more of that. That said, we’re not ready to make that leap from completely doing it in silico to humans with a super-high level of confidence.The human body is such a complex system that we’re not able to model that fully yet.

I do think what you’re pointing toward to some degree is democratization in science and the access for more people to be able with lower skills to be able to work in drug discovery and drug development at a distance. So for example, we have a company that we’ve worked with called Strateos that has a full robotic lab that — instead of having technicians standing there — you have robots and a little train track that moves assays throughout the room so that scientists who were stuck at home this year were able to continue experiments regardless of their geography or safety in the lab or time constraints.

TC: You have another interesting portfolio company, Opus 12, which is transforming industrial carbon dioxide emissions into chemicals. Toward what end?

LF: So obviously, decarbonizing the world is a huge focus. And you’re seeing for the first time corporations like United Airlines making commitments as to what their carbon footprint will be, or going to zero carbon emissions. Opus 12 emerged from two PhDs and an MBA out of Stanford a few years ago and their breakthrough is a catalyst material that allows you to take for example, waste CO2 — the bad stuff — and run it through this catalyst material and produce useful CO. This year, for example, they produced green polycarbonate car parts in partnership with Daimler. The material is exactly the same, which makes it easy to slot into existing products, but it’s actually made by reusing carbon.

The shift in consumer awareness around carbon made materials is an enormous opportunity.

TC: Do companies get some sort of carbon credit for doing that?

LF: Yes, and in the past what we’ve seen is a lot of companies trying to green themselves by basically buying and trading carbon credits, and the shift that we’re going through right now is everyone saying, ‘Okay, to some degree, that was a bit of financial engineering; now we actually need to see these businesses making a change in their direct use of fossil fuels and their direct impact in the amount of carbon.’ [There’s growing awareness that] buying carbon offsets isn’t going to be enough. So you’re now for the first time really seeing commitments to change processes, supply chain and ultimately products.

TC: In recent years, biotech companies have been going public two and three years after being formed. Now, we’re seeing a much wider array of younger companies being transformed into public companies through a growing number of blank-check companies. Any thoughts about whether or not there are parallels here?

LF: On the therapeutic side, you tend to have a very clear playbook around what the potential exit is and who the acquirers are. We know that big pharma is cash rich and pipeline poor, and so [these pharma giants] have to pick up the assets that are working, and you see them do that regularly. And you’ve got comps, and you know what that looks like,  so in placing a wide range of bets on early-stage therapeutics, it’s clear that if one wins, you’re covered.

The SPAC world is going to be really interesting because most of these companies are not operating off traditional playbooks, and it’s not clear whether they operate as public companies longer term. Are they really set up for acquisition?

[Another] difference here is these companies are going to have this enormous amount of funding, and yet they’re not going to be able to toil in obscurity, so the traditional metrics that we all want [in] public companies and looking at revenue and profits and those metrics, we’re going to have to look at these SPACs and their growth through a different lens, and I’m just not sure how receptive the public markets will be to that in the next 24 months. I think it’s unclear whether we’ll have a reckoning there or not.

If you’re curious to learn more, including about why new pots of money might be on the horizon for deep tech startups, you can listen in on our full conversation with Fishburne here. 

Source: Tech Crunch

After TechCrunch broke the news yesterday that Coursera was planning to file its S-1 today, the edtech company officially dropped the document Friday evening.

Coursera was last valued at $2.4 billion by the private markets, when it most recently raised a Series F round in October 2020 that was worth $130 million.

Coursera’s S-1 filing offers a glimpse into the finances of how an edtech company, accelerated by the pandemic, performed over the past year. It paints a picture of growth, albeit one that came at steep expense.

Revenue

In 2020, Coursera saw $293.5 million in revenue. That’s a roughly 59% increase from the year prior when the company recorded $184.4 million in top line. During that same period, Coursera posted a net loss of nearly $67 million, up 46% from the previous year’s $46.7 million net deficit.

Notably the company had roughly the same noncash, share-based compensation expenses in both years. Even if we allow the company to judge its profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis, Coursera’s losses still rose from 2019 to 2020, expanding from $26.9 million to $39.8 million.

To understand the difference between net losses and adjusted losses it’s worth unpacking the EBITDA acronym. Standing for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization,” EBITDA strips out some nonoperating costs to give investors a possible better picture of the continuing health of a business, without getting caught up in accounting nuance. Adjusted EBITDA takes the concept one step further, also removing the noncash cost of share-based compensation, and in an even more cheeky move, in this case also deducts “payroll tax expense related to stock-based activities” as well.

For our purposes, even when we grade Coursera’s profitability on a very polite curve it still winds up generating stiff losses. Indeed, the company’s adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of revenue — a way of determining profitability in contrast to revenue — barely improved from a 2019 result of -15% to -14% in 2020.

Source: Tech Crunch

Snowflake reported earnings this week, and the results look strong with revenue more than doubling year-over-year.

However, while the company’s fourth quarter revenue rose 117% to $190.5 million, it apparently wasn’t good enough for investors, who have sent the company’s stock tumbling since it reported Wednesday after the bell.

It was similar to the reaction that Salesforce received from Wall Street last week after it announced a positive earnings report. Snowflake’s stock closed down around 4% today, a recovery compared to its midday lows when it was off nearly 12%.

Why the declines? Wall Street’s reaction to earnings can lean more on what a company will do next more than its most recent results. But Snowflake’s guidance for its current quarter appeared strong as well, with a predicted $195 million to $200 million in revenue, numbers in line with analysts’ expectations.

Sounds good, right? Apparently being in line with analyst expectations isn’t good enough for investors for certain companies. You see, it didn’t exceed the stated expectations, so the results must be bad. I am not sure how meeting expectations is as good as a miss, but there you are.

It’s worth noting of course that tech stocks have taken a beating so far in 2021. And as my colleague Alex Wilhelm reported this morning, that trend only got worse this week. Consider that the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 11.4% from its 52-week high, so perhaps investors are flogging everyone and Snowflake is merely caught up in the punishment.

Snowflake CEO Frank Slootman pointed out in the earnings call this week that Snowflake is well positioned, something proven by the fact that his company has removed the data limitations of on-prem infrastructure. The beauty of the cloud is limitless resources, and that forces the company to help customers manage consumption instead of usage, an evolution that works in Snowflake’s favor.

“The big change in paradigm is that historically in on-premise data centers, people have to manage capacity. And now they don’t manage capacity anymore, but they need to manage consumption. And that’s a new thing for — not for everybody but for most people — and people that are in the public cloud. I have gotten used to the notion of consumption obviously because it applies equally to the infrastructure clouds,” Slootman said in the earnings call.

Snowflake has to manage expectations, something that translated into a dozen customers paying $5 million or more on a trailing 12 month basis, according to the company. That’s a nice chunk of change by any measure. It’s also clear that while there is a clear tilt toward the cloud, the amount of data that has been moved there is still a small percentage of overall enterprise workloads, meaning there is lots of growth opportunity for Snowflake.

What’s more, Snowflake executives pointed out that there is a significant ramp up time for customers as they shift data into the Snowflake data lake, but before they push the consumption button. That means that as long as customers continue to move data onto Snowflake’s platform, they will pay more over time, even if it will take time for new clients to get started.

So why is Snowflake’s quarterly percentage growth not expanding? Well, as a company gets to the size of Snowflake, it gets harder to maintain those gaudy percentage growth numbers as the law of large numbers begins to kick in.

I’m not here to tell Wall Street investors how to do their job, anymore than I would expect them to tell me how to do mine. But when you look at the company’s overall financial picture, the amount of untapped cloud potential and the nature of Snowflake’s approach to billing, it’s hard not to be positive about this company’s outlook, regardless of the reaction of investors in the short term.

Note: This article originally stated the company had a dozen customer paying $5 million or more per month. It’s actually on a trailing 12 month basis and we have updated the article to reflect that.

Source: Tech Crunch

Good robots don’t die — they just have their assets sold off to the highest bidder. Digital Dream Labs was there to sweep up IP in the wake of Anki’s premature implosion, back in 2019. The Pittsburgh-based edtech company had initially planned to relaunch Vector and Cozmo at some point in 2020, launching a Kickstarter campaign in March of last year.

Today, the company announced plans to deliver on the overdue relaunch, courtesy of a new distributor.

“There is a tremendous demand for these robots,” CEO Jacob Hanchar said in a release. “This partnership will complement the work our teams are already doing to relaunch these products and will ensure that Cozmo and Vector are on shelves for the holidays.”

I don’t doubt that a lot of folks are looking to get their hands on the robots. Cozmo, in particular, was well-received, and sold reasonably well — but ultimately (and in spite of a lot of funding), the company couldn’t avoid the fate that’s befallen many a robotics startup.

It will be fascinating to see how these machines look when they’re reintroduced. Anki invested tremendous resources into bringing them to life, including the hiring of ex-Pixar and DreamWorks staff to make the robots more lifelike. A lot of thought went into giving the robots a distinct personality, whereas, for instance, Vector’s new owners are making the robot open-source. Cozmo, meanwhile, will have programmable functionality through the company’s app.

It could certainly be an interesting play for the STEM market that companies like Sphero are approaching. It has become a fairly crowded space, but at least Anki’s new owners are building on top of a solid foundation, with the fascinating and emotionally complex toy robots their predecessors created.

Update: We removed a reference to a Kickstarter launched by Anki prior to Digital Dream’s acquisition of the company’s IP.

Source: Tech Crunch

In the world of early-stage startups, job titles are often a formality. In reality, each employee may handle a dozen responsibilities outside their job description. The choose-your-own-adventure type of work style is part of the magic of startups and often why generalists thrive here.

However, as a company progresses and the team grows, there comes a time when a founder needs to carve out dedicated roles. Of these positions, product management might be one of the most elusive — and key — roles to fill.

We spoke to startup founders and operators to get their thoughts about how and when they hired their first product manager. Some of the things we talked about were:

•  Which traits to look for.
•  Why it’s important to define the role before you look for your best fit.
•  Whether your new hire needs to have a technical background.
•  The best questions to ask in an interview.
•  How to time your first hire and avoid overhiring.

Don’t hire for the CEO of a product

Let’s start by working backward. Product managers often graduate into a CEO role or leave a company to become a founder. Like founders, talented product managers have innate leadership skills and are able to effectively and clearly communicate. Similarly, both roles require a person who is a visionary when it comes to the product and execution.

David Blake was a product manager before he became a serial edtech founder who created Degreed, Learn In, and most recently, BookClub. He says that experience helped him launch the first prototype of Degreed and attract first clients.

“The must-have skill is the ability to put the team’s best wisdom in check and inform the product decisions with users and potential clients to inform what you are building,” he said. The person “must also be able to take the team’s mission and develop and sell that narrative to users and potential clients. That is how you blaze a new trail, balance risk, while avoiding building a ‘faster horse.”

The overlapping synergies between PMs and founders is part of the reason why the role is so confusing to define and hire for. Ken Norton, former director of product at Figma who recently left to solo advise and coach product managers, says companies can start by defining what PMs are not: The CEO of the product.

“It’s about not handing off the product responsibilities to somebody,” he said. “You want the founder and the CEO to continue to be the evangelist and visionary.” Instead, the role is more about day to day “blocking and tackling.” Norton wrote a piece more than 15 years ago about how to hire a product manager, and it’s still an essential read for anyone interested in the field.

Define the role and set your expectations

Product managers help translate all the jugglers within a startup to each other; connecting the engineer with marketing, design with business development and sales with all the above. The role at its core is hard to define, but at the same time is the necessary plumbing for any startup that wants to be high-growth and ambitious.

While a successful product manager is a strong generalist, they have to have the ability to understand and humanize technical processes. The best candidates, then, have some sort of technical experience as an engineer or otherwise.

Source: Tech Crunch