Ideaforge

Last Halloween, we broke down some “good news” from a Canalys report: the smartphone industry saw one-percent year-over-year growth — not exactly the sort of thing that sparks strong consumer confidence.

In short, 2019 sucked for smartphones, as did the year before. After what was nearly an ascendant decade, sales petered off globally with few exceptions. Honestly, there’s no need to cherrypick this stuff; the numbers this year have been lackluster at best for a majority of companies in a majority of markets.

For just the most recent example, let’s turn to a report from Gartner that dropped late last month. The numbers focus specifically on the third quarter, but they’re pretty indicative of what we’ve been seeing from the industry of late, with a 0.4 percent drop in sales. It’s a fairly consistent story, quarter after quarter for a couple of years now.

Source: Tech Crunch

“Keep your head high and give them hell.”

My grandma, Opal Thompson, once wrote that to me in a letter, like the dyed-in-the-wool, strong Texan woman she was. It is now tattooed on my forearm for all to see. Memories of her powerful presence and great advice have been a North Star on my path to entrepreneurship, as well as the kick in the pants I have needed along the way to confidently go toe-to-toe with nonbelievers in my industry. “Honey, you need to work harder and smarter than men and get ‘er done,” she once told me. It may sound folksy, but it’s gotten me to where I am today.

Last October, my fearless cofounder Carolyn Rodz and I “gave them hell” with an announcement of which I couldn’t be prouder: our small business growth platform Alice just closed a Series A round of funding. That’s a major accomplishment that I think is newsworthy in its own right. But, the headline is even better. We required a morality clause in the funding agreement, legally demanding repercussions in the event of racial, gender, or sexual orientation discrimination.

As we were pitching Alice for funding, Carolyn and I went back to the fundamentals of why we started Alice for small business owners in the first place. Our platform exists to break down barriers to growth for our community of more than 100,000 business owners — especially entrepreneurs who are women, veterans, people of color, or members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Whether that means access to tips and best practices or funding opportunities of which they otherwise wouldn’t be aware, our job is to help small business owners “get ‘er done” — whatever that means to them. For us, there is an immense responsibility in being a comprehensive resource that small business owners trust to help them grow their ventures. We’re always encouraging our owners to try new approaches and go big in every aspect of their development, and that includes pushing owners to challenge institutions that stand in the way of their successes.

One institution that has long stood in our way is the silent perpetuation of discriminatory and predatory behavior by influential investors. While we’ve seen a rise of so-called “Weinstein” clauses drafted in the wake of the watershed #MeToo movement two years ago, most of those cases refer to protections for investors against investee executives who have outstanding allegations.

This is an important step in the right direction of instilling accountability at all levels of business. But we were left asking ourselves, “what happens when an investor is the one #MeToo’d?”

We at Alice were troubled by the lack of legal consequences for key decision makers, from board members to venture capitalists, given the reputational harm their actions could inflict on the businesses they touch. So to protect the reputation we have worked so hard to build for Alice and to protect the business owners who seek us for help every day from across the globe, Carolyn and I decided to lead by example and take a stand with our own investors. We took the “Weinstein” clause and flipped it, giving our board members the agency to use corporate governance mechanisms to vote for removal of any board member in the event of a #MeToo event, racial discrimination, or sexual orientation discrimination incident. Simply put, Alice and its investors are not afraid to show you the door if your behavior doesn’t serve the best interests of our community of entrepreneurs.

Including this provision was crucial to our vision for the company as we continue to grow. It echoes our core values of inclusivity within our online business community. And, as our users seek venture capital, we want them to know that they have the right to stipulate what should be common sense legal protections while still securing the funding they need. We have provided the clause openly here so everyone can take advantage — and not have to pay the legal bills we did.

Making sure that this information is available to anyone who wants it is part of our commitment to ensuring that everyone in business gets a fair shake. To have other founders include morality clauses like ours in their funding agreements is as important to me as the fact that we did it ourselves. We must make this a trend.

Our morality clause is also important to us as we strive to improve the broader business community and the way we all seek funding. Small businesses represent nearly 95 percent of all U.S. employers and support the careers of more than 50 percent of Americans.

But, while the small business landscape is changing into a New Majority, with more women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks starting businesses every day, the demographic of venture capitalists is much slower to change. To date, 89 percent of venture capital deciders are still men, and of all the investments they make, only 2 percent of them are in female-owned businesses. Less than half of a percent of women who receive venture capital are Latina, and the representation is even worse for other minority communities of entrepreneurs.

By now, Carolyn (who is Latina herself) and I have learned that we have to make our presence known in a business world that has often excluded us. And as more #MeToo behaviors come to light across industries, we’ll be able to protect our businesses and entrepreneurs making lasting impacts on our communities.

As we look to the next chapter of Alice and its expansion into new markets in 2020, we will continue to share our unique funding story with hopes that other small businesses will be inspired and empowered to do the same.

Venture capitalists be warned: the New Majority of entrepreneurs is here to stay, and our morality clause is just the beginning of a new path to small business success.

I think Grandma Opal would be proud.

Source: Tech Crunch

Kleiner is known for many things. Among them, increasingly, is the growing number of people who’ve logged time at the firm, then struck out on their own to hang their own shingles.

The latest among them: Lynne Chou O’Keefe, who joined Kleiner Perkins in 2013 as a partner in its life sciences group, where she focused on digital health and connected devices. Today, Chou O’Keefe is taking the wraps off a new firm, Define Ventures, and announcing a debut fund with $87 million in capital commitments.

We’d first written about the fund back in October, when we spied an SEC filing for it. As we reported then, Chou O’Keefe spent six years with Abbott Vascular, a division of the healthcare giant Abbott, as a global product manager and later as a global marketing director. She also logged a couple of years with Guidant (which is part of Boston Scientific and Abbott Labs) and, before that, worked in venture with Apax Partners.

That SEC filing listed a target of $65 million. But Chou O’Keefe, with whom we chatted on Friday, suggested that interest in the fund was even greater than imagined, thanks in part to investors she got to know through her work as a former board member of Livongo, a now publicly traded company that monitors and coaches patients with chronic diseases like diabetes.

Unsurprisingly, she says founders are also excited about her new firm, suggesting they’d been looking for a firm that doesn’t just dabble in digital health but that focuses expressly on it, as does Define Ventures .

“A lot of founders have said, ‘It’s so nice not to have to explain space to you.’ Having true partnerships is something they’ve needed and something you can do with a sector-focused fund.”

Define may be announcing its final fund close today, but the firm, which is interested in telemedicine startups and teams focused on chronic disease management, among others, has been actively investing in startups over the last year.

Among its bets so far: HIMS, the direct-to-consumer digital health and wellness company focused on men; Tia, a startup that plans to open membership-only women’s health clinics across the country, after opening its first location in New York last March; Verana Health, a clinical data startup that initially focused on ophthalmology but has been expanding into other areas; Unite Us, a care coordination software maker that looks to connect social services with healthcare; and Lightship, a startup that’s working to find and connect patients with the companies that need them for their clinical trials.

Though the lone general partner, Chou O’Keefe isn’t running the fund single-handedly. Helping her is principal Chirag Shah, who was most recently a vice president with Imagine Health, a Utah-based company that builds custom teams of healthcare providers for employers with large concentrations of employees in a single geography. He has also worked as a senior manager at the publicly traded company Castlight Health and as an associate with The Carlyle Group.

The two had numerous mutual connections, says Chou O’Keefe, adding that they plan to invest in between 15 and 18 startups altogether from their debut fund, writing checks that range from $750,000 on the earlier side to upwards of $6 million.

Whether Define proves smart to focus more narrowly on digital health will take time to know, but certainly, there’s growing interest in virtual healthcare across the board. According to one research outfit, Grand View Research, the global digital health market size is expected to reach $500 billion by 2025, expanding at a compound annual growth rate of roughly 27% between now and then.

In the meantime, Chou O’Keefe becomes part of a group of former Kleiner investors who are now in charge of their own destiny. Among other Kleiner alums who’ve since co-founded their own shops is Beth Seidenberg of Westlake Village Biopartners, Chi-Hua Chien of Goodwater Capital, Trae Vassallo of Defy, Mary Meeker of Bond and Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures, to name just a handful.

Source: Tech Crunch

Taking a ride on an electronic scooter soon? Wear your helmet! According to a recent study published in JAMA Surgery, not wearing headgear or taking other precautions while riding is increasingly sending young people to the hospital — leading to more than 40,000 broken bones, head wounds and other injuries.

Unfortunately, less than 5% of riders in the study were found to be wearing their helmet, leading to nearly one-third of patients having a head injury. That’s more than double the rate of head injuries experienced by bicyclists.

The rise is likely due to the increasingly popular adoption of scooters among young people in urban areas. Electronic scooter injuries for those aged 18-34 increased overall by 222%, and injuries sending riders to the hospital rose by 365% from 2014-2018, with the most dramatic increase in the last year. Close to two-thirds of those with scooter injuries were young men, and most were not wearing head protection.

“There was a high proportion of people with head injuries, which can be very dangerous,” said Dr. Benjamin Breyer, an associate professor of urology and chief of urology at UCSF partner hospital Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center. “Altogether, the near doubling of e-scooter trauma from 2017 to 2018 indicates that there should be better rider safety measures and regulation.”

Right now there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of requirements for head gear while scootering in California, thanks to a change in the law that went into effect at the beginning of last year. Those over the age of 18 who want to ride without a helmet are free and legal to do so in California. Several other states also don’t require helmet-wearing while on a motorized scooter.

The laws may need an update after recent revelations, but in the meantime, perhaps the scooter companies themselves can help ensure safety precautions. We reached out to several electronic scooter companies and only heard back from a few about this issue. Lime tells TechCrunch it is committed to safety by encouraging users to wear a helmet, offering discounts to buy one and giving away more than 250,000 as part of a campaign. Bird and others also encourage helmet-wearing on their site, and some companies offer helmets for rent at another location. But the promise of scooters is their convenience. You don’t have to carry anything. You just click on the app and hop on your ride. It’s too easy to just hop on a scooter without prior planning or helmet in tow.

So what’s the solution? Rider responsibility at this point. You’re free to take your chances but, though inconvenient, wearing your helmet on that scooter ride could prevent a serious accident.

“It’s been shown that helmet use is associated with a lower risk of head injury,” said first author Nikan K. Namiri, a medical student at the UCSF School of Medicine. “We strongly believe that helmets should be worn, and e-scooter manufacturers should encourage helmet use by making them more easily accessible.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Two co-founders of Google Pay in India are building a neo-banking platform in the country — and they have already secured backing from three top VC funds.

Sujith Narayanan, a veteran payments executive who co-founded Google Pay in India (formerly known as Google Tez), said on Monday that his startup, epiFi, has raised $13.2 million in its Seed financial round led by Sequoia India and Ribbit Capital. The round valued epiFi at about $50 million.

David Velez, the founder of Brazil-based neo-banking giant Nubank, Kunal Shah, who is building his second payments startup CRED in India, and VC fund Hillhouse Capital also participated in the round.

The eight-month-old startup is working on a neo-banking platform that will focus on serving millennials in India, said Narayanan, in an interview with TechCrunch.

“When we were building Google Tez, we realized that a consumer’s financial journey extends beyond digital payments. They want insurance, lending, investment opportunities and multiple products,” he explained.

The idea, in part, is to also help users better understand how they are spending money, and guide them to make better investments and increase their savings, he said.

At this moment, it is unclear what the convergence of all of these features would look like. But Narayanan said epiFi will release an app in a few months.

Working with Narayanan on epiFi is Sumit Gwalani, who serves as the startup’s co-founder and chief product and technology officer. Gwalani previously worked as a director of product management at Google India and helped conceptualize Google Tez. In a joint interview, Gwalani said the startup currently has about two-dozen employees, some of whom have joined from Netflix, Flipkart, and PayPal.

Shailesh Lakhani, Managing Director of Sequoia Capital India, said some of the fundamental consumer banking products such as savings accounts haven’t seen true innovation in many years. “Their vision to reimagine consumer banking, by providing a modern banking product with epiFi, has the potential to bring a step function change in experience for digitally savvy consumers,” he said.

Cash dominates transactions in India today. But New Delhi’s move to invalidate most paper bills in circulation in late 2016 pushed tens of millions of Indians to explore payments app for the first time.

In recent years, scores of startups and Silicon Valley firms have stepped to help Indians pay digitally and secure a range of financial services. And all signs suggest that a significant number of people are now comfortable with mobile payments: More than 100 million users together made over 1 billion digital payments transaction in October last year — a milestone the nation has sustained in the months since.

A handful of startups are also attempting to address some of the challenges that small and medium sized businesses face. Bangalore-based Open, NiYo, and RazorPay provide a range of features such as corporate credit cards, a single dashboard to manage transactions and the ability to automate recurring payouts that traditional banks don’t currently offer. These platforms are also known as neo-bank or challenger banks or alternative banks. Interestingly, most neo-banking platforms in South Asia today serve startups and businesses — not individuals.

Source: Tech Crunch

At a certain point during the last week, I found myself wandering the halls of CES, looking for the gadget that would fix all of my problems. Maybe it’s the modern condition, or just a sign of having been involved in this industry for far too long.

Technology, of course, has a long and sometimes spotty history of attempting to resolve problems it exacerbated in the first place. Fighting fire with fire, as it were. The Nintendo Wii, for instance, was heralded as fight against a sedentary population to which video games have significantly contributed. Hell, Fitbit helped build an entire industry out of it.

Having utterly matured the world of wearable fitness devices, however, the industry has moved on to the next bit frontier: sleep. There’s about a dozen reasons why sleeping with your smartphone is a bad idea, but I’ve woken up with an iPhone imprint on the side of my face more times than I’d care to admit. We know it’s bad and yet, we still do it. But the depths of our addiction are a topic for another time.

Source: Tech Crunch

Yoav Leitersdorf is the founder of YL Ventures, a 12-year-old, Mill Valley, California.-based seed-stage venture firm that invests narrowly in Israeli cybersecurity startups and closed its fourth fund with $120 million in capital commitments last summer — a vehicle that brings the capital it now manages to $260 million.

The outfit takes a concentrated approach to investing that has seemingly been paying off. YL Ventures was the biggest shareholder in the container security startup Twistlock, for example, which sold to Palo Alto Networks last year for $410 million after raising $63 million altogether. (YL Ventures had plugged $12 million into the company over four years.) It was also the biggest outside shareholder in Hexadite, an Israeli startup that used AI to identify and protect against attacks and that sold in 2017 to Microsoft for a reported $100 million.

Still, the firm sees a lot of cybersecurity startups. It also has an advisory board that’s comprised of more than 50 security pros from heavyweight companies. For insight into what they’re shopping for this year — and how startups might grab their attention — we reached out to Leitersdorf last week to ask what he’s hearing.

Source: Tech Crunch

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. At the beginning of each year, a large crowd of developers, content creators and digitally-savvy business owners gather in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou for the WeChat conference, the messaging giant’s premier annual gathering. The event is meant to give clues to WeChat’s future and the rare occasion where its secretive founder Allen Zhang emerges in public view. But this year, much to the audience’s disappointment, Zhang was absent.

WeChat’s new era of money-making

The boss’s absence was not outright unexpected, an industry analyst told me, as WeChat shifts to focus more on monetization. With 1.1 billion active users, the app has been incredibly conservative with selling ads and pursuing other money-making strategies, an admirable decision from the user’s perspective but arguably frustrating for Tencent’s stakeholders. Part of the restrain is due to Zhang’s user-first design philosophy and minimalistic product aesthetics. When reflecting on why WeChat doesn’t support splash ads — ads that are displayed full-page every time an app is launched — the boss had this to say (in Chinese) at last year’s WeChat conference:

“If WeChat is a person, it must have been your closest friend to deserve so much time you spent on it. So how could I have the heart to plaster an ad on your best friend’s face and ask you to watch the ad before speaking to him?”

The emphasis on user experience now seems overshadowed by Tencent’s need to carve out more revenue streams. The giant’s cash cow — its gaming business — has taken a hit in recent years following a wave of new government policies on the online entertainment industry. Tencent’s imminent rival ByteDance, the creator of TikTok, is getting a larger slice of the digital advertising pie in China.

One way to step up monetization within WeChat is to stimulate more business transactions. The app mapped out at the conference what it has done and what it plans to do on this front.

WeChat founder Allen Zhang addressing the audience of WeChat’s annual conference through a pre-recorded video in January 2020 

Mini programs

The lite apps that skip app store downloads and run inside WeChat have surpassed 300 million daily active users. Practically every internet service in China — with the exception of a few that are at odds with Tencent, such as Alibaba’s ecommerce platforms — have built a WeChat mini program version of their full-fledged app. Without ever leaving WeChat, users can complete tasks from playing casual games, booking movie tickets to getting food delivered.

Consumers and businesses are indeed increasingly embracing WeChat as a platform for transactions, of which the default payment method is WeChat Pay. Users spent more than 800 billion yuan ($115 billion) through mini apps in 2019, up 160% year-over-year driven by the likes of ecommerce and other retail activities.

To further drive that spending momentum, WeChat announced it will make it easier for businesses to monetize through mini programs. For one, these apps will be better integrated into WeChat’s search results, giving businesses more exposure. The messenger will also broaden the variety of ads embedded in mini programs and provide logistics management tools to retail-focused developers.

These efforts signify WeChat’s shift from focusing on mass consumers to businesses, a strategy that goes in tandem with Tencent’s enterprise-driven roadmap for the next few years. It remains to be seen whether these changes will square with Zhang’s user-first philosophy.

Credit scoring

WeChat’s one-year-old “Payments Score” has picked up some 100 million users by far. The program came about amid China’s push to encourage the development of credit scoring across society and industries to both regulate citizen behavior and drive financial inclusion, although Tencent’s private effort should not be conflated with Beijing’s national scheme. Like Alibaba’s Sesame Credit, WeChat Payments Score is better understood as a user loyalty program. Participation is optional and scores factors in the likes of user identities, payment behavior and default history.

Such a trust-building vehicle holds the potential to bring more transactions to WeChat, which previously lacked a full-fledged ecommerce infrastructure a la Alibaba’s Taobao. Users with a high score receive perks like deposit-free hotel booking, while application of the program is not limited to transactions but has also been adapted for rewarding “good” behavior. For instance, those with high points can redeem recyclable trash bags for free.

Tencent’s gaming empire

Tencent snatched up another gaming studio to add to its portfolio after earmarking an undisclosed investment in PlatinumGames, the Japanese developer of the well-received action title Bayonetta said in a blog post.

Over the decade the Chinese gaming behemoth has extended its footprint to a raft of influential gaming studios worldwide, taking stakes in the likes of League of Legends maker Riot Games (full control), Clash of Clans’ Supercell (84%), Fornite developer Epic Games (40%), PlayerUnkonwn’s Battlegrounds’ Bluehold (rumored 10%), and World of Warcraft’s Activation Blizzard. It’s also Nintendo Switch’s publishing partner in China.

PlatinumGames noted that it will continue to operate independently under its existing corporate structure, a setup that’s in line with Tencent’s non-interference investment principle and a major appeal for companies desiring both the giant’s resources and a degree of autonomy. The corpus of cash will help strengthen PlatinumGames’ current business, expand from game developing into self-publishing and add a “wider global perspective.”

Tencent’s hands-off approach has led industry experts to call it an “investment vehicle” relying on external intellectual property but in recent times the company’s in-house development teams have been striving for more visibility. Its Shenzhen-based TiMi studio, for example, is notable for producing the mobile blockbuster Honor of Kings; its Lightspeed and Quantum studio, similarly, rose to fame for developing the popular mobile version of PUBG.

Source: Tech Crunch

A strange new sensation has settled across the tech industry, one so foreign, so alien, it’s almost hard to recognize. A sense that some great expectations are being radically revised downwards; that someone has turned down a previously unquenchable money spigot; that unit economics can matter even when you’re in growth mode. Could it be … thrift?

Well, OK, let’s not go that crazy. But we are witnessing a remarkable confluence of (relatively) parsimonious events. Last year’s high-profile tech IPOs are far from high-fliers: Uber, Lyft, Slack, Pinterest, and Peloton are all down from their IPO prices as I write this, some of them significantly so, even while the overall market has climbed to all-time highs. Those who expected immediate massive wealth six months later, even for relative recent employees, have been surprised.

Meanwhile, not-yet-public companies are tightening their belts, or taking their chances. We have seen recent waves of layoffs at a spectrum of tech unicorns. Others, i.e. Casper and One Medical, just filed for IPOs to general criticism if not outright derision of the numbers in their S-1s.

The less said about the WeWork debacle, the better, but we can’t not talk about it, as the repercussions have been significant. Both directly — SoftBank is ramping back significantly, including walking away from term sheets, prompting more layoffs — and indirectly, in that they seem to have swung the Valley’s overall mood from greed towards fear.

Towards fear, please note, not to fear; there’s a big difference. Even in the absence of SoftBank there is is still a whole lot of venture money sloshing around out there … although it seems possible that its investors are beginning to find it a little harder to spend it responsibly. VCs, correctly, are generally still extremely optimistic about the overall future of the tech industry, and still tend to focus on growth first, revenue a distant second, cash flow third, and profits maybe someday eventually depending on a lot of factors.

That said, the once-pervasive sense that everything tech touches immediately turns to gold is much diminished. It’s worth noting that many pure software companies, and their IPOs, are still very successful: Zoom, Docusign, Datadog, and a lot of other companies you’ve never heard of unless you’re an enterprise software fetishist are doing quite nicely, thanks. It’s only consumer tech which seems to be either currently disappointing or previously overvalued, depending on your point of view. Software is continuing to eat the world.

But there seems to be a growing recognition that the world is a forest, not a pizza, and there is a big difference between low-hanging fruit and eggs hidden in the high branches. Just because you use some custom software doesn’t make you a software company; it just means you’re paying today’s table stakes. So if you’re not a software company, and you’re not a hardware company … then how exactly are you a tech company?

By that rubric, which seems like a pretty reasonable one, WeWork isn’t a tech company, and never was. Casper isn’t a tech company. One Medical isn’t a tech company. (This is admittedly highly anecdotal, but judging from my own household’s recently experiences, One Medical’s new software systems seem to have degraded rather than improved their level of care.) They’ve been dressed up like tech companies to adopt the tech halo, but it looks awfully unconvincing on them — and they’ve done so just as that halo has begun to slip.

Maybe this multi-market malaise is temporary, a hangover from a few overhyped IPOs and last year’s SoftBank madness. Maybe the tech wheat will be separated from the wannabe chaff soon enough, and the former will continue to prosper. Or maybe, just maybe, we’re beginning to see the end of the golden days of low hanging fruit, and increasingly only hard science or hard software will be the paths to tech success. It’s a little unclear which way to hope.

Source: Tech Crunch