Ideaforge

Startups depend on the angel lifecycle. A few flush post-exit individuals put the first cash into a fresh venture. With some skill and plenty of luck, the early team grows the company into a big success. It sells or goes public and those team members earn a fortune. They then pay it forward by investing in the next generation of startups.

If they hoard their spoils they starve the early-stage ecosystem or leave founders stuck with dumb money from non-strategic financiers. If they redistribute their winnings, they can influence startup culture by deciding what, and more importantly, who gets funding.

But how does a co-founder or VP learn to be a mini-VC? That’s the goal of First Round Capital’s Angel Track, a free three-month workshop series in San Francisco and New York for learning how to source, vet, close, and support angel investments.

A scene from Angel Track’s first cohort

Every two weeks, an expert on some part of the investing process like finding deals or interviewing founders talks to the class, does Q&A, and then leaves the group to openly discuss what they learned and how to use it. Angel Track sessions have been tought by some of the smartest people in the valley like growth master Elad Gil, #ANGELS founding partner and former Twitter VP of corp dev Jessica Verrilli, and Precursor Ventures managing partner Charles Hudson.

Hundreds of startup execs apply for the 15 spots on each coast. After two classes in SF and one in NYC, today First Round unveiled its recently-graduated third cohort from programs in both cities. Those include Lucy Zhang who sold Facebook her chat startup Beluga that became the foundation of Messenger, and Mented Cosmetics co-founder and CEO KJ Miller. By the end of the program they’re taking joint pitch meetings from startups, showing each other the best questions to ask.

As with Y Combinator, it’s as much about the fellowship between new investors as the education. “It’s both a community and a masterclass” says First Round general partner Hayley Barna who oversees the NYC Angel Track. “It’s about bringing a talented group of emerging angels together to build a productive cohort of collaborators.”

She says diversity and inclusion is a big goal of the program, and it features 50% women and 20% underrepresented minorities. Being rich is not a pre-requisite. Barna declares “We’re not pulling in the bankers and the traders doing angel investing as a side-hustle.”

LOS ANGELES, CA – MARCH 29: Confetti falls as Lyft CEO Logan Green (C) rings the Nasdaq opening bell celebrating the company’s initial public offering (IPO) on March 29, 2019 in Los Angeles, California. The ride hailing app company’s shares were initially priced at $72. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

After a slew of big 2019 IPOs from Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Slack, and Zoom, there are plenty of newly-minted potential angels for First Round to teach. The venture firm benefits by building a cadre of co-investors or alternative backers for deals it vets, and through added visibility into the next top fundraises. Unlike some VC scout programs, there’s no formal obligation to send opportunities to First Round or pledge funding alongside it. That keeps it appealing to future investors that innovation hubs need to keep the circle of life flowing.

“A lot of angel investors that got their start in the mid-to late 2000s, they’re almost all fund managers now. They went from angels or super angels to venture investors” First Round partner Brett Berson tells me. “There haven’t been a lot of people who’ve come in and filled that gap”, which could stunt the ecosystem’s growth. Graduates ramp up their angel investing while often staying in their operating roles, though some like former Pinterest head of culture Cat Lee who became a partner at Maveron turn investing into their day job.

First Round VP Ben Cmejla who helped launch the program explains that “Some people are doing it for the financial return. Some people want access to new ideas and are curious. Some people have a specific type of community they want to support with their investments.”

What Investors Learn From Angel Track

Becoming a successful angel means a lot more than evaluating term sheets. Just like how ideas are a dime a dozen and it’s about who can execute, fundraises are frequent but getting into the right ones takes hard work. First Round focuses on many of the soft skills required to win. Participants receive mentorship on how to:

• Develop an area of expertise and personal brand
• Mine their network for deals and post-investment assistance
• Assess market opportunities rigorously
• Judge an unproven startup’s team and product
• Convince a founder to let them into a round and negotiate terms
• Support their portfolio companies without being annoying

How to approach the delicate power balance of meetings with entrepreneurs can be especially tricky, so I spoke at length with First Round’s Phin Barnes about the session he teaches on founder interviews. I wanted to get a taste for what it’d be like in the classroom, despite First Round declining to let me attend the real thing. Turns out having a journalist in the room can disrupt a safe learning environment for budding angels.

First Round partner Phin Barnes

“Investing is a sell-side product” Barnes stresses. “Capital is a commodity, especially in this market. What you’re saying with a term sheet is that you think the founder’s equity is worth more than your dollars.” That means investors have to close the value gap with sweat.

Barnes gives me what he calls the ‘chocolate soufflé or brownies’ scenario. “The danger of being a smart, talented executive or entrepreneur is that when a founder talks to you about sugar and flour and butter, you start imagining a molten lava soufflé cake you’d build with the ingredients. You invest, and then the founder comes back with a tray of brownies. ‘That’s not what I thought I invested in!’”

The mistake comes in envisioning what you’d do rather than really listening to the founder — the one who’s cooking. Instead of trying to hijack the roadmap or being disappointed by the direction, angels need to help make those brownies as tasty as possible. That means entering into interviews with an open mind.

“You should be positively inclined to invest and have some critical questions. If you don’t think you should invest, you shouldn’t have the meeting in the first place” Barnes explains. “You want to hold that perspective loosely and as new information comes to light, you want to check ‘Am I still interested?’ By the end you want to know what you don’t know, and the open questions you need to answer to validate your hypothesis.”

The four main areas of evaluation are:

The market — Why does this category of product need to exist? What would the world look like if they dominate the category? Can they clearly explain to a five-year old the problem they’re trying to solve? What’s their contrarian thinking? And what motivation will keep them persevering to address the problem despite setbacks and opportunity cost?

The product — Is addressing this specific customer problem unique and defensible? It’s less about if the product is good or bad, or should the button be red or blue. It’s more about how the founder took the inputs and made the decision and how they process information. Have them walk you through the go-to-market plan and see how they shift between high-level strategy and ground-level tactics.

The team — Do they have on-paper talent like PhDs or experience? Can they iterate quickly? You have to weed out victims and look for people who are learners that evolve when faced with adversity. Do your homework on who they are before so you can dig deeper into how they tick. Ask how they show trust in their team and how they get their team to trust them. Have them tell you about the most important thing that happened at the company in the last week to understand their priorities and emotional connection to the process.

The relationship with the founder — Investors need to ask what the best way to work with them is, and what founders are looking for in support from an investor. Do they want a hands-off investor who only chimes in when summoned, or do they expect frequent co-building sessions? Do they need more help accessing a bigger network for hiring and partnerships, or industry-specific expertise to navigate complex decisions?

“We have two roles. We interview and then we coach” Barnes says, providing tips for both. “The very best questions are open-ended. They start with a how/what/why and end with a question mark. Double-barreled questions are terrible. Ask them what would you do, and stop. Get comfortable with silence. They’ll usually fill the silence with something off-script that reveals a deeper truth.” Only once has a founder asked Barnes ‘are you ok?’ in response to his inquisitive stare.

Being able to summarize what you’ve learned lets you quickly cross-check your assumptions with the founder and get helpful corrections. That helps you figure out what questions you still need to ask and keep a diligent list of what you’ll need to research after.

When it comes to giving an answer on whether you’ll invest, “Second best to a quick yes is a quick no with a strong point of view and information for the entrepreneur. The worst is ghosting people. 90% of people operate that way but that’s not the way to do it” Barnes emphasizes. “If you walk out without a yes, no, or what to learn more about in specific detail, you’ve failed as an investor and wasted the time of the entrepreneur.”

The antidote to dumb money

“It was like the perfect mix of your favorite college seminar and a super practical apprenticeship” says Ariana Poursartip, the VP of product for fintech startup Petal who was in the first NYC Angel Track class. “I came away with a better sense of my personal investing approach, and a community of fellow angel investors who I’ll continue to learn from for years.”‘

Fostering better educated angels is crucial for enabling founders. “Dumb money” from investors without expertise in a relevant space, connections they’ll leverage to help, or an understanding of what startups need can be dangerous. It can lead founders to raise more but inefficient capital and make slower progress that puts them at risk of a future down-round that can trigger a startup death spiral.

First Round’s Angel Track cohort 3

First Round is far from the only one trying to fill the angel gap. “Initiatives like Spearhead, YC’s Startup Investor School, and scout programs help lower the barrier to entry for many people who will be terrific and helpful investors for startups” says Cmejla. Sequoia, General Catalyst, Village Global and more run their own scout networks. There are some questionable programs out there too, though, like Venture University which charges from $4,000 to $65,000 for its programs that require students to source deals in exchange for a hazy profit-sharing agreement.

Cmejla insists “It isn’t about providing the capital, a short crash course, or a path to becoming a full-time VC, but about building a durable community that members can lean on and lean into as they level up.” Instead, First Round scores a way to connect founders it funds with relevant angels from its classes. That incentivizes the firm to teach savvy etiquette. Barna warns “You want to be thorough, but if you’re putting in a small check, you can’t ask founders to jump through too many hoops . . . and spend five hours just to get that dinky paycheck.”

Past Angel Track participants like Poursartip and Instacart VP of growth Bengaly Kaba tell me they wish the program got them spending more time together both during and after the class, which could spur deeper alliances. “Currently the program ends and there is no formal programming to keep the alumni cohorts engaged and connected” Kaba notes. Many already back startups brought to the class by their peers. Still, Square Cash app product lead Ayo Omojola wanted a stronger structure like perhaps a syndicate so cohort-mates could do more investing together. 

What they all cited was the massive value of learning to codify what they’re looking for and what they bring to the table. Kaba highlighted how he enjoyed “Hearing how Elad Gil, [Floodgate co-founding partner] Ann Muira-Ko, Charles Hudson and other guest speakers defined their investment theses around macro trends, industry specific insights, and founder traits.”

When the lock-ups expire on recent IPOs and employees start getting liquidity, “you’re going to see a whole new generation of investors get going over the next couple of years” says Berson.

Not every company spawns the same quality of investor, though. Companies like Uber that empower less-senior team members as the ride sharing company does with regional general managers tend to develop talent with the self-direction and conviction to be great angels. Looking back, you similarly see more angels and founders emerging from more decentralized Google than top-down Apple.

As software eats the world, unicorns proliferate, and the proceeds of tech’s winning streak are spread wide, more and more people will be ready to write angel checks. “It will most likely materially accelerate over the next 12-24 months” Berson concludes. Those without the skills could squander what they’ve earned. Angels who know what makes them special and can evaluate startups without getting swept up in the hype will crown the queens of tomorrow.

Source: Tech Crunch

MONET Technologies, a joint venture launched by Softbank and Toyota to provide on-demand mobility services eventually with an autonomous module bus, has five new partners.

Five Japanese automakers including Isuzu Motors, Suzuki Motor Corp., Subaru, Daihatsu and Mazda will each invest 2% in the venture. Softbank and Toyota each own 35% of the company. Honda and Toyota’s truck-making unit Hino each have 10% ownership.

The venture launched in September aims to launch an on-demand mobility service with buses and cars in Japan next year. Toyota’s autonomous vehicles — based on its e-palette vehicle that debuted at CES 2018 — will eventually become a central piece of the service.

The e-Palette electric vehicle has a modular interior that is designed to allow for it to be used for a variety of services including shuttling people, packages, even mobile food preparation.

The venture involves more than simply investing capital. The automakers are also sharing data. Datasets are essential to build a mobility-as-a-service platform with autonomous vehicles, according to MONET President and CEO Junichi Miyakawa.

Earlier this year, Toyota began piloting an on-demand bus service that lets people order a ride via an app. The pilot was being conducted in the Ohara district within Toyota City. The venture also conducted a demonstration project involving a multi-purpose shuttle for Fukuyama-shi Hattori school district.

Source: Tech Crunch

Tesla owners will be better able to express themselves artistically using their in-vehicle infotainment touchscreen with the next update of their vehicle’s in-car software. Tesla revealed via Twitter today that the forthcoming software update will bring improved Sketchpad features, providing essential upgrades to an Easter Egg it first debuted over two years ago that lets Tesla owners doodle in their cars.

In response to a request from a fan asking for Tesla’s in-car drawing software (this is a weird phrase to be writing) to add a color picker, saturation controls and an undo history, Tesla noted that new features are coming in the next big update planned for Tesla vehicle software. It sounds like all of those could be on the menu, based on this tweet, and that might not be the end of the improvements in store.

In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk responded to another Twitter fan who was requesting animation support. Musk replied just a simple ‘Ok’ but given his general meme love, I would not at all be surprised if the next version of Sketchpad supports GIF output.

Musk also noted at around the same time that “Every Tesla should have good art & music creation software” which does not actually seem like an essential accoutrement for a vehicle at all, but then again Musk is a billionaire and I am not.

The CEO also followed up with some more details on what he has in mind for music curation: A ‘little music tool’ to be released later, and even in-car karaoke.

Source: Tech Crunch

It looks like choose-your-own-adventure Twitter games won’t be a one-hit wonder, now that Apple’s social team has adopted the format. A new tweet from the @AppleTV Twitter account today helps users find a movie to watch by having them click through a series of Twitter threads. However, their effort (so far at least) pales compared with the original viral sensation — a Twitter choose-your-own-adventure style game that blew up earlier this month, where Twitter users try to not get fired as Beyoncé’s new assistant.

If you haven’t seen this masterpiece of Twitter handiwork, give yourself a break this Friday and go try it. It’s great fun.

The game is played by presenting you with a multiple choice question. You then click on your answer from among the Twitter replies presented by the original poster.

For example, you start your day by ordering Queen Bey her breakfast. You’re asked to choose between ordering a five-star breakfast or granola and yogurt. If you choose the former (spoiler alert!), you’re fired. If you click the right answer, you move on to the next task.

Further questions take you to new threads where you choose things like who Beyoncé should FaceTime, what activity you suggest while she waits for hair and makeup, what song to play for her when she asks for music, when she should get dressed for the event and where, whether you should photobomb her on the red carpet to fix her dress, where she sits at an event, and so on.

The game isn’t always simple A/B choices, either. The answers lead you down different paths. Your choice may not immediately result in being fired, but still could later on. For instance, if you send Beyoncé swimming, there’s no way to save your job when the next set of choices comes.

According to a TIME profile, the idea for the thread came from 19-year-old student Landon Rivera, who lives in L.A.

The thread, now which now has over a quarter million Twitter likes, was noticed by celebs like Chrissy Teigen and Questlove, the report also noted.

After the Beyoncé game blew up into a viral hit, the creator started new threads about being Cardi B’s bodyguard and getting away with murder. These haven’t yet taken off to the extent the original Beyoncé thread did, which today stands at over 250K Likes on the thread placeholder tweet, and 97,300 retweets.

While it’s interesting that Apple’s social media team has now copycatted the idea, their choose-your-own-adventure thread falls short.

Actually, really short.

In fact, it’s not much of an adventure at all.

Instead, the movie suggestion thread doesn’t go much further than letting your pick between two movie watching scenarios, then directs you into a genre of your choosing…then, it dead ends with a movie suggestion.

This overlooks the reasons the Beyoncé game went viral in the first place: because it was lengthy, complex, multi-branched, and funny. You could get down several threads deep into the thing and then get booted out and lose.

The questions themselves also prompted commentary from those who knew Beyoncé actual habits (or at least, thought they did.)

Social media teams looking to replicate this formula for their own success will need to do more than create a handful of quick-to-end threads with little payoff. Either invest the serious effort in designing a clever branching narrative or just tweet as usual.

Source: Tech Crunch

Influencer Marketing has ballooned into a $25 billion industry, yet many marketing managers are left confused by this, because for them, it’s really not delivering the results to justify the hype.

Here’s the thing. Influencer marketing is not a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy such as Facebook or Adwords advertising. Each company needs to take a closer look at what influencer marketing can achieve, where it falls down, and how you can do a better job with this latest form of marketing that delivers, on average, $6.50 of value for every $1 spent.

The analysis below relies on clients and case studies from our experience at OpenSponsorship.com (my company) which is the largest marketplace connecting brands with over 5500 professional athletes for marketing campaigns.

With over 3500 deals to date across clients as big as Vitamin Shoppe and Anheuser Busch, established players like Jabra and Project Repat, and new startups like Brazyn and Gutzy, we have seen a lot go wrong (who knew you could disable comments on a post!) and a lot go right (an unknown skiier’s $100 Instagram, posted right before the Winter Olympics, going viral after he won the Silver)!!

Thanks to our in-house data experts, integrations with IBM Watson, robust ROI tracking tools and 10 years+ of experience combining the learnings of sports sponsorship with influencer marketing, we have gained extensive insights into campaign strategies.

We will share our learnings about what criteria to consider when choosing the best influencer to work with, figuring out how much to pay the influencer, what rights to ask for in the deal, what terms and conditions are reasonable and how to track ROI for the deal.

Table of Contents

• Who is the right influencer?
• What is the right price to pay?
• What rights to include in the deal?
• T&Cs: need-to-have vs. nice-to-have?
• ROI, the holy grail, what and how to track?
• In Conclusion…

Who is the right influencer? 

At OpenSponsorship, we match brands with athletes for marketing campaigns, with a view to further expand into other areas of media and entertainment such as music artists, comedians, actors. Even within the athlete world, there is the concept of micro-influencers such as yogis, triathletes, marathon runners, all the way to macro-influencers such as NFL Quarterbacks, starting NBA point guards and everything in between.

Our 3 recommendations for picking the right influencers are:

Source: Tech Crunch

As brands pursue audiences online, they are producing more creative content than ever — particularly around Instagram.

In the past twelve months, Brandfolder‘s Brand Index (check out the full Brand Index Report at the end of this article) tracked an 80% increase in videos and other creative material targeted for the platform.

With the Instagram community being a highly engaged group, brands rely on rich, visual content to connect to them. With the proliferation of new Instagram features, like video, Stories, multi-photo carousels, and IGTV, each subset requires its own content, further inflating the need for more brand creative.

The growth in brand creative isn’t just due to audience demands, however. The shelf life of brand assets has fallen as more brands compete with other content (and each other) for user attention.

In 2016-2017, the average asset shelf life was 395 days. From 2017-2018, it was 280 days, with varying lifespans across file type and industry. That’s a 29% decrease in lifespan. Over the next few years, we predict this number will continue to decrease.

Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.

Which means, as brands are becoming increasingly dynamic and getting serious about personalization, the need for brand creative, more frequently, will continue to skyrocket in order to stay current and relevant.

To bring this to life, think about the last professional sports game you watched. You noticed one team on the field was wearing a throwback jersey with an old school logo. At a different game, they were back to wearing their normal jerseys with the most current logo.

Later in the season, however, the team is wearing pink jerseys for Breast Cancer awareness. This is a prime example of a dynamic brand expressing their creativity while adapting to varying circumstances, events, and audiences. All of this necessitates fluid brand creative.

But what exactly is brand creative? In the broadest sense, it refers to the all-encompassing collection of online and offline creative assets that a business uses to represent its brand. When we refer to brand creative, we refer to assets of all types–like videos, social media posts, product photography, lifestyle imagery, sales materials, logos, fonts, 3d renderings, and much more.

At Brandfolder, we are focused on delivering intelligence about our customer’s brand creative. We house and manage millions of creative assets from companies of all sizes–anyone from small-scale mom-and-pop shops to large-scale Fortune 10 companies.

And within this massive creative data set, our data science team extracts actionable insights through asset scoring algorithms, prediction formulas, collections, classification tools, and uniqueness analysis, to name a few.

Through these analyses mentioned above, our data science team created the Brand Index– a collection of high-level brand creative trends that CMOs, brand managers, agency professionals, and designers should use to guide their strategic campaigns and deliverables. It was built on discoveries from tens of thousands of creative assets stored in our digital asset management platform from more than 6,000 brands between 2016-2019.

Some brands house asset counts as low as 60, while others house as many as 38,000 assets or more. Specific information analyzed within the Brand Index includes amounts of assets, file formats, asset orientation, asset shelf life, event-based interactions with assets, and more. This information was then combined with the customer’s industry and anonymized to remove any identifying and brand-specific information.

In the Brand Index, companies can learn things like why and how brands’ digital footprints are growing exponentially. From 2017-2018, total asset count on a by-brand basis skyrocketed by 81%. And, it’s on track to continue climbing.

Check out the full Brandfolder Brand Index Report at the end of this article.

A major factor for this digital asset boom could be the increasing demand for rich and personalized media on multiple channels, putting an even greater emphasis on the need for a robust digital asset management platform.

Additionally, as CMOs and design directors are putting more time and effort into their brand creative, the need for understanding which assets perform better, when and where, will continue to rise. Brands are already taking advantage of optimizing their creative content based on rich insights.

Thus, by integrating testing data with a platform that provides asset-specific performance insights, brands will have the competitive edge they need to continue retaining and building equity in the minds of their consumers.

Our findings also show that companies should take note of the shift in file type and how brand creative needs to become increasingly dynamic in order to keep delighting their customers. Rich media files used for engaging and dynamic advertising are on the rise–with video being a key player.

Videos have become the go-to file format supporting a variety of marketing and business goals like sales, retention, upsell opportunities, customer experience, education, thought leadership, and more. JPGs still tend to be a brand favorite, however, gone are the days that these JPGs only live in one place. Asset versatility and responsiveness are critical for the increase of digital channels. Which leads me to my next point: brand identity.

Most brands now have at least four logo orientation and color variations that contribute to consistency and cohesion across their growing portfolio of channels. The brands that are succeeding in the marketplace have animated logos and other engaging asset types that they can switch out on any channel with the snap of a finger.

And as mentioned earlier, if the average shelf life of an asset differs by file type with a current average being 280 days or less, which file formats should brands continue to invest in order to maximize their ROI?

But, what does asset shelf life really mean? Asset shelf life is defined as the number of days between when an asset was created and its latest event date (the last time it was accessed, viewed, downloaded, distributed, etc.). An asset is just like a living, breathing creature. It moves from creation through purpose and finally reaches retirement or its, sometimes timely, archival.

Not all assets are created equal, however. With the creation of AI & ML technologies, brands are getting smarter about their content’s performance. High-performing brands are quicker to remove underperforming content from their arsenal and generate new brand creative to keep things fresh.

And with video on the rise, that also takes a big chunk of change out of marketing and creative budgets. Thankfully, but not ironically, we’re seeing that the asset types that take a larger investment also have longer shelf lives.

Companies should invest in a management solution for more expensive assets to ensure they are generating the maximum reach and profitability throughout their lives.

As brands look to scale their identities and creative asset production, as well as their distribution and delivery strategies, companies should take advantage of the Brandfolder Brand Index in order to ensure they aren’t left behind with the constantly evolving landscape.

Read the full Brandfolder Brand Index below:

Source: Tech Crunch