Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Just 12 hours left to apply to Startup Battlefield at TC Disrupt 2021

• May 27, 2021
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We’ve been urging you to apply to Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 for weeks now, and you have just over 12 hours left before the application window slams shut on May 27 at 11:59 pm (PT). Don’t procrastinate — the experience alone, whether you win the $100,000 prize or not, can improve the trajectory

We’ve been urging you to apply to Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 for weeks now, and you have just over 12 hours left before the application window slams shut on May 27 at 11:59 pm (PT). Don’t procrastinate — the experience alone, whether you win the $100,000 prize or not, can improve the trajectory of your business.

Case in point: Mollie Breen started out as a mathematician at the National Security Agency before co-founding an IoT/OT security startup called Perygee. She and her team competed in Startup Battlefield last year at Disrupt 2020. Although they didn’t reach the finals, Breen has plenty to say about the experience. Here’s what she shared with us in a quick Q&A.

TC: Why did you apply to Startup Battlefield?                                             

Breen: I admired the leadership and growth of other companies that, at one point, were Startup Battlefield contestants. I noticed they had similar traction to us when they applied, and their products resembled ours in their ability to disrupt the respective industry.

TC: What was the training process like?

Breen: It was incredibly valuable both in the short term and long term. Every team gets a weekly session with the Battlefield editor. Together you rehearse and go over every iteration of the pitch line-by-line and slide-by-slide. After each session, I walked away with constructive feedback on everything — the content, the speaking style and even the font color on a particular slide.

This was a unique opportunity, and we put in extra hours to be ahead of schedule, sent drafts for review in the off hours and even doubled down on additional practice with Q&As. As a result, we couldn’t have been more prepared for pitch day. And the training has stayed with Perygee well past the sessions and the competition.

TC: What did it feel like to pitch at Disrupt?

Breen: Pitching at Disrupt was, in some ways, like other pitches except that you have an international audience. Since, at that point, we had practiced our pitch dozens of times, the real unknown during the competition was the Q&A with the VC judges.

There was additional pressure to answer succinctly and convincingly within a time constraint that you wouldn’t have during a normal one-on-one pitch. But with the prep help from the TechCrunch team, I felt ready to speak in front of such a large audience. I encourage anyone who might be nervous about the big stage to go for it and trust you’ll have more than enough preparation when you get there.

TC: What was the post-pitch impact? Did you meet investors, press or other key partners?

Breen: It helped accelerate our progress. Following Battlefield, we closed an oversubscribed fundraising round. We acquired additional beta users, including our first beta user who messaged us after reading about Perygee on TechCrunch. We also gained numerous press opportunities to share our story.

It’s almost a year since Startup Battlefield, and I’m still impressed by how many people start the conversation saying they watched the pitch while reading our company’s background. It’s a reminder that the opportunities created by being a TechCrunch Battlefield company continue.

TC: Do you have any great news to share since your pitch?

Breen: At TechCrunch Battlefield we were a small team doing MVP testing and just about to start raising. Since the pitch, we have scaled on all fronts. We grew the founding team and the engineering team, and we deployed the product to enterprise networks. Some of those deployments include contacts who reached out because of TechCrunch — and we raised our seed round!

TC: Is there anything else you’d like to share?

Breen: I’m grateful for the camaraderie and relationships we developed with the other teams. What you didn’t see on stage during the pitches was all of us cheering one another on from the group chat or social media feed. Even now, we continue to support one another through navigating business questions or promoting product launches. If it weren’t for Startup Battlefield, I would never have met this awesome group of startups.

You have just 24 hours left to channel your inner Mollie Breen. Apply to Startup Battlefield before the deadline expires on May 27 at 11:59 pm (PT). Get moving!

News: The open-source Contributor Covenant is now managed by the Organization for Ethical Source

• May 27, 2021
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Managing the technical side of open-source projects is often hard enough, but throw in the inevitable conflicts between contributors, who are often very passionate about their contributions, and things get even harder. One way to establish ground rules for open-source communities is the Contributor Covenant, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke back in 2014. Like so

Managing the technical side of open-source projects is often hard enough, but throw in the inevitable conflicts between contributors, who are often very passionate about their contributions, and things get even harder. One way to establish ground rules for open-source communities is the Contributor Covenant, created by Coraline Ada Ehmke back in 2014. Like so many projects in the open-source world, the Contributor Covenant was also a passion project for Ehmke. Over the years, its first two iterations have been adopted by organizations like the CNCF, Creative Commons, Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Linux project, in addition to hundreds of other projects.

Now, as work is starting on version 3.0, the Organization for Ethical Source (OES), of which Ehmke is a co-founder and executive director, will take over the stewardship of the project.

“Contributor Covenant was the first document of its kind as code of conduct for open-source projects — and it was incredibly controversial and actually remains pretty controversial to this day,” Ehmke told me. “But I come from the Ruby community, and the Ruby community really embraced the concept and also really embraced the document itself. And then it spread from there to lots of other open-source projects and other open-source communities.”

The core of the document is a pledge to “make participation in our community a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of age, body size, visible or invisible disability, ethnicity, sex characteristics, gender identity and expression, level of experience, education, socio-economic status, nationality, personal appearance, race, caste, color, religion, or sexual identity and orientation,” and for contributors to act in ways that contribute to a diverse, open and welcoming community.

As Ehmke told me, one part that evolved over the course of the last few years is the addition of enforcement guidelines that are meant to help community leaders determine the consequences when members violate the code of conduct.

“One of the things that I try to do in this work is when people criticize the work, even if they’re not arguing in good faith, I try to see if there’s something in there that could be used as constructive feedback, something actionable,” Ehmke said. “A lot of the criticism for years for Contributor Covenant was people saying, ‘Oh, I’ll say one wrong thing and be permanently banned from our project, which is really grim and really unreasonable.’ What I took from that is that people are afraid of what consequences project leaders might impose on them for an infraction. Put that way, that’s kind of a reasonable concern.”

Ehmke described bringing the Covenant to the OES as an “exit to community,” similar to how companies will often bring their mature open-source projects under the umbrella of a foundation. She noted that the OES includes a lot of members with expertise in community management and project governance, which they will be able to bring to the project in a more formal way. “I’m still going to be involved with the evolution of Contributor Covenant, but it’s going to be developed under the working group model that the organization for ethical source has established,” she explained.

For version 3.0, Ehmke hopes to turn the Covenant into what she described as more of a “toolkit” that will allow different communities to tailor it a bit more to their own goals and values (though still within the core ethical principles outlined by the OES).

“Microsoft’s adoption of Contributor Covenant represents our commitment to building healthy, diverse and inclusive communities, as well as our intention to contribute and build together with others in the ecosystem,” said Emma Irwin, a program manager in Microsoft’s Open Source Program Office. “I am honored to bring this intention and my expertise to the OES’s Contributor Covenant 3.0 working group.”

News: Utah DOT pilots Blyncsy’s AI-powered road maintenance technology

• May 27, 2021
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If you drive past potholes and faded lane dividers on your morning commute to work, chances are you’ll continue to see such road blemishes until someone alerts the local department of transportation to the problem by filing a complaint. Utah-based startup Blyncsy wants to help governments be a bit more preemptive than that. The movement

If you drive past potholes and faded lane dividers on your morning commute to work, chances are you’ll continue to see such road blemishes until someone alerts the local department of transportation to the problem by filing a complaint. Utah-based startup Blyncsy wants to help governments be a bit more preemptive than that.

The movement and data intelligence company is launching an AI-powered technology, called Payver, that will use crowd-sourced video data to give transport agencies up-to-date information on which roads require maintenance and improvements. Blyncsy is offering this service to governments at a reduced cost and with no long-term commitment.

Utah’s DOT will be the first to pilot the program beginning June 1, deploying Payver in the Salt Lake County region, which covers more than 350 road miles. Blyncsy will be announcing other pilots in different states over the next few weeks. 

Governments are typically a bit slower to adopt new technologies, and while the U.S. DOT has spent more than $250 million in public and private funds for smart city and advanced transportation options, much of the progress tends to revolve around making public transit in cities greener and more efficient. Blyncsy founder and CEO Mark Pittman argues inefficient road maintenance is not only unsafe, but it also causes higher carbon emissions. 

“The inspiration for Payver came in 2017 when the UDOT executive director set a goal that it would be the first department in the country to have real-time situational awareness on our roadways, and we’ve been working on solving that problem for them,” Pittman told TechCrunch. “They want to know what’s happening and when it’s happening automatically so the public doesn’t have to be involved. So if there’s roadside debris or stop signs missing or paint lines that need to be fixed, how does the department know without the public having to call and complain or without an accident occurring?”

Blyncsy’s Payver technology works by collecting any kind of HD images and videos from a variety of sources, such as Nexar dash cameras, and analyzing the data sets with machine vision to deliver output to customers. The insights are available to transit agencies in a dashboard format, but Payver also integrates into the maintenance management software that determines a rank order of repair jobs.  

For the UDOT pilot, Payver will initially focus on monitoring paint lines, which is the basic requirement to support an autonomous environment, but may expand into potholes, construction barrels, knocked over signs and whatever else can go wrong from daily wear. UDOT has a budget of about $90,000 for this pilot, according to Rob Miles, UDOT’s director of traffic and safety.

“Right now, we do a lidar scan of our roadways every two years, so we’re always out there collecting data of some sort, but it’s not at a high enough fidelity that we can manage our striping off of it,” Miles told TechCrunch. “We’re still really managing striping off of public complaints. We’re hoping with a different data collection system that we can move from that complaint-based system to something that has less opinion and more measurable data behind it.”

Pittman said optimizing active mobility forms by helping predict repairs needed for pedestrian crossings or safe locations for bike lanes will be a priority for Payver as the technology advances, which is important for maintaining equity and inclusion in mobility. Payver can also help bridge the racial and socioeconomic gap in road conditions, says Pittman, helping DOTs deliver equitable services to the entire public.

“Pete Buttigieg recently talked about how transportation as it is has helped support systemic racism at times and pigeonhole communities because of the way we build roads often with lower income populations being closer to freeways,” he said. 

“The same thing is also true when you think about roadway maintenance. Lower-income populations are much less likely to complain and higher-income populations are a lot more likely to complain, but the impact of a pothole in a low-income population means a broken axle, which can determine the viability of that family surviving. That’s not true in a high-income environment.”

News: Breinify announces $11M seed to bring data science to the marketing team

• May 27, 2021
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Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totalling $11 million. The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined

Breinify is a startup working to apply data science to personalization, and do it in a way that makes it accessible to non-technical marketing employees to build more meaningful customer experiences. Today the company announced a funding round totalling $11 million.

The investment was led by Gutbrain Ventures and PBJ Capital with participation from Streamlined Ventures, CXO Fund, Amino Capital, Startup Capital Ventures and Sterling Road.

Breinify co-founder and CEO Diane Keng says that she and co-founder and CTO Philipp Meisen started the company to bring predictive personalization based on data science to marketers with the goal of helping them improve a customer’s experience by personalizing messages tailored to individual tastes.

“We’re big believers that the world, especially consumer brands, really need strong predictive personalization. But when you think about consumer big brands or the retailers that you buy from, most of them aren’t data scientists, nor do they really know how to activate [machine learning] at scale,” Keng told TechCrunch.

She says that she wanted to make this type of technology more accessible by hiding the complexity behind the algorithms powering the platform. “Instead of telling you how powerful the algorithms are, we show you [what that means for the] consumer experience, and in the end what that means for both the consumer and you as a marketer individually,” she said.

That involves the kind of customizations you might expect around website messaging, emails, texts or whatever channel a marketer might be using to communicate with the buyer. “So the AI decides you should be shown these products, this offer, this specific promotion at this time, [whether it’s] the web, email or SMS. So you’re not getting the same content across different channels, and we do all that automatically for you, and that’s [driven by the algorithms],” she said.

Breinify launched in 2016 and participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition in San Francisco that year. She said it was early days for the company, but it helped them focus their approach. “I think it gave us a huge stage presence. It gave us a chance to test out the idea just to see where the market was in regards to needing a solution like this. We definitely learned a lot. I think it showed us that people were interested in personalization,” she said. And although the company didn’t win the competition, it ended up walking away with a funding deal.

Today the startup is growing fast and has 24 employees, up from 10 last year. Keng, who is an Asian woman, places a high premium on diversity.

“We partner with about four different kinds of diversity groups right now to source candidates, but at the end of the day, I think if you are someone that’s eager to learn, and you might not have all the skills yet, and you’re [part of an under-represented] group we encourage everyone to apply as much as possible. We put a lot of work into trying to create a really well rounded group,” she said.

News: Coda’s Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona’s S. Somasegar to talk taking on Google on Extra Crunch Live

• May 27, 2021
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Collaborative software is so hot right now, but the space is also incredibly crowded. It can be hard to rise above the noise, but Coda has managed to do so with $140 million in funding and a valuation topping $600 million. So it should go without saying that we’re excited to hear from Coda CEO

Collaborative software is so hot right now, but the space is also incredibly crowded. It can be hard to rise above the noise, but Coda has managed to do so with $140 million in funding and a valuation topping $600 million.

So it should go without saying that we’re excited to hear from Coda CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Madrona investor S. Somasegar, who invested in the company’s Series C round, on an upcoming episode of Extra Crunch Live.

Soma is a managing director at Madrona, responsible for investments in Snowflake, UIPath, Coda, Pulumi, Seekout and more. He invests in a broad array of categories, including machine learning, next-gen cloud infrastructure, future of work, robotic process automation and more.

Before Madrona, Soma spent 27 years at Microsoft as SVP of the Developer Division. He’s got experience both as an operator and investor and will have plenty of wisdom to impart on the episode.

Mehrotra, for his part, has built a pretty massive business that has not only scaled well, but competes directly with giants like Google. Coda is a collaborative doc/spreadsheet software that looks to take on the G Suite. Before Coda, Mehrotra was an executive at YouTube and, prior to that, held leadership roles at Microsoft working on Windows, Office and SQL Server.

We’ll talk to these two about fundraising for a product like Coda, what attracted Soma to the platform and how they work alongside one another today. We’ll also have an Extra Crunch Live Pitch Off, where folks in the audience can come on “stage” and pitch their wares. Mehrotra and Soma will give their live feedback and, let’s face it, make all of us better at pitching in general.

The episode goes down on June 2 at 3 p.m. ET/noon PT, and is accessible to anyone. However, only Extra Crunch members can access this episode (and the entire ECL library) on-demand. If you’re not a member yet, join here.

Register here to hang out with us on the episode.

News: Dapper Labs backs art hardware startup Infinite Objects in $6 million seed raise

• May 27, 2021
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The NFT world is all about reshaping the idea of digital ownership, but art hardware startup Infinite Objects sees a big opportunity in making physical copies of those assets as it looks to reshape digital art and collectibles. The startup makes screens that show a single video from a single artist and don’t do anything

The NFT world is all about reshaping the idea of digital ownership, but art hardware startup Infinite Objects sees a big opportunity in making physical copies of those assets as it looks to reshape digital art and collectibles.

The startup makes screens that show a single video from a single artist and don’t do anything else. You can’t download apps to the screens or upload your own photos to them or check the time or weather. If you even want another piece of art from Infinite Objects, you can’t just download it, you have to actually go to their site and buy another display with that artwork on it. Each screen boasts information about the work, edition numbers and serial numbers etched on the back of it, inextricably tying the physical display to the work that it displays.

Infinite Objects CEO Joe Saavedra tells TechCrunch they’ve raised $6 million in seed funding from a host of backers including Courtside VC, which led the deal, and NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs.

For the longest time, Infinite Objects was an NFT platform without the NFTs. The company has worked with artists since 2018 to make (often limited run) series of physical display frames highlighting a specific digital work of the artist that looped forever. Sure, users could watch that looping video on the Infinite Objects website whenever they wanted, but the value was in owning an official copy of that artist’s work. Sound familiar?

When the wider popularity of NFTs as a speculative asset hit earlier this year, Saavedra saw a huge opportunity as internet users began discussing the future of digital art and digital scarcity. His team had already flirted with NFTs, partnering with artist Beeple back in December — months before he would spring out of relative obscurity in art circles with a $69 million sale at the Christie’s auction house — to release “physical tokens” of NFTs he was selling on the platform Nifty Gateway.

Saavedra sees a bigger opportunity for companies and creators in the NFT world to make their assets more approachable and understandable to a general audience with what his company is building, but he also sees a chance to transform NFTs from blind ownership to something more focused on actually appreciating the digital art that’s been purchased.

“When it comes to ownership, it’s exciting to be buying an NFT for $500 or $5,000, but what’s not exciting is having to open Safari on your phone to show it off,” Saavedra tells TechCrunch. “This physical vessel that we’ve designed is just so understandable for people who maybe don’t even understand what the blockchain at all, but they certainly understand limited edition physical merchandise.”

Saavedra is dismissive of other digital displays that cycle through artwork and says that art owners could also just toss images of their NFTs onto the TV if they wanted to, but that they all only serve up art as “glorified screensavers.”

The team at Infinite Objects sees broader opportunities in the NFT world but they’ve been tight-lipped on exactly what these efforts will look like. You can see some potential hints in the list of backers in this round, including most interestingly NBA Top Shot creator Dapper Labs. The startup has been building out its own blockchain called Flow and Saavedra was quick to sing its praises in our conversation, noting that its more scalable and sustainable than the Ethereum network. Dapper Labs recently announced its first major third-party NFT platform, partnering with avatar startup Genies –another investor in this round — for a digital accessories storefront that’s being launched this summer.

Serena Ventures, Betaworks, Brooklyn Bridge Ventures, GFR Fund, Kevin Durant & Rich Kleiman, Genies, and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures also participated in the round.

News: Twitter Spaces will be available for web, including accessibility features

• May 27, 2021
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On Wednesday evening, Twitter announced that Spaces – its Clubhouse competitor – will start rolling out for use on the web. Earlier this month, Twitter Spaces became available for any user with more than 600 followers on the iOS or Android apps, and around the same time, Clubhouse finally released its long-awaited Android app. Still,

On Wednesday evening, Twitter announced that Spaces – its Clubhouse competitor – will start rolling out for use on the web. Earlier this month, Twitter Spaces became available for any user with more than 600 followers on the iOS or Android apps, and around the same time, Clubhouse finally released its long-awaited Android app. Still, Clubhouse has yet to debut on the web, marking a success for Twitter in the race to corner the live social audio market. 

Even Instagram is positioning itself as a Clubhouse competitor, allowing users to “go live” with the ability to mute their audio and video. How will each app differentiate itself? Twitter CFO Ned Segal attempted to address this at JP Morgan’s 49th Annual Technology, Media, & Communications conference this week. 

“Twitter is where you go to find out what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about,” said Segal. “So when you come to Twitter, and you look at your home Timeline and you see a Space, it’s gonna perhaps be people who you don’t know but who are talking about a topic that’s incredibly relevant to you. It could be Bitcoin, it could be the aftershock from the Grammys, it could be that they’re talking about the NFL Draft.” 

Twitter’s focus areas for the web version of Spaces include a UI that adapts to the user’s screen size and reminders for scheduled Spaces. Before joining a space, Twitter will display a preview that shows who is in a Space, and a description of the topic being discussed. Users will also be able to have a Space open on the right side of their screen while still scrolling through their Timeline.

Image Credits: Twitter

Most crucially, this update lists accessibility and transcriptions as a focus area. For an audio-only platform, live transcriptions are necessary for Deaf and hard-of-hearing people to join in on the conversation. In screenshots Twitter shared of the new features, we can see how live captions will appear in Spaces. As for how accurate these transcriptions will be, the jury’s still out.

Twitter fielded well-deserved criticism last year when it failed to include captioning on its audio tweet feature. In an apology tweet, Twitter Support wrote, “Accessibility should not be an afterthought.” By September, Twitter launched two accessibility teams. 

Still, accessibility has often been treated as an afterthought throughout the rise of live audio. Clubhouse does not yet support live captioning. 

News: Between a rock and a farm raise

• May 27, 2021
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Something I think that gets lost in the conversation around robotics is just how many different tasks can — and at some point will — be automated. Here I’m talking specifically about agtech. We’ve seen a ton of agricultural robotics come across our desk in recent years, and one of the more remarkable things about

Something I think that gets lost in the conversation around robotics is just how many different tasks can — and at some point will — be automated. Here I’m talking specifically about agtech. We’ve seen a ton of agricultural robotics come across our desk in recent years, and one of the more remarkable things about it all is just how broad the applications are.

There are all of the usual automated tasks you’d expect: produce picking, payload carting, weed pulling. All necessary farming tasks that seem to be well served by the industry. But what of rocks? Honestly, it’s something that hadn’t really occurred to me, having not spent any time on farms, aside from the occasional elementary school field trip.

TerraClear first entered our radar in 2018, mostly due to the founder’s former company (Smartsheet). Rocks are, quite literally, a big problem for farmers and farming equipment, so the company built a tractor/robot designed to pick them up. The system, which ships next year, will be able to grab up to 400 rocks an hour — individual rocks weighing up to 300 pounds.

The company just announced a $25 million Series A, which brings its total funding up to $36 million, says founder and CEO Brent Frei.

“There are more than 400 million arable acres worldwide that have been waiting for a cost-effective and productive solution to this problem,” said Frei. “Repetitive tasks like this are optimal targets for automation, and the technologies we are bringing to the field dramatically reduce the labor and time needed to prep fields for planting.”

Image Credits: Bowery Farming

Since we’re talking about farms and robots, Bowery Farming deserves a mention for a massive $300 million round. That puts the NYC-based company’s value at a beefy $2.3 billion. Robots, sensors and AI are a big part of Bowery’s vertical farming approach. The company’s already sending its produce to 850 grocery stores, along with a deal with Amazon Fresh.

It’s probably safe to say that indoor farming has a future for all sorts of reasons having to do with land use, climate and beyond.

Image Credits: MIT

Of course today’s research is tomorrow’s unicorns (this is not actually a saying…yet), and there are a couple of projects worth noting this week. Leading off the bunch is MIT, which is giving robotic inspection the finger. The oddly (but not inaccurately) named Digger Finger is capable of sensing and identifying objects underground. It’s a useful skill that could someday be deployed for landmines, finding underground cables and a variety of other tasks.

And here’s a nice feel-good story, as it were. A new paper published in Science from University of Pittsburgh engineers highlights the value of adding tactile feedback for prosthetic arms. This delivers some clear advantages over traditional vision sensing. Per the paper:

Flesher et al. added an afferent channel to the brain-computer interface to mimic sensory input from the skin of a hand (see the Perspective by Faisal). The improvements achieved by adding the afferent input were substantial in a battery of motor tasks tested in a human subject.

News: Instacart speeds up grocery orders with ‘Priority Delivery’ option

• May 27, 2021
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Instacart is speeding up grocery delivery. The company announced today it’s debuting a faster delivery service, “Priority Delivery,” in select markets across the U.S. and Canada, with the aim of attracting customers who would have otherwise quickly run to the store for their smaller orders or more urgent demands. At launch, the service will operate

Instacart is speeding up grocery delivery. The company announced today it’s debuting a faster delivery service, “Priority Delivery,” in select markets across the U.S. and Canada, with the aim of attracting customers who would have otherwise quickly run to the store for their smaller orders or more urgent demands. At launch, the service will operate in several larger U.S. metros, and will offer deliveries in as fast as 30 minutes, the company says. Instacart is also expanding other speedier delivery services, including 45-minute and 60-minute options, to more cities and retailers in the months to come.

Today, many customers use Instacart to order their larger, weekly or monthly grocery orders, but still run to the store when they need a smaller number of items — like ingredients for tonight’s meal, for example. The new Priority Delivery wants to be an alternative to these shorter trips, effectively becoming the grocery delivery alternative to using a store’s express lane checkout.

In the markets where Priority Delivery is live, it will be indicated by supported retailers in the Instacart app with a lightning bolt icon that notes the expected delivery time, like “30 minutes or less.” Customers will also be given the option to choose Priority during checkout, instead of Standard delivery or a scheduled time, if they prefer.

The company tells us there’s not an item limit nor minimum on these types of orders. However, shorter requests — like milk, a few bags of chips, and a couple of bottles of wine, for instance — will be fulfilled faster than orders where the customer is requesting speciality deli items, a pickup from a bakery, or has a larger basket size.

When the basket size grows larger or the order becomes more complicated, the app will update to display that the 30-minute window is no longer available and display the new delivery time.

Instacart hasn’t yet finalized its pricing for the service, but Priority Delivery will carry an upcharge of some kind. However, the company tells us the fee will be “small” and “incremental,” and will likely be dynamic based on market considerations. It notes that the different delivery options and their associated fees and taxes are displayed during checkout, so there are no surprises.

Initially, Priority Delivery will be available in 5 cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle, across more than 300 store locations, including grocers and speciality retailers. It plans to roll out the service to more markets and retailers over time.

“We know that no two grocery shops are created equal – whether it’s a bulk buy for the week ahead or just a few ingredients for tonight’s dinner – so we’re launching new features that support the many ways people shop for their groceries today,” noted Daniel Danker, Vice President of Product at Instacart, in a statement about the launch. “For many customers, every minute counts when they’re in a pinch and need something in a hurry. With today’s launch of Priority Delivery, we’re redefining the ‘quick run to the store’ and bringing the grocery express lane online for customers,” he added.

In addition, Instacart will expand access to 45-minute and 60-minute delivery options to more cities across the U.S., allowing consumers other options for faster delivery, even if the Priority service is not available.

The move to increase delivery speeds across its footprint could help Instacart better compete with grocery delivery rivals, like Walmart and Amazon’s grocery businesses, as well as Target-owned Shipt.

It also shortly follows Amazon’s announcement last week that it would be shutting down its standalone Prime Now delivery app and website, to instead direct shoppers who want faster delivery on groceries to the Amazon app and website. However, in Amazon’s case, it’s promising 2-hour delivery windows on both Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods; not as low as 30 minutes. Meanwhile, Walmart’s membership-based delivery service, Walmart+, doesn’t currently guarantee same-day delivery even for its paying subscribers, as its time slots are on a first-come, first-serve basis. Among the big names, that leaves Shipt  — which offers same-day delivery, but not necessarily in 30 minutes.

The update may also make Instacart more competitive with other types of fast delivery businesses which don’t don’t serve grocery retailers — like goPuff’s ‘instant needs’ delivery service, Uber Eats Essentials, or DoorDash, which last year expanded to include convenience store items — including things like chips, ice cream, spices, packaged foods, and others that might have otherwise made for a quick store trip.

Instacart’s new service is rolling out now to customers in supported markets.

News: Poor onboarding is the enemy of good hiring

• May 27, 2021
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The world of hybrid work is here, and the usual 10-minute intro call, swag bag and first-day team lunch are just not enough to make your new employee feel welcome.

The world of hybrid work is here, and the usual 10-minute intro call, swag bag and first-day team lunch are just not enough to make your new employee feel welcome.

While many companies have found a way to interview and select candidates in a fully remote environment, fewer have spent time and resources on aligning the “pre-boarding” and onboarding process for the new hybrid world of work. Many employers still rely on old ways of welcoming new hires, despite our totally changed work environment.

In our experience at Greenhouse, where we help companies as diverse as BuzzFeed, HubSpot and Intercom hire talent across their organization, first impressions can make or break a candidate’s chances of staying at a company.

In fact, 69% of employees will stay for more than three years if their onboarding experience is good, while 20% will leave within 45 days if it’s bad. That difference is costly, as it takes, on average, around $4,129 and 42 days to fill a position.

Replacing someone can cost up to 50%-60% of their annual salary. At the same time, 58% of organizations said they were guilty of centering their onboarding processes on administrative and paperwork requirements alone.

Here is how we advise our clients to set up every new hire for success right from the start.

The company’s Day One comes long before the candidate’s Day One

Most of us can remember the excitement (and anxiety) of receiving and signing an offer for a new job. It’s important to capitalize on candidates’ enthusiasm and eagerness from the moment the offer is signed, instead of when they log in on Day One.