Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Deliveroo could leave Spanish market ahead of on-demand labor reclassification

Deliveroo said it is considering leaving the Spanish market, citing limited market share and a long road of investment with ‘highly uncertain long-term potential returns’ on the horizon.

Deliveroo announced today that it is considering leaving the Spanish market, citing limited market share and a long road of investment with “highly uncertain long-term potential returns” on the horizon.

The company, an on-demand outfit based in the U.K., went public earlier in 2021. Its shares initially sagged, drawing concern about both the value of on-demand companies and tech concerns listing in London more broadly. However, shares of Deliveroo have since recovered, and the company’s second-quarter earnings report saw it raise its expected gross order volume growth expectations “from between 30% to 40% to between 50% to 60%.”

Given its rising growth expectations and improving public-market valuation, you may be surprised that Deliveroo is willing to leave any of the 12 markets in which it currently operates. In the case of Spain, it appears that Deliveroo is concerned that changes to local labor laws will make its operations more expensive in the country, which, given its modest market share, is not palatable.

Recall that Spain adopted a law in May — a law generally agreed to in March — requiring on-demand companies to hire their couriers. This is the sort of arrangement that on-demand companies in food delivery and ride-hailing have long fought; many on-demand companies are unprofitable without hiring couriers, and doing so could raise their costs. The possibility of worsened economics makes such changes to labor laws in any market a worry for startups and public companies alike that lean on freelance delivery workers.

Let’s parse the Deliveroo statement to better understand the company’s perspective. Here’s the introductory paragraph:

Deliveroo today announces that it proposes to consult on ending its operations in Spain. Deliveroo currently operates across 12 markets worldwide, with the vast majority of the Company’s gross transaction value (GTV) coming from markets where Deliveroo holds a #1 or #2 market position.

Translation: We’re probably leaving Spain. Most of our order volume comes from markets where we are in a leading position (the company competes with Uber Eats, Glovo and Just Eat in different markets). We are not in a leading position in Spain.

Spain represents less than 2% of Deliveroo’s GTV in H1 2021. The Company has determined that achieving and sustaining a top-tier market position in Spain would require a disproportionate level of investment with highly uncertain long-term potential returns that could impact the economic viability of the market for the Company. 

Translation: Spain is a very small market for Deliveroo. To gain lots of market share in Spain would be very costly, and the company isn’t sure about the long-term profitability of the country’s business. This is where labor issues like this come into play — investing to gain market share in a country where your business is less profitable is hard to pencil out.

And according to El Pais, the decision by Deliveroo comes as it was up against a deadline regarding worker reclassification. That may have contributed to the timing of the announcement.

From this juncture, Deliveroo spends three paragraphs discussing how it will support workers in case it does leave the Spanish market. It closes with the following:

This proposal does not impact previously communicated full-year guidance on Group annual GTV growth and gross profit margin.

Fair enough.

On-demand companies have made arguments over the years that changes to labor laws that would push more costs onto their plates in the form of hiring couriers — or simply paying them more — would make certain markets uneconomic and drive them away. Here, Deliveroo can follow through with an exit at essentially no cost, given how small its order volume is compared to its other 11 markets.

News: For tech firms, the risk of not preparing for leadership changes is huge

A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in massive downsides.

Jason Dressel
Contributor

Jason Dressel is president of History Factory, which helps companies use their history and heritage to enhance and transform strategy, positioning, marketing and communication.

Every week over the past three and a half years, an average of three CEOs have exited tech companies in the U.S. That tally is higher — in good times and bad — than in any of the other 26 for-profit sectors tracked by executive search firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. You’d think tech companies should be the paradigm of how to prep for leadership transitions, since they operate in such a constant state of flux.

They’re far from it.

A change of command is one of the most delicate moments in the life cycle of any organization. If mishandled, the transition from one CEO to the next can result in a loss of market valuation, momentum and focus, as well as key personnel, customers and partners. It may even become that turning point when an organization begins to slide toward irrelevance.

With so much at stake, 84% of tech execs agree that succession planning is more important than ever because of today’s fast-changing business environment, according to our new survey of corporate America’s leaders. Seven out of 10 survey respondents agreed that tech companies face more scrutiny than other multinationals during a transition.

84% of tech execs agree that succession planning is more important than ever because of today’s fast-changing business environment.

Yet we found that tech execs appear just as unprepared for C-suite transitions as their peers in other sectors. Three out of five respondents said their companies don’t have a documented plan to handle a leadership change, even though, by that same ratio, they acknowledge that a documented plan is the biggest determinant in seamless transitions.

The findings may not be troubling if these respondents were millennial startup founders, years from leaving their companies. The executives we polled, however, hail from 160 companies that have been in business for a minimum of 15 years — 35 are tech companies, the largest industry cohort in the survey.

The smallest companies have at least 1,500 employees and $500 million in annual revenue, while the largest have head counts of over 500,000 and revenue upward of $100 billion. They have been around long enough to understand — and put into place — risk management and crisis planning, including what happens should their leaders fall victim to the proverbial milk truck.

Tech execs should be more rigorous about succession planning for one important reason: institutional memory. Tech firms generally are younger than other companies of a similar size, which partly explains why the median age of S&P 500 companies plunged to 33 years in 2018 from 85 years in 2000, according to McKinsey & Co.

These enterprises clearly have accomplished a lot in their short lives, but in their haste, most have not captured their history, unlike their longer-lived peers in other sectors. Less than half of these tech firms, in fact, have formally recorded their leader’s story for posterity. That puts them at a disadvantage when, inevitably, they will be required to onboard newcomers to their C-suites.

It’s best to record this history well before the intense swirl of a leadership transition begins. Crucially, it will help the incoming and future generations of leadership understand critical aspects of its track record, the lessons learned, culture and identity. It also explains why the organization has evolved as it has, what binds people together and what may trigger resistance based on previous experience. It’s as much about moving forward as looking back.

Most execs in our poll get it, with 85% saying a company’s history can be a playbook for new executives to learn and prepare for upcoming challenges and opportunities. “History is the mother of innovation for any type of company,” one respondent said. “History,” writes another, “includes the roadmap to failures as well as successes.”

But this documented history cannot be a hagiography of the departing CEO. Too often, outgoing execs spend their last years in office constructing their own trophy cases. Even as they conceded their own flat-footedness on transition planning, the majority of execs said they have already taken steps to create and reinforce their personal legacies — two-thirds said they have already completed their own formal legacy planning, many with the blessing of their boards.

It’s ironic, then, that three out of five also said that the legacy of a CEO or founder often overshadows the skill set and experience a successor brings. Two-thirds of tech execs believed that the longer a leader has been in office, the more it complicates a transition.

Tech leaders can do this right and have done so. Asked which five big-name CEO transitions was most successful, respondents’ No. 1 was Apple’s handoff from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook (38%), followed by Microsoft’s page-turn from Steve Ballmer to Satya Nadella (28%). The others, at General Electric, General Motors and Goldman Sachs, each netted no more than 13% of votes.

Apple’s apparent predominance in this survey might contradict the advice to play down the aggrandizement of an exiting CEO and highlight the compilation and transfer of an organization’s history to the next chief executive. Jobs, after all, painstakingly managed his legacy until the end. But even as he continued to take center-stage, he also made sure to pass along Apple’s institutional knowledge and ethos to Cook over the 13 years they shared space on Apple’s executive floor.

Sooner or later, everyone in the C-suite today — including startup founders — will depart. For the sake of everyone they’ll leave behind, they should begin prepping for that day now.

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Livestream e-commerce, growth marketing interviews, CEO for a day

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; have a great weekend.

This year, livestream viewers in China are projected to spend more than $60 billion on digital shopping experiences that let them interact with influencers in real time.

Promoting everything from cosmetics to food, social media stars use Taobao, TikTok and other platforms to livestream products and take questions from the audience.

On Taobao’s Single’s Day Global Shopping Festival in 2020, livestreams racked up $6 billion in sales, twice as much revenue as the year prior.

Sensing a trend, Western startups are getting in on the action, with companies like Whatnot and PopShop.Live raising rounds to build out their infrastructure. Looking forward, Alanna Gregory, senior global director at Afterpay, says she foresees four major trends:

  • Networks
  • SaaS streaming tools
  • Host discovery and outreach tools
  • Host marketplaces and agencies

“For brands, SaaS streaming tools will be the most impactful way to take advantage of livestream commerce trends,” Gregory writes in an Extra Crunch guest post. “All of this will be incredibly transformative.”


To help entrepreneurs take on the most fundamental challenge facing early-stage startups, our team is speaking to growth marketers to learn more about the advice they’re offering clients these days.

This week, Miranda Halpern and Anna Heim interviewed experts on growth marketing:

Growth is an existential issue, so these stories are free to read and share. If you’ve worked with an individual or an agency who helped your startup find and keep new users, please let us know.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson

Senior Editor, TechCrunch

@yourprotagonist

Why Latin American venture capital is breaking records this year

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim’s global exploration of Q2 venture capital data wrapped up this week with an in-depth look at Latin America.

One investor told them that today’s LatAm startup market “is a story about talent, not about capital.”

“The union of talent and money is what startup markets need to thrive,” they write. “But there are other reasons why Latin American startups are so frequently in the news today, including structural factors, such as strong digital penetration and quick e-commerce growth.”

Dear Sophie: Should we sponsor international hires for H-1B transfers and green cards?

lone figure at entrance to maze hedge that has an American flag at the center

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

My startup is desperately recruiting, and we see a lot of engineering candidates on H-1Bs.

They’re looking for H-1B transfers and green cards. What should we do?

— Baffled in the Bay Area

Why I make everyone in my company be the CEO for a day

Vincit runs a CEO of the Day program once a month

Image Credits: Blake Little (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In the reality TV series “Undercover Boss,” high-powered executives disguise themselves so they can work alongside everyday employees, ostensibly to learn from them.

Flipping that script, software company Vincit USA has a “CEO of the Day” program where staffers move into a metaphorical corner office for 24 hours and receive a very real unlimited budget. There’s just one requirement.

“The CEO must make one lasting decision that will help improve the working experience of Vincit employees,” said Ville Houttu, Vincit’s founder and CEO.

Since instituting the program, Vincit USA has received multiple awards for its workplace culture and sees reduced staff turnover.

“Though it may seem crazy, the initiative has paid off tenfold,” said Houttu.

What I’ve learned after 5 years of buying common stock in startups

Buying common stock can help align investor and founder incentives

Image Credits: Tim Robberts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Instead of giving founders standard term sheets, Boston-based seed-stage venture capital firm Pillar VC offers to buy common stock.

“There are many terms and conditions in a preferred term sheet that can misalign investors and founders,” says founding partner Jamie Goldstein.

“As with any experiment, we have learned a few things that have surprised us and faced challenges we’ve had to overcome.”

China’s regulatory crackdown is good news for startups aligned with CCP goals

Alex Wilhelm takes stock of the wall of news out of China over the past week to see if there’s a silver lining for startups in the country as the Chinese Communist Party cracks down on everything from edtech companies to streaming platforms.

His take?

“The result may be concentrated effort and capital in sectors that Beijing favors and reduced capital and focus from entrepreneurs in sectors that have been deemed fit for strict control,” he writes. “Simply: Central planning is going to tilt business more toward centrally planned goals.”

Duolingo’s IPO pricing is great news for edtech startups

The Pittsburgh-based language-learning unicorn initially aimed for an $85 to $95 per share IPO price range, then bumped that up to $95 to $100 before it began to trade. It ultimately entered the public markets at $102 per share.

Alex Wilhelm notes that based on Duolingo’s expected Q2 revenues, the company has a run-rate multiple of nearly 16x. Compare that to the median multiple for public SaaS companies of 14x.

“Duolingo, a consumer edtech company, is now more valuable per revenue dollar than the median public enterprise SaaS business,” Alex writes.

Financial firms should leverage machine learning to make anomaly detection easier

Machine learning can make anolmaly detection easier

Image Credits: GOCMEN (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

“Anomaly detection is one of the more difficult and underserved operational areas in the asset-servicing sector of financial institutions,” EZOPS CEO Bikram Singh writes in a guest column.

But it’s critical to detect these anomalies amid a sea of data. That’s where unsupervised learning can offer a solution.

​​”With all eyes on data, it’s crucial that financial institutions find solutions to detect anomalies upfront, thereby preventing bad data from infecting downstream processes,” Singh writes.

“Machine learning can be applied to detect the data anomalies as well as identify the reasons for them, effectively reducing the time spent researching and rectifying executions.”

African startups join global funding boom as fintech shines

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim continued their global tour of Q2 2021 venture capital data, this week focusing on Africa.

“Early data indicates that Africa is set to trounce historical records in terms of venture capital raised in the year and that the first half of 2021 saw roughly twice the funds raised by African startups as was recorded in the first half of 2020,” they write.

“Startups across Africa have never had more access to capital than they do right now.”

True ‘shift left and extend right’ security requires empowered developers

Empowered developers will change the nature of true shift left and extend right security

Image Credits: kuritafsheen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

The intention of DevSecOps is to wedge security and compliance into DevOps. But that’s easier said than done, says Apiiro founder and CEO Idan Plotnik.

“Shifting left and extending right doesn’t mean that a scanning tool or security architect should detect a security risk earlier in the process — it means that a developer should have all the context to prevent the vulnerability before it even happens,” he writes.

4 key areas SaaS startups must address to scale infrastructure for the enterprise

bonsai tree with miniature scaffolding

Image Credits: Stewart Sutton (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Asana’s head of engineering, Prashant Pandey, rounds up four tips for SaaS startups looking to build up their infrastructure to meet customers’ growing needs.

“Startups and SMBs are usually the first to adopt many SaaS products. But as these customers grow in size and complexity — and as you rope in larger organizations — scaling your infrastructure for the enterprise becomes critical for success,” he writes.

He offers four areas to focus on:

  • Address your customers’ security and reliability needs
  • Give IT admins control over product usage
  • Build data isolation into your architecture
  • Support customers by interconnecting their data across applications

News: Kodiak Robotics’ founder says tight focus on autonomous trucks is working

“We will need to raise more money, as you pointed out, that’s certainly no secret, but I think that we have multiple options to do that.”

Kodiak Robotics is one of the last private autonomous vehicles companies focused on trucking that is still standing. Nearly all the rest have been wooed by the public marketplace and the capital it can provide. But co-founder and CEO Don Burnette says the three-year-old company’s strategy of staying focused and small(er) is paying off.

It will be able to deploy a commercial-scale operation for about $500 million in funding, he says in the interview below. To put those go-to-market costs in perspective, that’s 10% of what Waymo has raised in external fundraising and less than 25% of newly publicly traded company TuSimple’s total fundraise.

Kodiak’s strategy is to take a specialized, hyperfocused approach to autonomous trucking that outsources a lot of tech, like data labeling, lidar, radar and mapping, to existing companies. Burnette, who was one of four founders of the self-driving truck startup Otto that Uber acquired, thinks this is a faster, cheaper and more efficient path to commercialization versus building out your own systems and teams.

The company is moving freight for commercial customers, dipping its toes in the market by working with technology partners within the existing ecosystem. Burnette says Kodiak’s Driver technology has achieved a level of maturity where it can handle anything the highway throws at it. In December, the startup achieved “disengagement-free deliveries” between Dallas and Houston, meaning the autonomous system didn’t have to be switched off for safety reasons.

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity. 

You previously told me that Kodiak would need about $500 million in total funding to get to commercial driverless. You also said you’ve had some undisclosed funding rounds, but publicly, you’ve only raised $40 million. Can you still execute on your vision this far off?

Absolutely. We are always, as startups are, in fundraising mode. We’re always talking to investors. And there’s a lot of great things happening behind the scenes currently that we haven’t yet announced. We are growing, we’re hiring, if you can look to that as an indicator of the health of a company.

Our tech and our plan is really sound, and we are building up our commercialization efforts in a way that I think is going to be very exciting to the overall industry and to the market. We will need to raise more money, as you pointed out, that’s certainly no secret, but I think that we have multiple options to do that.

“Kodiak is one of the only remaining serious AV trucking companies still in the private sector, and so I think that gives us some advantages in a lot of ways.”

How do you intend to close that gap? Are you looking at venture capital, or maybe going for an IPO or SPAC?

We’re considering all of the above. It’s a constant conversation internally on what is the best path for Kodiak, what is the appetite of the various forms of investors and strategic relationships. Nothing is excluded.

The stock market is obviously very attractive and exciting. I think TuSimple has demonstrated that an IPO with the right set of metrics and the right set of momentum and partners is possible and can be successful. I think there’s also lots of opportunity within the VCs and the private markets. Kodiak is one of the only remaining serious AV trucking companies still in the private sector, and so I think that gives us some advantages in a lot of ways.

What’s your sense of the venture funding environment right now in autonomous? Is it harder now than it was, say, four years ago?

The appetite has changed. In particular, investors are more skeptical of timelines and promises. There is not this sense of Wild West excitement like there was four or five years ago, and that was the Golden Age of raising capital, certainly for earlier stage companies.

Kodiak was at the tail end of that age, and now the goalposts have changed, and the target investors have changed. It’s no longer the early-stage VCs that companies like Kodiak and others are talking to. It’s more of the growth-stage funds, and growth-stage funds look for different types of metrics. They look for commercial traction, product-market fit, users, efficiencies, etc.

News: Growth roundup: Investing in community, targeting developers, new marketer recs

“The best thing a startup can do, and I’m seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on,” growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. “When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone

“The best thing a startup can do, and I’m seeing it happen more and more, is investing in community early on,” growth marketing expert Max van den Ingh of Unmuted tells us. “When I was leading growth at MisterGreen, we created a community for the first thousand Tesla Model 3 owners in the Netherlands. Everyone wanted to be a part of this founding tribe, learn from each other, get insights and so on.”

“This group turned out to be our most effective marketing tool,” he explains in an interview we published this week. “Word-of-mouth went through the roof. We had all of these people talking about our community at birthday parties, in their office, you name it. This is a great example of investing in marketing you can’t really measure, but which you do strongly believe in.”

Elsewhere in this week’s growth marketing recap, you’ll find TechCrunch’s coverage of growth marketing, and related topics, from the past week. You’ll also find a few recommendations for growth marketers. If you’d like to recommend a great one you’ve worked with, please fill out our survey.

Marketer: Scott Graham
Recommended by: Heather Larrabee, CMO, FORM
Testimonial: “He was referred to us and blew our socks off from his initial analysis. He’s the rare growth adviser expert at strategy and execution. He’s a servant leader, a systems thinker, integrates with the team with empathy and curiosity like he’s an internal teammate, brings a wealth of cutting-edge knowledge, and a stable of incredible partners and resources. He runs with the best and the brightest, but he’s the first one on and the last one off for the day, putting in the time to make things great. He has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts and make them accessible for all audiences, and he’s been a foundational game changer for our business and many others.”

Marketer: Ascendant
Recommended by: Robyn Weatherley, Thirdfort Limited
Testimonial: “Beyond their knowledge and experience (which is in abundance!), they have a deep understanding and appreciation for the unique challenges early-stage businesses have. They are in tune with the particular hurdles at various stages of growth and are able to adapt their working style dependent on those. They haven’t just helped us execute vital growth tactics, but they’ve helped us set up the framework to keep executing on those whether we are 5, 50 or 500 people. This is incredibly important as we scale and to demonstrate to future investors. They are also exceptional mentors and are able to offer real-world advice and work flexibly to suit the ever-changing nature of a high-growth early-stage business.”

Marketer: Ferdinand Goetzen
Recommended by: Willem van Roosmalen, Homerun
Testimonial: “Exceptional skills and experience in B2B SaaS, impressive track record, clear communicator, true leader, makes impact from day one, entrepreneur (actually launched his own start up, Reveall).”

Marketer: Adriana Ivascu, HoneyPot Dgtl
Recommended by: Mihaela Petre, Brussels Beer Project
Testimonial: “Besides her solid experience in growth and digital, Adriana has a genuine interest in growing not only the company but its people. She is hands-on in digital transformation but on top of it, she is a coach who inspires and brings the best in teams. We are very happy to have benefited from a long-term strategic growth path and a skill playbook that we can pass on to our whole organization.”

Marketer: Mariska Vroegindeweij, Growth & confetti
Recommended by: Hugo Pereira, EVBox
Testimonial: “[During our time working together] she was very young and bright. She started the Growth Marketing division on her own, built a team of developers, designers, advertisement specialists, product owners to drive conversion on the whole funnel from MQL to Opportunities. It’s hard to find a marketer that combines leadership skills with hardcore skills to drive growth. She was also very data-driven, challenged me a lot on assumptions and proved me wrong a few times by doing experiments and showcasing better ways to convert. And she was bold enough to start her own agency at a young age and doing well. Plus, she’s tons of fun.”

 

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

 

The MKT1 interview: Growth marketing in 2021, hiring versus outsourcing and more: We hosted a Twitter Spaces with strategic marketing firm MKT1 recently, following a popular interview we published with them a few weeks ago. “The skill sets of growth marketers are in high demand,” co-founder Kathleen Estreich told host Danny Crichton during the event. “They always have been, but it feels pretty acute right now. Given that a lot of the companies are raising money earlier and starting to try and build that traction faster to grow into the valuations, we’re starting to see a huge need.” If you’re curious to see what skills are needed in growth marketing positions right now, take a look at the job board curated by MKT1.

Draft.dev CEO Karl Hughes on the importance of using experts in developer marketing: Anna Heim interviewed Karl Hughes, founder of Daft.dev, which works with a large number of developer tool companies. Hughes’ insights come from personal experience, “I’ve been a software developer, and then most recently was a CTO at a startup in Chicago, so I knew that there were lots of companies trying to reach developers [ … ] and that a lot of them were doing a poor job of it.” In this interview, Hughes addresses the mistakes made when targeting marketing toward developers, the steps that Draft.dev takes to mitigate them and more.

Unmuted founder Max van den Ingh on success beyond the metrics: “At Unmuted, when we start working with a new client, we perform a series of exercises together,” he told us in the interview. “This helps us get a clear picture of where the client is now and where they could be when we’ve optimized marketing. Next, instead of fixed numbers, like a specific amount of new customers in a given period, we focus on growth levers, like month-over-month growth in certain conversion or activation areas. Focusing on growth levers makes our work more actionable.” Read the interview with him for more about Unmuted’s “modern” marketing approach, setting realistic goals and trends seen in growth marketing during the pandemic.

Dan Olsen leads a product-market fit masterclass for the Startup Alley+ cohort: As part of Startup Alley+, TC Disrupt 2021 is offering a VIP experience where Dan Olsen will be holding a product-market fit masterclass. Olsen’s roster of clients includes Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Is there a startup growth marketing expert that you want us to know about? Let us know by filling out our survey.

News: Yat thinks emoji ‘identities’ can be a thing, and it has $20M in sales to back it up

I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” she texted. Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something,

I learned about Yat in April, when a friend sent our group chat a link to a story about how the key emoji sold as an “internet identity” for $425,000. “I hate the universe,” she texted.

Sure, the universe would be better if people with a spare $425,000 spent it on mutual aid or something, but minutes later, we were trying to figure out what this whole Yat thing was all about. And few more minutes later, I spent $5 (in USD, not crypto) to buy ☕👉💩❗, an emoji string that I think tells a moving story about my caffeine dependency and sensitive stomach. I didn’t think I would be writing about this when I made that choice.

Kesha’s Yat URL on Twitter

On the surface, Yat is a platform that lets you buy a URL with emojis in it — even Kesha (y.at/🌈🚀👽), Lil Wayne (y.at/👽🎵), and Disclosure (y.at/😎🎵😎) are using them in their Twitter bios. Like any URL on the internet, Yats can redirect to another website, or they can function like a more eye-catching Linktree. While users could purchase their own domain name that supports emojis and use it instead of a Yat, many people don’t have the technical expertise or time to do so. Instead, they can make one-time purchase from Yat, which owns the Y.at domain, and the company will provide your with your own y.at subdomain for you.

This convenience, however, comes at a premium. Yat uses an algorithm to determine your Yat’s “rhythm score,” its metric for determining how to price your emoji combo based on its rarity. Yats with one or two emojis are so expensive that you have to contact the company directly to buy them, but you can easily find a four- or five-emoji identity that’ll only put you out $4.

Beyond that, CEO Naveen Jain — a Y Combinator alumnus, founder of digital marketing company Sparkart, and angel investor — thinks that Yat is ultimately an internet privacy product. Jain wants people to be able to use their Yats in any way they’re able to use an online identity now, whether that’s to make payments, send messages, host a website, or login to a platform.

“Objectively, it’s a strange norm. You go on the internet, you register accounts with ad-supported platforms, and your username isn’t universal. You have many accounts, many usernames,” Jain said. “And you don’t control them. If an account wants to shut you down, they shut you down. How many stories are there of people trying to email some social network, and they don’t respond because they don’t have to?”

Yat doesn’t plan to fuel itself with ad money, since users pay for the product when they purchase their Yat, whether they get it for $4 or $400,000.

In the long run, Yat’s CEO says the company plans to use blockchain technology as a way to become self-sovereign. Yats would become assets issued on decentralized, distributed databases. Today, there are several projects working to create a decentralized alternative to the current domain name system (DNS), which is managed by internet regulatory authority ICANN.  DNS is how you find things on the internet, but uses a centralized, hierarchical system. A blockchain domain name system would have no central authority, and some believe this could be the foundation of a next-gen web, or “Web 3.0.”

Today, words like “blockchain” and “cryptocurrency” don’t appear on the Yat website. Jain doesn’t think that’s compelling to average consumers — he believes in progressive decentralization, which explains why Yats are currently purchased with dollars, not ethereum.

“Something we think is really funny about the cryptocurrency world is that anyone who’s a part of it spends a lot of time talking about databases,” Jain said. “People don’t care about databases. When’s the last time you went to a website and it said ‘powered by MySQL’?”

Y.at, however, was registered at a traditional internet registrar, not on the blockchain.

“We agree that this is early stage, there’s no debate about that,” said Jain. “This is laying the foundation — there are certain elements of the vision that are certainly more of a social contract than actual implementation at this point in time. But this is the vision that we’ve set forth, and we’re working continuously towards that goal.”

Still, until Yat becomes more decentralized, it can’t yet give users the complete control it aspires to. At present, the Terms & Conditions give Yat the authority to terminate or suspend users at its discretion, but the company claims it hasn’t yet booted anyone from the system.

As Yat becomes more decentralized, our terms and conditions won’t be important,” Jain said. “This is the nature of pursuing a progressive decentralization strategy.”

In its “generation zero” phase (an open beta), Yat has sold almost $20 million worth of emoji identities. Now, as the waitlist to get a Yat ends, Yat is posting some rare emoji identities on OpenSea, the NFT marketplace that recently reached a valuation of $1.5 billion.

A still image of a Yat visualizer creation

“For the first time ever, we’re going to be auctioning some Yats on OpenSea, and we’re going to be launching minting of Yats on Ethereum,” Jain said. Before minting Yats as NFTs, users can create a digital art landscape for their Yats through a Visualizer. These features, as well as new emojis in the Yat emoji set, will launch this evening at a virtual event called Yat Horizon.

Yat Creators will now have more rights,” Jain said about the new ability to mint Yats as NFTs. “We are going to continue to pursue progressive decentralization until we achieve our ultimate goal: making Yat the best self-directed, self-sovereign identity system for all.”

Consumers have a demonstrated interest in retaining greater privacy on the internet — data shows that in iOS 14.5, 96% of users opted out of ad tracking. But the decentralization movement hasn’t yet been able to market its privacy advantages to the mainstream. Yat helps solve this problem because even if you don’t understand what blockchain means, you understand that having a personal string of emojis is pretty fun. But, before you spend $425,000 on a single-emoji username, keep in mind that Yat’s vision will only completely materialize with the advent of Web 3.0, and we don’t yet know when or if that will happen.

News: Calendly CEO Tope Awotona is joining us at Disrupt 2021

Early Bird Tickets to Disrupt end today, Friday, July 30. Book your tickets now! 

It all seems so simple. Instead of the dreaded back-and-forth on email, what if there was a solution that helped two parties (or multiple parties) schedule a call or a hangout?

Calendly was born out of that question. Today, the company is worth more than $3 billion, according to reports, and has more than 10 million users. The growth of the product is insane, with more than 1,000% growth from last year.

But that kind of success doesn’t come without hard work and dedication.

To hear more about the journey from bootstrapped to billions, Calendly founder and CEO Tope Awotona will join us at Disrupt this September.

P.S. Early Bird Tickets to Disrupt end today, Friday, July 30. Book your tickets now! 

Awotona put his entire life savings into Calendly and managed to bootstrap it for years before taking a $350 million funding round led by OpenView and Iconiq.

We’ll chat with Awotona about the early days of Calendly, how he navigated the hyper-growth phase, what made him choose to finally take institutional funding, his thoughts on pricing and packaging, and much more.

Awotona joins an incredible roster of speakers, including Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Mirror’s Brynn Putnam, Chamath Palihapitiya, Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield and more. Plus, Disrupt features the legendary Startup Battlefield competition, where startups from across the globe compete for $100,000 and eternal glory.

Disrupt’s virtual format provides plenty of opportunity for questions, so come prepared to ask the experts about the issues that keep you up at night.

One post can’t possibly contain all of Disrupt’s events. Don’t miss the epic Startup Battlefield competition, hundreds of early-stage startups exhibiting in the Startup Alley expo area, special breakout sessions — like the Pitch Deck Teardown — and so much more.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 offers tons of opportunities. Don’t miss out on the first one — buy your Disrupt pass today, July 30, by 11:59 pm (PT) for less than $100. It’s a sweet deal!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

News: The best way to grow your tech career? Treat it like an app

What happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills and grow in interesting and challenging new directions?

Raj Yavatkar
Contributor

As CTO, Raj Yavatkar is responsible for charting Juniper Networks‘ technology strategy through the execution of the company’s innovations and products for intelligent self-driving networks, security, mobile edge cloud, network virtualization, packet-optical integration and hybrid cloud.

Software developers and engineers have rarely been in higher demand. Organizations’ need for technical talent is skyrocketing, but the supply is quite limited. As a result, software professionals have the luxury of being very choosy about where they work and usually command big salaries.

In 2020, the U.S. had nearly 1.5 million full-time developers, who earned a median salary of around $110,000, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the next 10 years, the federal agency estimates, developer jobs will grow by 22% to 316,000.

But what happens after a developer or engineer lands that sweet gig? Are they able to harness their skills and grow in interesting and challenging new directions? Do they understand what it takes to move up the ladder? Are they merely doing a job or cultivating a rewarding professional life?

To put it bluntly, many developers and engineers stink at managing their own careers.

These are the kinds of questions that have gnawed at me throughout my 25 years in the tech industry. I’ve long noticed that, to put it bluntly, many developers and engineers stink at managing their own careers.

It’s simply not a priority for some. By nature, developers delight in solving complex technical challenges and working hard toward their company’s digital objectives. Care for their own careers may feel unattractively self-promotional or political — even though it’s in fact neither. Charting a career path may feel awkward or they just don’t know how to go about it.

Companies owe it to developers and engineers, and to themselves, to give these key people the tools to understand what it takes to be the best they can be. How else can developers and engineers be assured of continually great experiences while constantly expanding their contributions to their organizations?

Developers delight in solving complex challenges and working hard toward their company’s objectives. Care for their own careers may feel unattractively self-promotional or political — even though it’s in fact neither.

Coaching and mentoring can help, but I think a more formal management system is necessary to get the wind behind the sails of a companywide commitment to making developers and engineers believe that, as the late Andy Grove said, “Your career is your business and you are its CEO.”

That’s why I created a career development model for developers and engineers when I was an Intel Fellow at Intel between 2003 and 2013. This framework has since been put into practice at the three subsequent companies I worked at — Google, VMWare, and, now, Juniper Networks — through training sessions and HR processes.

The model is based on a principle that every developer can relate to: Treat career advancement as you would a software project.

That’s right, by thinking of career development in stages like those used in app production, developers and engineers can gain a holistic view of where they are in their professional lives, where they want to go and the gaps they need to fill.

Step 1: Functional specification

In software development, a team can’t get started until it has a functional specification that describes the app’s requirements and how it is supposed to perform and behave.

Why should a career be any different? In my model, folks begin by assessing the “functionality” expected of someone at their next career level and how they’re demonstrating them (or not). Typically, a person gets promoted to a higher level only when they already demonstrate that they are operating at that level.

News: A Tesla Megapack caught fire at the Victorian Big Battery facility in Australia

A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at 10 – 10.15am local time.

Saqib Shah
Contributor

Saqib Shah is a contributing writer at Engadget.

A 13-tonne Tesla Megapack caught fire on Friday morning at a battery storage facility in south-east Australia. The blaze occurred during testing at between 10 and 10.15am local time, according to Victorian Big Battery. The regional fire service said a specialist fire crew had been dispatched to the site in Geelong, Victoria. Firefighters were using a hazmat appliance designed for hazardous chemical spills and specialist drones to conduct atmospheric monitoring, according to Fire Rescue Victoria.

The site was evacuated and there were no injuries, Victorian Big Battery said in a statement. It added that the site had been disconnected from the power grid and that there will be no impact to the electric supply. French energy company Neoen, which operates the facility, and contractor Tesla are working with emergency services to manage the situation.

As a result of the fire, a warning for toxic smoke has been issued in the nearby Batesford, Bell Post Hill, Lovely Banks and Moorabool areas, reports The Sydney Morning Herald. Residents were warned to move indoors, close windows, vents and fireplace flues and bring their pets inside.

The Victorian Big Battery site, a 300 MW/450 MWh battery storage facility, is viewed as key to the Victorian government’s 50 percent renewable energy target by 2030. It follows the success of Neoen and Tesla’s 100 MW/129 MWh battery farm in Hornsdale in South Australia, which was completed ahead of schedule and has resulted in multi-million dollar savings for market players and consumers. Both sites essentially provide a regional power backup for when renewable energy is not available, effectively filling the gap when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

In February, Neoen announced that the Victorian Big Battery would utliize Tesla’s megapacks — utility-sized batteries produced at the company’s Gigafactory — and Autobidder software to sell power to the grid. Victorian Big Battery has a contract with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). As part of the pact, the site will provide energy stability by unlocking an additional 250 MW of peak capacity on the existing Victoria to New South Wales Interconnector over the next decade of Australian summers.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget.

News: Elon Musk calls Apple’s App Store fees ‘a de facto global tax on the Internet’

Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple’s Store fees “a de facto global tax on the Internet,” also adding that “Epic is right.” Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure to last years and the

Elon Musk is siding with Epic Games in the App Store monopoly case, with the Tesla CEO firing off a tweet Friday morning that called Apple’s Store fees “a de facto global tax on the Internet,” also adding that “Epic is right.”

Epic Games legal battle with Apple is sure to last years and the Fortnite maker has hardly been secretive about its aims to win the battle for popular opinion as well. Musk’s vote of confidence could hold sway with consumers who have yet to develop a clear opinion on the topic.

Apple has argued publicly that dissatisfied developers can take their products to Android or mobile web on iOS, but Epic Games and others have argued that Apple’s stranglehold on apps is nothing short of a monopoly.

What’s less clear is why Musk is taking up this issue right now. While Musk is rarely one to pass up offering an outside opinion on a contentious issue that doesn’t involve him, none of Musk’s current companies seem to be deeply affected by the fees from the App Store, though there certainly could be action happening behind the scenes.

Apple app store fees are a de facto global tax on the Internet. Epic is right.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2021

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