Tag Archives: Blog

News: SenpAI.GG wants to be your AI-powered video game coach

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

With most popular online video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules.

With most popular online video games, there’s a huge gap between being a good player and a great one. A casual player might be able to hold their own against other casual players, only for a random pro to wander by and chew through everyone like they’re somehow playing with a different set of rules.

Could an AI-driven voice in your ear help close that gap, if only a bit? SenpAI.GG, a company out of Y Combinator’s latest batch, thinks so.

Much of that aforementioned gap boils down to practice, muscle memory and — let’s face it — natural ability. But as a game gets older/bigger/more complex, the best players tend to have a wealth of one resource that’s oh-so-crucial, if not oh-so-fun to gather: information.

Which guns do the most damage at this range? Which character is best suited to counter that character on this map? Hell, what changed in that “minor update” that flashed across your screen as you were booting up the game? Wait, why is my favorite weapon suddenly so much harder to control?

Staying on top of all this information as players discover new tactics and updates shift the “meta” is a challenge in its own right. It usually involves lots of Twitch streams, lots of digging around Reddit threads and lots of poring over patch notes.

SenpAI.GG is looking to surface more of that information automatically and help new players get good, faster. Their desktop client presents you with information it thinks can help, post-game analysis on your strategies, plus in-game audio cues for the things you might not be great at tracking yet.

It currently supports a handful of games — League of Legends, Valorant and Teamfight Tactics — with the info it provides varying from game to game. In LoL, for example, it’ll look at both teams’ selected champions and try to recommend the one you could pick to help most; in Valorant, meanwhile, it can give you an audio heads-up that one of your teammates is running low on health (before said teammate starts yelling at you to heal them), when you’ve forgotten to reload or how long you’ve got before the Spike (read: game-ending bomb) explodes.

Just as important as the information it provides is the information it won’t provide. In my chat with him, SenpAI.GG founder Olcay Yilmazcoban seemed very aware that there’s a hard-to-define line here where “assistant” blurs into “cheating tool” — but the company follows certain rules to stay on the right side of things and prevent their players from getting banned.

They won’t, for example, ever take action on a player’s behalf — they might fire an audio cue to say “hey, you should heal that teammate,” but they won’t press the button for you. They’ll only generate their real-time insights from what’s on your screen — not anything hidden within the running process. They also won’t do things like reveal an enemy’s location just because your teammate is also running the app and can see them. Think “good player standing over your shoulder,” not “wall hack.” The company says that they’re always within each game developer’s competitive fairness guidelines, and only work with approved/provided APIs.

It’s a good idea because it’s one that, arguably, never gets old. With each new game they support, they’ve got a new potential audience to serve. Meanwhile, it’s not as if the old games/insights will expire — a game’s big ol’ book-of-stuff-you-need-to-know tends to only get bigger and more complex as a game ages and the patches pile up. There are games I’ve been playing for years where I’d still love a voice assistant that says “Oh hey, the recoil on the gun you just picked up has gotten way more intense since the last time you played.” SenpAI.GG isn’t there yet, but there’s a ton of natural room for growth.

Yilmazcoban tells me that they currently have over 400,000 active users, with a team of 11 people working on it. The base app is free, with plans to offer advanced features for a couple bucks a month.

News: How to hire and structure a growth team

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

I’m not here to sell you on why you need a growth team, but I will point out that product-led businesses with a growth team see dramatic results — double the median free-to-paid conversion rate.

Everyone at an organization should own growth, right? Turns out when everyone owns something, no one does. As a result, growth teams can cause an enormous amount of friction in an organization when introduced.

Growth teams are twice as likely to appear among businesses growing their ARR by 100% or more annually. What’s more, they also seem to be more common after product-market fit has been achieved — usually after a company has reached about $5 million to $10 million in revenue.

I’m not here to sell you on why you need a growth team, but I will point out that product-led businesses with a growth team see dramatic results — double the median free-to-paid conversion rate.

How do you hire an early growth leader?

According to responses from product benchmarks surveys, growth teams have transitioned dramatically from reporting to marketing and sales to reporting directly to the CEO.

Some of the early writing on growth teams says that they can be structured individually as their own standalone team or as a SWAT model, where experts from various other departments in the organization converge on a regular cadence to solve for growth.

My experience, and the data I’ve collected from business-user focused software companies, has led me to the conclusion that growth teams in business software should not be structured as “SWAT” teams, with cross-functional leadership coming together to think critically about growth problems facing the business. I find that if problems don’t have a real owner, they’re not going to get solved. Growth issues are no different and are often deprioritized unless it’s someone’s job to think about them.

I put early growth hires into a few simple buckets. You’ve got:

Product-minded growth experts: These folks are all about optimizing the user experience, reducing friction and expanding usage. They’re usually pretty analytical and might have product, data or MarketingOps backgrounds.

News: Online retailers: Stop trying to beat Amazon

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

It’s a matter of building a loyal customer base that comes back time and again for the reliable, personalized service provided by a platform that offers and delivers exactly what consumers want.

Brick-and-mortar stores forced to close due to pandemic lockdowns had to quickly pivot to an online-only model. Understandably, newcomers to the digital retail scene found themselves behind the curve in attracting online buyers, particularly in the face of popular established events like Amazon Prime Day. This year’s Prime Day, held June 21-22, was reportedly the biggest ever on the platform.

Online retailers that have opted to forge their own path to generate sales often wonder how they can compete with Amazon.

The reality is that Amazon’s true unique selling proposition is its distribution network. Online retailers will not be able to compete on this point because Amazon’s distribution network is so fast. Instead, it’s important to focus on areas where they can excel — without having to become a third-party seller on Amazon’s platform.

The following are seven key tips that are relevant for online retailers that want to attract and retain customers without having to partner with Amazon or to try to beat it at its own game.

Gain a 360-degree view of the customer

An online retailer needs to consider what kind of experience it wants to create; customers expect smooth processes on every step of their online shopping journey.

One idea is to implement a consumer data platform that will help the retailer gain the best insights into their customers: who they are and what they like, which websites they frequent and other relevant information. Retailers can use this data to then target customers with ads for products they’ll actually want to buy. Consumer data platforms can even help online retailers target consumers across platforms as well as in the store.

Ensure smooth and glitch-free pre-sale transactions

One of the biggest frustrations with online retailers is the performance of a website, from getting on the site through the closing of the sale. If something fails or glitches at any point in the process of searching for a product and paying for it, the customer will leave and not come back.

The solution to this problem involves a lot of testing of the user interface to ensure a good user experience. Tests should be done on all e-commerce segments on a site, including the basket and ad banners. By inserting tags along the customer journey, a retailer can track lost sales and see where problems happen on their website.

Offer a broad variety of payment options

As a payment option, PayPal recently experienced a record 36% year-on-year growth in payment volume between the third quarter of 2019 and Q3 2020. Despite PayPal’s popularity, Amazon does not accept it as a form of payment.

News: Venture capital probably isn’t dead

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Venture capitalists are chatting this week about a recent piece from The Information titled “The End of Venture Capital as We Know It.” As with nearly everything you read, the article in question is a bit more nuanced than its headline. Its author, Sam Lessin, makes some pretty good points. But I don’t fully agree

Venture capitalists are chatting this week about a recent piece from The Information titled “The End of Venture Capital as We Know It.” As with nearly everything you read, the article in question is a bit more nuanced than its headline. Its author, Sam Lessin, makes some pretty good points. But I don’t fully agree with his conclusions, and want to talk about why.

This will be fun, and, because it’s Friday, both relaxed and cordial. (For fun, here’s a long-ass podcast I participated in with Lessin last year.)

A capital explosion

Lessin notes that venture capitalists once made risky wagers on companies that often withered away. Higher-than-average investment risk meant that returns from winning bets had to be very lucrative, or else the venture model would have failed.

Thus, venture capitalists sold their capital dearly to founders. The prices that venture capitalists have historically paid for startup equity in high-growth tech upstarts make IPO pops appear de minimis; it’s the VCs who make out like bandits when a tech company floats, not the bankers. The Wall Street crew just gets a final lap at the milk saucer.

Over time, however, things changed. Founders could lean on AWS instead of having to spend equity capital on server racks and colocation. The process of building software and taking it to market became better understood by more people.

Even more, recurring fees overtook the traditional method of selling software for a one-time price. This made the revenues of software companies less like those of video game companies, driven by episodic releases and dependent on the market’s reception of the next version of any particular product.

As SaaS took over, software revenues kept their lucrative gross margin profile but became both longer-lasting and more dependable. They got better. And easier to forecast to boot.

So, prices went up for software companies — public and private.

Another result of the revolution in both software construction and distribution — higher-level programming languages, smartphones, app stores, SaaS and, today, on-demand pricing coupled to API delivery — was that more money could pile into the companies busy writing code. Lower risk meant that other forms of capital found startup investing — super-late stage to begin with, but increasingly earlier in the startup lifecycle — not just possible, but rather attractive.

With more capital varieties taking interest in private tech companies thanks in part to reduced risk, pricing changed. Or, as Lessin puts it, thanks to better market ability to metricize startup opportunity and risk, “investors across the board [now] price [startups] more or less the same way.”

You can see where this is going: If that’s the case, then the model of selling expensive capital for huge upside becomes a bit soggy. If there is less risk, then venture capitalists can’t charge as much for their capital. Their return profile might change, with cheaper and more plentiful money chasing deals, leading to higher prices and lower returns.

The result of all of the above is Lessin’s lede: “All signs seem to indicate that by 2022, for the first time, nontraditional tech investors — including hedge funds, mutual funds and the like — will invest more in private tech companies than traditional Silicon Valley-style venture capitalists will.”

Capital crowding into the parts of finance once reserved for the high priests of venture means that the VCs of the world are finding themselves often fighting for deals with all sorts of new, and wealthier, players.

The result of this, per Lessin, is that venture “firms that grew up around software and internet investing and consider themselves venture capitalists” must “enter the bigger pond as a fairly small fish, or go find another small pond.”

Yeah, but

The obvious critique of Lessin’s argument is one that he makes himself, namely that what he is discussing is not as relevant to seed investing. As Lessin puts it, his argument’s impact on seed investing is “far less clear.”

Agreed. Sure, it’s the end of venture capital as we know it. But it’s not the end of venture capital, because if capitalism is going to continue, there’s always going to need to be risky-ass shit for VCs to bet on at the bottom.

The factors that made later-stage SaaS investing something that even idiots can make a few dollars doing become scarce the earlier one looks in the startup world. Investing in areas other than software compounds this effect; if you try to treat biotech startups as less risky than before simply because public clouds exist, you are going to fuck up.

So the Lessin argument matters less in seed-stage and earlier investing than it does in the later stages of startup backing, and doubly less when it comes to earlier investing in non-software companies.

While it’s a little-known fact, some venture capitalists still invest in startups that are not software-focused. Sure, nearly every startup involves code, but you can make a lot of money in a lot of ways by building startups, especially tech startups. The figuring-out of SaaS investing does not mean that investing in marketplaces, for example, has enjoyed a similar decline in risk.

So, the VCs-are-dead concept is less true for seed and non-software startups.

Is Lessin correct, then, that the game really has changed for middle- and late-stage software investing? Of course it has, but I think that he takes the concept of less risky, private-market software investing in the wrong direction.

First, even if private-market investing in software has a lower risk profile than before, it’s not zero. Many software startups will fail or stall out and sell for a modest sum at best. As many in today’s market as before? Probably not, but still some.

This means that the act of picking still matters; we can vamp as long as we’d like about how venture capitalists are going to have to pay more competitive prices for deals, but VCs could retain an edge in startup selection. This can limit downside, but may also do quite a lot more.

Anshu Sharma of Skyflow — and formerly of Salesforce and Storm Ventures, where I first met him — made an argument about this particular point earlier this week that I am sympathetic with.

Sharma thinks, and I agree, that venture winners are getting bigger. Recall that a billion-dollar private company was once a rare thing. Now they are built daily. And the biggest software companies aren’t worth the few hundred billion dollars that Microsoft was largely valued at between 1998 and 2019. Today they are worth several trillion dollars.

More simply, a more attractive software market in terms of risk and value creation means that outliers are even more outlier-y than before. This means that venture capitalists that pick well, and, yes, go earlier than they once did, can still generate bonkers returns. Perhaps even more so than before.

This is what I am hearing about certain funds regarding their present-day performance. If Lessin’s point held up as strongly as he states it, I reckon that we’d see declining rates of return at top VCs. We’re not, at least based on what I am hearing. (Feel free to tell me if I am wrong.)

So yes, venture capital is changing, and the larger funds really are looking more and more like entirely different sorts of capital managers than the VCs of yore. Capitalism is happening to venture capital, changing it as the world of money itself evolves. Services were one way that VCs tried to differentiate from one another, and probably from non-venture capital sources, though that was discussed less when The Services Wars were taking off.

But even the rapid-fire Tiger can’t invest in every company, and not all its bets will pay out. You might decide that you’d be better off putting capital into a slightly smaller fund with a slightly more measured cadence of dealmaking, allowing selection at the hand of fund managers that you trust to allocate your funds among other pooled capital to bet for you. So that you might earn better-than-average returns.

You know, the venture model.

News: Australia’s v2Food aims to expand its plant-based meats to Europe and Asia with €45M raise

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

V2Food is one of many new contenders in the alternative protein space, founded in Australia but now setting its sights on Europe, Asia and beyond. It has a few key advantages over the competition, and with €45 million in new funding it may be finding its way to plates in the Eurozone soon. The company

V2Food is one of many new contenders in the alternative protein space, founded in Australia but now setting its sights on Europe, Asia and beyond. It has a few key advantages over the competition, and with €45 million in new funding it may be finding its way to plates in the Eurozone soon.

The company has seen strong uptake in its home market, and the first goal is to be No. 1 in Australia, said CEO and founder Nick Hazell, formerly of MasterFoods and PepsiCo R&D. But in the meantime they’ll be expanding their presence in Asia, where partner Burger King has launched a Whopper with their patty, and in Europe, where the product’s minimal suspicious elements come into play.

Currently v2Food makes plant-based ground beef and patties, sausages and a ready-made Bolognese sauce. Obviously they have strong competition in those categories, which are sort of the opening play of most alternative protein companies. But v2Food has a leg up on many of them in two ways.

First, v2Food products are made, or at least can be made, using “any standard meat production facility.” That’s a big plus for scaling and a minus for cost, since economies of scale are already in play. The processes for creating and mixing the plant-derived and other artificial substances that make up alternative proteins in general aren’t always amenable to existing infrastructure. This also opens the door to partnerships with existing meat companies that might have balked at having to switch processes. (Incidentally, Hazell noted that what they’re aiming for isn’t so much about replacing traditional meats so much as growing the market in a new direction, a philosophy those companies may appreciate.)

Second, as the press release announcing the fundraise puts it, “v2food products do not contain GMOs, preservatives, colors or flavorings. This makes it an ideal product for the European market, where the many large competitors have been unable to enter the market due to strict regulation.” It’s also a soft advantage for winning over in-store buyers vacillating between two plant-based options; who hasn’t on occasion ended up going for the one with fewer ingredients that proudly touts its lack of preservatives and such? The alt-protein buying demographic is likely especially sensitive to this consideration.

The €45 million round is a “B Plus,” led by European impact fund Astanor, with participation from Huaxing Growth Capitol Fund, Main Sequence and ABC World Asia. The money is going toward both R&D and scaling.

“This funding is an important step towards v2food’s goal of transforming the way the world produces food,” said Hazell. “It’s imperative that we scale quickly because these global issues need immediate solutions.”

To that end a large portion will go toward simply creating enough product to meet demand. They’re also doubling R&D spend to both accelerate new products and improve the existing ones. And rather than import the necessary ingredients to Australia, they’re exploring the possibility of building a local manufacturing facility there. With luck and a bit of plant-based elbow grease, the region could become a net exporter, propping up the local economy as well as building up v2Food’s resilience and cutting costs.

The Europe expansion is still a twinkle in the company’s (and Astanor’s) eye, for even with its simplicity and non-GMO origins, it’s not trivial to launch a new product in the European market.

 

News: Craft your pitch deck around ‘that one thing that can really hook an investor’

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Michelle Davey’s pitch to Jordan Nof of Tusk Ventures about Wheel, a startup focused on providing a full suite of virtual care solutions to clinicians, was front-loaded with early metrics.

Michelle Davey’s pitch to Jordan Nof of Tusk Ventures about Wheel, a startup focused on providing a full suite of virtual care solutions to clinicians, was front-loaded with early metrics. It may not be standard practice to start with the numbers, especially early on, but she explained to us why she chose that strategy — and Nof told us why it worked.

Davey and Nof joined us on a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live and went into detail on why Tusk was eager to finance Wheel, walking us through the startup’s Series A pitch deck and sharing which slides and bits clinched the deal.

Extra Crunch Live is a weekly virtual event series meant to help founders build better venture-backed businesses. We sit down with investors and the founders they finance to hear what brought them together, what they saw in each other and how they work together moving forward. We also host the Extra Crunch Live Pitch-Off, where founders in the audience can pitch their startups to our outstanding speakers.

Extra Crunch Live is accessible to everyone live on Wednesdays at noon PDT, but the on-demand content is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. You can check out the full ECL library here.

When to lead with traction

Davey emphasized the importance of not sticking to a rigid format for building a pitch deck. She said it’s important to instead focus on crafting your pitch around what makes you appealing and unique. That should be on the foreground and featured prominently.

For Wheel, that meant leading with traction, since the company had impressive uptake even early on. That remained true for their recent Series B raise, too.

News: Sequoia’s Stephanie Zhan and Rec Room’s Nick Fajt are joining us on Extra Crunch Live

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Sequoia is one of the most prestigious and successful venture firms to ever exist. The firm’s portfolio includes Airbnb, 23andMe, Docker, Dropbox, Figma and GitHub — and that barely covers the first half of the alphabet. (The Sequoia website lists portfolio companies in alphabetical order.) So it should go without saying that we are absolutely

Sequoia is one of the most prestigious and successful venture firms to ever exist. The firm’s portfolio includes Airbnb, 23andMe, Docker, Dropbox, Figma and GitHub — and that barely covers the first half of the alphabet. (The Sequoia website lists portfolio companies in alphabetical order.)

So it should go without saying that we are absolutely thrilled to have Sequoia partner Stephanie Zhan and Rec Room founder Nick Fajt join us on Extra Crunch Live in the coming weeks.

Rec Room is a Seattle-based startup that allows users to not only play games, but to build them collaboratively with their friends. The gaming world has seen a huge boost in the wake of the pandemic, and Rec Room is thinking way out in the future about what gaming looks like not only as a user, but as a creator.

The company has raised nearly $150 million, and Sequoia led Rec Room’s seed and Series A financing rounds.

Stephanie Zhan has been with Sequoia as part of the early-stage and seed investment team, with a portfolio that includes Sunday (outdoor home subscription service), Linear (issues tracking tool for modern developers) and Middesk (background checks for businesses). She has also helped lead investments in Graphcore (microprocessors for machine intelligence), Evervault (dev tools for data privacy) and Doppler (secrets management for developers).

Before joining Sequoia, Zhan held product roles at Google and Nest.

We’ll hear from this founder/investor duo about how they met, what made them choose each other and how they’ve worked together and tackled obstacles moving forward.  REGISTER HERE FOR FREE!

Extra Crunch Live also features the ECL Pitch-off, where founders in the audience will have the opportunity to virtually raise their hand and pitch on our stage to our guests, who will give live feedback.

Anyone can attend Extra Crunch Live, but accessing the content on-demand is reserved exclusively for Extra Crunch members. And damn, the Extra Crunch library is quite a resource. If you’re not yet a member, what are you waiting for? Sign up here.

This episode of Extra Crunch Live, which goes down on August 18 at 3 pm ET/noon PT, is a can’t miss. See you there!

News: The cost of Velodyne’s internal drama is starting to add up

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Velodyne Lidar, the sensor company that went public a year ago when it merged with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., reported its second quarter earnings Thursday, results that show a company spending more to find new customers for its products while grappling with an increasingly expensive internal drama. Just a few weeks ago,

Velodyne Lidar, the sensor company that went public a year ago when it merged with special purpose acquisition company Graf Industrial Corp., reported its second quarter earnings Thursday, results that show a company spending more to find new customers for its products while grappling with an increasingly expensive internal drama.

Just a few weeks ago, Velodyne’s CEO Anand Gopalan resigned, taking $8 million in equity compensation with him, according to the company’s second-quarter report. At the time of Gopalan’s resignation, the company restated its business outlook for 2021 revenue, noting that its guidance of between $77 million and $94 million remained unchanged.

Earlier in the year, founder David Hall was removed as chairman of the board and his wife, Marta Thoma Hall, lost her role of chief marketing officer following an investigation by the board into the couple for “inappropriate behavior.” The legal fees involved in this debacle set the company back $1.4 million this quarter, and $3.7 million for the first half of 2021, according to Velodyne CFO Drew Hamer.

The board’s fight with the Halls has escalated. In a May letter, David Hall blamed the SPAC, specifically the SPAC-appointed members of the combined company’s board, for its poor financial performance, and called for the resignation of Gopalan and two board members.

During a call with investors Thursday, Hamer also said general and administrative expenses are expected to increase by about 35% in 2021 due to increased public company and legal expenses, meaning the struggle is not over. From the first quarter to the second, there was already a 21% increase, from $17 million to $20.6 million.

The “general and administrative expenses” category falls under the company’s broader operating expenses, which were $84.8 million this quarter, about double last quarter’s spend. 

Rising legal costs at the company are only part of its accelerating cost profile. The company is also investing heavily in growth, namely in sales and marketing.

A large majority of operating expenses were spent on sales and marketing. Velodyne spent $47.2 million in the second quarter, which is up massively from $7.1 million in the first quarter.

On average, companies spend about 11.3% of their total revenue on marketing budgets, according to a 2020 CMO survey, though that is a broad metric. It’s important to note that the full impact of sales and marketing spend is never fully realized in the quarter in which that capital is put to work. In other words, we don’t know if Velodyne’s expanded Q2 sales and marketing spend has brought in more business.

The company’s revenue eased between the first and second quarters, falling from $17.7 million to $13.6 million. For a company investing so heavily in sales to see revenue decline is not encouraging, even if the bulk of results stemming from Q2 spend may not show up until the company’s third-quarter earnings report.

Velodyne is betting that its efforts will lead to accelerating sales in coming quarters. 

The company said it expects to make an additional $46 to $62 million revenue in the second half of the year due to an increase in demand for lidar products. While Q2’s total revenue was actually less than Q1’s, the company’s product-based revenue rose around 30%, which Hamer attributed to “renewed demand for lidar sensors from customers with delayed purchases due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.”

“Our pipeline continues to grow,” said Hamer. “We had 213 projects on August 1, up from 198 projects at May 1…Included in the signed and awarded pipeline are new ADAS multiyear agreements, which we expect will begin to ramp starting in 2026.”

Hamer estimated that through 2025, Velodyne has the opportunity for more than $1 billion in revenue from signed and awarded projects, plus a pipeline of projects that are not yet signed and awarded that could bring the company to $4.5 billion in potential revenue. 

At the end of April, Velodyne was selected by EV company Faraday Future as an exclusive lidar supplier for its flagship luxury electric car FF 91, which is due to be launched next year. Faraday’s cars would use the Velarray H800 lidar sensors to power their autonomous driving system. 

Velodyne has some other existing partnerships, but it faces steep competition in the automotive space.

Luminar, for example, has deals with major OEMs like Volvo and Toyota, and it recently bought one of its chip suppliers so that it wouldn’t have to be held up like everyone else in the industry, including Velodyne, by the semiconductor shortage. Hesai is also seeing some traction with customers like Lyft, Nuro, Bosch, Navya and Chinese robotaxi operators Baidu, WeRide and AutoX. 

Velodyne, which has long been the dominant supplier in the industry, has lost some customers more recently.

For instance, Ford, which had originally backed Velodyne, divested its stake in the company and placed its bets on Argo AI, which is supplying the automaker with its the autonomous vehicle technology. Argo had upped its game by drastically improving its in-house lidar sensor, meaning it would no longer need to rely on Velodyne. That had a ripple effect and impacted Veoneer, which had partnered with Velodyne to produce the lidar for Ford.

News: Prices increase tonight on all TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 passes

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

If your work life — or your life’s work — revolves around the tech startup world, there’s no more important place to be on September 21-23 than TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. And for just a few more hours, you can snag a pass to this be-all-and-end-all tech startup conference for less than $99. In other words,

If your work life — or your life’s work — revolves around the tech startup world, there’s no more important place to be on September 21-23 than TechCrunch Disrupt 2021. And for just a few more hours, you can snag a pass to this be-all-and-end-all tech startup conference for less than $99.

In other words, peeps, it’s now-o’clock. Buy your pass before the early-bird price ends tonight at 11:59 pm (PT).

We can’t possibly detail in one post all of the Disrupt presentations, speakers, events and opportunities waiting for you — believe me, we’ve tried. So, let’s focus on just one aspect of Disrupt 2021 you won’t want to miss. The breakout sessions.

You’ll find a diverse array of these sessions scattered throughout all three days. We’ll highlight a few here; be sure to check out all of them in the Disrupt 2021 agenda.

Startup Pitch Feedback Sessions: You’ll find 10 of these scheduled over three days. Make time to watch and learn as all the startups exhibiting in Startup Alley pitch and hear feedback from TC staff. You’re sure to pick up tips to improve your own pitch.

You Complete Me: In the age of the composable ecosystems, we’re all partners now — from frenemies to pure collaborations. So why is now the right time to invite friends and challengers to the table? The truth is we have to build for an unknown future, with a shared strategy and value outcome. Join us to discover five ways to encourage more symbiotic relationships in the platform economy. Presented by Elliott Limb, chief customer officer at Mambu.

Hacking U.S. Healthcare: Few things conjure more negative emotions than navigating medical billing; Americans urgently need solutions that prioritize their needs, decrease costs and elevate the patient journey so they can focus on getting care. Digital innovation can provide exceptional patient experiences that remove friction for payers, providers and consumers. Hear how Cedar, a digital-health unicorn, engineered a consumer-first digital platform that’s revolutionizing the financial experience for the entire healthcare industry. Presented by Cedar.

Taking Care of the Next Generation: KiwiCo empowers kids to explore, create and learn with hands-on kits. Mirvie provides a personalized window into pregnancy for early detection and intervention. Grove is committed to a plastic-free future with its line of eco-friendly beauty, home and lifestyle products. Hear from the exceptional leaders of these three companies about their mission to create a better world now and for future generations, building movements and communities, and the milestones in getting to escape velocity. Presented by Mayfield.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 is where you need to be on September 21-23. Why not be there for less than $100? Buy an early-bird pass before the deal expires tonight at 11:59 pm (PT).

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

News: zeroheight raises $10M round led by Tribe Capital to scale DesignOps for UX teams

• August 6, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

High quality UX for websites and apps is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have if a company is to succeed. But scaling the impact of UX teams is not simple, and in recent years teams have turned to what’s know as DesignOps platforms to help them. Now, a new startup hopes to become a

High quality UX for websites and apps is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have if a company is to succeed. But scaling the impact of UX teams is not simple, and in recent years teams have turned to what’s know as DesignOps platforms to help them.

Now, a new startup hopes to become a key DesignOps platform for UX teams, and has raised money to help it, in turn, scale-up.

zeroheight has now raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by Tribe Capital, with participation from Adobe, Y Combinator, FundersClub, and Expa, as well as angel investors including Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub), Bradley Horrowitz (VP Product at Google), Irene Au (built and ran UX design for Google) and Nick Caldwell (VP Engineering at Twitter).

London-based zeroheight will now expand to the San Francisco/Bay Area, and grow the team across the board. Its focus so far has been on UX documentation but it will now also explore other areas such as closing the gap between design and development.

Co-founder Jerome de Lafargue said: “zeroheight does for UX what DevOps platforms like GitHub do for building and shipping code, providing a central place to document and manage UX components, coupled with design APIs that allow teams to skip the design hand-off stage entirely and speed up the UX delivery process.”

He said the company addresses the scaling problem for UX teams: “Problems have emerged because UX teams have grown dramatically in the past few years, because UX is now so important for most companies to just compete. And so because of this you now need centralization, you need components that are reusable so that teams can be efficient and not lose quality as it keeps shipping.”

zeroheight counts several Fortune 500 companies like Adobe and United Airlines as customers among its 1,300+ customer base.