Tag Archives: Blog

News: Extra Crunch roundup: Think like a VC, CockroachDB EC-1, handle your stock options

• July 16, 2021
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Don’t wait until it’s too late to build your early-stage marketing team — but don’t hire too hastily, either.

Ants and camels are famously resilient, but when it was time to select a name for a startup that offers open-source, cloud-based distributed database architecture, you can imagine why “Cockroach Labs” was the final candidate.

Database technology is fundamental infrastructure, which partially explains why it’s so resistant to innovation: Oracle Database was released in 1979, and MySQL didn’t reach the market until 1995.

Since hitting the market six years ago, CockroachDB has become “a next-generation, $2-billion-valued database contender,” writes enterprise reporter Bob Reselman, who interviewed the company’s founders to write a four-part series:

Part 1: Origin story: From the creation of the popular open-source image editor GIMP to some of Google’s most well-known infrastructure products.

Part 2: Technical design: Analyzes the key differentiation that CockroachDB offers, particularly its focus on geography and data storage.

Part 3: Developer relations and business: How CockroachDB engages with developers while pivoting to the cloud at a key inflection point.

Part 4: Competitive landscape and future: A look at the fierce competition, and what possible exit routes might look like.

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Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

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Our ongoing search for the best startup growth marketers is yielding results: reporter Anna Heim interviewed SaaS and early-stage startup marketing consultant Lucy Heskins to learn more about the mistakes her clients are most likely to make before they seek her help.

“The first is hiring a marketer too soon,” said Heskins. “I’ve come into startups thinking I was coming in to set up their in-house function. However, very quickly you realize that they’ve jumped the gun and think they’ve got product-market fit when they are nowhere near it.”

Heskins shared a few pages from her early-stage marketing playbook, in which she recommends aligning content marketing with the customer experience — as opposed to just putting pages up that score well in search results.

Because their conversation contains a lot of strategic advice for startups that haven’t yet made a marketing hire, we made it available on TechCrunch.

If you know of a skilled growth marketer, please share your recommendation in this quick survey.

Thanks very much for reading!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Here are 3 things you should do with your stock options

Congratulations: You’ve joined a startup and received an Incentive stock option grant! You now own a percentage of the company, and there’s no telling how much it could be worth one day.

A few questions: Do you know your 409A valuation? What’s your strike price? Surely, you know the preferred share price and which type of options you were granted?

No?

It’s complicated stuff, and for most ISO recipients, this may be the first time they start thinking seriously about how federal tax laws impact them personally.

To break things down, Vieje Piauwasdy, Secfi’s director of equity strategy, recently shared a post with Extra Crunch.

“If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone.”

Where is suptech heading?

First of all, what is suptech?

“The emergence of purpose-built technologies to facilitate regulator oversight has, over the past few years, garnered its own moniker of supervisory technology, or suptech,” Marc Gilman, the general counsel and VP of compliance at Theta Lake, writes in a guest column.

Gilman notes that “nearly every financial services regulator is engaged in some type of suptech activity.”

But as a primer, he focused on three areas: regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulation, and market and conduct oversight.

Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra explains how to optimize your startup’s products for lasting growth

Superhuman co-founder and CEO Rahul Vohra joined us last week at TechCrunch Early Stage to provide an in-depth look at how he and his company worked to optimize and refine their product early to create a version of “growth hacking” that would not only help Superhuman attract users, but serve them best and retain them, too.

Vohra articulated a system that other entrepreneurs should be able to apply to their own businesses, regardless of area or focus.

Dear Sophie: Tell me more about the EB-1A extraordinary ability green card

Dear Sophie,

I’m a postdoc engineer who started STEM OPT in June after failing to get selected in the H-1B lottery.

A colleague suggested that I apply for an EB-1A for extraordinary ability green card, but I have not won any major awards, much less a Nobel Prize. Would you tell me more about the EB-1A?

Thanks!

— Bashful in Berkeley

India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs

Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim dialed in on India for today’s Exchange, noting that the country is a good example of the global trend of booming venture capital dollars invested.

“The country’s venture capital haul thus far in 2021 has nearly matched its 2020 total and is on pace for a record year,” they write. “But as the third quarter gets underway, something perhaps even more important is going on: public-market liquidity.”

They looked at recent venture capital results and considered what Zomato’s flotation means for the country’s IPO pipeline. Don’t miss this analysis of an explosive startup market.

How to navigate an acquisition without alienating your current employees

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are encouraging the world to reopen, two trends are underway:

In the first half of 2021, mergers and acquisitions increased by more than 150% YOY to $2.4 trillion; in several surveys, an overwhelming majority of workers said they intend to seek employment elsewhere.

If your startup is angling toward an exit, the promise of a big payday may not be enough to retain employees who feel burned out or dissatisfied.

Many founders don’t have prior management experience, and, frankly, the uncertainty associated with an exit makes it a poor time for on-the-job learning. With that in mind, here are several communication strategies that can help you keep your winning team intact.

Emergence Capital’s Doug Landis explains how to identify (and tell) your startup story

How do you go beyond the names and numbers with your startup pitch deck? For Doug Landis, the answer is one simple compound gerund: storytelling. It’s a word that gets thrown around a lot of late in Silicon Valley, but it’s one that could legitimately help your startup stand out from the pack amid the pile of pitches.

Landis joined the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event to offer a presentation about the value of storytelling for startups, whittling down the standard two-hour conversation to a 30-minute version.

Though he still managed to rewind things pretty far, opening with, “400,000 years ago, men and women used to sit around the fire pit and tell stories about their day, about their hunt, about the one that got away.”

Khosla’s Adina Tecklu breaks down how to nail your pitch

We kicked off our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising event with a deep dive on all the tips and tricks required to get the most out of pitching and slide decks. On hand was Adina Tecklu, a principal at Khosla Ventures, and who formerly built out Canaan Beta, the consumer seed practice at Canaan Partners.

We talked about the importance of knowing your customer (aka your potential investor), focusing on story, typical slides in a deck, the appendix slides, formatting, and then alternative formats and which to avoid in a pitch deck.

What impact will Apple’s buy now, pay later push have on startups?

News that Apple plans to get into the buy now, pay later game had Alex Wilhelm wondering about the impact on startups in the space.

Shares of public competitors Affirm and Afterpay dropped on the news, but it doesn’t mean a death knell for those looking to jump into the BNPL game, Alex notes.

“Provided that Apple’s BNPL solution is rolled out over time to the same markets where Apple Pay is present, the … company could consume market shares — and therefore oxygen — from generalized rival BNPL services,” he writes.

“Those startups building more niche or targeted solutions will likely enjoy some shelter from the competitive storms.”

How to make the math work for today’s sky-high startup valuations

So how does the math work out for all these startups with minimal revenue, tons of cash and sky-high valuations?

Alex Wilhelm ran through the numbers, explaining why the current state of the venture capital market makes sense for startups and investors alike.

“Today we can make super-expensive startup math work out, provided that growth rates stay generally strong and public-market multiples stay rich,” he writes in The Exchange. “If the latter dips, the former has to improve, and vice versa.”

Norwest’s Lisa Wu explains how to think like a VC when fundraising

At the TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising event last week, Norwest Venture Partners‘ Lisa Wu took the stage to discuss how founders can think like venture capitalists in all facets of their business.

The overlapping in job roles is uncanny: The best investors and founders have to find focus through the noise, understand the weight of due diligence and pitch others with conviction.

Wu used anecdotes and exercises — such as the eyebrow test — in the tactical, engaging chat.

Revolut’s 2020 financial performance explains its big new $33B valuation

Alex Wilhelm weeds through Revolut’s 2020 financial results again to determine if the U.K.-based consumer fintech player’s $33 billion valuation makes sense.

“The picture that emerges is one of a company with a rapidly improving financial image, albeit with some blank spaces regarding recent customer growth,” he writes.

How we got 75% more e-commerce orders in a single A/B test for this major brand

Jasper Kuria, the managing partner of The Conversion Wizards, breaks down how the CRO consultancy ran an A/B test to boost the conversion rates of a multibillion-dollar company.

“Radical redesigns that incorporate a large number of variables (instead of single-element tests) are more likely to provide substantial gains,” Kuria writes. “Another advantage to doing this is it requires much less time and traffic for your tests to reach statistical significance.”

Here’s a rundown of all the changes that led to a 75% bump in orders.

News: Virgin Galactic president Mike Moses on what’s next for the company’s growing fleet

• July 16, 2021
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This last weekend featured the much-ballyhooed launch of Virgin Galactic’s first (nonpaying) passengers, with founder and CEO Richard Branson along for the ride. After the festivities, I had the chance to talk with the company’s president, Mike Moses, who seems to be familiar with every detail of the operation and the company’s plans for going

This last weekend featured the much-ballyhooed launch of Virgin Galactic’s first (nonpaying) passengers, with founder and CEO Richard Branson along for the ride. After the festivities, I had the chance to talk with the company’s president, Mike Moses, who seems to be familiar with every detail of the operation and the company’s plans for going from test to commercial flights.

Unfortunately my recorder went on the fritz, but Moses was kind enough to hop on the phone later in the week to talk (again) about the next generation of spaceplanes, where the company needs to invest, and more. You can read through our conversation below. (Interview has been lightly edited for clarity.)

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TC: To begin with, can you tell me what’s left to test, and when do you expect to finish the test flight phase?

Moses: The test flight series that we’re kind of in right now, and the flight with Richard was the first of those, represents a shift from what was more classic and traditional, envelope testing, where we’re looking at aerodynamics and trajectories and handling qualities, to more of an operational check-out, where we are validating cabin experience experiences, training procedures, hardware for the folks in the back and what they’re going to go through.

So we’ve laid out a series of a few flights there, three to be specific, that both demonstrate key product milestones and features, as well as allow us time to iterate and develop and optimize some of that back-of-cabin experience. But as always, that’s a notional schedule, right? The schedule and the numbers are going to depend on the results. So if things go well, we think that’s a three-flight series if we find things that we need to adjust, we’ll add more as needed based on what we’re learning.

Based on the results that we got after Richard and crew came back from the last flight, you know, we know we have some stuff to work on but but everything was pretty much thumbs up.

Now, we know we’re going to do those flights over the course of this summer and late summer, and then we’ll be ready to move into, as we announced during our previous earnings call, a ‘modification phase’ where we’re going to do some upgrades on our mothership and our spaceship to prepare them for commercial service. The main focus there is to look at things that allow us to increase the flight-rate frequency. Right now in test, we fly at a fairly slow pace [i.e. infrequently, not at low speed], because we’re inspecting everything prudently. We’re going to want to start to move away from that, and as we learn, and so we already know, there’s some modifications we want to make to enable that to start to happen. We haven’t set a specific timescale for when that officially ends.

TC: You mentioned when we talked at the Spaceport, the crew hadn’t yet really been debriefed about the experience. I’m hoping maybe you have a little more information now about recommendations from Sir Richard, from Siriha, from everybody that was actually up there. Have you gotten any substantive feedback that you can share?

Moses: So we are definitely in the middle of all that feedback and debriefing. As you might imagine, there’s a lot of data to go through. And in some cases, that data is as simple as the 16 video cameras that we had onboard, and getting them all synced up to see that what’s happening where, and couple that with live notes, and debriefs, and the audio tracks that went with it. We are definitely gathering up the inputs, but there’s nothing on that list that I think I’m ready to disclose at this time. We’ll keep folks posted as we go.

The general feedback, post-landing both that day and the next day, was ‘things were awesome,’ right? Now that’s not a scientific answer, and I want the scientific answer, so we’re gonna make them go through the work to debrief.

TC: You touched on this with the ‘modification phase’… Unity is, I don’t know how exactly you’d describe it, a production prototype. Could you tell me whether there’s any special upkeep for it as the sort of first off the line?

Moses: There’s nothing special as part of its design or build that requires special upkeep. But as a test vehicle and as our first article, we give it a lot of extra attention. We dive in pretty deep on inspections, both regularly and as we see issues, we would probably, test those and explore just to make sure we truly understand that there’s no unknowns out there, things like how the system performs how it does in cold temperatures, under load and under stress. We keep an eye on it.

There’s a series of measurements that we make to say, you know, where did the vehicle perform based on its design envelope. And if we’re close to the edges of any of that envelope, we go do extra inspections to validate that our modeling and our predictions are right. So in that regard, it’s pretty similar to how you would have a first set of articles coming out for a new aircraft development, you would build a maintenance and inspection program. That is, an extremely conservative one. And then as you use it, you start to pull out that conservatism based on your positive feedback.

But in general, yes, Unity does get a lot of extra attention. And the next vehicles will have some of that designed in part of that. We’ve already learned a bunch of, like, ‘hey, on the next vehicle, make this different so I don’t have to look at it every time, I can look at it every five times.’

TC: I think that when we when we talked before, you mentioned that you expect multiple-hundred flights, at least theoretically, out of Unity.

Moses: Yeah, multiple-hundred flights of the vehicle. We set a design envelope where we designed for a certain lifetime, and we we tested to that, and then we can always go do life extension. Some of that is just a limitation of… you know, we’re going to cycle the stuff 10,000 times rather than 40,000 times, and we’ll come back later and get the other cycles when we get closer to the 10,000 life. We’ll go back and add more to it. There’s not a lot of components that have, you know, like a ‘fall off the cliff’ type of lifetime.

TC: You mentioned some of the modifications you are going to build into the successor or production craft. Can you tell me any of those, how it will differ in minor or major ways, when you expect weight on wheels and that kind of thing?

Moses: So we’ve already done weight on wheels. And we had our rollout, which is effectively that weight on wheels, where we transition from, basically major factory assembly into ground tests. So all of the systems are installed, and now they’re gonna start to run integrated ground testing, where you can basically go run a computer system through its checkouts, you can run the flight control system through checkouts… you’re still on the ground, right, you’re not yet ready to fly. But we are in that integrated testing.

As far as changes… when we designed the structure, if you think about it as the skeleton, under the skin, with Imagine and Inspire, we optimized and moved those skeletons, the ribs in the spars, to the locations where the load was highest. Unity was built off of the original design intent of Scaled Composites, and flight tests, they’ve shown us that sometimes that load is not exactly where it is expected. There’s a lot of extra weight in Unity to account for that load; Imagine and Inspire, we’re able to optimize and put the structure right where it needed to be.

There’s a joint, for example, on Unity that I have to go look at every time, because I had to add extra to it. Whereas on Imagine, it was designed to where it should be in the first place. I’ll still look at it, but it’s much easier access and a much shorter inspection.

So things like that, that let me optimize my inspection schedule. And other just simplistic things — there are now access panels where we know we need them, whereas we had to kind of add them after the fact in Unity. Your quick release fasteners and things like that, that make inspections shorter, we were able to add into the design, we made a pretty significant number of changes like that, all fairly minor, but they have a large effect on the maintainability of the vehicle.

And the next phase, right, we talked about this, the Delta class of spaceships, we’re going to make changes for manufacturability. Unity and Inspire and Imagine are still fairly one-off hand-built aircraft — spacecraft, sorry. And if we want to go build a dozen or more to get to these 400-flight-a-year rates, we need to make sure they’re manufacturable at a smaller price tag in a smaller time scale. So that next design will incorporate a bunch of that stuff.

TC: That’s actually one of the things I wanted to talk about is how you get to the reliability and cadence that you want to have for commercial operation? Obviously, more aircraft is one part of that, but you know, maybe expanding ground ops or crew, better maintenance and stuff like that.

Moses: Yeah, you bet. And I think that’s it, right: It’s a fleet, so we have multiple vehicles for dispatch. That gives you capacity to be able to handle anything that comes up unexpected, like weather. And then it’s the workforce — with more workforce, a 24/7 clock, then you can have multiple expertises, or a crew focused on just one vehicle. And the second crew, they’re focused on the second one.

I think our mantra here is going to be to take it in baby steps — we’re not going to try to go to those high flight rates initially, we want to get a little faster, then a little faster, then a little faster. That’s kind of Unity’s purpose in life in 2022, to allow us to go explore those operational cadences and see where we can apply multiplying factors for when we get additional spaceships.

You know, the business model is a great one, right? But in these next couple of years, it’s fairly insensitive to whether I’m doing eight flights or 10 flights or 12 flights with Unity. I mean, in terms of revenue, it doesn’t move the needle very much. But in terms of operational learning, that’s a significant step for us, so we want to be prudent with how we proceed down that path.

TC: Can you can you tell me again why, or whether, you plan on keeping the flight plans more or less the same? Maybe there’s possibility, later down the line with the revised version with six people in it, that you might have to have a slightly different profile?

Moses: That’s kind of coupled with what we talked about at the beginning of this Q&A, the move from a test phase into this operational readiness phase. Coupled with that is a profile that is now set — the trajectory that the pilots fly, the techniques they use, we’ll still optimize, but we’re not making major revisions. Those are all pretty much physics-based results. The airspeed we’re at, the angles that we’re at, and the subsequent altitude we get to, the weight we carry, are all kind of locked-in variables, and there’s not much you can do to change that equation.

There’ll be some definite trajectory changes that come along with Imagine because it will have more capacity on board, which means it’ll have a slightly different performance, and we just need to go verify that envelope. But for the most part, you know, the physics of the equation kind of set what you can do, roughly speaking, so that’s why we’re limited to only carrying four passengers here initially. We can change that, and we do plan on looking at weight reductions in the ship, but again, with an eye towards the fleet that we’re building, and make sure we get a fleet that is serviceable for the long haul.

TC: That’s all I’ve got here. Thanks again for taking the time to chat.

You can watch a recap of the recent Virgin Galactic launch here.

News: Digital lending platform Blend valued at over $4B in its public debut

• July 16, 2021
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Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business. If you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend. Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to be a leader

Mortgages may not be considered sexy, but they are a big business.

If you’ve refinanced or purchased a home digitally lately, you may not have noticed the company powering the software behind it — but there’s a good chance that company is Blend.

Founded in 2012, the startup has steadily grown to be a leader in the mortgage tech industry. Blend’s white label technology powers mortgage applications on the site of banks including Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank, for example, with the goal of making the process faster, simpler and more transparent. 

The San Francisco-based startup’s SaaS (software-as-a-service) platform currently processes over $5 billion in mortgages and consumer loans per day, up from nearly $3 billion last July.

Today, Blend made its debut as a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange, trading under the symbol “BLND.” As of early afternoon, Eastern Time, the stock was trading up over 13% at $20.36.

On Thursday night, the company had said it would offer 20 million shares at a price of $18 per share, indicating the company was targeting a valuation of $3.6 billion.

That compares to a $3.3 billion valuation at the time of its last raise in January — a $300 million Series G funding round that included participation from Coatue and Tiger Global Management. Also, let’s not forget that Blend only became a unicorn last August when it raised a $75 million Series F. Over its lifetime, Blend had raised $665 million before Friday’s public market debut.

In filing its S-1 on June 21, Blend revealed that its revenue had climbed to $96 million in 2020 from $50.7 million in 2019. Meanwhile, its net loss narrowed from $81.5 million in 2019 to $74.6 million in 2020.

In 2020, the San Francisco-based startup significantly expanded its digital consumer lending platform. With that expansion, Blend began offering its lender customers new configuration capabilities so that they could launch any consumer banking product “in days rather than months.”

Looking ahead, the company had said it expects its revenue growth rate “to decline in future periods.” It also doesn’t envision achieving profitability anytime soon as it continues to focus on growth. Blend also revealed that in 2020, its top five customers accounted for 34% of its revenue.

Today, TechCrunch spoke with co-founder and CEO Nima Ghamsari about the company’s decision to go with a traditional IPO versus the ubiquitous SPAC or even a direct listing.

For one, Blend said he wanted to show its customers that it is an “around for a long time company” by making sure there’s enough on its balance sheet to continue to grow.

“We had to talk and convince some of the biggest investors in the world to invest in us, and that speaks to how long we’ll be around to serve these customers,” he said. “So it was a combination of our capital need and wanting to cement ourselves as a really credible software provider to one of the most regulated industries.”

Ghamsari emphasized that Blend is a software company that powers the mortgage process and is not the one offering the mortgages. As such, it works with the flock of fintechs that are working to provide mortgages.

“A lot of them are using Blend under the hood, as the infrastructure layer,” he said.

Overall, Ghamsari believes this is just the beginning for Blend.

“One of the things about financial services is that it’s still mostly powered by paper. So a lot of Blend’s growth is just going deeper into this process that we got started in years ago,” he said. As mentioned above, the company started out with its mortgage product but just keeps adding to it. Today, it also powers other loans such as auto, personal and home equity.

“A lot of our growth is actually powered by our other lines of business,” Ghamsari told TechCrunch. “There’s a lot to build because the larger digitization trends are just getting started in financial services. It’s a relatively large industry that has lots of change.”

In May, digital mortgage lender Better.com announced it would combine with a SPAC, taking itself public in the second half of 2021.

 

News: Visualping raises $6M to make its website change monitoring service smarter

• July 16, 2021
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Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE Ventures, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of

Visualping, a service that can help you monitor websites for changes like price drops or other updates, announced that it has raised a $6 million extension to the $2 million seed round it announced earlier this year. The round was led by Seattle-based FUSE Ventures, a relatively new firm with investors who spun out of Ignition Partners last year. Prior investors Mistral Venture Partners and N49P also participated.

The Vancouver-based company is part of the current Google for Startups Accelerator class in Canada. This program focuses on services that leverage AI and machine learning, and, while website monitoring may not seem like an obvious area where machine learning can add a lot of value, if you’ve ever used one of these services, you know that they can often unleash a plethora of false alerts. For the most part, after all, these tools simply look for something in a website’s underlying code to change and then trigger an alert based on that (and maybe some other parameters you’ve set).

Earlier this week, Visualping launched its first machine learning-based tools to avoid just that. The company argues that it can eliminate up to 80% of false alerts by combining feedback from its more than 1.5 million users with its new ML algorithms. Thanks to this, Visualping can now learn the best configuration for how to monitor a site when users set up a new alert.

“Visualping has the hearts of over a million people across the world, as well as the vast majority of the Fortune 500. To be a part of their journey and to lead this round of financing is a dream,” FUSE’s Brendan Wales said.

Visualping founder and CEO Serge Salager tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to focus on building out its product but also to build a commercial team. So far, he said, the company’s growth has been primarily product led.

As a part of these efforts, the company also plans to launch Visualping Business, with support for these new ML tools and additional collaboration features, and Visualping Personal for individual users who want to monitor things like ticket availability for concerts or to track news, price drops or job postings, for example. For now, the personal plan will not include support for ML. “False alerts are not a huge problem for personal use as people are checking two-three websites but a huge problem for enterprise where teams need to process hundreds of alerts per day,” Salager told me.

The current idea is to launch these new plans in November, together with mobile apps for iOS and Android. The company will also relaunch its extensions around this time, too.

It’s also worth noting that while Visualping monetizes its web-based service, you can still use the extension in the browser for free.

News: Tumblr’s parent company is buying popular podcast app Pocket Casts

• July 16, 2021
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Pocket Casts will soon have a new home. Automattic, the parent company of Tumblr and WordPress.com, is buyinh the podcast app from a collective of public radio groups, including NPR and BBC Studios.

News: Rivian delays deliveries of R1T, R1S electric vehicles again

• July 16, 2021
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Rivian is pushing back deliveries of its long-awaited R1T electric pickup truck and R1S SUV several more months due to delays in production caused by “cascading impacts of the pandemic,” particularly the ongoing global shortage of semiconductor chips, according to a letter sent to customers from CEO RJ Scaringe. The R1T deliveries will begin in

Rivian is pushing back deliveries of its long-awaited R1T electric pickup truck and R1S SUV several more months due to delays in production caused by “cascading impacts of the pandemic,” particularly the ongoing global shortage of semiconductor chips, according to a letter sent to customers from CEO RJ Scaringe. The R1T deliveries will begin in September with the R1S to follow “shortly,” Scaringe wrote in the message.

Deliveries of the R1T Launch Edition vehicles, the limited edition release of its first series of “electric adventure vehicles,” were supposed to begin in July after being delayed by a month.

Rivian is hardly the only automaker grappling with the global chip shortage. GM, Ford, Toyota and virtually every other automaker has either slowed production or built its vehicles without certain features supported by chips. For instance, GM is now building certain mid- and full-sized SUVs without a wireless phone charging feature due to the global shortage of semiconductor chips.

Unlike the established players with plenty of inbound revenue, Rivian is a newcomer that is trying to be the first automaker to bring an electric pickup truck to market. Ford plans to bring the electric F-150 Lightning pickup truck to market in spring 2022. Production of a GMC Hummer EV pickup is expected to begin later this year.

Here’s a segment of the letter, which was viewed by TechCrunch:

We know you can’t wait to get behind the wheel of your vehicle. Earlier this summer, we announced that deliveries would begin in July; however, the timing for the first deliveries of the R1T has shifted to September, with the R1S shortly thereafter in the fall. I wanted to be sure you heard this from me directly.

There are many reasons why our production ramp is taking longer than expected. The cascading impacts of the pandemic have had a compounding effect greater than anyone anticipated. Everything from facility construction, to equipment installation, to vehicle component supply (especially semiconductors) has been impacted by the pandemic. Beyond these unforeseen challenges, launching three new vehicles while setting up a multi-vehicle manufacturing plant is a complex orchestra of coordinated and interlinked activities where small issues can translate into ramp delays.

Scaringe provided a few more details about the company’s progress, including it now employs more than 7,000 people. The Rivian factory in Normal, Illinois, has two separate production lines producing vehicles, according to Scaringe. One is dedicated for the R1 vehicles and other line is for its commercial vans.

In 2019, Rivian announced it was developing an electric delivery van for Amazon using its skateboard platform. Amazon ordered 100,000 of these vans, with deliveries starting in 2021. Earlier this year, Amazon began testing the electric delivery van in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Scaringe said Rivian has “built hundreds of vehicles as part of our validation process, with many of those spotted out in the wild covered in unique vinyl wraps.” He also addressed why those vehicles haven’t been delivered to customers, noting that the company believes “it is critical to both our long-term success and your ultimate satisfaction that the quality and robustness of our launch products truly sets the tone for what to expect from us as a brand.”

The founder and CEO also acknowledged that the company needed to improve how it communicates specifics around deliveries.

News: Crypto investors like Terraform Labs so much, they’re committing $150 million to its ‘ecosystem’

• July 16, 2021
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There are many blockchain platforms competing for investors’ and developers’ attention right now, from the big daddy of them all, Ethereum, to so-called “Ethereum Killers” like Solana, which we wrote about in May. Often, these technologies are seen as so promising that investors are willing to fund not only the blockchains but an ecosystem of

There are many blockchain platforms competing for investors’ and developers’ attention right now, from the big daddy of them all, Ethereum, to so-called “Ethereum Killers” like Solana, which we wrote about in May.

Often, these technologies are seen as so promising that investors are willing to fund not only the blockchains but an ecosystem of products and projects that are built on their blockchain networks. On Wednesday, for example, Phantom, a digital wallet that resides on the Solana blockchain network, announced $9 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (which in June also splashed out a lot of money for Solana’s digital tokens).

Similarly, a syndicate of investors today is casting their votes for Terraform Labs, a three-year-old platform that originally set out to mint different so-called stablecoins for e-commerce that mimic the value of various fiat currencies and has since expanded its offerings.

There is so much more to be built off the platform, in fact, that backers including Pantera Capital and Arrington XRP have just committed to investing $150 million on products tied to the Terra ecosystem, commitments that will be deployed over several years, says the company, and commitments that, should they prove fruitful, will boost Terraform’s underlying growth in a kind of virtuous circle.

Why are they so excited about Terraform? The Singapore-based company has apparently been gaining ground fast with merchants in users in South Korea by shortening settlement time from days to seconds, often without e-commerce customers knowing that their online (and sometimes offline) transaction involved a blockchain.

It’s been doing so well, says investor Mike Arrington, that it launched an e-commerce wallet called Chai that’s grown popular in Asia. It also launched Mirror Protocol, which creates fungible assets, or “synthetics,” that track the price of real world assets. (Arrington XRP led Mirror’s first round.)

Indeed, the market cap of Terraform’s tokens — they’re called LUNA — has skyrocketed from $300 million in January to $2.6 billion as excited buyers snap them up.

Whether these backers are getting ahead of themselves is an open question, but the company’s equity investors — which also include Coinbase Ventures and Mike Novogratz of Galaxy Digital — are plainly betting there is more to come.

Back in January, when Galaxy co-led a $25 million round in Terraform, Novogratz talked with Bloomberg about the investment. Among other praise heaped on the company, he said that: “What’s great about Terra is they are one of the first sandbox experiments that’s getting outside the sandbox. We are always looking at those projects because they are the canaries in the coal mines of what else is going to happen.”

News: Construct Capital’s Dayna Grayson will be a Startup Battlefield Judge at Disrupt 2021

• July 16, 2021
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Dayna Grayson has been in venture capital for more than a decade and was one of the first VCs to build a portfolio around the transformation of industrial sectors of our economy. At NEA, where she was a partner for eight years, she led investments in and sat on the boards of companies including Desktop

Dayna Grayson has been in venture capital for more than a decade and was one of the first VCs to build a portfolio around the transformation of industrial sectors of our economy.

At NEA, where she was a partner for eight years, she led investments in and sat on the boards of companies including Desktop Metal, Onshape, Framebridge, Tulip, Formlabs and Guideline. She left NEA to start her own fund, Construct Capital, that focuses exclusively on early-stage startups, with a portfolio that includes Copia, ChargeLab, Tradeswell and Hadrian.

It should come as no surprise, then, that we’re absolutely thrilled to have Grayson join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 in September.

Grayson has more than proven that she has a keen eye for transformational technology. Desktop Metal went public in 2020 — she still sits on the board as chair of the compensation committee. Onshape, another NEA-era investment, was acquired by PTC in 2019 for a whopping $525 million. Framebridge was also acquired by Graham Holdings in 2020.

Grayson saw an opportunity to develop a venture brand more hyperfocused on the types of deals she was doing at NEA, which centered around manufacturing and digitizing industrial verticals. That’s where Construct Capital came in. It’s a $140 million fund helmed by Grayson and former Uber exec Rachel Holt.

At Disrupt, Grayson will serve as a Startup Battlefield judge. The Battlefield is one of the world’s most prestigious and exciting startup competitions. Twenty+ early-stage startups hop on our stage and present their wares to a panel of expert VC judges, who then grill the founders on everything about the business, from the revenue model to the go-to-market strategy to the team to the technology itself.

The winner walks away with $100,000 in prize money and the glory of being a Battlefield winner. Households names in tech have gotten their start in the Battlefield, from Dropbox to Mint.

Grayson joins plenty of other seasoned investors on the Battlefield stage, including Camille Samuels, Deena Shakir, Terri Burns, Shauntel Garvey and Alexa Von Tobel.

Disrupt 2021 goes down from September 21 to 23 and is virtual. Snag a ticket here starting under $100 for a limited time!

News: An insurtech startup exposed thousands of sensitive insurance applications

• July 16, 2021
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A security lapse at insurance technology startup BackNine exposed hundreds of thousands of insurance applications after one of its cloud servers was left unprotected on the internet. BackNine might be a company you’re not familiar with, but it might have processed your personal information if you applied for insurance in the past few years. The

A security lapse at insurance technology startup BackNine exposed hundreds of thousands of insurance applications after one of its cloud servers was left unprotected on the internet.

BackNine might be a company you’re not familiar with, but it might have processed your personal information if you applied for insurance in the past few years. The California-based company builds back-office software to help bigger insurance carriers sell and maintain life and disability insurance policies. It also offers a white-labeled quote web form for smaller or independent financial planners who sell insurance plans through their own websites.

But one of the company’s storage servers, hosted on Amazon’s cloud, was misconfigured to allow anyone access to the 711,000 files inside, including completed insurance applications that contain highly sensitive personal and medical information on the applicant and their family. It also contained images of individuals’ signatures as well as other internal BackNine files.

Of the documents reviewed, TechCrunch found contact information, like full names, addresses and phone numbers, but also Social Security numbers, medical diagnoses, medications taken and detailed completed questionnaires about an applicant’s health, past and present. Other files included lab and test results, such as blood work and electrocardiograms. Some applications also contained driver’s license numbers.

The exposed documents date back to 2015, and as recently as this month.

Because Amazon storage servers, known as buckets, are private by default, someone with control of the buckets must have changed its permissions to public. None of the data was encrypted.

Security researcher Bob Diachenko found the exposed storage bucket and emailed details of the lapse to the company in early June, but after receiving an initial response, he didn’t hear back and the bucket remained open.

We reached out to BackNine vice president Reid Tattersall, with whom Diachenko was in contact and ignored. TechCrunch, too, was ignored. But within minutes of providing Tattersall — and him only — with the name of the exposed bucket, the data was locked down. TechCrunch has yet to receive a response from Tattersall, or his father Mark, the company’s chief executive, who was copied on a later email.

TechCrunch asked Tattersall if the company has alerted local authorities per state data breach notification laws, or if the company has any plans to notify the affected individuals whose data was exposed. We did not receive an answer. Companies can face stiff financial and civil penalties for failing to disclose a cybersecurity incident.

BackNine works with some of America’s largest insurance carriers. Many of the insurance applications found in the exposed bucket were for AIG, TransAmerica, John Hancock, Lincoln Financial Group and Prudential. When reached prior to publication, spokespeople for the insurance giants did not comment.

Read more:

• Metromile says a website bug let a hacker obtain driver license numbers
• Short seller says Lemonade website bug exposed insurance customers’ account data
• Geico admits fraudsters stole customers’ driver’s license numbers for months
• Thousands of US lab results and medical records spilled online after a security lapse
• Zocdoc says ‘programming errors’ exposed access to patients’ data

News: India poised for record VC year as unicorns head for decisive IPOs

• July 16, 2021
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India is on pace for a record year of money flowing into its booming startup sector. But as Q3 gets underway, something perhaps even more important is going on in India: public-market liquidity.

In case you’ve not been paying attention, we’ll say it again: The global venture capital industry is on fire. The second quarter of 2021 was the largest single three-month period on record for dollars invested.

The data coming in points to a worldwide boom. The United States’ startup market had a huge Q2, and investors don’t expect the pace to slow in the country. Europe is also having one hell of a year. Around the world, 2021 is shaping up to be a breakout year for venture investment into startups. And that’s after several years of growing, record-breaking results.

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India is another good example of this trend. The country’s venture capital haul thus far in 2021 has nearly matched its 2020 total and is on pace for a record year. But as the third quarter gets underway, something perhaps even more important is going on: public-market liquidity.

The new trend is being spearheaded by Zomato, an Indian food delivery giant that could be valued at $8.6 billion in its public debut. Other major Indian unicorns are following it to the public markets, including fintech players like MobiKwik and Paytm, which is backed by Alibaba and its affiliate Ant Financial. The trio of companies could herald a rush of public offerings from Indian companies if their debuts prove lucrative and stable.

Today, The Exchange is taking a look at India’s recent venture capital results and digging more deeply into the country’s IPO pipeline, with help from VCs Kunal Bajaj of Blume Ventures and Manish Singhal of pi Ventures. We’ll also read the tea leaves when it comes to how Zomato’s IPO is performing thus far, and what we can learn from its early data. This will be fun!