Tag Archives: Blog

News: Today’s big tech earnings in a mere 700 words

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Today was yet another day of earnings from tech’s biggest names. To keep you up to speed without burying you in an endless crush of numbers we’ve pulled out the key data from each of the major reports. In each you will also find a link to their earnings reports. What does all of the

Today was yet another day of earnings from tech’s biggest names. To keep you up to speed without burying you in an endless crush of numbers we’ve pulled out the key data from each of the major reports.

In each you will also find a link to their earnings reports. What does all of the data from the week’s earnings downloads mean for startups? We’ll have a full roundup on that front tomorrow morning, so stay tuned.

Here’s what you need to know:

• Facebook crushed financial expectations, missed slightly on users. Shares of Facebook are up around 5% after it reported its recent financial results. Facebook had a somewhat two-part report. The first piece of its results was a huge financial beat; the second was that it missed ever-so-slightly on active usage. Investors are weighing the former more heavily than the latter. In numerical terms, Facebook had been expected to report $23.67 billion in revenue. Instead, it posted $26.17 billion. And its earnings per share beat expectations by $0.93 per share, or just under 40%. Facebook is a controversial company with known issues. But turning in better than expected financial results is not one of them.

• Shopify smashed expectations, again. Its shares spiked, again. The post-IPO Shopify story of the Canadian e-commerce infra player kicking the heck out of expectations continued today. Investors had expected Shopify to post $865.48 million in total Q1 2021 revenue. Shopify managed $988.6 million instead. And it beat profit expectations by a multiple. What drove the Shopify results? The company’s so-called “Merchant Solutions” business, which grew by 137%, faster than the company’s aggregate 110% growth rate in the quarter. Merchant Solutions at the company encompasses its payments, shipping, and capital services, among other elements of its business.

• Apple shares rose after the company reported strong growth across its product categories. Apple, like Facebook, demolished investor expectations for its most recent quarter. In the three-month period ending March 27, 2021, Apple produced revenues of $89.6 billion and earnings per diluted share of $1.40 were miles ahead of an expected $77.35 billion in revenue and $0.99 in diluted EPS. What drove the huge win? Growth in every single product category that the company reports, compared to the year-ago period. iPhone sales totaled $47.94 billion, compared to a year-ago result of $28.96 billion. And the company’s key services business line grew from $13.35 billion to $16.90 billion over the same temporal interval. For the nerds in the room, Apple’s net income as a percentage of gross profit in the quarter was just over 62%. Wow.

• Spotify shares fell sharply after it reported slower-than-anticipated user growth. In financial terms, Spotify had a pretty good quarter. It met revenue expectations (around €2.15 billion), and lost less money per share than was anticipated. However, the music streaming company’s user base only reached 356 million in the first quarter of the year, the low end of Spotify’s 354 million to 364 million guidance, and under the market’s expectation of just over 360 million. Its shares were off around 12% today. Why did Facebook shares rise after its usage miss, while Spotify’s fell? Facebook crushed financial expectations. Spotify merely met them. And Facebook’s user base miss appears smaller than what Spotify detailed.
• GrubHub grew its revenues and losses ahead of its acquisition. GrubHub, which is in the final stages of being digested by JustEat Takeaway, brought in more money in the first quarter than in the same period a year ago, but also lost more money too. Here’s the breakdown: Revenue grew 52% year-over-year to $550.6 million thanks to all that pandemic-driven demand for delivery. GrubHub also reported a negative Adjusted EBITDA of $9.3 million. GrubHub blamed its adjusted EBITDA results on several factors, including temporary fee caps (which it opposes), increased delivery driver costs caused by short-term driver supply imbalances from surging demand, extreme winter weather in numerous parts of the country and, to a lesser degree, the issuance of stimulus payments that caused some drivers to temporarily reduce hours in March. Active diners rose 38% year-over-year to 33.0 million, another positive sign for the company. But alas, its net loss grew to $75 million, or a loss of $0.81 per diluted share compared to a net loss of $33.4 million or a loss of $0.36 per diluted share in the same year-ago period.

You can catch up on Microsoft and Alphabet earnings, among others, here.

News: How to fundraise over Zoom more effectively

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Even though in-person drinks and coffee walks are on the horizon, virtual fundraising isn’t going away. It’s imperative to ensure your virtual pitch is as effective as your IRL one.

I was a first-time CEO who had just finished Techstars with my co-founders when the pandemic hit last March. I remember sitting alone in my basement room in Boulder, Colorado, in sweatpants, while connecting with my advisers. They confirmed my biggest fear: Warmly, our startup, had just three months of runway left in the bank.

It was every founder’s nightmare around that time: I’d be forced to fundraise amid a global pandemic.

Of course, venture capital investors weren’t taking in-person meetings then, which meant pitching over Zoom. As opposed to late-night drinks, coffee chats while strolling along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and Sand Hill boardroom meetings (environments where I thought I could excel), I was stuck in a basement.

Whether I asked friends, mentors or Google, no one seemed to have any good tips for connecting with investors virtually. But I learned as I went, adopting new technology to assist in the VC fundraising process, and we were able to close a $2.1 million seed round in August. Phew.

While we might have thought virtual fundraising would impossible when the world shut down one year ago, I don’t think anyone believes that anymore. Not only is it more efficient — no expensive trips to San Francisco or trouble fitting investor meetings into one day — virtual fundraising helps democratize access to venture capital.

Founders can raise money from investors based anywhere in the world, and investors can consider startups from anywhere, too. My investors today are from California, Colorado, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois and the U.K. And so far, I haven’t met a single one of them in person.

News: Microsoft’s new default font options, rated

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Calibri, we hardly knew ye. Microsoft’s default font for all its Office products (and built-in apps like Wordpad) is on its way out and the company now needs your help picking a new one. Let’s judge the options! You probably don’t think much about Calibri, if you think about fonts at all, but that’s a

Calibri, we hardly knew ye. Microsoft’s default font for all its Office products (and built-in apps like Wordpad) is on its way out and the company now needs your help picking a new one. Let’s judge the options!

You probably don’t think much about Calibri, if you think about fonts at all, but that’s a good thing in this context. A default font should be something you don’t notice and don’t feel the need to change unless you want something specific. Of course the switch from Times New Roman back in 2007 was controversial — going from a serif default to a sans serif default ruffled a lot of feathers. Ultimately it proved to be a good decision, and anyway TNR is still usually the default for serif-specified text.

To be clear, this is about defaults for user-created stuff, like Word files. The font used by Microsoft in Windows and other official brand things is Segoe UI, and there are a few other defaults mixed in there as well. But from now on making a new document in an Office product would default to using one of these, and the others will be there as options.

Replacing Calibri with another friendly-looking universal sans serif font will be a considerably less dramatic change than 2007’s, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have opinions on it. Oh no. We’re going to get into it. Unfortunately Microsoft’s only options for seeing the text, apart from writing it out in your own 365 apps, are the tweet (doesn’t have all the letters) or some colorful but not informative graphic presentations. So we (and by we I mean Darrell) made our own little specimen to judge by:

You may notice Grandview is missing. We’ll get to that. Starting from the top:

Calibri, here for reference, is an inoffensive, rather narrow font. It gets its friendly appearance from the tips of the letters, which are buffed off like they were afraid kids might run into them. At low resolutions like we had in 2007 this didn’t really come across, but now it’s more obvious and actually a little weird, making it look a bit like magnetic fridge letters.

Bierstadt is my pick and what I think Microsoft will pick. First because it has a differentiated lowercase l, which I think is important. Second, it doesn’t try anything cute with its terminals. The t ends without curling up, and there’s no distracting tail on the a, among other things — sadly most common letter, lowercase e, is ugly, like a chipped theta. Someone fix it. It’s practical, clear, and doesn’t give you a reason to pick a different font. First place. Congratulations, designer Steve Matteson.

Tenorite is my backup pick, because it’s nice but less practical for a default font. Geometric sans serifs (look at the big fat “dog,” all circles) look great at medium size but small they tend to make for weird, wide spacing. Look at how Bierstadt makes the narrow and wide letters comparable in width, while in Tenorite they’re super uneven, yet both are near the same total length. Also, no, we didn’t mess with the kerning or add extra spaces to the end in “This is Tenorite.” That’s how it came out. Someone fix it! Second Place.

Skeena, apart from sounding like a kind of monster you fight in an RPG, feels like a throwback. Specifically to Monaco, the font we all remember from early versions of MacOS (like System 7). The variable thickness and attenuated tails make for an interesting look in large type, but small it just looks awkward. Best e of the bunch, but something’s wrong with the g, maybe. Someone might need to fix it. Third place.

Seaford is an interesting one, but it’s trying too hard with these angular loops and terminals. The lowercase k and a are horrifying, like broken pretzels. The j looks like someone kicked an i. The d looks like it had too much to eat and is resting its belly on the ground. And don’t get me started on the bent bars of the italic w. Someone fix it. I like the extra strong bold and the g actually works, but this would really bug me to use every day. Fourth Place.

Grandview didn’t render properly for us. It looked like Dingbats in regular, but was fine in bold and italic. Someone fix it. Fortunately I feel confident it won’t be the next default. It’s not bad at all, but it’s inhuman, robotic. Looks like a terminal font no one uses. See how any opportunity there is for a straight line is taken? Nice for a logo — feels strong structurally — but a paragraph of it would look like a barcode. Use it for H2 stuff. Last place.

So what should you “vote” for by tweeting hard at Microsoft? Probably it doesn’t matter. I’m guessing they’ve already picked one. Bierstadt is the smart pick, because it’s good in general while the others are all situational. If they would only fix that damn e.

News: GM partners with 7 charging networks ahead of electric vehicle push

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

GM revealed Wednesday a four-part plan meant to handle all the steps of charging an electric vehicle, including finding a public charger and paying for the power, as the automaker seeks ways to attract customers to the 30 EVs it plans to launch by 2025. The so-called Ultium Charge 360 plan — named after the

GM revealed Wednesday a four-part plan meant to handle all the steps of charging an electric vehicle, including finding a public charger and paying for the power, as the automaker seeks ways to attract customers to the 30 EVs it plans to launch by 2025.

The so-called Ultium Charge 360 plan — named after the underlying electric vehicle platform and batteries of its upcoming EVs — aims to handle the access, payment and customer service components of charging an electric vehicle at home and on the road. As part of the plan, which the company’s chief EV officer Travis Hester said will be rolling out over the next 18 months, GM has signed agreements with seven third-party charging network providers, including Blink Charging, ChargePoint, EV Connect, EVgo, FLO, Greenlots and SemaConnect. Using their GM vehicle brand mobile app, EV drivers will be able to see real-time information, including location and whether a charger is being used, from nearly 60,000 charging plugs throughout the U.S. and Canada. These functions will be rolled into the existing brand apps GM has created for owners of its Chevrolet, Cadillac and GMC vehicles.

The first GM and EVgo sites are now live in Washington, California and Florida. GM said each site is capable of delivering up to 350 kilowatts and averages four chargers per site. GM and EVgo are on track to have about 500 fast-charging stalls live by the end of 2021, according to the automaker.

Hester noted the plan isn’t just about how many third-party networks it partners with. (Although it should be noted that Electrify America is not on its list of partners announced Wednesday.)

“We know how critical the charging infrastructure is to our customers and how it plays a hugely significant role in EV adoption and experienced EV owners know that this is much more complicated than just a simple network quantity issue,” Hester said in a media briefing Wednesday.

For instance, the GM app will provide information on how to find stations along a route and initiate and pay for charging, Hester said. GM will continue to update the mobile app. GM is also planning to offer charging accessories and installation services for their home charger. The company said Wednesday it will cover standard installation of Level 2 charging capability for eligible customers who purchase or lease a 2022 Bolt EUV or Bolt EV in collaboration with Qmerit.

There were some gaps in the announcement, notably whether there would be Plug and Charge capabilities. Plug and Charge is a technology standard that allows the driver of an EV to pull up to a station, plug in and power up their EV without having to launch an app to begin the charging process or to pay for it. Instead, the vehicle is able to communicate with the charging infrastructure and the payment is integrated into that process. Alex Keros, the lead architect for EV infrastructure at GM, said the company wasn’t making any announcements around Plug and Charge, but noted that the company knows “that enabling that seamless experience is going to be an important part of that customer experience.”

News: Facebook ‘looking into’ hiding of posts calling for PM Modi’s resignation in India

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.” Original story follows. Facebook has temporarily hidden all posts with hashtag “ResignModi” in India, days after the U.S. social juggernaut — along with Twitter — complied with an order from New Delhi to

Updated at 1.17am IST, Thursday: Facebook comms Andy Stone said the company has restored the posts and is “looking into what happened.”

Original story follows.

Facebook has temporarily hidden all posts with hashtag “ResignModi” in India, days after the U.S. social juggernaut — along with Twitter — complied with an order from New Delhi to censor some posts critical of Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

On its website, Facebook said it had hidden posts with “ResignModi” hashtag because some of those violated its community standards. (A search for “ResignModi” is currently returning some results for users in the U.S.) It’s unclear at this time if Facebook was ordered to take this call or if it did so at its own will.

Tweets with “#ResignModi”, at the time of publication, were visible in India. With over 450 million WhatsApp users and nearly 400 million Facebook users, India is the largest market for the social company by the size of userbase.

Covid cases have surged in the South Asian nation in recent days, prompting many citizens to air their frustrations at the government on social channels as they struggle to find empty beds, oxygen supplies and medicines in hospitals.

Image Credits: Screengrab by TechCrunch

Facebook, which didn’t respond to a request for comment over censorship of posts in India over the weekend, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

News: Lobus raises $6 million for an art management platform on the blockchain

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Reshaping ownership proofs in the fine art markets has been one of the blockchain’s clearest real-world use cases. But in recent months as top auction houses have embraced NFTs and popular artists experiment with the crypto medium, that future has seemed more tangible than ever before. The ex-Christie’s and Sotheby’s team at Lobus is aiming

Reshaping ownership proofs in the fine art markets has been one of the blockchain’s clearest real-world use cases. But in recent months as top auction houses have embraced NFTs and popular artists experiment with the crypto medium, that future has seemed more tangible than ever before.

The ex-Christie’s and Sotheby’s team at Lobus is aiming to commoditize blockchain tech with an asset management platform that they hope can bring creator-friendly mechanisms from NFT marketplaces like SuperRare to the physical art world as well, allowing art owners to maintain partial ownership of the works they sell so that they can benefit from secondary transactions down the line. While physical art sellers have grown accustomed to selling 100% of their work while seeing that value accrue over time as it trades hands, Lobus’s goal is for artist’s to maintain fractional ownership throughout those sales, ensuring that they earn a commission on sales down the road. It’s a radical idea and a logistical nightmare made feasible by the blockchain’s approach to ownership.

“We’re really on a mission of making artists into owners,” Lobus co-CEO Sarah Wendell Sherrill tells TechCrunch. “We are really leveraging the best of what NFTs are putting out there about ownership and asking the questions of how to help create different ownership structures and interrupt this asset class.”

The startup is encapsulating these new mechanics in a wide-reaching art asset management platform that they hope can entice users of the aging legacy software suites being used today. Teaming robust ownership proofs with a CRM, analytics platform and tools like dynamic pricing, Lobus wants to give the art market its own Carta-like software platform that is approachable to the wider market.

Lobus tells TechCrunch they have raised $6 million from Upside Capital, 8VC, Franklin Templeton, Dream Machine, Weekend Fund and BoostVC, among others. Angels participating in the round include Rob Hayes, Troy Carter, Suzy Ryoo, Rebecca and Cal Henderson, Henry Ward and Lex Sokolin.

A big goal for the team has been removing the complexities of understanding what the blockchain is and instead focus on what their tech can deliver to their network of art owners. While the NFT boom of the past few months has already produced billions in sales, efforts like Lobus are attempting to cross-pollinate the mechanics of crypto art with the global art market in an effort to put stakeholders across the board on the same footing. In addition to having partnerships with around 300 active artists, Lobus has also sold their platform to collectors, artist estates and asset managers.

At the moment, Lobus has around 45,000 art objects in its database, encompassing about $5.4 billion in asset value across physical and digital objects.

News: DigitalOcean says customer billing data accessed in data breach

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers’ billing data, TechCrunch has learned. The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has “confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account.” The company said the person “gained access

DigitalOcean has emailed customers warning of a data breach involving customers’ billing data, TechCrunch has learned.

The cloud infrastructure giant told customers in an email on Wednesday, obtained by TechCrunch, that it has “confirmed an unauthorized exposure of details associated with the billing profile on your DigitalOcean account.” The company said the person “gained access to some of your billing account details through a flaw that has been fixed” over a two-week window between April 9 and April 22.

The email said customer billing names and addresses were accessed, as well as the last four digits of the payment card, its expiry date and the name of the card-issuing bank. The company said that customers’ DigitalOcean accounts were “not accessed,” and passwords and account tokens were “not involved” in this breach.

“To be extra careful, we have implemented additional security monitoring on your account. We are expanding our security measures to reduce the likelihood of this kind of flaw occuring [sic] in the future,” the email said.

DigitalOcean said it fixed the flaw and notified data protection authorities, but it’s not clear what the apparent flaw was that put customer billing information at risk.

In a statement, DigitalOcean’s security chief Tyler Healy said 1% of billing profiles were affected by the breach, but declined to address our specific questions, including how the vulnerability was discovered and which authorities have been informed.

Companies with customers in Europe are subject to GDPR and can face fines of up to 4% of their global annual revenue.

Last year, the cloud company raised $100 million in new debt, followed by another $50 million round, months after laying off dozens of staff amid concerns about the company’s financial health. In March, the company went public, raising about $775 million in its initial public offering. 

News: India’s entrepreneurs and investors are mobilizing to help the nation fight COVID-19 — and you can too

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

At a time when much of the world has asserted great control over containing the spread of the coronavirus, with countries increasingly vaccinating its citizens, a different story is playing out in India, the world’s second-most populous nation. For a week straight, India has reported more than 300,000 daily new infections, about half of all

At a time when much of the world has asserted great control over containing the spread of the coronavirus, with countries increasingly vaccinating its citizens, a different story is playing out in India, the world’s second-most populous nation.

For a week straight, India has reported more than 300,000 daily new infections, about half of all the cases across the globe, despite cutting down on testing in some states and underreporting deaths.

Hospitals have ran out of beds for new patients, and doctors are consistently pleading on social media, often tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi, for essential medical supplies such as oxygen.

With several major industries, including film and sports, going about their lives pretending there is no crisis, entrepreneurs and startups have emerged as a rare beam of hope in recent days, springing to action to help the nation navigate its darkest hours.

It’s a refreshing change from last year, when thousands of Indian startups themselves were struggling to survive. And while some startups are still severely disrupted, offering a helping hand to the nation has become the priority for most.

Hundreds of startup entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, if not more, are spending much of their time trying to build software to find ways to make it easier for people to track new updates and make donations to foundations, and are exploring and funding ideas that have the potential to address some of the challenges surrounding the crisis.

Two organizations rising to the occasion include:

ACT Grants, which is run by nearly all active venture funds and PE firms, in addition to dozens of other volunteers. The initiative is the collective group’s continuing effort from last year.

Zomato Feeding India: India’s largest food delivery startup is helping patients and hospitals with oxygen and other crucial supplies.

Additional resources and efforts:

News: Sydney Thomas is coming to judge startups at Disrupt

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what

Before Precursor Ventures hired Sydney Thomas, the firm was running its operations out of founder Charles Hudson’s inbox, the investor recently recalled. Thomas was hired specifically to do the operational work of bringing a solo GP fund, with less than $5 million in committed capital, to a more organized place — and that’s exactly what Thomas has done. Which is why we’re honored to have Thomas, a celebrated investor, philanthropist, podcaster and community advocate, attend TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 as a judge for our Startup Battlefield competition.

A graduate of the Haas School of Business at Berkeley in 2016, Thomas is now cutting checks as a principal at Precursor, where she focuses her time on investing and supporting pre-seed companies democratizing access to products and services for what Thomas calls the “mass market economy”. Thomas also founded and hosts the “Be About It” podcast, where she profiles companies that fit the thesis. All of this complements a full extracurricular schedule that includes working on a list of investors committed to backing Black and LatinX founders called “The Interrupters” and serving on the Advisory Board of Invanti — a startup generator in the Midwest. In 2020, she was honored to receive the Champion of Justice Award from Esq. Apprentice, an Oakland-based nonprofit that creates alternative pathways to legal careers.

The Startup Battlefield competition has been the launchpad for hundreds of startups at Disrupt, including Dropbox, Cloudflare, Fitbit and more. If you are interested in throwing in your hat to compete, applications are open now! Thomas joins a number of other seasoned investors as a judge at the show. You should be there as well and can get your ticket to attend for less than $100 for a limited time. Get your pass today!

News: Atlassian’s in-house incubator lets employees put their product ideas to work

• April 28, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Every company wants to maintain that initial spark it had when it was an early stage startup, but keeping that going as you scale into a public company isn’t always easy. Atlassian is taking a unique approach by opening up product ideas to an internal competition, and actually funding and building the best ones with

Every company wants to maintain that initial spark it had when it was an early stage startup, but keeping that going as you scale into a public company isn’t always easy. Atlassian is taking a unique approach by opening up product ideas to an internal competition, and actually funding and building the best ones with the goal of bringing them to market.

Steve Goldsmith, who is heading up the project for Atlassian says that it’s an in-house startup incubator called Point A. The company wants to encourage employees to be constantly thinking about new ways to improve the products. And every employee is encouraged to participate, not just engineers or product managers, as my might think.

“Point A is our internal framework for turning ideas into products. It’s our way of finding the innovation that’s happening all over the company, and giving a process and framework for those ideas to reach the maturity of actually becoming products that we offer to our customers,” Goldsmith told me.

He says that like many companies they hold internal hackathons and other events where many times employees come up with creative concepts for products, but they tend to get put on a shelf after the event is over and never get looked at again. With Point A, they can actually compete to put their experiments to work and see if they are actually viable.

“So we think of Point A as a way of finding all those different ideas and prototypes and concepts that people have in their brains or on the side of their desk kind of thing, and giving a process and a structure for those ideas to get out the door, and really invest in the ones that have some traction,” Goldsmith said.

He says by providing an official internal process to vet and maybe fund some of them, people inside the organization know that their proposals are being heard and they have a mechanism for submitting them, and the company has a way of seeing them.

The company launched Point A in 2019 looking at 35 possible projects, and testing them as possible products. Last January, they chose 9 that made the final cut and 4 turned into actual products and made it out the door this week including the Jira Work Management tool, which is being released today.

The next program is ready to roll with employees ready to present their ideas in a pitch day competition to get things going. “Our first class is graduating out of this program, and […] we start the process again. We actually just went through our big list of all the ideas to do it a second time, and we are doing a pitch day. It’s going t be a fun Shark Tank, The Voice kind of inspired [competition],” he said.

Company co-founders and co-CEOs Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar both participate in judging the competition, so it has executive buy-in giving more clout to the program and sending a message to employees that their ideas are being taken seriously.

The company provides funding, time away from your regular job, executive coaches and combines that with customer collaboration and early founder involvement with the goal of finding a scalable, repeatable process with defined phases that helps teams take the most innovative ideas from concept to customer.

Some make it. Some don’t as you might expect, but so far the plan seems to be working and is successfully encouraging innovation from within, something every company should be trying to do.