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Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020
I edited hundreds of stories in 2020, so choosing my favorites would be an exercise in futility.
Instead, I’ve tried to gather a sample of Extra Crunch stories that taught me something new. (Which means this top 10 list betrays my ignorance, a humbling admission for a know-it-all like myself.)
While narrowing down the field of candidates, I realized that we’re covering each of the topics on this list in greater depth next year. We already have stories in the works about no-code software, the emergence of edtech, proptech and B2B marketplaces, to name just a few.
Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know: We’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter.
But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look smart in meetings — and that’s worth something.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a very happy new year.
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
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1. The VCs who founders love the most
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Managing Editor Danny Crichton spearheaded the development of The TechCrunch List earlier this year to help seed-stage founders connect with VCs who write first checks.
The TechCrunch List has no paywall and contains details and recommendations about more than 400 investors across 22 verticals. Once it launched, Danny crunched the data to pick out 11 investors for which “founders were particularly effusive in their praise.”
2. API startups are so hot right now
Image Credits: Juana Mari Moya(opens in a new window)/Getty Images (Image has been modified)
Alex Wilhelm uses his weekday column The Exchange to keep a close eye on “private companies, public markets and the gray space in between,” but one effort stood out: An overview of six API-based startups that were “raising capital in rapid-fire fashion” when many companies were trying to find their COVID-19 footing.
For me, this was particularly interesting because it helped me better understand that an optimal pricing structure can be key to a SaaS company’s initial success.
3. ‘No code’ will define the next generation of software
4. Tracking the growth of low-code/no-code startups
Image Credits: Richard Drury(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
Two stories about the advent of no-code/low-code software that we ran in July take the third and fourth position on this list.
I have been a no-code user for some time: Using Zapier to send automated invitations via Slack for group lunches was a real time-saver in the pre-pandemic days.
“Enterprise expenditure on custom software is on track to double from $250 billion in 2015 to $500 billion in 2020,” so we’ll definitely be diving deeper into this topic in the coming months.
5. ‘Edtech is no longer optional’: Investors’ deep dive into the future of the market
Image Credits: PM Images(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
Natasha Mascarenhas picked up TechCrunch’s edtech beat when she joined us just before the pandemic. Twelve months later, she’s an expert on the topic.
In July, she surveyed six edtech investors to “get into the macro-impact of rapid change on edtech as a whole.”
- Ian Chiu, Owl Ventures
- Shauntel Garvey and Jennifer Carolan, Reach Capital
- Jan Lynn-Matern, Emerge Education
- David Eichler, TCV
- Jomayra Hererra, Cowboy Ventures
6. B2B marketplaces will be the next billion-dollar e-commerce startups
Image Credits: Kmatta(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
In 2018, B2B marketplaces saw an estimated $680 billion in sales, but that figure is expected to reach $3.6 trillion by 2024.
As companies shifted their purchasing online, these platforms are adding a range of complementary services like payment management, targeted advertising and logistics while also hardening their infrastructure.
7. Facebook’s former PR chief explains why no one is paying attention to your startup
Caryn Marooney, right, vice president of technology communications at Facebook, poses for a picture on the red carpet for the 6th annual 2018 Breakthrough Prizes at Moffett Federal Airfield, Hangar One in Mountain View, Calif., on Sunday, Dec. 3, 2017. Image Credits: Nhat V. Meyer/Bay Area News Group
Reporter Lucas Matney spoke to Caryn Marooney in August at TechCrunch Early Stage about how startup founders who hope to expand their reach need to do a better job of connecting with journalists.
“People just fundamentally aren’t walking around caring about this new startup,” she said. “Actually, nobody does.”
Speaking as someone who’s been on both sides of this equation, I most appreciated her advice about focusing on “simplicity and staying consistent” when it comes to messaging.
“Don’t let the complexity of your intellect cloud what needs to be simple,” she said.
8. You need a minimum viable company, not a minimum viable product
Image Credits: alvarez(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
In a guest post for Extra Crunch, seed-stage VC Ann Miura-Ko shared some of what she’s learned about “the magic of product-market fit,” which she termed “the defining quality of an early-stage startup.”
According to Miura-Ko, a co-founding partner at Floodgate, startups can only reach this stage when their business model, value propositions and ecosystem are in balance.
Using lessons learned from her portfolio companies like Lyft, Refinery29 and Twitch, this article should be required reading for every founder. As one commenter posted, “I read this thinking, ‘I need to add some slides to my deck!’”
9. 6 investment trends that could emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic
10 January 2020, Berlin: Doctor Olaf Göing, chief physician of the clinic for internal medicine at the Sana Klinikum Lichtenberg, tests mixed-reality 3D glasses for use in cardiology. They can thus access their patients’ medical data and visualize the finest structures for diagnostics and operation planning by hand and speech. The Sana Clinic is, according to its own statements, the first hospital in the world to use this novel technology in cardiology. Image Credits: Jens Kalaene/picture alliance via Getty Images
During “the early innings of this period of uncertainty,” an article we published offered several predictions about investor behavior in the U.S.
Although we posted this in April, each of these forecasts seem spot-on:
- Future of work: promoting intimacy and trust.
- Healthcare IT: telemedicine and remote patient monitoring.
- Robotics and supply chain.
- Cybersecurity.
- Education = knowledge transfer + social + signaling.
- Fintech.
10. Construction tech startups are poised to shake up a $1.3-trillion-dollar industry
Image Credits: Steve Proehl(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
I’ve always found the concept of total addressable market (TAM) hard to embrace fully — the arrival of a single disruptive company could change an industry’s TAM in a week.
However, several factors are combining to transform the construction industry: high fragmentation, poor communication, a skilled labor shortage and a lack of data transparency.
Startups that help builders manage aspects like pre-construction, workflow and site visualization are making huge strides, but because “construction firms spend less than 2% of annual sales volume on IT,” the size of this TAM is not at all speculative.
11. Don’t let VCs be the gatekeepers of your success
Image Credits: PM Images(opens in a new window)/Getty Images
As a bonus, I’m including a TechCrunch op-ed written by insurtech founder Kevin Henderson that describes the myriad challenges he has faced as a Black entrepreneur in Silicon Valley.
Some of the discussions about the lack of diversity in tech can feel abstract, but his post describes its concrete consequences. For starters: he’s never had an opportunity to pitch at a VC firm where there was another Black person in the room.
“Black founders have a better chance playing pro sports than they do landing venture investments,” says Henderson.
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Ann Miura-Ko’s framework for building a startup
As an early-stage investor, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko looks for two breakthroughs in order to invest in a startup: The first happens in the value-seeking stage of a startup’s journey and the second occurs in its growth-seeking phase.
“There are really two stages to building a company,” Miura-Ko said at the TechCrunch Early Stage virtual event earlier this week. “One is what we call value-seeking mode, and this is where you’re really trying to figure out what the company actually looks like, including what’s the product? Who are you selling to? How do you price it? All of these things are still being discovered in the value-seeking mode.”
After founders have answered those questions, they can move into growth-seeking mode, she said. That’s the point when startups are trying to attract as many customers as possible.
Throughout these two distinct stages, Miura-Ko says she looks for the two breakthroughs: the inflection insight and product-market fit.
Inflection insights
The idea of an inflection insight, Miura-Ko said, is a relatively new framework Floodgate is exploring. Often times, she said founders need to ride some massive, exponential curves that allow their businesses to grow sustainably and scale.
These inflections have two parts to it: cause and impact. The causes are generally either technological (cloud, 5G), regulatory (GDPR, AV regulation) or societal (belief or behavior shifts). On the impact side, products and distribution may become cheaper or faster, while also presenting new use cases or customers, she said.
“Or even more interesting, you have something that was impossible that now is possible,” she said. “And that is an exponential impact that you could ride on.”
But simply finding that inflection insight doesn’t mean you should create a business. What founders must do next is determine if the insight is right and nonconsensus.
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And the winner of Startup Battlefield at Disrupt SF 2019 is… Render
At the very beginning, there were 20 startups. After two days of incredibly fierce competition, we now have a winner.
Startups participating in the Startup Battlefield have all been hand-picked to participate in our highly competitive startup competition. They all presented in front of multiple groups of VCs and tech leaders serving as judges for a chance to win $100,000 and the coveted Disrupt Cup.
After hours of deliberations, TechCrunch editors pored over the judges’ notes and narrowed the list down to five finalists: OmniVis, Orbit Fab, Render, StrattyX and Traptic.
These startups made their way to the finale to demo in front of our final panel of judges, which included: Mamoon Hamid (Kleiner Perkins), Ashton Kutcher (Sound Ventures), Alfred Lin (Sequoia), Marissa Mayer (Lumi Labs), Ann Miura-Ko (Floodgate Ventures) and Matthew Panzarino (TechCrunch).
Winner: Render
Render has created a managed cloud platform. The company wants to provide an alternative to traditional cloud providers, such as AWS, Azure and GCP. And it starts with an infrastructure that is easier to manage thanks to automated deployments and a abstracted way to manage your application that is reminiscent of Heroku.
Read more about Render in our separate post.
Runner-Up: OmniVis
OmniVis aims to make detection of cholera and other pathogens as quick, simple and cheap as a pregnancy test. Its smartphone-powered detection platform could save thousands of lives.
Read more about OmniVis in our separate post.
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At TechCrunch Disrupt, insights into key trends in venture capital
At TechCrunch Disrupt, the original tech startup conference, venture capitalists remain amongst the premier guests.
VCs are responsible for helping startups — the focus of the three-day event — get off the ground, and, as such, they are often the most familiar with trends in the startup ecosystem, ready to deliver insights, anecdotes and advice to our audience of entrepreneurs, investors, operators, managers and more.
In the first half of 2019, VCs spent $66 billion purchasing equity in promising upstarts, according to the latest data from PitchBook. At that pace, VC spending could surpass $100 billion for the second year in a row. We plan to welcome a slew of investors to TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss this major feat and the investing trends that have paved the way for recording funding.
Mega-funds and the promise of unicorn initial public offerings continue to drive investment. SoftBank, of course, began raising its second Vision Fund this year, a vehicle expected to exceed $100 billion. Meanwhile, more traditional VC outfits revisited limited partners to stay competitive with the Japanese telecom giant. Andreessen Horowitz, for example, collected $2.75 billion for two new funds earlier this year. We’ll have a16z general partners Chris Dixon, Angela Strange and Andrew Chen at Disrupt for insight into the firm’s latest activity.
At the early-stage, the fight for seed deals continued, with larger funds moving downstream to muscle their way into seed and Series A financings. Pre-seed has risen to prominence, with new funds from Afore Capital and Bee Partners helping to legitimize the stage. Bolstering the early-stage further, Y Combinator admitted more than 400 companies across its two most recent batches,
We’ll welcome pre-seed and seed investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy to give founders tips on how to raise VC. Plus, Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel and Ali Rowghani, the CEO of YC’s Continuity Fund, which invests in and advises growth-stage startups, will join us on the Disrupt Extra Crunch stage ready with tips on how to get accepted to the respected accelerator.
Moreover, activity in high-growth sectors, particularly enterprise SaaS, has permitted a series of outsized rounds across all stages of financing. Speaking on this trend, we’ll have AppDynamics founder and Unusual Ventures co-founder Jyoti Bansal and Battery Ventures general partner Neeraj Agrawal in conversation with TechCrunch’s enterprise reporter Ron Miller.
We would be remiss not to analyze activity on Wall Street in 2019, too. As top venture funds refueled with new capital, Silicon Valley’s favorite unicorns completed highly anticipated IPOs, a critical step toward bringing a much needed bout of liquidity to their investors. Uber, Lyft, Pinterest, Zoom, PagerDuty, Slack and several others went public this year, and other well-financed companies, including Peloton, Postmates and WeWork, have completed paperwork for upcoming public listings. To detail this year’s venture activity and IPO extravaganza, David Krane, CEO and managing partner of Uber and Slack investor GV, will be on deck, as will Sequoia general partner Jess Lee, Floodgate’s Ann Miura-Ko and Aspect Ventures’ Theresia Gouw.
There’s more where that came from. In addition to the VCs already named, Disrupt attendees can expect to hear from Bessemer Venture Partners’ Tess Hatch, who will provide her expertise on the growing “space economy.” Forerunner Ventures’ Eurie Kim will give the Extra Crunch Stage audience tips on building a subscription product, Mithril Capital’s Ajay Royan will explore opportunities in the medical robotics field and SOSV’s Arvind Gupta will dive deep into the cutting-edge world of health tech and more.
Disrupt SF runs October 2-4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Passes are available here.
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Theresia Gouw and Ann Miura-Ko are coming to Disrupt
For a very long time, the venture industry was stubbornly resistant to change. The same people sat back in their chairs on Sand Hill Road while nervous founders made the rounds, hoping one of these firms would champion their cause.
No longer. Since roughly the advent of Y Combinator, the landscape has seemed to shift by the year, with more startups raising capital every year, more people becoming VCs, more Medium posts, more newsletters, more events, more great founders, more bad behavior, more congestion, and more money from all over the world finding its way to Silicon Valley and a growing number of smaller but fast-growing hubs.
How to make sense of it all? At Disrupt, we do our best to answer that question by sitting down each year with top venture capitalists who tell us what they are seeing. In 2015, for example, we talked with VCs about why you can start, but not always scale, a company from anywhere. In 2016, the discussion turned to why VCs were gathering up so much capital when the IPO market was (at the time) all but closed to new tech issuers. In 2017, we examined how then-new U.S. President Donald Trump might impact the venture and startup industry. By last year, we were talking about Softbank, mega rounds, and whether Silicon Valley is losing its gravitational pull.
This year, we’re again going to be taking stock of what trends have so far defined 2019 — and what may be around the corner — and we’re thrilled to announce the VCs who will help us to answer some of these questions: Ann Miura-Ko, a cofounder of the seed- and early-stage venture firm Floodgate, and Theresia Gouw, a cofounder of the early-stage venture firm Aspect Ventures.
Both of these longtime investors bring a lot of deep insights to any venture discussion. Miura-Ko has been in the industry since before the last major tech boom, starting in the late ’90s. Then a McKinsey analyst who was focused on wireless technologies, she went on to become an analyst at the venture firm CRV before cofounding with partner Mike Maples the venture firm Floodgate in 2008. Since joining forces, Floodgate has backed a long list of powerful companies, including Twitch, Sonos, Chegg, AdRoll, BazaarVoice, and Lyft, where Miura-Ko remains on the board of directors. She has seen plenty of ups and downs, within both Floodgate’s portfolio and the broader startup industry.
Gouw, meanwhile, also has a perspective on the industry that many newer investors don’t enjoy, having worked as a VP at a Bay Area startup during the dot.com run-up, then joining the venture firm Accel in 1999, just a year before the industry imploded. It could have been a short-lived stint. Instead, she helping the firm sift through the wreckage and right itself before leaving in 2014 to start her own firm — Aspect — with partner and former DFJ partner Jennifer Fonstad. Since then, the firm has backed a wide variety of companies, from The RealReal to Exabeam, HotelTonight to Forescout. Put another way, Gouw also knows what the deal is.
We can’t wait to sit down with both of these top investors to talk about the trends shaping the industry right now, from the growing secondary market to IPO trends, from what excites them the most to what their biggest concerns are for their firms and their portfolio companies as we sail toward 2020.
It’s a conversation you will not want to miss if you want a better understanding of what’s happening on the ground right now. Join us at Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are available here.
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Ashton Kutcher, Ann Miura-Ko and Mamoon Hamid are coming to Disrupt!
The Disrupt Battlefield is one of the best parts of the conference. Twenty+ startups step on to the Disrupt Main Stage with a product, a pitch and a dream. They have six minutes to convey how they’re going to fundamentally disrupt their industry, and six minutes of Q&A with world-renowned judges from the VC world.
Pride. Anxiety. Despair. Glory. Anything could happen on that stage, particularly with judges that are at the top of their game and can smell bullshit from a mile away.
This year, at Disrupt SF 2019, we’ll be joined by Ashton Kutcher, Ann Miura-Ko and Mamoon Hamid in the final round of the Battlefield. And we couldn’t be more excited!
This won’t be Kutcher’s first time at Disrupt. He’s hung out with us a couple of times to discuss his investment strategy for Sound Ventures, and previously, A-Grade investments. This will be his first time as a Finals Judge for the Battlefield, however, and it’ll be fascinating to see the superstar investor work in real time on the Main Stage.
Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner at Floodgate, will be returning as a Battlefield judge. Miura-Ko is a repeat member of the Forbes Midas List, The New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, and has been called the most powerful woman in startups. Her portfolio includes Lyft, which went public this year, as well as Refinery29, Xamarin and Thinkful.
Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid will also be judging the Battlefield Finals. Hamid was a co-founder at Social Capital and a partner at US Venture Partners before joining Kleiner Perkins, and has invested in companies like Slack, Yammer, Box and Figma.
We’re amped to have such amazing VCs join us for the final round of the Startup Battlefield competition. Join us at Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are still available at an early-bird rate, but that ends this week.
See you there!
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