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Cent, the platform that Jack Dorsey used to sell his first tweet as an NFT, raises $3M

Published August 5, 2021

Cent was founded in 2017 as an ad-free creator network that allows users to offer each other crypto rewards for good posts and comments — it’s like gifting awards on Reddit, but with Ethereum. But in late 2020, Cent’s small, San Francisco-based team created Valuables, an NFT market for tweets, and by March, the small blockchain startup was thrown a serendipitous curveball.

“We just wrapped up for the day, and I was about to go eat dinner, and all these people started texting me,” remembers CEO Cameron Hejazi. Then, he realized that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had minted Twitter’s first-ever Tweet through Cent’s Valuables application. “I was basically like, mildly shivering for the rest of the night. The whole team, we were like, ‘Okay, battle stations, prepare to get hacked!’ ”

Dorsey ended up selling his NFT for $2.9 million, and he donated the proceeds to Give Directly’s Africa Response fund for COVID-19 relief. But for Cent, it was as if the small company had just been handed a free marketing campaign. Now, about five months later, Cent is announcing a $3 million round of seed funding with investors like Galaxy Interactive, former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, will.i.am and Zynga founder Mark Pincus.

On Valuables, anyone on the internet can place an offer on any tweet, which then makes it possible for someone else to make a counter-offer. If the author of the tweet accepts an offer (logging into Valuables requires you to validate your Twitter account), then Cent will mint the tweet on the blockchain and create a 1-of-1 NFT.

The NFT itself contains the text of the tweet, the username of the creator, the time it was minted and the creator’s digital signature. The NFT also includes a link to the tweet, though the linked content lives outside the blockchain.

Image Credits: Cent (opens in a new window)

There’s nothing proprietary about minting tweets as NFTs — another company could do the same thing that Cent is doing. Even Twitter itself has recently dabbled in giving away free NFT art, though it hasn’t tried to sell actual tweets as NFTs like Cent. Still, Hejazi sees Dorsey’s use of Cent like an endorsement — he thinks it would be difficult for Twitter to shut them down, since Dorsey made $2.9 million on the platform himself. After all, Dorsey chose Cent instead of taking a screenshot of his first tweet, minting the .JPG as an NFT and posting it on a larger NFT platform, like OpenSea.

“We’ve spoken with people at Twitter. I’m positive that we have a healthy relationship going,” Hejazi said (Twitter declined to comment on or confirm whether that’s true). “We thought about applying this approach to other social platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, but we hypothesized that this is particularly suited for Twitter, because it’s a conversation platform, and it’s where all of the crypto people are actually living.”

Twitter is making NFTs now, apparently

With Cent’s seed funding Hejazi hopes to continue building the platform. The company’s goal is to enable anyone creative to make an income through the use of NFTs — that means developing tools to make it simpler for its users to mint NFTs, but also, building out its existing creator-focused social network. The content people post on Cent is usually creative work, like art and writing, rather than short posts — it’s closer to DeviantArt than it is to Reddit. These are lofty goals for a $3 million seed funding round, but there are aspects of Cent’s Beta platform that make it promising.

“There’s already value in what we post on social media. It’s just being proxied through ad dollars, and it doesn’t have to be the case that there’s so much wealth concentration in a single entity. We can work toward a system that decentralizes that wealth,” said Hejazi. “These networks as they exist have monopolies on distribution — you can’t take your Twitter audience, download it as a .CSV and send them all an email.”

A screenshot of Cent’s social platform.

In addition to independent distribution lists, Hejazi wants to move away from the ad-supported internet. He references Substack as an example of a company where the creator has control of their list, and at the same time, the platform can remain ad-free, since the money that propels it comes from the users who pay to subscribe to newsletters (and also, venture capital helps).

But Cent does something different by allowing users to essentially invest in creators who they think have the potential to take off on their platform.

Users can “seed” a post, which is how you subscribe to a creator participating on the creatives side of Cent’s platform. As the seeder, you pay a set fee of at least one dollar per month. There’s an incentive to support up-and-coming creators on the platform, because seeders get a portion of the creators’ future profit — it’s like making a bet on them that they will continue to make great content in the future. Five percent of profits go toward Cent, but the remaining 95% is split 50/50 between the creator and all of their past seeders. Participating on this platform would allow creators to network and show support for one another, but doesn’t prevent them from more directly monetizing their work on other creator platforms, like Patreon.

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

In addition to seeding posts, users can also “spot” other people’s posts — Cent’s version of a “like” button. Each “spot” is the equivalent of one cent from the user’s crypto wallet. Cent’s argument is that getting 1,000 likes on a post on other platforms yields nothing but a vague sensation of social clout. But on Cent, if a user gets 1,000 “spots,” that’s $10. Still, a project like this can only work if enough people use the platform.

“When we started Cent, we chose cryptocurrencies because we loved the idea of someone being able to earn money with nothing more than their creativity and a crypto address,” Hejazi said. “Over time, we’ve found it to be limiting as a payment type — very few people actually own it and have it ready to spend. We’re working on ways to make payments to creators using Cent easier, and are exploring both crypto-native and non-crypto options.”

This mindset echoes other NFT startups like Yat, which allows payments via credit card as part of its “progressive decentralization” model. So much of these companies’ success depends on public buy-in toward an eventual decentralized, blockchain-based internet. But until then, companies like Cent will continue to experiment in reimagining how creatives can get paid online.

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed?

Adobe launches a new, simplified digital asset manager

Published April 27, 2021

Adobe today announced the launch of a new asset management tool, Adobe Experience Manager Assets Essentials. That’s a mouthful, but while the company didn’t necessarily simplify the name, the idea here is to give teams that work with lots of digital assets an easier-to-use management experience in the Adobe Experience Cloud than Adobe’s current enterprise-centric asset management tool can offer.

In addition, Adobe is also launching the first tool to integrate this new experience: the Adobe Journey Optimizer. This new tool is meant to help users leverage their customer data to build out customer journeys and figure out the best ways to deliver messages and content along that journey.

“The push towards digital content and building these richer, engaging experiences — customers expect it,” Elliot Sedegah, director of Strategy and Product Marketing, Adobe, told me. “Almost every interaction that you go along, you expect a rich experience. And not only at that point of just having richer material, like images or video, etc., but you expect it at every point of interaction with that customer. So that customer, if you think of it, isn’t just interacting with a brand, but our customers, they think of it as a customer journey. So using the same content, from awareness to conversion to post-sale and loyalty — they expect that same story to maintain. And it’s getting increasingly hard to get to all the different touchpoints.”

Image Credits: Adobe

Like with similar products, the idea here is to create a centralized, collaborative space for content creators and the teams that use their work. In that respect, this new tool isn’t necessarily all that different from other shared online file management services. But Adobe is also leveraging some of its unique capabilities. It’s using its AI smarts and Adobe Sensei platform to help users organize and tag their assets, for example, to make them more easily searchable. And the new tool is integrated with Adobe Asset Link, so creative professionals can search, browse and edit these assets directly from Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and XD without having to switch context.

CIO Cynthia Stoddard explains Adobe’s journey from boxes to the cloud

As Sedegah noted, not too long ago, it was mostly the creative teams and marketing that were involved in the content creation and management process. But today, this group also includes sales teams and customer support, for example, and the pandemic only accelerated this process.

Image Credits: Adobe

“[Our customers] have been forced to rethink their business models, rethink the way that they engage with customers — and it essentially accelerated this digital-everywhere process of the experiences customers get, the agility that customers expect from businesses, and then the number of people — and how they work — leveraging that content.”

So while Adobe’s enterprise asset management tools worked just fine before, the company’s users were telling it that it needed to do a better job at creating tools that made its asset management technology easier to use by more teams.

The first tool to integrate this new asset management experience directly is the Journey Optimizer. “That was a great opportunity for us to rethink that user experience that our customers wanted to deliver — and then make it easier for that person to do,” Sedegah said. “So as you’re building out a content journey — or maybe you’re designing a piece of content that’s going to get sent to maybe a customer as they engage with a brand — the digital assets appear right there for that author to use.”

Next up for integration is Workfront, the work management platform Adobe acquired last year. There’s an obvious synergy here between Workfront’s abilities to manage the planning, review and approval stages of a project and an asset management system like this.

The long-term strategy, though, is to integrate this experience across all Experience Cloud applications.

Adobe acquires marketing workflow startup Workfront for $1.5B

Startups Weekly: Part & Parcel plans plus-sized fashion empire

Published September 14, 2019

Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about Stripe’s grand plans. Before that, I noted Peloton’s secret weapons.

Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.

Startup spotlight

The best companies are built by people who have personally experienced the problem they’re attempting to solve. Lauren Jonas, the founder and chief executive officer of Part & Parcel, is intimately familiar with the struggles faced by the women she’s building for.

San Francisco-based Part & Parcel is a plus-sized clothing and shoe startup providing dimensional sizing to women across the U.S. The company operates a bit differently than your standard direct-to-consumer business by seeking to include the women who wear and evangelize the Part & Parcel designs by giving them a cut of their sales.

Here’s how it works: Ambassadors sign up to receive signature styles from Part & Parcel, which they then share and sell to women in their network. Ultimately, the sellers are eligible to receive up to 30% of the profit per sale. The out-of-the-box model, which might remind you somewhat of Mary Kay or Tupperware’s business strategy, is meant to encourage a sense of community and usher in a new era in which plus-sized women can facilitate other plus-sized women’s access to great clothes.

“I bought a brown men’s polyester suit and wore it to an interview,” Jonas, an early employee at Poshmark and the long-time author of the popular blog, ‘The Pear Shape,’ tells TechCrunch. “I was that kid wearing a men’s suit.”

Clothing tailored to plus-sized women has long been missing from the retail market. Increasingly, however, new brands are building thriving businesses by catering precisely to the historically forgotten demographic. Dia&Co., for example, raised another $70 million in venture capital funding last fall from Sequoia and USV. And Walmart recently acquired another brand in the space, ELOQUII, for an undisclosed amount. Part & Parcel, for its part, has raised $4 million in seed funding in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Jeremy Liew.

The startup launched earlier this year in Anchorage, “a clothing desert,” and has since grown its network to include women in several other underserved markets. Given her own history struggling to find a fitted woman’s suit, Jonas launched her line with structured pieces, including suits and blouses — though the startup’s biggest success yet, she says, has been its boots, which come in three different calf width options.

“Seventy percent of women in this country are plus-sized,” Jonas said. “I’m bringing plus out of the dark corner of the department store.”

This week in VC

Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Must read

TechCrunch’s Megan Rose Dickey published a highly anticipated deep dive on the state of sex tech this week. The piece provides new data on funding in sex tech and wellness companies, analysis on sex tech startup’s battle for public advertising and responses from industry leaders on how we can destigmatize sex with technology. Here’s a short passage from the story:

Cindy Gallop sees a market opportunity in every type of business obstacle she encounters. That’s why All The Sky will also seek to invest in startups that tackle the infrastructural tools needed to fuel sextech, like payments, hosting providers and e-commerce sites.

“I want to fund the sextech ecosystem to maintain and sustain a portfolio for All the Skies, to create a bloody huge sextech ecosystem and three, to monopolistically build out the ecosystem to be a multi-trillion-dollar market,” Gallop says.

On my radar

I swung by Contrary Capital‘s Demo Day this week, in which a number of startups gave a 4- to 5-minute pitch. Next on my list is Alchemist‘s Demo Day in Menlo Park. The accelerator welcomes enterprise startups for a six-month program focused on early customer adoption, company development and mentorship.

Also on my radar is Females To The Front. The event began this week in Palm Springs and if I were based in SoCal, I would have swung by. Led by Amy Margolis, the event is said to be the largest gathering of female cannabis founders and funders to date. Here’s how the group describes the event: “Females to the Front Retreat will mix immersive and hands-on workshops, pitch training, investment deck preparation and business skill set education with investor meetings and plenty of shared meals, pool time, yoga, connections, rest and rejuvenation. Every workshop is built to directly engage attendees instead of powerpoint and panels. Be prepared to return home inspired, engaged and with so many more tools in your toolbox.”

For the record, I don’t advertise events in my newsletter just wanted to give props to this one because it’s a great development for the cannabis tech ecosystem.

Time to Disrupt

We are just weeks away from our flagship conference, TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. We have dozens of amazing speakers lined up. In addition to taking in the great line-up of speakers, ticket holders can roam around Startup Alley to catch the more than 1,000 companies showcasing their products and technologies. And, of course, you’ll get the opportunity to watch the Startup Battlefield competition live. Past competitors include Dropbox, Cloudflare and Mint… You never know which future unicorn will compete next.

You can take a look at the full agenda here. And if you still need convincing, here’s five reasons to attend this year’s conference from our COO himself.

And finally… #EquityPod

This week, the lovely Alex Wilhelm, editor-in-chief of Crunchbase News, and I gathered to discuss a number of topics including WeWork’s IPO and Uber’s attempts to bypass a new law meant to protect gig workers. Listen here.

Holloway launches in-depth startup guides, aims to rewrite publishing with $4.6M from NYT, tech VCs

Published August 1, 2019

Founders need to get smart quickly about the many nuanced aspects of building a company, from understanding weird language in a big term sheet to hiring a key software developer.

But the best practical advice is scattered across blog posts, podcasts and books, and it gets outdated quickly as industry norms evolve. Even experienced founders spend a lot of time searching and still end up with the wrong information.

Holloway has an ambitious solution: Today, it’s launching a library of book-length online guides about work, written and regularly updated by teams of industry experts.

The flagship title is called Raising Venture Capital, which features 340 thoughtfully organized pages in 15 sections and three appendices on all aspects of the funding process. Designed for easy reading and easy searching in spite of the information density and length (it has a 14-hour total read-time), the guide could become a go-to resource for the startup world.

Some sections will be most appealing to newer founders, like the part on whether to raise VC in the first place. Other portions are relevant to even the most experienced serial entrepreneurs — like how to think through potential drag-along and pay-to-play provisions, full-ratchet anti-dilution clauses and other tricky terms one might find. Did you know that investors can include more than 20 types of conditions in a term sheet? Do you know how to handle each one?

With $4.6 million in seed funding from a combination of top tech investors and The New York Times that it is also announcing now, Holloway intends to expand to cover the wide variety of work-related topics about startups and technology, and beyond. The next guide, currently in progress, will be on technical hiring and recruiting. A relatively shorter sample guide on equity compensation is already available for free.The goal is to democratize access to how the best are doing business today (and take on traditional publishing).

“We didn’t just do this for Silicon Valley and New York,” and other startup-heavy cities, co-founder and chief executive Andy Sparks tells me, “we did this for people in cities like Columbus and Atlanta where startup communities are growing, but knowledge is harder to come by.”

The lawyers and other experts who author and edit the guides could otherwise cost more than $800 an hour, he explains, and won’t have time for many clients in the first place. (The company estimates there are $40,000 worth of legal fees in the VC guide.)

Sparks, previously the co-founder of analytics platform Mattermark, is also the lead author on “Raising Venture Capital” — along with another 20 or so contributors, like Brad Feld of the Foundry Group, and Darby Wong, co-founder of the popular legal document startup Clerky . The lead author of the technical recruiting guide is Ozzie Osman, former head of product engineering at Quora, and a main contributor to it is Aditya Agarwal, the former CTO of Dropbox.

The current pricing is $100 per guide forever (including future updates), with a discount available if you pre-order. Sparks says this may change to ensure the guides stay affordable, as well as cover the very real costs of producing this quality of content.

The big-picture bet is that the startup market is large enough to create strong demand for the initial guides, in the same way that many successful tech startups of this decade have started out serving companies like themselves. Some of the topics that Holloway is working on, like tech recruiting, naturally blend in with the rest of the business world and those wider audiences. Eventually, through expansion into broader work-related topics, Holloway’s online-first approach could compete against the existing book publishing industry at a bigger scale.

This is why the company is investing heavily in its software, in addition to its content. The interface was inspired by the experiences of co-founder Joshua Levy, a veteran technologist who found himself writing popular third-party guides on GitHub about how to use common services like AWS. Features in the software include search results that break out sections and sources, a detailed left-hand index view, a hyperlinked in-house glossary of hundreds of key terms, notes of warning and importance from experts and numerous links to third-party sources.

“We decided to invest in a digital reading experience that makes reading book-length content in a browser a great experience,” Sparks said, “which also means you will land on the right guide when you go hunting for answers on search engines like Google .”

Holloway co-founders Joshua Levy (left) and Andy Sparks (right)

You’ll even see a number of links to TechCrunch and Extra Crunch articles in the guides. Sparks tells me that the company plans to continue to link to a wide variety of sources in the future — so when guest columnists write something great and practical on Extra Crunch, we will help them to get this work featured in Holloway as well. The company is also accepting a variety of contributor types for its guides going forward, which you can find more details about here.

(On that note, we’ve published an excerpt from Holloway’s “Raising Venture Capital” guide, about pro rata terms and issues, on Extra Crunch. Subscribers can go check it out here, and find a special discount to Holloway inside.)

Sparks is careful to say that the current guides are not literally finished, despite all the effort put into them so far. And indeed, they will never be. Holloway is named after the “hollow ways” seen in the European countryside, where well-used roads have gradually sunk through hundreds of years of regular use. The company intends for its guides to be the paths that people who build companies tread year after year, where the knowledge that accumulates from the usage of many forms the clear direction that those in the future take.

The company’s investors include NEA, South Park Commons, The New York Times Co., Precursor Ventures and Comcast Ventures as well as Day One Ventures, Social Capital, Abstract Ventures, 415, Royal Bank of Canada, Lightspeed Ventures, & Full Tilt Capital. Angels include Leo Polovets, Lee Linden, Raj De Datta, Neil Parikh, Mikhail Larionov, Danielle & Kevin Morrill, Srinath Sridhar, Dennis Phelps and Kevin Lee.

Should you hire an in-house designer or a contractor?

Published April 8, 2019

Katherine Gustafson
Contributor

Three reasons to go in-house

After leaving Red Hat in 2009, Grams helped start New Kind, a branding agency that provides contract design services mostly to tech companies. This new vantage point allowed him to see drawbacks and advantages for companies in outsourcing design versus bringing it in-house.

One of the key benefits of in-housing is the designer’s intimacy with the deeply held values and culture of the company, which makes their branding work feel more authentic.

“The internal agency’s power really reveals itself when people are deeply part of the mission of the company,” says Grams. “It comes through in the work. You get an amazing work product.”

The second benefit, especially for tech companies, is the depth of understanding in-house designers can develop about the company’s products and services. And the third is that a dedicated in-house designer can be directed as needed to respond to pressing priorities.

“You can have them stop on a dime,” says Grams. “Say a competitor comes out with a big launch and you need to have something out within 24 hours. You can work on it right away.”

These are real benefits, but they may not outweigh the advantages of contracting out your design to a high-quality agency.

The benefits of using an agency

A major benefit of an agency is that you can hire people with a level of expertise and variety of skills that would be out of reach for an in-house team. When Grams was at New Kind, for example, “we had a combined 30 years of experience with open-source branding work,” he says.

An agency can also provide the bandwidth to take on non-priority tasks such as a rebrand or a special series that in-house teams are often too work-strapped to take on.

Hiring an agency also has advantages in terms of flexibility and cost. The ability to customize the timing and amount of design work to your needs can be less expensive over time, even if each working hour is more expensive.

“You can ramp down and ramp up with an agency,” says Grams. “It’s impossible to do that with people… You’re paying that extra margin to have that flexibility.”

There’s a lot to think about, but Grams advises prioritizing the need for your design to be authentic to your culture… or not.

“I think the biggest thing is the power of your culture, frankly,” says Grams. “If you have a company where culture is not an asset, I would not build an in-house design team… But if you’re building a mission-driven organization or an organization where culture is super important, that’s where I would take an extra-long look at building an internal agency.”

VCs say Silicon Valley isn’t the gold mine it used to be

Published September 21, 2018

In the days leading up to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2018, The Economist published the cover story, ‘Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley.’

The author outlined reasons why the Valley has “peaked.” Venture capital investors are deploying capital outside the Bay Area more than ever before. High-profile entrepreneurs and investors, Peter Thiel, for example, have left. Rising rents are making it impossible for new blood to make a living, let alone build businesses. And according to a recent survey, 46 percent of Bay Area residents want to get the hell out, an increase from 34 percent two years ago.

Needless to say, the future of Silicon Valley was top of mind on stage at Disrupt.

“It’s hard to make a difference in San Francisco as a single entrepreneur,” said J.D. Vance, the author of ‘Hillbilly Elegy’ and a managing partner at Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Fund, which backs seed-stage companies based outside Silicon Valley. “It’s not as a hard to make a difference as a successful entrepreneur in Columbus, Ohio.”

In conversation with Vance, Revolution CEO Steve Case said he’s noticed a “mega-trend” emerging. Founders from cities like Pittsburgh, Detroit or Portland are opting to stay in their hometowns instead of moving to U.S. innovation hubs like San Francisco.

“The sense that you have to be here or you can’t play is going to start diminishing.”

“We are seeing the beginnings of a slowing of what has been a brain drain the last 20 years,” Case said. “It’s not just watching where the capital flows, it’s watching where the talent flows. And the sense that you have to be here or you can’t play is going to start diminishing.”

J.D. Vance says that most entrepreneurs don’t need to move to Silicon Valley.

Here’s why. #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/0mFPeTuHLe

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 6, 2018

Farewell, San Francisco

“It’s too expensive to live here,” said Aileen Lee, the founder of seed-stage VC firm Cowboy Ventures, amid a conversation with leading venture capitalists Spark Capital general partner Megan Quinn and Benchmark general partner Sarah Tavel .

“I know that there are a lot of people in the Bay Area that are trying to work on that problem and I hope that they are successful,” Lee added. “It’s an amazing place to live and we’ve made it really challenging for people to live here and not worry about making ends meet.”

One of Cowboy’s portfolio companies opted to relocate from Silicon Valley to Colorado when it came time to scale their business. That kind of move would’ve historically been seen as a failure. Today, it may be a sign of strong business acumen.

Bay Area VCs agree that Silicon Valley may be losing its gravitational pull after all

Quinn said that of all 28 of Spark’s growth-stage portfolio companies, Raleigh, North Carolina-based Pendo has the easiest time recruiting folks locally and from the Bay Area.

She advises her Bay Area-based late-stage companies to open a second office outside of the Valley where lower-cost talent is available.

“We often say go to [flySFO.com], draw a three-hour circle around San Francisco where they have direct flights, find a city that has a university and open up a second office as quickly as possible,” Quinn said.

Still, all three firms invest in a lot of companies based in San Francisco. Of Benchmark’s 10 most recent investments, for example, eight were based in SF, according to Crunchbase.

“I used to believe really strongly if you wanted to build a multi-billion dollar company you had to be based here,” Tavel said. “I’ve stopped giving that soap speech.”

Aileen Lee (Cowboy Ventures), Megan Quinn (Spark Capital), and Sarah Tavel (Benchmark Capital) on whether or not Silicon Valley is on the wane for investors #TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/SOpn7p0eNQ

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 5, 2018

Underestimated talent

A lot of Bay Area VCs have been blind to the droves of tech talent located outside the region. Believe it or not, there are great engineers in America’s small- and medium-sized markets too.

At Disrupt, Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton announced the firm would launch an accelerator to further amplify companies led by underestimated founders. The program will have cohorts based in four cities; San Francisco was noticeably absent from that list.

Instead, the firm, which invests in underrepresented founders and recently raised a $36 million fund, will work with companies in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, London and one more city, which will be determined by a public vote. Aniyia Williams, the founder of Tinsel and Black & Brown Founders, will spearhead the Philadelphia effort.

“For us, it’s about closing that wealth gap to address inequity in tech,” Williams said. “There needs to be more active participation from everyone.”

Hamilton added that for her, the tech talent in LA and London is undeniable.

“There is a lot of money and a lot of investors … it reminds me of three years ago in Silicon Valley,” Hamilton said.

Backstage Capital to launch an accelerator in four cities to promote underrepresented founders

Silicon Valley vs. China

Silicon Valley’s demise may not be just as a result of increased costs of living or investors overlooking talent in other geographies. It may be because of heightened competition abroad.

Doug Leone, an early- and growth-stage investor at Sequoia Capital, said at Disrupt that he’s noticed a very different work ethic in China.

Chinese entrepreneurs, he explained, are more ruthless than their American counterparts and they’re putting in a whole lot more hours.

Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital says founders in the US and China both want to change the world, but Chinese founders are a little more desperate (and you see it in the crazy work ethic they have).#TCDisrupt pic.twitter.com/dPxsRTbJoq

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) September 6, 2018

“I’ve had dinner in China until after 10 p.m. and people go to work after 10 p.m.,” Leone recalled.

“We don’t see that in the U.S. I’m not saying the U.S. founders oughta do that but those are the differences. They are similar in character. They are similar in dreams. They are similar in how they want to change the world. They are ultra-driven … The Chinese founders have a half other gear because I think they are a little more desperate.”

Much of this, however, has been said before and still, somehow, Silicon Valley remained the place to be for investors and startup entrepreneurs.

The reality is, those engaged in tech culture are always anxiously awaiting for the bubble to pop, the market to crash and for “peak Valley” to finally arrive.

Maybe, just maybe, Silicon Valley is forever.

Here’s more of our coverage of Disrupt 2018.

Disrupt SF 2018

New federal rules blamed in disappearance of Kindle erotica titles

Published March 29, 2018

The upcoming Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, in addition to making Microsoft move to reduce obscenity on its platform, has hit erotica authors on Amazon. After many authors saw their rankings stripped on the Kindle store, essentially reducing their availability and visibility, while forcing others in the romance category to recategorize or get dinged as well.

The Digital Reader followed the changes this week, reporting that “I have seen numerous reports on Facebook, KBoards, and elsewhere that Amazon has adopted a new policy where some romance titles, most notably those titles that Amazon has identified as erotica, have been removed from the Kindle Store best-seller list.” Amazon’s changes began on March 22.

Delisting titles from the Amazon Kindle store essentially buries them completely, leading to massive revenue loss for indie authors. One author received a note from KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing – discussing the changes:

I’m following up concerning some of your books missing their best sellers ranking.

After hearing from our technical team we have confirmed that this is due to a recent update to the filter option for Erotica ebooks.

All adult themed titles will be filtered from the main category sales rank as part of this update. However, you will still continue to keep all of your category rankings. I know this wasn’t the answer you were looking for but appreciate your understanding on this policy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

The FOSTA Bill is ostensibly about preventing online sex trafficking and has already caused Craigslist to shut down its online personals. However, it can also be construed as a bill that prevents sexual material of all kinds from receiving ready distribution online, a fact that is giving some big content providers pause. The Digital Reader notes that “the change in policy only affects the main Amazon site, and not other sites like Amazon UK.”

I have reached out to authors and Amazon for further comment.

Pronoun, A Self-Publishing Platform For Authors, Is Ready To Serve Humanity

Published October 3, 2015

scaled.IMG_0052 Pronoun, a self-publishing system that aims to help authors get their books edited and printed, is beginning the long road to making it easier for self-published authors to get noticed. First stop? Getting authors onto the platform. The company, founded by Josh Brody and Ben Zhuk, raised $3.5 million in June to create books that people will read. The goal is noble: by bringing all of the… Read More

Derek Jeter, Budding Media Mogul, On Launching The Players’ Tribune

Published February 19, 2015

As his new company, The Players’ Tribune, plots its course toward dominance in the sports media market after its official launch on Tuesday, Derek Jeter gives us his thoughts on his company and the transition from iconic athlete to startup entrepreneur in the email interview below. Since Jeter took his final bow in Yankee pinstripes, the former shortstop has been working to reinvent… Read More