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Bosun Tijani talks strategy as CEO of Africa’s new largest tech hub
With CcHub‘s acquisition of iHub in September, Nigerian Bosun Tijani is at the helm of (arguably) the largest tech network in Africa.
He is now CEO of both organizations, including their robust membership rosters, startup incubation programs, global partnerships and VC activities from Nigeria to Kenya .
One could conclude Tijani has become one of the most powerful figures in African tech with the CcHub/iHub merger. But that would be a little shortsighted.
The techie from Lagos still faces plenty of challenges and unknowns in integrating two innovation hubs that lie 3,818 flight kilometers apart. Several sources speaking on background over the last year have indicated iHub was experiencing financial difficulties.
Tijani offered TechCrunch some initial details last month on how the acquisition will fall together.
But more recently he shared greater detail on his strategy for operating the multi-country innovation network. A big test for Tijani will be aligning the organizations on a path to sustainability. The buzzword is usually code for generating consistent operating income beyond expenses.
The growth of innovation spaces, accelerators and incubators in Africa — which tally 618 per GSMA stats — is often lauded as an achievement for the continent’s tech ecosystem.
But debate on how these focal points for startup formation, training and IT activity fund themselves is ever-present.
Grant income has served as a dominant revenue source for Africa’s tech hubs — including iHub in its early days — though many have worked to diversify.
That includes CcHub, according to Tijani, who plans to continue the trend across the expanded CcHub/iHub organization.
“When people talk about sustainability, we’ve been in business for nine years,” he notes of CcHub Nigeria.
“We de-emphasized grant funding six years ago; most of our revenue is actually earned revenue.”
On income sources Tijani looks to foster across both organizations, he named consulting services (for corporates, governments and development agencies), events services and generating greater return on investment.
iHub has been active with startup seed investments and CcHub has a portfolio of companies through its Growth Capital Fund.
“Our size will become a major part of us being able to invest in startups, and the longer we stay invested the more we will start to see significant returns and exits,” said Tijani.
The CcHub/iHub nexus will also use its size to leverage more partnerships. Tijani and team have already mastered gaining collaborations with big African and global tech names, such as MainOne and Facebook.
Tijani will look to connect iHub to CcHub’s Google-sponsored Pitch Drive — which has done African startup tours of Asia and Europe — and potentially take the show to the U.S.
“We’re talking about it,” Tijani said, of a U.S. pitch trip. And this could lead to a permanent presence in San Francisco for the new CcHub/iHub entity.
“Beyond just a tour, we want to build strong presence in the Bay Area,” Tijani said, but didn’t offer more specifics on what that could mean.
So on the list of things to emerge from the CcHub-iHub acquisition, African tech planting a big flag in San Francisco is a future possibility.
A more immediate result of the union between the innovation spaces will be Bosun Tijani becoming a regular sight on flights between Lagos and Nairobi.
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New startup Capital wants to reintroduce founders to venture debt
Why raise venture capital when you can raise debt and keep your equity?
That’s the question a whole slew of new financial technology companies are hoping entrepreneurs will ask themselves as they begin to think about collecting outside capital for their businesses. Clearbanc made waves with its “20-Minute Term Sheet” campaign, with a goal of backing 2,000 businesses with $1 billion in non-dilutive capital by the end of 2019. Now, Capital is launching to educate founders about the possibility of debt funding.
Founded by former Draper Fisher Jurvetson (now known as Threshold Ventures) investor Blair Silverberg, Csaba Konkoly and Chris Olivares, Capital is launching today with $5 million from Future Ventures, Greycroft, Wavemaker and others. Additionally, it’s raised from “prominent institutional pools of capital” to invest between $5 million and $50 million in promising companies, determined using “The Capital Machine.”
Capital co-founder Blair Silverberg.
Capital’s underwriting technology, dubbed The Capital Machine, determines if businesses have the growth potential necessary for an infusion of debt (by analyzing revenue and other financial considerations), then delivers term sheets within 24 hours. The expedited process cuts out the time-consuming elements of pitching venture capitalists, the company says, allowing businesses to go from zero to $5 million — or more — in a matter of hours.
For companies that are’t ready for a debt round, or that don’t meet Capital’s qualification, the company is offering access to a free calculator that determines the cost of a company’s capital based on their fundraising and valuation data.
“We are trying to create a business that is the place that all founders go to start their fundraising process,” Silverberg tells TechCrunch. “We just want entrepreneurs to understand that step one in building a balance sheet is to understand your cost of capital. Step two is you can now use that to compare your financing options. We hope we can make this process simpler and more transparent.”
Capital charges a 5% to 15% flat fee on its capital, investing a maximum of $50 million over time. The company has ambitions of becoming a holistic investment bank of sorts, says Silverberg, ready and willing to advise companies on fundraising possibilities and connect them with VCs for future deals.
Historically, Silverberg explains, venture capital dollars went to risky upstarts poised to disrupt a category. Today, loads of equity funding is funneled into predictable business models that could be funded entirely with non-dilutive capital: “I saw what the venture process was like,” Silverberg said, referencing his stint at DFJ. “Tech companies do not utilize debt … this is extremely expensive for founders.”
There’s a culture surrounding venture capital fundraising in Silicon Valley and beyond. One in which startups seek to become “unicorns,” hoping for stories on this very site to laud their accomplishments — including the loads of venture capital dollars they’ve pulled in. In reality, much of that capital is plowed into things like Facebook and Google to fuel digital ad campaigns, which is not how VC is intended to be used and can result in founders taking a company public with just a few percentage points of ownership.
Solutions like Capital, Clearbanc, Lighter Capital and others should remind entrepreneurs that venture capital isn’t the only route to getting a company off the ground and can be raised in addition to venture debt.
“There’s no excuse for not knowing your cost of capital,” Silverberg adds.
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Morpheus Space’s modular, scalable satellite propulsion could be a game-changer for orbital industry
Building effective propulsion systems for satellites has traditionally been a highly bespoke affair, with expensive, one-off systems tailor-made to big, expensive spacecraft hardware. But increasingly, companies, including startups, are looking at ways to provide propulsion tech that can scale with the projected boom in demand for orbital satellites, including CubeSats and small sats, as the commercialization of space and advances in sensor, communication and launch technology broaden the scope of those working in this bold new frontier.
Morpheus Space, which began life as a research project at the University of Western Germany, has accomplished a lot when it comes to propulsion in the short time since its official founding around a year and a half ago. The Dresden-based startup already has sent some of its thrusters to space, where they’re actually providing propulsion, and it’s working with a number of clients and potential clients, including NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The startup also just wrapped up its participation in Techstars’ inaugural Starburst Space Program in LA.
“Our motivation behind starting Morpheus Space was the lack of maneuverability of, especially small satellites in space,” explained Morpheus CEO and co-founder Daniel Bock, with whom I spoke at last week’s International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C. “We have around 2,000 active satellites in space, and in the next few years this will increase by 10x. We have to deal with that. So the first step in how we want to solve that is with our proportion systems, to give mobility to small satellites.”
The startup has seen a ton of inbound interest, and has even had conversations with the CTO of NASA and the CEO of Aerospace Corporation based on the strength of its technology. But what’s so special about what they’re doing, versus what has already been available for satellite propulsion? Put simply, “it’s the world’s smallest and most efficient propulsion system,” according to Morpheus Space co-founder István Lőrincz.
A single Morpheus NanoFEEP thruster propulsion system
Morpheus’ thruster uses gallium as its fuel source, which allows it to be very efficient, with an operating linespace of up to three or more years — non-stop, Lőrincz told me. When you factor in the low cost of these thrusters versus other solutions, and the ability to make them incredibly small (one thruster, along with electronics, is not that much larger than your average USB charger), you get a product that’s tailor-made for the cost-sensitive emerging new space industry. Ensuring the mass of these thrusters is small pays off big dividends when it comes to thinking about launch costs, and the fact that these are “Lego-like” in their modularity means they can suit a variety of different clients’ needs.
“You can build propulsion systems for satellites that are below one kilogram, up to those the size of trucks, just by creating arrays,” Lőrincz says.
An example of a Morpheus multi-thruster array used in a 3U-sized small satellite
Size is important, but so is scalability, and that’s another strength that the Morpheus thrusters bring to the market. Lőrincz told me that their technology allows you to quickly and easily build a large batch of the thrusters, instead of having to tailor-make your propulsion system to fit the satellite, which provides big benefits in terms of manufacturing and design costs — which Morpheus can then pass on to its customers, opening up to a whole new, much more price-sensitive segment of the market the possibility of including true orbital maneuvering capabilities.
Next up for Morpheus Space, after it gets its hardware business fully up and running, is to develop and deploy software that complements its thrusters and can offer clients things like fully automated route planning and navigation, Bock told me.
“For example, you can imagine you just have to command ‘Okay I want to go from A to B,’ and everything is handled on board,” he said. So when and how you turn, all the routing. And the next step will be an automated way of handling whole constellations.”
It’s a big goal, but there’s a big potential pay-off. More and more companies are getting into the constellation game, including SpaceX and Amazon, and there’s a lot more to come on that front as companies build out new use cases for collecting and making use of data gathered from orbit. Orbital traffic management and collision avoidance is one reason big industry groups like the Space Safety Coalition are being formed, and anyone who can help supply with a solution players at all budget levels of the industry stands to benefit.
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Meet Utah’s next unicorn
Weave, a developer of patient communications software focused on the dental and optometry market, was the first Utah-headquartered company to graduate from Y Combinator in 2014. Now, it’s poised to enter a small but growing class startups in the ‘Silicon Slopes’ to garner ‘unicorn’ status.
The business announced a $70 million Series D last week at a valuation of $970 million. Tiger Global Management led the round, with participation from existing backers Catalyst Investors, Bessemer Venture Partners, Crosslink Capital, Pelion Venture Partners and LeadEdge Capital.
The company was founded in 2011 and fully bootstrapped until enrolling in the Silicon Valley accelerator program five years ago. Since then, it’s raised a total of $156 million in private funding, tripling its valuation with the latest infusion of capital.
“Our aim with this funding round is to exceed our customers’ expectations at every touchpoint, investing heavily in the products we create, the markets we serve and the overall customer experience we provide,” Weave co-founder and chief executive officer Brandon Rodman said in a statement. “We will continue to invest in our customers, our products and our people to build a solid, sustainable, and scalable business.”
Weave charges its customers, small and medium-sized businesses, upwards of $500 per month for access to its Voice Over IP-based unified communications service. Rodman previously launched a scheduling service for dentists and realized the opportunity to integrate texting, phone service, fax and reviews to facilitate the patient-provider relationship.
While his second effort, Weave, has long been targeting the dentistry and optometry market, Rodman told Venture Beat last year the opportunities for the company are endless: “Ultimately, if a business needs to communicate with their customer, we see that as a possible future customer of Weave.”
Based in Lehi, Weave added 250 employees this year with total headcount now reaching 550. The company claims to have doubled its revenue in 2018, too. While we don’t have any real insight into its financials, given the interest it’s garnered amongst Bay Area investors, we’re guessings it’s posting some pretty attractive numbers.
“Weave has some of the best retention numbers we’ve ever seen for an SMB SaaS company,” Catalyst partner Tyler Newton said in a statement. “We’re continually impressed by their accelerated growth and results.”
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Vendr, already profitable, raises $2M to replace your enterprise sales team
Vendr has developed an enterprise SaaS solution for managing enterprise SaaS.
The new startup, founded by InVision’s former head of enterprise sales Ryan Neu, is another standout from Y Combinator’s latest batch. Contrary to the majority of those businesses, however, Vendr is already profitable.
In classic YC fashion, the company has created software to sell to other startups, and, as such, it was quick to gain the confidence of top venture capital investors. Headquartered in Boston, Vendr has raised a $2 million round led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Garage VC and angel investors including Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht and HubSpot COO JD Sherman.
The company offers subscription-based software, priced depending on company headcount, that helps fast-growing businesses buy and manage enterprise SaaS. In short, the product cuts the human out of the sales process, allowing companies to purchase or upgrade software using software. The goal isn’t to eliminate the sales profession, rather to put an end to “persuasion driven” sales, Neu explains, and to make enterprise software purchases as easy as consumer product purchases.
Boston-based Vendr graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator earlier this year
“We see software sales actually going away because most people are tired of being sold to, they are tired of being persuaded, they want to transact,” Neu, who previously led sales at HubSpot, tells TechCruch. “Vendr was created to allow people to transact software without actually having to talk to people.”
Founded 14 months ago, Vendr has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue, which, for context, has historically been amongst the benchmarks necessary for a SaaS startup to raise its Series A. Neu says the company is growing 15% month-over-month with monthly recurring revenue currently sitting at $96,500. Already profitable, Neu says they want to put themselves in a position in which they don’t have to raise any additional outside capital.
“I can’t imagine looking at the bank account every month and watching it deplete,” Neu said. “We want to be in a position where we can control our own destiny.”
Vendr currently operates with a team of six employees and 19 customers, including Canva, Grammarly, GitLab, Brex, HubSpot and InVision. The company is also backed by Okta’s general counsel Jon Runyan, AppDynamics’ COO Dan Wright and YC partner Aaron Epstein.
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Report: SoftBank is taking control of WeWork at an ~$8B valuation
WeWork, once valued at $47 billion, will be worth as little as $7.5 billion on paper as SoftBank takes control of the struggling co-working business, CNBC reports.
SoftBank, a long-time WeWork investor, plans to invest between $4 billion and $5 billion in exchange for new and existing shares, according to CNBC . The deal, expected to be announced as soon as tomorrow, represents a lifeline for WeWork, which is said to be mere weeks from running out of cash and has been shopping several of its assets as it attempts to lessen its cash burn.
WeWork declined to comment.
To be clear, it is reportedly the Vision Fund’s parent company, SoftBank Group Corp. that is taking control, with SoftBank International chief executive officer Marcelo Claure stepping in to support company management, per reports.
The Japanese telecom giant’s move comes precisely four weeks after co-founder and former CEO Adam Neumann relinquished control of the company and transitioned into a non-executive chairman role, and about three weeks after WeWork decided to delay its highly anticipated initial public offering. WeWork’s vice chairman Sebastian Gunningham and the company’s president and chief operating officer Artie Minson are currently serving as WeWork’s co-CEOs.
In addition to those personnel shake-ups, WeWork has lost its communications chief, Jimmy Asci, its chief marketing officer, Robin Daniels and several others. Meanwhile, the company has slashed hundreds of jobs, and opted to shut down its school, WeGrow, in 2020.
Now expected to go public in 2020, WeWork was also said to be in negotiations with JPMorgan for a last-minute cash infusion. The company, now a cautionary tale, will surely continue to reduce the sky-high costs of its money-losing operation in the upcoming months.
WeWork revealed an unusual IPO prospectus in August after raising more than $8 billion in equity and debt funding. Despite financials that showed losses of nearly $1 billion in the six months ending June 30, the company still managed to accumulate a valuation as high as $47 billion, largely as a result of Neumann’s fundraising abilities.
“As co-founder of WeWork, I am so proud of this team and the incredible company that we have built over the last decade,” Neumann said in a statement confirming his resignation last month. “Our global platform now spans 111 cities in 29 countries, serving more than 527,000 members each day. While our business has never been stronger, in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed toward me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down as chief executive. Thank you to my colleagues, our members, our landlord partners, and our investors for continuing to believe in this great business.”
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Airbnb’s WeWork problem
Airbnb may be another overvalued “unicorn,” but it’s no WeWork.
The Information this morning reported new Airbnb financials — indicating a massive increase in operating losses — that immediately call Airbnb’s future into question. Precisely, Airbnb lost $306 million on operations on $839 million in revenue, namely as a result of marketing spend, in the first quarter of 2019. In total, Airbnb invested $367 million in sales and marketing, representing a 58% increase year-over-year, in Q1. The company is gearing up for a major liquidity event next year and is making a concerted effort to rake in new customers, as any soon-to-be-public business would.
Given WeWork’s sudden demise, coupled with Uber and Lyft’s lukewarm performances on the stock markets, many have wondered how Wall Street will respond to Airbnb’s eventual IPO prospectus. Will money managers have an appetite for another over-valued Silicon Valley darling? Or will the market compete like mad for shares in the massive home-sharing marketplace?
But Airbnb, again, is no WeWork, and I wager Wall Street will have a much friendlier approach to its offering. For one, Airbnb’s co-founder and chief executive officer Brian Chesky isn’t dropping $60 million on private jets — I don’t think. CEO behaviors aside, Airbnb has more capital in the bank than it has raised in its entire 11-year history, which is a whole lot of money. This is all according to a source who is familiar with Airbnb’s financials and shared this detail with TechCrunch following The Information’s Thursday morning report. As for Airbnb, the company told TechCrunch, “we can’t comment on the figures, but 2019 is a big investment year in support of our hosts and guests.”
Airbnb’s CEO Brian Chesky speaks at TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2014
Airbnb has attracted more than $3.5 billion in equity funding at a $31 billion valuation and has even more locked away in its bank account. Additionally, Airbnb has an untouched $1 billion credit line, the source said. Presumably, the referenced credit line is the 2016 $1 billion debt financing from JPMorgan, CitiGroup, Morgan Stanley and others.
Moreover, Airbnb has been “cumulatively” free cash flow positive for some time, meaning that it’s seen more money coming in than going out during recent quarters, according to our source. It has been reported that Airbnb surpassed $1 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2019 and in the third quarter of 2018, but we’re guessing the business did not top $1 billion in Q4 of 2018 or Q1 of 2019 because it if had, that information would probably have been “leaked.”
Finally, Airbnb has been profitable on an EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) basis for two consecutive years, the company announced in January. Gross bookings, meanwhile, are growing, as is Airbnb’s business offering and its experiences product.
Why does any of this matter, you ask?
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Atlassian acquires Code Barrel, makers of Automation for Jira
Atlassian today announced that it has acquired Code Barrel, the makers of Automation for Jira, a low-code tool for easily automating many aspects of Jira that’s also one of the most popular add-ons for Jira Software and Jira Service Desk in Atlassian’s marketplace. The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.
Sydney-based Code Barrel was founded by two of the first engineers who built Jira at Atlassian, Nick Menere and Andreas Knecht. With this acquisition, they are returning to Atlassian after four years in startup land.
“For me and Andreas, it’s almost like coming home,” said Menere, who joined the Jira team in 2005 when there were only a handful of developers working on the product. “It’s the place where we pretty much learned how to develop software and how to develop product. For us, this was the only company we would ever go back to.”
As the name implies, Automation for Jira makes it easy to automate recurring tasks in Atlassian’s issue and project tracking service. “Increasingly, [our customers] are having to spend a lot of time on the mundane,” Noah Wasmer, the VP of Product for Tech Teams at Atlassian, told me. “What we’re seeing is that with Jira as the backbone, they are interacting with a lot of systems, are duplicating work, are manually entering work into different systems. And so what we’re finding is that they’re spending an inordinate amount of time doing things that aren’t actually helping them build and create those next-generation things that help change our world.”
If you want to reduce this kind of duplication of work, then automation is the obvious thing to look at. And with more than 6,000 companies that found Code Barrel’s solution in Atlassian’s marketplace, plus the founders’ obvious connection to the company, Automation for Jira must have been an obvious candidate for an acquisition.
Wasmer also stressed that the fact that they built a no-code tool will allow anybody who uses Jira to create scripts without having to be a programmer. Automation for Jira allows users to set up time-based rules or those that run based on triggers inside of Jira. It also features third-party integrations with SMS, Slack and Microsoft Teams, among others.
For the time being, Automation for Jira will remain in the Atlassian Marketplace and will continue to sell at the same price of $5/user/month for teams with up to 10 users and $2.5/user/month for teams between 11 and 100 users, with prices going down from there for larger enterprises. Surely, Atlassian will start integrating some of the tool’s features into Jira, but for the time being the company doesn’t have anything to announce on that front.
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Startups Weekly: Part & Parcel plans plus-sized fashion empire
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
- Affirm is said to be in the market for as much as $1.5B
- Voyage raises $31M for its driverless taxi fleet
- Simbe gets $26M for its retail inventory robot
- Incredible Health’s hiring platform for nurses gets $15M from a16z
- Sidewalk Labs spinout Replica nabs $11M
- Patch Homes locks in $5M Series A
- Accel and Sequoia-backed Middesk secures $4M
- Nigeria’s Kuda raises $1.6M for online banking
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.
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SAP & Pricefx cover hot topics at TechCrunch’s Sept. 5 Enterprise show in SF
You can’t talk enterprise software without talking SAP, one of the giants in a $500 billion industry. And not only will SAP’s CEO Bill McDermott share insights at TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 on September 5, but the company will also sponsor two breakout sessions.
The editors will sit down with McDermott and talk about SAP’s quick growth due, in part, to several $1 billion-plus acquisitions. We’re also curious to hear about his approach to acquisitions and his strategy for growing the company in a quickly changing market. No doubt he’ll weigh in on the state of enterprise software in general, too.
Now about those breakout sessions. They run in parallel to our Main Stage set and we have a total of two do-not-miss presentations for you to enjoy. On September 5, you’ll enjoy three breakout sessions –two from SAP and one from Pricefx. You can check out the agenda for TC Sessions: Enterprise, but we want to shine the light on the sponsored sessions to give you a sense of the quality content you can expect:
- Innovating for a Super-Human Future
Martin Wezowski (SAP) We talk about change, but what are the mechanics and the dynamics behind it? And how fast is it? The noted futurist will discuss what it means to be an innovator is transforming faster than before, and this transformation is deeply rooted in the challenges and promises between cutting-edge tech and humanism. The symbiosis between human creativity & empathy and machine intelligence opens new worlds for our imagination in a time when “now” has never been so temporary, and helps us answer the question: “What is human, and what is work in a superhuman future?” (Sponsored by SAP) - Pricing from Day One
Madhavan Ramanujam (Simon-Kucher & Partners, Gabriel Smith) and Darius Jakubik (Pricefx) A key ingredient distinguishing top performing companies is clear focus on price. To maximize revenue and profits, pricing should be a C-level / boardroom consideration. To optimize pricing, you should think about price when determining which products and features to bring to market; put the people, process and technology in place to optimize it; and maintain flexibility to adjust strategy and tactics to respond to changing markets. By doing so, companies unlock the single greatest profit lever that exists. (Sponsored by Pricefx) - Cracking the Code: From Startup to Scaleup in Enterprise Software
Ram Jambunathan (SAP.iO), Lonnie Rae Kurlander (Medal), Caitlin MacGregor (Plum) and Dimitri Sirota (BigID) The startup journey is hard. Data shows that 70% of upstart tech companies fail, while only 1% of these startups will go on to gain unicorn status. Success in enterprise software often requires deep industry experience, strong networks, brutally efficient execution and a bit of luck. This panel brings together three successful SAP.iO Fund-backed enterprise startups for an open discussion on lessons learned, challenges of scaling and why the right strategic investors or partners can be beneficial even at early stages. (Sponsored by SAP)
TC Sessions: Enterprise 2019 takes place in San Francisco on September 5. It’s a jam-packed day (agenda here) filled with interviews, panel discussions and breakouts — from some of the top minds in enterprise software. Buy your ticket today and remember: You receive a free Expo-only pass to TechCrunch Disrupt SF 2019 for every ticket you buy.
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