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ChargerHelp co-founder, CEO Kameale C. Terry is heading to TC Sessions: Mobility 2021

Published May 31, 2021

Thousands of electric vehicle charging stations will be built around the country over the next decade. ChargerHelp!, founded in January 2020 by Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis, wants to make sure they stay up and running.

The idea for the on-demand repair app for EV charging stations came to Terry when she was working at EV Connect, where she held a number of roles including director of programs and head of customer experience. She noticed long wait times to fix non-electrical issues at charging stations due to the industry practice to use electrical contractors.

“When the stations went down we really couldn’t get anyone on site because most of the issues were communication issues, vandalism, firmware updates or swapping out a part — all things that were not electrical,” Terry said in an interview with TechCrunch earlier this year.

After Terry quit her job to start ChargerHelp!, she joined the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator, where she developed a first-of-its-kind EV Network Technician Training Curriculum. Shortly after, Terry and Ellis were accepted into Elemental Excelerator’s startup incubator and have landed contracts with major EV charging network providers like EV Connect and SparkCharge.

The company uses a workforce-development approach to hiring, meaning that they only hire in cohorts. Workers receive full training, earn two safety licenses, are guaranteed a wage of $30 an hour and receive shares in the startup, Terry said.

We’re excited to announce that Kameale Terry will be joining us at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021, a one-day virtual event that is scheduled June 9. We’ll be covering a lot of ground with Terry, from how she developed her EV repair curriculum to what she sees in the company’s future.

Each year TechCrunch brings together founders, investors, CEOs and engineers who are working on all things transportation and mobility. If it moves people and packages from Point A to Point B, we cover it. This year’s agenda is filled with leaders in the mobility space who are shaping the future of transportation, from EV charging to autonomous vehicles to urban air taxis.

Among the growing list of speakers are Rimac Automobili founder Mate Rimac, Revel Transit CEO Frank Reig, community organizer, transportation consultant and lawyer Tamika L. Butler and Remix/Via co-founder and CEO Tiffany Chu, who will come together to discuss how (and if) urban mobility can increase equity while still remaining a viable business.

Other guests include Motional’s President and CEO Karl Iagnemma, Aurora co-founder and CEO Chris Urmson, GM‘s VP of Global Innovation Pam Fletcher, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Joby Aviation founder and CEO JoeBen Bevirt, investor and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman (whose special purpose acquisition company just merged with Joby), investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital, Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson.

We also recently announced a panel dedicated to China’s robotaxi industry, featuring three female leaders from Chinese AV startups: AutoX’s COO Jewel Li, Huan Sun, general manager of Momenta Europe with Momenta, and WeRide’s VP of Finance Jennifer Li.

Don’t wait to book your tickets to TC Sessions: Mobility as prices go up at the door. Grab your passes right now and hear from today’s biggest mobility leaders.

SAP launches ‘RISE with SAP,’ a concierge service for digital transformation

Published January 27, 2021

SAP today announced a new offering it calls ‘RISE with SAP,’ a solution that is meant to help the company’s customers go through their respective digital transformations and become what SAP calls ‘intelligent enterprises.’ RISE is a subscription service that combines a set of services and product offerings.

SAP’s head of product success Sven Denecken (and its COO for S/4Hana) described it as “the best concierge service you can get for your digital transformation” when I talked to him earlier this week. “We need to help our clients to embrace that change that they see currently,” he said. “Transformation is a journey. Every client wants to become that smarter, faster and that nimbler business, but they, of course, also see that they are faced with challenges today and in the future. This continuous transformation is what is happening to businesses. And we do know from working together with them, that actually they agree with those fundamentals. They want to be an intelligent enterprise. They want to adapt and change. But the key question is how to get there? And the key question they ask us is, please help us to get there.”

With RISE for SAP, businesses will get a single contact at SAP to help guide them through their journey, but also access to the SAP partner ecosystem.

The first step in this process, Denecken stressed, isn’t necessarily to bring in new technology, though that is also part of it, but to help businesses redesign and optimize their business processes and implement the best practices in their verticals — and then measure the outcome. “Business process redesign means that you analyze how your business processes perform. How can you get tailored recommendations? How can you benchmark against industry standards? And this helps you to set the tone and also to motivate your people — your IT, your business people — to adapt,” Denecken described. He also noted that in order for a digital transformation project to succeed, IT and business leaders and employees have to work together.

In part, that includes technology offerings and adopting robotic process automation (RPA), for example. As Denecken stressed, all of this builds on top of the work SAP has done with its customers over the years to define business processes and KPIs.

On the technical side, SAP is obviously offering its own services, including its Business Technology Platform, and cloud infrastructure, but it will also support customers on all of the large cloud providers. Also included in RISE is support for more than 2,200 APIs to integrate various on-premises, cloud and non-SAP systems, access to SAP’s low-code and no-code capabilities and, of course, its database and analytics offerings.

“Geopolitical tensions, environmental challenges and the ongoing pandemic are forcing businesses to deal with change faster than ever before,” said Christian Klein, SAP’s CEO, in today’s announcement. “Companies that can adapt their business processes quickly will thrive – and SAP can help them achieve this. This is what RISE with SAP is all about: It helps customers continuously unlock new ways of running businesses in the cloud to stay ahead of their industry.”

With this new offering, SAP is now providing its customers with a number of solutions that were previously available through its partner ecosystem. Denecken doesn’t see this as SAP competing with its own partners, though. Instead, he argues that this is very much a partner play and that this new solution will likely only bring more customers to its partners as well.

“Needless to say, this has been a negotiation with those partners,” he said. “Because yes, it’s sometimes topics that we now take over they [previously] did. But we are looking for scale here. The need in the market for digital transformation has just started. And this is where we see that this is definitely a big offering, together with partners. “

The big question on every startup’s mind for 2021

Published January 5, 2021

My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we’re in the early innings of seeing what “aha moments” have materialized into companies. And we won’t know the pandemic’s true impact on our psyches until the dust settles and we have an opportunity to reflect.

We do know it will be fascinating to watch. In 2020, innovators and investors were forced to stand still, and witness cracks, fractures and rubble in society in a way like never before. It was a humbling year that, for much of the tech community, was mostly spent inside, away and alone.

One reaction I’ve noticed so far — that isn’t necessarily new but comes with new weight — is a rush of innovation that focuses on reducing friction. Take trends like the rise of building in public or the unbundling of venture capital. Or remote work’s shift from enabling communication to now needing to enable passive and active collaboration. Apply the same idea to mental health, education and fitness. Heck, we’re even seeing people take the Y Combinator format and apply it to anything that makes sense, from helping operators turn into investors to helping employees try to turn their side gig into a full-time company.

While these movements didn’t begin because of the coronavirus, they all seem to have a huge, pandemic-sized asterisk next to it.

It would be easy to dismiss these movements as small and inconsequential. But, as my colleague and fellow Equity co-host Danny Crichton pointed out this week, “sometimes the most important changes in venture and startups more generally have come from lowering that last bit of friction to action.”

Z Fellows offers $10k to stop what you’re doing for a week and work on a side project

Lowering friction feels like the mantra with which we all need to enter 2021.

I already have hope that innovation will come from a more diverse set of people, whether it’s in a hacker house for undergraduate women or a student-founded service that matches undergraduate students to nonprofits. So, as we enter the new year — and bear with me here — I urge you to be optimistic.

There’s no ‘hacker house’ geared toward undergraduate women, so they created one of their own

The last year in tech hasn’t left people exhausted and hopeless, it’s left them energized and ready.

Maze, computer artwork. (Image Credits: Pasieka / Getty Images)

Will the second time be the charm for Qualtrics?

When SAP announced that Qualtrics was getting spun out in July, the full-circle moment made the Equity podcast crew jump to our mics with guesses around why. Now, months later, there’s a new S-1 filing, and more to color in. Alex Wilhelm broke down the Utah-based unicorn’s numbers, noting that it’s the second time Qualtrics has filed.

Equity Shot: All about the Qualtrics IPO

Will the second time be the charm that Qualtrics needs to actually go public this time around? I’ll let you make the call yourself once you sift through Alex’s analysis of the valuation and financials.

Blackboard Business Strategy Concept. (Image Credits: hanibaram / Getty Images)

Miami, Substack and Clubhouse

If those three words in a single subhed elicit a certain reaction from you, Danny Crichton has a bone to pick with you. He wrote a piece this week about tech’s cynicism around anything new, underscoring how Miami’s future as a tech hub, Substack’s future as a replacement for traditional journalism and Clubhouse’s future as a social media disruptor have come under fire as expected:

The cynicism of immediate perfection is one of the strange dynamics of startups in 2020. There is this expectation that a startup, with one or a few founders and a couple of employees, is somehow going to build a perfect product on day one that mitigates any potential problem even before it becomes one. Maybe these startups are just getting popularized too early, and the people who understand early product are getting subsumed by the wider masses who don’t understand the evolution of products?

Danny’s argument is to give these companies a little more grace to execute on a vision they themselves are not even close to scratching the surface of. When it comes to holding specific decision-makers and businesses to a certain standard, I prefer a more fluid conversation. But I do agree that writing off a business because it hasn’t done everything correctly from the start can hurt progress. It’s easy to be grumpy, but why not choose to be an optimist? Tell me your optimistic bets by responding to this newsletter or tweeting me @nmasc_.

Skyline of downtown Miami, Florida looking toward the Brickell neighborhood on Biscayne Bay. Brickell is one of the largest financial districts in the United States and also has many high-rise residential condominium and apartment towers. (Image Credits: John Coletti / Getty Images)

And some good news

Speaking of humbling moments and optimism, our own Sarah Perez wrote a piece this week about EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children. While Acorns and Stash have similar offerings, EarlyBird is bringing a fresh UX play to financial literacy, freedom and education. There’s a ton of work left to be done, hurdles to deal with, and giant unicorns to compete with. EarlyBird, however, is only weeks old, so there’s much to watch out for.

EarlyBird’s new app lets families and friends ‘gift’ investments to children

VP Caleb Frankel, now EarlyBird COO, explained the early inspiration:

“This all started with a problem I experienced years ago when my beautiful baby niece was born. I found myself head over heels and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on just the most ridiculous stuff — pretty much just junk gifts,” he says. “I wanted to have a larger impact in her life and something that she could really use when she grew up.”

Crowdfunding Concept Investment into Idea or Business Startup

Image Credits: oxygen (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Around TechCrunch

Attending CES 2021? TechCrunch wants to meet your startup

Gift Guide: Last-minute subscriptions to keep the gifts going all year

Across the week

Seen on Extra Crunch

How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021

On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point

The 2020 boom in climate tech SPACs

2021 will be a calmer year for semiconductors and chips (except for Intel)

Understanding Europe’s big push to rewrite the digital rulebook

Seen on TechCrunch

China lays out ‘rectification’ plan for Jack Ma’s fintech empire Ant

NSO used real people’s location data to pitch its contact-tracing tech, researchers say

India’s slow 2020 told through dollars and cents

An earnest review of a robotic cat pillow

@EquityPod

The Equity pod put together a 2021 predictions episode (with Chris Gates, our producer, making a guest appearance on the mic as well!). We talk about IPO candidates, San Francisco and the future of drugs.

The Equity crew predicts what’s to come in 2021

2020 brought several million downloads to the podcast, and we’re super thankful to all of y’ all for tuning in. This year will be even bigger, better and, hey, maybe we’ll even get to make fun of each other in person too.

Till next week,

Natasha Mascarenhas

Your first sales hire should be a missionary, not a mercenary

Published September 1, 2020

Micah Smurthwaite
Contributor

Micah Smurthwaite is a partner at Next47 focusing on investments in enterprise software, infrastructure, cybersecurity and frontier technology companies.

As the first sales hire at Cloudflare, I learned firsthand from both our high growth and my own mistakes how to build a world-class sales team. Early hires are the cultural cornerstones of an organization. As Vinod Khosla described the initial hires at Sun Microsystems, “Initial hiring is way more important than you think because of its multiplicative effect. So, it’s worth taking a little longer when you hire those people.”

The first sales hire will set the best practices, cultural tone and is responsible for making sure each subsequent new sales hire succeeds. For this reason, it is important that startups look to hire missionaries, not mercenaries, when they bring on their first sales team member. If the first sales hire is a “coin-operated” mercenary whose priority is to overachieve quota and is a great solo player, they may be more competitive than collaborative. In contrast, if the first hire is a missionary who cares more about evangelizing the product and is a team player, they will naturally enable the next set of hires to succeed.

Hiring the missionary

There is an overwhelming amount of declarative advice on how to make your first sales hire: They should have experience selling at an early-stage company, tenure in that company to a much larger team (five to 50 employees, or $100,000 to $10 million ARR), they’ve sold at your price point, overachieved quota consistently (beware of this one. Quota overachievement can be a false positive and may be the result of a fruitful territory, a comp plan where quotas were too low or selfish “me-first” behavior.), etc. What you should look for are missionaries, and they exhibit two key qualities: resourceful ingenuity and team-based behavior.

Missionaries are resourceful team players

At early-stage startups, there is more work to do than people to do it. These are resource-constrained environments where roles go beyond job descriptions and are “jack-of-all-trades” positions. This first sales hire is not an ordinary sales gig. It requires a missionary with a deep interest in the technology who wants to evangelize the product. The resourceful missionary must have an enterprising mindset to build their own sales collateral, a clever approach for testing pricing, a passion for the product technology and an ability to navigate the organization so engineering and product teams can hear the voice of the customer.

While resourceful skills are needed to test out different sales motions, the most important quality the missionary must have is a team-first attitude to share those learnings with colleagues. As the missionary, and the subsequent missionary hires, are developing a repeatable process they are engaging in novel intellectual work; this is not routine execution. When someone develops better messaging, or discovers a new use case, the goal is to spread that expertise so overall collective intelligence and team performance increases. If that operational know-how becomes siloed and an individual optimizes for themselves, instead of the team, the organization loses.

Apple goes to war with the gaming industry

Published August 9, 2020

Most gamers may not view Apple as a games company to the same degree that they see Sony with PlayStation or Microsoft with Xbox, but the iPhone-maker continues to uniformly drive the industry with decisions made in the Apple App Store.

The company made the news a couple times late this week for App Store approvals. Once for denying a gaming app, and the other for approving one.

The denial was Microsoft’s xCloud gaming app, something the Xbox folks weren’t too psyched about. Microsoft xCloud is one of the Xbox’s most substantial software platform plays in quite some time, allowing gamers to live-stream titles from the cloud and play console-quality games across a number of devices. It’s a huge effort that’s been in preview for a bit, but is likely going to officially launch next month. The app had been in a Testflight preview for iOS, but as Microsoft looked to push it to primetime, Apple said not so fast.

The app that was approved was the Facebook Gaming app which Facebook has been trying to shove through the App Store for months to no avail. It was at last approved Friday after the company stripped one of its two central features, a library of playable mobile games. In a curt statement to The New York Times, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said, “Unfortunately, we had to remove gameplay functionality entirely in order to get Apple’s approval on the stand-alone Facebook Gaming app.”

Microsoft’s Xbox team also took the unusually aggressive step of calling out Apple in a statement that reads, in-part, “Apple stands alone as the only general purpose platform to deny consumers from cloud gaming and game subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. And it consistently treats gaming apps differently, applying more lenient rules to non-gaming apps even when they include interactive content.”

Microsoft is still a $1.61 trillion company so don’t think I’m busting out the violin for them, but iOS is the world’s largest gaming platform, something CEO Tim Cook proudly proclaimed when the company launched its own game subscription platform, Apple Arcade, last year. Apple likes to play at its own pace, and all of these game-streaming platforms popping up at the same time seem poised to overwhelm them.

Image Credits: Microsoft

There are a few things about cloud gaming apps that seem at odds with some of the App Store’s rules, yet these rules are, of course, just guidelines written by Apple. For Apple’s part, they basically said (full statement later) that the App Store had curators for a reason and that approving apps like these means they can’t individually review the apps which compromises the App Store experience.

To say that’s “the reason” seems disingenuous because the company has long approved platforms to operate on the App Store without stamping approval on the individual pieces of content that can be accessed. With “Games” representing the App Store’s most popular category, Apple likely cares much more about keeping their own money straight.

Analysis from CNBC pinned Apple’s 2019 App Store total revenue at $50 billion.

When these cloud gaming platforms like xCloud scale with zero iOS support, millions of Apple customers, myself included, are actually going to be pissed that their iPhone can’t do something that their friend’s phone can. Playing console-class titles on the iPhone would be a substantial feature upgrade for consumers. There are about 90 million Xbox Live users out there, a substantial number of which are iPhone owners I would imagine. The games industry is steadily rallying around game subscription networks and cloud gaming as a move to encourage consumers to sample more titles and discover more indie hits.

I’ve seen enough of these sagas to realize that sometimes parties will kick off these fights purely as a tactic to get their way in negotiations and avoid workarounds, but it’s a tactic that really only works when consumers have a reason to care. Most of the bigger App Store developer spats have played in the background and come to light later, but at this point the Xbox team undoubtedly sees that Apple isn’t positioned all that well to wage an App Store war in the midst of increased antitrust attention over a cause that seems wholly focused on maintaining their edge in monetizing the games consumers play on Apple screens.

CEO Tim Cook spent an awful lot of time in his Congressional Zoom room answering question about perceived anticompetitiveness on the company’s application storefront.

The big point of tension I could see happening behind closed doors is that plenty of these titles offer in-game transactions and just because that in-app purchase framework is being live-streamed from a cloud computer doesn’t mean that a user isn’t still using experiencing that content on an Apple device. I’m not sure whether this is actually the point of contention, but it seems like it would be a major threat to Apple’s ecosystem-wide in-app purchase raking.

The App Store does not currently support cloud gaming on Nvidia’s GeForce platform or Google’s Stadia which are also both available on Android phones. Both of these platforms are more limited in scope than Microsoft’s offering which is expected to launch with wider support and pick up wider adoption.

While I can understand Apple’s desire to not have gaming titles ship that might not function properly on an iPhone because of system constraints, that argument doesn’t apply so well to the cloud gaming world where apps are translating button presses to the cloud and the cloud is sending them back the next engine-rendered frames of their game. Apple is being forced to get pretty particular about what media types of apps fall under the “reader” designation. The inherent interactivity of a cloud gaming platform seems to be the differentiation Apple is pushing here — as well as the interfaces that allows gamers to directly launch titles with an interface that’s far more specialized than some generic remote desktop app.

All of these platforms arrive after the company already launched Apple Arcade, a non-cloud gaming product made in the image of what Apple would like to think are the values it fosters in the gaming world: family friendly indie titles with no intrusive ads, no bothersome micro-transactions and Apple’s watchful review.

Apple’s driver’s seat position in the gaming world has been far from a wholly positive influence for the industry. Apple has acted as a gatekeeper, but the fact is plenty of the “innovations” pushed through as a result of App Store policies have been great for Apple but questionable for the development of a gamer-friendly games industry.

Apple facilitated the advent of free-to-play games by pushing in-app purchases which have been abused recklessly over the years as studios have been irresistibly pushed to structure their titles around principles of addiction. Mobile gaming has been one of the more insane areas of Wild West startup growth over the past decade and Apple’s mechanics for fueling quick transactions inside these titles has moved fast and broken things.

Take a look at the 200 top grossing games in the App Store (data via Sensor Tower) and you’ll see that all 199 of them rely solely on in-app micro-transaction to reach that status — Microsoft’s Minecraft, ranked 50th costs $6.99 to download, though it also offers in-app purchases.

In 2013, the company settled a class-action lawsuit that kicked off after parents sued Apple for making it too easy for kids to make in-app purchases. In 2014, Apple settled a case with the FTC over the same mechanism for $32 million. This year, a lawsuit filed against Apple questioned the legality of “loot box” in-app purchases which gave gamers randomized digital awards.

“Through the games it sells and offers for free to consumers through its AppStore, Apple engages in predatory practices enticing consumers, including children to engage in gambling and similar addictive conduct in violation of this and other laws designed to protect consumers and to prohibit such practices,” read that most recent lawsuit filing.

This is, of course, not how Apple sees its role in the gaming industry. In a statement to Business Insider responding to the company’s denial of Microsoft’s xCloud, Apple laid out its messaging.

The App Store was created to be a safe and trusted place for customers to discover and download apps, and a great business opportunity for all developers. Before they go on our store, all apps are reviewed against the same set of guidelines that are intended to protect customers and provide a fair and level playing field to developers.

Our customers enjoy great apps and games from millions of developers, and gaming services can absolutely launch on the App Store as long as they follow the same set of guidelines applicable to all developers, including submitting games individually for review, and appearing in charts and search. In addition to the App Store, developers can choose to reach all iPhone and iPad users over the web through Safari and other browsers on the App Store.

The impact has — quite obviously — not been uniformly negative, but Apple has played fast and loose with industry changes when they benefit the mothership. I won’t act like plenty of Sony and Microsoft’s actions over the years haven’t offered similar affronts to gamers, but Apple exercises the industry-wide sway it holds, operating the world’s largest gaming platform, too often and gamers should be cautious in trusting the App Store owner to make decisions that have their best interests at heart.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get more of my weekly opinions and notes on the news by subscribing to Week in Review here, and following my tweets here.

Intercom announces the promotion of Karen Peacock to CEO

Published June 18, 2020

Three years ago almost to the day, Intercom announced that it was bringing former Intuit exec Karen Peacock on board as COO. Today, she got promoted to CEO, effective July 1. Current CEO and company co-founder Eoghan McCabe will become Chairman.

As it turns out, these moves aren’t a coincidence. McCabe had been actively thinking about a succession plan when he hired Peacock. “When I first started talking to Eoghan three years ago, he shared with me that his vision was to hire someone as COO, who could then become the CEO at the right time and he could transition into the chairman role,” Peacock told TechCrunch .

She said while the idea was always there, they didn’t feel the need to rush the process. “We were just looking for whatever the right time was, and it wasn’t something we were expected to do in the first year or two. And now is really the right time to transition with all of the momentum that we’re seeing in the market,” she said.

She said as McCabe makes the transition away from running the company he helped found, he will still be around, and they will continue working together on things like product and marketing strategy, but Peacock brings a pedigree of her own to the new role.

Not only has she been in charge of commercial aspects of the Intercom business for the past three years, prior to that she was SVP at Intuit where she ran small business products that included QuickBooks, and grew it from a $500 million business to a hefty $2.5 billion during her tenure.

McCabe says that experience was one of the reasons he spent six months trying to convince Peacock to become COO at Intercom in 2017. “It’s really hard to find a leader that’s as well rounded, and as unique as Karen is. You know she doesn’t actually fit your typical very experienced operator,” he said. He points to her deep product background, calling her a “product nerd,” and her undergraduate degree in applied mathematics from Harvard as examples.

In spite of the pandemic, she’s taking over a company that’s still managing to grow. The company’s business messenger products, which enable companies to chat with customers online, have become increasingly important during the pandemic with many brick-and-mortar businesses shut down and the majority of business is being conducted digitally.

“Our overall revenue is $150 million in annual recurring revenue, and a supporting data point to what we were just talking about is that our new business to up market customers through our sales teams has doubled year over year. So we’re really seeing some quite nice acceleration there,” she said.

Peacock says she wants to continue building the company and using her role to build a diverse and inclusive culture. “I believe that [diversity and inclusion] is not one person’s job, it’s all of our jobs, but we have one person who’s the center post of that (a head of D&I). And then we work with outside consulting firms as well to just try and stay in a place where we understand all of what’s possible and what we can do in the world.”

She adds, “I will say that we need to make more progress on diversity and inclusion. I wouldn’t step back and pat ourselves on the back and say we’ve done this perfectly. There’s a lot more that we need to do, and it’s one of the things that I’m very excited to tackle as CEO.”

According to a February Wall Street Journal article, less than 6% of women hold CEO jobs in the U.S. Peacock certainly sees this and wants to continue to mentor women as she takes over at Intercom. “It is something that I’m very passionate about. I do speak to various different groups of up and coming women leaders, and I mentor a group of women outside of Intercom,” she said. She also sits on the board at Dropbox with other women leaders like Condoleezza Rice and Meg Whitman.

Peacock says that taking over during a pandemic makes it interesting, and instead of visiting the company’s offices, she’ll be doing a lot of video conferences. But neither is she coming in cold to the company having to ramp up on the business side of things, while getting to know everyone.

“I feel very fortunate to have been with Intercom for three years, and so I know all the people and they all know me. And so I think it’s a lot easier to do that virtually than if you’re meeting people for the very first time. Similarly, I also know the business very well, and so it’s not like I’m trying to both ramp up on the business and deal with a pandemic,” she said.

Intercom lands former Intuit exec Karen Peacock as its new COO

Sphero appoints new CEO, spins off robotics startup for first responders

Published May 20, 2020

Sphero just announced that it has spun off another company. Once again, the new startup has a decidedly different focus from its parent company’s core of education-focused products. While still a robotics company at its heart, the underwhelmingly named Company Six will create robotic systems designed for first responders and other humans whose work requires them to put themselves in harm’s way.

Also snuck into the press release, almost as an an afterthought, is the appointment of Paul Copioli as the new CEO of Sphero, effective immediately. The executive is an industry veteran who has worked at VEX Robotics, industrial robotics giant Fanuc and Lockheed Martin. Most recently, he was the president and COO of littleBits when the startup was acquired by Sphero.

Copioli takes over after the company’s exit from the consumer space. Sphero has pivoted almost entirely into the educational market, with the littleBits acquisition making up an important piece of the puzzle.

“It’s an honor to lead the Sphero team as we continue to pave the way for accessible robots, STEAM and computer science education for kids around the world,” he says in a release. “With our focus on education and our mission to inspire the creators of tomorrow, Sphero has a long-standing place in our school systems and beyond.”

Spinning off Company Six as its own independent entity is seemingly part of the new focus. The seeds of the startups were formed by former CEO Paul Berberian’s Public Safety Division within Sphero. He has since shifted to become chairman of both companies, while former Sphero COO Jim Booth will head Company Six as COO. Got all that?

Company Six has already closed a $3 million seed round, lead by Spider Capital, with Sphero investors Foundry Group and Techstars also on-board. Like previous Sphero spin-off Misty, information about Company Six is minimal at the time of its announcement. The new company’s site is essentially bare. We only know it will be focused on creating robotic systems for first responders, defense workers and other dangerous jobs. The news echoes iRobot’s 2016 spin-off of its military wing, Endeavor.

Sphero explains:

By applying the experience used to bring more than 4 million robots to market at Sphero, the Company Six team believes it can create products that are not only robust and feature-rich enough for professional applications, but also affordable enough to be adopted by the majority, rather than the minority, of civilian and military personnel.

More news to follow soon, no doubt.

Startups are transforming global trade in the COVID-19 era

Published May 13, 2020

Scott Bade
Contributor

Scott Bade is a former speechwriter for Mike Bloomberg and co-author of “More Human: Designing a World Where People Come First.”

Daily Crunch: AT&T CEO steps down

Published April 24, 2020

AT&T is getting a new boss, the first piece of Apple and Google’s COVID-19 contact tracing program should be available soon and Snap is looking to raise more debt.

Here’s your Daily Crunch for April 24, 2020.

1. Randall Stephenson to step down as AT&T chief, succeeded by COO John Stankey

A big changing of the guard is underway at one of the world’s biggest names in telecoms and media. The change is effective on June 1, and while Stephenson is retiring, he will stay on as executive chairman of AT&T until January 2021.

Stankey has held other roles at AT&T, including CEO of WarnerMedia and CEO of the AT&T Entertainment Group. His promotion suggests a continuing emphasis on the media side of the business.

2. First version of Apple and Google’s contact tracing API should be available to developers next week

The first version of Apple and Google’s jointly developed, cross-platform contact tracing API should be available to developers as of next week, according to a conversation between Apple CEO Tim Cook and European Commissioner for internal market Thierry Breton.

3. Snap looks to load up on cash in sizable debt offering

Snap’s Q1 earnings impressed investors but the company is still losing plenty of cash and it’s clear that the full impact of the digital ad market’s downturn won’t be seen until the company’s Q2 earnings. The company is now looking to raise looking to raise $750 million.

4. Google ditched tipping feature for donating money to sites

Leaked images obtained by TechCrunch reveal that Google considered and designed a feature that would let people donate money to websites to help support news publishers, bloggers and musicians. But the company ultimately scrapped the idea.

5. Seven VCs look into the future of fintech

Although it looks like the COVID-19 pandemic has clipped the tails of many unicorns, this era won’t last forever. Investors expect the domestic and global economy to recover, perhaps as soon as late 2020 or early 2021. (Extra Crunch membership required.)

6. House passes COVID-19 relief package to replenish PPP loan funding

The interim legislation will allocate $310 billion to replenish the SBA’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), $75 billion for hospitals and $25 billion for COVID-19 testing. President Trump previously expressed his approval of the bill, as well as his intention to sign it and make the funds available as quickly as possible.

7. After 160,000 accounts are compromised, Nintendo shuts down NNID logins

Nintendo confirmed earlier reports of account breaches dating back over the past few weeks. The gaming giant issued an update (via Nintendo Japan) noting that around 160,000 Nintendo Accounts were impacted, with accounts being used to purchase digital items without the owner’s consent.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.

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.