day one ventures
Auto Added by WPeMatico
Owner.com serves up $10.7M so that independent restaurants can get cooking
Independent restaurants don’t typically have the luxury to create their own online food ordering and delivery capabilities or negotiate for lower rates from legacy ordering platforms like the large restaurant chains do.
Here’s where Owner.com comes in. The Palo Alto-based company provides a free online ordering, delivery and marketing platform for independent restaurants that puts them on similar playing fields with the big guys. And unlike the legacy food delivery services, Owner.com restaurants own their customer data and can automate marketing campaigns.
Adam Guild is the company’s 21-year-old co-founder and CEO, a high school dropout and a Thiel Fellow, who originally started by assisting his mother’s dog grooming business that was having difficulties attracting customers. After stepping in with some online marketing methods, her business grew, and is now looking to expand into multiple locations. Guild then wanted to work with a bigger group of people and stumbled across restaurants while helping some clients create online landing pages.
With consumer demand shifting to primarily online ordering and delivery over the past 18 months, online ordering revenue is expected to double from $248 billion in 2020 to $449 billion by 2025. Ordering platforms like Doordash, Uber Eats and Grubhub control 80% of orders and typically charge between 20% and 30% per order to restaurants and additional fees to consumers.
In contrast, Owner.com is free for restaurants and charges customers a 5% convenience fee when they order from the website. Guild explained that larger restaurant chains have the buying power to negotiate lower rates, while independent restaurants do not. With the inability to keep up, some 110,000 restaurants in the U.S. closed in 2020.
Guild initially bootstrapped his company, working with large restaurant chains, like P.F. Chang’s, drive in-store orders. Then the global pandemic hit. He ended up losing all of his revenue and had to let all of his employees go but one. To add to his bad luck, he was then rejected from Y Combinator and other accelerator programs.
“For the first three days, I was depressed,” Guild told TechCrunch. “I had spent two years building a company and now it was dead. In the same way we were disrupted, I began to think there was no better position to be in than a scrappy startup. I didn’t know what the next business would look like, so I started cold-calling restaurant owners, asking how I can be helpful and what type of technology they were looking for. Many of them told me that online ordering sucked, but if they didn’t solve it soon, they would go out of business.”
One pivot and a year later with co-founder Dean Bloembergen, Owner.com closed on $10.7 million in seed funding led by SaaStr Fund, with participation from Redpoint Ventures and Day One Ventures, as well as a group of individual investors including Naval Ravikant, CNBC’s The Profit host Marcus Lemonis, The Kitchen Restaurant Group’s Kimbal Musk, DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder, Figma founder Dylan Field, The Chainsmokers and independent restaurant owners and customers of Owner.com.
Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr Fund, said restaurant SaaS was a space in which his firm was interested in investing, but thought it was a bit boring — there were already quite a few vendors in the space, like Toast and Grubhub, and most were just technology solutions. However, when he heard that Owner.com was a break-out company from the monotony, he said he had to take a look.
“The ability to own the customer relationship is that ultimate differentiation,” Lemkin said. “Their ultimate goal is to provide a robust technology platform to increase margins, have people order more and come back often.”
Meanwhile, Guild intends to use the new funding to continue product development and add new features like landing pages, the ability to make reservations and native apps for white-label service.
Since the launch last year, the company has reached a seven-figure run-rate and over 105% monthly revenue retention across over 700 restaurant locations, Guild said. To date, Owner.com has transacted over $18 million and helped its restaurant customers avoid paying $3 million to online order platform fees annually.
“It’s all about empowering the 40% of the restaurant industry that is run by people who started off in entry-level positions, and over the years, worked their way up to own the ‘American Dream,’ ” he added.
Powered by WPeMatico
Infinite Canvas raises $2.8M for a metaverse creator group modeled after esports teams
With the promise of an interconnected virtual world coming into focus and user-crafted gaming content exploding, Infinite Canvas is looking to apply to the metaverse lessons learned in the esports boom.
“Metaverse” is the hot buzzword right now, but it’s not an empty term. Ten different people would probably define the metaverse in 10 different ways, but it’s generally used as shorthand for the web of emerging virtual spaces full of personalized avatars, games and digital goods that are already shaping our world.
Much like the realm of esports boasts individual standout players who command their own followings, the social gaming world has its own stars who make original in-game content. But right now, creators making hit content in Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft are mostly operating on their own, without the supportive infrastructure that quickly professionalized the esports world. And like the early waves of esports players, those content creators skew young and lack some of the resources that would make it smoother to scale the digital brands they’re building.
Founded by Tal Shachar and Sebastian Park, Infinite Canvas is looking to connect creators who craft content for the world’s most popular online games with the financial resources, tools and experience they need to grow their businesses beyond what would be possible in isolation.
Shachar, the former growth strategist at BuzzFeed Studios and chief digital officer at Immortals Gaming Club, and Park, previously VP of Esports for the Houston Rockets, where he founded League of Legends franchise team Clutch Gaming, envision a hybrid talent management company and game publisher modeled after the success they’ve seen in the esports world. The pair liken the new venture to “an esports team for the metaverse.”
To grow their vision, Infinite Canvas has raised $2.8 million in pre-seed funds led by Lightshed Venture Partners, the venture firm founded by media analyst Richard Greenfield. BITKRAFT Ventures, Day One Ventures, Crossbeam and Emerson Collective also participated in the funding round.
“We are just at the beginning of seeing what the metaverse market opportunity can be,” said Greenfield. “While the path to monetization is clear on platforms like YouTube, in virtual worlds Infinite Canvas is pioneering a network that will unite creators, players and content partners to enhance the earning power of the talent building new virtual empires.”
Out of the gate, Infinite Canvas has partnered with some big names in Roblox, including RussoPlays, DeeterPlays, Sabrina and DJ Monopoli from Terabrite Games, as well as a handful of other Roblox developers, Fortnite map makers and streamers who, combined, reach more than 4.5 million subscribers.
For the team, this nascent era of user-generated gaming content looks a lot like another now-ubiquitous creator platform once did.
“Roblox in particular, but really all of these UGC gaming platforms, really reminded me a lot of YouTube. Which is to say that they were enabling a new type of person to distribute a content format that was previously kind of locked right behind like barriers of distribution and also of skills set and capital, quite frankly,” Shachar told TechCrunch.
After getting curious, Shachar and Park dove into the creator community and found a diverse array of generally self-taught young people from all around the world crafting custom in-game content for Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft. Much of that content, whether intentionally or not, offered players more digital spaces to connect during the pandemic-imposed social isolation, which saw interest in online social spaces take off.
“Everyone was pretty negative about the world writ large and we’re just talking to these like 17, 16, 18, 19-year-old guys, gals and non-binary pals from all over the world, just like straight up making cool stuff,” Park said.
In those conversations, Park and Shachar realized that while the world of user-generated gaming content can produce huge hits, creators were mostly isolated from support that could help them take their work to the next level.
“It felt very siloed — you have people making content over here on the right and then people developing these games on the left and then players kind of in the center there and that didn’t really make a ton of sense to us,” Shachar said. “Especially because it was super clear that there was this really strong loop of content creation leading to gameplay leading to content creation.”
With Infinite Canvas, they want to provide that missing framework, offering creators crafting content in virtual worlds everything from marketing support to capital and tech tools. As creator monetization channels within virtual worlds mature, Infinite Canvas hopes to even be able to broker ad and brand opportunities and empower creators to expand their own brands across platforms.
“What if we built a new kind of organization that blended parts of being a game publisher, parts of being an esports team, parts of being a capital and tech backend to basically enable these people to do what they do but better and bigger?” Shachar asked.
“For the metaverse — whatever word you want to use — to really exist, it’s going to take all of these independent people to actually populate it and bring it to life and make all of these experiences and there’s just an insane amount of talent out there that we think can be unlocked.”
Powered by WPeMatico
5 VCs discuss the future of SaaS and software after Pfizer’s vaccine breakthrough
Monday’s news that a COVID-19 vaccine candidate looks to be incredibly effective gave investors reasons to believe in a better future. Perhaps COVID-19 won’t be with us for years, investors appeared to think, but will instead become something that we can bend the curve on sooner than we thought.
A strong vaccine would be key toward moving back to life as it was. And for many companies battered by the pandemic, news that one was coming was more than a shot in the arm — it was stock market salvation. Airline shares soared. Cruise companies jumped. Even long-suffering Boeing shares took flight.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
But amidst the cheering, one sector of the stock market, a key comp for a host of startups, took hits. Yes, the high-flying SaaS and cloud stocks that have been such a key narrative in 2020 thanks to the pandemic and low interest rates, fell sharply while other sectors rallied off the vaccine tidings.
SaaS and cloud stocks are off more this morning, though their declines are shallower than Monday’s losses.
We asked yesterday what signal public investors were trying to send with their trades. But that’s just one angle of the picture. So, to better understand how private investors are viewing the same signals, I reached out to a few VCs who invest in SaaS and, in my experience, are worth listening to.
Below I’ve compiled notes from Bessemer’s Mary D’Onofrio, Work Life Ventures’ Brianne Kimmel, Day One Ventures’ Masha Drokova, Floodgate’s Iris Choi and Shasta’s Jacob Mullins on our question.
Are the bulls still bullish? Let’s find out.
SaaS, vaccines and the future of work
D’Onofrio wrote that her firm was still digesting the vaccine news and that it was “too early to say decisively whether or not people will be back to a pre-COVID life in the next few quarters.” That’s fair. Some good vaccine news does not mean that I’ll be back to speed-running United Economy Plus across the country every two weeks come April.
That said, D’Onofrio doesn’t appear too worried about the early-week selloff, noting that SaaS and cloud stocks — as measured via her firm’s cloud index — are still far ahead of other, broader indices this year. Why does that matter? “Stocks are forward-looking,” she said, which tells her “that even with more visibility into returning to ‘normal,’ the market anticipates that cloud companies will still be able to capitalize on the [market expansion] and growth opportunities that COVID helped to propel.”
“The pie,” she concluded, “has expanded.” That’s bullish and fair, I reckon.
Powered by WPeMatico
Work Life Ventures raises $5M for debut enterprise SaaS seed fund
Brianne Kimmel had no trouble transitioning from angel investor to general partner.
Initially setting out to garner $3 million in capital commitments, Kimmel, in just two weeks’ time, closed on $5 million for her debut venture capital fund Work Life Ventures. The enterprise SaaS-focused vehicle boasts an impressive roster of limited partners, too, including the likes of Zoom chief executive officer Eric Yuan, InVision CEO Clark Valberg, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Cameo CEO Steven Galanis, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon, Initialized Capital GP Garry Tan and fund-of-funds Slow Ventures, Felicis Ventures and NFX.
At the helm of the new fund, Kimmel joins a small group of solo female general partners: Dream Machine’s Alexia Bonatsos is targeting $25 million for her first fund; Day One Ventures’ Masha Drokova raised $20 million for her debut effort last year; and Sarah Cone launched Social Impact Capital, a fund specializing in impact investing, in 2016, among others.
Meanwhile, venture capital fundraising is poised to reach all-time highs in 2019. In the first half of the year, a total of $20.6 billion in new capital was introduced to the startup market across more than 100 funds.
For most, the process of raising a successful venture fund can be daunting and difficult. For well-connected and established investors in the Bay Area, like Kimmel, raising a fund can be relatively seamless. Given the speed and ease of fund one in Kimmel’s case, she plans to raise her second fund with a $25 million target in as little as 12 months.
“The desire for the fund is to take a step back and imagine how do we build great consumer experiences in the workplace,” Kimmel tells TechCrunch.
Kimmel has been an active angel investor for years, sourcing top enterprise deals via SaaS School, an invite-only workshop she created to educate early-stage SaaS founders on SaaS growth, monetization, sales and customer success. Prior to launching SaaS School, which will continue to run twice a year, Kimmel led go-to-market strategy at Zendesk, where she built the Zendesk for Startups program.
View this post on Instagram
available offline #google #remote
A post shared by Work Life Ventures (@worklifevc) on
“You start by advising, then you start with very small angel checks,” Kimmel explains. “I reached this inflection point and it felt like a great moment to raise my own fund. I had friends like Ryan Hoover, who started Weekend Fund focused on consumer, and Alexia is one of my friends as well and I saw what she was doing with Dream Machine, which is also consumer. It felt like it was the right time to come out with a SaaS-focused fund.”
Emerging from stealth today, Work Life Ventures will invest up to $150,000 per company. To date, Kimmel has backed three companies with capital from the fund: Tandem, Dover and Command E. The first, Tandem, was amongst the most coveted deals in Y Combinator’s latest batch of companies. The startup graduated from the accelerator with millions from Andreessen Horowitz at a valuation north of $30 million.
Dover, another recent YC alum, provides recruitment software and is said to be backed by Founders Fund in addition to Work Life. Command E, currently in beta, is a tool that facilities search across multiple desktop applications. Kimmel is also an angel investor in Webflow, Girlboss, TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 Startup Battlefield winner Forethought, Voyage and others.
Work Life is betting on the consumerization of the enterprise, or the idea that the next best companies for modern workers will be consumer-friendly tools. In her pitch deck to LPs, she cites the success of Superhuman and Notion, a well-designed email tool and a note-taking app, respectively, as examples of the heightened demand for digestible, easy-to-use B2B products.
“The next generation of applications for the workplace sees people spinning out of Uber, Coinbase and Airbnb,” Kimmel said. “They’ve faced these challenges inside their highly efficient tech company so we are seeing more consumer product builders deeply passionate about the enterprise space.”
But Kimmel doesn’t want to bury her thesis in jargon, she says, so you won’t find any B2B lingo on Work Life’s website or Instagram.
She’s focusing her efforts on a more important issue often vacant from conversations surrounding investment in the future of work: diversity & inclusion.
Kimmel meets with every new female hire of her portfolio companies. Though it’s “increasingly non-scalable,” she admits, it’s part of a greater effort to ensure her companies are thoughtful about D&I from the beginning: “Because I have a very focused fund, it’s about maintaining this community and ensuring that people feel like their voices are heard,” she said.
“I want to be mindful that I am a female GP and I feel [proud] to have that title.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Holloway launches in-depth startup guides, aims to rewrite publishing with $4.6M from NYT, tech VCs
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.
Powered by WPeMatico