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Google Cloud lets businesses create their own text-to-speech voices
Google launched a few updates to its Contact Center AI product today, but the most interesting one is probably the beta of its new Custom Voice service, which will let brands create their own text-to-speech voices to best represent their own brands.
Maybe your company has a well-known spokesperson for example, but it would be pretty arduous to have them record every sentence in an automated response system or bring them back to the studio whenever you launch a new product or procedure. With Custom Voice, businesses can bring in their voice talent to the studio and have them record a script provided by Google. The company will then take those recordings and train its speech models based on them.
As of now, this seems to be a somewhat manual task on Google’s side. Training and evaluating the model will take “several weeks,” the company says and Google itself will conduct its own tests of the trained model before sending it back to the business that commissioned the model. After that, the business must follow Google’s own testing process to evaluate the results and sign off on it.
For now, these custom voices are still in beta and only American English is supported so far.
It’s also worth noting that Google’s review process is meant to ensure that the result is aligned with its internal AI Principles, which it released back in 2018.
Like with similar projects, I would expect that this lengthy process of creating custom voices for these contact center solutions will become mainstream quickly. While it will just be a gimmick for some brands (remember those custom voices for stand-alone GPS systems back in the day?), it will allow the more forward-thinking brands to distinguish their own contact center experiences from those of the competition. Nobody likes calling customer support, but a more thoughtful experience that doesn’t make you think you’re talking to a random phone tree may just help alleviate some of the stress at least.
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Student-led accelerator Envision reaches demo week for class one, looks to class two
Back in early July, TechCrunch covered the Envision Accelerator. The program was put together by a group of students and recent graduates, often with some early venture capital experience, to help give some young startups a boost, and to shake up industry diversity metrics at the same time.
Now on the other side of their first batch’s official program and into its investor week, Envision shared a number of statistics regarding that first cohort, and talked about plans for its second.
What I appreciate about the Envision group is that by simply going out and making their own accelerator, they have shown that it is possible to attract a diverse group of startups to a program. How diverse? Let’s find out.
The Envision cohort
According to data provided to TechCrunch by Annabel Strauss and Eliana Berger from the Envision team (more on them here, if you’re curious), 17 companies made it into the first group. Of those 17 companies and their founding teams, around one-third of founders were black, around one in five were Latinx and more than 75% had a female founder.
Those are impressive metrics, frankly, especially when we consider what other groups have managed in recent sessions. Envision’s founders also skew young, not a surprise, given that the effort was effectively students making a program for their fellow students, with a three-to-one bias in favor of undergrads versus graduate students.
We’ll list the participating companies with links to their sites below, as per usual with this sort of accelerator roundup.
But, before we do, a few notes on how the first batch went down. When we last talked about Envision, they were still fundraising to pull together more capital to give to their selected companies. The idea was to provide $10,000 in equity-free capital, along with an eight-week program of lectures, networking and hands-on help from the Envision collective and a group of advisors.
According to Strauss and Berger, Envision was able to raise all the money that it needed to provide funding to its selected companies, though not every team picked up the full $10,000, with the duo noting that the amount varied based somewhat on need.
It will not be clear for a bit if the companies that went through Envision’s maiden class manage to raise more capital, scale, and become success. But for the Envision team itself, round one went well enough that a second effort is just around the corner.
And when it comes to that second push — or class, really — Envision remains in a hurry. After putting together its initial cohort while building its own organization on the fly, the group is going to kick off its second batch in October, giving it slim breathing room between cohorts.
There’s a reason for the haste, however. First, Envision wants to add two weeks to its programming, bringing the accelerator to a total of 10 weeks to include more training, and to fit that into the current semester, October was the kickoff month. Strauss and Berger noted that some students are taking leave during the first semester of this academic year.
More on Envision itself when we hear more on how the first batch did in attracting investor interest.
Here are the companies from batch one:
- Adora: Adora is a personalized, digital campus visit platform that makes compelling visits accessible to everyone.
- Devie: Devie is a parent coaching app that guides parents through challenges in a personal, accessible and actionable way.
- Forage: Forage is a mobile application that provides real-time pricing at grocery stores so families can save money.
- Holdette: At Holdette, we make professional work wear with real pockets for women entering the workforce for the first time.
- Justice Text: Justice Text makes video evidence management software to produce fair outcomes in the criminal justice system.
- Klara: Klara is a data science platform transforming the way consumers discover skincare and haircare products.
- Mindstand: Mindstand helps leaders identify implicit bias, employee engagement and culture fit within their internal communications.
- MODE: MODE helps people discover and purchase clothes through a personalized, social shopping experience.
- Mylabox: Mylabox is a cross-border e-commerce marketplace enabling SMBs in LatAm to access high-quality overseas products.
- Nibble: Nibble is a platform solving food waste by helping restaurants sell excess meals and ingredients at a discount.
- Pareto: Pareto is building a library of quick-to-launch workflows that startups can deploy for operations as they scale.
- Schefs: Schefs is a platform for college students to facilitate and participate in themed conversations over a virtual meal.
- UrConvey: UrConvey is a safe app that makes it easy to ride share with people you know by harnessing your network.
- Vngle: Vngle is a decentralized grassroots news network bringing “various angles” of local reality coverage to news deserts.
- Wellnest: Wellnest is a joyful journaling app that increases mindfulness by prioritizing user experience, voice and insights.
- Winkshare: Winkshare is a secure messaging app designed for the modern relationship. Your relationship, your business.
- Yup: Yup rewards valuable opinions across the web. Rate anything, earn rewards for accuracy, and gain status.
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InfoSum raises $15.1M for its privacy-first, federated approach to big data analytics
Data protection and data privacy have gone from niche concerns to mainstream issues in the last several years, thanks to new regulations and a cascade of costly breaches that have laid bare the problems that arise when information and data security are treated haphazardly.
Yet that swing has also thrown up a whole series of issues for organisations and business functions that depend on sharing and exchanging data in order to work. Today, a startup that has built a new way of exchanging data while still keeping privacy in mind — starting first by applying the concept to the “marketing industrial complex” — is announcing a round of funding as it continues to pick up momentum.
InfoSum, a London startup that has built a way for organizations to share their data with each other without passing it on to each other — by way of a federated, decentralized architecture that uses mathematical representations to organise, “read” and query the data — is today announcing that it has raised $15.1 million.
Data may be the new oil, but according to founder and CEO Nick Halstead, that just means “it’s sticky and gets all over the place.” That is to say, InfoSum is looking for a new way to use data that is less messy, and less prone to leakage, and ultimately devaluation.
The Series A is being co-led by Upfront Ventures and IA Ventures. A number of strategics using InfoSum — Ascential, Akamai, Experian, British broadcaster ITV and AT&T’s Xandr — are also participating in the round. The startup has raised $23 million to date.
Nicholas Halstead, the founder and CEO who previously had founded and led another big data company, DataSift (the startup that gained early fame as a middleman for Twitter’s firehose of data, until Twitter called time on that relationship to push its own business strategy), said in an interview that the plan is to use the funding to continue fueling its growth, with a specific focus on the U.S. market.
To that end, Brian Lesser — the founder and former CEO of Xandr (AT&T’s adtech business that is now a part of AT&T’s WarnerMedia), and previous to that the North American CEO of GroupM — is joining the company as executive chairman. Lesser had originally led Xandr’s investment into InfoSum and had previously been on the board of the startup.
InfoSum got its start several years ago as CognitiveLogic, founded at a time when Halstead was first starting to get his head around the problems that were becoming increasingly urgent in how data was being used by companies, and how newer information architecture models using data warehousing and cloud computing could help solve that.
“I saw the opportunity for data collaboration in a more private way, helping enable companies to work together when it came to customer data,” he said. This eventually led to the company releasing its first product two years ago.
In the interim, and since then, that trend, he noted, has only gained momentum, spurred by the rise of companies like Snowflake that have disrupted the world of data warehousing, cookies have started to increasingly go out of style (and some believe will disappear altogether over time) and the concept of federated architecture has become much more ubiquitous, applied to identity management and other areas.
All of this means that InfoSum’s solution today may be aimed at martech, but it is something that affects a number of industries. Indeed, the decision to focus on marketing technology, he said, was partly because that is the industry that Halstead worked most closely with at DataSift, although the plan is to expand to other verticals as well.
“We’ve done a lot of work to change the marketing industrial complex,” said Lesser, “but its bigger use cases are in areas like finance and healthcare.”
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5 steps for building a thriving developer community
Bear Douglas leads Developer Relations at Slack, where she and her team help developers build more pleasant and productive ways to work.
Every API or platform that has been successful long term owes a large part of their success to a thriving developer community — including Slack. As the lead of our Developer Relations team and a senior marketing manager, we oversee the Slack Platform Community. The community has grown quickly, so we’re both often asked how to successfully build a similar group.
At Slack, our app ecosystem has expanded alongside the product. The Slack App Directory contains 2,200 apps and over 600,000 custom apps (apps people build just for their teams) are used every week. No technology company creates its ecosystem alone. The growth in ours is part of a wider trend, as the total number of APIs has increased by 30% over the last few years. We’re also currently experiencing a surge in app submissions as more workforces operate entirely at home, and companies need tools to support remote operations. In early April, we saw a 100% increase in app submissions week-over-week.
As more developers try a platform, community support is critical to everyone — the platform company, new developers and those who have been developing for years. If your platform doesn’t have a developer community yet, creating one takes a few purposeful steps. Here are some of the best practices we’ve learned over nearly three decades’ worth of combined work in developer communities.
Start (and continue) listening
You can’t build a community without participating in one first. If you already have people developing on your platform, and they’re open to receiving contact from you, reach out! Get to know the people behind the integrations you’re seeing built.
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COVID-19 is driving demand for low-code apps
Now that the great Y Combinator rush is behind us, we’re returning to a topic many of you really seem to care about: no-code and low-code apps and their development.
We’ve explored the theme a few times recently, once from a venture-capital perspective, and another time building from a chat with the CEO of Claris, an Apple subsidiary and an early proponent of low-code work.
Today we’re adding notes from a call with Appian CEO Matt Calkins that took place yesterday shortly after the company released its most recent earnings report.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. You can read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Appian is built on low-code development. Having gone public back in 2017, it is the first low-code IPO we can think of. With its Q2 results reported on August 6, we wanted to dig a bit more into what Calkins is seeing in today’s market so we can better understand what is driving demand for low- and no-code development, specifically, and demand for business apps more generally in 2020.
As you can imagine, COVID-19 and the accelerating digital transformation are going to come up in our notes. But, first, let’s take a look at Appian’s quarter quickly before digging into how its low-code-focused CEO sees the world.
Results, expectations
Appian had a pretty good Q2. The company reported $66.8 million in revenue for the three-month period, ahead of market expectations that it would report around $61 million, though collected analyst estimates varied. The low-code platform also beat on per-share profit, reporting a $0.12 per-share loss after adjustments. Analysts had expected a far worse $0.25 per-share deficit.
The period was better than expected, certainly, but it was not a quarter that showed sharp year-over-year growth. There’s a reason for that: Appian is currently shedding professional services revenue (lower-margin, human-powered stuff) for subscription incomes (higher-margin, software-powered stuff). So, as it exchanges one type of revenue for another with total subscription revenue rising a little over 12% in Q2 2020 compared to the year-ago quarter, and professional services revenue falling around 10%, the company’s growth will be slow but the resulting revenue mix improvement is material.
Most importantly, inside of its larger subscription result for the quarter ($41.4 million) were its cloud subscription revenues, worth $29.6 million for the quarter and up 30% compared to the year-ago period. Summing, the company’s least lucrative revenues are falling as its most lucrative accelerate at the fastest clip of any of its cohorts. That’s what you’d want to see if you are an Appian bull.
Shares in the technology company are up around 45% this year. With that, we can get started.
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LaunchNotes raises a $1.8M seed round to help companies communicate their software updates
LaunchNotes, a startup founded by the team behind Statuspage (which Atlassian later acquired) and the former head of marketing for Jira, today announced that it has raised a $1.8 million seed round co-led by Cowboy Ventures and Bull City Ventures. In addition, Tim Chen (general partner, Essence Ventures), Eric Wittman (chief growth officer, JLL Technologies), Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan (VP Product, LinkedIn), Scot Wingo (co-founder and CEO, Spiffy), Lin-Hua Wu (chief communications officer, Dropbox) and Steve Klein (co-founder, Statuspage) are participating in this round.
The general idea behind LaunchNotes is to help businesses communicate their software updates to internal and external customers, something that has become increasingly important as the speed of software developments — and launches — has increased.
In addition to announcing the new funding round, LaunchNotes also today said that it will revamp its free tier to include the ability to communicate updates externally through public embeds as well. Previously, users needed to be on a paid plan to do so. The team also now allows businesses to customize the look and feel of these public streams more and it did away with subscriber limits.
“The reason we’re doing this is largely because [ … ] our long-term goal is to drive this shift in how release communications is done,” LaunchNotes co-founder Jake Brereton told me. “And the easiest way we can do that and get as many teams on board as possible is to lower the barrier to entry. Right now, that barrier to entry is asking users to pay for it.”
As Brereton told me, the company gained about 100 active users since it launched three months ago.
Image Credits: LaunchNotes
“I think, more than anything, our original thesis has been validated much more than I expected,” co-founder and CEO Tyler Davis added. “This problem really does scale with team size and in a very linear way and the interest that we’ve had has largely been on the much larger, enterprise team side. It’s just become very clear that that specific problem — while it is an issue for smaller teams — is much more of a critical problem as you grow and as you scale out into multiple teams and multiple business units.”
It’s maybe no surprise then that many of the next items on the team’s roadmap include features that large companies would want from a tool like this, including integrations with issue trackers, starting with Jira, single sign-on solutions and better team management tools.
“With that initial cohort being on the larger team size and more toward enterprise, issue tracker integration is a natural first step into our integrations platform, because a lot of change status currently lives in all these different tools and all these different processes and LaunchNotes is kind of the layer on top of that,” explained co-founder Tony Ramirez. “There are other integrations with things like feature flagging systems or git tools, where we want LaunchNotes to be the one place where people can go. And for these larger teams, that pain is more acute.”
The fact that LaunchNotes is essentially trying to create a system of record for product teams was also part of what attracted Cowboy Ventures founder Aileen Lee to the company.
Image Credits: LaunchNotes
“One of the things that I thought was kind of exciting is that this is potentially a new system of record for product people to use that kind of lives in different places right now — you might have some of it in Jira and some in Trello, or Asana, and some of that in Sheets and some of it in Airtable or Slack,” she said. She also believes that LaunchNotes will make a useful tool when bringing on new team members or handing off a product to another developer.
She also noted that the founding team, which she believes has the ideal background for building this product, was quite upfront about the fact that it needs to bring more diversity to the company. “They recognized, even in the first meeting, ‘Hey, we understand we’re three guys, and it’s really important to us to actually build out [diversity] on our cap table and in our investing team, but then also in all of our future hires so that we are setting our company up to be able to attract all kinds of people,” she said.
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MIT CSAIL grad launches machine learning platform with $10M Series A
Manasi Vartak, founder and CEO of Verta, conceived of the idea of the open-source project ModelDB database as a way to track versions of machine models while she was still in grad school at MIT. After she graduated, she decided to expand on that vision to build a product that could not only track model versions, but provide a way to operationalize them — and Verta was born.
Today, that company emerged from stealth with a $10 million Series A led by Intel Capital with participation from General Catalyst, which also led the company’s $1.7 million seed round.
Beyond providing a place to track model versioning, which ModelDB gave users, Vartak wanted to build a platform for data scientists to deploy those models into production, which has been difficult to do for many companies. She also wanted to make sure that once in production, they were still accurately reflecting the current data and not working with yesterday’s playbook.
“Verta can track if models are still valid and send out alarms when model performance changes unexpectedly,” the company explained.
Image Credits: Verta
Vartak says having that open-source project helped sell the company to investors early on, and acts as a way to attract possible customers now. “So for our seed round, it was definitely different because I was raising as a solo founder, a first-time founder right out of school, and that’s where having the open-source project was a huge win,” she said.
Certainly Mark Rostick, VP and senior managing director at lead investor Intel Capital, recognized that Verta was trying to solve a fundamental problem around machine learning model production. “Verta is addressing one of the key challenges companies face when adopting AI — bridging the gap between data scientists and developers to accelerate the deployment of machine learning models,” Rostick said.
While Vartak wasn’t ready to talk about how many customers she has just yet at this early stage of the company, she did say there were companies using the platform and getting models into production much faster.
Today, the company has 9 employees, and even at this early stage, she is taking diversity very seriously. In fact, her current employee makeup includes four Indian, three Caucasian, one Latino and one Asian, for a highly diverse mix. Her goal is to continue on this path as she builds the company. She is looking at getting to 15 employees this year, then doubling that by next year.
One thing Vartak also wants to do is have a 50/50 gender split, something she was able to achieve while at MIT in her various projects, and she wants to carry on with her company. She is also working with a third party, Sweat Equity Ventures, to help with recruiting diverse candidates.
She says that she likes to work iteratively to build the platform, while experimenting with new features, even with her small team. Right now, that involves interoperability with different machine learning tools out there like Amazon SageMaker or Kubeflow, the open-source machine learning pipeline tool.
“We realized that we need to meet customers where they are at their level of maturity. So we focused a lot the last couple of quarters on building a system that was interoperable so you can pick and choose the components kind of like Lego blocks and have a system that works end to end seamlessly.”
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Google Cloud Anthos update brings support for on-prem, bare metal
When Google announced Anthos last year at Google Cloud Next, it was a pretty big deal. Here was a cloud company releasing a product that purported to help you move your applications between cloud companies like AWS and Azure — GCP’s competitors — because it’s what customers demanded.
Google tapped into genuine anxiety that tech leaders at customer companies are having over vendor lock-in in the cloud. Back in the client-server days, most of these folks got locked into a tech stack where they were at the mercy of the vendor. It’s something companies desperately want to avoid this go-round.
With Anthos, Google claimed you could take an application, package it in a container and then move it freely between clouds without having to rewrite it for the underlying infrastructure. It was and remains a compelling idea.
This year, the company is updating the product to include a couple of specialty workloads that didn’t get into version 1.0 last year. For starters, many customers aren’t just multi-cloud, meaning they have workloads on various infrastructure cloud vendors, they are also hybrid. That means they still have workloads on-prem in their own data centers, as well as in the cloud, and Google wanted to provide a way to include these workloads in Anthos.
Pali Bhat, VP of product and design at Google Cloud, says they have heard customers still have plenty of applications on premises and they want a way to package them as containerized, cloud-native workloads.
“They do want to be able to bring all of the benefits of cloud to both their own data centers, but also to any cloud they choose to use. And what Anthos enables them to do is go on this journey of modernization and digital transformation and be able to take advantage of it by writing once and running it anywhere, and that’s a really cool vision,” Bhat said.
And while some companies have made the move from on prem to the cloud, they still want the comfort of working on bare metal where they are the only tenant. The cloud typically offers a multi-tenant environment where users share space on servers, but bare metal gives a customer the benefits of being in the cloud with the ability to control their own destiny as they do on prem.
Customers were asking for Anthos to support bare metal, and so Google gave the people what they wanted and are releasing a beta of Anthos for bare metal this week, which Bhat says provides the answer for companies looking to have the benefits of Anthos at the edge.
“[The bare metal support] lets customers run Anthos […] at edge locations without using any hypervisor. So this is a huge benefit for customers who are looking to minimize unnecessary overhead and unlock new use cases, especially both in the cloud and on the edge,” Bhat said.
Anthos is part of a broader cloud modernization platform that Google Cloud is offering customers that includes GKE (the Kubernetes engine), Cloud Functions (the serverless offering) and Cloud Run (container run time platform). Bhat says this set of products taps into a couple of trends they are seeing with customers. First of all, as we move deeper into the pandemic, companies are looking for ways to cut costs while making a faster push to the cloud. The second is taking advantage of that push by becoming more agile and innovative.
It seems to be working. Bhat reports that in Q2, the company has seen a lot of interest. “One of the things in Q2 of 2020 that we’ve seen is that just Q2, over 100,000 companies used our application modernization platform and services,” he said.
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Five VCs discuss how no-code is going horizontal across the world’s industries
Few topics garner cheers and groans quite as quickly as the no-code software explosion.
While investors seem uniformly bullish on toolsets that streamline and automate processes that once required a decent amount of technical know-how, not everyone seems to think that the product class is much of a new phenomenon.
On one hand, basic tools like Microsoft Excel have long given non-technical users a path toward carrying out complex tasks. (There’s historical precedent for the perspective.) On the other, a recent bout of low-code/no-code startups reaching huge valuations is too noteworthy to ignore, spanning apps like Notion, Airtable and Coda.
The TechCrunch team was interested in digging in to what defines the latest iteration of no-code and which industries might be the next target for entrepreneurs in the space. To get an answer on what is driving investor enthusiasm behind no-code, we reached out to a handful of investors who have explored the space:
- Laela Sturdy, general partner at CapitalG
- Raviraj Jain, partner at Lightspeed
- Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient Ventures
- S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Venture Group
- And, closing notes from an interview with Rajeev Batra from Mayfield
As usual, we’re going to pull out some of the key trends and themes we identified from the group’s collected answers, after which we’ll share their responses at length, edited lightly for clarity and formatting.
Trends, themes
Our investor participants agreed that low-code/no-code apps haven’t reached their peak potential, but there was some disagreement in how universal their appeal will prove to various industries. “Every trend is overhyped in some way. Low-code/no-code apps hold a lot of promise in some areas but not all,” Lightspeed’s Raviraj Jain told us.
Meanwhile, Gradient’s Darian Shirazi said “any and all” industries could benefit from increased no-code/low-code toolsets. We can see it either way, frankly.
CapitalG’s Laela Sturdy says the breadth of appeal boils down to finding which industries face the biggest supply constraints of technical talent.
“There just isn’t enough IT talent out there to meet demand, and issues like security and maintenance take up most of the IT department’s time. If business users want to create new systems, they have to wait months or in most cases, years, to see their needs met,” she wrote. “No-code changes the equation because it empowers business users to take change into their own hands and to accomplish goals themselves.”
Mayfield’s Rajeev Batra agreed, saying it would be cool “to see not twenty million developers [building] really cool software but two, three hundred million people developing really cool, interesting software.” If that winds up being the case, the sheer number of monthly-actives in the no and low-code spaces would imply a huge revenue base for the startup category.
That makes a wager on platforms in the space somewhat obvious.
And those bets are being placed. On the topic of valuations and developer interest, our collected interviewees were largely bullish on startup prices (competitive) and VC demand (strong) when it comes to no-code fundraising today.
Sturdy added that the number of early-stage companies in the category “are being funded at an accelerating pace,” noting that her firm is “excitedly watching this young cohort of emerging no-code companies and intend to invest in the trend for years to come.” So, we’re not about to run short of fodder for more Series A and B rounds in the space.
Taken as a whole, like it or not, the no and low-code startup trend appears firm from both a market-fit perspective and from the perspective of investor interest. Now, the rest of the notes.
Laela Sturdy, general partner, CapitalG
We’ve seen some skepticism in the market that the low-code/no-code trend has earned its current hype, or product category. Do you agree that the product trend is overhyped, or misclassified?
I don’t think it’s over-hyped, but I believe it’s often misunderstood. No code/low code has been around for a long time. Many of us have been using Microsoft Excel as a low-code tool for decades, but the market has caught fire recently due to an increase in applicable use cases and a ton of innovation in the capabilities of these new low-code/no-code platforms, specifically around their ease of use, the level and type of abstractions they can perform and their extensibility/connectivity into other parts of a company’s tech stack. On the demand side, the need for digital transformation is at an all-time high and cannot be met with incumbent tech platforms, especially given the shortage of technical workers. Low-code/no-code tools have stepped in to fill this void by enabling knowledge workers — who are 10x more populous than technical workers — to configure software without having to code. This has the potential to save significant time and money and to enable end-to-end digital experiences inside of enterprises faster.
What other opportunities does the proliferation of low-code/no-code programs open up when it comes to technical and non-technical folks working more closely together?
This is where things get exciting. If you look at large businesses today, IT departments and business units are perpetually out of alignment because IT teams are resource constrained and unable to address core business needs quickly enough. There just isn’t enough IT talent out there to meet demand, and issues like security and maintenance take up most of the IT department’s time. If business users want to create new systems, they have to wait months or in most cases years to see their needs met. No-code changes the equation because it empowers business users to take change into their own hands and to accomplish goals themselves. The rapid state of digital transformation — which has only been expedited by the pandemic — requires more business logic to be encoded into automations and applications. No code is making this transition possible for many enterprises.
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Figma CEO Dylan Field discusses fundraising, hiring and marketing in stealth mode
You’d be hard pressed to hang out with a designer and not hear the name Figma .
The company behind the largely browser-based design tool has made a huge splash in the past few years, building a massive war chest with more than $130 million from investors like A16Z, Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins and Index.
The company was founded in 2012 and spent several years in stealth, raising both its seed and Series A without having any public product or user metrics.
At Early Stage, we spoke with co-founder and CEO Dylan Field about the process of hiring and fundraising while in stealth and how life at the company changed following its launch in 2016. Field, who was 20 when he founded the company, also touched on the lessons he’s learned from his team about leadership. Chief among them: the importance of empowering the people you hire.
You can check out the full conversation in the video embedded below, as well as a lightly edited transcript.
Raising a Series A a year behind schedule while still in stealth
I actually had approached John Lilly from Greylock in our seed round. For those who don’t know, John Lilly was the CEO of Mozilla and an amazing guy. He’s on a lot of really cool boards and has a bunch of interesting experience for Figma, with very deep roots in design. I had approached him for the seed round, and he basically said to us, “You know, I don’t think you guys know what you’re doing, but I’m very intrigued, so let’s keep in touch.” This is the famous line that you hear from every investor ever. It’s like “Yeah, let’s keep in touch, let me know if I can be helpful.” Sometimes, they actually mean it. In John’s case, he actually would follow up every few months or I would follow up with him. We’d grab coffee, and he helped me develop the strategy to a point that got us to what we are today. And that was a collaboration. I could really learn a lot from him on that one.
When we started off the idea was: Let’s have this global community around design, and you’ll be able to use the tool to post to the community and someday we’ll think about how people can pay us. Talking with John got me to the point where I realized we need to start with a business tool. We’ll build the community later. Now, we’re starting to work toward that.
At some point, John told me, “Hey, if you ever think about raising again, let me know.” A few weeks later, I told him maybe we would raise because I just wanted to work with him. We talked to a few other investors. I think it’s pretty important that there’s always a competitive dynamic in the round. But really, it was just him that we were really considering for that round. He really did us a solid. He really believed in us. At the time, it wasn’t like there were metrics to look at. He had conviction in the space, a conviction in the attack, and he had conviction in me and Evan, which I feel very, very honored by. He’s a dear mentor to this day, and he’s on our board. And it’s been a really deep relationship.
How to recruit while in stealth mode
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