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Can you beat Google with Google’s brains?

Published March 12, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Like every week, we had to leave a lot of great stuff on the cutting-room floor. But, we did get to touch on a bunch of news that we feel really matters.

Also we do wind up talking about a few Extra Crunch pieces, which is where our deeper analysis on news items lives. If the paywall is a bother, you can get access while saving 50% with the code “EQUITY.”

Here’s what we got into:

Crypto-art and the NFT boom continue. Check out what Beeple just did. Danny has an opinion on the matter.
The Roblox direct-listing does very little actually solve the IPO pricing issue. That said, well done Bloxburg.
We talked about the Coursera S-1, which gave us the first financial peek into an education company revitalized by the pandemic.
The numbers needed context, so our follow up coverage gives readers 5 takeaways from the Coursera IPO.
Language learning has a market, and it’s big. We talked about Preply’s $35 million raise and why tutoring marketplaces make sense.
Dropbox is buying DocSend, which makes pretty good sense. Even if the exit price won’t matter much for bigger funds. We’re still witnessing Dropbox and Box add more features to their product via acquisitions. Let’s see how it impacts their revenue growth.
Zapier buys Makerpad. We struggled to pronounce Zapier, but did have some notes on the deal and what it might mean for the no-code space.
Sticking the acquisition theme, PayPal bought Curv. If you were looking for more evidence that big companies are taking crypto seriously, well, here it is.
And to close we nerded out about Neeva. Can a Google-competitor take on Google if it was founded by ex-Googlers?

The show is back Monday morning. Stay cool!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

Dropbox to acquire secure document sharing startup DocSend for $165M

Published March 9, 2021

Dropbox announced today that it plans to acquire DocSend for $165 million. The company helps customers share and track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment.

“We’re announcing that we’re acquiring DocSend to help us deliver an even broader set of tools for remote work, and DocSend helps customers securely manage and share their business-critical documents, backed by powerful engagement analytics,” Dropbox CEO Drew Houston told me.

When combined with the electronic signature capability of HelloSign, which Dropbox acquired in 2019, the acquisition gives the company an end-to-end document-sharing workflow it had been missing. “Dropbox, DocSend and HelloSign will be able to offer a full suite of self-serve products to help our millions of customers manage the entire critical document workflows and give more control over all aspects of that,” Houston explained.

Houston and DocSend co-founder and CEO Russ Heddleston have known each for other years, and have an established relationship. In fact, Heddleston worked for Dropbox as a summer in intern in 2010. He even ran the idea for the company by Houston prior to launching in 2013, who gave it his seal of approval, and the two companies have been partners for some time.

“We’ve just been following the thread of external sending, which has just kind of evolved and opened up into all these different workflows. And it’s just really interesting that by just being laser-focused on that we’ve been able to create a really differentiated product that users love a ton,” Heddleston said.

Those workflows include creative, sales, client services or startups using DocSend to deliver proposals or pitch decks and track engagement. In fact, among the earliest use cases for the company was helping startups track engagement with their pitch decks at VC firms.

DocSend raises $8M for smarter document sharing

The company raised a modest amount of the money along the way, just $15.3 million, according to Crunchbase, but Heddleston says that he wanted to build a company that was self-sufficient and raising more VC dollars was never a priority or necessity. “We had [VCs] chase us to give us more money all the time, and what we would tell our employees is that we don’t keep count based on money raised or headcount. It’s just about building a great company,” he said.

That builder’s attitude was one of the things that attracted Houston to the company. “We’re big believers in the model of product growth and capital efficiency, and building really intuitive products that are viral, and that’s a lot of what what attracted us to DocSend,” Houston said. While DocSend has 17,000 customers, Houston says the acquisition gives the company the opportunity to get in front of a much larger customer base as part of Dropbox.

Moving storage in-house helped Dropbox thrive

It’s worth noting that Box offers a similar secure document-sharing capability enabling users to share a link instead of using an attachment. It recently bought e-signature startup SignRequest for $55 million with an eye toward building more complex document workflows similar to what Dropbox now has with HelloSign and DocSend. PandaDoc is another competitor in this space.

Both Dropbox and DocSend participated in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield, with Houston debuting Dropbox in 2008 at the TechCrunch 50, the original name of the event. Meanwhile, DocSend participated in 2014 at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City.

DocSend’s approximately 50 employees will be joining Dropbox when the deal closes, which should happen soon, subject to standard regulatory oversight.

Dropbox snares HelloSign for $230M, gets workflow and e-signature

Give the gift of Extra Crunch membership

Published May 14, 2020

Starting today, TechCrunch readers can send an Extra Crunch annual membership as a gift to a friend, family member or co-worker. For a limited time we’re offering the gift at a discounted rate of $99/year (plus tax).

The gifting feature can be found here.

Extra Crunch membership is designed for startup teams, entrepreneurs, investors and business school students, and it includes more than 100 exclusive articles per month:

Find out where startup investors plan to write their next checks in our weekly surveys
Build your company better with how-tos and interviews from experts on fundraising, growth, monetization and other key work topics
Learn about the best startups today through our IPO analysis, late-stage deep dives and other exclusive reporting delivered daily

Extra Crunch membership can save you time time with an exclusive newsletter, no banner ads, Rapid Read mode and our List Builder tool. Annual and two-year members can also save money with discounts on events and access to Partner Perks. Our Partner Perks provide discounted access to services from companies like AWS, Brex, DocSend, Crunchbase, Typeform and more.

Gifting is currently supported in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and select countries in Europe. Purchases can be made through Visa, Mastercard and PayPal in all supported countries, but Amex support is limited to the U.S. and Canada.

If there are other features you’d like to see us add to Extra Crunch, please let us know by leaving a comment on this post or emailing me directly at travis@techcrunch.com.

TechCrunch readers can find the Extra Crunch gifting feature here.

8 tips for founders trying to raise their first round of venture capital

Published October 15, 2019

If you’re an avid TechCrunch reader, someone who loves to absorb endless startup profiles and pore through fundraising stories, you might think raising venture capital is easy. In reality, it’s very, very difficult and not the best source of capital for most businesses.

For startups hoping to scale far and wide as fast as possible, VC may be the right fit. To shed light on the process of raising equity capital from venture capital firms and provide some exclusive tips and tricks for Extra Crunch subscribers, we sat down with three experts on the subject. Below are the top pieces of advice from Charles Hudson, founder and managing partner of Precursor Ventures, Redpoint Ventures general partner Annie Kadavy, and DocSend founder Russ Heddleston. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

1. First, make sure your company is fit to raise venture capital.

Charles Hudson: I think venture capital, it’s really a specialty type of capital. It’s really for companies that have the aspiration to grow really quickly, to build really large businesses … If you’re not a company that needs to grow quickly, venture capital might not be the right source of capital for you. There has to be a really big prize at the end of the journey.

2. Raise capital early if you’re stressing about small costs or fretting competition

Russ Heddleston: If you’re thinking about whether or not to raise, there are a couple of reasons that I will often advise people to raise early. One is if they’re really stressing about buying a whiteboard for their office, or like some something of relatively small cost. If you think it could be a big company, and you’re stressing about small things, raise money and buy the whiteboard, hire the additional person and get back to what you should be doing, which is running your business and growing it quickly.

The other thing is if you ask the question, ‘is there a competitor I don’t know about?’ If you heard tomorrow, that competitor just raised $2 million, or $5 million or $10 million, how nervous would that make you? For some businesses, you’re like, I don’t really care, it’s a services industry, it’s not a winner take all market. And other times, you’re like, oh, I’d be really nervous. So if either those apply, that’s a good reason to make a compelling case to someone like Charles.

The number one thing you can do to get a VC’s attention is make [your pitch] really simple. Precursor Ventures’ Charles Hudson

3. It’s OK to take a salary

Annie Kadavy: I’d be hard-pressed to think of an example where a founder is not paying themselves, the question, though, is how much? You’re paying yourself enough so that the basic costs of life and running your business are not giving you anxiety, because as an early stage investor one of our primary roles is to try and keep the baseline stress as low as it can be, because it’s really hard to go build a company.

If a founder is coming in at the Series A and they say I’m going to go pay myself $300,000, we might be like, well, that doesn’t really feel right, shouldn’t you want to put some of that money into the company? The ranges I’ve seen are anything from $60,000 up to probably $120,000 at the Series A, or maybe $150,000. Then, as the company grows and as the balance sheet grows and it’s de-risked, your salary as an executive at the company will scale with that.

Get your pitchdeck analyzed by top investors and experts at Disrupt SF next week

Published September 27, 2019

…And see other pitchdecks get the teardown treatment from top early-stage investors Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures), Anu Duggal (Female Founders Fund) and Russ Heddleston (CEO of DocSend). If you’re attending Disrupt, you’ll get an email with instructions on how you can submit your deck and if you are selected, you can get feedback directly from them in a workshop setting.

If we use your deck, we’ll also provide you a free ticket to any TechCrunch event of your choosing next year.

This is part of a new project to make Disrupt even more focused on founders. We’re already offering the Extra Crunch stage, where you’ll get lots of time to ask questions yourselves in addition to hearing their interviews. For this additional project, we’re setting up workshops with experts on our Q&A stage where they’ll be going over the actual founder problems.

These folks have seen everything, so they will have a gut sense for how generalized advice can be applied to your specific team and market — the nuance that can compellingly explain your strengths and weaknesses. Hudson and Duggal have written some of the first checks for some of the most interesting startups today. The Athletic, Clearbanc, Incredible Health, Sudo and Pico are names you may recognize from the Precursor portfolio; Tala, BentoBox, Thrive Global and WayUp are a few of the many on Female Founder Fund’s list.

Pitching your product will kill your fundraising

Heddleston, meanwhile, is a repeat founder who now has some of the best insight into trends in funding through his current company, DocSend . As you may have read on TechCrunch already, the company provides document management for a large portion of startup founders out there, allowing them to share anonymized data with DocSend about how investors are reading their pitch decks. He’ll provide a data-driven founder perspective.

Data says there are only two seasons for fundraising and one secret window

Attendees will be notified via email on how to submit their pitch deck. If you want to submit your deck for review, get your pass to the event here and we’ll send out an email with instructions on how to submit your deck.

Please note: The workshop is open to conference attendees and is officially on the record. Other investors and members of the media may be in the workshop and see what you have in your deck, so plan accordingly.

‘The Operators’: Experts from Airbnb and Carta on building and managing your company’s customer support

Published August 8, 2019

Tim Hsia & Neil Devani
Contributor

Tim Hsia is the CEO of Media Mobilize and a Venture Partner at Digital Garage. Neil Devani is an angel investor and venture capitalist focused on companies solving hard problems.

The show:

The Operators brings experts with experience at companies like Airbnb, Brex, Docsend, Facebook, Google, Lyft, Carta, Slack, Uber, WeWork, etc. to share insider tips on how to break into fields like marketing and product management. They also share best practices for entrepreneurs on how to hire and manage experts from domains outside their own.

In this episode:

In Episode 5, we’re talking about customer service. Neil interviews Andy Yasutake, Airbnb’s Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products, and Jared Thomas, Carta’s Head of Enterprise Relationship Management.

Neil Devani: Hello and welcome to the Operators, where we talk to entrepreneurs and executives from leading technology companies like Google, Facebook, Airbnb, and Carta about how to break into a new field, how to build a successful career, and how to hire and manage talent beyond your own expertise. We skip over the lofty prognostications from venture capitalists and storytime with founders to dig into the nuts and bolts of how it all works here from the people doing the real day to day work, the people who make it all happen, the people who know what it really takes. The Operators.

Today we are talking to two experts in customer service, one with hundreds of millions of individual paying customers and the other being the industry standard for managing equity investments. I’m your host, Neil Devani, and we’re coming to you today from Digital Garage in downtown San Francisco.

Joining me is Jared Thomas, head of Enterprise Relationship Management at Carta, a $1 billion-plus company after a recent round of financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Carta, formerly known as eShares, is the leading provider of cap table management and valuation software with thousands of customers and almost a million individual shareholders as users. Customers and users trust Carta to manage their investments, a very serious responsibility requiring trust and security.

Also joining us is Andy Yasutake, the Global Product Director of Customer and Community Support Platform Products at Airbnb, one of the most valuable private tech startups today. Airbnb has millions of hosts who are trusting strangers to come into their homes and hundreds of millions of guests who are trusting someone to provide a roof over their head. The number of cases and types of cases that Andy and his team have to think about and manage boggle the mind. Jared and Andy, thank you for joining us.

Andy Yasutake: Thank you for having us.

Jared Thomas: Thank you so much.

Devani: To start, Andy, can you share your background and how you got to where you are today?

Yasutake: Sure. I’m originally from southern California. I was born and raised in LA. I went to USC for undergrad, University of Southern California, and I actually studied psychology and information systems.

Late-90s, the dot com was going on, I’d always been kind of interested in tech, went into management consulting at interstate consulting that became Accenture, and was in consulting for over 10 years and always worked on large systems of implementation of technology projects around customers. So customer service, sales transformation, anything around CRM, as kind of a foundation, but it was always very technical, but really loved the psychology part of it, the people side.

And so I was always on multiple consulting projects and one of the consulting projects with actually here in the Bay Area. I eventually moved up here 10 years ago and joined eBay, and at eBay I was the director of product for the customer services organization as well. And was there for five years.

I left for Linkedin, so another rocket ship that was growing and was the senior director of technology solutions and operations where I had all the kind of business enabling functions as well as the technology, and now have been at Airbnb for about four months. So I’m back to kind of my, my biggest passion around products and in the customer support and community experience and customer service world.

Annie Kadavy, Russ Heddleston and Charles Hudson will tell us how to raise seed money at Disrupt SF

Published June 17, 2019

Just about anyone can come up with a good idea. Fewer people can execute on that idea and turn it into a prototype or MVP. But there is still one final challenge for most entrepreneurs that can prove challenging.

How do you secure that initial seed capital and take your idea to the next level?

At Disrupt SF in October, Redpoint’s Annie Kadavy, DocSend’s Russ Heddleston and Precursor’s Charles Hudson will sit down together and chat it out on the Extra Crunch stage.

Kadavy, Heddleston and Hudson can offer a unique perspective on the process of early-stage fundraising.

Kadavy joined Redpoint in 2018 after a four-year stint at Charles River Ventures, where she sourced or led deals with ClassPass, Cratejoy, DoorDash, Lauren & Wolf and Patreon. She’s also spent time within firms like Bain & Company, Warby Parker and Uber Freight. She understands the importance of operational experience, and knows better than most how to take a company from point A to point B.

Heddleston, co-founder and CEO of DocSend, has a completely different perspective. DocSend is used to securely send and track documents, and one of the most prevalent documents on the platform happens to be pitch decks. Heddleston can tell us about what characteristics get (and keep) the attention of investors, as well as what turns them off.

Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, has been on both sides of the conference room table. He founded Bionic Panda Games, which was acquired by Zynga in 2010. He moved on to SoftTech VC (now Uncork Capital), where he spent eight years working on seed-stage investments in the consumer internet space. At Precursor Ventures, he’s continuing to invest in early-stage companies that are tackling problems in new markets.

These three each have their own perspective on how to get the attention of investors and how to turn a conversation into a cap table.

“How to Raise Your First Dollars” is but one of many panels that will take place on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF. The Extra Crunch stage, much like Extra Crunch on the web, is meant to serve as a resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and VCs, offering practical, step-by-step advice on how to get to where you’re going.

We’re thrilled to have Kadavy, Heddleston and Hudson join us at the show.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 – October 4 at the Moscone Center in SF. Tickets to Disrupt SF are available here.

DocSend raises $8M for smarter document sharing

Published April 11, 2016

DocSend Document analytics startup DocSend has raised $8 million in new funding. Naturally, co-founder and CEO Russ Heddleston said he used his company’s tools to make the deal. DocSend launched at our Disrupt NY conference two years ago, offering users a different way to send email attachments. The attachments are presented in a web viewer, meaning that you get notifications whenever someone… Read More