Extra Crunch
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Listen to the TechCrunch staff’s YC Demo Day wrap-up call here
It’s been a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren’t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator’s Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.
TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we’ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We’ve been around for things like the old single-day events in the South Bay computer history museum, and we’ve been around for the SF era. Hell, we were there for the two-stage concept.
But this year’s Demo Day brought with it something altogether new: No in-person pitches and demos. Yep, in response to COVID-19, Y Combinator made its demo day virtual, even scooting up its presentations by a full week. Obviously we tuned in en masse, writing a host of posts about the presenting companies (read them here, here, here and here). We also caught up with CEO of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, to here his take on what’s ahead for the accelerator.
Given the scale of change, however, we weren’t content with just those entries. So, we gathered the TechCrunch crew, hopped on a Zoom, invited in our friends until our Zoom account maxed out (we didn’t know that that was a thing; more capacity coming) to chat over observations and the most interesting startups. We didn’t even miss the usual slew of Y Combinator live tweets — for the most part.
Hit the jump and we’ve got the recording for you. And see which companies the TechCrunch staff liked the most.
The Chat
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Big opening for startups that help move entrenched on-prem workloads to the cloud
AWS CEO Andy Jassy showed signs of frustration at his AWS re:Invent keynote address in December.
Customers weren’t moving to the cloud nearly fast enough for his taste, and he prodded them to move along. Some of their hesitation, as Jassy pointed out, was due to institutional inertia, but some of it also was due to a technology problem related to getting entrenched, on-prem workloads to the cloud.
When a challenge of this magnitude presents itself and you have the head of the world’s largest cloud infrastructure vendor imploring customers to move faster, you can be sure any number of players will start paying attention.
Sure enough, cloud infrastructure vendors (ISVs) have developed new migration solutions to help break that big data logjam. Large ISVs like Accenture and Deloitte are also happy to help your company deal with migration issues, but this opportunity also offers a big opening for startups aiming to solve the hard problems associated with moving certain workloads to the cloud.
Think about problems like getting data off of a mainframe and into the cloud or moving an on-prem data warehouse. We spoke to a number of experts to figure out where this migration market is going and if the future looks bright for cloud-migration startups.
Cloud-migration blues
It’s hard to nail down exactly the percentage of workloads that have been moved to the cloud at this point, but most experts agree there’s still a great deal of growth ahead. Some of the more optimistic projections have pegged it at around 20%, with the U.S. far ahead of the rest of the world.
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As Uber and Lyft continue to melt, the 2019 unicorn class loses its shine
You’d be excused for feeling that mid-2019 was in a different decade as far as venture-backed IPOs go.
Last year saw a number of successful flotations of venture-backed technology and technology-enabled companies, and most performed well after they began trading. But despite some early success, a number of the most famous 2019 IPOs have seen their valuations decline rapidly in ensuing quarters.
In some cases, once richly valued public unicorns are off more than twice the market’s recent declines, have given up all their gains earned as public companies, or fallen under their final private market valuations. It’s a stunning reversal for several of the most-lauded companies to come out of the venture capital machine in a decade.
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Manage remote teams with a transparent culture
Many companies have been designed to optimize productivity when everybody is in the office. As offices close due to the coronavirus outbreak, many people are experimenting with remote work at scale for the first time.
Employees have to learn what it means to work remotely — but managers also have to learn how to keep their teams on track. That’s why it’s interesting to talk about what it’s like to manage a remote team.
Some companies have chosen to give up on the office and work completely remotely. I interviewed Reedsy’s co-founder and CEO Emmanuel Nataf (pictured above, right) about the company’s current work culture. Reedsy operates a marketplace of professionals in the publishing industries: If you’re a writer, you can find editors, designers, marketing experts and more. And if you’re a freelancer in one of those fields, you can find clients.
The short answer: Managing a remote team takes discipline. The long answer is much more interesting as Reedsy has implemented many different processes to foster information transparency. The interview was translated from French and edited for clarity and brevity.
TechCrunch: What does it mean to have a remote culture?
Emmanuel Nataf: I think our case is quite specific. We’re 30 people and what we do cannot necessarily work for a bigger team. It works for smaller teams but maybe not above 50 people.
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All Raise CEO Pam Kostka on how the world isn’t ending
This isn’t the first economic downturn All Raise CEO Pam Kostka has been through.
“I was here during the dot-com bust and rush, and here during the financial fallout that happened, so we’re a little overdue for some corrective action in the market,” Kostka said. “While I’ve been through boom and bust cycles before, this one is more meaningful because life and death are associated with it.”
All Raise is a nonprofit that focuses on increasing diversity within venture capital, both from a decision-maker and a deal perspective. It recently released its annual report, and we covered how female-founded startups landed more deals than ever before in 2019, per PitchBook data.
After our piece looking at the numbers came out, however, some readers weighed in that our coverage missed the mark: In the headline, did we focus too much on progress and not enough on what is left to be done?
Because we’re both social distancing, I caught up with Kostka on the phone and got her take on how to report numbers around diversity without glossing over the work that remains to be accomplished. We also discussed how to stay optimistic during a downturn, potential innovation that might come out of COVID-19 and why diversity matters now more than ever.
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Where top VCs are investing in remote events
The novel coronavirus pandemic has rapidly moved companies into a remote-first world.
Nearly all of the world’s largest events have been canceled, put on pause or pivoted to online-only. In the tech world, event cancellations thus far have included SXSW, GDC, Mobile World Congress, Google I/O, Facebook F8, E3 and others.
As more and more hosts consider staging fully remote events as possible alternatives, we decided to take a deeper look into the venture-backed startups focused on supporting large-scale virtual gatherings, like Hopin and Run The World. To further understand the impact of COVID-19, we asked five leading VCs who have invested in or have knowledge of startups focused on remote events to update us on the state of the market and to share where they see opportunity in the sector:
- Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
- Connie Chan, Andreessen Horowitz
- Andrei Brasoveanu, Accel Partners
- Ryan Kuder, Techstars Anywhere
- Paul Murphy, Northzone
Sarah Cannon, Index Ventures
Which trends in remote events/conferencing excite you the most from an investing perspective?
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Dear Sophie: How do I get visas for my team to work from home?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
More posts by this contributor
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I sent my startup team home to work remotely for several weeks. We have several folks on visas and work permits — am I supposed to do anything special for them? Can I proactively get visas for future employees to primarily work from home?
— Burrowing in Burlingame
Dear Burrowing,
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When this growth investor expects startups will be able to raise again
Earlier today, TechCrunch caught up with Chris Sugden, a managing partner at Edison Partners, to talk about the current fundraising market, what’s next for SaaS startups and if there’s any good news to be found in today’s market.
As the stock market continues to gyrate (more up than down), and the unicorn exit market looks increasingly moribund, understanding how private investors are putting capital to work today and over the next few quarters is critical for startup founders. A host of startups that would have normally raised in Q1 of this year did not. The fundraising market they encounter the rest of the year will help determine their business trajectory.
Before we dive into our Q&A on all that, a short note on Edison Partners . Edison is a growth equity firm, which, according to Sugden, means that its checks range from $5 million to $30 million, with a “sweet spot” between $10 million and $15 million. Regarding stage, Sugden said that Edison looks to put capital into companies with between $8 million and $20 million in revenue, noting that the larger companies stretch his firm’s check size to the max.
About 75% of the firm’s investments are in software-as-a-service companies (SaaS), with the other 25% going into other types of startups. According to the investor, the average growth in Q4 2019 of the firm’s 12 investments from its ninth fund was about 100%, compared to the year-ago period.
So, Sugden is an active investor at a firm that has been around for a few decades with a good-sized account from which to invest. Let’s dig into how he sees the market shaking out.
Fundraising in 2020
The following excerpts come from TechCrunch’s chat with Sugden, which we’ve grouped and edited for clarity. We’ve peeled back the conversation, allowing us to pull out the parts that felt the most useful for startups. We start with his view of the 2020 venture capital market.
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What we’re getting right and wrong about coronavirus and VC investing
It has only been nine days since I wrote an overview of the state of VC investing during the rise of the novel coronavirus pandemic.
And what a week it has been: The markets have triggered circuit breakers for an unprecedented third time, a global economic depression seems in the offing and the Trump administration is now proposing upwards of $1 trillion in fiscal stimulus on top of the Fed’s hundreds of billions of dollars in quantitative easing.
My God, there is so much news.
Given how much has changed in just the past few days, I wanted to revisit my original advice and go over what is still true, what has turned out to be wrong and what is trending one way or the other as events unfold.
Let’s get started.
As I have said ad nauseam this year, VCs are in a hyper-competitive market like we have never seen before. There are more VCs, VC firms and VC dollars in more geos worldwide prowling for the next startup than ever.
The coronavirus outbreak has not changed this basic thesis in the market.
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Have hundreds of unicorns missed their exit window as Q1 IPOs grind to a halt?
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
As investors struggle to price the stock market as economic and political news continues to break, the private market is entering a rough period. It seems increasingly likely that the period of disruption due to COVID-19 will persist for months, if not quarters. That means missed Q1 and Q2 revenue growth, bookings, and the like from startups domestically and around the world.
And that’s the bullish case. For some cohorts of startups, the outlook is even worse. Think about travel startups, ride-hailing upstarts, and any grouping of private companies that pursued a high-burn, high-growth model; that final category is about to run into the twin issues of the inflexibility of cost structure and the impact of slowing sales. That alone would make fundraising more difficult; toss in a deflating stock market and possible recession, and the mixture is a downright mess.
But we owe it to ourselves to survey what is going on in an attempt to answer our own questions about IPOs, exits, unicorn tallies, and who might be in trouble. Unlike when things were less bad, there will be no laughing this morning and no jokes. Just notes on what’s going wrong and what it might mean for private companies.
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