networking
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How to break into Silicon Valley as an outsider
Domm Holland, co-founder and CEO of e-commerce startup Fast, appears to be living a founder’s dream.
His big idea came from a small moment in his real life. Holland watched as his wife’s grandmother tried to order groceries, but she had forgotten her password and wasn’t able to complete the transaction.
“I just remember thinking it was preposterous,” Holland said. “It defied belief that some arbitrary string of text was a blocker to commerce.”
So he built a prototype of a passwordless authentication system where users would fill out their information once and would never need to do so again. Within 24 hours, tens of thousands of people had used it.
Nothing beats building human networks. That’s the way that you’re going to get this done in terms of fundraising.
Shoppers weren’t the only ones on board with this idea. In less than two years, Holland has raised $124 million in three rounds of fundraising, bringing on partners like Index Ventures and Stripe.
Although the success of Fast’s one-click checkout product has been speedy, it hasn’t been effortless.
For one thing, Holland is Australian, which means he started out as a Silicon Valley outsider. When he arrived in the U.S. in the summer of 2019, he had exactly one Bay Area contact in his phone. He built his network from the ground up, a strategic process he credits to one thing: hard work.
On an episode of the “How I Raised It” podcast, Holland talks about how he built his network, why it’s important — not just for fundraising but for building the entire business — and how to avoid the mistakes he sees new founders make.
Reach out with relevance
Holland’s primary strategy in building networks sounds like an obvious one — reach out to relevant people.
“When I first got to the States, I wanted to build networks,” Holland said, “but I didn’t really know anyone here in the Bay Area. So I spent a lot of time reaching out to relevant people — people working in payments, people working in technology, people working in identity authentication — just really relevant people in the space working in Big Tech who were building large-scale networks.”
One of the people Holland connected with was Allison Barr Allen, then the head of global product operations at Uber. Barr Allen managed her own angel investment fund, but Holland wasn’t actually looking for money when he reached out to her. He was much more interested in her perspective as the leader of an enormous financial services operation.
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Twilio to become minority owner in Syniverse Technologies with $750M investment
Syniverse Technologies, a company that helps mobile providers move communications across public and private networks, announced an extensive partnership with Twilio this morning. Under the agreement, Twilio is investing up to $750 million to become a minority owner in the company.
The idea behind the partnership is to combine Twilio’s API communications expertise with Syniverse’s mobile carrier contacts to create this end-to-end communications system. Twilio’s strength has always been its ability to deliver communications like texts without having a carrier relationship. This deal gives them access to that side of the equation.
James Attwood, executive chairman at Syniverse, certainly saw the value of the two companies working together. “The partnership will provide Syniverse access to Twilio’s extensive enterprise and API services expertise, creating opportunities to continue to build on Syniverse’s highly innovative product portfolio that helps mobile network operators and enterprises make communications better for their customers,” Attwood said in a statement.
Today’s deal comes on the heels of the company’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Segment at the end of last year as it continues to look for ways to expand its markets. Will Townsend, an analyst at Moor Insight & Strategy who covers the network and carrier markets, sees this deal giving Twilio access to a broader set of technologies.
“Twilio [gets] access to Syniverse’s significant capabilities in massive industrial IoT and private 4G LTE and 5G cellular networking. Both are poised to ramp significantly given newfound enterprise access to licensed spectrum via recent C-Band and CBRS auctions,” Townsend told me. He believes this will help Twilio reach parts of the enterprise not connected by Wi-FI or where the customers are dealing with “a mishmash of solutions that don’t scale or propagate well.”
As it turns out, it’s not a coincidence the two companies are coming together like this. In fact, Twilio has been a Syniverse customer for some time, according to Chee Chew, chief product officer at Twilio.
It’s a case of an old-school company like Syniverse, which was founded in 1987, combining forces with a more modern approach to communications like Twilio, which provides developers with APIs to deliver communications services inside applications with just a couple of lines of code.
The Wall Street Journal, which broke the news of this deal, is also reporting the company could go public via SPAC at a value of between $2 and $3 billion some time later this year. That would suggest that it has not gained much value since the 2010 deal.
Holger Mueller, an analyst at Constellation Research, says the SPAC provides an interesting additional component to the deal. “The high-flying stock market creates all kind of new chickens, one of them being a SPAC, and that’s the financial opportunity that Twilio is likely pursuing with the investment into Syniverse. The more immediate benefit is for Twilio to use the messaging vendor for its services. Call it a partnership with investment upside,” Mueller said.
According to Syniverse, “the company is one of the largest private IP Packet Exchange (IPX) providers in the world and offers a range of networking solutions, excelling in scenarios where seamless connections must cross over networks — either across multiple private networks or between public and private networks.”
The company is currently owned by the Carlyle Group private equity firm, which bought it in 2010 for $2.6 billion. Twilio launched in 2008 and raised over $236 million before going public in 2016 at $15 per share. The stock was up 3.82% in early trading, suggesting that Wall Street approves of the deal.
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Juniper Networks acquires Boston-area AI SD-WAN startup 128 Technology for $450M
Today Juniper Networks announced it was acquiring smart wide area networking startup 128 Technology for $450 million.
This marks the second AI-fueled networking company Juniper has acquired in the last year and a half after purchasing Mist Systems in March 2019 for $405 million. With 128 Technology, the company gets more AI SD-WAN technology. SD-WAN is short for software-defined wide area networks, which means networks that cover a wide geographical area such as satellite offices, rather than a network in a defined space.
Today, instead of having simply software-defined networking, the newer systems use artificial intelligence to help automate session and policy details as needed, rather than dealing with static policies, which might not fit every situation perfectly.
Writing in a company blog post announcing the deal, executive vice president and chief product officer Manoj Leelanivas sees 128 Technology adding great flexibility to the portfolio as it tries to transition from legacy networking approaches to modern ones driven by AI, especially in conjunction with the Mist purchase.
“Combining 128 Technology’s groundbreaking software with Juniper SD-WAN, WAN Assurance and Marvis Virtual Network Assistant (driven by Mist AI) gives customers the clearest and quickest path to full AI-driven WAN operations — from initial configuration to ongoing AIOps, including customizable service levels (down to the individual user), simple policy enforcement, proactive anomaly detection, fault isolation with recommended corrective actions, self-driving network operations and AI-driven support,” Leelanivas wrote in the blog post.
128 Technologies was founded in 2014 and raised over $96 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its most recent round was a $30 million Series D investment in September 2019 led by G20 Ventures and The Perkins Fund.
In addition to the $450 million, Juniper has asked 128 Technology to issue retention stock bonuses to encourage the startup’s employees to stay on during the transition to the new owners. Juniper has promised to honor this stock under the terms of the deal. The deal is expected to close in Juniper’s fiscal fourth quarter, subject to normal regulatory review.
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Arrcus snags $30M Series B as it tries to disrupt networking biz
Arrcus has a bold notion to try and take on the biggest names in networking by building a better networking management system. Today it was rewarded with a $30 million Series B investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Existing investors General Catalyst and Clear Ventures also participated. The company previously raised a seed and Series A totaling $19 million, bringing the total raised to date to $49 million, according to numbers provided by the company.
Founder and CEO Devesh Garg says the company wanted to create a product that would transform the networking industry, which has traditionally been controlled by a few companies. “The idea basically is to give you the best-in-class [networking] software with the most flexible consumption model at the lowest overall total cost of ownership. So you really as an end customer have the choice to choose best-in-class solutions,” Garg told TechCrunch.
This involves building a networking operating system called ArcOS to run the networking environment. For now, that means working with manufacturers of white-box solutions and offering some combination of hardware and software, depending on what the customer requires. Garg says that players at the top of the market like Cisco, Arista and Juniper tend to keep their technical specifications to themselves, making it impossible to integrate ArcOS with those companies at this time, but he sees room for a company like Arrcus .
“Fundamentally, this is a very large marketplace that’s controlled by two or three incumbents, and when you have lack of competition you get all of the traditional bad behavior that comes along with that, including muted innovation, rigidity in terms of the solutions that are provided and these legacy procurement models, where there’s not much flexibility with artificially high pricing,” he explained.
The company hopes to fundamentally change the current system with its solutions, taking advantage of unbranded hardware that offers a similar experience but can run the Arrcus software. “Think of them as white-box manufacturers of switches and routers. Oftentimes, they come from Taiwan, where they’re unbranded, but it’s effectively the same components that are used in the same systems that are used by the [incumbents],” he said.
The approach seems to be working, as the company has grown to 50 employees since it launched in 2016. Garg says that he expects to double that number in the next six-nine months with the new funding. Currently the company has double-digit paying customers and more than 20 in various stages of proofs of concepts, he said.
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NYC launches partnership network, ‘The Grid,’ to help grow urban tech ecosystem
The New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) and CIV:LAB — a nonprofit dedicated to connecting urban tech leaders — have announced the launch of The Grid, a member-based partnership network for New York’s urban tech community. The goal of the network is to link organizations, academia and local tech leaders in order to promote collaboration and the sharing of knowledge and resources.
In addition to connecting member companies and talent, The Grid will host various events, educational programs and co-innovation projects, while hopefully improving access to investors as well as pilot program opportunities. The Grid is launching with more than 70 member organizations — approved through an application and screening process — across various stages and sectors.
In recent years, the tech and startup scene in New York has notably ballooned — evolving from the Valley’s obscure younger sibling to one of the top cities for talent, entrepreneurship and venture capital investment. And while the city has seen countless startups, VCs, accelerators and other entrepreneurial resources set up shop within its borders, getting the right tools in place is only part of the battle.
New York wants to prove its initiatives are more than just “show-and-tell” projects and city officials believe that building a truly sustainable innovation economy is dependent on all its local resources working in conjunction, allowing entrepreneurship to permeate every arm of commerce. With an institutionalized network like The Grid, New York hopes it can further fuse its pockets of innovation into one well-oiled machine, consistently producing transformative ideas.
“The Grid represents a promising new way for NYCEDC to work across sectors to strengthen collaboration and innovation, first in New York City and hopefully soon in many more cities across the country and around the world,” said NYCEDC president and CEO James Patchett in a statement. “It signals that New York City is leading with a new approach to technology and startup culture, with a real focus on diversity, inclusion, equity, and community.”
As one of the largest and most industrially diverse cities in the world, New York has naturally placed a heightened focus on the growing sector of “urban tech” — which has been broadly categorized as innovation focused on improving city functionality, equality or ease of living. According to NYCEDC, the urban tech space has seen nearly $80 billion in VC investment since 2016, with nearly 10 percent going to New York-based beneficiaries.
The launch of The Grid is part of an expansion of NYCEDC’s larger UrbanTech NYC program, which has already helped establish the New York innovation hubs New Lab, Urban Future Lab and Company. Alongside the membership network and a new site for UrbanTech NYC, NYCEDC is also launching The Grid Academy, an adjacent academic group with the mission of creating applied R&D partnerships between local academic institutions and corporate sponsors. The expansion of UrbanTech NYC represents the latest of several initiatives NYCEDC is pursuing to develop the broader ecosystem, coming just months after the EDC announced the launch of Cyber NYC, a $30 million investment initiative focused on growing New York’s cybersecurity presence and infrastructure.
The group will be led by a steering committee that will guide decisions related to strategic priorities, funding, events and communications. Members of the committee include some of The Grid’s largest government and corporate members, including the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, Civic Hall, Company, New Lab, Urban Future Lab, Dreamit UrbanTech, URBAN-X, Urban.Us, Accenture, Samsung NEXT, Rentlogic, Smarter Grid Solutions, Civic Consulting USA and the World Economic Forum.
“Since its early days, innovation has been part of the DNA that is New York City,” said Jeff Merritt, head of IoT + Smart Cities at World Economic Forum. “Nowhere else in the world can you find an ecosystem that combines as many industries and nationalities. New York’s thriving urban technology community is a natural byproduct of what happens when you allow diversity, entrepreneurship and ambition to collide in one of the greatest cities in the world.”
The Grid’s first meeting will be held on February 19th at Samsung NEXT’s New York HQ. Membership applications for The Grid are accepted on a rolling basis and can be found here on the UrbanTech NYC website.
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AWS Transit Gateway helps customers understand their entire network
Tonight at AWS re:Invent, the company announced a new tool called AWS Transit Gateway designed to help build a network topology inside of AWS that lets you share resources across accounts and bring together on premises and cloud resources in a single network topology.
Amazon already has a popular product called Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), which helps customers build private instances of their applications. The Transit Gateway is designed to help build connections between VPCs, which, up until now, has been tricky to do.
As Peter DeSantis, VP of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS speaking at an event Monday night at AWS Re:Invent explained, AWS Transit Gateway gives you a single set of controls that lets you connect to a centrally managed gateway to grow your network easily and quickly.
Diagram: AWS
DeSantis said that this tool also gives you the ability to traverse your AWS and on-premises networks. “A gateway is another way that we’re innovating to enable customers to have secure, easy-to-manage networking across both on premise and their AWS cloud environment,” he explained.
AWS Transit Gateway lets you build connections across a network wherever the resources live in a standard kind of network topology. “Today we are giving you the ability to use the new AWS Transit Gateway to build a hub-and-spoke network topology. You can connect your existing VPCs, data centers, remote offices, and remote gateways to a managed Transit Gateway, with full control over network routing and security, even if your VPCs, Active Directories, shared services, and other resources span multiple AWS accounts,” Amazon’s Jeff Barr wrote in a blog post announcing to the new feature.
For much of its existence, AWS was about getting you to the cloud and managing your cloud resources. This makes sense for a pure cloud company like AWS, but customers tend to have complex configurations with some infrastructure and software still living on premises and some in the cloud. This could help bridge the two worlds.
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AWS Global Accelerators helps customers manage traffic across zones
Many AWS customers have to run in multiple zones for many reasons, including performance requirements, regulatory issues or fail-over management. Whatever the reason, AWS announced a new tool tonight called Global Accelerators designed to help customers route traffic more easily across multiple regions.
Peter DeSantis, VP of global infrastructure and customer support at AWS speaking at an event Monday night at AWS Re:Invent, explained that much of AWS customer traffic already flows over their massive network, and customers are using AWS Direct Connect to help applications get consistent performance and low network variability as customers move between AWS regions. He said what has been missing is a way to use the AWS global network to optimize their applications.
“Tonight I’m excited to announce AWS Global Accelerator. AWS Global Accelerator makes it easy for you to improve the performance and availability of your applications by taking advantage of the AWS global network,” he told the AWS re:Invent audience.
Graphic: AWS
“Your customer traffic is routed from your end users to the closest AWS edge location and from there traverses congestion-free redundant, highly available AWS global network. In addition to improving performance AWS Global Accelerator has built-in fault isolation, which instantly reacts to changes in the network health or your applications configuration,” DeSantis explained.
In fact, network administrators can route traffic based on defined policies such as health or geographic requirements and the traffic will move to the designated zone automatically based on those policies.
AWS plans to charge customers based on the number of accelerators they create. “An accelerator is the resource you create to direct traffic to optimal endpoints over the AWS global network. Customers will typically set up one accelerator for each application, but more complex applications may require more than one accelerator,” AWS’s Shaun Ray wrote in a blog post announcing the new feature.
AWS Global Accelerator is available today in several regions in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
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Google Cloud expands its networking feature with Cloud NAT
It’s a busy week for news from Google Cloud, which is hosting its Next event in London. Today, the company used the event to launch a number of new networking features. The marquee launch today is Cloud NAT, a new service that makes it easier for developers to build cloud-based services that don’t have public IP addresses and can only be accessed from applications within a company’s virtual private cloud.
As Google notes, building this kind of setup was already possible, but it wasn’t easy. Obviously, this is a pretty common use case, though, so with Cloud NAT, Google now offers a fully managed service that handles all the network address translation (hence the NAT) and provides access to these private instances behind the Cloud NAT gateway.
Cloud NAT supports Google Compute Engine virtual machines as well as Google Kubernetes Engine containers, and offers both a manual mode where developers can specify their IPs and an automatic mode where IPs are automatically allocated.
Also new in today’s release is Firewall Rules Logging, which is now in beta. Using this feature, admins can audit, verify and analyze the effects of their firewall rules. That means when there are repeated connection attempts that the firewall blocked, you can now analyze those and see whether somebody was up to no good or whether somebody misconfigured the firewall. Because the data is only delayed by about five seconds, the service provides near real-time access to this data — and you can obviously tie this in with other services like Stackdriver Logging, Cloud Pub/Sub and BigQuery to create alerts and further analyze the data.
Also new today is managed TLS certificated for HTTPS load balancers. The idea here is to take the hassle out of managing TLS certificates (the kind of certificates that ensure that your user’s browser creates a secure connection to your app) when there is a load balancer in play. This feature, too, is now in beta.
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Tinder’s latest feature, Tinder U, is only for college students
Tinder is today rolling out what may be one of its smartest additions yet with the launch of Tinder U, a feature designed specifically for Tinder users in college. Once enabled, students with a .edu email address will be able to register with their school, then swipe on students who also attend their school or others nearby. Beyond limiting potential matches to other students, the overall Tinder experience is unchanged.
Students will still be able to view each others’ profiles, swipe right and left to match or pass, message mutual matches, use Super Likes, and more.
To use Tinder U, students will first have to be geolocated on campus and log in to the Tinder app using their .edu email address. They’ll then have to check their inbox for the verification email and tap the button to confirm their account.
After completing this process, users will be in the Tinder U experience the next time they launch the app.
Here, students will see their school’s logo appear at the top of the screen, and individual profile photos will have flair on the bottom left to indicate the user’s school. Tinder U doesn’t prevent users from swiping off campus, however – using a toggle button at the top of the screen (see photo above), users can choose to swipe by location instead, or by Tinder Picks by toggling over to the diamond icon, if they’re a Gold member.
Tinder U makes sense for the company, whose user base already skews younger – it has said before that half its user base is between 18 and 24, for example. And dating apps’ usage, in general, among this age group has roughly tripped from 10% in 2013 to 27% by 2016, according to Pew Research. And of course, there’s the fact that Tinder itself got its start on college campuses – a market that’s young, single, and more willing to adopt mobile dating apps than other, older demographics.
The feature arrives at a time when Facebook is poised to enter the dating market – a market Tinder and its parent company Match Group today dominate. Tinder now has an estimated 50 million worldwide users, and nearly 3.8 million subscribers.
“Five years ago at college campuses around the U.S, students first heard about Tinder through friends. Tinder spread like wildfire, because it was a really fun and easy way to meet people who went to school, but you didn’t know personally,” Match Group CEO Mandy Ginsberg recently said, when announcing the product. “We believe it is critical that Tinder maintains a strong foothold at universities around the globe, especially given that every 18-year-old who starts college is building a social life from scratch making new friends and starting new relationships.”
Tinder says the new feature is launching initially on iOS devices at 4-year, accredited, not-for-profit schools in the U.S. that deliver courses in a traditional face-to-face learning format – meaning, no online universities or virtual schools will be supported. The company didn’t provide a timeframe for the Android release.
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Microsoft launches new wide-area networking options for Azure
Microsoft is launching a few new networking features today that will make it easier for businesses to use the company’s Azure cloud to securely connect their own offices and infrastructure using Azure and its global network.
The first of these is the Azure Virtual WAN service, which allows businesses to connect their various branches to and through Azure. This basically works like an airline hub and spoke model, where Azure becomes the central hub through which all data between branches flows. The advantage of this, Microsoft argues, is that it allows admins to manage their wide-area networks from a central dashboard and, of course, that it makes it easy to bind additional Azure services and appliances to the network. And with that, users also get access to all of the security services that Azure has to offer.
One new security service that Microsoft is launching today is the Azure Firewall, a new cloud-native security service that is meant to protect a business’s virtual network resources.
In addition to these two new networking features, Microsoft also today announced that it is expanding to two new regions its Azure Data Box service, which is basically Microsoft’s version of the AWS Snowball appliances for moving data into the cloud by loading it onto a shippable appliance: Europe and the United Kingdom (and let’s not argue about the fact that the U.K. is still part of Europe). There is also now a “Data Box Disk” option for those who don’t need to move petabytes of data. Orders with up to five of those disks can hold up to 40 terabytes of data and are currently in preview.
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