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China’s expected edtech clampdown may chill a key startup sector
News that China’s government may force domestic tutoring-focused companies to go nonprofit is taking a huge bite out of the value of several technology companies. Bloomberg notes that the value of companies like New Oriental Education & Technology Group and TAL Education are tumbling in light of the news, which would constitute merely the latest salvo against tech companies in the autocratic country.
New Oriental’s Hong Kong-listed shares fell 44.22% in after-hours trading after the nonprofit news broke, while NYSE-shares of TAL are off an even sharper 51.75% in pre-market trading. With Yahoo Finance listing a roughly $13.8 billion market cap for TAL ahead of its impending declines at the market open, billions of equity value are about to get deleted. The list goes on: China Online Education Group is off 39.97% in after-hours trading, for example.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.
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A new decision by China’s government to exert more control over a sector of its domestic economy should not surprise. And we shouldn’t be shocked that online tutoring is in the country’s targets; today’s news is a follow-up to prior regulatory action in the sector from earlier in the year.
As China has become synonymous with edtech startups in recent years, the news impacts more than just public companies. The expected rules change may also hit a host of private, venture-backed companies.
For example, what will happen to Yuanfudao? The company was valued at $15.5 billion last year, offering what TechCrunch described as “live tutoring, an online Q&A arm and a math-problem-checking arm.” Will the company see its wings clipped?
Or how about Zuoyebang, which raised $1.6 billion in a single round last year? TechCrunch wrote that Zuoyebang offers “online courses, live lessons and homework help for kindergarten to 12th grade students.” Is it in trouble as well?
All this comes on the same day that shares in Zomato began to float, with the Indian online food delivery company seeing its shares close up nearly 65% in their first day’s trading. TechCrunch has viewed the Zomato IPO as a possible bellwether for the larger Indian startup market, and the results augur well for other growth-focused, loss-making unicorns in the country.
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Extra Crunch roundup: 2 VC surveys, Tesla’s melt up, The Roblox Gambit, more
This has been quite a week.
Instead of walking backward through the last few days of chaos and uncertainty, here are three good things that happened:
- Google employee Sara Robinson combined her interest in machine learning and baking to create AI-generated hybrid treats.
- A breakthrough could make water desalination 30%-40% more effective.
- Bianca Smith will become the first Black woman to coach a professional baseball team.
Despite many distractions in our first full week of the new year, we published a full slate of stories exploring different aspects of entrepreneurship, fundraising and investing.
We’ve already gotten feedback on this overview of subscription pricing models, and a look back at 2020 funding rounds and exits among Israel’s security startups was aimed at our new members who live and work there, along with international investors who are seeking new opportunities.
Plus, don’t miss our first investor surveys of 2021: one by Lucas Matney on social gaming, and another by Mike Butcher that gathered responses from Portugal-based investors on a wide variety of topics.
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week. I hope we can all look forward to a nice, boring weekend with no breaking news alerts.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription
The Roblox Gambit
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
In February 2020, gaming platform Roblox was valued at $4 billion, but after announcing a $520 million Series H this week, it’s now worth $29.5 billion.
“Sure, you could argue that Roblox enjoyed an epic 2020, thanks in part to COVID-19,” writes Alex Wilhelm this morning. “That helped its valuation. But there’s a lot of space between $4 billion and $29.5 billion.”
Alex suggests that Roblox’s decision to delay its IPO and raise an enormous Series H was a grandmaster move that could influence how other unicorns will take themselves to market. “A big thanks to the gaming company for running this experiment for us.”
I asked him what inspired the headline; like most good ideas, it came to him while he was trying to get to sleep.
“I think that I had ‘The Queen’s Gambit’ somewhere in my head, so that formed the root of a little joke with myself. Roblox is making a strategic wager on method of going public. So, ‘gambit’ seems to fit!”
8 investors discuss social gaming’s biggest opportunities
Image Credits: Erik Von Weber (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
For our first investor survey of the year, Lucas Matney interviewed eight VCs who invest in massively multiplayer online games to discuss 2021 trends and opportunities:
- Hope Cochran, Madrona Venture Group
- Daniel Li, Madrona Venture Group
- Niko Bonatsos, General Catalyst
- Ethan Kurzweil, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Sakib Dadi, Bessemer Venture Partners
- Jacob Mullins, Shasta Ventures
- Alice Lloyd George, Rogue
- Gigi Levy-Weiss, NFX
Having moved far beyond shooters and sims, platforms like Twitch, Discord and Fortnite are “where culture is created,” said Daniel Li of Madrona.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez uses Twitch to explain policy positions, major musicians regularly perform in-game concerts on Fortnite and in-game purchases generated tens of billions last year.
“Gaming is a unique combination of science and art, left and right brain,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss of NFX. “It’s never just science (i.e., software and data), which is why many investors find it hard.”
How to convert customers with subscription pricing
Image Credits: C.J. Burton (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Startups that lack insight into their sales funnel have high churn, low conversion rates and an inability to adapt or leverage changes in customer behavior.
If you’re hoping to convert and retain customers, “reinforcing your value proposition should play a big part in every level of your customer funnel,” says Joe Procopio, founder of Teaching Startup.
What is up with Tesla’s value?
Image Credits: Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Alex Wilhelm followed up his regular Friday column with another story that tries to find a well-grounded rationale for Tesla’s sky-high valuation of approximately $822 billion.
Meanwhile, GM just unveiled a new logo and tagline.
As ever, I learned something new while editing: A “melt up” occurs when investors start clamoring for a particular company because of acute FOMO (the fear of missing out).
Delivering 500,000 cars in 2020 was “impressive,” says Alex, who also acknowledged the company’s ability to turn GAAP profits, but “pride cometh before the fall, as does a melt up, I think.”
Note: This story has Alex’s original headline, but I told him I would replace the featured image with a photo of someone who had very “richest man in the world” face.
How Segment redesigned its core systems to solve an existential scaling crisis
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On Tuesday, enterprise reporter Ron Miller covered a major engineering project at customer data platform Segment called “Centrifuge.”
“Its purpose was to move data through Segment’s data pipes to wherever customers needed it quickly and efficiently at the lowest operating cost,” but as Ron reports, it was also meant to solve “an existential crisis for the young business,” which needed a more resilient platform.
Dear Sophie: Banging my head against the wall understanding the US immigration system
Image Credits: Sophie Alcorn
Dear Sophie:
Now that the U.S. has a new president coming in whose policies are more welcoming to immigrants, I am considering coming to the U.S. to expand my company after COVID-19. However, I’m struggling with the morass of information online that has bits and pieces of visa types and processes.
Can you please share an overview of the U.S. immigration system and how it works so I can get the big picture and understand what I’m navigating?
— Resilient in Romania
The first “Dear Sophie” column of each month is available on TechCrunch without a paywall.
Revenue-based financing: The next step for private equity and early-stage investment
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For founders who aren’t interested in angel investment or seeking validation from a VC, revenue-based investing is growing in popularity.
To gain a deeper understanding of the U.S. RBI landscape, we published an industry report on Wednesday that studied data from 134 companies, 57 funds and 32 investment firms before breaking out “specific verticals and business models … and the typical profile of companies that access this form of capital.”
Lisbon’s startup scene rises as Portugal gears up to be a European tech tiger
Image Credits: Westend61 (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
Mike Butcher continues his series of European investor surveys with his latest dispatch from Lisbon, where a nascent startup ecosystem may get a Brexit boost.
Here are the Portugal-based VCs he interviewed:
- Cristina Fonseca, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Pedro Ribeiro Santos, partner, Armilar Venture Partners
- Tocha, partner, Olisipo Way
- Adão Oliveira, investment manager, Portugal Ventures
- Alexandre Barbosa, partner, Faber
- António Miguel, partner, Mustard Seed MAZE
- Jaime Parodi Bardón, partner, impACT NOW Capital
- Stephan Morais, partner, Indico Capital Partners
- Gavin Goldblatt, managing partner, Portugal Gateway
How late-stage edtech companies are thinking about tutoring marketplaces
Image Credits: John Lund (opens in a new window)/ Getty Images
How do you scale online tutoring, particularly when demand exceeds the supply of human instructors?
This month, Chegg is replacing its seven-year-old marketplace that paired students with tutors with a live chatbot.
A spokesperson said the move will “dramatically differentiate our offerings from our competitors and better service students,” but Natasha Mascarenhas identified two challenges to edtech automation.
“A chatbot won’t work for a student with special needs or someone who needs to be handheld a bit more,” she says. “Second, speed tutoring can only work for a specific set of subjects.”
Decrypted: How bad was the US Capitol breach for cybersecurity?
Image Credits: Treedeo (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
While I watched insurrectionists invade and vandalize the U.S. Capitol on live TV, I noticed that staffers evacuated so quickly, some hadn’t had time to shut down their computers.
Looters even made off with a laptop from Senator Jeff Merkley’s office, but according to security reporter Zack Whittaker, the damages to infosec wasn’t as bad as it looked.
Even so, “the breach will likely present a major task for Congress’ IT departments, which will have to figure out what’s been stolen and what security risks could still pose a threat to the Capitol’s network.”
Extra Crunch’s top 10 stories of 2020
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On New Year’s Eve, I made a list of the 10 “best” Extra Crunch stories from the previous 12 months.
My methodology was personal: From hundreds of posts, these were the 10 I found most useful, which is my key metric for business journalism.
Some readers are skeptical about paywalls, but without being boastful, Extra Crunch is a premium product, just like Netflix or Disney+. I know, we’re not as entertaining as a historical drama about the reign of Queen Elizabeth II or a space western about a bounty hunter. But, speaking as someone who’s worked at several startups, Extra Crunch stories contain actionable information you can use to build a company and/or look smart in meetings — and that’s worth something.
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Why I left edtech and got into gaming
Darshan Somashekar co-founded drop.io (acquired by Facebook), Imagine Easy Solutions (acquired by Chegg) and is currently co-founder of gaming platform Solitaired and a venture partner at TMV.
Now that COVID-19 has accelerated the adoption of digital education tools, edtech has become one of the hottest areas of investment.
As someone who has been in edtech for nearly 20 years, this sounds like the precise moment to capitalize on all the newfound interest. Which is why what I’m about to say might be surprising: I’m leaving edtech for the world of gaming with my new company, Solitaired.
I first got into edtech in high school, when a friend and I founded EasyBib, a website that helped students cite sources for their papers. At the time, we were just students who felt there had to be a better way than formatting tedious citations for research papers by hand. But as we dove into the business further, we realized there was a lot to like about bibliographies and education technology in general.
For one, the education market is large. There are more than 56 million K-16 students in the U.S., and over 1.3 billion globally. Federal, state and local governments spend an aggregate of 5% of GDP on education, and that doesn’t even include what students and parents spend on content and technology.
Secondly, it’s structured. Students generally all go through the same curriculum together. That means most students have the same problem in the same way; if you solve a problem for one group of users, you’ve probably solved it for most users.
The citation problem was just like that. When we sold our company to Chegg, we were already reaching four out of five students that needed bibliographies, or over 30 million students in the U.S. Edtech companies that help students with math, chemistry, homework help, tutoring and other curricular needs can build massive audiences quickly.
Edtech that’s part of the curriculum also has high engagement. EasyBib users stayed on our site for nearly ten minutes per session, creating one citation after another for their bibliographies. For direct-to-consumer edtech companies that are ad and subscription driven, this behavior creates many monetization opportunities.
While we grew fast, our endemic market opportunity was limited. Why? The strengths of edtech can also be its downsides, especially for a startup. On the user growth front, we focused on school relationships, marketing and SEO. But once we reached four out of every five students in the U.S., there wasn’t much more room to grow.
To increase engagement even further, we tried a number of things: encouraging more citation creation, adding research and note-taking features and building a Chrome extension to be more ever-present in the user’s research journey. Those efforts fell short too. Ultimately, the school calendar dictated how often students needed to use us, and we were constrained by the number of research papers teachers assigned.
These challenges can certainly be overcome. But as a startup, we had to decide if we wanted to pursue adjacencies and expansions ourselves. Ultimately, this realization was one of the reasons we decided to sell our company to Chegg, which had a wider user base and product synergies that we couldn’t achieve on our own. As anyone who follows Chegg might know, they’ve been very successful in accelerating the edtech digital transformation.
When we began thinking about our second business, we had these lessons in the back of our mind. That’s when we discovered gaming.
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Peer tutoring platform Knack raises $1.5M from Charles Hudson, Jeff Vinik
Knack, a peer tutoring platform aimed at college students, is taking a different approach than some online tutoring marketplaces have in the past. As a result, the Florida-based startup has raised a $1.5 million seed round co-led by Charles Hudson’s Precursor Ventures and Tampa Bay Lighting owner and Fenway Sports Group Partner, Jeff Vinik.
Other investors in the round include Bisk Ventures, the corporate venture-arm of Bisk Education; Arizona State University Enterprise Partners; Doug Feirstein, founder of Hired, uSell, and LiveOps; former State of Florida CFO Alex Sink; Tom DiBenedetto of Fenway Sports Group; PAR Inc.; and Elysium Venture Capital.
While many tutoring marketplaces have focused on only connecting students with others who could help them with their studies, Knack has instead also been focusing on adding institutional partners as its customers.
Today, it works with more than 50 colleges across the U.S., like seed investor ASU, which is licensing Knack to modernize their student support services and increase access to supplemental help for students.
“Although most universities already have on-campus tutoring centers,” explains company co-founder and CEO Samyr Qureshi, “Knack partners with institutions as a technology-enabled supplemental solution, filling in the gaps by increasing course and topical coverage for nuanced courses that campus learning centers may not be able to cover due to budgetary and resource constraints,” he says.
In addition, Knack is also now working with corporate employer sponsors like PwC and ConnectWise, which want to engage with high-potential students from Knack’s campus networks.
“We’re focusing on the full life cycle of learning from ‘I need some help on Knack’ to ‘I can offer help through Knack’ to ‘my skills built and showcased through Knack helped me land a job,’” notes Qureshi.
The CEO says he was inspired to work in the edtech space because, as a first-generation immigrant, education has been at the forefront of his life. His mother brought Qureshi and his sister to the U.S. to allow them to pursue college degrees.
During his own time in school, Qureshi both sought tutoring and provided tutoring, which led him to believe that one of the best ways to learn was from a peer.
In 2016, the startup applied to the University of Florida’s Business Plan Competition and took home first place, winning a $25,000 cash prize. That opened the door to venture capital, and its first pre-seed round of funding.
While institutions and businesses are the focus in terms of monetization, Knack still caters directly to students today. Those who need help with their coursework can use Knack to book tutoring, and those who want to offer their skills can create a tutoring profile with basic info, like their bio, courses, rates and availability.
The platform then handles all the logistics, including searching, matching, scheduling, tracking, billing and rating and reviewing.
Knack takes a 20 percent service fee on this tier of its service. University partners are on a SaaS-based annual platform, and Employer partners are charged a sponsorship amount depending on their targeting criteria.
The team of eight is based in Tampa, Florida and plans to use the seed funding for sales and marketing, as well as making some key engineering hires, the CEO says.
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