scooter braun
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Founders seeking their first check need a fundraising sales funnel
Milana Lewis, CEO and co-founder of music tech startup Stem, started the fundraising process long before she actually asked any investors for money (dig the well before you’re thirsty — it’s the best way). She recommends that other founders do the same.
Ten years ago, Milana started working at United Talent Agency (UTA), one of the world’s leading talent agencies. When tasked with finding the best tools and technologies that UTA’s clients could use to self-distribute their work, she discovered a glaring gap.
“There were all these tools built for the distribution of content, monetization of content and audience development,” she says. “The last piece missing was the financial aspect.” The entertainment industry desperately needed a platform that would help artists manage the financial side of their business — and that’s how the idea for Stem was born.
Because UTA had its own investment branch, called UTA Ventures, Milana’s job also introduced her to some brilliant investors. Years later, when it was time to fundraise for Stem, those connections played a pretty big role.
In an episode of How I Raised It, Milana shared how Stem has landed some superstar investors and raised a little under $22 million.
1. Bring investors along for the ride — from the very start
Milana’s involvement with UTA Ventures exposed her to the investor experience and put her in the same room as people like Gary Vaynerchuk, Jonathon Triest from Ludlow Ventures, Anthony Saleh from Wndrco and Scooter Braun.
After meeting them the first time, she made sure to nurture those relationships, and she was “honest and vulnerable” about the fact that she wanted to be an entrepreneur one day.
“It’s amazing how much people will help and support you along in that journey,” Milana says. Investors “get excited about making early-stage investments because they want to identify that person before anyone else does.”
As her idea for Stem came together, she shared that with them, too. Over the course of a year, she provided regular updates on her vision, like how she was building out her team, and she also called them for occasional advice.
By the time she approached some of them for funding, she didn’t even need to present a full pitch. By then, they already knew enough about Stem, and about Milana as a businesswoman. Her pitch meeting with Gary Vaynerchuk — the first person to invest — ended up being just 15 minutes long.
“I brought people on my entrepreneurial journey in the beginning,” Milana says. “The biggest piece of advice I could give is to start raising a year before you start raising. Start building relationships and data points.”
Image Credits: Nathan Beckord (opens in a new window)
2. Become best friends with systems and deadlines
For each round, Milana put together a lead list — a list of potential investors who she either met socially or through business. Each time, she wanted to have at least 100 names on this list.
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Investors say emerging multiverses are the future of entertainment
The COVID-19 pandemic is accelerating the adoption of new technologies and cultural shifts that were already well underway. According to a clutch of heavy-hitting investors, this dynamic is particularly strong in gaming and extended reality.
Unlike other segments of the startup and tech world, where valuations have been slashed, early-stage companies focused on building new games, gaming infrastructure and virtual or extended reality entertainment are having no trouble raising money. They’ve even seen valuations rise, investors said.
“Valuations have increased pretty significantly in the gaming sector. Valuations have gone up 20 to 25% higher than I would have seen prior to this pandemic,” Phil Sanderson, a co-founder and managing director at Griffin Gaming Partners, told fellow participants on a virtual panel during the Los Angeles Games Conference earlier this month.
Driving the appetite for new investments is the entertainment industry’s bearhug of virtual events, animated features, games and social media platforms after widespread shelter-in-place orders made physical events an impossibility.
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Grain, a startup built expressly atop of Zoom for note-taking and video-clip making, raises $4 million
Whenever a platform breaks out, companies emerge to seize on its reach by building their services or products atop it. It happened with Facebook and Twitter and Slack. Now, it’s happening with Zoom, the video conferencing company that took the world by storm earlier this year as the coronavirus sent people around the globe indoors and into self-imposed isolation.
It’s not a brand-new trend. Plenty of companies are selling their wares through the Zoom App Marketplace, which launched in the fall of 2018 and now features 18 pages of providers. But Grain, founded in 2018 in San Francisco, is among the first to build its entire business around it, at least as a starting point.
What is that business? According to co-founder and CEO Mike Adams, the idea is to capture content in Zoom calls that can be saved and shared across platforms, including Twitter, Discord, Notion, Slack and iMessages.
Say a student wants to take notes; he or she can record part of what a teacher is saying to save or share with classmates, without having to rewatch an entire lecture. The same is true in work settings. By using Grain, a colleague can flag the most important bits of information that was conveyed, then share just those bits via a clip that has its own unique URL.
Grain also transcribes content in clips and allows users to turn on closed captions if they choose.
The video clips can range from 30 seconds up to 10 minutes. They can also be strung together into reels to create summary highlights. (These have no time limit.) Not last, users can trim or adjust the length of the highlight after it has been recorded, as well as control who else can edit the video afterward to prevent nefarious actors from manipulating the snippets.
Adams says he and his brother, Jake — a former software engineer at Branch Metrics with whom he co-founded the company — are even using Grain to save snippets of precious moments on Zoom involving nieces and nephews, though the focus is very much on the companies and schools that will pay on a per-seat basis for the software.
Indeed, Adams says the idea for Grain was really born at the last company he co-founded: MissionU, a Zoom-based one-year alternative to a traditional college whose students weren’t asked for tuition but instead agreed to hand over up to 15% of their incomes for three years once they landed a job that paid $50,000 or more.
MissionU — which was founded in 2016 and raised $11.5 million from investors — sold to WeWork in 2018 in a stock deal before its students earned anything (they were released from their income-sharing agreements). Still, the experiment was long enough that Adams, who left MissionU at the time of the sale, says he saw firsthand the need for better tools to help students capture what’s important in their online content.
The question, of course, is whether Zoom also sees the opportunity. Relying so heavily on another company is always a risk. (See Facebook and Twitter and the long list of third-party developers that have been burned by both companies.)
If Zoom, which is starting to make venture-like bets, were an investor in Grain, it might help inoculate it from potential competition down the road.
Still, that it isn’t didn’t dissuade other investors who are betting that Zoom will prove friend and not foe. In fact, late last year, Grain raised $4 million over two seed rounds from a long list of notable investors, including Acrew Capital, Founder Collective, Peterson Partners, Slack Fund, Scott Belsky, Sriram Krishnan, Andreas Klinger, Scooter Braun and others.
Now its 11-person team is ready to take the wraps off what they’ve been building in beta with some of that capital.
Certainly, Grain — which plans to eventually integrate with numerous other companies — could do worse as springboards go than Zoom, one of the rare new breakout platform companies in memory and a tool that, early this week, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison called an “essential service” that will change how work is done.
Zoom has long been powered by viral end user adoption, enjoying growth internally and externally because of the nature of video conferencing across companies. Now, its pick-up as a consumer company is following a similar trajectory, with a high percentage of new users who are invited to Zoom calls eventually signing up for the service so that they can themselves host a call.
If Grain gets lucky, some percentage of that percentage will also discover Grain.
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100 Thieves’ Nadeshot and Scooter Braun are coming to Disrupt
If you’re at all familiar with esports, chances are you’ve heard of 100 Thieves. The esports org, founded by Matthew “Nadeshot” Haag, has grown over the past couple years into an absolute powerhouse of esports and a household name for those who follow gaming.
Which is why we’re thrilled to have Nadeshot and 100 Thieves part owner Scooter Braun join us at Disrupt SF 2019.
Matthew Haag got his start as a pro gamer when esports were still in their infancy. He became one of the most decorated esports athletes in history, serving as Captain of the legendary Optic Gaming CoD team where he led the team to an X Games Gold Medal and a CoD World Championship.
In 2015, Nadeshot retired from competitive gaming and started some of the most-watched YouTube and Twitch channels in the gaming world. A year later, he founded his own esports org with 100 Thieves, which combines streaming content, competitive esports and apparel under a single brand name.
Scooter Braun is one of the biggest names in the entertainment industry, managing megastars like Justin Bieber and Arianna Grande. But Bruan is also the founder of SB Projects, which is a highly diversified media company that focuses on music management, film/TV, as well as Silent Labs, a tech incubator which holds investments in companies like Uber, Spotify, Songza, Casper, Waze, and Pinterest.
Braun is also at the helm of Ithica Holdings, which made waves this year with the acquisition of Big Machine Label Group (Taylor Swift’s former label). Ithica also owns Mythos Studios with Marvel Founding Chairman David Maisel, Atlas Publishing and has partnerships with various management companies.
In 2018, Drake and Scooter Braun became co-owners in 100 Thieves through a $25 million Series A investment.
At Disrupt SF, we’ll ask Braun and Nadeshot about the opportunities ahead in the esports industry, what it’s like to grow a brand and team from scratch, and how they see esports evolving over the next few years.
Nadeshot and Braun join an amazing list of speakers, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Will Smith and Ang Lee, Snap CEO Evan Spiegal, Zola CEO Shan Lyn Ma, and many more.
Disrupt runs October 2 to October 4 right in San Francisco. If you still need tickets, you can pick those up right here.
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Startups Weekly: Diamond-encrusted disruption
Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the week’s noteworthy startups and venture capital news. Before I jump into today’s topic, let’s catch up a bit. Last week, I wrote about the flurry of IPO filings. Before that, I noted the differences between raising cash from angels vs. traditional venture capitalists.
Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter @KateClarkTweets. If you don’t subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do that here.
What’s new
Venture capitalists look for companies poised to disrupt markets untouched by innovative technology. Believe it or not, a very small percentage of jewelry shopping is done online, which means there’s a big opportunity — for the right team — to bring jewelry buyers and sellers to the 21st century.
Enter Pietra, a new startup that’s just raised $4 million in a round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Andrew Chen (Substack & Hipcamp investor). Robert Downey Jr.’s VC fund Downey Ventures and Will Smith’s fund Dreamers Fund also participated, as did Hollywood manager Scooter Braun, Michael Ovitz and supermodel Joan Smalls.
I spoke to the founding team, which includes Uber alum Ronak Trivedi and Ashley Bryan, who hails from fashion e-commerce site Moda Operandi. The pair bring a healthy mix of technology and fashion expertise to the mix. Trivedi tells TechCrunch he’s drawn on his Uber experience to recruit engineers from top tech companies and to advocate for fast growth. Meanwhile, Bryan has leveraged her fashion industry connections to establish relationships with luxury designers.
“Fashion is typically really under-resourced in terms of tech,” Bryan tells TechCrunch. “[The fashion industry] is great at the creativity part but it’s tough, especially with jewelry because you really have to put up a lot of capital.”
Pietra’s plan is to create a high-end marketplace for consumers to connect with jewelry designers. To do this, the team has adopted the standard marketplace approach, taking a 30% marketplace fee from sellers, as well as a 7% fee from buyers commissioning jewelry on the platform.
“Whether you do custom jewelry or engagement jewelry or you do jewelry for celebrities like Drake, you can come on Pietra and connect with a global marketplace,” says Trivedi.
The jewelry market is expected to be worth more than $250 billion by 2020, according to McKinsey research. And where there’s a billion-dollar market, there are VCs.
“Even though gemstones and jewelry have been at the center of art, commerce, and culture since the dawn of human civilization — going from stone jewelry created 40,000 years ago in Africa to the trade routes between East and West to Fifth Avenue in New York to the Instagram feed on your phone — the technology for discovering, designing, and purchasing jewelry online hasn’t evolved much at all,” writes a16z’s Chen, who overlapped with Trivedi during his Uber tenure.
Pietra completed its official launch this week. It has 100 designers on the platform and counting, along with what the founders say is a lengthy waitlist.
In other news
This week I published a long feature on the state of seed investing in the Bay Area. The TL;DR? Mega-funds are increasingly battling seed-stage investors for access to the hottest companies. As a result, seed investors are getting a little more creative about how they source deals. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and everyone wants a stake in The Next Big Thing. Read the story here.
Demo Day
Y Combinator graduated another batch of 200 companies this week. We were there both days, taking notes on each and every company. To make things easy on you, I’ve put together the ultimate YC reading list:
- All 84 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day 1
- All 82 startups from Y Combinator’s Demo Day 2
- The 11 best startups from YC’s Demo Day 1 (Extra Crunch membership required.)
- Our 12 favorite startups from Y Combinator’s S19 Demo Day 2 (Extra Crunch membership required.)
- YC’s Michael Seibel on building startups and early-stage deal-making
- YC is doubling down on these investment theses in its latest batch
Here’s a look at some of the profiles we’ve written on the S19 companies:
- Fresh out of YC, Tandem lands millions from a16z
- Stoic is a journaling app with a focus on understanding your feelings
- Narrator wants to become the operating system for data science
- This startup is building a weed breathalyzer for cops
- Lokal wants to bring local news to 900M Indians in their regional languages
- Holy Grail is using machine learning to build better batteries
- YC’s latest bet is building a cyberpunk anime MMO
- Rent the Backyard wants to build a studio apartment in your yard
- Shiru is developing a protein replacement for food additives
- Lumineye helps first responders identify people through walls
- GradJoy is a fintech startup to help you knock out your student loans
- Traces AI is creating a less invasive alternative to facial recognition tracking
Listen
We recorded two great episodes of Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital podcast, this week. The first was with YC CEO Michael Seibel, in which he speaks to trends at the seed stage of investing, changes at the accelerator program, including its move to San Francisco and more. You can listen to that one here. Plus, we had on Unusual Ventures co-founder and partner John Vrionis, who talked to us about direct listings versus IPOs and the future of DoorDash and Airbnb. You can listen to that one here.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast and Spotify.
Tips for B2B startups
Contributors Tyler Elliston and Kevin Barry share advice for B2B companies: “Over the years, we’ve seen a lot of B2B companies apply ineffective demand generation strategies to their startup. If you’re a B2B founder trying to grow your business, this guide is for you. Rule #1: B2B is not B2C. We are often dealing with considered purchases, multiple stakeholders, long decision cycles, and massive LTVs. These unique attributes matter when developing a growth strategy. We’ll share B2B best practices we’ve employed while working with awesome B2B companies like Zenefits, Crunchbase, Segment, OnDeck, Yelp, Kabbage, Farmers Business Network, and many more.” Read the full story here. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
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Where top VCs are investing in media, entertainment & gaming
Most of the strategy discussions and news coverage in the media and entertainment industry is concerned with the unfolding corporate mega-mergers and the political implications of social media platforms.
These are important conversations, but they’re largely a story of twentieth-century media (and broader society) finally responding to the dominance Web 2.0 companies have achieved.
To entrepreneurs and VCs, the more pressing focus is on what the next generation of companies to transform entertainment will look like. Like other sectors, the underlying force is advances in artificial intelligence and computing power.
In this context, that results in a merging of gaming and linear storytelling into new interactive media. To highlight the opportunities here, I asked nine top VCs to share where they are putting their money.
Here are the media investment theses of: Cyan Banister (Founders Fund), Alex Taussig (Lightspeed), Matt Hartman (betaworks), Stephanie Zhan (Sequoia), Jordan Fudge (Sinai), Christian Dorffer (Sweet Capital), Charles Hudson (Precursor), MG Siegler (GV), and Eric Hippeau (Lerer Hippeau).
Cyan Banister, Partner at Founders Fund
“In 2018 I was obsessed with the idea of how you can bring AI and entertainment together. Having made early investments in Brud, A.I. Foundation, Artie and Fable, it became clear that the missing piece behind most AR experiences was a lack of memory.
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On-demand Alcohol Delivery Startup Saucey Drinks To $4.5 Million In Seed Funding
Los Angeles-based on-demand alcohol startup Saucey has delivered good times in a bottle since 2013 but held off raising VC funding till now. The service just pulled in $4.5 million in seed money to make its platform more efficient. Saucey origins begin with three buddies who worked together and liked to imbibe after a long day. Founders Chris Vaughn, Daniel Leeb and Andrew Zeck were… Read More
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