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Former Stitch Fix COO Julie Bornstein just took the wraps off her app-only e-commerce startup, The Yes
After teasing the launch of their new startup last year, e-commerce veteran Julie Bornstein and her technical co-founder, Amit Aggarwal, are today launching The Yes, a women’s shopping platform that they’ve been quietly building for 18 months and they say will create tailor-made experiences for each user, courtesy of its sophisticated algorithms.
Bornstein’s experience and vision alone attracted $30 million in funding to the venture last year from Forerunner Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and True Ventures, among others. To learn more about how it breaks through in a world rife with e-commerce companies, we talked with Bornstein, who previously spent four years as COO of the styling service Stitch Fix and before that spent years as a C-level executive at Sephora. We wondered specifically how The Yes differs from Stitch Fix, given that both companies use data science to discover clothing for shoppers based on their size, budget and style.
Aside from the fact that The Yes is taking an app-only approach (unlike Stitch Fix), and doesn’t have a subscription model, Bornstein says that The Yes is very much focused on people “who want to shop” versus those who want their shopping done for them. Yet that’s just the start of what makes The Yes different than its other predecessors, said Bornstein in a conversation that follows below, edited lightly for length.
TC: You’re building what you call a store around each user, who downloads the app, answers questions that provide a lot of “signal” about that person’s style and brand preferences and size and budget, and that’s adaptive, meaning the algorithm is always re-ranking products as it learns better what a person likes. What demographic are you targeting?
JB: It’s women of a very broad age range, from 25 to 75, who care about fashion, whether they’re an in-the-know-on-everything fashionista or they just want to look great. And you can shop high/low, which is how most women shop these days. So it depends what you’re looking for.
TC: It sounds like you’re selling women’s apparel exclusively to start. Are you also selling handbags? Jewelry? Accessories?
JB: We’re focused on fashion and footwear, and we have accessories and handbags. A lot of our brands have great handbags. Then we will be expanding more to jewelry and other accessory categories over time.
TC: What brands can shoppers find on the platform?
JB: We have 145 brands at launch, ranging from Gucci, Prada and Erdem to contemporary brands like Vince and Theory to direct-to-consumer brands like Everlane and La Ligne to everyday brands like Levis. When a brand integrates with The Yes, the platform sells each brand’s full digital catalog.
TC: Why go app only?
Most of the e-commerce sites that have mobile presence really feel like a website converted to a small screen. We [thought if we] challenged ourselves to leverage the technology of the native app environment, [we] could build a much slicker experience for the user. We also know that mobile is growing. It’s about 50% of total purchases now in fashion and growing faster, so while we know that web will be important to add, we really felt like mobile and iOS were the places to start.
TC: Stitch Fix uses machine learning to analyze customer tastes, but it ultimately relies on human stylists to choose items. What new advances have been made in AI that can allow The Yes to actually pick products using artificial intelligence? Isn’t fashion, like music, a “noisy” problem, with consumers often not knowing what they want?
JB: It’s such a nuanced area and really hard to do in the form of recommendations, but there are a number of reasons that enable us to do it. One is we had to build the most extensive taxonomy that exists in fashion. We did think a lot about the music genome project that Pandora did and all the work that Spotify has done. Music is definitely one of our inspirations. And if you look at what they did, they had some human expertise in the beginning, creating these categories, and then the machine learned on top of it, and we have done the same in fashion. So we had fashion expertise build our initial taxonomy.
Then we leveraged both machine learning and computer vision to train models to understand how to absorb all pieces of data related to a product, as well as the image itself and how to read images. And it gave us a really strong understanding of 500 dimensions for every single item. [Meanwhile] to understand what the consumer cares about, we spent a lot of time testing and learning which questions [to ask] when it comes to brand and price and things like color and style and size and fit…
TC: Because of your background, comparisons are probably going to be made between The Yes and Stitch Fix. What was the impetus for this new business? Was it a matter of eliminating that personal touch?
JB: I had such a great experience at Stitch Fix, and I’m still a shareholder and a big fan of the company and the team. And I think what they’re doing, what they continue to do, is terrific in really pushing the boundary on this concept of shopping-as-a-service.
What I am working on, and our team is really focused on, is the actual consumer shopping experience for consumers who want to shop. There’s a strong percent of the population who really loves to shop and wants agency in their own selection, and that is really the consumer we’re going after.
TC: You’re launching with roughly 150 brands. What is your relationship with them? Are you taking a cut of a transaction? Are you ever taking possession of their products? Do you have a warehouse or warehouses?
There were two things coming into this business that I wanted to avoid based on my personal experience, which was one, owning inventory, and two, reshooting every item for its own new photographs on the site. Pinterest and Instagram and all these other visual sites have shown us that the brands spend a lot of money shooting images to look a certain way to help communicate what their brand is all about. So leveraging those assets has been terrific.
[Regarding inventory], there’s no reason to ship the product from the brand to another warehouse and then to the consumer. We’re cutting out that stuff and shipping it direct from the brand. From a consumer standpoint, you order on our app, and everything is one-click, and you are charged by [us]. But then the order is placed through the brand and is shipped from the brand to you. Then we will communicate to you when it’s shipped, when it’s arriving, and if you have any customer service issues, we take care of it.
And we take a flat commission [on sales].
TC: Returns are free. But isn’t that a huge cost center, and might it deter people from returning items if you charged something for returns?
JB: My feeling is that free shipping and free returns is a baseline requirement to offer a great service. And it’s our job to help match [shoppers] to product that you’re not going to return. We have an enormous goal to have the lowest return rate in the industry. It will obviously take us some time to get there. But we believe that by making sure that we understand what works for you and what doesn’t, we can get [there].
TC: You raised $30 million last year. Are you in the market for a Series B? What will you have to show investors toward that end?
JB: The logic behind the dollar amount that we raised was: how much do we need to build what we want to build, and then bring it to market and get traction? And so that is our goal that starts tomorrow. . .
TC: How has this current reality altered your plans? Launching during a pandemic isn’t what you were imagining, obviously.
JB: No, it is not. [Laughs.] I don’t know that any of us could have possibly. We did delay our launch; we were originally launching in March, and once COVID hit, we needed to make sure we could see straight and understand the impact. I think as time has passed, we have felt more and more compelled to get out there to help our brands, all of whom are feeling the impact of the retail stores closing, or orders being canceled by their retail partners. They’re all businesses and many of them small businesses, so we want to help them.
It’s also an interesting time because we all need a little bit of levity and escape. And the app really is a fun escape.
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Spotify Kids app rolls out blocking, listening history features for parents
Spotify is expanding the capabilities of its parental controls on its Spotify Kids app, aimed at children ages 3 and up on a parent’s Spotify Premium Family plan. Before, parents could only select whether the child was directed to the experience for younger or older children. Now, they’ll be able to specifically block content from their child’s account when accessing the child’s listening history.
These features had been hinted at when Spotify Kids made its U.S. debut in March. At the time, Spotify said it heard from parents testing the app in other markets how they wanted to have even more control over the app’s included content. Though the company didn’t detail its plans then, it did say new features would involve allowing parents making more specific choices over what their child could stream.
Both new features are now included in the PIN-protected “Grown Ups” section, previously called the “Parental Settings.” Once there, a parent can select which child’s account they want to to update or view.
The Listening History option will allow them to view every track the child has streamed on the Spotify Kids app over the past three months. From here, a parent can also opt to select a track and block it by tapping the “block” icon next to the track in question.
These blocked tracks are then removed from the child’s account and can’t be streamed. However, parents can unblock the track further down the road if they choose, by accessing either the Listening History section or the Blocked Tracks section and tapping the red icon next to each track.
Spotify says these new features are the first step in many planned updates for its Kids application, which today includes more than 8,000 kid-appropriate songs, stories, audiobooks and sounds that are curated into 125+ playlists. Though the app is aimed at kids young and old, many children will age out of it around their tweens, despite its support for an “older kids” experience. That’s because kids have established some favorite artists and musical preferences by then, and the more limited catalog on Spotify Kids doesn’t deliver. Plus, the downside of hand-curation means newly emerging hits — like, say, those blowing up on TikTok — may not make an appearance on Spotify Kids until later.
While it makes sense that Spotify would focus more immediately on parental controls catering to parents of the younger children, in time being able to go the other direction — perhaps a whitelisting option or the import of pre-approved playlists — would be appreciated by parents of older kids.
The Spotify Kids app is now live across 14 global markets, including as of today, Japan and Germany.
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Spotify launches its promised fundraising feature for artists
Last month, Spotify announced that as part of its coronavirus relief efforts it would soon add new fundraising features for artists on its platform. Today, the company is following through with the launch of “Artist Fundraising Pick,” a feature that allows artists to fundraise for themselves, their crews, or one of the verified music relief initiatives Spotify has already vetted through the Spotify COVID-19 Music Relief project.
At launch, Spotify is working with a small group of fundraising partners to make the donation process easier, including Cash App, GoFundMe, and PayPal.me.
Cash App is currently Spotify’s preferred method, as it has also established a $1 million relief effort for artists. When Spotify artists choose their “$cashtag” as their Artist Fundraising Pick and secure at least one donation of any size, they’ll receive an additional $100 in their account from Cash App up until a collective total of $1 million has been contributed. This works for artists in the U.S. and U.K., but Spotify users worldwide can donate through Cash App.
To use the new fundraising tools, artists (or Spotify for Artists admin users) will go to their Artist dashboard and click “Get started” on the banner at the top to submit their Fundraising Pick. This is a similar process as to how artists choose which track they want to display on their profile.
Once live, fans can donate to the cause through the artist’s profile. In addition to Cash App, PayPal is broadly available and GoFundMe is available in 19 markets.
If the artist chooses to raise for a music relief organization, they can select from those associated with Spotify’s existing charity project, which launched last month in partnership with MusiCares, PRS Foundation, and Help Musicians. It has now expanded to include a wider range of participating organizations, including several local options, and is continuing to grow.
At launch, a handful of artists already have the new feature live, including Tyrese Pope and Boy Scouts who are fundraising through Cash App; Marshmello who is fundraising for MusiCares; and Benjamin Ingrosso who is fundraising for Musikerforbundet.
Spotify says it moved to quickly launch this feature because it believed it was in a unique position to help artists raise money from a global network of fans. However, it cautions that it’s never built a fundraising feature like this before, and considers this a “first version.” Over time, the feature will likely evolve and update based on artist feedback.
“This is an incredibly difficult time for many Spotify users and people around the world — and there are many worthy causes to support at this time,” the company wrote in an announcement. “With this feature, we simply hope to enable those who have the interest and means to support artists in this time of great need, and to create another opportunity for our COVID-19 Music Relief partners to find the financial support they need to continue working in music and lift our industry,” it said.
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Sonos launches Sonos Radio, a free streaming radio service including artist and genre stations
Sonos has launched its first in-house music streaming offering: Sonos Radio, a digital streaming radio service that includes both existing radio stations from TuneIn and iHeartRadio, as well as its own original programming through three new products including two ad-free offerings and one ad-supported option.
The original streaming options from Sonos include Sonos Sound System; an ad-free single station hosted by Sonos itself, that will play “new and well-known” music, along with snippets of stories from artists about their music, as well as hours guest-hosted by select artists themselves. Sonos says this is all about mixing crowd-pleasers with the occasional song you might’ve missed, in a bid to create a single stream that will have broad appeal.
There’s also Artist Stations, which also don’t have any ads, and which are hand-curated by artists and feature a selection of songs they love or that have inspired them. The first such station, debuting with the Sonos Radio launch, is Thom Yorke’s ‘In the Absence Thereof…’, and there are more to follow in the “coming weeks,” including stations from Brittany Howard of Alabama Shakes, David Byrne and more.
The final component of the original Sonos streaming content is Sonos Stations, which include over 30 dedicated genre stations. These are also free, but are ad-supported, so you’ll hear the occasional promotional message throughout the stream, kind of like you get with Spotify’s free tier.
To date, Sonos has acted strictly as an integrator for the services of others, operating the platform layer to provide in-house, multi-room streaming via its Sonos speaker and audio equipment products. This marks its first foray into doing something on the services side, so it’s a big change. I asked about whether this signals further moves into streaming, including through a potential paid premium offering with on-demand content, which would more directly compete with some of its biggest partners including Apple, Google and Spotify, and Sonos Product Marketing Director Ryan Richards didn’t shut the door on that possibility.
“This is about lean-back listening, it’s about discovery,” he said. “There are a lot of options for active listening out there, too, and so what we’re really focused on is first and foremost making the best possible radio service for our customers. In the future, we’ll see how that changes, but that’s what we’re focused on now.”
At launch, the global radio option backed by iHeartRadio and TuneIn will be available globally, but Sonos Radio’s original products will only be available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Ireland and Australia, with the company planning to expand availability in future. Its in-house offerings are powered by a deal with Napster to use their streaming catalog, and Richards told me that that arrangement also bounds the availability of the services. Sonos is working on signing up additional streaming licensing partners for an expanded geographic footprint and catalogue size, however.
The new Sonos Radio features won’t be compatible with voice control via either Google Assistant or Amazon’s Alexa on Sonos hardware that supports that at launch, though Richards says the company is looking at adding that as a future feature update. Sonos also acquired a startup that built its own smart voice assistant last November, so that could potentially still result in another in-house offering to lessen its reliance on partners at some point in the future.
To get access, anyone with a Sonos system should see the new offering in their Sonos app via a software update available today.
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Players Ntwrk launches celebrity gaming channel backed by WME, Daylight and Stratton Sclavos
Emerging from the smoldering wreckage of Echo Fox and Vision Venture Partners, the investor Stratton Sclavos is rising again to launch a new esports-related venture — a gaming-focused digital network also backed by the WME talent agency and Daylight Holdings.
Tapping Daylight and WME’s roster of talent, Sclavos has created Players Ntwrk, a new gaming-focused production company that will look to compete with other upstarts angling to tap into esports and competitive gaming’s newly dominant place in the entertainment firmament.
Players Ntwrk will feature original programming, unscripted series, celebrity gameplay and live events tapping talent from music, traditional pro-sports and the esports gaming world.
Sclavos and the multifaceted talent manager and president of Daylight Holdings, Ben Curtis, dreamed up Players Ntwrk as a way to tie together disparate groups of athletes and entertainers around their shared love of gaming and entertainment. The network will initially leverage relationships with WME and Klutch Sports Group, the agency founded by LeBron James’ longtime manager, Rich Paul, to find talent for programming.
The network will launch on Tuesday at 5:00 pm Pacific for two hours of gameplay featuring the New Orleans Pelicans Guard/Forward Josh Hart and Sacramento Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox on the Players Ntwrk Twitch channel. Additional live streams will be broadcast Friday and Saturday, the company said.
Over the next 12 weeks the network will add live programming featuring all of its “First Squad” talent and experimenting with different gaming and unscripted formats. Ultimately, the network will produce between 12 and 15 hours of original programming per week by the end of the second quarter and will ramp up to 20 to 24 hours of programming per-week by the end of the year.
Initial programming is going to be devoted to charity fundraising, with proceeds going to designated charities based on direct audience donations, the company said.
Players Ntwrk’s First Squad talent roster includes:
- Professional athletes: De’Aaron Fox (Sacramento Kings), Josh Hart (New Orleans Pelicans), Jarvis Landry (Cleveland Browns) and Alvin Kamara (New Orleans Saints)
- Music and Entertainment: PARTYNEXTDOOR, Murda Beatz, producer Boi-1da, actor/former athlete Donovan Carter (Ballers)
- Creators/Streamers: KatGunn, Sodapoppin, Cash, Jesser, Jericho, Octane, Sigils, Sonii and DenkOps
Players Ntwrk joins companies like Venn, which are angling to gain a slice of the roughly 37.5 million monthly viewers that are expected to watch live streams on Twitch by the end of 2020, according to research done by eMarketer.
“The number of viewers and subscribers consuming gaming entertainment across YouTube and Twitch tops other entertainment services such as Netflix, HBO, Spotify and ESPN combined,” said Sclavos, in a statement. “Entertainment spectacle is trumping hardcore gaming competition. That kind of engagement makes it clear; gaming entertainment is the next pop culture phenomena. PLAYERS NTWRK is the only platform embracing and executing this new reality by creating original content with the most influential people who also happen to be fans themselves.”
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Equity Monday: Two early-stage rounds, grocery delivery and SoftBank’s bill
Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week.
Before we jump into today’s show, don’t forget that the long-form Equity that started in the unicorn era and continue in today’s changed world still drops on Friday. We had a blast last week, so make sure to catch up.
That said, there was a lot to go over this morning, so let’s get into what we had to discuss:
- Global spend patterns are changing, helping some startups and slowing others. But notable in the mix is how well grocery delivery is doing; if the change will be enough to turn uncertain bets like Instacart into sure things, however, is not yet clear.
- Earnings are finally nearly here. We’ll see the big names start to disclose results next week. In the next three weeks or so we’ll hear from Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Netflix and Spotify. The results will help us understand how the market is doing; and, by proxy, how startups are performing.
- Quoting from our script this morning: “Would it be great to know how startups are doing without resorting to our chronic use of public proxies? Yes. Any startup who wants to kick off that trend can send in reports of how their Q1 went and what they expect in Q2 and the other two quarters of 2020 to EquityPod@TechCrunch.com. That’s probably the easiest way to get your company on the show, so, please do write in with specifics.”
- We took a look at the latest rounds from Kargo and Pangea.app.
- Finally, SoftBank’s huge Vision Fund bill is coming due. I almost can’t believe these numbers. What a mess.
And that’s the show for today. Stay safe, and we’ll be back Friday morning to cap off whatever this week winds up becoming.
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Spotify rolls out a more personalized home screen to users worldwide
Spotify has been slowly rolling out a redesigned mobile app in small sections — first with an update to podcast pages, then to other parts of the experience. Today, the company is revamping the most critical part of the Spotify app: the home screen. Now, when Spotify users launch the app, they’ll notice the new home screen greets them depending on what time of day it is with a “Good Morning,” “Good Afternoon” or “Good Evening,” for example. But the screen’s content and recommendations will also change with the time of day, Spotify says, and the content has also been better organized so you more easily jump back in or browse recommendations from the main page.
Before, Spotify’s home screen emphasized your listening history by putting at the top of the page things like your “Recently Played,” “Your Top Podcasts” and “Your Heavy Rotation.”
Effectively, the update separates the app’s home screen into two main parts: familiar content on top and new or recommended content on the bottom half.
Now, the home screen reserves six spots underneath the daily greeting where you can continue with things like the podcast you stream every morning, your workout playlist or the album you’ve been listening to on heavy rotation this week. This content will update as your day progresses to better match your activities and interests, based on prior behavior.
Beneath these six spots, the home page will display other things like your top podcasts, “made for you” playlists, recommendations for new discoveries based on your listening and more.
The concept for the new home screen is similar to what Pandora recently rolled out with its personalized “For You” tab late last year. Like Spotify, Pandora’s tab also customizes the content displayed based on the time of day, in addition to the day of the week and other predictions it can make about a customer’s mood or potential activity, based on prior listening data.
Pandora’s revamp led to double the number of users engaging with the personalized page, compared with the old Browse experience, it says. Spotify, too, is likely hoping to see a similar bump in usage and engagement, as users won’t have to dart around the app as much to find their favorite content or recommendations. That way, they’ll be able to start streaming more quickly after the app is launched, potentially leading to longer sessions and more discovery of new content.
Spotify to date has defined itself by its advanced personalization and recommendation technology, but its app hasn’t always been the easiest to use and navigate — especially in comparison to its top U.S. rival, Apple Music, which favors a simpler and cleaner look-and-feel. Its recent changes have tried to address this problem by making its various parts and pages easier to use.
Spotify says the updated home screen will roll out starting today to all global users with at least 30 days of listening history.
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Datastax acquires The Last Pickle
Data management company Datastax, one of the largest contributors to the Apache Cassandra project, today announced that it has acquired The Last Pickle (and no, I don’t know what’s up with that name either), a New Zealand-based Cassandra consulting and services firm that’s behind a number of popular open-source tools for the distributed NoSQL database.
As Datastax Chief Strategy Officer Sam Ramji, who you may remember from his recent tenure at Apigee, the Cloud Foundry Foundation, Google and Autodesk, told me, The Last Pickle is one of the premier Apache Cassandra consulting and services companies. The team there has been building Cassandra-based open source solutions for the likes of Spotify, T Mobile and AT&T since it was founded back in 2012. And while The Last Pickle is based in New Zealand, the company has engineers all over the world that do the heavy lifting and help these companies successfully implement the Cassandra database technology.
It’s worth mentioning that Last Pickle CEO Aaron Morton first discovered Cassandra when he worked for WETA Digital on the special effects for Avatar, where the team used Cassandra to allow the VFX artists to store their data.
“There’s two parts to what they do,” Ramji explained. “One is the very visible consulting, which has led them to become world experts in the operation of Cassandra. So as we automate Cassandra and as we improve the operability of the project with enterprises, their embodied wisdom about how to operate and scale Apache Cassandra is as good as it gets — the best in the world.” And The Last Pickle’s experience in building systems with tens of thousands of nodes — and the challenges that its customers face — is something Datastax can then offer to its customers as well.
And Datastax, of course, also plans to productize The Last Pickle’s open-source tools like the automated repair tool Reaper and the Medusa backup and restore system.
As both Ramji and Datastax VP of Engineering Josh McKenzie stressed, Cassandra has seen a lot of commercial development in recent years, with the likes of AWS now offering a managed Cassandra service, for example, but there wasn’t all that much hype around the project anymore. But they argue that’s a good thing. Now that it is over ten years old, Cassandra has been battle-hardened. For the last ten years, Ramji argues, the industry tried to figure out what the de factor standard for scale-out computing should be. By 2019, it became clear that Kubernetes was the answer to that.
“This next decade is about what is the de facto standard for scale-out data? We think that’s got certain affordances, certain structural needs and we think that the decades that Cassandra has spent getting harden puts it in a position to be data for that wave.”
McKenzie also noted that Cassandra provides users with a number of built-in features like support for mutiple data centers and geo-replication, rolling updates and live scaling, as well as wide support across programming languages, give it a number of advantages over competing databases.
“It’s easy to forget how much Cassandra gives you for free just based on its architecture,” he said. “Losing the power in an entire datacenter, upgrading the version of the database, hardware failing every day? No problem. The cluster is 100 percent always still up and available. The tooling and expertise of The Last Pickle really help bring all this distributed and resilient power into the hands of the masses.”
The two companies did not disclose the price of the acquisition.
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Spotify mimics Apple’s design with new podcast show page updates
Spotify’s ongoing investments in the podcast-streaming side of its business helped boost podcast listening on its service by 200% last year. But today, only 16% of Spotify’s monthly listeners are engaging with podcasts — a number the company today hopes to nudge higher by redesigning the podcast side of its streaming app. The new layout now makes it easier to view information about podcasts and improves discovery of new shows.
In particular, Spotify has given podcast show trailers a more prominent position in its app.
Show trailers help podcasts find new listeners by offering a concise introduction to the podcast and its creators. A good trailer hooks listeners on the show’s concept by selling its strengths, or even by offering a snippet of content that makes listeners hungry to hear more.
In the updated version of Spotify’s app, these trailers are labeled “trailer” and are highlighted at the top of the episode list, separated from the content as Apple does in its own podcasts app.
The belief here is that listeners need an easier way to check out the different podcasts out there, without having to commit to full episodes. That’s more important than ever as Spotify’s podcast library expands. The app’s catalog now has more than 700,000 podcasts across all sorts of topics — a figure that’s growing quickly. In January, Spotify was at the Consumer Electronics Show touting its “over 500,000” podcasts. By the time of this month’s earnings, it was using the higher number.
Also to aid in discovery, Spotify is adding descriptive show categories underneath the show’s description. These will be simple labels, like “true crime,” “personal stories,” “travel,” “relationships” and more. This change is also focused on catching up with market leader Apple Podcasts, which already categorizes its podcasts in a similar way.
The other major change is to the landing page for podcast shows in Spotify, which are getting a revamp to be more readable at a glance.
The updated layout has moved the descriptions up to the top of the page, so you don’t have to swipe on a show to read about it. Before, Spotify would display the podcast’s thumbnail image at the top, and you’d swipe left to view the description. Now, the layout looks more like — yes, you guessed it — Apple Podcasts.
The combined changes do make Spotify’s app more usable for podcast listening and discovery — especially for people who are used to Apple Podcasts’ design and layout but are now making the jump to Spotify. However, Spotify’s real advantage in podcasts isn’t just how it can mimic Apple’s better design, but how it’s catering to creators, investing in originals and exclusives, personalizing its recommendations and, now, its ads.
Spotify says the redesign is rolling out to its mobile app starting today.
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Lucky coffee, unicorn stumbles and Sam Altman’s YC wager
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week we had TechCrunch’s Alex Wilhelm and Danny Crichton on hand to dig into the news, with Chris Gates on the dials and more news than we could possibly cram into 30 minutes. So we went a bit over; sorry about that.
We kicked off by running through a few short-forms to get things going, including:
- Alex wanted to talk about his recent story on Lily AI’s $12.5 million Series A. Canaan led the round into the e-commerce-focused recommendation engine that has a cool take on what people care about.
- Danny talked about the acquisition of Armis Security by Insight for $1.1 billion, the VC round for self-driving forklift startup Vecna and an outside-the-Valley round for Houston-based HighRadius.
Turning to longer cuts, the team dug into the latest from SoftBank, its Vision Fund and the successes and struggles of its enormous startup bets. Leading the news cycle this week were layoffs at Zume, a robotic pizza delivery venture that is no longer pursuing robotic pizza delivery. Now it’s working on sustainable packaging. Cool, but it’s going to be hard for the company to grow into its valuation while pivoting.
Other issues have come up — more here — that paint some cracks onto the Vision Fund’s sunny exterior. Don’t be too beguiled by the bad news, Danny says; venture funds run like J-Curves, and there are still winners in that particular portfolio.
After that, we turned to China, in particular its venture slowdown. The bubble, in Danny’s view, has burst. The story discussed is here, if you want to read it. The short version for the lazy is that not only has China’s venture scene slowed down dramatically, but startups — even those with ample capital raised — are dying by the hundred. But one highly caffeinated Chinese startup continues to find growth in the world’s greatest tea market.
Finally we hit on the Sam Altman wager and the latest from Sisense, which is now a unicorn. All that and we had some fun.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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