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Papaya Global raises $100M more at a $1B+ valuation for tools to hire, pay and manage distributed workforces
Remote working — hiring people further afield and letting people work outside of a central physical office — is looking like it will be here to stay, and today one of the startups building tools for that environment is announcing a big fundraise in response to the opportunity.
Papaya Global, an Israeli startup that provides cloud-based payroll and hiring, onboarding and compliance services across 140 countries for organizations that employ full-time, part-time and contract workers outside of their home country, has picked up $100 million in funding and has confirmed that its valuation is now over $1 billion.
The company targets organizations that not only have global workforces, but are expanding their employee bases quickly. They include fast-growing startups like OneTrust, nCino and Hopin (which today announced a monster $400 million round), as well as major corporates like Toyota, Microsoft, Wix and General Dynamics.
Papaya is not disclosing revenue numbers but said that sales have grown 300% year-over-year for each of the last three years.
Led by Greenoaks Capital Partners, this Series C also includes significant participation from IVP and Alkeon Capital. Previous backers Insight Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, Dynamic Loop, New Era and Workday Ventures, Access Ventures and Group 11 also chipped in. The new investment brings Papaya’s total funding to $190 million.
Papaya has been on a fundraising tear in the last 18 months. Today’s news comes less than six months after it raised a $40 million Series B. And that round came less than a year after a $45 million Series A.
Why so much, so quickly? Partly because of the demands on the business, but possibly also to capitalize on an opportunity at a time when so many others are also going after it as well.
The opportunity is that companies and other organizations are finding themselves needing tools to address the current state of play: Workforce growth today doesn’t look like it did in 2019, and so incumbent solutions like ADP, or cobbled together solutions covering multiple geographies, either don’t cut it, or are too costly to maintain.
Papaya Global, in contrast, says it has built an AI-based platform that automates a lot of work and removes much of the manual activity that comes out of trying to right-size a lot of legacy payroll products to work in new paradigms.
“The major impact of COVID-19 for us has been changing attitudes,” CEO Eynat Guez, who co-founded the company with Ruben Drong and Ofer Herman, told me in an interview last September. “People usually think that payroll works by itself, but it’s one of the more complex parts of the organization, covering major areas like labor, accounting, tax. Eight months ago, a lot of clients thought, it just happens. But now they realize they didn’t have control of the data, some don’t even have a handle on who is being paid.”
One challenge, however, is that many others are also chasing these customers in hopes of becoming the ADP of distributed and global work.
Last month, a startup called Oyster, also aimed at distributed workforces, raised $20 million. Others in the same area that have raised lots of capital include Turing, Deel, Remote, Hibob, Personio, Factorial, Lattice, Turing and Rippling.
And as we have pointed out before, these are just some of the HR startups that have raised money in the last year. There are many, many more.
Investors here are hoping that as we see some consolidation emerge out of this mix, there will be a few leaders and that Papaya will be one of them.
“Papaya Global has built a best in class solution to onboard new employees, automate payroll, and manage a global workforce through a single pane of glass. Both growing and established companies have dramatically changed their working practices in recent years, and Papaya has seen impressive growth as a result. We’re excited to continue supporting them as they seek to simplify an increasingly complex challenge for some of the world’s biggest companies,” said Patrick Backhouse, partner at Greenoaks Capital, in a statement.
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Personio raises $125M on a $1.7B valuation for an HR platform targeting SMEs
With the last year changing how (and where) many of us work, organizations have started to rethink how well they manage their employees, and what tools they use to do that. Today, one of the startups that is building technology to address this challenge is announcing a major round of funding that underscores its traction to date.
Personio — the German startup that targets small- and medium-sized businesses (10-2,000 employees) with an all-in-one HR platform covering recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking and other major HR functions — has picked up $125 million in funding at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.
The Series D is being co-led by Index Ventures and Meritech, with previous backers Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Global Founders Capital and Picus all participating.
The $1.7 billion valuation is a big jump on the company’s $500 million valuation a year ago, and it comes after a year where the startup has doubled its revenues and was not on the hunt to raise, with much of its previous fundraising still in the bank.
Personio currently counts some 3,000 SMEs in Europe as customers.
In an interview, Hanno Renner, the co-founder and CEO of Personio, said that the startup would be using the funding to continue building out the product — which operates a little like Workday, but built for much smaller organizations — as well as expanding its presence in Europe.
Although SMEs can be a notoriously challenging customer segment, Renner said that a new opportunity has emerged: A new wave of people in the SME sector have started to realise the value of having a modern and integrated HR platform.
“We started Personio in 2016 wanting to become the leading HR platform for midmarket companies, and we knew it could be a great company, but we realize it can be hard to grasp what HR really means,” he said. “But I think what has driven our business in the past year has been the realization that HR is not just an important part, but maybe the most important part, of any business.”
It may take one magic turn to convert users, he said, by providing (as one example) tools to recruit, sign contracts and onboard new employees remotely. Still, he acknowledges that the midmarket — especially those companies not built around technology — has been “lagging for years,” with many still working off Excel spreadsheets, or even more surprisingly, pen and paper. “Supporting them by helping them to digitize in a more efficient way has been driving our business.”
Personio is not the only startup hopeful that the shift in how we work will bring a new appreciation (and appetite) for purchasing HR tools. Others like Hibob have also seen a big boost in their business and have also been raising money to tap into the opportunity more aggressively.
Hibob is looking to build in more training tools, underscoring the feature race that Personio will also have to run to keep up.
But given the sheer numbers of SMBs in the European market — more than 25 million, and accounting for more than 99% of all enterprises, according to research from the European Union — the fact that many of them have yet to adopt any kind of HR platform at all, there remains a lot of growth for a number of players.
“SMEs are the backbone of the European economy, employing 100 million people across the continent, but it is also a sector that has been neglected by software companies focused predominantly on large enterprises,” Martin Mignot, a partner at Index who sits on Personio’s board, said in a statement. “Personio changes that, having created a set of powerful tools tailored to address the needs of small businesses.”
“We have had the pleasure of working with some of the most successful SaaS companies in the world, and given Personio’s success over the past five years and the immense market potential, we strongly believe in Personio’s ability to build an equally successful and impactful business,” added Alex Clayton, general partner at Meritech Capital, in his own statement. “After many great discussions with Hanno over recent years, we are now excited to be joining the journey.” Clayton is also joining the board with this round.
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Student-founded Develop for Good surpasses 25,000 volunteer hours connecting students with nonprofits
This has been the year of the social organization. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world and the United States, governments and a patchwork of nonprofits and volunteer organizations sprang into action, offering everything from food and medical supplies to children’s books and clothing to individuals and families struggling in the virus’s wake.
Perhaps the biggest divide though to getting people help has been digital — non-profits need to connect with their beneficiaries over the internet just as much as any retailer today. Unfortunately, tech talent is expensive and hard to find, particularly for often cash-strapped nonprofits.
That was part of the impetus for two Stanford seniors, Mary Zhu and Amay Aggarwal, to co-found Develop for Good, a matching service designed to connect motivated and ambitious undergrads in computer science, design and economics to nonprofits with specific projects that require expertise. They launched the network in March as the pandemic started spreading rapidly, and since then, the organization has itself started growing exponentially as well.
Develop for Good “was in response to [the pandemic], but at the same time, a lot of our peers were having their internships canceled, [and] a lot of companies were having hiring freezes,” Zhu explained. “People were also seeking opportunities to be able to develop their professional skills and develop their project experience.” This coincidence of needs among both students and nonprofits helped accelerate the matching that Develop for Good offers.
So far, the 501(c)(3) non-profit has coordinated more than 25,000 volunteer hours across groups like the Ronald McDonald House, UNICEF, the Native American Rights Fund (NARF), Easterseals, The Nature Conservancy, Save the Children, AARP and more. The program, which in its first batch focused on Zhu and Aggarwal’s network at Stanford, has since expanded to more than a dozen schools across the United States. The two first reached out to nonprofits through Stanford’s alumni network, although as the program’s reputation has grown, they have started getting inbound interest as well.
Volunteers take on a project for 5-10 hours per week for 10 weeks, typically in teams. Each team meets their nonprofit client at least weekly to ensure the project matches expectations. Typical projects include application development, data visualization, and web design. Most projects conclude at the end of the batch, although the founders note that some in-depth projects like product development can cross over into future batches. As the program has expanded, Zhu and Aggarwal have added a more formal mentorship component to the program to help guide students through their work.
Applications for the next batch starting in January are currently open for students (they’re due January 2nd, so get them in quick!). The founders told me that they are expecting 800 applications, and are likely going to be able to match about 200 volunteers to 32 projects. Applications are mostly about matching interests with potential programs for the best fit, rather than a purely competitive exercise. So far, the program has worked on 50 projects to date.
For this next batch, Amazon Web Services will sponsor a stipend for first-generation and low-income students to help defray the financial impact of volunteer work for some students. “Over the past cycle, a few people had to drop out because they said, ‘they’re unable to work for free because they’re having a lot of financial stress for their families’,” Aggarwal said. The new stipend is meant to help these students continue to volunteer while alleviating some of that financial burden.
Aggarwal said that two-thirds of the program’s volunteer developers and designers are female, and one-third are first-generation or low-income.
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Turing nabs $32M more for an AI-based platform to source and manage engineers remotely
As remote work continues to solidify its place as a critical aspect of how businesses exist these days, a startup that has built a platform to help companies source and bring on one specific category of remote employees — engineers — is taking on some more funding to meet demand.
Turing — which has built an AI-based platform to help evaluate prospective, but far-flung, engineers, bring them together into remote teams, then manage them for the company — has picked up $32 million in a Series B round of funding led by WestBridge Capital. Its plan is as ambitious as the world it is addressing is wide: an AI platform to help define the future of how companies source IT talent to grow.
“They have a ton of experience in investing in global IT services, companies like Cognizant and GlobalLogic,” said co-founder and CEO Jonathan Siddharth of its lead investor in an interview the other day. “We see Turing as the next iteration of that model. Once software ate the IT services industry, what would Accenture look like?”
It currently has a database of some 180,000 engineers covering around 100 or so engineering skills, including React, Node, Python, Agular, Swift, Android, Java, Rails, Golang, PHP, Vue, DevOps, machine learning, data engineering and more.
In addition to WestBridge, other investors in this round included Foundation Capital, Altair Capital, Mindset Ventures, Frontier Ventures and Gaingels. There is also a very long list of high-profile angels participating, underscoring the network that the founders themselves have amassed. It includes unnamed executives from Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Microsoft, Snap and other companies, as well as Adam D’Angelo (Facebook’s first CTO and CEO at Quora), Gokul Rajaram, Cyan Banister and Scott Banister, and Beerud Sheth (the founder of Upwork), among many others (I’ll run the full list below).
Turing is not disclosing its valuation. But as a measure of its momentum, it was only in August that the company raised a seed round of $14 million, led by Foundation. Siddharth said that the growth has been strong enough in the interim that the valuations it was getting and the level of interest compelled the company to skip a Series A altogether and go straight for its Series B.
The company now has signed up to its platform 180,000 developers from across 10,000 cities (compared to 150,000 developers back in August). Some 50,000 of them have gone through automated vetting on the Turing platform, and the task will now be to bring on more companies to tap into that trove of talent.
Or, “We are demand-constrained,” which is how Siddharth describes it. At the same time, it’s been growing revenues and growing its customer base, jumping from revenues of $9.5 million in October to $12 million in November, increasing 17x since first becoming generally available 14 months ago. Current customers include VillageMD, Plume, Lambda School, Ohi Tech, Proxy and Carta Healthcare.
Remote work = immediate opportunity
A lot of people talk about remote work today in the context of people no longer able to go into their offices as part of the effort to curtail the spread of COVID-19. But in reality, another form of it has been in existence for decades.
Offshoring and outsourcing by way of help from third parties — such as Accenture and other systems integrators — are two ways that companies have been scaling and operating, paying sums to those third parties to run certain functions or build out specific areas instead of shouldering the operating costs of employing, upsizing and sometimes downsizing that labor force itself.
Turing is essentially tapping into both concepts. On one hand, it has built a new way to source and run teams of people, specifically engineers, on behalf of others. On the other, it’s using the opportunity that has presented itself in the last year to open up the minds of engineering managers and others to consider the idea of bringing on people they might have previously insisted work in their offices, to now work for them remotely, and still be effective.
Siddarth and co-founder Vijay Krishnan (who is the CTO) know the other side of the coin all too well. They are both from India, and both relocated to the Valley first for school (post-graduate degrees at Stanford) and then work at a time when moving to the Valley was effectively the only option for ambitious people like them to get employed by large, global tech companies, or build startups — effectively what could become large, global tech companies.
“Talent is universal, but opportunities are not,” Siddarth said to me earlier this year when describing the state of the situation.
A previous startup co-founded by the pair — content discovery app Rover — highlighted to them a gap in the market. They built the startup around a remote and distributed team of engineers, which helped them keep costs down while still recruiting top talent. Meanwhile, rivals were building teams in the Valley. “All our competitors in Palo Alto and the wider area were burning through tons of cash, and it’s only worse now. Salaries have skyrocketed,” he said.
After Rover was acquired by Revcontent, a recommendation platform that competes against the likes of Taboola and Outbrain, they decided to turn their attention to seeing if they could build a startup based on how they had, basically, built their own previous startup.
There are a number of companies that have been tapping into the different aspects of the remote work opportunity, as it pertains to sourcing talent and how to manage it.
They include the likes of Remote (raised $35 million in November), Deel ($30 million raised in September), Papaya Global ($40 million also in September), Lattice ($45 million in July) and Factorial ($16 million in April), among others.
What’s interesting about Turing is how it’s trying to address and provide services for the different stages you go through when finding new talent. It starts with an AI platform to source and vet candidates. That then moves into matching people with opportunities, and onboarding those engineers. Then, Turing helps manage their work and productivity in a secure fashion, and also provides guidance on the best way to manage that worker in the most compliant way, be it as a contractor or potentially as a full-time remote employee.
The company is not freemium, as such, but gives people two weeks to trial people before committing to a project. So unlike an Accenture, Turing itself tries to build in some elasticity into its own product, not unlike the kind of elasticity that it promises its customers.
It all sounds like a great idea now, but interestingly, it was only after remote work really became the norm around March/April of this year that the idea really started to pick up traction.
“It’s amazing what COVID has done. It’s led to a huge boom for Turing,” said Sumir Chadha, managing director for WestBridge Capital, in an interview. For those who are building out tech teams, he added, there is now “No need for to find engineers and match them with customers. All of that is done in the cloud.”
“Turing has a very interesting business model, which today is especially relevant,” said Igor Ryabenkiy, managing partner at Altair Capital, in a statement. “Access to the best talent worldwide and keeping it well-managed and cost-effective make the offering attractive for many corporations. The energy of the founding team provides fast growth for the company, which will be even more accelerated after the B-round.”
PS. I said I’d list the full, longer list of investors in this round. In these COVID times, this is likely the biggest kind of party you’ll see for a while. In addition to those listed above, it included [deep breath] Founders Fund, Chapter One Ventures (Jeff Morris Jr.), Plug and Play Tech Ventures (Saeed Amidi), UpHonest Capital (Wei Guo, Ellen Ma), Ideas & Capital (Xavier Ponce de León), 500 Startups Vietnam (Binh Tran and Eddie Thai), Canvas Ventures (Gary Little), B Capital (Karen Appleton Page, Kabir Narang), Peak State Ventures (Bryan Ciambella, Seva Zakharov), Stanford StartX Fund, Amino Capital, Spike Ventures, Visary Capital (Faizan Khan), Brainstorm Ventures (Ariel Jaduszliwer), Dmitry Chernyak, Lorenzo Thione, Shariq Rizvi, Siqi Chen, Yi Ding, Sunil Rajaraman, Parakram Khandpur, Kintan Brahmbhatt, Cameron Drummond, Kevin Moore, Sundeep Ahuja, Auren Hoffman, Greg Back, Sean Foote, Kelly Graziadei, Bobby Balachandran, Ajith Samuel, Aakash Dhuna, Adam Canady, Steffen Nauman, Sybille Nauman, Eric Cohen, Vlad V, Marat Kichikov, Piyush Prahladka, Manas Joglekar, Vladimir Khristenko, Tim and Melinda Thompson, Alexandr Katalov, Joseph and Lea Anne Ng, Jed Ng, Eric Bunting, Rafael Carmona, Jorge Carmona, Viacheslav Turpanov, James Borow, Ray Carroll, Suzanne Fletcher, Denis Beloglazov, Tigran Nazaretian, Andrew Kamotskiy, Ilya Poz, Natalia Shkirtil, Ludmila Khrapchenko, Ustavshchikov Sergey, Maxim Matcin and Peggy Ferrell.
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Nana nabs $6M for an online academy and marketplace dedicated to appliance repair
A lot of the focus in online education — and, let’s face it, education overall — has been about professional development for knowledge workers, education for K-12 and how best to deliver cost-effective, engaging higher learning to those in college and beyond. But in what might be a sign of the times, today a startup that’s focused on e-learning and the subsequent job market for a completely different end of the spectrum — home services — is announcing some funding to continue building out its business in earnest.
Nana, which runs a free academy to teach people how to fix appliances, and then gives students the option of becoming a part of its own marketplace to connect them to people needing repairs — has picked up $6 million.
The seed round is being led by Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures; Next Play Ventures (ex-LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner’s new fund), Lachy Groom, Scott Belsky, Geoff Donaker of Burst Capital and Michael Staton of Learn Capital are among those also participating.
Nana has now raised $10.7 million, with past backers including Alpha Bridge Ventures, Bob Lee and the Uber Syndicate, an investment vehicle to back Uber alums in new ventures. Founder and CEO David Zamir is not actually an Uber alum, but one of his first employees, VP of Engineering Oliver Nicholas is an early Uber engineer and the company has also found a lot of traction of Uber drivers this year, after many found themselves out of work after the chilling effect that the pandemic had on ridesharing.
Nana — full name Nana Technologies (and not to be confused with Nana Technology, tech built for older adults) — is partly a labor/future of work play, partly an educational play, partly a tech/IoT play and partly an ecological play, in the eyes of Zamir, who himself trained as an appliance repairperson, running his own successful business in the Bay Area before pivoting it into a training platform and marketplace.
“There are 5.9 million tons of municipal solid waste [which includes lots of electronics like washing machines, blenders and everything in between] in the U.S.,” he said in an interview, “and only 50% of that is capable of getting recycled. We’re in a vicious cycle with appliances, and it’s partly because there aren’t enough people with the knowledge to repair them. But what if you had the liquidity to do that? We’re talking about creating jobs, but also saving the environment.”
Nana’s proposition starts with free lessons to fix a range of appliances — currently dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers — and their typical breakdown/poor performance issues to anyone who wants to know how to repair them. These classes are available to anyone — an individual simply interested in learning how to fix a machine, but more likely someone looking to pick up a skill and then use it to make some money.
Once you take and pass a course — currently remote — you have the option (but not requirement) to register on Nana’s platform to become a repair person who picks up jobs through it to get jobs fixing that particular issue. Nana already has partnerships with major appliance and warranty companies, including GE, Miele, Samsung, Assurant, Cinch and First American Home Warranty, so this is how it gets most of its work in, but it also accepts direct requests from consumers for repair of dishwashers, refrigerators, ovens, stoves, washers and dryers.
Over time, Zamir said, the plan is not just to take in jobs and send out technicians to fix things in an Uber-style dispatch service — but to expand it to fit the kinds of next-generation appliances that are being built today, with IoT diagnostic monitoring and helping also to integrate these appliances into connected homes. It also seems to be slowly expanding into other home services too, alongside appliance repair (which remains its main business).
Nana has to date registered hundreds of technicians in 12 markets across the U.S. and said it expects to expand to 20 markets by the end of 2021.
Nana has an unlikely founder story that speaks to how so much of the tech world is still about hustle and finding opportunities in the margins.
Founder and CEO David Zamir hails from Israel, but unlike many of the transplants you may come across from there to the Bay Area tech world, he’s not a tech guy by education, training or work experience. He used to run clothing stores in Tel Aviv and vaguely liked the idea of being involved in a tech business at some point — Israel loves to call itself “startup nation,” so that bug is bound to bite even those who don’t study computer science or engineering — but he didn’t know what to do or where to begin.
“The clothing business didn’t make much money,” he said. So after a period Zamir and his American wife decided to move to the U.S. and try their luck there.
While initially based on the east coast near her family and wondering about what kind of job to pursue, Zamir spoke with a friend of his in Toronto who was working as an independent tradesperson fixing appliances, and the friend suggested this as an option, at least for a while.
“So I hopped on an airplane to shadow my friend,” he recalled. “The lightbulb went off. I thought, I should do this in San Francisco,” where he had been wanting to move to crack in to the tech world, somehow. “I thought that I’d start with fixing appliances while I figured out how to find my way into tech.”
That turned into more than a temporary income stopgap, of course. After finding that his business was taking off, Zamir saw that technology would be the avenue to growing it.
He was helped in part to build the idea and the business through his grit. Josh Elman, the famous tech investor, complained about a broken dryer back in April, and asked the Twitter hive mind whether he should get a new one or go through the pain of fixing it. Someone flagged the question to Zamir, who reached out and connected Elman with one of Nana’s online teaching technicians. Twelve hours later, Elman’s drier was diagnosed (by Elman), on its way to getting fixed, and Elman signed on as an advisor to the company.
Move fast and fix things
The world of tech is all about building new things and solving problems, with “breaking” being more synonymous with disruption (= “good”) and fearlessness (see: Facebook’s old mantra to its early employees to move fast and break things). But behind that, there is an interesting disconnect between the tech version of “broken” and objects that are actually “broken” in the real world.
Many of us these days find using apps and other digital interfaces second-nature, but most of us would have no idea how to repair or work with much more basic electronic systems. And nor do most of us want to. More often than not, we give up on it, decide it’s not worth fixing and click on Amazon et al. to get a new shiny object.
Looked at on a wider scale, this is actually a big problem.
Electronics can be recycled, but in reality only about half the materials can be usefully reused. Meanwhile, Nana estimates that the appliance repair market is a $4 billion opportunity, with some 80 million appliances in need of being serviced annually in the U.S. But currently there are only some 31,000 trained technicians in the market. Nana estimates that to meet the demand of growing numbers, an additional 28,000 new technicians will be needed by 2025.
At the same time, the move to automation in many skilled labor jobs is putting people out of work: research from the Brookings Institution estimates that some 30 million people will lose their jobs in coming years because of it.
The idea here is that a platform like Nana can help some of those people retrain to fill the gap for appliance technicians, while at the same time extending the life of people’s appliances in a less painful way — putting less stuff into landfill — while at the same time expanding knowledge for anyone who cares for it.
Zamir said that Nana was named after his mother, who raised David as a single parent after his father passed away, a reference to working hard and being practical.
That sentimentality seems to motivate him in a bigger way, too: Zamir himself is a guy with a lot of heart and emotion vested into the concept of his startup. When I told him an anecdote of how our dishwasher broke down earlier this year and both a customer service rep from the maker (Siemens) and a separate repair person advised me to replace it, he got visibly agitated over our video call, as if the subject was something political or significantly more grave than a story about a dishwasher.
“I am not a supporter of what they told you,” he said in an angry voice. “It’s really upsetting me.” (I calmed him down a little, I think, when I told him that I myself uninstalled the broken dishwasher and installed the new one myself, because COVID.)
Zamir said that there are no plans to charge for its academy courses, nor to tie people into signing up with Nana to work once they take the courses. The fact that it provides a lot of inbound jobs attracts enough turnover — between 40% and 60% of those taking courses stay on to work when they took in-person classes, and for now the online figures are between 15% and 35%.
“It’s still early days,” he said, “but we’re finding the take up impressive… Most want to participate in the marketplace.” He says that there are other call-out services where they could register, but the tech that Nana has built makes its system more efficient, and that means better returns.
All of this has played well with those who have become Nana’s investors. People like Jeff Weiner — who in his time as CEO of LinkedIn led the company to acquire Lynda as part of a bigger emphasis on the importance of skills training and education — see the opportunity and need to provide an equivalent platform not just for knowledge workers but those who have more manual jobs, too.
“We are excited by Nana’s vision of providing training, access and opportunity for rewarding, satisfying work while also filling a critical gap in our economy,” said Shripriya Mahesh of Spero Ventures, in a statement. “Nana has created a new, scalable approach to giving people the agency, tools and support systems they need to build new skills and pursue fulfilling work opportunities.”
The round was oversubscribed in the end, and Nana shouldn’t find it too hard to raise again if it sticks to its plan and the market continues to grow as it has. That does not seem to be the motivation for Zamir, though.
“We just think it’s super important to build Nana for the people,” he said.
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Now may be the best time to become a full-stack developer
Sergio Granada
Contributor
Contributor
Sergio Granada is the CTO of Talos Digital, a global team of professional software developers that partners with agencies and businesses in multiple industries providing software development and consulting services for their tech needs.
In the world of software development, one term you’re sure to hear a lot of is full-stack development. Job recruiters are constantly posting open positions for full-stack developers and the industry is abuzz with this in-demand title.
But what does full-stack actually mean?
Simply put, it’s the development on the client-side (front end) and the server-side (back end) of software. Full-stack developers are jacks of all trades as they work with the design aspect of software the client interacts with as well as the coding and structuring of the server end.
In a time when technological requirements are rapidly evolving and companies may not be able to afford a full team of developers, software developers that know both the front end and back end are essential.
In response to the coronavirus pandemic, the ability to do full-stack development can make engineers extremely marketable as companies across all industries migrate their businesses to a virtual world. Those who can quickly develop and deliver software projects thanks to full-stack methods have the best shot to be at the top of a company’s or client’s wish list.
Becoming a full-stack developer
So how can you become a full-stack engineer and what are the expectations? In most working environments, you won’t be expected to have absolute expertise on every single platform or language. However, it will be presumed that you know enough to understand and can solve problems on both ends of software development.
Most commonly, full-stack developers are familiar with HTML, CSS, JavaScript and back-end languages like Ruby, PHP or Python. This matches up with the expectations of new hires as well, as you’ll notice a lot of openings for full-stack developer jobs require specialization in more than one back-end program.
Full-stack is becoming the default way to develop, so much so that some in the software engineering community argue whether or not the term is redundant. As the lines between the front end and back end blur with evolving tech, developers are now expected to work more frequently on all aspects of the software. However, developers will likely have one specialty where they excel while being good in other areas and a novice at some things… and that’s OK.
Getting into full-stack, though, means you should concentrate on finding your niche within the particular front-end and back-end programs you want to work with. One practical and common approach is to learn JavaScript because it covers both front and back-end capabilities. You’ll also want to get comfortable with databases, version control and security. In addition, it’s smart to prioritize design, as you’ll be working on the client-facing side of things.
Because full-stack developers can communicate with each side of a development team, they’re invaluable to saving time and avoiding confusion on a project.
One common argument against full stack is that, in theory, developers who can do everything may not do one thing at an expert level. But there’s no hard or fast rule saying you can’t be a master at coding and also learn front-end techniques, or vice versa.
Choosing between full-stack and DevOps
One hold up you may have before diving into full-stack is you’re also mulling over the option to become a DevOps engineer. There are certainly similarities among both professions, including good salaries and the ultimate goal of producing software as quickly as possible without errors. As with full-stack developers, DevOps engineers are also becoming more in demand because of the flexibility they offer a company.
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Impact, a YC-style accelerator for the entertainment industry, spins out from Imagine Entertainment with backing from Benchmark
Hollywood has been better known for making films and TV shows about the tech industry than it has been for being a part of it, but today a new enterprise is launching, backed by a major Silicon Valley venture firm, that hopes to hit pause on that image.
Imagine Impact, a content accelerator that launched two years ago under production powerhouse Imagine Entertainment to impart a “Y Combinator” approach to sourcing new work and connecting it with production opportunities, has raised a Series A round of funding from Benchmark, the VC firm that has backed Uber, Twitter, Dropbox, Snapchat and many more — funding that it plans to use to continue building out its accelerator model as well as launching new technology ventures, it said.
With the investment, Imagine Impact is effectively spinning out of Imagine Entertainment, and rebranding as a standalone company called Impact Creative Systems.
Brian Grazer and Ron Howard, the high-profile duo that in 1985 started the film and TV production company that has been behind a string of hits, stay on as founders, but Impact (as the firm calls itself) will be run day to day by CEO Tyler Mitchell. (And all three will be talking with us on the Disrupt stage today about this and more.)
Mitchell says that the amount of the investment, the first outside money that Impact has taken, is not being disclosed but that it’s in line with a typical Benchmark Series A. That would put it between $10 million and $20 million. The investment is being led by Bill Gurley, who will join the board with the deal.
The funding will be used to help the firm spearhead new ventures that continue building out the idea of taking a new approach to networking and finding career opportunities throughout the entertainment industry, breaking down some of the barriers of how business has always been done — through networks of who you know, lots of lunches and other hobnobbing. The idea is for the projects coming out of Impact to be underpinned not just with a tech ethos, but with actual technology.
First up is the launch later this year of The Creative Network, which Imagine describes as “an online marketplace and professional networking platform designed specifically for entertainment industry professionals to help bring efficiency and access to Hollywood.” It’s a little like LinkedIn meets Behance.
Up to now, Impact has been focusing its energies on building out its accelerators and securing deals for the writers in its cohorts, with the whole set-up inspired by the famous Silicon Valley accelerator.
The YC playbook is used in two ways. The first is in the model it’s using, where it opens applications to anyone interested to applying, and then provides those selected with mentorship, time and a little financing to do their creative work. The second comes in the form of the mentors having a lot of connections in the industry and using those to help the writers connect with others to produce their work.
The accelerator model has seen an accelerating amount of interest. Impact now has built a second accelerator outside of LA, in Australia, and started a podcast featuring interviews with famous actors, directors and others (pointing to other kinds of content that it might spin out as business projects). And it has inked a deal with Netflix Films to help source and develop content globally.
And perhaps most interestingly for laying groundwork for The Creative Network, it has built up a network of 30,000 writers across 80 countries; it has helped develop 72 projects, 25 of which are now with major studios.
Those efforts have also had some tech built around them. Mitchell said that a beta of sorts for The Creative Network was built originally to use for the accelerator. “We built it because we were just three people running the accelerator and didn’t have the human resources available to send out or read potentially thousands of scripts” — specifically 3,000 script submissions in 72 hours — “so we built a mobile app.” Features include the ability to push submissions, make watermarks and track emails in the bigger database, he said.
“We talk about ourselves as a dating app,” joked Mitchell. “You have to get four people to fall in love with one story or writer or piece of material” to advance, he said, “the producer, director, star and financier. That involves a lot of phone calls and relationships and phone tag. It can be a very long process to triangulate and build the right teams.”
While efforts so far have been focused on building ways of connecting writers with producers, the bigger picture is to build a network that can bring in the rest of the ecosystem, including directors, actors and the extensive technical and admin talent needed to get a project off the ground and on to a screen. All of these connections up to now have been firmly stuck in the analogue world, making them slow, limited in terms of inclusiveness, and obviously very ripe for technological disruption.
“It takes 500-1,000 people in total to bring a project to life,” Mitchell said. And the bigger opportunity for connecting networks is massive. Mitchell estimates that just in the U.S., the production business employs 2.6 million people and accounts for some $177 billion in wages each year, and it’s growing.
“The old way of sourcing talent in the entertainment industry is based on who you know, which presents high barriers-to-entry for the fresh voices we need to hear from,” said Gurley, in a statement. “Impact is knocking down these barriers through a marketplace model that reduces information asymmetry and levels the playing field. Ultimately this leads to more opportunities and better outcomes for everyone involved.”
Indeed, Hollywood has been between a rock and a hard place when it comes to changing up its ways.
On one side, the industry regularly faces criticism for lacking diversity in its ranks and failing to identify with the masses. Complaints include too few women in decision-making roles and the difficulty of finding work if you don’t fit into particular age and appearance types; accusations of racism (OscarsSoWhite being a recurring theme each awards season); and more.
On the other, the media industry — including how consumers watch video — is rapidly evolving. For better or worse, the TV was once the absolute epicenter of how a family came together and saw what was happening in the world outside. Those Happy Days are gone now, so to speak. People watch YouTube and TikTok, Snapchat and Netflix, and while some of that definitely is still tapping into the older Hollywood ecosystem — Netflix, of course, repurposes a lot of traditional TV and film content, and commissions its own — it also speaks to just how rapidly the mediums and their delivery are changing.
While the first efforts of Impact are addressing the first group of these issues, one follow-up question — the sequel, you might say — might be how and if Impact chooses to use its networks, tech and strategy to think about the second of these.
Before coming to the entertainment industry (he was a writer and producer for years before this), Mitchell said he had a background in finance and has “always been entrepreneurial.” The tech scene in LA has definitely been growing over the years — it’s home to Snap and others — meaning it’s ripe for tapping for hiring more people for the startup.
“We’re talking with data scientists to build better algorithms for the Network and yes we’re hiring engineers,” he said. “We’ve attracted some incredible talent and the majority of the investment is going to scaling our team.” Impact now has 11 full-time technical staff, he said.
“We could not be more thrilled to be working with Benchmark. They have an unrivaled track record in building marketplaces and companies that have changed the world,” said Grazer, in a statement. “From the moment we met Bill, it was clear that he understood and believed in our vision. Benchmark is not just an investor, but a true partner, whose expertise you can’t put a price on.”
“With Benchmark, we are now in a better place to serve the greater creative community worldwide,” said Howard, in a statement. “Their investment enables us to go wider and deeper in bringing great storytellers to the forefront and connecting them to the entertainment industry.”
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Supercell’s CEO talks about its majority owner Tencent, finding its next hit and more
Mobile games maker Supercell has been one of the great, understated breakthroughs of the European startup world. The Helsinki-based mobile games maker built an empire out of Clash of Clans, raking in tons of money and catching the eye of world-class investors and eventually a new strategic majority shareholder in the form of Tencent at a $10.2 billion valuation.
That was in 2016. So how does a hot startup keep its edge?
As part of this year’s virtual Disrupt, we sat down to talk with the company’s founder and CEO, Ilkka Paananen, about that and the other challenges and opportunities facing the company, and asked for his tips and opinion on spinning up and running startups in Europe today.
Times are definitely not easy right now: all of us are living through a global health pandemic, and economies as a result of that are teetering; and there is an interesting sea change happening as gaming companies (along with other content makers) face off against big tech, where there’s a question of whether platforms or the games themselves have the upper hand. (The most visible and recent example of that: the counter-lawsuits between Epic and Apple over in-app payments.)
For Supercell specifically, its majority owner, Tencent, is in hot water in the U.S. (a major market for Supercell); and it’s sitting on a still-popular but now-ageing game franchise that you could argue is in the middle of its own Battle Royale against the many other big games that are vying for people’s attention (and spending power to keep playing and levelling up). In short, the company itself, now 10 years old, may itself be facing more existential questions of who are we now, and what comes next?
As you’ll see in the video below, Paananen is very sanguine and calm, which is to say quite Finnish, about a lot of this.
Even without the experience thus far of Supercell under his belt, he has been in the industry for years. Supercell is his second big hit company: before that he founded Sumea, which was acquired by Digital Chocolate, where he became president in the now-defunct bigger studio’s heyday. And, he has been and is an investor, too: most recently Paananen backed Zwift, the gamefied home fitness startup, in its most recent, $450 million round, which included him joining the company’s board. All of this is to say that he can see the bigger picture.
The Tencent issues in the U.S., he said, are something that the company is watching. But not only are they unresolved — indeed just this week, ahead of any proposed bans on Tencent properties and WeChat in particular, the U.S. government issued more clarification on how people are liable for using WeChat. In any case, Paananen said in the interview that he believes that Supercell doesn’t fall under the U.S. executive order to be shut down, because Tencent is only a shareholder, not a full owner. He’s still waiting to see how it all plays out.
“Our current understanding [is that] it’s about WeChat not Tencent as a whole,” he said, “and that it doesn’t apply to Tencent-invested companies like Supercell.” (Also: one of the good things to have come out of not getting fully acquired, it seems.)
Similarly, Paananen is not overly concerned about the fact that its big hit, while still one of the highest-grossing apps globally, is getting on and slowly bringing in fewer revenues.
Judging by the fact that Supercell has yet to follow up with another successful franchise, and has killed quite a few attempts in the meantime, the process to produce a hit, in fact, still seems to be as elusive to a company that has produced a hit already as it is to those that have not.
“It would be nice to be always on this kind of a growth curve, but the reality is… it’s very much about hits or misses,” he said.
“Sometimes figures go up, and sometimes they go down [so] what’s your time horizon? We never ever think about the next quarter, and very, very rarely think about it and maybe next year, I think that’s a target in itself, you know. We try to think in decades. Our dream is to build a game so as many people as possible will play for a very long time. We are inspired by companies like, say, Nintendo. And if you’re going to take that… then that changes your perspective.”
The company has been building out its options, though, making about three investments a year in other gaming startups, and some full acquisitions of studios, to diversify the team and bring in more options for new games in the future. Later in the Q&A with viewers, Paananen said Supercell has no plans yet for anything in AR or VR, with a firm belief that mobile, and the mechanics of a touch screen, are the best for what it’s building.
It seems the most valuable lesson Paananen has learned, it turns out, is the thing that continues to be his top priority: building the right team for the long haul.
Making sure you have a group that can work together, inspire each other and be productive has been the constant, one that perhaps means even more as the company grows bigger and we continue to work under very decentralised circumstances.
“We are currently on the look-out for people from all around the world to join Supercell to build the best teams and then of course the best games,” he said.
Hear about all this, plus Paananen’s opinion on raising money, and more, below.
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5 steps for building a thriving developer community
Bear Douglas leads Developer Relations at Slack, where she and her team help developers build more pleasant and productive ways to work.
Every API or platform that has been successful long term owes a large part of their success to a thriving developer community — including Slack. As the lead of our Developer Relations team and a senior marketing manager, we oversee the Slack Platform Community. The community has grown quickly, so we’re both often asked how to successfully build a similar group.
At Slack, our app ecosystem has expanded alongside the product. The Slack App Directory contains 2,200 apps and over 600,000 custom apps (apps people build just for their teams) are used every week. No technology company creates its ecosystem alone. The growth in ours is part of a wider trend, as the total number of APIs has increased by 30% over the last few years. We’re also currently experiencing a surge in app submissions as more workforces operate entirely at home, and companies need tools to support remote operations. In early April, we saw a 100% increase in app submissions week-over-week.
As more developers try a platform, community support is critical to everyone — the platform company, new developers and those who have been developing for years. If your platform doesn’t have a developer community yet, creating one takes a few purposeful steps. Here are some of the best practices we’ve learned over nearly three decades’ worth of combined work in developer communities.
Start (and continue) listening
You can’t build a community without participating in one first. If you already have people developing on your platform, and they’re open to receiving contact from you, reach out! Get to know the people behind the integrations you’re seeing built.
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The H-1B visa ban is creating nearshore business partnership opportunities
Andrés Vior
Contributor
Contributor
Andrés Vior is the VP and country manager for Argentina at intive. A computer engineer who graduated from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), he is also a member of the Chamber of Software and Computer Services Companies of Argentina (CESSI).
In June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily suspending work visas for H-1B holders, which includes skilled workers like software developers.
Considering that 71% of workers in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs are international, the order poses a number of logistical and business challenges for startups.
While nearshoring was an option before the virus struck, the urgency to nearshore due to the visa ban, combined with the remote revolution taking place, has meant companies are reconsidering it as a solution. As a result, the suspension presents an opportunity for companies to bring on board software development capabilities from abroad.
Nearshoring is a way to hire teams in locations that share similar time zones and are easily accessible. Nearshoring also enables U.S. companies to utilize services from close locations, where the talent, working conditions, and salaries are more favorable. In fact, it can save businesses up to 80% on costs, while providing employees with flexibility, autonomy and better career development pathways.
Not only is nearshoring a pragmatic response to the visa ban, it has the potential to be a long-term hiring alternative for businesses. Here’s how:
Laying the groundwork for remote teams
Amid the pandemic, demand for developers has remained high, no doubt due to companies needing teams to build, maintain and optimize digital platforms as they transition to online services. The visa ban means that businesses in foreign markets can help meet such demand, particularly as tech talent from other countries comes with a fresh, different skill set that empowers companies to solve problems in new ways.
In the past, moving to the U.S. and living the American Dream oriented many foreign businesses’ professional paths. However, the trend has changed. The appeal of the United States was slipping prior to the virus — it ranked 46th out of 66 for “perceived friendliest to expats” — and post-COVID-19 may be even more detrimental.
In a more connected world, businesses and individuals can reap the benefits of U.S. opportunities — top technology stack, access to exciting companies and world-class research — without having to actually live in the country. In this respect, nearshoring means foreign teams have the best of both worlds: the comfort of home and ties to an international powerhouse.
The remote shift is demonstrating that teams can function well at a distance; some studies have even revealed that employee productivity and happiness benefit from remote work. In the global remote shift, nearshoring is being seen as an accepted and advantageous model. Companies that opt to nearshore in response to the visa ban can take advantage of the changing tides and use this time to lay the groundwork for best practices within remote teams. For instance, by devising policies for things like communication, tracking progress, vacation and development plans according to the new conditions and specific mission statements. As a result, businesses can seamlessly build professional partnerships.
Another advantage of nearshoring is that the flexible teams contribute to a ready-to-scale model for startups. By having development partners located in different countries, companies can network on a wider level and grow faster among local markets. Rather than start from scratch when expanding, nearshoring gives companies a presence — no matter how small — across regions, which can later be built upon.
Attracting fresh investment
Similar to having a readiness to scale, the H-1B visa suspension positions nearshoring as a viable way to strategically partner with foreign development studios. In contrast to offshoring, nearshored businesses are often more vested in the projects they work on because they share time zones and are thus able to work more closely and with greater agility. Within startups, such agility is essential to continuously test, iterate and pivot products or services. Outsourced teams often have defined outputs to achieve, while freelancers are split across several projects, so aren’t completely ingrained in companies’ visions.
With nearshoring, startups can target partners that have experience in a particular area of business or with a specific tech feature and accelerate their time to market. Instead of building systems from zero, they can launch into version 2.0 because the wider choice of experts means there’s a higher chance of partnering with teams who already understand how the industry functions. Nearshore partners also have vast knowledge across industrial fields at a level that is impossible for direct hires to have. Companies therefore don’t have to tackle the difficulty of curating a great team, because nearshore partners are an already solid pairing.
When it comes to funding, this synchronicity, agility and preparedness indicates that a startup has momentum. For investors, nearshoring shows that the company has on-the-ground insights about potential markets to disrupt, and that the business model can thrive using remote teams. As the world braces itself to go fully digital, startups that have already adopted remote processes that catalyze growth will no doubt catch the attention of investors.
Promoting greater diversity in teams
Latin America is a clear choice for U.S. businesses looking to nearshore. The region’s proximity, increasing internet penetration, and impressive number of highly skilled developers are all a significant draw.
It’s also worth noting that diversity plays a core role in nearshoring. Currently within tech, Hispanic workers are noticeably underrepresented, making up a mere 16.7% of jobs. Despite the physical distance, nearshoring in Latin America can bring people from different social and economic backgrounds into companies, boosting their visibility in industries as a whole, and setting a firm foundation for equality.
Studies also show that diversity influences creativity among teams, as well as increases company revenue.
Moreover, nearshoring accelerates diversity in a manner that isn’t disruptive. Foreign team members don’t have to sacrifice their home, friends and family to further their professional career. Relocating to the U.S. can be daunting for people who haven’t previously worked abroad, especially when factoring the change in living costs and new culture norms. Nearshoring means teams can work from locations they’re familiar with, so need less time to get up to speed on business processes. They additionally have the emotional support of their social circles nearby, which in the current climate is important for employees’ personal and professional wellbeing.
Leveraging the right partnership
Research is key to successfully find a nearshore company, and startups don’t always have the time and resources to conduct an in-depth analysis of locations and their ecosystems. The most practical manner to nearshore the right talent is with a nearshoring partner that is responsible for scouting, vetting and communicating with foreign developers.
To find an appropriate partner, ensure that they have previous experience in your industry and positive testimonials from startups in your location. They should also have a clear presence in the regions they operate in; try checking online for their press releases, events they sponsor and general content that validates they are active and respected.
Once you’ve found an appropriate nearshore partner, rely on them to know what teams in your preferred locations need in terms of culture. Nearshore partners will essentially be your development partner — you can leverage them to be your whole Research and Development department. They can guide you on the tech side of your business, advise you on the right team at the right time, give you direction on stack and methodology, and curate the right environment for the team to be productive. In contrast, hiring freelancers comes with risks because you won’t necessarily know the specific needs of the location they’re in. Be aware — if there’s a cultural disconnect, you risk not finding a partner, but a vendor that’s buying into a superficial version of your startup, as opposed to your real startup vision.
Once you’ve settled on a well-fitting nearshoring partner, ensure you have detailed contracts with all team members, as well as nondisclosure agreements. Nearshoring requires a level of mutual trust, however, at such an early stage of your company’s lifecycle, you need to know that your processes and data will not be revealed to competitors. Check that your nearshore partner’s financial status is secure and sufficient for a long-term model. Correspondingly, service level agreements will set the parameters for job responsibilities and deliverables. After all the formalities are covered, you can focus on curating fruitful, long-term relationships.
Acclimatizing in the new normal
The COVID-19 crisis has made recruitment a remote-dominated sphere. Traditional modes of hiring are being reassessed, and companies are realizing that teams don’t have to be in an office to be productive. In fact, not having to cover visa and administration fees for foreign employees is much more cost-effective for companies.
As time passes and businesses develop habits best-suited to remote work, nearshoring will become increasingly popular. People are prioritizing joining teams where their career development, well-being and ethics are protected, all of which nearshoring can offer with the added benefit of not completely upheaving workers’ lives.
Startups who embrace nearshoring early on could find themselves competing with top tech firms that struggle because of recruiting limitations. With the end of the pandemic unknown, and thus no hard deadline for the visa ban, tech companies have to look at alternative modes of building teams. Startups have the advantage of revising their remote product development approach without disturbing workflows too severely. They are also known for pioneering fairer and more innovative workplaces that are enticing for a broader scope of employees.
Nearshoring is mutually beneficial because developers don’t have to give up their culture for a great employment opportunity, and businesses can reap the benefits of diversification. Ultimately, the H-1B visa suspension could stimulate true globalization in tech, where companies can achieve their best performance using global resources.
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