TechCrunch Disrupt
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Caroline Brochado and Sophia Bendz on the boom in Europe’s early and growth-stage startups
As part of Disrupt 2020 we wanted to look at the contrasting positions of both early and later-stage investing in Europe. Who better to unpack this subject than two highly experienced operators in these fields?
After a career at Spotify and then as a VC at Atomico, Sophia Bendz has rapidly gained a reputation in Europe as a keen early-stage investor. She recently left Atomico to pursue her early and seed-stage passion with Cherry Ventures. Bendz is a prolific angel investor, with a total of more than 44 deals in the last nine years. Her angel investments include AidenAI, Tictail, Joints Academy, Omnius, LifeX, Eastnine, Manual, Headvig, Simple Feast and Sana Labs. She is known for being a champion of the femtech space, and her angel investments in that space include Clue, Grace Health, Daye, O School and Boost Thyroid.
Carolina Brochado, the former Atomico partner and most recently a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund’s London office, recently joined EQT Ventures to help launch EQT’s Growth fund, which is positioned between ventures and private equity. Brochado led investments in a number of promising companies at Atomico, including logistics company OnTruck, health tech company Hinge Health and restaurant supply chain app Rekki.
After establishing that these two knew each other while at Atomico, I asked Bendz why she headed back into the seed-stage arena.
“I’m a trained marketeer and storyteller by heart… What makes me excited is new markets opportunities, people, culture, teams. So with that, in combination with my angel investing, I think I’m better suited to be in the earlier stages of investing. When I was investing before joining Atomico, I said to myself, I want to learn from the best, I want to see how it’s done, how you structure the process and how you think about the bigger investments.”
Brochado says the European “cat is out of the bag,” as it were:
When I first moved to Europe in 2012 and first joined Atomico, after having been at a very small startup, there was still a massive gap in funding and Europe versus the U.S. I think you know the European secret is no longer a secret, and you have incredible funds being started at that early-stage seed and Series A, and because I was here in 2012, I’ve seen the amazing pipeline of growth companies that are coming up the curve, how the momentum of those companies is accelerating and how the market cap of those businesses are growing. And so I just became super excited about helping those businesses scale… I just now felt like bridging that gap in between was really exciting.
One of the perennial topics that come up time and time again is whether or not founders should go with VC partners who have previously been operators, versus those with a finance background.
“Looking back, my years at Spotify, we had great investors, but there were not many of them that had the experience of scaling a big company,” Bendz said. “So, I’m happy to give [a startup] more than just the check in a way that I would have wished I had a sounding board when I was 25 and tackling that challenge at Spotify.”
Brochado concurred: “Having operators in the room is just is an incredible gift I think to a fund and at certain levels, having people that understand you know different forms of financing and different structures can also be incredibly helpful to founders who may not necessarily have that background. So I think that the funds that do it best have that diversity.”
Bendz is passionate about investing in female founders and femtech: “It’s such a massive business opportunity that is completely untapped. We’ve seen it many times when you have a female investment partner [that] the pipeline opens up and you get more deal flow from female founders…. So I think we have a lot of work to do. I think it’s definitely improved a lot in the last couple of years but not enough… That is one of the drivers for why I put my money where my mouth is and invest in lifting the founders, but also because there are incredibly interesting business opportunities… There are so many opportunities and products or services that we will see being developed. When we have a more equal society, and more women, both building their own companies, coding and also investing… I can’t wait to see what that world will look like.”
Brochado’s view is that “even beyond founders… the best managers today are putting a lot of focus on this and I think what’s exciting is, I think we’re past the point where you have to explain to people why diversity matters.”
Is there a post-Series A chasm?
Bendz thinks: “We have more big funds in Europe [now]. We have a really solid ground here in Europe of A, B and C investors.”
Brochado said: “It’s definitely getting better. You don’t hear as many founders say that to do my Series B or my Series C I have to move to the Valley as you used to. But there’s a lot of room still for growth investors in Europe. I think Series B is the hardest round actually because, at seed or Series A, you can raise on very early traction or the quality of the management team. At Series B the price goes up but the risk doesn’t necessarily go down as much. And so I think that’s where you really need investors who are sector or thematic focused, who can come with conviction and also some knowledge around the company to really propel that company forward.”
Did they both see European entrepreneurs still making silly mistakes, or has the ecosystem mastered?
Brochado thinks 10 years ago it was hard for European founders as a lot of the talent to scale companies was still in the U.S. “What you’ve seen is a lot of big companies grow up in Europe, a lot of people come back from the U.S., and so I think that pool of talent now is larger, which is very helpful. I don’t think it’s yet at the scale of where the U.S. is. But it gives us, you know as investors, a great window of opportunity to help get some of that talent for our portfolio companies.”
The impact of COVID-19
Bendz thinks we will “see a much slower spring, but… I think it has been overall a good exercise for some companies, and I have not seen a slower deal flow. I’ve actually done more angel deals this spring than I normally do… Some businesses have definitely accelerated their whole business concept because of COVID. Investments are being made even though we haven’t met the founders. We’re able to do everything remotely so I think the system is kind of adjusting.”
Brochado’s view is that at the growth stage “there’s been a flight to quality. So actually, the really great companies or the companies that are seeing great tailwinds or companies that will still be category-leading once [have] seen a lot of interest. It’s been a very busy summer, which usually it isn’t, particularly at the growth stage… I think a lot of money is still in the system, and has flown into technology. And so if you look at how tech in the public markets has performed it’s performed extremely well. And that includes European public companies and within tech.”
Watch the full panel below.
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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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PlayVS is halfway to recruiting every state into its global esports community
Millions of high school kids play online multiplayer games, but they seldom have crosstown rivals in Fortnite or Valorant. PlayVS wants to make that happen with its platform for school-sponsored esports, and it’s growing like crazy, doubling its staff in the last year and putting thousands of schools on its platform.
PlayVS connects online games with official school administration and branding, elevating esports from hobby to school-sponsored activity.
“I think we’re building the biggest company in gaming,” founder and CEO Delane Parnell said in an interview at Disrupt 2020 this week. With around 20,000 high schools signed up currently and nearly a hundred million dollars in the bank to grow with, it’s not a totally unrealistic statement.
The company collects $64 per player per semi-yearly season, which starts to add up real quick when you have Counter-Strike teams of a dozen people with alternates, or competing League teams at the same school — multiplied by 20,000, of course. A bit of napkin math suggests income from existing customers is easily in the tens of millions.
Parnell offered the following metaphor to explain what the company aspired to.
“Imagine if there was one basketball court, and every kid who ever wanted to play basketball, whether it’s on behalf of their school, or pick-up, or some sort of tournament, that’s the court that they had to play on,” he said. “That’s what we’re building.”
Sure, it sounds a little bit like a monopoly on hoops, but the problem right now is that there really isn’t a shared court at all. Esports is wildly disorganized at that level, if it’s organized at all (and let’s be honest, even at the pro level it’s a bit of a jumble). PlayVS wants to provide the connective tissue so that there’s one place that both players and administrators go when it comes to inter-school competitive gaming.
Parnell explained that the last year has been about learning the ropes and establishing a presence in the also quite confusing world of state school systems.
“We certainly built the base of the business on the partnership with the NFHS — essentially the NCAA of high schools, they govern and write the rules for our high school sports,” he said. But then individual relationships need to be established with districts, financial programs, state leaders and of course the game publishers themselves, which are understandably eager to connect with the younger generation of gamers.
So far schools in 23 states have signed up, and Parnell said they’re on track to get every state in the union on board by 2022.
“Those are partnerships that take a little time to form. It also takes additional time to build the technology that actually enables online esports, which most people think exists today, but it actually doesn’t,” he said. “So we’ve started to invest very deeply into hiring a team to build our product. We have a ton of capital in the bank and we intend to use that very wisely.”
The product build-out is more than buying servers — it’s attempting to create parity with the tools available in the context of sports like football and basketball.
“There’s products and services that we can bake in, things like recruiting, scouting, proven technology, highlights… these are things that would normally exist from independent companies within traditional sports,” he said. “One company does one thing, a thousand companies do ancillary things that make the sports experience better for every stakeholder, a parent, a coach, a player, etc. We’re going to be able to do all of those things within the PlayVS ecosystem, because we’re the league operator and the sole holder of that data. We will effectively have complete control of what that experience looks like and all of the revenue models associated with that.”
For comparison he suggested fantasy sports, now a huge industry but not one dominated by a single entity. “If there was one group, like CBS for example, that could have aggregated all that behavior, that’d be a $40-50 billion a year company. But they couldn’t get in with, you know, the NFL, the NBA, to give them exclusive rights to be the only fantasy provider on the market,” Parnell explained. “Game publishers are willing to do that with us, they’re willing to integrate with our product because they know we can execute. So I think that’s a big opportunity. And one that could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars.”
PlayVS won’t be expanding into pro leagues, he confirmed, saying that the high school and college level work is as much as they can handle right now. But they’re overwhelmed in the best way.
“It’s almost as if the NBA existed for four years, and then they went back and said hey, we need to build high school basketball, college basketball, etc.,” he said. “Obviously there’s a lot of catching up to do.”
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Kerry Washington explains why she became a startup investor
“Scandal” and “Little Fires Everywhere” star Kerry Washington won her first Emmy Award yesterday, but when she joined us at TechCrunch Disrupt today, she was much more focused on her work as an investor.
Washington traced much of her interest in technology to the premiere of “Scandal” in 2012. It had, she said, been “almost 40 years since a Black woman was the lead on a network drama,” which meant that the pressure was high — and that “Scandal” was considered a “bubble show,” with the network “taking a big risk by putting a Black woman in the lead.”
So Washington said she drew on her experience as a volunteer with Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, and particularly her work with social media organizing, to try to rally support.
“From the very beginning of that show, we leveraged the power of technology to support the show in ways that traditional media wasn’t supporting us — or was waiting to see what the public response would be,” she said. “Really, I think the Twitter-verse allowed us to have a second season, and then we kind of took off from there.”
As for how that led to investing her own money into startups, Washington suggested that she wanted to be more involved.
“When it comes to my engagement with any sort of any creative relationship that I’m in, I’m not really good at having a seat at the table without a voice,” she said. For example, she noted, “I gravitated very quickly in my career … toward being a producer.”
Similarly, she said that using tech tools was exciting, “but figuring out how to have more stake, more input, more creative voice, more ability to impact the technology itself was really exciting for me.”
Washington’s first investment was in female co-working space The Wing, which she explained as being part of her commitment to “ideas of inclusivity and community, celebrating identity in a really inclusive way, supporting women’s voices, supporting marginalized voices.”
The Wing has seen its share of success, but also controversy, with a New York Times article reporting that a number of employees (particularly women of color) felt that they had been mistreated. In the wake of these criticisms, CEO Audrey Gelman departed this summer.
When asked about her response to the controversy, Washington said, “As somebody who’s an investor, as a woman of color, it’s important to me that there is increased transparency and also accountability.” She said that over the past few months, her role as an investor has been “really just supporting leadership in this transition,” while also expressing a “deep desire” for that transparency and accountability.
Other investments include Community, which allows celebrities to manage text message conversations with fans. (Washington promised that if you text her, she will really be the one who responds — though she also asked for patience, since she’s texting with “thousands and thousands of people.”) There’s also direct-to-consumer teeth-straightening startup Byte, which Washington said she uses herself.
As for her dream startup, Washington said she has a not-yet-announced investment in a direct-to-consumer fashion startup, “and it feels really dreamy at the moment.”
Again, these have all been personal investments so far. Would Washington consider raising a fund or joining a venture capital firm?
“I have considered it, but at this point, I really like having the more intimate and really hands-on relationship with the investments that I’ve made,” she said. “I feel like I’m really able to be in the trenches and bring more value as an individual investor.”
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Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says the pandemic forced the company to reevaluate what work means
Dropbox CEO and co-founder Drew Houston, appearing at TechCrunch Disrupt today, said that COVID has accelerated a shift to distributed work that we have been talking about for some time, and these new ways of working will not simply go away when the pandemic is over.
“When you think more broadly about the effects of the shift to distributed work, it will be felt well beyond when we go back to the office. So we’ve gone through a one-way door. This is maybe one of the biggest changes to knowledge work since that term was invented in 1959,” Houston told TechCrunch Editor-In-Chief Matthew Panzarino.
That change has prompted Dropbox to completely rethink the product set over the last six months, as the company has watched the way people work change in such a dramatic way. He said even though Dropbox is a cloud service, no SaaS tool in his view was purpose-built for this new way of working and we have to reevaluate what work means in this new context.
“Back in March we started thinking about this, and how [the rapid shift to distributed work] just kind of happened. It wasn’t really designed. What if you did design it? How would you design this experience to be really great? And so starting in March we reoriented our whole product road map around distributed work,” he said.
He also broadly hinted that the fruits of that redesign are coming down the pike. “We’ll have a lot more to share about our upcoming launches in the future,” he said.
Houston said that his company has adjusted well to working from home, but when they had to shut down the office, he was in the same boat as every other CEO when it came to running his company during a pandemic. Nobody had a blueprint on what to do.
“When it first happened, I mean there’s no playbook for running a company during a global pandemic so you have to start with making sure you’re taking care of your customers, taking care of your employees, I mean there’s so many people whose lives have been turned upside down in so many ways,” he said.
But as he checked in on the customers, he saw them asking for new workflows and ways of working, and he recognized there could be an opportunity to design tools to meet these needs.
“I mean this transition was about as abrupt and dramatic and unplanned as you can possibly imagine, and being able to kind of shape it and be intentional is a huge opportunity,” Houston said.
Houston debuted Dropbox in 2008 at the precursor to TechCrunch Disrupt, then called the TechCrunch 50. He mentioned that the Wi-Fi went out during his demo, proving the hazards of live demos, but offered words of encouragement to this week’s TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield participants.
Although his is a public company on a $1.8 billion run rate, he went through all the stages of a startup, getting funding and eventually going public, and even today as a mature public company, Dropbox is still evolving and changing as it adapts to changing requirements in the marketplace.
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LanzaTech eyes two more spin-off companies
Just three months after LanzaTech announced a spin-out aimed at selling sustainable aviation fuel, the company is already preparing for two more.
LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren said Tuesday on the Disrupt 2020 virtual stage that the carbon capture technology company is planning to use its core technology to create two other businesses.
LanzaTech captures waste gas emissions and uses bacteria to turn it into useable ethanol fuel. A bioreactor is used to convert into liquids captured and compressed waste emissions from a steel mill or factory or any other emissions-producing enterprises.
The core technology of LanzaTech — and its future businesses — is a bacteria that likes to eat these dirty gas streams. As the bacteria eats the emissions it essentially ferments them — a bit like how beer is made, Holmgren recently explained — and emits ethanol. The ethanol can then be turned into various products.
“Using a technology like ours that can use so many different feedstocks — waste biomass, industrial gases, CO2 from the air — you’re going to be making so much ethanol, that I think of ethanol as the feedstock of the future. In other words, you’re going to use ethanol to make other products.”
In June, LanzaTech did just that and announced a spin-off called LanzaJet. The new company launched with commitments from Japanese trading and investment company Mitsui & Co. and Canadian oil and gas producer Suncor Energy, which will invest $85 million to fund pilot and development-scale facilities for LanzaJet.
Now it seems that LanzaTech has plans to pursue other pieces of the supply chain. Holmgren said the company is focused on a couple of use cases on the chemical side. Ethanol, for instance, can be converted to ethylene, which is used to make polyethylene for bottles and PEP for fibers used to make clothes.
“We see a path from ethanol to products using today’s supply chain,” Holmgren said.
More importantly, LanzaTech has focused on synthetic biology. The company has learned to modify the bacteria that it already uses to make ethanol, and instead harnesses it to make other chemicals directly.
“So you can imagine someday, we’re not just gonna make a fuel for a plane, we’re going make the seatbelts and upholstery — all of these things through synthetic biology,” she said, adding that this will likely become a spin-off.
The second spin-off company focuses on a byproduct it already makes. The bacteria that eats carbon monoxide, hydrogen and carbon dioxide is a “skinny bacteria” as Holmgren calls it, because it is mostly protein. LanzaTech already sells this skinny bacteria as a co-product of its technology.
“Not in the too distant future we will want to run a reactor with all of these gases, not to make ethanol, but to make protein, and I see that as an ultimate spin-out as well,” she said.
Holmgren didn’t provide a specific timeline of these spin-outs. Although she added that the company is putting together a plan now and will begin to make some moves in the next three months. There is capital that will be needed to get these enterprises up and running. The synthetic biology spin-off, which Holmgren said is further along, will need a couple hundred million dollars up front.
Holmgren also announced Tuesday during Disrupt 2020 a new small-scale waste biomass gasifier in India. The new gasifier will be hosted at Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemical, one of India’s largest refiners. The LanzaTech gasifier, which will be built in partnership with Indian project development firm Ankur Scientific, will use waste to make ethanol and chemicals rather than power.
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Triller aims for TikTok with additions of influencers like Charli D’Amelio and Addison Rae
Triller had been poised to benefit from a potential TikTok ban in the U.S. Though that may not happen now, given the apparent Oracle deal, the chaos around TikTok has increased the attention given to alternative apps such as Triller. As TikTok users sought a new home — or at least hedged their bets in the event of a full ban — Triller’s app shot up the app store charts. It even became the No. 1 across 80 different countries at some point, Triller CEO Mike Lu says.
At Techcrunch Disrupt 2020, Lu today spoke of Triller’s growing potential and what makes its app unique. He also touched on Triller’s involvement in several high-profile additions, including influencers and public figures like TikTok star Charli D’Amelio and family, and even Trump himself.
Lu also noted another top TikToker, Addison Rae, will make her way to Triller this week, as well.
Though Triller has often positioned itself as a different sort of app than TikTok, the company has steadily worked to onboard the same set of influencers that made TikTok so popular. TikTok star Josh Richards recently joined Triller as both an investor and chief strategy officer, despite being only 18, for example. Other TikTok stars Noah Beck and Griffin Johnson also joined Triller earlier this summer.
And just this week, Triller snagged TikTok’s queen herself, Charli D’Amelio, whose current TikTok account has 87 million followers.
Though Triller often benefits from influencers setting up their own accounts, Lu confirmed Triller reached out to D’Amelio to establish the relationship and to learn how the company could help her create a different type of presence on the Triller app.
Deal terms were not disclosed, but Lu said that, “up until a month ago, we had never paid anyone to make a video.”
follow my triller teehee
— charli d’amelio (@charlidamelio) September 15, 2020
TikTok stars aren’t the only notable new additions. Last month, Donald Trump launched his own official Triller account, as well, to promote his political campaign.
Lu said he welcomes all the new users, including Trump.
“We’re an open platform and what we really strive for is creativity. So, we welcome anyone — regardless of whether you’re on the left side or the right side of the fence — to express yourself on the Triller platform,” he said. “Seeing some of the world leaders and also some of the biggest influencers in the world join the platform is very exciting for Triller.”
Lu also explained how Triller differentiates itself from the broader social media app lineup, noting that much of the focus of older social networks had been on allowing users to post status updates, not creative content.
Triller’s identity, Lu added, “has always been around music, around content, and around creative discovery.”
“I think that we will always shine more than your traditional status updates — which I think that the world of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter has done really well,” he said. But today’s users “really don’t post creative content to those old platforms anymore,” he continued. “They’re actually posting them on platforms like ourselves, where they’re looking for an expressive and creative outlet.”
Lu claimed Triller also benefited from older social networks’ attempt to enter the short-form video space.
When Instagram launched its TikTok competitor, Reels, Triller saw a 20% spike in usage, Lu said.
“We realized that a lot of users who were waiting for Reels…they saw what it was. And they decided they’re sticking to Triller,” he said.
On the topic of business matters, Lu declined to speak about recent reports of its supposed billion-dollar valuation, but did confirm Triller is in the process of raising new funding. He also declined to speak about the status of Triller’s reported $20 billion bid with Centricus for TikTok assets, but said the company believed it would have been a good home for TikTok creator content from an infrastructure perspective.
Not surprisingly, given Triller’s potential growth in the midst of TikTok concerns, Lu also supported the idea that TikTok could be a security threat to U.S. users.
“Given the sensitivity of the data [and] the amount of data that they collect, it does pose a national risk,” Lu said of TikTok. “This is a Chinese-owned company. The data is sitting, probably, not here in the States…” he added, seemingly refuting TikTok’s claims that its U.S. data was on U.S. servers.
“We take that stuff very seriously. We are a U.S.- based company,” he said, noting how Triller was compliant with U.S. regulations, like COPPA. “Something we actually take very strong pride in is making sure that we uphold [Triller] to the right standards that we’re used to, and as well as the privacy of our users and our citizens,” Lu said.
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LanzaTech is developing a small-scale waste biomass gasifier for ethanol production in India
As part of the continuing global rollout of LanzaTech’s technology to capture carbon dioxide emissions and turn those emissions into fuel and chemicals, the company is rolling out a new small-scale waste biomass gasifier in India.
The new gasifier, which was announced Tuesday on TechCrunch Disrupt’s virtual stage, will be hosted at Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemical, one of India’s largest refiners. The LanzaTech gasifier, which will be built in partnership with Indian project development firm Ankur Scientific, will use waste to make ethanol and chemicals rather than power.
While most of the industry uses large-scale, expensive oxygen-blown gasifiers to make liquids, the LanzaTech air-blown technology is much cheaper and easier to operate and can still produce bacteria at a scale that produces a meaningful amount of ethanol.
Contamination also isn’t an issue with the gas feedstock for LanzaTech’s bacteria, according to LanzaTech CEO Jennifer Holmgren. The new process can produce biochar that ends up replacing fertilizer in soil and thereby reducing nitrogen oxide emissions, which are another greenhouse gas contributing to global climate change.
If the pilot project is successful and the gasifiers are rolled out at scale across India, it could mean an ability for the country to produce roughly 25 billion liters of ethanol per year and result in removing 60 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to LanzaTech’s estimates.
“Overall something that people said makes no sense, may well make sense and may well result in benefits beyond just the immediate reuse of waste agri carbon and production of a fuel that results in keeping some petroleum in the ground,” according to a statement from Holmgren. “Holistic systems thinking is the way.”
For Holmgren, the small pilot project in India is an example of how small-scale, low-cost distributed systems can compete with the big oil industry.
“There are two paths to scale, bigger which is cheaper per unit produced, or massively replicating a small scale unit (numbering up versus scaling up),” Holmgren said. “Most people have always believed that numbering up is for toys and food, but I think it will also fit process technology. Certainly, larger fits petroleum, but it can’t fit biotechnology or biomass or waste gases which are distributed and difficult to move.”
Decarbonization, Holmgren believes, will require a reimagining of traditional systems if humanity is to break the carbon cycle that’s now causing global climate catastrophes that can be observed in the Western United States right now.
“We must not benchmark today’s innovation against the past; we must, instead, imagine and create a very different future, one where the production of energy, fuels and chemicals is based on distributed, rather than centralized principles,” said Holmgren. “Recent breakthroughs in miniaturization, automation, AI and 3D printing enable distributed production beyond anything that could have been previously imagined and of course, a simple gasifier will help that along.”
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Airtable’s Howie Liu has no interest in exiting, even as the company’s valuation soars
In the middle of a pandemic, Airtable, the low-code startup, has actually had an excellent year. Just the other day, the company announced it had raised $185 million on a whopping $2.585 billion valuation. It also announced some new features that take it from the realm of pure no-code and deeper into low-code territory, which allows users to extend the product in new ways.
Airtable CEO and co-founder Howie Liu was a guest today at TechCrunch Disrupt, where he was interviewed by TechCrunch News Editor Frederic Lardinois.
Liu said that the original vision that has stayed pretty steady since the company launched in 2013 was to democratize software creation. “We believe that more people in the world should become software builders, not just software users, and pretty much the whole time that we’ve been working on this company we’ve been charting our course towards that end goal,” he said.
But something changed recently, where Liu saw people who needed to do a bit more with the tool than that original vision allowed.
“So, the biggest shift that’s happening today with our fundraise and our launch announcement is that we’re going from being a no-code product, a purely no-code solution where you don’t have to use code, but neither can you use code to extend the product to now being a low-code solution, and one that also has a lot more extensibility with other features like automation, allowing people to build logic into Airtable without any technical knowledge,” he said.
In addition, the company, with 200,00 customers, has created a marketplace where users can share applications they’ve built. As the pandemic has taken hold, Liu says that he’s seen a shift in the types of deals he’s been seeing. That’s partly due to small businesses, which were once his company’s bread and butter, suffering more economic pain as a result of COVID.
But he has seen larger enterprise customers fill the void, and it’s not too big a stretch to think that the new extensibility features could be a nod to these more lucrative customers, who may require a bit more power than a pure no-code solution would provide.
“On the enterprise side of our business we’ve seen, for instance this summer, a 5x increase in enterprise deal closing velocity from the prior summer period, and this incredible appetite from enterprise signings with dozens of six-figure deals, some seven-figure deals and thousands of new paid customers overall,” he said.
In spite of this great success, the upward trend of the business and the fat valuation, Liu was in no mood to talk about an IPO. In his view, there is plenty of time for that, and in spite of being a seven-year-old company with great momentum, he says he’s simply not thinking about it.
Nor did he express any interest in being acquired, and he says that his investors weren’t putting any pressure on him to exit.
“It’s always been about finding investors who are really committed and aligned to the long-term goals and approach that we have to this business that matters more to us than the actual valuation numbers or any other kind of technical aspects of the round,” he said.
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