texas
Auto Added by WPeMatico
How to go to market in middle America
Deborah Eisenberg is the founder of TechStarts PR, where she helps technology companies both big and small hone their message and reach their audience.
There comes a time for many startup companies where they either realize they need to do a nationwide rollout, or they need to actively target buyers in the middle of the country. If you are a startup on either the East or the West Coasts, it’s worth thinking about how this market might present its own set of unique challenges, and how you plan to overcome them.
There are a lot of misconceptions about what some people call “flyover country,” and as a San Francisco native who spent two decades in New York, Washington DC, and Boston before moving to Pittsburgh, I can assure you they are almost all wrong. Without getting into specifics, the reality of “middle America” is that it’s the same as anywhere else.
Income, education, world view, and waistlines are all varied. It’s pretty accurate that San Francisco possesses a culture obsessed with fitness and entrepreneurship, but California isn’t necessarily all like that, and if you think it is, I encourage you to go to Bakersfield, the Central Valley, or Eureka sometime.
In addition, just because the stereotypes are wrong doesn’t mean there’s nothing different about doing business here. As you think about how to conduct your rollout, here are some things you should consider:
Table of Contents
Research
As with any market, research is key since it informs every other aspect of the rollout. Start by looking into who your competition is.
Since there are fewer VC-backed startups in middle America, and smaller companies tend to get less press, the research may be harder. However, there are some major universities that are actively putting money into their own Entrepreneurship programs and those spinoffs often do very well.
Powered by WPeMatico
AI services startup Hypergiant brings on Bill Nye as an advisor
Hypergiant, a startup launched last year to address the execution gap in bringing applied AI and machine learning technologies to bear for large companies, has signed on a high-profile new advisor to help out with the new ‘Galactic Systems’ division of its services lineup.
Hypergiant founder CEO Ben Lamm also serves as an Advisory Council Member for The Planetary Society, the nonprofit dedicated to space science and exploration advocacy that’s led by Nye who acts as the Society’s CEO. Nye did some voiceover work for the video at the bottom of this post for Hypergiant through the connection, and then decided to come on in a more formal capacity as an official advisor working with the company. He’ll act as a member of Hypergiant’s Advisory Board.
Nye was specifically interested in helping Hypergiant to work on AI tech that touch on a couple of areas he’s most passionate about.
“Hypergiant has an ambitious mission to address some big problems using artificial intelligence systems,” Nye explained via email. “I’m looking forward to working with Hypergiant to develop artificially intelligent systems in two areas I care about a great deal: climate change and space exploration. We need to think big, and I’m very optimistic about what AI can do to make the world quite a bit better.”
Through its work, Hypergiant has an impact on projects in flight from high-profile customers including Apple, GE, Starbucks and the Department of Homeland Security to name just a few. Earlier this year, Austin-based Hypergiant announced it was launching a dedicated space division through the acquisition of Satellite & Extraterrestrial Operations & Procedures (SEOPS), a Texas company that offered deployment services for small satellites.
Hypergiant founder and CEO Ben Lamm along with members of the Hypergiant team at NASA. Credit: Hypergiant.
Nye’s role will focus on this division, advising on space, but also equally on advising clients as to climate change in order to ensure that Hypergiant can “make the most of AI systems to hep provide a high quality of life for people everywhere,” Nye wrote.
“Climate change is the biggest issue we face, and we need to get serious about new ways to fight it,” he explained in an email, noting that the potential impact his work with Hypergiant will have in this area specifically is a key reason he’s excited to undertake the new role.
A Better World from HYPERGIANT on Vimeo.
Powered by WPeMatico
Corporations and private investors are backing new ‘green’ deals as climate worries mount
In the nine years since private equity and venture capital investments into sustainable technologies last crossed the $6 billion threshold, the problems caused by global carbon emissions have only intensified.
Now, as the world confronts the reality that there’s not much time left to reverse course on carbon emissions and the impact they will have on life on earth, both corporate and private investors are once again stepping up their commitments to startups in the space.
In 2018, global venture capital investment into startups focused on sustainability jumped 127 percent, to $9.2 billion, the highest since 2010, according to a January report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Powering that boost was a $1.1 billion investment in the smart window maker, View, and another $795 million for Chinese electric vehicle firm Youxia Motors. In fact, there were no fewer than eight VC/PE financings of Chinese EV specialist companies in 2018, totaling some $3.3 billion.
That stark assessment is coming from more corners of the scientific community, and the reality of the danger is being emphasized by politicians and concerned citizens around the globe.
The simple truth is that things are getting worse. And for the past two years, emissions have been increasing as countries continue to use oil and gas and coal to fuel economic growth, even as the global community realizes that carbon emissions are an increasing threat.
A recent assessment by the U.S. government put the cost of climate change caused by carbon emissions at $500 billion annually by the end of the century. And the financial toll doesn’t begin to assess the cost to the quality of human life and the potential lives that will be lost because of climate-related disasters.
This isn’t the first time the world has realized the threat climate change poses. It’s not even the second. Back in 1979 — and throughout the next decade — the U.S. grappled with how to craft an appropriate response to the coming climate-related crisis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the government failed, and the issue of imminent climate disaster was set aside.
Former Vice President Al Gore picked up the thread in the mid-2000s in the wake of his defeat to the Connecticut Yankee turned Texas oilman George W. Bush in the contested 2000 presidential election. Through advocacy work and the popular climate-focused documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” Gore was able to proselytize among a group of technocrats looking for the next big thing in the wake of the internet explosion that had transformed professional and personal lives.
Venture capital investors flocked to invest in renewable technologies — from biofuels to new solar energy generating technologies to new battery chemistries and beyond.
Over the next seven years billion-dollar companies would rise and fall on the back of speculative investment in the promise of a cleaner energy future that would disrupt the oil industry and turn billionaires into multi-billionaires — all while saving the world.
It didn’t work out.
Problems with scaling technologies beyond a controlled laboratory setting; global economic pressures wrought by an explosion of manufacturing capacity in countries like China; and the hubris of investors who thought that their investment acumen in picking winners of the information age could work just as well in centuries-old industries like oil and gas, or electricity, found themselves floundering in complicated, regulated markets with deep-pocketed incumbents and entrenched interests in promoting the status quo.
In the process, investors lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S. alone, and destabilized some of the oldest firms in the investment industry.
Now, companies and investors are returning to the market in a major way. Some of the largest businesses in the food and agriculture industry are investing in new companies that are developing protein replacements and novel cultivation technologies; utilities are investing more heavily in smart grid technologies as electrification and microgrids become more real; automakers and battery manufacturers are backing new energy storage technologies; and frontier investors are backing companies tackling everything from biologically based chemical manufacturing to new construction technologies for smart homes and cities, to new kinds of nuclear power that could transform how the world conceives of energy abundance (along with geo-engineering tech to remove carbon from the atmosphere).
“In the last few years, the number of technologies ripe for investment has expanded dramatically,” Ravi Manghani, research director for energy storage at Wood Mackenzie, an energy research and consultancy firm, told CNBC in March. “It’s no longer just three or four technology verticals.”
While none of these technological advancements are a guaranteed solution to the threats carbon emissions pose, or are surefire commercially viable businesses, the fact that investors are once again looking at sustainability as a viable investment thesis — capable of producing multiple billion-dollar businesses — is a good step forward.
Any plan to address decarbonization has to confront industries as diverse as agriculture, construction, transportation, chemicals and consumer goods from clothes to chemicals.
Failure to confront these challenges would be catastrophic. Even if global warming is restricted to just the 2 degree Celsius target set at the Paris climate agreement, that could mean the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs and several meters of sea-level rise, as The New York Times reported last August. Already the impacts of climate change have meant tens of billions of dollars in damage for the U.S. in 2018 alone.
“The era of incrementalism on climate change is over,” said Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey, one of the architects of the “Green New Deal” legislation, in an interview with Vox. “We are now in the era of the Green New Deal. It’s not going away. It is creating an incentive for governors to do more, for mayors to do more, for companies to do more. The polling says it has political legs that will drive it right into the election of 2020, and when that cycle is done, I think we’re going to see a much greater capacity for us to take the kind of action that we need.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Polis, the door-to-door marketer, raises another $2.5 million
Polis founder Kendall Tucker began her professional life as a campaign organizer in local Democratic politics, but — seeing an opportunity in her one-on-one conversations with everyday folks — has built a business taking that shoe leather approach to political campaigns to the business world.
Now the company she founded to test her thesis that Americans would welcome back the return of the door-to-door salesperson three years ago is $2.5 million richer thanks to a new round of financing from Initialized Capital (the fund founded by Garry Tan and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian) and Semil Shah’s Haystack.vc.
The Boston-based company currently straddles the line between political organizing tool and new marketing platform — a situation that even its founder admits is tenuous at the moment.
That tension is only exacerbated by the fact that the company is coming off one of its biggest political campaign seasons. Helping to power the get-out-the-vote initiative for Senatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Polis’ software managed the campaign’s outreach effort to 3 million voters across the state.
However, politically focused software and services businesses are risky. Earlier this year the Sean Parker-backed Brigade shut down and there are rumblings that other startups targeting political action may follow suit.
“Essentially, we got really excited about going into the corporate space because online has gotten so nasty,” says Tucker. “And, at the end of the day, digital advertising isn’t as effective as it once was.”
Customer acquisition costs in the digital ad space are rising. For companies like NRG Energy and Inspire Energy (both Polis clients), the cost of acquisitions online can be as much as $300 per person.
Polis helps identify which doors for salespeople to target and works with companies to identify the scripts that are most persuasive for consumers, according to Tucker. The company also monitors for sales success and helps manage the process so customers aren’t getting too many house calls from persistent sales people.
“We do everything through the conversation at the door,” says Tucker. “We do targeting and we do script curation (everything from what script do you use and when do you branch out of scripts) and we have an open API so they can push that out and they run with it through the rest of their marketing.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Taali takes its popped water lily snacks from Y Combinator to the world
Aditya and Aarti Kochhar Kaji didn’t set out to start the snack food business Taali Foods when they were studying for their business degrees at Harvard.
The couple both hail from Mumbai and met at the University of Pennsylvania . They were married before starting at Harvard’s Business School and initially were interested in other areas — Aarti was exploring a career in venture capital and Aditya was looking at the food and beverage industry broadly in his classes at Harvard.
Addicted to snack foods like chips and popcorn to fuel her Harvard study sessions, Aarti started making popped water lily seeds as a snack — a food both she and her husband had grown up eating in India, she said.
The seeds, which are high in anti-oxidants and low in fat, have been a staple of Ayurvedic medicine — thanks to their purported anti-inflammatory properties, and are a staple of Indian snacking traditions. Now, with American consumers on the hunt for healthier snacks, they’re becoming a big business in the U.S. as well.
Y Combinator is very on-trend, with its decision to invest and accelerate Taali as part of its most recent cohort of startups. But in this instance you may call the accelerator a fast follower rather than a progenitor of this trend.
No less auspicious a food tastemaker than Whole Foods named water lily seeds as one of the top 10 new food trends of 2019. With that attention, competitors to Taali abound.
Bohana and AshaPops are just two new snack food companies floating on the popped water lily seed movement. Bohana even managed to nab the attention of PepsiCo’s Nutrition Greenhouse competitive accelerator.
It’s no secret that technology investors are investing more heavily in consumer businesses — everything from snack foods to period products and baby formula — and startups need only point to the success of Amazon as the everything store to show that there’s always money to be made in the category.
Indeed, at $1.47 trillion, the consumer packaged goods industry dwarfs technology as a share of the nation’s economy.
As Ryan Caldbeck, the head of the consumer-focused investment firm CircleUp noted last year:
The uptick in tech VC dollars going to the CPG market is partly because tech investing is brutally competitive and saturated, and largely because these VCs are awakening to the strong historical returns in CPG, especially with the trend leaning towards small brands stealing market share.
Consumer is a massive market – about 3x the size of tech, as seen below.
Despite the size of the market, the early-stage has historically been underserved by investors due to market inefficiencies like the geographic dispersion of brands and a lack of structured information sources (i.e. there is no Silicon Valley for consumer, and certainly no Crunchbase equivalents – yet).
Strong exits are already possible for consumer brands — and not necessarily from the big-ticket, headline grabbing acquisitions like Dollar Shave Club. Last week This is L. — the condom and period product retailer — sold for roughly $100 million after raising seed funding from investors, including 500 Startups and Y Combinator.
Taali was similarly bootstrapped before it was accepted into Y Combinator. The company is already selling its snacks through Amazon and in retail locations like Fairway in New York and Central Market in Texas. The founders expect to be in stores in California in the next few months.
Powered by WPeMatico
Hola Code tackles the real migration crisis
Tamara Davison is a British journalist reporting from Mexico. She has written for The i Newspaper and Entrepreneur as well as many regional newspapers worldwide, and she is the current editor of Aztec Reports.
After spending eight months in an immigration facility in the United States, Abimael Hernandez made the tough decision to return to Mexico.
He had spent 14 years in Florida and was leaving behind his wife and three children to return to Mexico so he could go through the process of returning to the United States legally.
Hernandez didn’t want to live in fear of being pulled over by police; he longed to own a car in his name and he didn’t want his immigration status to be illegal any longer.
Upon his return to Mexico, Hernandez had worked in construction, call centers and sold CDs before finally being given an opportunity that made a return to the United States less appealing. Hernandez now works as a software developer at Ignite Commerce in Mexico and has integrated well into the country that he at first struggled to identify as home.
Hernandez’s struggle to adjust and adapt to life in a new country mirrors that of other migrants who are returning to Mexico. And ongoing U.S. government attempts to put an end to the DACA program instituted under President Barack Obama, an initiative which protected as many as 800,000 unauthorized migrants that had come to the United States as children, are pushing many others along the same path.
For the people facing an increasingly hostile environment for migrants who choose — or are forced — to return to Latin America, little support awaits.
What tends to lie in store for these deportees and returnees in Mexico is usually low-paying service employment. For those with an undocumented status especially, no collateral in Mexico leads to problems in accessing finances, whilst having spent the majority of their lives in the United States, barriers in the Spanish language mean some returnees fail to be accepted into the Mexican education system.
Though there are some government initiatives aimed at supporting deportees by providing shelter and food, this usually bilingual cohort is prone to unemployment, as well as the mental struggle assigned to the frustrations of reintegrating into a country with which many can’t identify.
It is the hardship of reintegration that inspired the foundation of Hola Code, the only Mexican startup of its kind that currently runs in the country. Founded by CEO Marcela Torres just last year, Hola Code is coined as hackers without borders and is a startup that offers a coding bootcamp for migrants, ensuring that this young generation, new to Mexico, does not slip under the radar.
Geared at supporting the integration of deportees, the startup is prepping Mexicans to enter into a high-demand sector through an intensive five-month software development training program that gives the students qualification, even though many have started from scratch.
‘‘We don’t know of any social enterprises or even regular startups that are actually tackling migration in Mexico,’’ Torres recently told TechCrunch. Although migration and deportations continue to make headlines, it appears that Hola Code might be the only Mexican startup trying to do anything about it.
Backed by San Francisco-based Hack Reactor, the Mexican organization costs nothing until graduates have secured a full-time job, and pays their students a monthly stipend without any bureaucratic red tape.
Collectively venturing into Mexican society with peers in a similar position, most Hola Code students also don’t plan to return to the United States and want to use their skill set in the ever-growing Mexican tech ecosystems. For former student Hernandez, he remains grateful for the support network that Hola Code became for him.
‘‘If Mexico had more opportunities like Hola Code I think returnees would definitely think about not going back to the United States and other countries,’’ he said.
The question now remains as to how international policies will continue to affect Latin American families in the future.
‘‘You create the program in the hopes that one day that you will run out of work,’’ CEO and co-founder Marcela Torres ambitiously explained.
MISSION, TX – JUNE 12: A Central American immigrant stands at the U.S.-Mexico border fence after crossing into Texas on June 12, 2018 near Mission, Texas. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political-asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
The bittersweet reality is that Hola Code has, in fact, blossomed within the past year, with now more than 400 monthly applications from Mexicans and Central American migrants that are seeking refuge in the country. Although the organization celebrates the achievements of their alumni, who tend to quickly ascend into well-paid tech jobs across Mexico, the coding bootcamp is never short of work, and is now looking to open an office in Tijuana to be closer to the border.
The journey for the startup’s female founder, one of a small number of women in Mexican tech leadership, has also not been an easy feat.
‘‘It’s very difficult for a woman that has designed a business plan and has ideas to be taken seriously,’’ Torres explains. ‘‘It took me a long time to find the original investors that would believe in my idea and in my capacity, as well, to run the organization because this is the first startup that I have executed.’’
The cultural burdens that still exist in Mexico is a reality that deters many women from entering into the entrepreneurial scene within the country. From finding investors to promoting an idea, it is the issue of being taken seriously that is most effective at stalling Mexico’s female entrepreneurs.
‘‘I think that it’s important for younger women to start seeing us out there trying to take risks and thinking that they can do it as well. Even if they’re not successful, that it’s something that is available and achievable for them.’’
Confronted by her own hurdles in becoming the tech leader of Hola Code today, however, her organization does much more than just in-depth coding. From encouraging young Mexican women to leap into business and tech, to helping each student find a job, Torres speaks of the hope, security and routine that every Hola Coder gathers as they become immersed in Mexican life through this community.
‘‘Helping them navigate the expectations of how to start a career in tech is one of the things that we work on and therefore it means that they develop the right skill set, and once they finish the program, to be able to successfully jump into big areas such as banking.’’
MCALLEN, TX – JUNE 12: Central American asylum seekers wait for transport while being detained by U.S. Border Patrol agents near the U.S.-Mexico border on June 12, 2018 in McAllen, Texas. The group of women and children had rafted across the Rio Grande from Mexico and were detained before being sent to a processing center for possible separation. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is executing the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy towards undocumented immigrants. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions also said that domestic and gang violence in immigrants’ country of origin would no longer qualify them for political asylum status. (Photo by John Moore/Getty Images)
Former student Miriam Alvarez is now a software engineer for SegundaMano. Growing up in the United States, Mexican Universities did not accept her U.S. documents and she too began working in a call center before hearing about the project, applying just days before the application deadline. ‘‘It’s OK to not know everything, but you should always be open to trying new things and learning something new,’’ Alvarez said, speaking of the broader messages that Hola Code delivers.
The overwhelming lessons that all Hola Code’s alumni praise is how the bootcamp delivers more than just coding, but also important life skills that allow for the transition to Mexico to be easier. Through reasoning and problem solving, many are grateful for the structure and direction that Hola Code provides Mexicans new to the country.
Though many of their students had joined Hola Code feeling “American,” the values that the group provides adds to the larger picture of Mexico’s growing tech scenes.
‘‘The biggest challenge for the tech sector in the country is access to human capital and the second one is retaining the talent.’’ By fine-tuning the country’s coding talent pools with bicultural young developers that speak English, Spanish and also JavaScript, the organization contributes to growing tech hubs such as Tijuana, Guadalajara and Mexico City, which are increasingly gaining global attention.
Hola Code is one of just a few life-changing organizations filling the gap in an immigration story that is seldom covered by the media.
Providing social mobility to people that have been forced to return through education, employment and exposure to tech pioneers, Hola Code’s alumni are spreading the message of integration through education far and wide across the globe.
As long as the fragility of migration continues to be tested, however, Torres and her team have work to do in their mission to produce Mexico’s next pioneering coding generation.
Powered by WPeMatico
Deliverr raises $7M to help e-commerce businesses compete with Amazon Prime
When Amazon rolled out its membership-based two-day shipping service in 2005, e-commerce and customer expectations around fulfillment speed changed forever.
Today, more than 100 million people use Amazon Prime. That means, 100 million people are fully accustomed to two-day shipping and if they can’t have it, they shop elsewhere. As The Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims recently put it: “Alongside life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, you can now add another inalienable right: two-day shipping on practically everything.”
Only recently have Amazon’s competitors begun to offer similar fast delivery options. About two years ago, Walmart launched its own free two-day delivery service for its owned-inventory; eBay followed suit, establishing a three-day or less delivery guaranteed option for shoppers in March 2017.
To power these Prime-like delivery options, Walmart, eBay and the Canadian e-commerce business Shopify are relying on a little upstart.
One-year-old Deliverr helps businesses offer rapid delivery experiences to their customers. Today, the company is announcing a $7.1 million Series A led by Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, with participation from Zola founder Shan-Lyn Ma, Flexport chief executive officer Ryan Peterson and others.
The San Francisco-based startup uses machine learning and predictive intelligence to determine which of its warehouses to store its client’s goods.
Currently, Deliverr operates out of more than 10 warehouses in Texas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Ohio and New Jersey, among other states, though co-founder Michael Krakaris says that number is growing every week. Its customers typically store inventory in three to five different locations based on Deliverr’s predictive algorithms.
Unlike Amazon, which owns more than 75 fulfillment centers, Deliverr doesn’t own its warehouses. Krakaris describes the company’s strategy as a sort of Uber for fulfillment.
“Uber didn’t change the physical infrastructure of cars. They didn’t build their own taxis. What they did was create software that could connect excess capacity drivers,” Krakaris told TechCrunch. “Most warehouses aren’t going to be full. We are going in and filling that extra space they wouldn’t otherwise fill.”
One of the startup’s tricks is to use brand-neutral packaging so any and all marketplaces could theoretically power fulfillment through Deliverr. Amazon, of course, sticks a Prime sticker on all its outgoing packages. And because Amazon’s fulfillment service is used by some eBay sellers, eBay items are known to show up at customers’ homes in Amazon-branded packaging. Not a great look for eBay.
“You need an independent fulfillment service that can handle all these different fulfillment channels and be neutral,” Krakaris said.
Deliverr plans to use the investment to scale its team and ink partnerships with additional online retailers.
Powered by WPeMatico
Managing the music business from a mobile phone, Jammber is making the industry sing
The music business is littered with stories about songwriters or studio contributors and session musicians who never get the credit — or money — they’re often due for their work on hit songs.
And for every storied session musician in “The Wrecking Crew” there are perhaps hundreds of other contributors who aren’t getting their just desserts.
That’s where Jammber comes in. The five-year-old company co-founded by serial entrepreneur Marcus Cobb has developed a suite of tools to manage everything from songwriting credits and rights management to ticketing and touring all from a group of apps on a mobile phone. And has just raised $2.4 million in funding to take those tools to a broader market.
Jammber “Muse” gives collaborators a single platform to exchange lyrics and song ideas, while the company’s “Splits” app tracks ownership and credits of any eventual product from a collaboration. The company’s nStudio tracks songwriting credits to assist with chart and Grammy submission — through a partnership with Nielsen Music — and its “PinPoint” helps organize touring. The recording applications even have a presence feature so session musicians, songwriters and artists can actually be tagged in the studio while they’re working.
“I think we need to get attribution and monetization closer to the creators,” Cobb has said. “Why aren’t we doing that? The industry is growing and thriving. Are we making sure that performers and creators of all different tiers are being equally compensated?”
The answer, sadly, for many in the music industry is no. In fact, while Cobb had originally set out to make a networking tool for creatives with Jammber he wound up shifting the service to the management toolkit after visiting the offices of a music label.
Jammber chief executive Marcus Cobb
“I saw stacks and stacks of payroll checks that were returned to sender,” Cobb, told Crain’s Chicago Business. “These checks were taking three months to two years to print, and they were wrong addresses, or there were stage names instead of legal names.”
That experience convinced Cobb of the demand, but it was Nashville that gave the serial entrepreneur the crucible within which to develop the full suite of tools that now make up Jammber’s soup-to-nuts platform.
Cobb likes to say that Jammber was conceived in Chicago (where the company spun up from the city’s massively influential 1871 entrepreneurship center) and born in Nashville — the home of the multi-billion-dollar American country music industry. All of the tools in Jammber, Cobb says, were created with input from a local musician, producer, artist and repertoire person or a label executive.
In 2015, the company came down to Nashville as part of the first batch of companies in Project Music, a joint venture between the Country Music Association and the Nashville Entrepreneur Center meant to encourage the development of technology for the music industry.
For the 41-year-old Cobb, programming and entrepreneurship has literally been a life saver. Growing up in Texas and Nevada with an abusive, drug-addicted stepfather took a toll on Cobb and programming became an outlet — thanks to a particularly well-equipped computer lab at his high school. “I had moved 24 times,” Cobb said in an interview. “My stepfather was a full-blown crack addict. He would disappear with money; we got evicted a lot.”
But the experience with computers led to an early job out of high school, which launched Cobb’s tech career. He sold his first company, Eido Software in 2007 a year after launching it and has used that money to pursue other endeavors.
And while Cobb is a gifted programmer, that’s not his only interest. His next big foray into business was as the owner and lead designer of Marc Wayne Intimates, a boutique lingerie company that also provided the business-savvy Cobb with his first window into the music business — outfitting dancers in music videos for artists like Pitbull.
Cobb has invested $300,000 of his own money into Jammber and raised roughly $400,000 in early seed funding. The $2.3 million that the company raised in its most recent round came from a who’s who of music executives, including former Sony Nashville chief executive Joe Galante; Hootie and the Blowfish manager Clarence Spalding; and Kings of Leon manager Ken Levitan.
These investors know the tension at the heart of the music business better than anyone, Cobb says — which is that the creative act of making music can often be at odds with the mundanity of organizing and running an effective business to ensure that the music getting made is actually heard by an audience that then pays the musician for their work.
“The irony about making a living in a copyright industry like the music industry is you have to be very organized to make money in a timely manner or even get credit for your work,” said Cobb. “Over 40 percent of the money creators are owed is tied up by bad or wrong data because it’s very difficult to be organized while you create. These tools finally change that.”
Jammber’s services are currently in a closed, invite-only beta that will be capped at 10,000 users. There’s a basic set of services that will be available for free, with pricing for “unlimited” access to the toolkit starting at $10 per month. In addition to the applications, the company also has an online platform that integrates with the mobile suite. Pricing for that service starts at $25 per month.
“This is an ecosystem play for us. I’ve been in software for a long time and the realization for me is that it’s not just mobile-first or cloud-first anymore, it’s simplicity-first. Independent artists and record labels generated $5.2 billion in revenues last year and the sector continues to grow — all while largely using paper and spreadsheets for their back office tools,” said Cobb. “This is a massive, underserved market and we believe we’ve figured out how to provide the value they’ve been waiting for.”
Powered by WPeMatico
Scaling startups are setting up secondary hubs in these cities
America’s mayors have spent the past nine months tripping over each other to curry favor with Amazon.com in its high-profile search for a second headquarters.
More quietly, however, a similar story has been playing out in startup-land. Many of the most valuable venture-backed companies are venturing outside their high-cost headquarters and setting up secondary hubs in smaller cities.
Where are they going? Nashville is pretty popular. So is Phoenix. Portland and Raleigh also are seeing some jobs. A number of companies also have a high number of remote offerings, seeking candidates with coveted skills who don’t want to relocate.
Those are some of the findings from a Crunchbase News analysis of the geographic hiring practices of U.S. unicorns. Since most of these companies are based in high-cost locations, like the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston and New York, we were looking to see if there is a pattern of setting up offices in smaller, cheaper cities. (For more on survey technique, see Methodology section below.)
Here is a look at some of the hotspots.
Nashville
One surprise finding was the prominence of Nashville among secondary locations for startup offices.
We found at least four unicorns scaling up Nashville offices, plus another three with growing operations in or around other Tennessee cities. Here are some of the Tennessee-loving startups:
When we referred to Nashville’s popularity with unicorns as surprising, that was largely because the city isn’t known as a major hub for tech startups or venture funding. That said, it has a lot of attributes that make for a practical and desirable location for a secondary office.
Nashville’s attractions include high quality of life ratings, a growing population and economy, mild climate and lots of live music. Home prices and overall cost of living are also still far below Silicon Valley and New York, even though the Nashville real estate market has been on a tear for the past several years. An added perk for workers: Tennessee has no income tax on wages.
Phoenix
Phoenix is another popular pick for startup offices, particularly West Coast companies seeking a lower-cost hub for customer service and other operations that require a large staff.
In the chart below, we look at five unicorns with significant staffing in the desert city:
Affordability, ease of expansion and a large employable population look like big factors in Phoenix’s appeal. Homes and overall cost of living are a lot cheaper than the big coastal cities. And there’s plenty of room to sprawl.
One article about a new office opening also cited low job turnover rates as an attractive Phoenix-area attribute, which is an interesting notion. Startup hubs like San Francisco and New York see a lot of job-hopping, particularly for people with in-demand skill sets. Scaling companies may be looking for people who measure their job tenure in years rather than months.
Those aren’t the only places
Nashville and Phoenix aren’t the only hotspots for unicorns setting up secondary offices. Many other cities are also seeing some scaling startup activity.
Let’s start with North Carolina. The Research Triangle region is known for having a lot of STEM grads, so it makes sense that deep tech companies headquartered elsewhere might still want a local base. One such company is cybersecurity unicorn Tanium, which has a lot of technical job openings in the area. Another is Docker, developer of software containerization technology, which has open positions in Raleigh.
The Orlando metro area stood out mostly due to Robinhood, the zero-fee stock and crypto trading platform that recently hit the $5 billion valuation mark. The Silicon Valley-based company has a significant number of open positions in Lake Mary, an Orlando suburb, including HR and compliance jobs.
Portland, meanwhile, just drew another crypto-loving unicorn, digital currency transaction platform Coinbase. The San Francisco-based company recently opened an office in the Oregon city and is currently in hiring mode.
Anywhere with a screen
But you don’t have to be anywhere in particular to score jobs at many fast-growing startups. A lot of unicorns have a high number of remote positions, including specialized technical roles that may be hard to fill locally.
GitHub, which makes tools developers can use to collaborate remotely on projects, does a particularly good job of practicing what it codes. A notable number of engineering jobs open at the San Francisco-based company are available to remote workers, and other departments also have some openings for telecommuters.
Others with a smattering of remote openings include Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike, enterprise software developer Apttus and also Docker.
Not everyone is doing it
Of course, not every unicorn is opening large secondary offices. Many prefer to keep staff closer to home base, seeking to lure employees with chic workplaces and lavish perks. Other companies find that when they do expand, it makes strategic sense to go to another high-cost location.
Still, the secondary hub phenomenon may offer a partial antidote to complaints that a few regions are hogging too much of the venture capital pie. While unicorns still overwhelmingly headquarter in a handful of cities, at least they’re spreading their wings and providing more jobs in other places, too.
Methodology
For this analysis, we were looking at U.S. unicorns with secondary offices in other North American cities. We began with a list of 125 U.S.-based companies and looked at open positions advertised on their websites, focusing on job location.
We excluded job offerings related to representing a local market. For instance, a San Francisco company seeking a sales rep in Chicago to sell to Chicago customers doesn’t count. Instead, we looked for openings for team members handling core operations, including engineering, finances and company-wide customer support. We also excluded secondary offices outside of North America.
Additionally, we were looking principally for companies expanding into lower-cost areas. In many cases, we did see companies strategically adding staff in other high-cost locations, such as New York and Silicon Valley.
A final note pertains to Austin, Texas. We did see several unicorns based elsewhere with job openings in Austin. However, we did not include the city in the sections above because Austin, although a lower-cost location than Silicon Valley, may also be characterized as a large, mature technology and startup hub in its own right.
Powered by WPeMatico
After Harvey, ignore the climate debate and focus on building better, more efficient cities
In the intervening years since those storms, the nation has been continually pummeled by “historic” climatological events. While the country has been taking this beating from Mother Nature, the conversation in statehouses, city halls and Washington has been bogged down in a discussion about climate change. What causes it, what to do about it, and whose fault it is that… Read More
Powered by WPeMatico