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Extra Crunch roundup: Unpacking BuzzFeed’s SPAC, curb your meeting enthusiasm, more
Meetings should have a clear purpose, but instead, they’ve become a way to measure status and reinforce what is colloquially referred to as CYA culture.
There’s a kernel of truth in every joke, so whenever someone quips, “This meeting could have been an email!” you can bet that some small part of them meant it sincerely.
Few people know how to run meetings effectively and keep conversations on track. Making matters worse, attendees often don’t bother to prepare, which makes a boring session even less productive.
And then there’s the complication of workplace politics: How secure do you feel declining an invitation from a co-worker — or a manager?
“Every time a recurring meeting is added to a calendar, a kitten dies,” says Chuck Phillips, co-founder of MeetWell. “Very few employees decline meetings, even when it’s obvious that the meeting is going to be a doozy.”
Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.
Changing your meeting culture is difficult, but given that 26% of workers plan to look for a new job when the pandemic ends, startups need to do all they can to retain talent.
Aimed at managers, this post offers several testable strategies that will help you boost productivity and say goodbye to poorly run, lazily planned meetings.
“Declining a bad meeting should never be taboo, and you should reiterate your trust in the team and challenge them to spend their and others’ time with more intention,” Phillips says. “Help them feel empowered to decline a bad meeting.”
Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch, and have a great weekend.
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Why Amazon should pay attention to Shein
Image Credits: Shein
In the last year, online apparel shopping app Shein grew active daily users by 130%, reports Apptopia.
Each day, thousands of new products arrive on the app’s virtual shelves. Items are rapidly designed and prototyped before Shein’s contractors put them into production in Guangzhou factories — two weeks later, those SKUs arrive in fulfillment centers around the globe.
TechCrunch reporter Rita Liao examined how the company’s agile supply chain has become hot talk among e-commerce experts, but beyond a strong logistics game and data-driven product development, Shein’s close relationships with suppliers are integral to its success.
She also tried to answer a question many are asking: Is Shein a Chinese company?
“It’s hard to pin down where Shein is from,” answered Richard Xu from Grand View Capital, a Chinese venture capital firm.
“It’s a company with operations and supply chains in China targeting the global market, with nearly no business in China.”
Inside GM’s startup incubator strategy
Image Credits: Chevrolet
GM Vice President of Innovation Pam Fletcher is in charge of the company’s startups that tackle “electrification, connectivity and even insurance — all part of the automaker’s aim to find value (and profits) beyond its traditional business of making, selling and financing vehicles,” Kirsten Korosec writes.
Fletcher joined TechCrunch at a virtual TC Sessions: Mobility 2021 event to discuss what it’s like to launch a slew of startups under the umbrella of a 113-year-old automaker.
Investor Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool’s Chris Bennett on getting to the point with a pitch deck
Image Credits: MaC Venture Capital / Wonderschool
MaC Venture Capital founding managing partner Marlon Nichols and Wonderschool CEO Chris Bennett joined Extra Crunch Live to tear down the company’s early deck.
“The first thing that jumped out at all of us was just how bare-bones the presentation is: white text on a blue background, largely made up of bullet points,” Brian Heater writes before noting the CEO admitted that “not much changed aesthetically between that first pitch and the Series A deck.”
“It aligned with what we were valuing at the time,” Bennett says. “We were really focused on getting the product-market fit and really trying to understand what our customers needed. And we’re really focused on building the team.”
Dear Sophie: What options would allow me to start something on my own?
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch
Dear Sophie,
I’ve been working on an H-1B in the U.S. for nearly two years.
While I’m grateful to have made it through the H-1B lottery and to be working, I’m feeling unhappy and frustrated with my job.
I really want to start something of my own and work on my own terms in the United States. Are there any immigration options that would allow me to do that?
— Seeking Satisfaction
Investors’ thirst for growth could bode well for SentinelOne’s IPO
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Alex Wilhelm calls SentinelOne’s looming debut “fascinating.”
“Why? Because the company sports a combination of rapid growth and expanding losses that make it a good heat check for the IPO market,” he writes. “Its debut will allow us to answer whether public investors still value growth above all else.”
Alex delves into an early dataset from SentinelOne and why public market investors still appear to value growth above anything else.
Before an exit, founders must get their employment law ducks in a row
Image Credits: Jenny Dettrick (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Guest columnist Rob Hudock, a litigator who focuses on helping companies recruit the best talent available while avoiding distracting workplace issues or lawsuits, lays out the importance of putting out any employment-related fires before an exit.
“Inattention to employment issues can have a significant impact on deals — from preventing closings and reducing the deal value to altering the deal terms or significantly limiting the pool of potential buyers,” he writes.
“Fortunately, such issues typically can be resolved well in advance with a little forethought and legal guidance.”
Practice agile, iterative change to refine products and build company culture
Image Credits: John M Lund Photography Inc (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Building an excellent product and a standout company culture require the same process, Heap CEO Ken Fine writes in a guest column.
“At Heap, the analytics solution provider I lead, a defining principle is that good ideas should not be lost to top-down dictates and overrigid hierarchies,” he writes. “The best results come when you approach leadership like you would create a great product — you hypothesize, you test and iterate, and once you get it right, you grow it.”
Here, he lays out his method that argues in favor of iterative change, not “one-and-done decrees.”
a16z’s new $2.2B fund won’t just bet on the crypto future, it will defend it
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
The big news on Thursday was the announcement of Andreessen Horowitz’s new cryptocurrency-focused fund. Most focused on the eye-popping $2.2 billion figure, but Alex Wilhelm dug a bit deeper into the announcement to note that a16z isn’t just pumping a ton of money into the crypto space, it’s putting on gloves to fight for it.
Alex writes that “a16z intends to run defense for crypto in the American, and perhaps global, market. Crypto-focused startups are likely unable to tackle the regulation of their market on their own because they’re more focused on product work in a particular region of the larger crypto economy. The wealthy and connected investment firm that backs them will take on the task for its chosen champions.”
5 takeaways from BuzzFeed’s SPAC deck
Image Credits: Nicholas Kamm / AFP / Getty Images
Alex Wilhelm dives headfirst into BuzzFeed’s announcement that it plans to go public via a blank check company.
He looked at its historical and anticipated revenue growth (the latter is very sunny, which is not atypical for SPAC presentations), what makes up that revenue (more “commerce” as time goes on), its long-term profitability projections, as well as fun stuff, like the Pulitzer Prize-winning BuzzFeed News.
Admit it. You’re curious.
3 issues to resolve before switching to a subscription business model
Image Credits: SaskiaAcht (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
Moving from a pay-as-you-go model to a subscription service is more than just putting a monthly or yearly price tag on a product, CloudBlue’s Jess Warrington writes in a guest column.
“Executives cannot just layer a subscription model on top of an existing business,” Warrington writes. “They need to change the entire operation process, onboard all stakeholders, recalibrate their strategy and create a subscription culture.”
Warrington says that in his role at CloudBlue, companies often approach him for “help with solving technology challenges while shifting to a subscription business model, only to realize that they have not taken crucial organizational steps necessary to ensure a successful transition.”
Here’s how to avoid that situation.
Veo CEO Candice Xie has a plan for building a sustainable scooter company, and it’s working
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Rebecca Bellan interviewed Veo CEO Candice Xie about the micromobility startup’s “old-fashioned way” of doing business.
“I understand people are eager to prove their unit economics, their scalability and also improve their matrix to the VC to raise another round,” Xie says. “I would say that’s OK in the consumer industry, like consumer electronics or SaaS.
“But we are in transportation. It is a different business, and transportation takes years of collaboration and building between private and public partners. … So I don’t see it happening from day one, turning over a billion-dollar company, while simultaneously having it all make sense for the cities and users.”
5 companies doing growth marketing right
Image Credits: jayk7 (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
All companies want more or less the same thing: growth. But how do you accomplish it?
Ideally, don’t start from scratch.
The race to grow faster is more pressing than ever before. … “[F]orward-thinking entrepreneurs and growth marketers simply must make time to study their competition, learn best practices and apply them to their own business growth,” Mark Spera, the head of growth marketing at Minted, writes in a guest column.
“Of course, you should still run your own experiments, but it’s just more capital-efficient to emulate than to trial-and-error from scratch. Here are five companies with growth strategies worth emulating — including the most important lessons you can begin applying to your business today.”
Musculoskeletal medical startups race to enter personalized health tech market
Image Credits: ChrisChrisW (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
With more than 50 million Americans suffering from chronic pain and musculoskeletal (MSK) medical problems, a number of startups are offering patients new products “that don’t resemble the cookie-cutter status quo,” reports Natasha Mascarenhas.
Startups hoping to enter this space have an uphill climb. Setting aside regulations that cover aspects like product packaging and marketing, they must compete with well-entrenched competition from Big Pharma as they try to partner with health insurance companies.
Natasha profiles three companies that are each taking a different approach to personalized health: Clear, Hinge Health and PeerWell.
Like the US, a two-tier venture capital market is emerging in Latin America
Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
In the second part of an Exchange series looking at the global early-stage venture capital market, Alex Wilhelm and Anna Heim unpacked the scene in Latin America, discovering it looked a lot like the situation in the United States: slow Series A rounds, fast B rounds.
“Mega-rounds are no longer an exception in Latin America; in fact, they have become a trend, with ever-larger rounds being announced over the last few months,” they write.
Despite that, the funds aren’t being equitably distributed, and the region still lags behind its peers: Brazil has the most $1 billion startups in Latin America, with 12. The U.S., meanwhile, has 369, and China has 159.
But the Latin American market remains hot, if not quite as scorching as the U.S. and China.
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Veo raises $25M for AI-based cameras that record and analyze football and other team sports
Sports have been among some of the most popular and lucrative media plays in the world, luring broadcasters, advertisers and consumers to fork out huge sums to secure the chance to watch (and sponsor) their favorite teams and athletes.
That content, unsurprisingly, also typically costs a ton of money to produce, narrowing the production and distribution funnel even more. But today, a startup that’s cracked open that model with an autonomous, AI -based camera that lets any team record, edit and distribute their games, is announcing a round of funding to build out its business targeting the long tail of sporting teams and fixtures.
Veo Technologies, a Copenhagen startup that has designed a video camera and cloud-based subscription service to record and then automatically pick out highlights of games, which it then hosts on a platform for its customers to access and share that video content, has picked up €20 million (around $24.5 million) in a Series B round of funding.
The funding is being led by Danish investor Chr. Augustinus Fabrikker, with participation from U.S.-based Courtside VC, France’s Ventech and Denmark’s SEED Capital. Veo’s CEO and co-founder Henrik Teisbæk said in an interview that the startup is not disclosing its valuation, but a source close to funding tells me that it’s well over $100 million.
Teisbæk said that the plan will be to use the funds to continue expanding the company’s business on two levels. First, Veo will be digging into expanding its U.S. operations, with an office in Miami.
Second, it plans to continue enhancing the scope of its technology: The company started out optimising its computer vision software to record and track the matches for the most popular team sport in the world, football (soccer to U.S. readers), with customers buying the cameras — which retail for $800 — and the corresponding (mandatory) subscriptions — $1,200 annually — both to record games for spectators, as well as to use the footage for all kinds of practical purposes like training and recruitment videos. The key is that the cameras can be set up and left to run on their own. Once they are in place, they can record using wide-angles the majority of a soccer field (or whatever playing space is being used) and then zoom and edit down based on that.
Image Credits: Veo Technologies
Now, Veo is building the computer vision algorithms to expand that proposition into a plethora of other team-based sports, including rugby, basketball and hockey, and it is ramping up the kinds of analytics that it can provide around the clips that it generates, as well as the wider match itself.
Even with the slowdown in a lot of sporting activity this year due to COVID — in the U.K. for example, we’re in a lockdown again where team sports below professional leagues, excepting teams for disabled people, have been prohibited — Veo has seen a lot of growth.
The startup currently works with some 5,000 clubs globally ranging from professional sports teams through to amateur clubs for children, and it has recorded and tracked 200,000 games since opening for business in 2018, with a large proportion of that volume in the last year and in the U.S.
For a point of reference, in 2019, when we covered a $6 million round for Veo, the startup had racked up 1,000 clubs and 25,000 games, pointing to customer growth of 400% in that period.
The COVID-19 pandemic has indeed altered the playing field — literally and figuratively — for sports in the past year. Spectators, athletes and supporting staff need to be just as mindful as anyone else when it comes to spreading the coronavirus.
That’s not just led to a change in how many games are being played, but also for attendance: witness the huge lengths that the NBA went to last year to create an extensive isolation bubble in Orlando, Florida, to play out the season, with no actual fans in physical seats watching games, but all games and fans virtually streamed into the events as they happened.
That NBA effort, needless to say, came at a huge financial cost, one that any lesser league would never be able to carry, and so that predicament has led to an interesting use case for Veo.
Pre-pandemic, the Danish startup was quietly building its business around catering to the long tail of sporting organizations which — even in the best of times — would be hard-pressed to find the funds to buy cameras and/or hire videographers to record games, not just an essential part of how people can enjoy a sporting event, but useful for helping with team development.
“There is a perception that football is already being recorded and broadcast, but in the U.K. (for example) it’s only the Premier League,” Teisbæk said. “If you go down one or two steps from that, nothing is being recorded.” Before Veo, to record a football game, he added, “you need a guy sitting on a scaffold, and time and money to then cut that down to highlights. It’s just too cumbersome. But video is the best tool there is to develop talent. Kids are visual learners. And it’s a great way to get recruited, sending videos to colleges.”
Those use cases then expanded with the pandemic, he said. “Under coronavirus rules, parents cannot go out and watch their kids, and so video becomes a tool to follow those matches.”
‘We’re a Shopify, not an Amazon’
The business model for Veo up to now has largely been around what Teisbæk described as “the long tail theory”, which in the case of sports works out, he said, as “There won’t be many viewers for each match, but there are millions of matches out there.” But if you consider how a lot of high school sports will attract locals beyond those currently attached to a school — you have alumni supporters and fans, as well as local businesses and neighborhoods — even that long tail audience might be bigger than one might imagine.
Veo’s long-tail focus has inevitably meant that its target users are in the wide array of amateur or semi-pro clubs and the people associated with them, but interestingly it has also spilled into big names, too.
Veo’s cameras are being used by professional soccer clubs in the Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Italy’s Serie A and France’s Ligue 1, as well as several clubs in the MLS such as Inter Miami, Austin FC, Atlanta United and FC Cincinnati. Teisbæk noted that while this might never be for primary coverage, it’s there to supplement for training and also be used in the academies attached to those organizations.
The plan longer term, he said, is not to build its own media empire with the trove of content that it has amassed, but to be an enabler for creating that content for its customers, who can in turn use it as they wish. It’s a “Shopify, not an Amazon,” said Teisbæk.
“We are not building the next ESPN, but we are helping the clubs unlock these connections that are already in place by way of our technology,” he said. “We want to help them capture and stream their matches and their play for the audience that is there today.”
That may be how he views the opportunity, but some investors are already eyeing up the bigger picture.
Vasu Kulkarni, a partner at Courtside VC — a firm that has focused (as its name might imply) on backing a lot of different sports-related businesses, with The Athletic, Beam (acquired by Microsoft) and many others in its portfolio — said that he’d been looking to back a company like Veo, building a smart, tech-enabled way to record and parse sports in a more cost-effective way.
“I spent close to four years trying to find a company trying to do that,” he said.
“I’ve always been a believer in sports content captured at the long tail,” he said. Coincidentally, he himself started a company called Krossover in his dorm room to help somewhat with tracking and recording sports training. Krossover eventually was acquired by Hudl, a competitor to Veo.
“You’ll never have the NBA finals recorded on Veo, there is just too much at stake, but when you start to look at all the areas where there isn’t enough mass media value to hire people, to produce and livestream, you get to the point where computer vision and AI are going to be doing the filming to get rid of the cost.”
He said that the economics are important here: the camera needs to be less than $1,000 (which it is) and able to produce something demonstrably better than “a parent with a Best Buy camcorder that was picked up for $100.”
Kulkarni thinks that longer term there could definitely be an opportunity to consider how to help clubs bring that content to a wider audience, especially using highlights and focusing on the best of the best in amateur games — which of course are the precursors to some of those players one day being world-famous elite athletes. (Think of how exciting it is to see the footage of Michael Jordan playing as a young student for some context here.) “AI will be able to pull out the best 10-15 plays and stitch them together for highlight reels,” he said, something that could feasibly find a market with sports fans wider than just the parents of the actual players.
All of that then feeds a bigger market for what has started to feel like an insatiable appetite for sports, one that, if anything, has found even more audience at a time when many are spending more time at home and watching video overall. “The more video you get from the sport, the better the sport gets, for players and fans,” Teisbæk said.
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Veo raises $6M Series A to bring its ‘AI camera’ for soccer matches to the US
Veo, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based startup that offers an “AI camera” to make it easier for amateur soccer clubs to video and stream matches, has raised $6 million in Series A funding.
Backing the round is U.S.-based CourtsideVC, France’s Ventech Capital and Danish firm VC Seed Capital. Veo says the new capital will be used to launch in the U.S.
Founded in 2015 by Henrik Teisbæk, Jesper Taxbøl and Keld Reinicke, Veo has set out to “democratise” the filming of soccer matches and training by negating the need for multiple camera operators and/or a vision mixer.
It does this by employing a 4K lens camera that records the entire pitch (it’s designed to be mounted on a 23-foot tripod for optimal view), coupled with its AI video technology that processes the resulting video. This sees Veo follow the action via virtual panning and zooming to create a TV-like viewing experience.
As we’ve noted before, that does mean a portion of the image will often be cropped out, resulting in a loss of resolution overall. However, the idea is that by starting with 4K, the video quality is more than sufficient for playback on smaller screens, such as smartphones and tablets.
“Our immediate goal is to establish a foothold for Veo on the U.S. market, and a lot of the investment will go towards achieving that,” Veo CEO Henrik Teisbæk tells TechCrunch with regards to the new funding round. “In the long term, we want to use our U.S. market presence as a stepping stone towards becoming a central player on the global football market, and to hopefully break into other sports.”
Teisbæk says the U.S. was chosen because it is one of the “biggest and most exciting” soccer markets, and North American soccer players, coaches, clubs and associations are very data-driven and open to new technology. “That represents a huge potential for us,” he adds.
Meanwhile, Veo says that in the last year it has seen 25,000 games recorded by 1,000 clubs in 50 countries. The company now employs 35 people in its Copenhagen HQ, where it develops the Veo software and hardware.
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