Conference call with CEO Eric Yuan of newly-IPOd Zoom
Since we first started Extra Crunch three months ago (my, time flies), we’ve been offering members live conference calls with our reporters. This week, we are trying something new and bringing a guest aboard.
TechCrunch’s SF-based startup and venture capital reporter Kate Clark is going to talk today with Eric Yuan, who founded video conferencing startup Zoom that just went public last month, making Yuan a very happy man.
Come armed with your questions or send them in to Arman Tabatabai. Instructions for joining the call will be mailed to members about an hour in advance, so check your inboxes.
Housing affordability market map
Dan Wu, a regtech and legaltech evangelist, published a great series of market maps on the housing affordability space this week on Extra Crunch, covering more than 200+ companies and organizations. He looks at spaces as diverse as property management, land acquisition, group developers, and new financial asset classes.
There are three parts to this series:
- Overview of housing affordability
- Startups focused on cost drivers in affordable housing
- Startups focused on alternative mechanisms for improving housing access
Innovations in older, highly regulated industries, like housing and real estate, are part of what Steve Case calls the “third wave” of technology. VCs like Case’s Revolution Fund and the SoftBank Vision Fund are investing billions into what they believe is the future.
These innovations are far from silver bullets, especially if they lack involvement from underrepresented communities, avoid policy and ignore distributive questions about who gets to benefit from more housing.
Yet there are hundreds of interventions reworking housing that cannot be ignored. To help entrepreneurs, investors and job seekers interested in creating better housing, I mapped these innovations in this package of articles.
The misunderstandings of 18-month-old Luckin’s $500m IPO
It’s not every day you get to talk about a startup that grew from a single kiosk to thousands of stores and tens of millions in revenue in about 18 months. But that is the story with Luckin Coffee, the Chinese coffee delivery startup that has been making waves since its debut in 2017.
For all the discussion about Luckin though, there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it is and who it competes against (hint: it’s not really Starbucks). So I decided to round up all the challenges in covering this business into a guide for understanding the future of coffee in China — and possible the world.
There is nothing in the United States that compares to Luckin. But that hasn’t stopped journalists, financial analysts, and what I suspect is Luckin’s own PR folks from making the obvious coffee chain comparison.
There is a huge danger to using analogies to understand any startup inventing a new market. Just as many VCs passed on UberCab because they couldn’t see how a black-car-on-demand service could possibly grow to venture scale, it’s easy to like or dismiss Luckin while wearing Starbucks green-tinted glasses. That analogy danger is even more manifest for a startup with only a scant few months of operating history.
MailChimp’s Ben Chestnut on bootstrapping a startup to $700M in revenue
Ben Chestnut has one of the best founder stories I have read in some time. TechCrunch’s London-based news editor Ingrid Lunden interviews Chestnut about the birth and growth of MailChimp, which has quickly become a household name in the email deliverability, subscription, and email marketing spaces.
Ingrid:Mailchimp’s in an interesting place to mark that growth, given your history.
Ben:Yes, we stared 18 years ago after my co-founder [Dan] and I were laid off from a dot-com. I got a severance paycheck and we used that to start the business. We built it as a side project, and I think it was actually one of the first SaaS point solutions. We got tired of sending invoices and it came out of that. I would say it was one of the first cloud companies, and at the time, even a monkey could have made money in the cloud. [Note: Chestnut said that sentiment is not where the “chimp” of Mailchimp came from…]
Ingrid:Everyone knows that since that day, you haven’t taken any outside funding, and you’ve rejected acquisition offers. Have you ever been tempted?
Ben:We have never needed the funding because there was just a big need for small businesses to have something like this. Enterprises were already getting email services, but small businesses didn’t. A lot of competitors said small businesses need to be dumbed down and cheap. We agreed on cheap, but not dumbed down. We wanted to empower them.
On acquisitions, I’ve had multi-billion-dollar offers, but it’s not about the money. It’s about being useful, and this is extremely fulfilling to us. The only thing I ever worry about is a succession plan for someone else to take over. PE firms sometimes prey on that fact, too. But I’m a pretty competitive son of a bitch.
Ingrid:So that means you’ve never had a formal valuation, either?
Ben:Some private equity firms have tried to make offers, and they give valuations through rough comps. We will make $700 million this year, give or take, in revenues and are highly profitable.
An interview with Yext CEO Howard Lerman
Our NYC-based correspondent Anthony Ha interviewed adtech CEO Howard Lerman of Yext, which debuted two years ago on the NYSE. What changes with a startup once it hits the public markets? That’s something we didn’t think about a year or two ago, but with the spate of new public issues coming forth, more and more CEOs are having to figure out how to manage their companies’ cultures in these turbulent markets.
Howard Lerman: When you’re public two things happen: One is that we’re able to have a lot more credibility … and when big Global 2000 companies look at your financial reports, they can feel comfortable. You’re not going to sign a big bank in Germany without [that] credibility behind you.
But the other thing is from a compensation perspective, if you do well, you’re able to really attract amazing talent. When you look at our talent deck, in the past two years, we’ve added the president of Salesforce, Jim Steele. We’ve added Dave Rudnisky, who is the former head of North American sales from Salesforce. The talent we’ve been able to attract as a public company, it’s different than what we had when we were a one-room schoolhouse on the Upper West Side, as a scraggly group of guys in ponytails.
What Uber and Lyft’s investment bankers got right
There is always a lot of angst about the fees that investment bankers command in the IPO process. Few people make as many millions of dollars while offering up such squishy advice. But I argue that Uber and Lyft’s debuts last week and last month respectively prove that investment banking advice was a lot more spot on than it often gets credit for:
The IPO window and race both indicate that investment bankers — for all their faults — aren’t (always?) inventing contexts to extract additional fees. Even with more and more algorithmic trading, markets are ultimately human in origin and design, and they respond to the emotional whims of those traders. The art of reading those humans is presumably what founders are spending millions of dollars in underwriting fees on. At least in the case of Uber and Lyft, that advice appears to be worth the cost.
Verified Expert Brand Designer: Phil Weiner
Continuing our series of profiles of great brand designers, Yvonne Leow interviewed Phil Weiner. In a different life, Phil was a founder, but now he is an independent designer working out of Oakland. He’s previously worked with Virgin Unite and Marvell on their brands.
Phil Weiner:One of the most challenging [projects] was working with a hardware company called Sana.io. It’s a great business. It’s a health medtech company that creates neuromodulation technology for chronic pain relief. The founder had been working on the company for almost 12 years, and he invented the product to essentially solve his own chronic pain problem. But over the years, he had positioned his product for sleep. They were up against the clock in terms of runway and we had to completely reposition the entire company, amidst a fundraising round, with existing investors on board. We helped them with their investor raise, which allowed them to add people to the team. It’s hard to pinpoint every little thing because we did web, marketing, the repositioning of the brand, the identity, the voice, even his press positioning. The second co-founder mentality really kicked in.
Equity Shot transcribed: Judging Uber’s less-than-grand opening day
And if you want even more Uber downer discussion, we did a special episode of Equity on Friday looking back at the Uber meltdown in the stock market with hosts Alex Wilhelm and Kate Clark. We have the transcript available here for Extra Crunch members, along with of course the audio.
Thanks
To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com.
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