Programming note: Happy Labor Day!
To our U.S.-based readers, happy Labor Day weekend. Extra Crunch will be off on Monday and will resume publishing next Tuesday.
Reminder: EC ticket discounts for Enterprise Sessions and Disrupt SF
Next week, we will be hosting our Enterprise Sessions event at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. It’s a killer lineup, and directly follows up on Ron and Frederic’s Extra Crunch coverage around quantum computing, next-generation cloud services, artificial intelligence, and data center orchestration. I just checked in with the events team, and we are down to the last dozen or so tickets before the fire marshal gets angry — so if you want to join us, please snag a ticket soon.
I will be at Yerba Buena all day, so if you are a subscriber and you are attending next Thursday, feel free to reach out — would love to meet any of you in person.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch Disrupt SF is about a month away, and it also has a stellar lineup. This year, we have a dedicated “Extra Crunch” stage focused on helping founders build their companies, from how to fundraise without dilution, to massively growing a team at scale, to how to build a brand and reach out to media. In addition, we will have a special Extra Crunch members-only lounge space as just one of a couple of ways we are trying to make our premium readers feel special at our biggest event of the year.
Today is the last day before ticket prices rise, so if you’re interested in coming, be sure to get an order in.
For all TechCrunch events, EC annual subscribers get a 20% ticket discount. Just reach out to customer service at extracrunch@techcrunch.com and they will get you all squared away.
Fitbit’s CEO discusses the company’s subscription future
Our hardware editor Brian Heater got a chance to sit down with James Park, CEO of Fitbit, about a topic near and dear to my heart: consumer subscriptions. With the rise of consumer fitness subscription startups like Peloton, which recently filed its S-1, the business model of fitness is being upended, and now Fitbit is preparing to move even more in this direction. Be sure to also check out Brian’s earlier analysis of the state of the smartwatch.
Heater:The narrative around Apple’s last several quarters, as far as how they’re allocating, is a shift into content. Do you think that more and more of the revenue is going to be generated by content and services versus hardware?
Park: Yeah, I think more of our profits, because of the gross margin profile, will be generated by the software and services. But I think the good thing for our category in general is that unlike smartphones, the hardware portion is still rapidly growing in many countries around the world.
If you look at smartwatches, they’re growing 30% or higher per year. And for us, in the first half, trackers actually grew 51% year over year. So there’s still a lot of innovation and growth in the hardware portion of wearables. But where we do see things rapidly taking off is in software and services.
What is Andela, the Africa tech talent accelerator?
Our AfricaTech writer Jake Bright profiles one of the continent’s leading startups, Andela. The coding bootcamp and talent marketplace hybrid has raised some $180 million in venture capital from firms like Spark Capital, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and Generation Investment Management.
Yet despite all the press, capital, and excitement around the company, it seems that many still don’t really understand the underlying business model and what makes the startup unique. Jake interviews the founders and gives us a full update on where Andela has been and where it going.
To the talent-exit discussion, [Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson] offered some example and data. “This year Andela is going to hire approximately 1000 engineers and of our total developer staff of 1575, approximately 120 engineers will leave Andela because we either don’t have a role for them or they choose to pursue other opportunities,” he said.
Of those who leave, about 10 per quarter move outside their countries and the others take jobs in the local ecosystem, according to Johnson.
“The more interesting number, though I have no way of tracking it, is how many engineers stay in their home country because of Andela,” he added.
That raises one of the limitations in the debates around Andela: there isn’t much quantitative data or empirical research out there on Africa’s developer markets to inform it.
How are UK VCs managing the risk of a ‘no deal’ brexit?
Brexit is always in the news, what with the looming deadline coming up in a little over two months and long-winded explanations of exactly what proroguing is. Our policy reporter Natasha Lomas wanted to pursue a different type of story though, looking at brexit through the lens of tech companies and their investors.
She interviews eight leading VCs, including Harry Briggs of Omers Ventures, James Wise of Balderton Capital and Imran Ghory of Blossom Capital to talk about how startups are navigating the partial dissolution of the European Union.
Matt Clifford, co-founder and CEO, Entrepreneur First: I’ll give you an example. One bit of advice that we got was whether the stakes that we hold in various different European entities will still have limited liability in our holding block. Now it sounds minor and technical — but if the answer’s no then that’s a pretty dramatic change that has all sorts of tax and regulatory implications.
The way I would think about it is that things that seem very important to me right now — like understanding exactly whether I have limited liability in the dozen investments I have in Germany or in France — that seems like a big deal but I can see that it won’t be a huge deal for the government because they’ll be worrying about medicines and fresh water. I’m only slightly exaggerating. What I mean is, I’m sure that they will figure out the medicines and fresh water thing. I would hope so. I just can see that things that in normal times would be pretty high on the priority list — like status of investments in Europe — will be pushed down the pecking order and that is a little bit nerve-wracking.
‘Behind the Screen’ illuminates the invisible, indispensable content moderation industry
Content moderation is the underpinning for many of the most successful tech companies, from Facebook to YouTube. Yet despite its ubiquity and importance, precious little has been written about who the people are behind these decisions. That’s set to change now as Sarah Roberts of UCLA has a new book out entitled “Behind the Screen” that fills in some of the gaps in our knowledge and gets product managers thinking about the complexities of human-technical systems. Devin Coldewey interviewed Roberts and reviews the book for Extra Crunch.
“A number of factors are coalescing to make the public more receptive to this kind of work,” she explained. “Average social media users, just regular people, are becoming more sophisticated about their use, and questioning the integration of those kinds of tools and media in their everyday life. And certainly there were a few key political situations where social media was implicated. Those were a driving force behind the people asking, do I actually know what I’m using? Do I know whether or how I’m being manipulated? How do the things I see on my screen actually get there?”
‘The Operators’: Finance in startups with Duda CFO Stephanie Hsiung and Zeus Living’s Head of Finance Mark Kang
Finally this week, we have the edition of The Operators podcast available as a transcript for EC members. In this episode, hosts Neil Devani and Tim Hsia talk with two notable financial heads and discuss the challenges of being VP of Finance or CFO within the context of startups.
Neil: Are there things that you wish you knew before you got to where you are today? Things that were some harder learnings that you can share
Stephanie: Mine would be, I think you kind of mentioned it as well, is like the level of precision in finance, trading that off versus timeliness, especially for critical decision making. Sometimes you don’t know everything, but you have to make a decision and you need to make your best judgment and best-educated guess, calculate things, rounding up and down, and making your best estimates as opposed to being completely precise.
And I think for some finance folks, that’s a bit of a shift of mentality, but it is something that’s really valuable when you move to startup companies are moving very quickly. Their expectation isn’t that you get everything right to the dollar and the penny, but that you make it easy for folks to make clear decisions on the whole.
ICYMI: Earlier this week:
- How to move from VP of Sales to CRO with leading exec recruiter David Ives
- Customer success isn’t an add-on – start early to win later
- The Void’s Curtis Hickman on expansion, working with massive licenses, and the future of VR
- Why now is the time to get ready for quantum computing
- How to use Amazon and advertising to build a D2C startup
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.