Tomorrow: Google Cloud Next conference call
Join TechCrunch’s enterprise mavens Frederic Lardinois and Ron Miller as they discuss what’s happening on the ground and at the (I am sure, very exciting) parties this week at Google Cloud Next in SF. They will talk live tomorrow at 1pm EDT / 10am PDT, and be sure to check your inbox one hour before for the dial-in information.
When to ditch that nightmare customer
No, we are not “firing” any Extra Crunch members — yet. But multi-time founder Joe Procopio has a strong view that not only should you identify your worst customers, you should fire them, stat. Here’s a preview of his personal journey learning this fundamental tenet of startups:
Many years ago I realized that I’d lost other, better customers because I was afraid of losing one horrible customer. This is the thing we shouldn’t do.
It goes back to that one time I lost the handle on my company because of one awful customer. This customer was willing, almost out of the blue, to work with me to customize my product and spin it out into a program that they, and probably a hundred companies like them, would use in a similar way.
It’s what a lot of entrepreneurs dream of because it’s usually the first step to acquisition. It’s glorious, as long as we know, which I do now but didn’t then, that we can’t alienate our base to serve the needs of one big customer.
The right way to do AI in security
There are infinite wrong ways to do AI in cybersecurity these days, most of which involve adding a sequence of buzzwords (autonomous! pattern recognition!) to the marketing literature of any startup in the space. Our resident cybersecurity thinker Kelly Shortridge blows up the current bubble in buzzwords, and instead tries to direct our attention to the real ways that founders and executives in cybersecurity can build stronger products with the advances being made in AI these days:
Security programs do not fail because they lack AI to better detect something; they fail because they struggle to routinely and efficiently patch, threat model, or apply configuration management changes. Security teams drown in manual, eternally-urgent tasks on a ceaseless treadmill of fires to extinguish. They seek more bodies and more technology to solve the problem of their processes choking them – trying to create new paths of airflow rather than avoid the hand grasping their throat in the first place.
This is where AI might assist, behaving like a finely-tuned Clippy, the ill-fated Microsoft Word assistant of yore. It is akin to automating the process of flossing and brushing your teeth based on environmental factors like time of day and whether you ate, rather than alerting that there is an unknown type of food particle in your teeth that might lead to a novel dentistry issue. It is less sexy, alleviating a time-consuming pain point rather than surprising and delighting with its intellectual freshness.
Can transportation startups ever make money?
Uber and Lyft are two of the hottest companies on the market right now, and with Uber about to drop its S-1 any minute, attention on the space is only intensifying. But can transportation startups ever turn a profit? TechCrunch’s Tracey Lindeman says that subsidies are still going to rule for most of the industry, and that the “real” money may well be in ancillary services:
Courville from BlackBerry QNX suggests the real money is in sensors, software, automation and other technologies that will power new mobility. “It will likely be about the services they can monetize by virtue of having that mobile platform,” he adds, offering car subscriptions as one example.
As for the vast majority of B2C transportation providers, the answer is “probably not.” Because of how resource-intensive it is to create and operate a customized solution and because of how price-sensitive consumers are, margins would probably always be thin — or non-existent.
Verified Expert Brand Designer: Red Antler
Following our verified experts profiles in the legal world, we have now started to turn to the world of brand design. Our first profile is on Red Antler, which has conceived of some of the most iconic startup brands of the last decade, including Allbirds, Brandless, Foursquare, and Casper. Yvonne Leow interviews the company and talks about their unique process and approach to building brands that stick.
Niantic EC-1 reading guide
Part 3 of the Niantic EC-1 is almost finished, but while we wait for Greg Kumparak to finish that up, Arman Tabatabai has put together a comprehensive reading guide to everything published on the company, similar to the one we published last month on Patreon. Given that the company is slowly but surely heading to the public markets, now is the time to start to read up. Tabatabai covers topics including the company’s background, strategy, marketing, design, growth and M&A.
A special Equity deep dive plus last week’s episode
We are trialing a new extended format of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast where we bring together an Extra Crunch writer to discuss their work and how it affects the world of venture capital. In this edition, we have Eric Peckham chatting with TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos about Patreon, the focus of our first EC-1 last month. The two dive into the creation of the package as well as Patreon’s evolving strategy.
Second and as usual, we have last week’s transcript for Equity’s normal podcast, where hosts Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm covered a rash of topics including A16Z’s future and more IPO news.
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.