Harry Potter, the Platform, and the Future of Niantic
After deep dives into the story of Niantic’s spinout from Google and its creation and development of Pokémon GO, TechCrunch editor Greg Kumparak turns his attention to Niantic’s future, looking at how Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is not just uniting wand-wielders, but also the company’s ambitions in areas as diverse as 5G, China, 3D mapping, and the next-generation of augmented reality.
This is definitely a weekend read (it’s about 25 mins in length), but here’s a taste:
There’s one more piece to this grander AR vision, and it’s perhaps the biggest and most challenging one.
Your phone knows your location, but current GPS tech is really only accurate within a few feet. Even when it’s at its most accurate, it doesn’t always stay there for long. Ever use Google Maps in a big city and had your marker hop around all over the map? That’s probably from the signals bouncing off buildings, vehicles, and all of the myriad metal things around you.
That’s good enough for basic augmented reality functionality seen in Pokémon GO today. But Niantic wants to get closer and closer to the vision of GO’s original trailer, where hundreds of people can look up to see the same Zapdos flying overhead, synchronized in time and space across all of their devices. Where you can gather in a park with friends to watch massive Pokémon battles play out in real time, or leave a virtual gift on a bench for a friend to walk up to and discover. For this, Niantic will need something more precise and more consistent. Like pretty much everything with Niantic, it all goes back to maps.
More specifically, they’ll need to build a 3D map of the environments where people are playing. It’s easy enough to get relatively accurate 3D data about huge things like buildings, but what about everything around those buildings? The statues, the planters, the trees, the bus stops. John [Hanke, Niantic’s CEO], and others in the space, refer to this map as the “AR Cloud.”
What does the data show makes the best fundraise decks?
Every day, thousands of founders are pitching their startups to investors and strategic partners. But how do people respond to those pitches? What slides are most carefully read and which ones ultimately close the sale?
Russ Heddleston, co-founder and CEO of DocSend, has perhaps more data on this question than anyone given the company’s wide-usage among Valley founders. In an exclusive analysis for Extra Crunch, Heddleston determines what works best for successful fundraise decks. Here’s one insight:
Across the board, we’ve learned that an opening that clearly speaks to the company’s purpose is the most successful way to begin a pitch. Conversely, the common denominator of unsuccessful fundraising pitch decks is leading with the product rather than contextualizing why the company exists.
In successful pitch decks, investors spent 22 seconds, on average, on company purpose slide while they spent an average of 61 seconds on the opening product page of a failed pitch deck: that’s 20% of their total time spent viewing a pitch deck.
The article is filled with other data-driven tips on decks, so definitely have a look.
What does 110 years of investing look like?
We talk about the SoftBank Vision Fund and all of its prodigious spending on startups, but they are hardly the only players in town. Baillie Gifford, the 110-year old wealth manager out of Edinburgh, Scotland (Arman Tabatabai has a short profile of them), has been doubling down on late-stage venture capital, becoming one of the most widely invested in Silicon Valley in companies as diverse as Salesforce, Lyft, and SpaceX.
Our fintech expert Gregg Schoenberg and I interviewed the firm’s co-head Charles Plowden, with topics ranging from the unique structure of the firm (they are a partnership without limited liability), to the firm’s investment philosophies and whether stock markets are as robust as they once were.
Plowden: We can be a bridge investor, and this I think is of particular relevance to people who read TechCrunch, because if you go to private equity specialists, they have shorter time horizons, and at some point, they’re going to want to make exits. If you come to us, we don’t need an exit. We can hold you whether you’re private or public. We can hold you for five years or for 20 years. But as I said earlier, the public market’s function has changed from raising capital to actually giving the entrepreneurs a bit of an exit where they can sell down part of their holding.
Verified Expert Brand Designer: Character
We wrote about Red Antler earlier this week, and now we have our next design firm ready, Character. Character has also worked on some of the most important brands in the world, including Doordash and Palm.
TechCrunch’s Yvonne Leow interviewed Character’s co-founder and creative director Ben Pham in a wide-ranging interview about how the design firm thinks about branding and working with startups.
Pham: What you look like is absolutely important but what’s equally important is what you sound like. What are you saying out there to the world? So, the branding portion of it, beyond the designs, is that we get to sit in a room with founders, work through their strategy, come up with a visual identity, and then work with them on what they sound like. I mean somebody’s giving you the keys to their company, and trusting you to be able to help them. We don’t take that lightly, because that’s a significant level of trust. There are some times when we tell a company we work with, “We’ve got to change your name. The name is not right.” For them to be able to be okay with that is humbling.
Verified Startup Lawyer: Adam Zagaris
Meanwhile, over in the legal department, we have our next Verified Expert startup attorney with Adam Zagaris, who founded and is partner at Moonshot Legal. Extra Crunch’s managing editor Eric Eldon interviewed Zagaris about his distinct approach to helping startups with all things legal.
Adam Zagaris: My practice is based on radical, flexible fee transparency. My billing rate is favorable and given my practice style and experience, there are levels of efficiency on top of that. For smaller clients, to the extent I can, I charge flat fees for certain types of deals and handling things like reviewing forms. For larger clients (30 plus employees), I can do the same thing. But for some larger clients, I work on a subscription fee basis (not a retainer, rather a flat fee with no overage).
ICYMI: Earlier Extra Crunch stories this week
We sent out the mid-week edition of this newsletter on Wednesday, but in case you missed it, here is a list of the other stuff published on Extra Crunch this week:
- The right way to do AI in security
- The definitive Niantic reading guide
- Uber, Lyft, and the challenge of transportation startup profits
- Verified Expert Brand Designer: Red Antler
- When to ditch that nightmare customer (before they kill your startup)
- An Equity deep dive on Patreon
- Equity transcribed: Funding news round-up, a16z’s future, an upcoming IPO and more Lyft
- Dissecting what Lyft’s IPO means for Uber and the future of mobility
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.