Bad PR ideas, esports, and the Valley’s talent poaching war

Sending severed heads, and even more PR DON’Ts

I wrote a “master list” of PR DON’Ts earlier this week, and now that list has nearly doubled as my fellow TechCrunch writers continued to experience even more bad behavior around pitches. So, here are another 12 things of what not to do when pitching a startup:

DON’T send severed heads of the writer you want to cover your story

Heads up! It’s weird to send someone’s cranium to them.

This is an odd one, but believe it or not, severed heads seem to roll into our office every couple of months thanks to the advent of 3D printing. Several of us in the New York TechCrunch office received these “gifts” in the past few days (see gifts next), and apparently, I now have a severed head resting on my desk that I get to dispose of on Monday.

Let’s think linearly on this one. Most journalists are writers and presumably understand metaphors. Heads were placed on pikes in the Middle Ages (and sadly, sometimes recently) as a warning to other group members about the risk of challenging whoever did the decapitation. Yes, it might get the attention of the person you are sending their head to, in the same way that burning them in effigy right in front of them can attract eyeballs.

Now, I get it — it’s a demo of something, and maybe it might even be funny for some. But, why take the risk that the recipient is going to see the reasonably obvious metaphorical connection? Use your noggin — no severed heads.

Why your CSO — not your CMO — should pitch your security startup

TechCrunch’s cybersecurity editor Zack Whittaker has a simple message around pitching security startups: substantiveness matters, and you should probably hire a chief security officer early in a startup’s existence. Your chief security officer (or founder, depending on who is on the exec team) should be building core competencies around security, and they should be the one explaining the core technology to journalists, not a CMO who is using an alphabet soup of buzzwords they overheard at RSA this year.

The extra overhead of an additional person dedicated to security may seem like a burden on the already stretched budgets of your startup. Think of them — like any other member of your executive suite — as an investment. Just as you want your sales chief to reap the revenue rewards and your marketing boss to perfect your company’s branding, your CSO will help protect you from flaws, weaknesses, hackers and breaches.

How to source hard-to-fill programming positions

Zack Burt, founder of tech recruiting firm Code for Cash, dives into the strategies required to fill positions that can seem impossible to recruit for in the engineering department. Burt talks about online and offline channels, managing the recruitment funnel, and the philosophy of great tech recruiting.

Our recruiting strategy is surprisingly simple, and boils down to optimizing various segments of the sourcing funnel: awareness, pageviews, and application submits.

What ties these tactics together, though, is you, your company, what you’re offering, and how you approach the people you want to hire. If you want to build a strong, diverse team, you need to develop a thoughtful, empathetic and proactive approach before you can optimize.

It’s open season for poaching talent in Silicon Valley

Talking about the talent war, Lewis & Llewellyn LLP attorneys Nick Saenz and John Frost discuss the changing labor laws in California and how competition is increasing as the courts recognize that non-solicitation clauses are unenforceable:

For some time the enforceability of these “employee non-solicit” provisions has been unclear and largely dependent on the facts of individual cases, but several recent decisions have treated employee non-solicit provisions like non-competes and concluded that non-solicits are invalid under California law. These decisions pave the way for new startups to more readily attract talent and increases the potential liability for companies that rely on non-solicit provisions.

In other words, the courts might have declared that it is open season for companies to poach another business’s talent pool.

Zwift CEO Eric Min on fitness-gaming and bringing esports into the Olympics

Zwift is a virtual cycling startup that has raised more than $170 million in venture capital, riding a wave of interest in startups like Peloton and Tonal that have transformed interest in the personal fitness market. TechCrunch’s media columnist Eric Peckham sat down with Zwift CEO Eric Min in the company’s London office to discuss the potential of this rapidly-growing market, the product thinking behind Zwift, and what the future of esports might look like.

Eric Peckham: What led to all the live in-person competitions you organize?

Eric Min: The community was creating or organizing races themselves outside of the game. They had this simple calendaring tool that they used to organize all the races and group social rides. As usual, the community was one step ahead of us. They were informing us what they wanted and we were able to learn from their experiments, see what worked, then say, okay, we need to build that into the game now.

Eric Peckham: Are they getting together and setting up their trainers and playing the game together, or will they often go cycling in the real world together?

Eric Min: It’s both. Here’s a funny story. A couple of winters ago, a group of Canadians would ride on Zwift together, then get in their cars to meet for coffee because that’s what cyclists do — eat cake and coffee after their ride. This is the social experience they want. We can only solve half of it though.

Robotics VCs on what’s real, what’s coming, and what to keep in mind

Last week, TechCrunch hosted our Sessions Robotics event at the University of California, Berkeley. Our Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos interviewed a number of noted robotics VCs, including Helen Liang of FoundersX Ventures, Peter Barrett of Playground Global, Andy Wheeler of GV, and Eric Migicovsky of Y Combinator. We’ve posted an edited transcript of their conversation for Extra Crunch members:

TC: VCs we’ve talked with in the past have suggested that in robotics, they often see cool ideas for which there isn’t necessarily a market or big market need. Is this also your experience?

Peter Barrett: This is a common pattern where there was some mechanism, some capability of the robot, some feat of dexterity or something [and founders think, ‘That’s really cool, I’m going to make a company out of it.’ But we think about it in terms of, what do you want from the robots? What’s the outcome that everybody agrees is worthwhile? And then, how do you find and build companies to achieve those goals?

One thing we’re struggling with right now is that there’s no real hardware or software platforms. You think about 10 years hence [and] the kinds of things we’ll be investing in, [and it’s] robotics applications that are aggregates of neural networks and some explicit software bound together in some form that can be delivered, so a large enterprise can use an application and not have everybody start from first principles. Because right now, when you built a robotics application, you make all the hardware, you make all the software. All the intellectual and actual capital [money] gets dissipated, building and rebuilding those same things. So robotics applications over time will be investable, much more like the way we invest in software, and that will allow smaller units of creativity to produce useful products.

ICYMI: Earlier this week:

Thanks

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