Getaround, Facebook, AI chips, Nvidia, Africa, and immigration

Who helped your startup grow? Nominate a growth marketing agency.

For those who have been members of Extra Crunch for a while now, you have seen us go through two cycles of Verified Experts, covering startup attorneys and brand designers. Now, we turn our attention to our third community of startup professionals: growth marketers / hackers. Growth is the single most important objective of any startup, and so these professionals can have an outsized impact on which companies grow, and by how much.

Yvonne Leow is leading our search for the best growth marketers out there, as rated by founders. Worked with someone yourself? Impressed by the growth of a friend’s startup? Let us know with this handy form and get ready for new profiles in the coming weeks.

The Exit: Getaround’s $300M roadtrip

Our SF-based reporter Lucas Matney published his second piece in his “The Exit” series on, well, startup exits. Last time, Lucas looked at the acquisition of Dynamic Yield for $300 million by McDonald’s, and now he looks at Getaround’s $300 million acquisition of Paris-based Drivy (why Lucas loves $300m transactions, I have no idea). He interviewed Jeremy Uzan of Alven Capital to get the details:

Lucas: For Drivy, if Getaround hadn’t played the acquirer — though in a lot of ways this deal feels more like a merger — what kind of challenges would they have faced?

Jeremy:I would say international expansion. I mean, if you look at the story of Drivy, the inception of the company and the creation of the platform, then finding the first cars and drivers, then preparing the next generation outside of France, that was all the first step.

Then we did something truly important two years ago, which was creating Drivy Open, which let you open the car with your mobile app and enable instant bookings. So there, our next step was to just raise a lot of money to continue international expansion. It was just a question of can we find the right kind of money. If you don’t have what you need, it becomes a very painful job, because you know that you will be too weak to infiltrate the whole region and that can be very frustrating.

So we had this option of trying to find money, but it’s not easy to find a lot of it. And the other was exactly, this kind of merger, it’s true that it was almost a merger, I think we call this an acquisition because it is part-cash, part-shares, but the reason behind this is that Getaround raised a lot of money thanks to Softbank and so they had the ability to become the acquirer.

What does ‘regulating Facebook’ mean? Here’s an example

Speaking of France, our Paris-based correspondent Romain Dillet discussed what regulating Facebook means in the context of the French government’s newly released report on social media regulation. Romain covers all the details and frameworks in that report, and also points out that this is all a strategy for France to play the regulatory leader in the space:

Now that the French government has developed a regulation model, the government wants to convince as many countries as possible that they should follow in France’s footsteps. This is when diplomacy kicks in.

There are multiple groups of countries that could potentially be interested in social network regulation. And if France wants to have a significant influence on the moderation processes of social networks, the government needs allies.

That’s why last week’s announcements were significant. World leaders and tech giants signed a pledge called the Christchurch Call. Named after the recent terrorist attack in Christchurch, world leaders asked tech platforms to increase their efforts when it comes to blocking toxic content.

These startups are locating in SF and Africa to win in global fintech

Our African startup beat writer Jake Bright has a great piece out on the rise of African fintech startups and their relocations to San Francisco. African entrepreneurs are quickly inventing new forms of fintech services to handle the massive economic growth and wealth accumulation happening on the continent these days. Jake spends some time specifically looking at payments company Flutterware:

For the moment, Flutterwave sources all of its engineers from Nigeria, but is looking to tap developers more broadly across Africa, according to GB [Flutterwave’s founder Agboola (who goes by “GB”)].

He believes characteristics of Africa’s fintech landscape have forced unique innovation. “African fintech is ahead of its time,” he explained. “Fragmented payment markets have required payment processors like us to become world-class in execution and delivery by developing global solutions that can adapt to local circumstances.”

One of those local realities is a dearth of credit options in Africa for individuals and traders to cover small expenses, emergencies, and working capital needs.

To meet that need, Mines.io — a San Francisco-based, Nigeria-founded technology company — is creating white-label lending solutions for Africa’s largest banks.

Mines has worked to address the reasons large financial institutions in Africa have overlooked consumer lending products in favor of corporate banks.

When will customers start buying all those AI chips?

Few areas of investment have been as hot as the AI chip space, what with hundreds of millions of venture capital dollars flowing into the the industry. Yet, the numbers from leading companies like Nvidia paint a much less rosy view of the demand from customers today for these specialized chips.

I take a look at Nvidia’s most recent financial results and conclude that much more work has to be done to get AI workflows built on top of hardware:

Nvidia’s overall strategy has been to expand into areas outside of its core graphics and gaming customers to more strategic segments like data centers, AI, automotive, and more. That transition has been inchoate, to say the least.

Take cloud computing, which is where most AI chips are likely destined for at least the short-to-medium term (longer term, expect them to show up in more of our devices and gaming consoles as prices and power consumption become reasonable). Nvidia has pushed heavily into data centers as a key pillar of the company’s economic future, but as it wrote in its 10-Q:

“Data Center revenue was $634 million, down 10% from a year ago and down 7% sequentially, primarily reflecting a slowdown in purchases by certain hyperscale and enterprise customers, partially offset by growth in inference sales. We believe this slowdown in purchases will likely persist into the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.”

10 Immigration Tips for Love-Struck Tech Workers

Immigration laws are changing worldwide. Last week, we had Natasha Lomas’ investigation into the immigration laws of the UK and one founder’s challenging experience with the immigration authorities. Now, we have a tip sheet from founder Xiao Wang of Borderless and immigration law advisor Anjana Prasad on what happens when love and immigration collide:

These tips boil down to one thing: You’ve got a long wait and a mountain of paperwork ahead of you. That’s why it’s vital to start now. The path of true love never did run smoothly — and unfortunately, immigrants can count on it running even less smoothly in the future. For many foreign-born tech workers, the best way to say “I love you” is to lock things down now, and file green card or naturalization paperwork — for yourself or your spouse-to-be — as soon as possible.

Why startups need to be careful about export licenses and the Huawei ban

Finally, talking about toughening international standards, the Trump administration has been pushing tougher export licensing controls on China’s leading telecom equipment company Huawei. Yet, these export controls apply to everyone, including startups, who must bear the brunt of the compliance costs without the capital to handle them properly. I wrote a piece going over how to think about export compliance for startups:

The first thing to do is to identify who your customers are. For startups targeting large enterprises, this presumably is knowable given the value of each customer. If you target small businesses or individuals though, it might be a lot harder.

Knowing your customers allows you to do a couple of things. First, you can start to identify their nationalities, since some export controls are based on the company or individual’s origin. You can either do this directly by looking up who or what they are, or you can look at data such as billing address, bank account, etc.

There is some “best efforts” intention here. Just because a customer has a U.S.-based billing account doesn’t mean that they aren’t covered by export controls. Thanks to the rise of shell corporations, identifying the ultimate beneficial owner of a company can be dazzlingly complicated. For instance, Iran — covered by many sanctions and export restrictions by the United States — was linked to a building in Midtown Manhattan until recently thanks to the smokescreen of LLCs.

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.