The next service marketplace wave: Vertical market networks
B2B service marketplaces (think translation as a service) are an extraordinarily lucrative startup category. But despite the incredible potential of these platforms to generate outsized returns, many fail. Why?
Ivan Smolnikov, the CEO and founder of translation service startup Smartcat, investigates why certain marketplaces seem to grow while others stall. His conclusion is that unlocking value for both sides of the marketplace is much more challenging than it appears, and the most successful, next-generation marketplaces are going to come from highly networked, efficient platforms for complex projects targeting specific verticals.
Smolnikov then gives a step-by-step guide to optimizing marketplace growth.
One reason is that several service providers must often work together to complete a single job for a buyer, requiring a complex workflow from end to end. As a result, it’s difficult for marketplaces to not only mediate service delivery but also make it significantly more efficient for buyers and suppliers. If both the buyer and suppliers don’t see a significant efficiency gain other than being initially matched, why would they continue using the marketplace?
What startup names are most effective?
Perhaps the first step in building a company is just figuring out what to call it. Adam Zelcer, who founded Adboy, explores some tactics on how to optimize a startup’s name.
Today, keywords still play a critical role in App names for discovery, with search accounting for 65 percent of downloads in Apple’s app store. Most of the apps on my phone are brand + keyword App names like Google Maps. When searching the app store for “Music” you should find names like Samsung Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music dominating the first page.
What is the Libra Association going to do, really?
When it comes to zodiac signs, Libra certainly got some serious search traffic last week. With Facebook finally unveiling its crypto plans, tech writers couldn’t resist offering hot takes on all aspects of the new stablecoin.
TechCrunch’s Paris-based corespondent Romain Dillet, who has spent quite a bit of time in the crypto space over the years, turns his attention instead onto the Libra Association, the partnership that will guide the development of the Libra coin and also (at least partially) insulate it from the machinations of Facebook’s leadership when the company hands over control in the future.
In the U.S. in particular, each state has its own set of regulation when it comes to financial services. And Calibra also has to deal with cryptocurrency regulation, which is another source of troubles. That’s why it took a while to access Coinbase from all 50 states.
Creating a subsidiary makes this process easier for Facebook. The subsidiary has to comply with cryptocurrency and financial regulation, but not Facebook at large.
This isn’t the first time Facebook is creating a subsidiary to handle peer-to-peer payments. Facebook created a subsidiary called Facebook Payments Inc. It has money transmitter licenses in all 50 states.
That’s why it’s misleading to say Calibra was created to “ensure separation between social and financial data and to build and operate services on its behalf on top of the Libra network.” Calibra was built for regulation purposes.
Why Carbon just raised another $260 million
The 3D printing wave might have crested a few years ago, but a number of startups are continuing to grow substantial businesses in the space. TechCrunch’s hardware editor Brian Heater had the opportunity to sit down with Carbon CEO and co-founder Joseph M. DeSimone to discuss how the company intends to expand following the massive growth round it announced this week.
Dental is becoming a booming business for smaller companies. In October 2017, Invisalign had 40 patents expire, and the company has continued to lose exclusivity on dozens of patents since, created an opening for the competition. Carbon was waiting in the wings with a technology that could bring 3D dental molds into the world more efficiently than ever before.
How to scale a start-up in school
Many Extra Crunch readers are students, and we wanted to explore the specific challenges of building a company while also taking classes. Founder Julianna Keeling of Terravive discusses those challenges in her piece, but also the specific opportunities that students have over entrepreneurs in the workforce.
As a founder in school, perhaps the single most beneficial thing you can do to position yourself and your business for long-term success is to take a gap year while you’re in school. My gap year in between my first and second years at Washington & Lee abruptly changed the course of my life for the better.
Most people take a gap year between high school and university, or after college. It’s rare to see students voluntarily take time off in the middle of their university experience, but based on my experiences, this is exactly the time to do it.
When you arrive to college, you get a better feel for the types of courses you can take, and your intellectual interests begin to take shape. Understanding what the school can offer you and vice versa will help you craft a meaningful gap year experience.
Gender & compensation at VC-backed Startups – Where are we today?
Pay equality has been a hot topic for years, but there has been much less coverage of the dynamics for startup founders. Conrad Lee of Shareworks Compensation investigates the gender dynamics of founders and employees, finding for instance that “Female founders are paid 24% less, but own 15% more equity.” He then goes beyond the numbers to investigate how to create a compensation model that not only attracts great talent, but does so in a fair way as well.
Establish pay ranges.If you don’t have formal pay ranges, establish them NOW. Yes, I know you’re focused on building product, product, product, but employees are your biggest expense by a long shot. It’s worth the time. Create pay ranges, and update them at least annually.
Sidewalk Labs’ blueprint for a ‘mini’ smart city is a massive data mine
The future of the city may have been unveiled in Toronto this past week, where Sidewalk Labs, a division of Alphabet, unveiled its master plan for the Quaiside district. The plan is deeply futuristic, but belies much tougher questions about data, privacy and power for urban residents of the future. Our automotive correspondent Kirsten Korosec took a deeper dive into those challenges and how Sidewalk is addressing them.
The endpoints to this system will be sensors, which have the potential to be everywhere from traffic signals and park benches to waste receptacles, buildings and transit services like self-driving cars and shared bikes. Sensors have the ability to provide valuable information that can make a city run more efficiently. For instance, Doctoroff noted that a sensor on traffic signal could gauge whether a pedestrian needed a little extra time to cross the street.
It’s the data collected by these sensors — and the idea that such a large project would go to one company connected to a tech giant — that has concerned so many privacy and security experts. The Canadian Civil Liberties Union has sued and called for a reset on the project. The CCLU wants the government to protect it from the risk of “surveillance capitalism” before the plans goes through the approval process.
Climate change, AI and ethical leadership in ‘big tech’, with Amazon principal UX design lead Maren Costa
Our resident ethics columnist Greg Epstein has a corollary interview to his piece last week, this time with Amazon designer Maren Costa. The two discuss ethical leadership in the context of a large tech company, and also how employee action can improve climate outcomes.
Costa: I know. And there was very much the idea in the early Amazon days that Amazon was actually on the positive side of climate change. We almost felt like just by existing we were doing the right thing. Because driving your individual car to the grocery store is so much more of a carbon impact than [delivery], or individual data centers versus cloud.
So we [thought], “Yay, we’re already intrinsically contributing to making the world a better place.” But that really is an outdated mindset, and it took us a while to realize that, like, “oh, no.”
Actually, the hyper-consumerism being supported by [not having] to drive your car to the store has now sort of run amok. It’s no longer something we can put in the plus column, because if every person gets every item singly delivered within two hours of when they want it, which is exactly where Amazon is heading now.
‘This is Your Life in Silicon Valley’: Former Pinterest President, Moment CEO Tim Kendall on Smartphone Addiction
Finally, we have a conversation from the podcast “This is Your Life in Silicon Valley” with Pinterest’s former president Tim Kendall. He talks about the early years of Pinterest and Facebook, as well as his current project called Motion, to alleviate smartphone addiction.
Kendall:…well I think the, they’re probably bundled, my last few years at Pinterest and not because at being Pinterest necessarily, I just started to see my personal use blown. And it was coincident with having two young children at home and getting home from a hard day of work at Pinterest and its six o’clock at night and I should be in our kitchen or in the living room down on my knees hanging out with my kids and really interacting with them. And I am in my pantry scrolling through you name it, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and I can’t, I literally can’t stop.
I know intellectually, higher level parts of my brain, this is not congruent with my values I don’t want to do this. But my limbic brain is saying no enjoy, enjoy this indulge yourself and you need a break. And that cognitive dissonance was a struggle so I was suffering and I thought to myself, god I’ve gotta get a handle on this and realizing that others might be struggling as well. So it was really, almost a realizing that my physiological health was being impacted, probably a lot of others were.
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.