Editor’s Note: Shortened week
Due to the U.S. Independence Day holiday this week on July 4th, Extra Crunch will not be publishing our normal editorial on Thursday and Friday of this week, nor will we send out this EC Roundup newsletter on Saturday. Normal publishing will resume starting next week on Monday.
Conference Call Today with VC and Coach Jerry Colonna
TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor Connie Loizos will be conducting an Extra Crunch exclusive live conference call with noted venture capitalist and long-time executive coach Jerry Colonna today at 2pm EST / 11am PST. Dial-in details have been sent to all subscribers.
For those joining, the two will talk about Colonna’s new book Reboot, his other projects, and of course questions from subscribers.
When is the right time to pitch VCs for funding?
DocSend is among the most popular tools used by founders seeking venture capital to send their pitch decks to VCs, but when do VCs actually read those pitches? DocSend CEO Russ Heddleston works through the data to find the patterns that can help with timing a fundraise.
Interestingly, March comes in third as the best month for decks viewed by investors, with an index value of 89, yet fundraisers don’t seem to send many decks in March, only 67% compared to October.
And while summer is often considered a poor season for fundraising, it’s not as unproductive as you might think. Indeed, in July and August decks are reviewed almost as much as in April, May and June.
In-depth with Freada Kapor Klein
Megan Rose Dickey had the opportunity to sit down with noted diversity and inclusion champion Freada Kapor Klein, who co-founded Kapor Capital and also Project Include. The two talk about a bunch of topics, including the current state of affairs in the tech industry, “the Founders’ Commitment,” and how to approach diversity from a comprehensive angle.
MRD:Looking back over the last ten years of your work in Silicon Valley across diversity and inclusion, what gives you hope that we’re moving in the right direction? Or, do you think we’re moving in the right direction?
Freada Kapor Klein:I would characterize where we are now is a leap forward over the last ten years and several steps sideways and a few steps backwards. And so I think it’s a very noisy time to be looking at D&I. Because any point you can make in a positive direction, there’s a countervailing negative. And similarly, any time you can raise a criticism, somebody can point to something hopeful. So, we’re still in the middle of it — I hope — although I worry about diversity fatigue, which people are talking about and writing about these days.
But I do remain hopeful for very specific reasons. And one of those is quite simply changing demographics in the US. The march of demographics is unstoppable. And we know the K 12 school-age population in the US, which has been majority kids of color for five years now. And so that is the future workforce. Changing demographics is certainly one cause for hope. And critical mass, which has been a concept around a long time in social science, has some real legitimacy.
Sam Lessin and Andrew Kortina on their voice assistant’s workplace pivot
Kate Clark has a profile of founders Sam Lessin and Andrew Kortina, who have been working together on a startup called Fin. Both are noted for their past projects, including Lessin as a leading PM at Facebook and Kortina as a co-founder of Venmo. The two are working to build a personal assistant, and have recently pivoted into the enterprise to use the data generated by Fin to improve operations.
Lessin and Kortina are in a unique position to leverage their consumer expertise as the consumerization of the enterprise — the idea that companies should take a consumer-first approach to product design — takes off. Somewhat by accident, they’ve created a solution for businesses more cost-effective and productive than a consulting firm, which have historically been brought in to help big enterprises better understand what they can improve, as well as where and who they can cut.
Fin Analytics was created roughly two years ago as a byproduct of the Fin Assistant. The team needed a measurement platform to track and analyze operations work, Lessin explained, and there were no tools on the market: “It was a critical piece of infrastructure that just didn’t exist anywhere,” Lessin said. “Fin Analytics was the most important thing we built because it’s something no one else had but everyone needed.”
“Now we have to evangelize the space,” Lessin concluded. “It’s not like CEOs wake up in the morning and say I really need an operational analytics platform.”
WeChat wants to own tourism
WeChat is the dominant messenger app in China, and indeed, it also dominates in a host of other categories from ridehailing to food delivery. Now, as our China tech reporter Rita Liao discusses, WeChat’s owner Tencent wants to own tourism too. Through a partnership, it has launched an app targeting Chinese travelers to Helsinki, and soon, may offer Chinese exclusive tourist apps for cities all around the world.
“The number of Chinese visitors traveling overseas is growing rapidly and travel patterns are in real transition. Among those travelers in-depth traveling has become a trend. With Helsinki mini program, a comprehensive and reliable one-stop service, Tencent wants to serve them as well as possible,” Zhan Shu, general manager of the Tencent Governmental Affairs and Tourism Center, said in a statement.
IP strategy: How should startups decide whether to file patents
Intellectual property attorneys Bryant Lee, Ed Steakley and Saleh Kaihani wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch members on how and when to file patents. Protecting intellectual property should be a key goal for startups, but it can also be quite expensive to do properly. How do you balance the need to have defensible patents (which can take years to acquire) with the fast-moving tech of an early-stage startup?
In order to make a decision about what to patent, a startup must first know what IP it has. For very small teams, it may be possible for everyone to have a shared idea of the IP. However, once teams grow beyond a few people, it is no longer possible to have complete visibility into what everyone on the team is doing and potentially inventing. Therefore, a regular IP harvesting process must be put in place to ensure proper reporting of IP to the executive level.
Most startups are best served with a simple IP harvesting process involving just three steps: (1) disclosure (2) invention review and (3) patent filing. In the disclosure stage, employees who are in IP creation roles must be trained to disclose ideas that are potentially protectable IP.
Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Factorial Digital
Yvonne Leow has our next Verified Experts profile, this time of growth marketing agency Factorial Digital. The firm, founded by Corey Eulas and Sasha Dagayev, specializes in SEO tactics among several other offerings.
Yvonne Leow: What’s your philosophy when it comes to growth?
Corey Eulas: I believe real growth has to be sustainable. “Growth hacking” is exciting, but what’s the long-term marketing plan it fits into? I always challenge founders by asking: What if the channel changes? What if consumers stop using it? What if the ad policies change? What if the costs just double and become too prohibitive? What do you do at that point? You’d have to start from scratch. We encourage founders to run marketing strategies in parallel to growth, and to never be complacent about growth because there’s always somebody who is coming right behind you.
‘The Operators’: Slack PM Lorilyn McCue and Google Senior PM Jamal Eason on becoming a product manager and PM best practices
Finally this week, we have a transcript from the new “The Operators” podcast, this time with guests Lorilyn McCue from Slack and Jamal Eason from Google.
McCue:One thing I love about the job is that you definitely have a lot of different hats that you wear. One day you’re more of a data analyst, and you’re coordinating with your analytics team figuring out what’s really happening with this data.
Another day you’re talking to legal, figuring out what’s the best course of action for a given thing. Another day you’re coordinating with your engineers and discussing a different technical trade-off.
Sometimes you’re talking to marketing. It’s like you’re using a different language. Like whatever function that you’re talking with. There’s really nothing that’s off-limits, but I think it’d be a bad day if we were coding.
Although the one time we were talking in Slack, and one of the PM’s said, “I’m going to try coding this.” We have this emoji which is a little popcorn emoji to be like, “I can’t want to see how this goes.” And someone reacts to it, it was like popcorn and I was like, “Popcorn…”
Thanks
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