Top Articles in August
We are back from Labor Day (which an ironically somewhat unkind Canadian EC subscriber noted also takes place up north). August was the most successful month for Extra Crunch since our launch about six months ago — so thank you to the thousands of new and continuing members that help us sustain quality journalism and analysis.
For those who took extended vacations last month, here are the top five most popular articles among EC members we published last month:
Y Combinator Demo Day: We picked our favorites from day one and day two and our venture capital reporter Kate Clark wrote an analysis of what the 160+ startups in the batch seemed to indicate about YC’s investment theses these days. YC remains as popular as ever if EC members’ curiosity with these articles is any indication.
How a Swedish saxophonist built Kobalt, the world’s next music unicorn: Our Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham traveled to Europe to report out this deep dive into Kobalt, which is upending traditional music rights management, and is closing in on unicorn status as well. This origin story here was one of my favorites, since it showed how tenacity against incredible adversity can lead to success in the long run. I am editing Eric’s next two parts of this EC-1 as I write this, so expect those shortly.
How Dropbox, Nike, Salesforce, MailChimp, Google and Pepsi welcome their new hires: This was a bit of a surprise one for me. Our guest writer Vladimir Polo has been collecting welcome kits from different companies for years, and he compiled all of them for this piece on how different companies think about welcoming employees.
WeWork’s S-1 misses these three key points: WeWork is the most polarizing startup I have seen in sometime. So I read through the S-1 (yes, all 200-300 pages of the damn thing) to find a couple of nuggets I thought the company was missing from the filing (which, in itself, was a follow up of my EC analysis of what we should expect to see in the S-1 in the first place).
How should B2B startups think about growth? Not like B2C: Finally, we had our guest writers Kevin Barry and Tyler Elliston discuss the differences between marketing and growing a B2B startup and how that compares with B2C startups. They give a detailed guide on the ways to think about growth in B2B and the tactical tools that these startups can use.
Apple still has work to do on privacy
Over the long weekend, our privacy and policy writer Natasha Lomas wrote an insightful analysis of what we know about Apple’s privacy promises given the news that the company was offering Siri recordings to contractors for grading. Lomas sees Apple’s privacy promises as quite cynical given the context, but also sees an opportunity for the company to right its past wrongs.
Respecting people’s privacy certainly doesn’t mean hiding the fact your system doesn’t respect every person’s privacy. Really the golden rule when it comes to other people’s information is don’t ever just do — always ask if it’s okay first.
It’s both surprising and not surprising that Apple so spectacularly failed to ask in this case. While Apple talks big on privacy, as a company it affords itself administrator privileges over users; taking decisions on their behalf and exercising a high degree of control over products in order, it would say, to deliver the best experience.
It’s an approach that is naturally criticized across the OS aisle for control freakery and serving up hermetically sealed products. But, on the flip side, it can deliver mainstream user benefits — especially when combined with Apple’s historical design flair for simplifying technical processes and making them more widely accessible. Even if, over time, some complexity has crept back, and some of its more ‘courageous’ design decisions haven’t been a delight to every Apple user.
Starship Technologies CEO Lex Bayer on focus and opportunity in autonomous delivery
Robotics startup Starship Technologies wants to launch a fleet of autonomous delivery robots to get you your packages (and food) faster. Fresh off of another infusion of venture capital (this time, a $40 million round), what’s next for the company? TechCrunch writer Darrell Etherington interviews CEO Lex Bayer on the company’s strategy, including why it is targeting college campuses.
“The university campus has just been pulling our business forward — only are students pulling it, meaning there are more orders than the restaurant from the robots can keep up with so we had to add restaurants and add hours,” Bayer explained. “Late night is particularly big on university campuses, as well as eating breakfast — which is becoming a thing, now that our robots are there, students are eating more breakfast. And so we’ve seen signal from the students, and we’ve also seen signal from universities reaching out to us and from the food service providers.”
It’s an ideal market for a number of reasons, but one of the most important ones is that demand is currently underserved. And not demand for autonomous robot delivery, but demand for the core value they offer of on-demand food delivery at a more basic level.
How Zhihu’s become one of China’s biggest hubs for experts
Lastly this short week, our Taipei-based correspondent Catherine Shu analyses the rise of Chinese Q&A platform Zhihu, which started off as a sort of Quora alternative and has since transformed into one of the region’s most trusted social networks.
Since the launch of official accounts in 2016, Zhihu has been used as a platform by Chinese and international companies including Tencent, Disney, Alipay, LinkedIn and Google. Users who work in a wide range of industry go to Zhihu for what would be considered very specific (and often lengthy) content that would get lost on other platforms like Weibo or WeChat. For example, in 2018, Nissan hosted a 10-hour long livestream during which an Infiniti car was dismantled to show users how it was built.
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.