The weird things after closing a venture round, iPhone 11, AI ad errors, and Cloud Foundry

Annual Extra Crunch members get 100,000 Brex Rewards points upon credit card signup

We’re excited to announce an addition to the Extra Crunch community perks. Starting today, annual Extra Crunch members can get 100,000 Brex Rewards points after signing up for a Brex corporate credit card. This offer is worth about $1,000 in credit card points.

Brex’s corporate credit card is designed for startups, and Extra Crunch was built for the startup ecosystem. We understand that startups are trying to be as frugal as possible with spending, and we felt that the Brex corporate credit card was the perfect way to stretch those valuable dollars.

Brex gives startup founders and finance teams higher credit limits than what they would get with any other business credit card option, and it does so without requiring a personal credit check or security deposit during the application. There are some impressive reward multipliers across categories like rideshare, travel, and restaurants. It also comes with $50,000 worth of partner offers from AWS, Salesforce and many more.

Learn more here.

All the weird stuff that happens to you after you close your round

There is nothing like the excitement of closing a venture round, but what happens immediately after the money hits the bank? Well, apparently, nothing really good: a deluge of scams, requests, appointments, and more from every professional service and fly-by-night operation imaginable.

Matt Rodak, the founder and CEO of FundThatFlip, compiled the emails and other messages he got after closing his $11 million Series A financing, offering us a peek inside the world of a post-close founder:

You’ll be held ransom

The scum that isn’t trying to get you with phishing attacks may be running “white hat” penetration tests on your website. They’re quick to point out all the “vulnerabilities” of your site and “fix” them if you’re willing to pay up. Not willing to pay up? Then be prepared to be threatened by these wolves in sheeps’ clothing.

Lesson:We experienced this one at our seed round too, so we were prepared this time around. We ran our own trusted penetration test prior to the announcement. This way when we were threatened, we knew immediately that the claims were nothing more than empty threats.

Be prepared internally and run your own tests prior to your announcement. Delete the emails and move on.

What the iPhone 11 says about Apple’s present — and future

Our hardware editor Brian Heater was on site at Apple headquarters yesterday for the unveiling of iPhone 11. He has an exclusive analysis of his impressions of what the new smartphone means for Apple’s trajectory going forward, and how the company is attempting to adapt to a world of smartphone saturation.

Of course, we’ve known for a while that software and services have and will continue to become an increasingly important part of the company’s bottom line, especially as the iPhone has become a less reliable revenue stream. But the act of stepping out of the way to let games and TV shows do the talking was a suitably on-the-nose metaphor for the shift. So too was the way in which hardware advances like the A13 chip were filtered through a gaming lens.

Why am I seeing this ad? AI, ML & human error in advertising

Adam Zelcer, founder of Adboy.com, investigates why we sometimes see ads we aren’t supposed to see and how as marketers and founders, we can improve our ad spending by getting smarter about these errors and improving systems for ad purchases. He offers an extensive guide to ad errors and their underlying causes.

While scrolling through your news feed, you may have seen a sign-up ad to something you are already signed up to. I can recall two recent ones, a free month trial for the music streaming service I already pay for and free ad credits for new accounts on an ad platform I’ve been using every day for years.

Both companies have an incredibly large user base so this isn’t a small loss. And, given that both companies are adtech, I suspect it common that companies spend to acquire customers, already acquired.

An advertising campaign like this is most likely set to get the most amount of users within the advertising budget. As a user already, I’m probably the cheapest and when the machine or expert learns this it will use my data points to spend on showing more ads to people like me, existing customers.

So, the expert in charge looks great in their reports as they show cheap new signups for the company ad spend, but in fact, it’s money down the drain and opportunity lost.

With its Kubernetes bet paying off, Cloud Foundry double down on developer experience

Finally this mid-week, TechCrunch enterprise editor Frederic Lardinois gives us an update on Cloud Foundry, an open-source cloud application platform that has been going through something of a transition in recent years as it has adapted to Kubernetes and other container orchestration technologies. Frederic talks with Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers about what’s next for the platform.

Over the course of the last two years, Cloud Foundry added both a Kubernetes-based service for managing containers from third-party vendors, as well as the so-called Project Eirini that uses Kubernetes as an alternative deployment surface and another project that allows operators to run Cloud Foundry itself on Kubernetes clusters. All of this wasn’t without some pain and confusion in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem, but it looks like the project is now at a point where it can put all of this behind it.

“We’re really happy about the re-convergence of the Cloud Foundry vendor community around the new architecture,” Cloud Foundry Foundation CTO Chip Childers told me ahead of the project’s bi-annual Summit this week. “We’ve gotten all the vendors looking at this now as the future path, which, frankly, now frees up the project. There’s still some work to do to complete that transition — and we’re going to do that as a community with a lot of maturities.”

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.