Editor’s Note
This week, we hosted 23 panels on all aspects of building startups on the Extra Crunch stage at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Thanks to the thousands of attendees who attended those talks, as well as the workshops we held on the Breakout Stage — your enthusiasm was palpable.
We also had hundreds of new EC members join during the conference — to all of you: welcome!
This newsletter covers all of last week, and is a bit abbreviated thanks to Disrupt. Back to normal next week.
Where top VCs are investing in edtech
Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham interviewed almost a dozen leading venture capitalists about the state of edtech, including Jennifer Carolan of Reach Capital, Aydin Senkut of Felicis Ventures, and Charles Birnbaum of Bessemer. There is still a lot of enthusiasm for the space, but the theses for these investors have diverged quite significantly.
Marlon Nichols , Managing Partner at MaC Venture Capital (a new LA-based seed fund with investments in Catalyte, Codeverse, and Wonderschool):
“Many education technology companies target individual teachers, which presents a long path to sizable revenue (requires too many customers) while others usually attempt to navigate the lengthy and bureaucratic sales cycle of selling to school districts. VCs prefer companies that have short sales cycles that can scale revenue quickly so in general, edtech companies are difficult investments for venture capital.
That said, education is a giant opportunity in the US because high quality education is not evenly distributed across communities or social classes. It’s a crisis. Companies that address this at scale are attractive if the revenue model makes sense. That’s why I led the first round into Wonderschool, which delivers high quality education and child care at costs relative to one’s zip code. The schools double as the educator’s home so there isn’t a need for real estate investment.”
Why is Dropbox reinventing itself? A chat with Dropbox VP of Product Adam Nash and CTO Quentin Clark
Dropbox may be known for its singular file storage product, but the company is adapting and changing as it seeks new customers and also learns more about what “file storage” really means to users.
TechCrunch editor Greg Kumparak interviews two of the leading thinkers at Dropbox, Adam Nash and Quentin Clark, about how they are positioning the company for the future against intense competition from Microsoft, Google, and others.
Kumparak: A lot of those users signed up for this idea of this very simple folder, this Dropbox, this shared folder. Some of the early feedback so far has been that this complicates that.
Clark: It doesn’t have to.
I’ll say two things. We’ve been very careful about the design of this launch. If users just want to stay anchored to the classic file sync-and-share job that Dropbox has done a great job with for years, they can. There’s a place in the user experience where they can go and say ‘No no no, don’t give me the Dropbox foreground app, just stay in the finder/explorer/etc, I’m good, thanks.” We’ve been very careful about that.
The other thing I’ll say is that we’ve continued to make deep, deep investments into that core functionality. Core synchronization of content, and sharing of content, is still the foundation of what we do. We’re never going to walk away from that. I’ve been making big engineering investments into our synchronization engines, so that we can continue to scale, so that we continue to adopt the new operating system releases, so that companies of all scales continue to embrace Dropbox. That takes continued vigilance and investment, and that’s not going away.
First mover advantage: does it matter in startup fundraising?
DocSend founder and CEO Russ Heddleston looks at the data to investigate a simple question: do VCs who write the first term sheet for a startup usually win the deal? The answer is that they often can catalyze the closure of a process, but that the fastest don’t always win.
What was the number one factor in founders deciding on who to choose as their lead investor? We found that nearly 48% of founders chose their lead investor because they were the first one to make the offer.
Anecdotally this makes sense. When DocSend was raising we received a lot of “maybes” during our first few meetings. However, once we had a term sheet most of those “maybes” flipped to a firm “yes.” In fact, many investors that had originally promised a $25k or $50k investment if we found other backers were suddenly asking for $300k or $500k.
How Bongo, the ‘Netflix of Bangladesh’, won the local video streaming market with just $10M
Our India-based correspondent Manish Singh investigates the massive startup success of Bongo, which transformed a small venture capital investment into one of the leading video entertainment companies in the country.
Bongo has also tied up with telecom operators, a common practice for video streaming companies especially in developing markets. The service today has a partnership with every major telecom network in the country as well as 1,100 small ones.
Its data centers today span across the country to deliver content at low cost and at low latency. “We also worked with the national internet exchange to ensure that the pipes were set up to ensure an efficient delivery system,” he said.
Bongo is now going a step further. Currently, the company is testing ways to create a networking system that would allow users in certain localities — mostly in rural parts of Bangladesh — to access its content without internet access.
The idea is to create a mesh network with micro-CDNs. “Say for example, in high-traffic areas such as a university or a bus stand, we will have content delivery networks that will store all the content in the cache. Users in the vicinity will be able to connect to these networks and download movies and shows,” he said.
How Lime, Scoot, JUMP and Spin plan to deploy adaptive scooters
Mobility is important for everyone, but none more so than users with disabilities, who can struggle to find high-quality and efficient options to move around urban cities. Our SF startup reporter Megan Rose Dickey investigates the recent applications from the leading scooter companies in San Francisco on how they are intending to offer disability-friendly transportation options.
Through meetings with key stakeholders, JUMP says it wants to better understand the preferred vehicle type, whether that means foot or e-powered tricycles, tandems, vehicles with trailers and so forth. Additionally, JUMP says it wants to better understand needs around making a reservation, bringing along service animals while riding and payment options.
Based on conversations with people in the city’s disability community, as well as in partnership with advocacy organizations, JUMP will select up to five different types of vehicles to test in San Francisco. From there, JUMP will determine how many and what kind of vehicles to pilot with the SFMTA.
Even more stories
- How ‘the Internet broke America’ with The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz — our ethics columnist Greg Epstein interviews Andrew Marantz about what tech is doing to democracy and elections as well as the future of human societies.
- HTC’s new CEO discusses the phonemaker’s future — our hardware editor Brian Heater talks with HTC CEO Yves Maitre about the challenges facing the mobile handset manufacturer and the future of 5G, edge computing, and VR.
- How you shouldn’t handle your data breach — our security editor Zack Whittaker has covered dozens of data breaches over the years. This is his playbook on how to truthfully and properly disclose these security problems.
- As Sinai Ventures returns first fund, partner Jordan Fudge talks new LA focus — Eric Peckham chats with VC Jordan Fudge about his first major returns and what he sees as the future of the Los Angeles startup ecosystem.
- T2D3 Software Update: Embracing the Founder to CEO (F2C) Journey — Battery Ventures partner Neeraj Agrawal writes in with an update on his approach to growing SaaS founders into CEOs.
- Tracking China’s growing digital influence in Africa — our AfricaTech expert Jake Bright looks at China’s growing influence in the Africa startup ecosystem, as well as the rise of leading companies like Transsion.
- Defining micromobility and where it’s going with business and mobility analyst Horace Dediu — Megan Rose Dickey chats with the man who coined “micromobility,” Horace Dediu, about what he sees next in this increasingly heavily-funded industry.
- SmartNews’ head of product on how the news discovery app wants to help readers break free of their filter bubbles — Taipei-based correspondent Catherine Shu interviews Jeannie Yang of SmartNews about the product’s design, and how Yang is trying to improve the consumption of news for readers.
- European early-stage VC firm ‘Project A’ on Europe’s startup scene taking the next step — finally this week, Steve O’Hear looks at VC firm Project A, which just raised a new $200 million fund and is poised to continue adding to the depth of VC quality in Europe’s early-stage scene.
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.