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Canon's new full-frame mirrorless RF system looked incredibly promising, but it got off to a rough start with the launch of the EOS R, a camera that was missing key features next to rival models from Nikon, Sony and Panasonic. Rather than intro…
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Whenever a security startup lands on my desk, I have one question: Who’s the chief security officer (CSO) and when can I get time with them?
Having a chief security officer is as relevant today as a chief marketing officer (CMO) or chief revenue boss. Just as you need to make sure your offering looks good and the money keeps rolling in, you need to show what your security posture looks like.
Even for non-security startups, having someone at the helm is just as important — not least given the constant security threats that all companies face today, they will become a necessary part of interacting with the media. Regardless of whether your company builds gadgets or processes massive amounts of customer data, security has to be at the front of mind. It’s no good simply saying that you “take your privacy and security seriously.” You have to demonstrate it.
A CSO has several roles and they will wear many hats. Depending on the kind of company you have, they will work to bolster your company’s internal processes and policies on keeping not only your corporate data safe but also the data of your customers. They also will be consulted on security practices of your app or product or service to make sure you’re complying with consumer-expected privacy expectations — and not the overbearing and all-embracing industry standards of vacuuming up as much data as there is.
But for the average security startup, a CSO should also act as the point-person for all technical matters associated with their company’s product or service. A CSO can be an evangelist for the infosec professional who can speak to their company’s offering — and to reporters, like me.
In my view, no startup of any size — especially a security startup — should be without a CSO.
The reality is about 95 percent of the world’s wealthiest companies don’t have one. Facebook hasn’t had someone running the security shop since August. It may be a coincidence that the social networking giant has faced breach after exposure after leak after scandal, and it shows — the company is running around headless without a direction of where to go.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why your CSO, not your CMO, should pitch your security startup
Sam Altman’s little brother Jack is an entrepreneur, too.
Jack Altman, whose resume includes a stint as vice president of business development at Teespring, has raised $15 million in Series B funding for his startup, Lattice, a modern approach to corporate goal setting. Shasta Ventures led the round, with participation from Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the latter being the organization his brother led as president until very recently.
Lattice, used by high-growth companies like Reddit, Slack, Coinbase and Glossier, helps human resources professionals develop insights about their teams. Founded in 2015, Altman and Eric Koslow, like most entrepreneurs, developed the idea for Lattice out of their own pain points.
“We realized that with quarterly goal settings, OKRs, we would write them up and get the leadership together and then they would sit on a shelf and nothing would happen,” Altman told TechCrunch.
Lattice, a SaaS business, is a flexible platform that caters to startups and larger businesses’ specific cultures, management practices and varying approaches to employee engagement. The product, inspired by platforms like Gmail and Slack, is designed with consumers in mind. Lattice, the team hopes, has a look and feel that makes incumbent HR platforms feel antiquated.
The product makes it simple for employees and their managers to complete engagement surveys, share feedback, arrange one-on-one meetings and complete comprehensive performance reviews with a larger goal of reworking the company goal-setting process entirely. No more once-yearly check-ins; Lattice enables businesses to check-in with their employees on a weekly basis.
Lattice currently has 1,200 customers, 60 employees and was cash flow break-even for the first time in Q1 2019. With the latest financing, the San Francisco-based startup plans to invest in product development.
“Life is short,” Altman said. “You want to have work that you enjoy and an office that feels good to be at.”
Lattice has previously raised capital from investors including SV Angel, Marc Benioff, Slack Fund and Fuel Capital, Sam Altman, Elad Gil, Alexis Ohanian, Kevin Mahaffey, Daniel Gross and Jake Gibson. Lattice completed the Y Combinator startup accelerator in 2016.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Lattice raises another M to improve performance reviews
On the one hand, you’ve got Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey lamenting the “like” button’s existence, and threatening to just kill the thing off entirely for incentivizing the wrong kind of behavior. On the other hand, you have twttr — Twitter’s prototype app where the company is testing new concepts including, most recently, a way to make liking tweets even easier than before.
Confused about Twitter’s product direction? Apparently, so is the company.
In the latest version of the twttr prototype, released on Thursday, users are now able to swipe right to left on any tweet in order to “like” it. Previously, this gesture only worked on tweets in conversation threads, where the engagement buttons had been hidden. With the change, however, the swipe works anywhere — including the Home timeline, the Notifications tab, your Profile page, or even within Twitter Search results. In other words, it becomes a more universal gesture.
This makes sense because once you got used to swiping right, it was confusing that the gesture didn’t work in some places, but did in others. Still, it’s odd to see the company doubling down on making “likes” easier to use — and even rolling out a feature that could increase user engagement with the “Like” button — given Jack Dorsey’s repeated comments about his distaste for “likes” and the conversations around the button’s removal.
Of course, twttr is not supposed to be Dorsey’s vision. Instead, it’s meant to be a new experiment in product development, where users and Twitter’s product teams work together, in the open, to develop, test, and then one day officially launch new features for Twitter.
For the time being, the app is largely focused on redesigning conversation threads. On Twitter today, these get long and unwieldy, and it’s not always clear who’s talking to who. On twttr, however, threads are nested with a thin line connecting the various posts.
The app is also rolling out other, smaller tweaks like labels on tweets within conversations that highlight the original “Author’s” replies, or if a post comes from someone you’re “following.”
And, of course, twttr introduced the “swipe to like” gesture.
While it’s one thing to want to collaborate more directly with the community, it seems strange that twttr is rolling out a feature designed to increase — not decrease — engagement with “likes” at this point in time.
Last August, for example, Dorsey said he wanted to redesign key elements of the social network, including the “like” button and the way Twitter displays follower counts.
“The most important thing that we can do is we look at the incentives that we’re building into our product,” Dorsey had said at the time. “Because they do express a point of view of what we want people to do — and I don’t think they are correct anymore.”
Soon after, at an industry event in October 2018, Dorsey again noted how the “like” button sends the wrong kind of message.
“Right now we have a big ‘like’ button with a heart on it, and we’re incentivizing people to want to drive that up,” said Dorsey. “We have a follower count that was bolded because it felt good twelve years ago, but that’s what people see us saying: that should go up. Is that the right thing?,” he wondered.
While these comments may have seemed like a little navel-gazing over Twitter’s past, a Telegraph report about the “like” button’s removal quickly caught fire. It claimed Dorsey had said the “like” button was going to go away entirely, which caused so much user backlash that Twitter comms had to respond. The company said the idea has been discussed, but it wasn’t something happening “soon.” (See above tweet).
Arguably, the “like” button is appreciated by Twitter’s user base, so it’s not surprising that a gesture that could increase its usage would become something that gets tried out in the community-led twttr prototype app. It’s worth noting, however, how remarkably different the development process is when it’s about what Twitter’s users want, not the CEO.
Hmmm.
Hey, twttr team? Maybe we can get that “edit” button now?
Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Twitter makes ‘likes’ easier to use in its twttr prototype app. (Nobody tell Jack.)
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Slack has filed to go public via a direct listing. Similar to what Spotify did last year, this means that the company won’t have a traditional IPO, and will instead allow existing shareholders to sell their stock to investors.
The company’s S-1 filing says it plans to make $100 million worth of shares available, but that’s probably a placeholder figure.
The S-1 offers data about the company’s financial performance, reporting a net loss of $138.9 million and revenue of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before.
The company attributes these losses to its decision “to invest in growing our business to capitalize on our market opportunity,” and notes that they’re shrinking as a percentage of revenue.
Slack also says that in the three months ending on January 31, it had more than 10 million daily active users across more than 600,000 organizations — 88,000 on the paid plan and 550,000 on the free plan.
In the filing, the company says the Slack team created the product to meet its own collaboration needs.
“Since our public launch in 2014, it has become apparent that organizations worldwide have similar needs, and are now finding the solution with Slack,” it says. “Our growth is largely due to word-of-mouth recommendations. Slack usage inside organizations of all kinds is typically initially driven bottoms-up, by end users. Despite this, we (and the rest of the world) still have a hard time explaining Slack. It’s been called an operating system for teams, a hub for collaboration, a connective tissue across the organization, and much else. Fundamentally, it is a new layer of the business technology stack in a category that is still being defined.”
The company suggests that the total market opportunity for Slack and other makers of workplace collaboration software is $28 billion, and it plans to grow through strategies like expanding its footprint within organizations already using Slack, investing in more enterprise features, expanding internationally and growing the developer ecosystem.
The risk factors mentioned in the filing sound pretty boilerplate and/or similar to other internet companies going public, like the aforementioned net losses and the fact that its current growth rate might not be sustainable, as well as new compliance risks under Europe’s GDPR.
Slack has previously raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase, from investors including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, SoftBank, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.
Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Slack files to go public, reports 8.9M in losses on revenue of 0.6M
