<span>Monthly Archives</span><h1>April 2020</h1>
    Startups

    Dribbble, a bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn’ for designers, acquires Creative Market, grows to 12M users

    April 30, 2020

    Traditionally dominated by big players like Adobe and Autodesk, the world of design has been flush with a newer wave of startups that are creating collaboration spaces and new cloud-based tools designed to address the needs of creatives. Today, two of those players are combining. Dribbble, an online community for designers that lets them post their work and look for work, is acquiring Creative Market, a marketplace for ready-to-use fonts, icons, illustrations, photos and other design assets.

    Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, Dribbble’s CEO Zack Onisko said in an interview. Prior to this, bootstrapped Dribbble was profitable — revenues come from its job boards, advertising and member subscriptions, kind of like a LinkedIn aimed at the design community — and it had 6 million monthly active users, with 3.5 million registered users. Adding Creative Market will bring the total number of monthly active users across the two sites to 12 million.

    The acquisition is happening at a time when we’re seeing some big growth among startups that speaks to how the balance of power is shifting in the world of software aimed at designers.

    Just today, Figma announced a $50 million raise at a $2 billion valuation, money that it plans to use for its own spate of acquisitions and investments in more design tools. Canva last year raised funding at a $3.2 billion valuation. Smaller, younger startups like Frontify (which helps companies manage their design assets) have also been raising, and Dyndrite has also been raising. Meanwhile, Adobe continues to work on ways to keep its legacy products, like the 30-year-old Photoshop (look, it’s a millennial!) relevant.

    Indeed, even the concept of who the target audience even is has shifted.

    “We talk about designers, but really it’s creatives,” Onisko said. “A lot of creatives are multi-skilled and they work in all sorts of different mediums. The historic focus is product and web design but we’ve seen it slide into motion graphics or 3D or photography.”

    This is actually the second time Creative Market has been acquired. The startup was first purchased by Autodesk in 2014, at a time when the latter was looking to widen its range of products both to take on Adobe more squarely and target more casual and prosumer users, as well as to address the wider needs of its core designer community.

    That ultimately didn’t work out, and Creative Market was spun out as a startup again in 2017, with $7 million in funding led by Accomplice.

    More than two years on from that, it seems that Creative Market saw the logic in coming together with another company for better economies of scale.

    And perhaps this time, the acquirer is a better cultural fit. Both companies are pretty distributed and decentralised (making for a very easy transition to working under stay-at-home orders in recent weeks). And it might have helped, too, that Onisko had once previously been Creative Market’s chief growth officer before taking on the role as Dribbble’s CEO.

    The plan will be to keep both companies’ brands and teams separate, with Chris Winn continuing to lead Creative Market as its CEO. Creative Market will continue to build out its marketplace of design assets, and Dribbble will continue to position itself as a place for those designers to set out their profiles and connect with those looking to hire them, as well as each other.

    “We’re able to do our own thing and beat our own drums,” said Onisko, with the plan being to keep “marching on our own roadmaps.”

    Over time, when the time is right, Onisko said there might be an opportunity to integrate the businesses, but that will be in the future.

    One area where the two will be coming together right away is in cross-pollinating membership. Up to now, people joined Dribbble by invitation from previous members, which Onisko said was a good way of keeping growth in check and applying a kind of peer-reviewed quality control layer. Now, the idea will be that Dribbble will open up to all new users, and those who are already registered on Creative Market can automatically become members on the sister site.

    “The big opportunity is that we can do in 2-3 years what we would have done in 3-5 years as separate companies,” Onisko added.

    “We’re so excited to bring together two fully-distributed teams who work everyday to serve the design community,” said Winn, in a statement. “The opportunity for both companies is that much larger thanks to this partnership and I’m so excited to join forces.”

    For its part, Onisko said that Dribbble has no intention of changing from its growth course when it comes to finances. The company has always been bootstrapped — that is, surviving with no outside investors — and is profitable. And there are no plans to use this moment to seek outside funding, he added. The company has been approached by interested parties — “all the usual suspects,” he said — for acquisition, Onisko said, but for now that’s also not been something the company has wanted to explore.

    “We feel that we’re very much in our infancy,” Onisko said. “We have pretty big ambitions and want to march forward. We’ve talked to all the usual suspects, and we are on friendly terms and keep all the conversations going, but we will continue to stay independent and operate in our contrarian way.”


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Dribbble, a bootstrapped ‘LinkedIn’ for designers, acquires Creative Market, grows to 12M users

    Startups

    Early-stage investor The Fund expands beyond NYC with new partners in LA and London

    April 30, 2020

    The Fund, an early-stage investment firm with a memorably straightforward name, is looking beyond New York City as it starts investing its second fund.

    Founders Jenny Fielding (who’s also managing director at Techstars New York) and Scott Hartley (also co-founder and partner at Two Culture Capital) told me that in the past two years, they’ve already backed 52 New York City startups.

    “The seed funds in New York have all gone upstream,” Fielding argued, making it harder for founders to get the smaller checks they need when they’re getting started. So The Fund is aiming to participate in those “first check” rounds of between $500,000 and $1.2 million.

    To find those investments, Fielding and Hartley rely on a “crowdsourced” approach, taking recommendations from the startup founders they’ve recruited as limited partners in The Fund — a group that includes names like General Assembly founder Matthew Brimer, One Medical founder Tom Lee, Handy co-founder Oisin Hanrahan, SoundCloud founder Alex Ljung and ClassPass co-founder Sanjiv Sanghavi.

    At the same time, rather than relying on a “voting and consensus” process, the decisions are ultimately made by the investment committee, a smaller group that initially included Brimer, Fielding, Hartley and Katie Hunt.

    The firm is targeting $9 million for the second fund, with one-third deployed in New York, another third in Los Angeles and the final third in London.

    Hartley said The Fund is taking a “modular approach” to this expansion, with an independent investment committee in each city: In New York, it will be Josh Hix, Katie Shea and Becky Yang, along with Fielding and Hartley; in Los Angeles, the committee includes Raina Kumra, Josh Jones, Anna Barber and Austin Murray; and in London, it’s Carmen Alfonso Rico, Eamonn Carey and Marina Gorey.

    “The big vision is, we’ve literally written the playbook,” Fielding said. “Fund one was an experiment, and now fund two is an experiment: Does this scale? After we have about a year’s worth of data about deals under our belt, we want to take it to the next level. Why shouldn’t The Funds be popping up in every city?”

    And even though COVID-19 has brought a halt to large sectors of the global and domestic economy, Hartley said the firm has continued to write checks at the same pace.

    “We had such conviction in the [founding] teams that it hasn’t really slowed down the cadence of our investing,” he said. “We take a long-term approach with pre-seed investing. We see this as a multi-year journey.”

    Fielding added that it’s been “inspiring” and “phenomenal” to see how their existing portfolio companies have adapted to this new reality. As an example, she pointed to how rowing class startup CityRow has shifted to virtual classes.

    And if you’re wondering about that name, Fielding said they were perfectly aware that calling themselves The Fund could prompt some “Who’s on first?”-style confusion.

    “We wanted to make fun of ourselves a little bit,” she said. And besides, most of the good tree names were taken.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Early-stage investor The Fund expands beyond NYC with new partners in LA and London

    Startups

    Freada Kapor Klein warns of ‘vulture capitalists’ during pandemic

    April 30, 2020

    The tech industry experienced turmoil before during the dot-com bust and again during the 2008 economic downturn. But this time it’s a bit different, according to Kapor Capital founding partners Freada Kapor Klein and Mitch Kapor.

    “What’s different this time is that it is society-wide,” Kapor Klein said during an Extra Crunch Live appearance this week. “It’s not just the dot-com bust or its not just financial services. It is much more widespread. But again, as you point out, tech is in a much better position because tech is related to the things that are thriving.”

    Kapor, formerly a partner at a Sand Hill Road VC firm during the dot-com bust, said it’s similar in that it’s an “enormous disruption with great uncertainty about what will be on the other side of it.”

    The details, however, are very different. Assuming there will eventually be a vaccine, Kapor said he believes things will be able to get back to some sort of normal, “notwithstanding the irrecoverable disruptions of permanently-closed small businesses.”

    In the two previous downturns, there was something inherently wrong with the economy, but that’s not the case right now, he added.

    “The good news is that, to the extent to which the pandemic gets under control, the economy should restart,” said Kapor. “The question, though, is on what basis and do we use this as an opportunity to rethink some fundamentals. Are we actually serious about treating essential workers better, really having a safety net and paid sick leave and universal health benefits and childcare — where we can see and feel now the absence of that is hurting the people we depend on four our lives. But it is not a certainty. This is the other thing about these great disruptions. We have some agency about what happens next. And so it’s almost a cliché now, but it’s terrible to waste, you know, a crisis. Our hope is that coming out of this, as a society, we make some different decisions about how we allocate resources and what we think the baseline is that everybody is entitled to.”

    But while we’re all still knee-deep in the pandemic, there are ways to ensure employers treat workers fairly and VC firms treat founders with respect and don’t take advantage of them during these vulnerable times.

    Below you’ll find some more stellar insights from the duo that touch on making tough decisions to layoff or furlough employees and how to do it in an equitable way, as well as the rise of what Kapor Klein refers to as “vulture capitalists.”

    Equitable layoffs


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Freada Kapor Klein warns of ‘vulture capitalists’ during pandemic

    Startups

    Material Bank, a logistics platform for sourcing architectural and design samples, raises $28M

    April 30, 2020

    Material Bank, a logistics platform for the architectural and design industry, has announced the close of a $28 million Series B financing today, led by Bain Capital Ventures. Bain’s Merritt Hummer led the round on behalf of the firm and will join the board of directors at Material Bank, along with Jeff Sine, cofounder and partner at The Raine Group.

    Existing investors Raine Ventures and Starwood Capital Group cofounder, Chairman and CEO Barry Sternlicht also participated in the round.

    Material Bank launched in January 2019, founded by Adam I. Sandow. Its platform is meant to serve designers, architects and others who source and purchase the very building blocks of our physical world: materials.

    Most architectural firms and designers have their own physical library of materials in their office, like carpet swatches, wall covering samples, tiles, and hardwoods for flooring. These libraries are nearly impossible to keep up to date — not only do styles change over time (just like clothes or anything else) but architects pull this or that binder of wall coverings or carpets and there’s no telling if or when that binder returns to the library, or if the binder will still be complete when it does return.

    The other big obstacle for designers and architects is that there’s no real aggregation across the many, many manufacturers of these materials.

    Sandow likens it to searching for a flight in the old days.

    “We all used to book airline travel through an agent, and then the airlines offered websites,” said Sandow. “We thought ‘this is great! I can just go to AA.com or Delta.com to book my flights.’ Until we wanted to price shop. Then you had to search four or five different websites and write down all the prices and by the time you found the price you wanted, it may be gone.”

    Then came Expedia and Hotwire.

    That’s how Sandow thinks of Material Bank for the architectural industry.

    Material Bank aggregates materials across hundreds of vendors, giving users the ability to filter around multiple parameters to find a selection of materials in minutes instead of hours.

    But aggregation and powerful search are only half the battle. Designers and architects are also burdened by the time it takes to get their samples. One package may arrive tomorrow, with two others in the next three days, and still more coming in one week.

    This leads to a confusing experience of getting all these samples together to show a client, and is a huge environmental waste with dozens of boxes arriving at the same exact location over several days.

    To combat this waste, Material Bank built a facility in Memphis directly next door to FedEx’s sorting center. This facility is the very last stop that FedEx makes each night before sorting and sending off its overnight packages by plane.

    That means that Material Bank users can place an order by midnight EST and get their samples, from any vendor on Material Bank, by 10am ET the next morning. These samples come in a single box with a tray that can be repurposed into a return package to send back unneeded samples.

    Obviously, Material Bank’s facility would require hundreds of workers to turn around orders that come in late to be picked up by FedEx if it weren’t for advancements in robotics. Material Bank partners with Locus Robotics in its facility, and is thus able to pay $17.50 an hour to its human workers in the building.

    Sandow says that coronavirus has not hampered the business at all, with the company seeing record revenues in March and with expectations to beat that record in April. That is partially due to the fact that those physical sample libraries in architectural and design firms are no longer accessible to employees who have had to shift to working from home.

    Material Bank doesn’t charge architects or designers for the service, but does have a hybrid SaaS model in place for manufacturers and vendors on the platform. Manufacturers pay a monthly fee to access and use the platform, listing their SKUs, as well as a transactional fee to get access to the architects and designers placing orders for samples of their materials. Essentially, the manufacturers pay for the lead generation and hand-off to potential customers.

    Sandow spent the last two decades growing a media network of architectural and design-focused magazines and knew early on that a reliance on advertising wouldn’t cut it as media moved online, with plans to build tools and services instead.

    Material Bank was born out of that effort, and spun out of Sandow group relatively early on in its life.

    The company has raised a total of $55 million since inception.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Material Bank, a logistics platform for sourcing architectural and design samples, raises M

    Startups

    7 VCs talk about today’s esports opportunities

    April 30, 2020

    Even before the COVID-19 shutdown, venture funding rounds and total deal volume of VC funding for esports were down noticeably from the year prior. The space received a lot of attention in 2017 and 2018 as leagues formed, teams raised money and surging popularity fostered a whole ecosystem of new companies. Last year featured some big fundraises, but esports wasn’t the hot new thing in the tech world anymore.

    This unexpected, compulsory work-from-home era may drive renewed interest in the space, however, as a larger market of consumers discover esports and more potential entrepreneurs identify pain points in their experience.

    To track where new startups could arise this year, I asked seven VCs who pay close attention to the esports market where they see opportunities at the moment:

    Their responses are below.

    This is the second investor survey I’ve conducted to better understand VCs’ views on gaming startups amid the pandemic; they complement my broader gaming survey from October 2019 and an eight-article series on virtual worlds I wrote last month. If you missed it, read the previous survey, which investigated the trend of “games as the new social networks”.

    Peter Levin, Griffin Gaming Partners

    Which specific areas within esports are most interesting to you right now as a VC looking for deals? Which areas are the least interesting territory for new deals?

    Everything around competitive gaming is of interest to us. With Twitch streaming north of two BILLION hours of game play thus far during the pandemic, this continues to be an area of great interest to us. Fantasy, real-time wagering, match-making, backend infrastructure and other areas of ‘picks and shovels’-like plays remain front burner for us relative to competitive gaming.

    What challenges does the esports ecosystem now need solutions to that didn’t exist (or weren’t a focus) 2 years ago?

    As competitive gaming is still so very new with respect to the greater competitive landscape of content, teams and events, the Industry should be nimble enough to better respond to dramatic market shifts relative to its analog, linear brethren. A native digital industry, getting back “online’”will be orders of magnitude more straightforward than in so many other areas.


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | 7 VCs talk about today’s esports opportunities

    Startups

    VC appetite for AI startups holds up in Q1 despite lackluster exit volume

    April 30, 2020

    Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

    Today we’re taking our final look back at Q1 venture capital through the lens of AI-focused startups. New data out this week paints a mixed picture of the AI startup landscape. Venture dollar volume in Q1 was pretty good, though there was weakness in certain startup stages. Exit data was weak, however, and some Q1 numbers were juiced by a single deal.

    AI-focused startups have grown past their history as the hot new thing (remember when every new tech company was doing AI for 45 minutes?) into a more mature niche; TechCrunch has spent a reasonable amount of time digging into their economics, and just this week a new, $180 million AI-focused fund caught our attention.

    In the post-hype days, then, let’s check in on what global AI startups got done with investors in Q1. We’re leaning on this report from CB Insights, which breaks down the quarter’s numbers for us. Let’s pick them apart and see what we can divine concerning the future.

    AI Q1 2020

    To set the stage, venture capital investment into AI-focused startups has generally risen on a global basis for years. Indeed, deal and dollar totals have risen year-over-year from 2015 through 2019. Indeed, 2019’s Q2 and Q3 saw record AI startup venture dollar volume ($8.45 and $8.47 billion, respectively), per CB Insights .


    Source: Tech Crunch Startups | VC appetite for AI startups holds up in Q1 despite lackluster exit volume

    World News

    Coronavirus updates: Drug trials bring hope as COVID-19 keeps spreading – CBS News

    April 30, 2020
    1. Coronavirus updates: Drug trials bring hope as COVID-19 keeps spreading  CBS News
    2. Fauci: New Drug Remdesivir Cuts Down Coronavirus Recovery Time | NBC Nightly News  NBC News
    3. Gilead says early results of coronavirus drug trial show improvement with shorter remdesivir treatment  CNBC
    4. FDA will reportedly authorize use of remdesivir for Covid-19 after trial shows ‘positive effect’ on recovery time  CNN
    5. Gilead Sciences’ (GILD) Remdesivir Sparks Market Hope With Trial Success  Yahoo News
    6. View Full Coverage on Google News

    Source: Google News | Coronavirus updates: Drug trials bring hope as COVID-19 keeps spreading – CBS News

    World News

    Gigi Hadid looks effortlessly stylish in laid-back selfies – Daily Mail

    April 30, 2020
    1. Gigi Hadid looks effortlessly stylish in laid-back selfies  Daily Mail
    2. Pregnant Gigi Hadid and Boyfriend Zayn Malik Are Expecting a Baby Girl  Us Weekly
    3. How Tyler Cameron Feels About Ex-Girlfriend Gigi Hadid’s Pregnancy  E! NEWS
    4. Fans Think Gigi Hadid Revealed Her Baby’s Gender at Her Birthday Party  Yahoo Lifestyle
    5. One Direction Is a Girl Group Now  Jezebel
    6. View Full Coverage on Google News

    Source: Google News | Gigi Hadid looks effortlessly stylish in laid-back selfies – Daily Mail