Browsing Tag: Startups

Women and seniors are joining the cannabis movement, and that’s presenting new investing opportunities, according to a panel of cannabis investors we interviewed several days ago at an event organized by the cross-border venture firm DCM.

Specifically, they say, expect to see an uptick in products of all types that make it easier to consume small and controlled amounts of THC, the main psychoactive ingredient in pot.

The trend isn’t so surprising. Anecdotally, women increasingly see cannabis as a potential way to take the edge off without getting plastered, which is not a small concern. Women’s bodies are affected differently by alcohol than are men’s, including because they produce less of a particular enzyme that breaks down alcohol in the body. They’re also working more, drinking more and developing cirrhosis at a faster rate. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the related death rate for women ages 45 to 64 soared a stunning 57% between 2000 and 2015, compared with men, whose death rate owing to cirrhosis rose 21% over the same period.

Meanwhile, the case for seniors is even more widely understood. Many live with chronic discomfort, including because of arthritis or osteoporosis or sometimes autoimmune diseases that can cause fatigue, joint pain and worse. A growing number is addicted to OxyContin and other pain killers and looking for a way to lessen their dependence on them. It’s also the case that cannabis isn’t viewed as scandalously as it once was. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner — who is pushing 70 and long opposed the legalization of marijuana — even joined the board of cannabis distributor Acreage Holdings last summer, alongside former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld (age: 73).

One product promising newcomers a more predictable experience with cannabis is a two-year-old, Woodland Hills, Calif.-based vaporizer company called Indose, whose tagline is “greatness comes with control.” The outfit, which just closed on $3.5 million in funding led by Casa Verde Capital, enables users to adjust how many milligrams of THC they are inhaling, from a modest 1 to 2 milligrams, to a more impactful 3 to 4 milligrams, per puff.

Dosist, a Santa Monica, Calif.-based maker of vape pens, similarly appeals to new users. Its pens vibrate when a user has inhaled for three-seconds, a way to help that person calibrate his or her experience. Dosist also markets its formulations in ways that are accessible to new users, including selling one simply called “Sleep,” and another called “Bliss.”

Yet another area of growth centers on so-called sublinguals, or products delivered under the tongue, like cannabis tinctures, which are becoming more popular among newer cannabis users, largely because the THC dosage is easier to manage. In fact, the cannabis wholesale ordering platform Leaflink has said that cannabis-infused sublingual and tincture products, drops, tablets and strips were the fastest growing cannabis product categories last year.

But perhaps the biggest opportunity going forward may be edibles, which have been around forever but will most certainly begin to look and be marketed differently. DCM, for example, just bet $5 million on a new beverage brand that, beginning this summer, intends to sell flavored THC-infused shots that let users know exactly how many milligrams they are consuming — along with how they might feel and when.

The company’s target market, as we wrote earlier this week, is women who wouldn’t necessarily smoke a joint but who — thanks to easing regulations, advertising and smart packaging — are becoming “canna curious,” much like one of the firm’s co-founders, a former consumer packaged goods exec who began experimenting with cannabis herself last year.

And more form factors may be on the horizon. As Karan Wadhera, a managing director at Casa Verde Capital, told us during the panel discussion: “There’s a massive market opportunity out there in many areas” now that the industry has “started to show us that people really do care about actual precise dosing.”

Narbe Alexandrian, the president of the cannabis investment firm Canopy Rivers, fully agreed. He told attendees that “when you look at consumer data, and you look at intenders,” meaning those who currently don’t use cannabis but are open to it, “then look at rejectors,” or people who haven’t used cannabis in the last six months and aren’t likely to consider it, “a lot of rejectors have tried cannabis. But they were turned off by it because they had a weed brownie that hit them too hard, and they never want to touch the substance again.”

The opportunity to sell both camps micro-dosing products is “huge,” said Alexandrian, suggesting that most people welcome more control when offered it. He also hinted that it’s also a wide open field, thanks to the awkward math of many current retailers.  As he explained it, it’s often the case today that a store will focus on how many milligrams it’s selling, instead of focusing on the products themselves. “So they’re thinking about selling a 100-milligram beverage for $10 and a 50-milligram beverage for $5” and forcing the customer to figure out how to dilute what they are buying. That will change in the near future, he said.

When she weighed in, panelist and longtime cannabis investor Emily Paxhia echoed the sentiments of both men. More specifically, she said, she has grown “very interested in lower-dose platforms,” especially as women begin seeking more “moderate dosing” opportunities. She said to think of it as “akin to having a glass of wine or glass of beer, as opposed to, ‘I’m buying straight in for the double martini lunch.’ ”

Added Paxhia — who co-founded in 2013 the cannabis-focused investment firm Poseidon Asset Management, which holds stakes in a wide variety of companies, including Pax Labs, Juul, an HR startup for the cannabis industry and a data and analytics company solely focused on it — “There are many ways we can educate the consumer and help them feel more comfortable with [cannabis]. Having these lower-dose products in the market is one great way to do it.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Where cannabis investors see the next big wave? In precision dosing

Not everyone gets a second chance in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneur Hosain Rahman has been given many more than that. Though his last company, Jawbone, which produced wireless speakers and Bluetooth earpieces, went kaput in 2017 after burning up $1 billion in venture funding over the course of 10 years, Rahman has managed to raise $65.4 million for his new company. So shows a new SEC filing that, coincidentally or otherwise, was processed late yesterday while most of the world’s attention was focused on Uber’s IPO.

The company, Jawbone Health, isn’t brand new. According to reports of two years ago and Rahman’s LinkedIn bio, he began working in earnest on his newest endeavor when the original Jawbone was running on fumes in the summer of 2017.

In fact, according to LinkedIn, Jawbone Health now employs 51 people, including some who worked with Rahman previously. Among these is the new outfit’s VP of engineering, Jonathan Hummel, who’d been a senior engineering manager at Jawbone during the last two years of its life. Others are new to the organization because of its focus on healthcare. These include Yaniv Kerem, Jawbone Health’s VP of Informatics, whose last job was as an emergency medical physician with Kaiser Permanente.

Certainly, the company has a very different mission than even the wearable fitness trackers that Jawbone began making as a kind of Hail Mary pass, and whose failure signaled to some the end of the wearables industry — though it was really just the end of Jawbone.

As Rahman told reporter Kara Swisher last fall, what Jawbone Health is selling is a “personalized subscription service where we take all of this continuous health data about you and we combine that with a lot of machine intelligence . . .”

The idea is to prevent the avoidable diseases that wind up killing two-thirds of us owing to bad decision-making and plain-old inattention. “If you catch that stuff early and you change your behavior or whatnot, you can push out half of those deaths and save 70 percent of the cost,” he told her, adding that Jawbone Health is making its own devices, which will will come free with the service.

It sounds like a practical offering. Still, one obvious concern for the new company is competition. Where Jawbone made attractive, wireless speakers ahead of many other companies whose products now litter our homes, Rahman is seemingly late to the party with Jawbone Health. There are already rings that track sleep activity and heart rate; bracelets that come with built-in accelerometers, heart-rate sensors and temperature sensors; and even textiles that unlock biometric insights.

That’s saying nothing of the Apple Watch, which has already put plenty of startups out of business.

Rahman says one of Jawbone Health’s biggest differentiators is that the product and service are “clinical grade.” That may be a selling point for some consumers, though we’d imagine most won’t really care. After all, humans don’t have the best track record when it comes to taking care of themselves.

Either way, the new funding, atop so much lost capital already, is sure to frustrate some founders who’ve been given fewer opportunities. It may also confuse others who’ve either worked with or funded Rahman in the past.

Then again, Rahman wouldn’t be the first founder to bounce back from failure, and he has plenty to prove. His new backers may well be counting on it.

According to the filing, Jawbone Health is backed by SignalFire and Refactor Capital in the Bay Area, and Polymath Ventures in Dubai. In his sit-down with Swisher, Rahman had also said that Meraas in Dubai is an investor. Indeed, he described it as the company’s “primary” investor.

We’ll have more on the company soon.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | After burning through billion, Jawbone’s Hosain Rahman has raised million more

These days, most days are good days. My clients are founder and executives, I set my own schedule, and I live in a city I love. As an executive coach and advisor, I work with founders and CEOs of companies who have raised more than $100M. Like any enterprise, it’s taken a lot of building, planning, and failing for me to get where I am.

What I’m supposed to tell you is that I worked hard and persevered – and I did.

But what I’m not supposed to tell you is how it felt to do all that failing, and above all how, for years, shame was the primary emotion that guided my life and career. How, at my lowest point, I felt worthless. How I even contemplated self-harm.

It takes a herculean energy to start a company, which is maybe why, so often, our stories sound like myths. Mine went something like this: If I could just raise money from a top-tier VC, get to $1M in revenue, and sell the business for more than $5M, then I’d be good enough. I’d be the successful young adult I wanted to be. Then, once I had made my first million, I could take a swing and start a billion-dollar company.

The fact that I didn’t feel worthy of love, that I lacked inherent value, drove my decisions. My failure to reach the goals I set reinforced the belief I that I was unworthy. Luckily, I eventually found the self-awareness to realize that blindly pursuing goals I couldn’t achieve was unhealthy.

But I didn’t expect that walking away from my job as CEO would break me, nor did I realize how far I would sink.

After extensive therapy, it’s easy for me to see how misguided I was from the outset. Shame, most of the time, is a thing of the past. But for a long time, it fueled every decision I made yet never seemed to exhaust itself – there was always more. In the business world, this is more common than we’re led to think — almost every entrepreneur I meet shares an experience “otherness.” We glorify failure, but we don’t have the patience to honor the pain that turns into the shame of feeling “I’m not good enough.”

We are supposed to be resolute, driven, and resilient. To that end, I want to share what I’ve learned so others who struggle with worthlessness know they aren’t alone, and that happiness – and enjoying success – is still possible.

Accidentally Starting a Company

At 19, I didn’t have a grand plan to change higher education. I was simply a pissed off freshman in college. In an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jeff Young asked me: what would I do with UnCollege, the site I’d just put online?

UnCollege was a fledgling website I’d created out of my frustration in college. It was designed to create a community of people who were frustrated with the status quo in higher education. In that pivotal moment, when Young asked about my plans for the site, I immediately tied my self-worth to its future. It was, after all, the reason I was being interviewed by a major publication. I had to turn UnCollege into something, or else I’d be a failure – and worse, everyone would know it, because now it was public.

From then on, I started a mental list of what I needed to do to be a successful entrepreneur. My list grew quickly and each item carried a familiar caveat. I must write a book or I’m worthless. I must start a company and raise $1M or I’m worthless I must speak at conferences around the world or I’m worthless.

I did raise money. I did start the company. I got to $1M in revenue. Each time I checked one of these boxes, I wasn’t happier. I started to be afraid I would never feel I was enough. I didn’t feel “successful,” especially in the way I saw success portrayed by others, both online and in the industry.

I thought that if I was “successful,” people would see that I wasn’t flawed, and I’d finally be worth something. What I didn’t know is that each time I checked something off my mental checklist, I’d be consumed with shame and insecurity, needing to check the next item off the list in order to feel worthy.

Instead, I felt trapped. I didn’t yet know that self-worth must come from within.

Mistaking my work for self-worth

I realized quickly that I’d committed myself to starting a company because I was afraid of failure, not because I had carefully considered what problem I wanted to dedicate the next ten years of my life to solving. Nonetheless, UnCollege enrolled its first students in September 2013.

That fall, I began to suspect I’d made a mistake. But I was afraid to tell my investors, and those that had supported me to get the business this far. My survival skill was to smile and act like I knew better than everyone else. If only I’d had the courage to sincerely ask for advice.

One consequence of not asking for help was I had to let go of two of the first people I hired, and layoff two more because we didn’t have the cash.

The first cohort was a disaster. I hadn’t designed a properly structured curriculum, and students were dissatisfied. The students liked the community of self-directed learners, but the company wasn’t delivering value beyond the community. Two weeks before the end of the semester, the students declared mutiny and demanded to know what we were going to do to improve the program.

I was terrified and wanted to leave, but we’d already taken money for the next cohort of students. I believed I didn’t have any other choice. We created a coaching program, hired coaches, built two dozen new workshops, and started working to get students placed into internships. The coaching model we built worked, and we spent the next two years improving it.

In the spring of 2015, I called my lead investor, my voice shaking. He knew that I had my share of fear and insecurity, but I told him clearly that day “I can’t do this anymore. It’s going to break me.”

At the same time I was experiencing burnout, the company was pivoting from a college alternative into a pre-college program. The board agreed: it was time to hire a CEO.

After hiring a CEO, it became more difficult to motivate myself to go to work every day. Getting out of bed became a chore. One morning, after a breakfast with a prospective investor at the Four Seasons, I sat down on a bench outside and began to cry. Looking up, I saw one of our previous students waving at me, and quickly wipe away my tears to give him a faint smile.

I felt embarrassed, weak, and helpless.

Deriving identity from my work wasn’t working, and I knew I had to put an end to it. But what were my alternatives?

I was excited for my company and its new leadership, but I was anxious. I was empty. I didn’t know where the company stopped and I began. At my 25th birthday dinner, I couldn’t eat. I was consumed by shame, by fear. I managed to hold off all through dinner, but as soon as I arrived home I broke down sobbing.

Shame is a Habit

In December, I was no longer CEO of my own company. Six months later, I couldn’t get out of bed.

Those first few months I spent catching my breath. I was still on the board of the company, but I didn’t control it. As I began constructing a life post-UnCollege, I had no idea where to start. I didn’t yet realize it, but I needed to go through the individuation process – to figure out who I was and what I believed, independent of my family of origin. Already 25, I’d managed to avoid these questions. The irony is not lost on me that most of my peers faced them in college.

Shame is a consumptive state of being. The longer I went without answers to questions tied to my selfhood, the more shame ate me up. What did I care about? Did I make the right choice? Was the sacrifice I’d made to start this company worth it? Had I taken the wrong path? Was all the pain I’d been through a waste? Would I ever learn to feel happy again? I was beginning to feel as if I had no self at all.

Without a job to make me feel useful, I spent most days drinking at Dolores Park in San Francisco. I knew this wasn’t healthy, but I convinced myself I deserved it after years of hard work. Again, I was only 25. Life had lost its color. Things that once brought me joy no longer did. I could no longer grin and bear the pain. Believing my own bullshit about how I was going to be OK was no longer working. The more this cycle continued, the stronger it got, and the weaker I felt – all the more trapped.

One Monday in October, I found myself completely unable to function. Alone in my house, I realized I hadn’t gotten out of bed or eaten a meal for several days. I was supposed to get on a plane to fly to Minneapolis, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I called my dad, who encouraged me to message my doctor and say, “I think I might be depressed.” I was still too scared to pick up the phone, and it would be another few months before I uttered those words out loud. I started therapy, but things got worse before they got better.

Beyond “I’m sad that my company didn’t turn into what I wanted,” I didn’t have names for my emotions. A lightbulb moment came when my therapist asked, “When have you felt anxiety?” The only example I could think of was the time my company was only a few days from running out of cash.

“Have you ever considered that you only feel your emotions at extremes – a 20, for example, on a 1-10 scale? It’s human to feel anxiety in day-to-day life.”

That opened a door. I wasn’t just sad about leaving my company: I felt shame that I wasn’t “successful.” It wasn’t only my identity I’d tied to the business, but my self-worth. Deep down, my core belief that I – myself – wasn’t good enough. This is shame by definition: a hole that forms in our deepest selves we can never fill because it seems permanent; it seems, by nature, that this is who we are, not what we have done.

Shame often comes from feeling different as a child. In my case, I stuttered as a child. My voice was too ugly to be heard, so I concealed it. I used synonyms to avoid the sounds I couldn’t make. I did this because I couldn’t handle the intense shame of not being able to say my own last name without stuttering. In doing so, I learned to ignore, to numb those intense feelings of shame. I coped, and because I learned to cope so early in life, I learned to numb the rest of my feelings along with it.

By the time I launched a company, all those feelings that tell us “something’s wrong” – sadness, exhaustion, frustration, embarrassment, anxiety, guilt, and so on – were so buried and so unnamed that I could only tell myself “You are what’s wrong” when I hit a block, when I encountered the normal and natural failures that entrepreneurs face every day, no matter how successful in the long run.

Ignoring my feelings was a survival skill as child. Ignoring the doubt and anxiety caused by early critics allowed me to push through and launch a company. But it was also my achilles heel. It led me to derive my identity and self-worth from my work.

A CEO, the story goes, has it all together: a CEO is a visionary who sees around corners without any help. Because of this, I couldn’t give myself permission to ask for help, and when I left the company, I lacked the vocabulary or awareness to describe my feelings. My perfectionism, which long ago enabled me to ignore my stuttering, had associated help with failure, and failure with shame.

All these years later, I still couldn’t allow myself to ask for help.

Learning to tame trauma

Stress, overwhelm, burnout: these were the closest words I had to describe my feelings. This is startup lingo for things you cycle through now and again, and the story goes that we push past them and keep working. But these aren’t emotions. They are coverups for feelings of pain and shame. Ultimately, they describe trauma.

When most people think of trauma they imagine a car crash, or maybe a natural disaster or physical assault. An event that curtails your ability to function entirely. But trauma is simply a piece of the past we carry with us in the present that shapes us — in both positive and negative ways.

In my coaching career, I’ve worked with entrepreneurs and executives who felt too pretty, too ugly, too gay, too fat, too foreign, too dumb, too smart, too dark, or too light. These were the holes of shame they couldn’t fill and believed would always be there. They weren’t by any means failures: even the most successful people carry trauma, and often lash themselves onward with its whip. But shame is something even the best of us can’t outrun. Eventually it catches up with you. It took me years to understand this, and being compassionate towards myself will be a lifelong journey.

Once I had the vocabulary to separate my self-worth from my professional ambitions, UnCollege was a failure I could be proud of, not to mention a learning experience I could bring to my next project: Helping others learn to love themselves, and as a result, build wildly successful companies.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | As a founder, I mistook my work for self-worth

Lately, my inbox has been chock-full of pitches for weed businesses.

A couple of years ago it was bitcoin/blockchain startups, then came scooters; now, it seems “CannTech” is hitting an all-time high thanks to support from venture capitalists. By the way, I didn’t make up the term CannTech, but it seems just as good as anything else, so I’m rolling with it.

According to data collected by PitchBook, VCs have put $1.2 billion in U.S.-based cannabis companies so far in 2019. That’s significantly more than last year’s record high of $836 million, and we aren’t even halfway through 2019.

At this rate, we can expect roughly $2.5 billion invested in CannTech in 2019, i.e. more capital invested in the space in a single year than has been funneled into the space in the last decade.

What’s going on? A few things. Of course, states are increasingly legalizing medical and/or recreational marijuana. That’s allowed companies like Eaze, a marijuana delivery company, to grow at unprecedented rates. The startup, for example, closed its Series C in December on $65 million and is already fundraising again, this time at a $500 million valuation.

In addition to legalization, VCs, and more importantly, limited partners, have woken up to the business opportunity of cannabis. Soon, gone will be the days of strict morality clauses that dissuaded VC firms from supporting startups focused on weed. The firms that were early to understand the space, like DCM Ventures or Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital, will reap the benefits.

Speaking of DCM, the firm put on a huge, first-of-its-kind summit this week focused on CannTech: “For three years I was struggling with a lot of pain issues,” DCM co-founder David Chao told the audience. “One day I was playing Xbox with Blake Krikorian [co-founder of Sling Media] and I said ‘you know Blake, I have this pain problem’ and he said, ‘oh, you should try pot.’ And I said ‘why should I do that? I haven’t smoked since college?’ “

Long story short, Chao can thank his friend Blake for making him aware of an exploding market, and he can thank DCM’s scrappy partner, Kyle Lui, for helping the firm score some major investments in the space, like Eaze.

“We were the first Sand Hill VCs to invest in cannabis and everyone started calling me saying ‘you’re crazy, why are you doing this?’ ” Lui said.

It’s still very early days in the CannTech space, but the market is expected to be worth as much as $80 billion by 2030. That can only mean interest will soar from here.

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IPO corner

Uber: It was a disappointing debut, to say the least. The ride-hailing business (NYSE: UBER), previously valued at $72 billion by venture capitalists, priced its stock at $45 apiece for a valuation of $82.4 billion on Thursday. Then it began trading Friday morning at $42 apiece, only to close even lower at $41.57, down 7.6% from its IPO price.

Slack: Not a whole lot of news to share here yet, other than that the workplace messaging business will host its investor day on Monday. It’s invite-only, though Slack, like Spotify, will live-stream the event to the public. More details on that here.

Luckin Coffee: The Chinese upstart going after Starbucks is set to debut on the Nasdaq under the symbol “LK.” In a new filing, Luckin said it plans to sell 30 million shares at an initial range of $15-$17. That gives an estimated raise of $450 million to $510 million, but it could be bumped up if underwriters take up the additional allocation of 4.5 million shares. So, as a grand total, the listing could raise $586.5 million if the full offering is bought at the top of the range.

Lyft: Not an IPO update but the company did release its first-ever earnings report. Here’s the TL;DR: revenues of $776 million on losses of $1.14 billion, including $894 million of stock-based compensation and related payroll tax expenses. The company’s revenues surpassed Wall Street estimates of $740 million, while losses came in much higher as a result of IPO-related expenses.

M&A

Harry’s razors are crappy, I’m told. Alas, the brand is worth $1.37 billion to Edgewell Personal Care, the company behind Schick and Banana Boat. Founded in 2013, Harry’s had raised about $375 million in venture capital funding. Edgewell says its $1.37 billion payment will break down to roughly 79% cash and 21% stock, giving Harry’s shareholders an 11% stake in Edgewell.

Big rounds

• VCs value Carta at $1.7B with $300M round
• Gett raises $200M at $1.5B valuation
• BigBasket becomes a unicorn with $150M investment 
• Unity has filed to raise up to $125M at $6B valuation
• Sumo Logic gathers $110M at $1B valuation 

Small(er) rounds

• Tourlane raises $47M from Sequoia and Spark Capital
• Cybersecurity insurance startup Coalition raises $40M
• K-Zen Beverage, a cannabis-infused drink brand, nabs $5M
• Recent YC-grad MedCrypt raises $5M 
• Sextech company scorned by CES scores $2M

Inspiration

Meet Beat Saber, an eight-person startup with no funding that’s turned into VR’s biggest success story. Venture capital isn’t always the answer, folks.

~Extra Crunch~

Our premium subscription service was loaded with A+ content this week. TechCrunch contributor Jon Evans wrote a piece titled “Against the Slacklash,” wherein he makes the case that Slack isn’t inherently bad. “Rather, the particular way in which you are misusing it epitomizes your company’s deeper problems.” Plus, Eric Peckham asked nine top VCs, including Cyan Banister and Charles Hudson, to share where they are putting their money when it comes to media, gaming and entertainment.

#Equitypod

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Startups Weekly: Venture capitalists are crazy for cannabis

Truecaller, an app that helps users screen strangers and robocallers, will soon allow users in India, its largest market, to borrow up to a few hundred dollars.

The crediting option will be the fourth feature the nine-year-old app adds to its service in the last two years. So far it has added to the service the ability to text, record phone calls and mobile payment features, some of which are only available to users in India. Of the 140 million daily active users of Truecaller, 100 million live in India.

The story of the ever-growing ambition of Truecaller illustrates an interesting phase in India’s internet market that is seeing a number of companies mold their single-functioning app into multi-functioning so-called super apps.

Inspired by China

This may sound familiar. Truecaller and others are trying to replicate Tencent’s playbook. The Chinese tech giant’s WeChat, an app that began life as a messaging service, has become a one-stop solution for a range of features — gaming, payments, social commerce and publishing platform — in recent years.

WeChat has become such a dominant player in the Chinese internet ecosystem that it is effectively serving as an operating system and getting away with it. The service maintains its own app store that hosts mini apps and lets users tip authors. This has put it at odds with Apple, though the iPhone-maker has little choice but to make peace with it.

For all its dominance in China, WeChat has struggled to gain traction in India and elsewhere. But its model today is prominently on display in other markets. Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asian markets are best known for their ride-hailing services, but have begun to offer a range of other features, including food delivery, entertainment, digital payments, financial services and healthcare.

The proliferation of low-cost smartphones and mobile data in India, thanks in part to Google and Facebook, has helped tens of millions of Indians come online in recent years, with mobile the dominant platform. The number of internet users has already exceeded 500 million in India, up from some 350 million in mid-2015. According to some estimates, India may have north of 625 million users by year-end.

This has fueled the global image of India, which is both the fastest growing internet and smartphone market. Naturally, local apps in India, and those from international firms that operate here, are beginning to replicate WeChat’s model.

Founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Paytm Vijay Shekhar Sharma speaks during the launch of Paytm payments Bank at a function in New Delhi on November 28, 2017 (AFP PHOTO / SAJJAD HUSSAIN)

Leading that pack is Paytm, the popular homegrown mobile wallet service that’s valued at $18 billion and has been heavily backed by Alibaba, the e-commerce giant that rivals Tencent and crucially missed the mobile messaging wave in China.

Commanding attention

In recent years, the Paytm app has taken a leaf from China with additions that include the ability to text merchants; book movie, flight and train tickets; and buy shoes, books and just about anything from its e-commerce arm Paytm Mall . It also has added a number of mini games to the app. The company said earlier this month that more than 30 million users are engaging with its games.

Why bother with diversifying your app’s offering? Well, for Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO of Paytm, the question is why shouldn’t you? If your app serves a certain number of transactions (or engagements) in a day, you have a good shot at disrupting many businesses that generate fewer transactions, he told TechCrunch in an interview.

At the end of the day, companies want to garner as much attention of a user as they can, said Jayanth Kolla, founder and partner of research and advisory firm Convergence Catalyst.

“This is similar to how cable networks such as Fox and Star have built various channels with a wide range of programming to create enough hooks for users to stick around,” Kolla said.

“The agenda for these apps is to hold people’s attention and monopolize a user’s activities on their mobile devices,” he added, explaining that higher engagement in an app translates to higher revenue from advertising.

Paytm’s Sharma agrees. “Payment is the moat. You can offer a range of things including content, entertainment, lifestyle, commerce and financial services around it,” he told TechCrunch. “Now that’s a business model… payment itself can’t make you money.”

Big companies follow suit

Other businesses have taken note. Flipkart -owned payment app PhonePe, which claims to have 150 million active users, today hosts a number of mini apps. Some of those include services for ride-hailing service Ola, hotel booking service Oyo and travel booking service MakeMyTrip.

Paytm (the first two images from left) and PhonePe offer a range of services that are integrated into their payments apps

What works for PhonePe is that its core business — payments — has amassed enough users, Himanshu Gupta, former associate director of marketing and growth for WeChat in India, told TechCrunch. He added that unlike e-commerce giant Snapdeal, which attempted to offer similar offerings back in the day, PhonePe has tighter integration with other services, and is built using modern architecture that gives users almost native app experiences inside mini apps.

When you talk about strategy for Flipkart, the homegrown e-commerce giant acquired by Walmart last year for a cool $16 billion, chances are arch rival Amazon is also hatching similar plans, and that’s indeed the case for super apps.

In India, Amazon offers its customers a range of payment features such as the ability to pay phone bills and cable subscription through its Amazon Pay service. The company last year acquired Indian startup Tapzo, an app that offers integration with popular services such as Uber, Ola, Swiggy and Zomato, to boost Pay’s business in the nation.

Another U.S. giant, Microsoft, is also aboard the super train. The Redmond-based company has added a slew of new features to SMS Organizer, an app born out of its Microsoft Garage initiative in India. What began as a texting app that can screen spam messages and help users keep track of important SMSs recently partnered with education board CBSE in India to deliver exam results of 10th and 12th grade students.

This year, the SMS Organizer app added an option to track live train schedules through a partnership with Indian Railways, and there’s support for speech-to-text. It also offers personalized discount coupons from a range of companies, giving users an incentive to check the app more often.

Like in other markets, Google and Facebook hold a dominant position in India. More than 95% of smartphones sold in India run the Android operating system. There is no viable local — or otherwise — alternative to Search, Gmail and YouTube, which counts India as its fastest growing market. But Google hasn’t necessarily made any push to significantly expand the scope of any of its offerings in India.

India is the biggest market for WhatsApp, and Facebook’s marquee app too has more than 250 million users in the nation. WhatsApp launched a pilot payments program in India in early 2018, but is yet to get clearance from the government for a nationwide rollout. (It isn’t happening for at least another two months, a person familiar with the matter said.) In the meanwhile, Facebook appears to be hatching a WeChatization of Messenger, albeit that app is not so big in India.

Ride-hailing service Ola too, like Grab and Go-Jek, plans to add financial services such as credit to the platform this year, a source familiar with the company’s plans told TechCrunch.

“We have an abundance of data about our users. We know how much money they spend on rides, how often they frequent the city and how often they order from restaurants. It makes perfect sense to give them these valued-added features,” the person said. Ola has already branched out of transport after it acquired food delivery startup Foodpanda in late 2017, but it hasn’t yet made major waves in financial services despite giving its Ola Money service its own dedicated app.

The company positioned Ola Money as a super app, expanded its features through acquisition and tie ups with other players and offered discounts and cashbacks. But it remains behind Paytm, PhonePe and Google Pay, all of which are also offering discounts to customers.

Integrated entertainment

Super apps indeed come in all shapes and sizes, beyond core services like payment and transportation — the strategy is showing up in apps and services that entertain India’s internet population.

MX Player, a video playback app with more than 175 million users in India that was acquired by Times Internet for some $140 million last year, has big ambitions. Last year, it introduced a video streaming service to bolster its app to grow beyond merely being a repository. It has already commissioned the production of several original shows.

In recent months, it has also integrated Gaana, the largest local music streaming app that is also owned by Times Internet. Now its parent company, which rivals Google and Facebook on some fronts, is planning to add mini games to MX Player, a person familiar with the matter said, to give it additional reach and appeal.

Some of these apps, especially those that have amassed tens of millions of users, have a real shot at diversifying their offerings, analyst Kolla said. There is a bar of entry, though. A huge user base that engages with a product on a daily basis is a must for any company if it is to explore chasing the super app status, he added.

Indeed, there are examples of companies that had the vision to see the benefits of super apps but simply couldn’t muster the requisite user base. As mentioned, Snapdeal tried and failed at expanding its app’s offerings. Messaging service Hike, which was valued at more than $1 billion two years ago and includes WeChat parent Tencent among its investors, added games and other features to its app, but ultimately saw poor engagement. Its new strategy is the reverse: to break its app into multiple pieces.

“In 2019, we continue to double down on both social and content but we’re going to do it with an evolved approach. We’re going to do it across multiple apps. That means, in 2019 we’re going to go from building a super app that encompasses everything, to Multiple Apps solving one thing really well. Yes, we’re unbundling Hike,” Kavin Mittal, founder and CEO of Hike, wrote in an update published earlier this year.

And Reliance Jio, of course

For the rest, the race is still on, but there are big horses waiting to enter to add further competition.

Reliance Jio, a subsidiary of conglomerate Reliance Industry that is owned by India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is planning to introduce a super app that will host more than 100 features, according to a person familiar with the matter. Local media first reported the development.

It will be fascinating to see how that works out. Reliance Jio, which almost single-handedly disrupted the telecom industry in India with its low-cost data plans and free voice calls, has amassed tens of millions of users on the bouquet of apps that it offers at no additional cost to Jio subscribers.

Beyond that diverse selection of homespun apps, Reliance has also taken an M&A-based approach to assemble the pieces of its super app strategy.

It bought music streaming service Saavn last year and quickly integrated it with its own music app JioMusic. Last month, it acquired Haptik, a startup that develops “conversational” platforms and virtual assistants, in a deal worth more than $100 million. It already has the user bases required. JioTV, an app that offers access to over 500 TV channels; and JioNews, an app that additionally offers hundreds of magazines and newspapers, routinely appear among the top apps in Google Play Store.

India’s super app revolution is in its early days, but the trend is surely one to keep an eye on as the country moves into its next chapter of internet usage.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | India’s most popular services are becoming super apps

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We are back, as promised. Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm re-convened today to discuss the latest from the Uber IPO. Namely that it opened down, and then kept falling.

A few questions spring to mind. Why did Uber lose ground? Was it the company’s fault? Was it simply the macro market? Was it something else altogether? What we do know is that Uber’s pricing wasn’t what we were expecting and its first day was not smooth.

There are a whole bunch of reasons why Uber went out the way it did. Firstly, the stock market has had a rough week. That, coupled with rising U.S.-China tensions made this week one of the worst of the year for Uber’s monstrous IPO.

But, to make all that clear, we ran back through some history, recalled some key Lyft stats, and more.

We don’t know what’s next but we will be keeping a close watch, specifically on the next cohort of unicorn companies ready to IPO (Postmates, hi!).

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Equity Shot: Judging Uber’s less-than-grand opening day

Uber finally made its debut Friday on the New York Stock Exchange, ending its decade-long journey from startup to publicly traded company.

So far, it’s been a ho-hum beginning, with shares opening at $42, down from the IPO price. The share price is hovering just under $44.

Thirteen people, including executives, early employees, drivers and customers, were on the balcony for the historic bell ringing that opened the markets Friday. Noticeable absentees were co-founder Garrett Camp and former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who was ousted from the company in June 2017 after a string of scandals around Uber’s business practices.

Kalanick, who still sits on the board and has an 8.6% stake in Uber, wasn’t part of the opening bell ceremony. However, Kalanick and Camp were both at the NYSE for the event.

Here is who participated in the opening bell ceremony.

The bell ringer

Austin Geidt, who rang the bell, was employee No. 4 when she started as an intern in 2010, and is one of Uber’s earliest employees.

Geidt joined Uber in 2010 and has since worked in numerous positions at the company. She led Uber’s expansion in hundreds of new cities and dozens of new countries. Geidt now heads up strategy for Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, the unit working on autonomous vehicles.

Executives

CEO Dara Khosrowshahi stood next to Geidt at the opening of the market Friday. Khosrowshahi joined Uber in 2017 after Kalanick resigned and the board launched an extensive search for an executive who could change the culture at the company and prepare it for an eventual IPO.

Khosrowshahi was the CEO of Expedia before joining Uber. Khosrowshahi gave a one-year update on his time at Uber during TechCrunch Disrupt in September 2018.

Uber CTO Thuan Pham has been with the company since 2013. Prior to coming to Uber, Pham was vice president of engineering at VMware.

Rachel Holt, vice president and head of New Mobility, was also on hand. Holt has worked at Uber since October 2011, when the company was live in just three cities. In May 2016, she became VP and regional general manager of Uber’s operations in the U.S. and Canada.

She was promoted to head up new mobility in June 2018. She’s responsible for the ramp-up and onboarding of additional mobility services, including public transit integration, scooters, car rentals and bikes.

Rachel Holt (Getty Images)

Other executives included Pierre-Dimitry Gore-Coty and Andrew MacDonald, both vice presidents and regional general managers at Uber, as well as Jason Droege, a vice president who heads up Uber Eats.

Droege, who joined Uber in 2014, has the official title of head of UberEverything. This is the team that created the food delivery service Uber Eats, which now operates in 35 countries.

Drivers

Uber had five drivers on hand for the opening bell, who represented different services and geographies.

Among the drivers were:

• Jerry Bruner, a Los Angeles-based driver who is a military veteran and former professional golfer. Bruner has completed more than 30,000 Uber trips.
• Tiffany Hanna, a military veteran, is based out of Springfield, Missouri. Hanna is a truck driver who uses the Uber Freight carrier app. 
• Jonelle Bain, a New York-based driver. Uber, which shared the bios of the drivers, said Bain is taking coding classes and plans to become a software engineer.
• Onur Kerey is a driver based out of London. Kerey is deaf. According to his bio, “He doesn’t let his disability get in the way of his passion for driving or connecting with others.”
• J. Alexander Palacio Sanchez is based in Australia and has been driving with Uber since 2015. His true passion is acting, according to Uber, and at the urging of his riders, he auditioned for the role of Kevin in “The Heights” — and landed it.

Customers

One customer, Elise Wu, also participated in the opening bell. Wu owns Kampai, a family of restaurants in France that serves affordable cuisine made available for delivery through Uber Eats.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Uber’s trading debut: who was (and wasn’t) at the opening bell

Don’t like the idea of your baby guzzling down liquid candy all day? It may surprise you to find corn syrup is the main ingredient in most infant formulas in the U.S. That’s where Bobbie, a Bay Area-based baby formula delivery startup promising only wholesome ingredients, hopes to fill in.

Just go down the baby food aisle of any supermarket in America and start reading the ingredients and you’ll likely find corn syrup, soy bean oil, glucose syrup, maltodextrin and palm oil at the top. Even “organic” options often add these ingredients.

While it’s high-fructose corn syrup we should be most concerned with when it comes to diabetes (and some doctors might even recommend adding some sort of syrup to your baby’s diet to combat constipation), corn syrup is not something some parents may want their baby drinking all day.

Touting itself as “European” style, Bobbie’s first product features fresh, grass-fed cows’ milk as the main ingredient. What it does not include, however, is key for the concerned parent. There’s zero corn syrup, maltodextrin or other artificial sugars or unhealthy oils.

Of course, some babies might not be able to stomach the lactose from bovine sources, but grass-fed and corn syrup-free is music to the ears of many parents (me included) who’ve resorted to ordering bulk from Germany just to avoid feeding our kids Snickers in a bottle.

Yes, it seems crazy to order all the way from Europe when there are so many choices here in the U.S. — and there are some formula manufacturers here making an effort to offer better options — but finding something that meets the simple standard of no sugar, corn syrup or processed oils in the baby food is weirdly difficult.

The other nugget Bobbie provides is delivery. Heaven knows every second is precious when you are a new parent. Delivery can be an especially big help in maintaining some semblance of order in those early days. Sure, Amazon delivers many baby things — it even ships the popular, German-based Hipp brand of formula — but it comes at a premium price and will only ship in bulk.

You can also get the European brands delivered straight from sites like Organic Start, Huggable and a number of others easily Googled. But for those wanting something local, slightly less expensive and with presumably less of a carbon footprint than shipping from another continent, Bobbie is here for you (and we’re told will be delivered with a soft knock on the door, in case baby is sleeping).

The company was founded by two San Francisco moms and former Airbnb operation leaders Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy. Both found out how hard it was, after returning from maternity leave, to pump each day while keeping up with the demands of the job. However, neither of them liked the formula options they found at the grocery store for their own little broods.

Modi and Hardy thought it was time to give parents a more local choice in healthy formula. The two founded the company in 2018 and pulled in $2.5 million in funding last year from Bolt Capital, Nextview Ventures, Lakehouse and Precursor while Modi was pregnant, closing the round a week before giving birth to her baby boy.

Bobbie will (appropriately) begin taking orders this Mother’s Day. Unfortunately, Bobbie only delivers to the Bay Area for now. However, those interested can order one 400 g trial box for $27, which should make about 22 bottles at 6 ounces per bottle, according to a company spokesperson. You can also sign up for the subscription package for $23 per box.

Bobbie Baby – Evolving the conversation of parenthood from Laura Modi on Vimeo.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Meet Bobbie, a baby formula delivery startup promising healthier ingredients

Uber’s much heralded public offering has arrived not so much with a bang as with a whimper, thanks largely to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.

Overnight, the U.S. government made good on the threat from President Donald Trump to hike tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese goods to 25% up from 10%.

As a result, stock markets slid further on Friday, and their decline hit Uber’s initial public offering. The company’s shares began trading at $42.54, below its initial pricing of $45 per share.

At its initial pricing, Uber was valued at $75.5 billion, below the $120 billion price that Wall Street thought the company would fetch late last year, but still among the biggest public offerings in history. Only Facebook’s $81 billion public offering and the whopping $169 billion debut of Alibaba were bigger, according to a Dealogic analysis cited by Business Insider.

Uber’s historic public offering — which was designed to raise at least $90 billion for the ride-hailing giant — was no match for the equally historic struggle between the U.S. and China’s emerging economic superpower.

The rising tariffs were designed to hit business equipment, but will also affect prices on some $40 billion in consumer goods — ranging from clothes to furniture, refrigerators, washers and dryers.

Trump boosted tariffs after China reneged on certain concessions it had made during the trade negotiations. Chiefly, the U.S. was looking for written commitments from the Chinese government that it would provide less direct support to its state-owned enterprises and loosen restrictions on U.S. companies operating in the country.

Uber’s disappointing debut can’t be chalked up to trade woes alone. Its immediate American rival, Lyft, has seen its stock decline precipitously since its opening at nearly $79 per share. Lyft is now trading at around $55 per share.

Yesterday, Lyft reported its first earnings as a public company, losing $1.14 billion on $776 million in revenue.

While Lyft is focused on consumer transportation, Uber has expanded to include freight shipping and meal delivery as part of its attempts to become an all-in-one hub for consumer and business logistics.

That expansion has come at a cost. The company may have generated revenues of $11.3 billion in 2018, but it operated at a $3 billion loss for the year. And Uber is deeply in the red. With deficits reaching nearly $8 billion by the end of 2018, as MarketWatch points out.

Trade wars, it seems, trump transportation disruption.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How the trade war with China hit Uber’s public offering

At long last, it’s lift-off for Uber. After pricing its initial public offering at $45 per share, at the bottom end of the range it set previously, to raise $8.1 billion, the transportation startup began trading today on the New York Stock Exchange, and the shares opened at $42, down from the IPO price.

Ahead of Uber finally making its debut, the company had an indication price that went as low as $42 ahead of live trading. With the overall market in a slump this week over trade woes with China, it’s a challenging time to list, to say the least.

Uber had raised $28.5 billion as a private company from no less than 166 different backers, with its last valuation in the region of $75 billion. The $82.4 billion valuation that it finally settled on for the IPO (selling 180 million shares at $45/share) is definitely up from that, but far from the lofty projections of $120 billion that banks and analysts that floated in the months leading up to today.

The figures nevertheless cement Uber, alongside Alibaba and Facebook, as one of the most valuable tech IPOs in history, and a major beacon for breaking ground in a new area of tech, transportation.

But if it is the sheer scale and potential of Uber that catapulted it to such financial heights (real and imaginary), it’s the bare financials that have tempered some of those notions.

On one side, Uber essentially created and currently dominates the market for on-demand transportation, which started with the premise of connecting drivers with passengers by way of an app that tracked the location of both, but eventually evolved into a wider two-sided marketplace ambition that brings together different modes of transportation — including bikes, public buses and more — with human passengers, as well as the movement of other goods like food, all on a global scale.

That model has propelled Uber to 93 million active platform consumers (from 70 million a year ago) and 17 million trips per day across 700 cities on six continents, along with a lot of high hopes from others like PayPal — which are making very late-stage, strategic investments to bank on what it believes could shape up to be a lucrative e-commerce empire in the years to come.

But Uber’s prospects are not without competition — which includes a host of more regional players like Lyft, Gett, Heetch, MyTaxi, Bolt and more — and not without controversy. Even as it goes public, the company is dealing with high-profile driver protests, lawsuits and ongoing regulatory pressures, not to mention a bigger cloud over its business practices that has hovered for years that the company has worked to dispel.

Even today, during the iconic bell ringing, there was a notable absence: former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick, who was ousted over the controversies around business practices but still sits on the board, was not up there — although he did show up at the NYSE for the event.

Outside, meanwhile, protesters against the company were also making their voices heard.

Two drivers hold up a protest sign as the Uber banner hangs on the front of the New York Stock Exchange May 10, 2019 in New York. – Uber is set for its Wall Street debut Friday with a massive share offering that is a milestone for the ride-hailing industry, but which comes with simmering concerns about its business model. Shares will be priced at $45 for the initial public offering (IPO). (Photo: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images)

On the pure metric of profit and loss, Uber’s been firmly in the latter column, most recently posting a loss of some $1 billion in the last quarter on revenues of $3 billion-$3.1 billion, versus $2.6 billion a year ago.

Today’s listing is a small pause on the bigger question of how and if Uber will ever turn that boat around. It has made some significant shifts, such as divesting certain regional assets and reducing some of the incentive payments and discounts it made to drivers around the world to lure them to its platform; and under current CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, it has made a concerted effort to play nice on a number of fronts. Khosrowshahi acknowledged the new set of challenges that staff would be facing as of today in a memo he sent out this morning:

As we move from a private to a public company, our jobs will no doubt become harder and all eyes will be on us. We’ll have an even deeper responsibility to our customers, to our shareholders, to our cities, and to each other. With every share purchased, someone else will join us as a co-owner of Uber — and we’ll gain another person to whom we owe a duty to always ‘do the right thing, period.’

Remember: while the public markets will keep their version of the ‘score’ and the value of what we build, our true north will be determined over the long term. We will go through periods when we will be misunderstood, as well as periods when we will be hailed as heroes. It’s during those days, regardless of the ups and downs, that we should focus on our work: on creating opportunity, on moving the world, and relentlessly innovating and executing.

But the big question will still remain of whether all these changes and the recast approach will be enough, and whether — now that it’s listed — public investors will be patient enough. At least in the short term, the performance of its smaller rival, Lyft, which largely operates on similar metrics and business model to Uber, might give some pause: it is currently trading at around $55, well below its debut of $78.29 on March 29.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Uber opens at a disappointing per share