Browsing Tag: Startups

It’s true that DoorDash offsets the amount it pays its drivers with customer tip, according to an FAQ page on its own site.

“For each delivery, you will always receive at least $1 from DoorDash plus 100% of the customer tip,” DoorDash states on a Dasher FAQ page. “Where that sum is less than the guaranteed amount, DoorDash will provide a pay boost to make sure you receive the guaranteed amount. Where that sum is more than the guaranteed amount, you pocket the extra amount.”

To be clear, drivers see the guaranteed amount in the app before deciding to accept or reject the order. That amount is based on the size of the order, whether or not you have to place the order in person, distance away, traffic and other factors.

On another page, DoorDash describes its payment structure as follows: $1 plus customer tip plus pay boost, which varies based on the complexity of order, distance to restaurants and other factors. It’s only when a customer doesn’t tip at all, which DoorDash told Fast Company happens about 15 percent of the time, that DoorDash is on the hook to pay the entire guaranteed amount.

Here’s an example of what Dashers see:

“DoorDash doesn’t show workers what part of the ‘guarantee’ is from tip and what part is from DoorDash,” Sage Wilson of labor organization Working Washington told TechCrunch in an email. “(Instacart’s old policy did show this, which is why it was easier to demonstrate.) So that’s exactly where their “transparency” stops— at the point when it’s clear they’re taking tips.”

And just because DoorDash is upfront about parts of its practice, it doesn’t mean drivers are okay with it. There’s a webpage, Reddit and Subreddits that all describe DoorDash’s practices.

On the website, No Tip Doordash, it states:

While the tip may technically be going to the driver, it is only replacing the normal delivery pay. Your tip saves doordash money, and it is not increasing the drivers pay. Please tip in cash, if available.

In a statement to Bloomberg, DoorDash said it implemented this policy to “ensure that Dashers are more fairly compensated for every delivery.”

This comes shortly after Instacart apologized and announced it would stop engaging in that practice. In a blog post last week, Instacart CEO Apoorva Mehta said all shoppers will now have a guaranteed higher base compensation, paid by Instacart. Depending on the region, Instacart says it will pay shoppers between $7 to $10 at a minimum for full-service orders (shopping, picking and delivering) and $5 at a minimum for delivery-only tasks. The company will also stop including tips in its base pay for shoppers.

Amazon also reportedly engages in this practice, according to The Los Angeles Times.

I’ve reached out to DoorDash and will update this story if I hear back.

This story has been updated to reflect comments from Working Washington organizer Sage Wilson.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | DoorDash subsidizes driver wages with tips

I’m not in the habit of getting naked during meetings at startup offices, but this time it felt appropriate.

Nebia, a shower startup that has attracted investments from the likes of Apple CEO Tim Cook and former Google chairman Eric Schmidt’s foundation is back with some new cash (though it won’t divulge how much) and a new generation of its thoughtfully designed shower heads that aim to dramatically reduce the amount of water people use while cleaning up.

After a lengthy chat with Nebia CEO Philip Winter, who discussed all of the nuances of the Nebia’s second-gen “Spa Shower” for which they just launched a crowdfunding campaign today, he asked whether I’d like to try it out. With a couple hours of empty space in my calendar, I said “Why not?” and wandered over to the startup office’s shower showroom.

Shower thoughts

This was probably the most analytical thinking I’ve done in the shower about the process of showering itself.

The shower head in my bathroom at home is pretty standard and basically concentrates the water into a couple dozen streams organized in a circle that are firing at an even pace. It’s nothing fancy, and I couldn’t tell you the brand, but I can say that I spend at least 20-30 minutes in there everyday without exception.

Nebia’s shower is wildly more complicated — as a $499 shower should be — but it’s the combination of different techniques that leads to a shower that feels full and refreshing but is using significantly less water than you’re used to. The customer for this is probably placing a healthier premium on the fact that it’s great for the environment rather than that it’s a spa-type experience; the shower head uses 65 percent less water than your average shower head, the company says.

The Nebia shower is all a very strange feat of engineering and involves the water being “atomized” as they called it, with water droplets being significantly smaller when it exits some nozzles, leading to an enveloping mist, and larger and warmer jets being shot out of the shower head’s center. The big improvement in this generation is that the water is about 29 percent warmer.

How does the shower head even control warmth? Isn’t all the water coming from the same heater? As Winter explained to me, things are a lot more complicated when it comes to how Nebia handles thermodynamics. Smaller water droplets means increased surface area exposed to the room temperature, which means greatly sped up heat dissipation. In practice, this means that the distance the water can travel from the shower head before getting chilly is a much shorter journey than your current shower. To adjust that, Nebia fires the water droplets three times quicker and maintains some larger droplet streams to maintain the heat for longer.

Nebia does a bit of cheating by also having a second shower head firing from the hip. The wand adds to the water being used but still keeps the system using about half of the amount of water that the average shower head uses.

Thankfully, there was also room for a side-by-side comparison as I was able to try out both the gen-1 and gen-2 Spa Shower in the same bathroom. The shower experience didn’t feel wildly distinct, but the difference in water heat when cranked to full blast was notable; my own temperature sensing isn’t quite finely tuned enough to confirm the 29 percent figure, but that doesn’t seem off.

Ultimately, it was the best shower I’ve had in a startup’s office to date, but it was also a shower that didn’t feel as though I was resting my head under a light trickle of cold water like other low-flow showers. It’s a real product, though at this point it’s also a decidedly premium product, even with the $100 crowdfunding discount of the $499 retail price. Beyond the warmer water, the new shower’s easy-install system is now compatible with about 95 percent of American homes, the company says. There’s also a new matte black color option and a little matching shower shelf you can add to keep that high-design look.

The company, which launched out of Y Combinator, has attracted some top investors who seem to be intrigued by the water-saving impact. The company says they’ve already shipped more than 16,000 shower heads and that more than 100 million gallons of water have been saved.

This Series A investment was led by Moen, the faucet and shower head maker that also announced a partnership with the startup. The latest round also boasts follow-on investment from Tim Cook and The Schmidt Family Foundation, as well as some new investors like Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Starwood Hotels co-founder Barry Sternlicht, Fitbit co-founder James Park and Stanford StartX.

The crowdfunding campaign kicked off today and has already blown past $300,000 in pre-orders (they’ve already sold most of the $349 early-bird deals); the company hopes to ship the first 2.0 shower heads in June.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Tim Cook-backed shower startup Nebia shows off a warmer, water-saving shower head

Google for Startups has expanded a partnership with startup training program Founder Gym to better serve underrepresented founders through a new scholarship program.

The program typically charges $396 to participate, but thanks to this partnership with Google for Startups, Google will cover the costs for select scholarship recipients to participate in the six-week program. This partnership is an extension of a pilot program that started last March.

“Google for Startups took an early bet on Founder Gym when we were less than six months old, and as any founder knows, you never forget the first people to say ‘yes’ to your dream,” Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said in a statement.

“Our team at Founder Gym has used that early vote of confidence to help fuel our efforts to train a groundbreaking number of founders around the world in our inaugural year.”

Founder Gym, co-founded by Mandela Schumacher-Hodge Dixon and Gabriela Zamudio,* unveiled its online platform in November 2017 to support and train underrepresented founders building tech startups.

“We are deeply committed to supporting the growth and success of underrepresented founders,” Google for Startups VP Lisa Gevelber said in a statement. “At Google we know that innovation can come from anywhere, but the resources needed to succeed are not evenly distributed. Founder Gym is truly moving the needle in this space – their unique program delivers the tangible resources necessary to level the playing field for founders and help them grow their businesses.”

Instead of describing it as a school, bootcamp or incubator, Founder Gym describes itself as a topical, six-week training program that covers topics like fundraising, pitching, user growth and problem validation. In Founder Gym’s first 12 months of operation, its cohort has collectively raised $35 million in funding.

“As we enter year two of this journey, we couldn’t be more excited to expand our partnership with Google for Startups, an organization that has a long history of supporting the entrepreneur’s journey,” Schumacher-Hodge Dixon said. “There is no doubt in my mind, this partnership will help us achieve our mission of developing the next generation of great innovators and leaders.”

Update 3:14 pm: This story has been edited to reflect the fact that Zamudio is no longer at Founder Gym. 

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Google expands partnership with Founder Gym to support underrepresented founders

Donde Search has just closed a $6 million Series A investment led by Matrix Partners, with participation from previous investors such as senior leaders from AliExpress, Google and Waze.

Donde first launched in 2014 as a consumer-facing app that helped users search and discover apparel items based on visual characteristics rather than text-based searches. In early 2018, the company pivoted to the enterprise space, helping retailers power suggestions and related items on their websites.

Here’s how it works:

Retailers partnered with Donde hand over their product catalog and run it through the Donde algorithm, which identifies all the visual features associated with each product. Retailers can then add a widget to their site to let users search based on those features (like sleeve length or type, color or material).

As users interact with the products, the website adapts to that behavior to offer personalized product recommendations and related items.

Moreover, Donde offers an analytics dashboard that not only provides insights on the customer’s own website, but a look into trends being featured on competing e-commerce websites to understand the industry in general.

Donde was founded by Liat Zakay, who previously served as a software engineer and R&D team manager in the Israeli intelligence unit 8200. Using her technical expertise, she built Donde to solve her own problem of not having the time or energy to go through the tedious process of online shopping.

Zakay told TechCrunch that Donde is focused on apparel for now, but that the technology can be applied to almost any vertical.

“One of the interesting pieces about Donde is that it’s language agnostic,” said Zakay. “You don’t need to know what it’s called and it doesn’t matter what language you speak, you can still find what you want based on visual features. Which makes us extremely relevant to global retailers.”

The new funding, which will be used to expand the product and the team, came shortly after the announcement of Donde’s partnership with Forever 21. The fast-fashion retailer tested out the Donde platform on its mobile app and, after a month, saw a 20 percent increase in average purchase value and higher conversions. Forever 21 has now expanded the program, putting Donde on the web, as well.

Donde said it is working on pilot programs with several other retailers across the U.S. and Europe.

Fast fashion, in particular, represents a big opportunity for Donde. Because product turnover is so fast, retailers rarely have reliable data around a certain SKU, with the website being run on outdated data from last “season.”

This latest round brings Donde’s total funding to $9.5 million, with backing from UpWest, Afterdox and Golden Seeds.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Donde Search picks up million to help fashion retailers with visual search

After winding down its consumer-oriented operations last July, mental health startup Lantern has partnered with larger mental health providers to license its IP. In addition to licensing its IP to Omada Health, Lantern has licensed its tech to Spring Health, Ginger and two others.

Spring Health, which offers mental health benefits for large employers, provides personalized, clinically proven approaches to mental health care for employees. But Spring Health has always wanted to integrate digital cognitive behavioral therapy into its approach, Spring Health CEO April Koh told TechCrunch.

Spring Health has already offered psychiatry, therapy and self-help tools, but it was wanting to refer people to digital CBT, Koh said.

“There was really only one player that was committed to evidence as deeply as we were and that was Lantern,” she said. “So when the opportunity presented itself, we were thrilled.”

CBT is a clinically validated approach that examines the relationship between thoughts, feelings and behaviors. Lantern, which proved the clinical validity of its digital CBT tools, offered programs designed to empower people to learn how to manage their anxiety, stress and/or body images on a daily basis.

“We’re in the market of saying one size doesn’t fit all,” Koh said. “One size fits one person. There are so many different options and treatments for people. We shouldn’t try to come up with blanket solutions and expect those solutions to help everybody.”

Omada, which develops tools for people struggling with chronic illnesses like diabetes and obesity-related diseases, was also attracted to Lantern’s IP because of the startup’s demonstration of clinical validity and effectiveness.

“We have known that anxiety and depression are likely co-morbidities for the population we serve, and that they are obstacles to success for those dealing with chronic conditions,” Omada Health president Adrian James said in a statement to TechCrunch.

Thanks to Lantern’s IP, Omada plans to launch a behavioral health program for its customers, as well as integrate more CBT content into its chronic disease prevention and management programs. The money made from selling the IP, Lantern founder Alejandro Foung told TechCrunch, will go back to LPs and investors. Lantern had previously raised more than $20 million in funding.

Meanwhile, Foung has also started a nonprofit organization, All Mental Health, to offer free tools to a group of people sometimes referred to as the “sandwich generation” — those who are caring for kids as well as their aging parents.

“So they’re basically sandwiched in between those two things and that’s a very difficult place to be,” Foung said.

Similar to Lantern, All Mental Health’s tools are CBT-oriented. But rather than focus on selling to employers to offer as an employee benefit or people who can already afford to pay for therapy, Foung told me, “the goal of the not-for-profit is to actually be content and techniques for everyone. And by being a not-for-profit, we’re more able to serve a more macro audience that’s currently not getting anything.”

When Foung and I chatted in July, he said he would be focused on “addressing gaps that exist for underserved populations.” This is where All Mental Health comes in. Its first app, Caring for You, is designed to help support caregivers in caring for themselves. The next app Foung has planned is geared toward breakups, followed by one that’s focused on life after sports.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Mental health startup Lantern will continue to live through IP licensing deals

French startup Devialet has done it again. The new Phantom Reactor is a smaller, more effective speaker that packs in everything that made Devialet speakers good in the first place.

Devialet’s first speaker, the Phantom, attracted rave reviews a few years ago. The egg-shaped speaker promised no background noise, no saturation and no distortion in a relatively small package.

To be clear, it wasn’t that small when you compared it with an average bookshelf speaker. But when you turned it on, it would feel like a much larger speaker — something that you’d find in a concert hall.

But that speaker wasn’t for everyone. If you live in a tiny apartment, spending $1,700 to $3,500 for a speaker capable of generating up to 4,500 watts of power was overkill.

Hence the Phantom Reactor, a smaller version of the Phantom with the same promises — no background noise, no saturation and no distortion. It still features the iconic egg-shaped design.

The company let me borrow a Phantom Reactor for a few weeks to play with it at home. And I’ve been impressed by the speaker. It’s a tiny beast that makes any all-in-one Bluetooth speaker sound like a joke.

In many ways, this speaker reminds me of the iPod lineup. When Apple first introduced the iPod, it was the perfect device for music enthusiasts. For the first time, you could take all of your music with you, even if you had a large music library.

But that device was heavy, expensive and thick — stack three iPhone XSes and you get the thickness of the original iPod. Everything was great on paper, but it was impractical if you’re not that much into music.

With the iPod mini, Apple created a device that was not only cheaper than the original iPod but also more effective. Music devices, from portable players to connected speakers, are supposed to disappear and integrate perfectly in your daily routine.

The Phantom Reactor is a damn good speaker. Music fills my living room in a way that none of my many other speakers do. When I compare it with another speaker, I can hear that it’s the same song. But, with Devialet’s speaker, it feels like I’m experiencing the song instead of just listening to the song.

The 900W model that I’m using is still too powerful for my apartment — I can’t play music at 60 percent of the volume for too long without thinking about my neighbors. If you live in a crowded city with small living rooms, the cheaper 600W model is probably enough. If you have a house in the suburbs, that’s probably a different story.

The Phantom Reactor isn’t portable per se. It doesn’t have a battery and it still weighs 9.5lbs/4.3kg. You’ll be able to unplug it and carry it to another room every now and then, but you won’t take it with you to your friend’s house.

You can currently play music using AirPlay, Bluetooth, Spotify Connect and UPnP, as well as analog and optical input. You can connect it to your network using Wi-Fi or Ethernet.

The mobile app is quite minimal. It guides you through the setup process and lets you select the source input at any time. You’re supposed to control music from your usual music players. There are also touch buttons on the top of the speaker for basic playback and pairing controls.

I’ve been mostly using Spotify Connect, which lets you stream music on the speaker directly. If you’re not familiar with the protocol, you play a song or playlist in the Spotify app just like you would normally do — you just have to select the Phantom Reactor as the output speaker. Nothing actually happens on your phone or computer, the Spotify app acts as a remote.

As you may have noticed, AirPlay 2 isn’t supported just yet and you can’t pair multiple speakers. The company says those features will come later with a software update. Devialet also says that it isn’t in the business of voice assistants — there’s no microphone on board.

But if you’re looking for a unit that sounds good and you have enough money for the Phantom Reactor, the speaker is available now for for $999/€990/£990 for the 600W model and $1,299/€1,290/£1,290 for the 900W model.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Devialet’s Phantom Reactor turns music into an emotional experience

Medium is seeking to juice up its premium subscription content in its home market with the acquisition of The Bold Italic. The 10-year-old online culture magazine will go behind the $5 per month Medium membership paywall. The deal will keep The Bold Italic afloat when other San Francisco-local publications have struggled, following the shutdown of the The Oakland Tribune an SFist, plus the layoff of most of the Easy Bay Express.

The Bold Italic could make Medium membership more appealing to Bay Area techies, newshounds and community-philes. It needs all the subscribers it can get after pivoting away from ads and laying off 50 employees, as well as shuttering two offices in 2017. That’s despite having raised $132 million. Last year it gave some publications whiplash by suddenly terminating its program that let them operate their own paywalls on the Medium platform. With so many publications competing for subscription revenue (TechCrunch launched its own subscription product called Extra Crunch today), and having raised so much money, many are uncertain of Medium’s fate.

The Bold Italic almost died too. Back in 2015, its owner Gannett decided it wasn’t worth operating. But Scripted co-founder Sunil Rajaraman and tech author Sonia Arrison managed to buy The Bold Italic assets off of Gannett and relaunch the publication. It has continued to chronicle the weird mashup of local startup and hipster cultures, the art scene’s resistance against rent hikes and San Francisco’s persistent civic troubles.

“Medium is a natural partner for us,” writes Bold Italic editor-in-chief Clara Hogan. “Not only have we already been operating on the platform for several years, but we’re also both intrinsically committed to innovation and risk taking when it comes to journalism. We’re excited to now have greater resources to produce even better content and, most importantly, pay our contributors — old and new — significantly more.”

Bringing in premier, well-branded content could make people see Medium membership as more than just paying for what you could get elsewhere for free.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Medium buys Bay Area mag The Bold Italic to add to its paywall

New technology companies are poised to transform the shipping and freight industry across Latin America.

Startups like Liftit, a Colombian provider of trucking services, and Nowports, a Mexican freight shipping startup, are angling to be the next Convoy and Flexport — at a time when shipping and logistics business in Latin America is booming thanks to increasing trade coming from China.

In the first half of 2018, Chinese foreign direct investment in Latin America increased to a whopping $15.3 billion at the same time it plummeted in the U.S. to $1.8 billion. And while much of that investment had historically gone to minerals and natural-resource extraction or agriculture, China is also making infrastructure investments — just as it has in Africa.

“The most exciting sectors for innovation in shipping are in trucking, consumer/third-party shipping options, and in last-mile delivery,” writes the venture investor Nathan Lustig, a partner with the Chilean investment firm Magma Partners. “Startups in the logistics industry have their work cut out for them in Latin America, and these sectors are the most prominent battlegrounds for innovation so far.”

Some Latin American logistics companies — like the Brazilian trucking company CargoX — have gained the attention of investors like Goldman Sachs, The Blackstone Group and Samsung Ventures, thanks, in part, to being initially backed by Oscar Salazar, one of the minds that originally launched Uber. The company raised $60 million in its most recent round of funding, but has been on investors’ radar for years, thanks to its famous pedigree.

Now companies like Nowports are entering the fray. The company, which is graduating as part of the most recent crop of Y Combinator -accelerated startups, has set itself up to be the Flexport of Latin America.

Flexport became a billion-dollar business by applying technology to the outdated shipping industry, and Nowports is angling to do much the same.

Alfonso de los Rios and Maximiliano Casal met at a program at Stanford University, but both come from Mexico originally. And Mexico is where the company is operating. De los Rios comes from a shipping family and is very familiar with the time-consuming, manual practices that now dominate the Latin American shipping industry.

“One out of every two containers is lost or delayed because of miscommunication,” says de los Rios. “One container can get 300 emails between the freight provider and the shipper. We reduce the mistakes to zero and processing documentation three times faster than a normal freight provider in Latin America.”

To familiarize himself with the market for which he’d be developing a technology, Casal worked in a freight forwarder in Kansas City that had been operating for more than 30 years.

Nowports is operating from Monterrey and Mexico City and will soon be opening offices in Santiago and Montevideo, Uruguay.

“Right now we have four customers and we are moving 60 containers per month and we have a pipeline that will be growing to a very big number in March,” says Casal.

In all, freight providers are getting paid nearly $40 billion per year to move freight into Latin America.

If Nowports is building a new kind of shipping business, then Liftit, which just raised the largest Series A of any company hailing from Colombia, is looking to do the same with trucking.

The $14.3 million round was led by the International Finance Corp. and the Brazilian-based pan-Latin American investment firm Monashees.

Founded by serial entrepreneur Brian York, Liftit is looking to be the logistics provider for trucking in Latin America.

York, who was born in Bogota, but was raised by his adoptive parents in Boston, returned to Latin America after several years as a successful serial entrepreneur in the United States.

After several years of searching for his biological family and exploring his roots in-between running startups, York decided to return to Colombia more permanently. He found his biological brother (who is working for Liftit as a truck driver) and launched the company with a $2 million seed round.

The opportunity for logistics startups is vast. As Lustig notes:

The challenge of automating and streamlining shipping logistics in Latin America is becoming more pressing as e-commerce and other B2C delivery businesses take hold. Not only are large corporations dealing with sending and receiving bulk cargo across the region, but individual consumers want more on-demand services that require better organization and logistics.

Latin America still lags behind in the development of its shipping industry. The World Bank reported that in 2014, no Latin American country was in the top 25% of the Logistic Performance Index global rankings. In 2016, this figure hardly changed; Panama is the top-ranked Latin American country for logistics and shipping, yet it comes in 40th on the LPI global rankings. Chile is next at 46th, with Mexico and Brazil ranking 54th and 55th, respectively.

It’s with this in mind that investors are willing to open their wallets for startups in these emerging markets. And aligning the infrastructure in the region with 21st century standards will create even more opportunities as startups can take advantage of the more modern delivery and distribution tools at their disposal.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Investors are pouring money into Latin America’s logistics and shipping businesses

WeWork has made a big name for itself in a short period of time as a global co-working space. In fact, WeWork is now the largest private office tenant in all of Manhattan.

But whether the real estate play alone can support its reported $47 billion valuation still remains to be seen. That might explain the company’s 2018 acquisition spree, as well as today’s newly announced changes to the WeWork app.

The new feature set is aimed at fostering collaboration and real-life communities among WeWork’s 400,000+ members, but if executed properly and adopted, could also provide a way for WeWork to potentially harness the data of its users to find new revenue streams.

Up until now, WeWork has always offered its members the opportunity to connect via the WeWork app in a relatively unstructured way. With the new updates, WeWork is looking to give users the chance to offer up their skills to other WeWork members who may be looking for a freelancer or service provider.

It starts with the profile. WeWork has added new fields for members to include their skills and interests. The interests portion will allow WeWork to customize programming based on location, so that a building with a high number of people interested in mindfulness (for example) can have access to specific programming in that field.

Where skills are concerned, WeWork has given users the tools to be hyper-specific. For example, alongside noting that John Doe is a graphic designer, he can also specify that he is particularly interested in/skilled at designing brand logos or web pages.

We Company CPO Shiva Rajaraman told TechCrunch that adding structure and matching algorithms to the website allows for members to get the most out of both their local WeWork community and the global community as a whole.

“We think that, in many of these interactions, it’s better to have someone close by,” said Rajaraman. “Being face to face can often help solve problems more efficiently, but there are instances when members might need the expertise of someone within our global community, and the app offers the ability to do both.”

Members who make a request for help from someone in the community are matched with a person who has the skills they seek by the algorithm, which is overseen by community managers who’ve gotten to know the members in their building. The app facilitates setting up a time and place to meet, and interactions are ranked after the fact to ensure that the meetings are productive.

It’s not hard to imagine entrepreneurial-minded individuals building up a customer base among WeWork members in fields like design, engineering and accounting.

In fact, language skill consultant Jen Carmody of the Miami Brickell City Centre location says she’s reached 100 percent of her clients through the WeWork app.

For now, Rajaraman says there are no current plans to add the ability to complete a freelance contract or transaction within the app.

“For us, it’s about removing as much friction as possible when facilitating these connections between people,” said Rajaraman. “We want to learn from these connections and see what might help. This is largely about making the value proposition of what we do richer than just providing space.”

We Company CEO Adam Neumann has said before that WeWork has made space, which has traditionally been a fixed entity, much more flexible. But it seems that WeWork itself is becoming more flexible as well.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | WeWork launches skills-based profiles as a value add for tenants

The founders of Glide, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, had a notion that building mobile apps in the enterprise was too hard. They decided to simplify the process by starting with a spreadsheet, and automatically turning the contents into a slick mobile app.

David Siegel, CEO and co-founder at Glide, was working with his co-founders Jason Smith, Mark Probst and Antonio Garcia Aprea at Xamarin, a cross-platform mobile development company that Microsoft acquired for $500 million in 2016. There, they witnessed first-hand the difficulty that companies were having building mobile apps. When their two-year stint at Microsoft was over, the four founders decided to build a startup to solve the problem.

“We saw how desperate some of the world’s largest companies were to have a mobile strategy, and also how painful and expensive it is to develop mobile apps. And we haven’t seen significant progress on that 10 years after the smartphone debuted,” Siegel told TechCrunch.

The founders began with research, looking at almost 100 no-code tools, and were not really satisfied with any of them. They chose the venerable spreadsheet, a business tool many people use to track information, as the source for their mobile app builder, starting with Google Sheets.

“There’s a saying that spreadsheets are the most successful programming model of all time, and smartphones are the most successful computers of all time. So when we started exploring Glide we asked ourselves, can these two forces be combined to create something very valuable to let individuals and businesses build the type of apps that we saw Xamarin customers needed to build, but much more quickly,” Siegel said.

Photo: GlideThe company developed Glide, a service that lets you add information to a Google Sheet spreadsheet, and then very quickly create an app from the contents without coding. “You can easily assemble a polished, data-driven app that you can customize and share as a progressive web app, meaning you can get a link that you can share with anybody, and they can load it in a browser without downloading an app, or you can publish Glide apps as native apps to app stores,” Siegel explained. What’s more, there is a two-way connection between app and spreadsheet, so that when you add information in either place, the other element is updated.

The founders decided to apply at Y Combinator after consulting with former Xamarin CEO, and current GitHub chief executive, Nat Friedman. He and other advisors told them YC would be a great place for first-time founders to get guidance on building a company, taking advantage of the vast YC network.

One of the primary lessons Siegel says they learned is the importance of getting out in the field and talking to customers, and not falling into the trap of falling in love with the act of building the tool. The company has actually helped fellow YC companies build mobile apps using the Glide tool.

Glide is live today and people can create apps using their own spreadsheet data, or by using the templates available on the site as a starting point. There is a free tier available to try it without obligation.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Glide helps you build mobile apps from a spreadsheet without coding