If the last few years has seen a growing consensus that the tech industry has a diversity and inclusion problem, then what is clearly needed next are practical solutions. While most people agree that building a diverse and inclusive company culture is easier to achieve the earlier you set out to do so, for startups and even much larger companies it is often difficult to know where to start, let alone what your own eventual D&I strategy might look like.

Conversely, there’s a body of evidence that points to diverse teams creating more successful and longer-lasting companies. Besides, it’s never smart to leave talent on the table. Enter a new initiative from Diversity VC, a nonprofit partnership promoting diversity in Venture Capital, and London venture capital firm Atomico.

The pair have teamed up to launch what may well be an industry-first resource: a practical and hands-on guide for ambitious technology entrepreneurs to “help them build companies that have diversity and inclusion at their core.” The guide can be found online here, and is also in print. It was unveiled last week onstage at Slush 2018 by Diversity VC’s Check Warner and Atomico founder Niklas Zennström.

The objective of the “Founder Guide” is to be a central place for technology companies, large and small to “find pragmatic, actionable advice for planning, implementing and measuring their D&I strategy”. It’s also meant to be a work in progress, and with the help of feedback and suggestions, will evolve as the industry’s understanding of D&I develops.

More broadly, the guide focuses on diversity and inclusion in the workplace in its broadest sense, looking at ethnicity, socio-economic backgrounds, disability, gender, sexuality, religious faith, cognitive differences, dependants and caring responsibilities and how all those factors, and the “intersections of those factors,” can impact an individual’s success in tech companies, and therefore the success of companies overall.

In an email Q&A with Diversity VC co-founder and CEO Check Warner, we delved deeper into what the guide hopes to achieve, why D&I matters and what diversity and inclusion might look like as an end goal. I also argued that the way we think about D&I is currently too narrow and needs to put a greater emphasis on social mobility, which at times seems to be missing from the conversation entirely.

TC: Why did you decide to create a Diversity & Inclusion guide for tech companies? And why was it needed?

CW: The conversation on Diversity & Inclusion until now has focused on highlighting the challenges we face (which are significant), but there’s been very little actionable advice. The idea of the Diversity & Inclusion guide is to move the discussion forward. We want to start a positive conversation around what tech companies can do to promote diversity and inclusion, and we want entrepreneurs to start making simple, meaningful changes today. Sixty-five percent of founders surveyed in the Atomico State of European Tech Report said they didn’t have a Diversity & Inclusion policy for hiring, and 55 percent said there was no Diversity & Inclusion lead in their company (source — Atomico’s State of European Tech Report 2018).

The guide is intended to make it as simple and frictionless as possible to start that conversation and put in place a plan. At the same time, we know that this Guide is only the first step. It’s not a panacea for all ills. But we hope it helps move the conversation forward, and constitutes a step toward tackling the deep and nuanced challenge of creating an industry where everyone has a fair chance to succeed.

The organisation Diversity VC is a nonprofit dedicated to promoting diversity and inclusion in venture capital and tech. We focus on positive interventions and this guide is a high-impact, useful resource for VCs to give their portfolio companies, and for the industry as a whole. Atomico shares this mission and were being asked by their portfolio for help with Diversity and Inclusion, so we joined forces.

We hope that by publishing this guide now, and publishing it in a format which people can contribute and add to through our website www.inclusionintech.com, that we encourage input from companies who have had success in promoting Diversity and Inclusion. We’ve already started to see this happen, as we’ve had several notes from founders with suggestions of other interventions that can be made, even in the two days since the guide was released.

TC: Clearly diversity within the workforce is always going to be a “work in progress,” but in terms of an end goal, what does diversity actually look like?

CW: For us, success looks like a technology and venture capital industry where anyone, from any background, ability, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and socio-economic background can succeed and thrive. We want there to be equity of opportunity between these groups and everyone else.

TC: What would you say to people who believe that although a diverse and inclusive workforce is a noble aim, early-stage companies and founders have much more immediate problems to solve, such as finding product-market fit, fundraising or making their first 10 hires. Therefore, a D&I strategy is nice to have but ultimately a distraction for a startup?

CW: Having a diversity and inclusion strategy is not “additional to” any of these things, but instead a key part of them, and an essential ingredient to success. When it comes to finding product-market fit, having a diverse team has been shown to increase creativity, and improve performance and profitability. A diverse team will also help the company connect to, and empathise with, a broader base of customers, which competitors who have homogenous teams will be in a much worse position to do. Having an inclusive company culture will ensure that a company can attract the broadest range of talent, and therefore pick and retain the very best people.

TC: The guide is pretty dense — yes, I’ve read it! — and packed with lots of actionable advice, but at times asks more questions of a company than it provides answers. Where should a founder or D&I champion within a company start if it all feels a bit overwhelming at first?

CW: Thank you for reading it! We’ve tried as much as possible to focus on practical advice and we have over 40 tech tools and resources included in the guide which can help with everything from hiring to culture to product design. There’s also a two-page summary of the key takeaways to make it as easy as possible for founders to digest. However — the structural inequalities that we’re talking about are multi-faceted and complex — so it’s unfortunately not something that can be simply “solved.” In our research we found the companies that were most successful in fostering a diverse and inclusive culture were the ones that included their employees, at all levels, in inputting and crafting solutions and answers, so we suggest that starting a conversation, asking questions and making sure that the whole company feels part of that conversation is a good beginning.

TC: The guide has a few passages on the role of PR as part of a D&I strategy. Shouldn’t this be one area where it explicitly isn’t about publicity as this leaves companies open to accusations — rightly or wrongly — of being superficial or so-called virtue signalling?

CW: The emphasis we have put on PR is about the need for leaders across the technology industry to show public commitment to promoting diversity and inclusion in their companies. For too long, this is a subject that people have been afraid of talking about for fear of “getting it wrong” or of revealing that they are not making progress fast enough. So long as the commitment to Diversity & Inclusion comes from a place of understanding and the actions being taken are genuine and actually helping, then companies should have nothing to fear in talking about their work in this area. In fact, I would like to see more leaders across the technology industry state, like Niklas Zennstrom has this week, where they are struggling and where they need to make more progress, as I think this will accelerate getting answers!

TC: The report provides some very good tips on how to get “buy in” for a D&I agenda across the whole company and from other stakeholders. Why is this important and what are the biggest mistakes a founder or other D&I champion can make in this regard along the way?

CW: Like any strategic project or undertaking, making sure that there’s a shared goal in terms of what the founder is trying to achieve is important, but it is particularly so when it comes to putting in place a D&I strategy because the impact of getting it wrong compounds as the company grows. One mistake I’ve seen is where well-meaning companies isolate a single group of people and focus their a D&I strategy on them, which may actually be to the detriment of other underrepresented groups, or to those at the intersection of multiple groups.

TC: It is very noticeable that in the “The current state of diversity and inclusion in tech” section of the guide the entire conversation is reduced to the underrepresentation of women in tech, leaving out other marginalised groups or other definitions of diversity. This seems to be quite common across the industry as a whole, where diversity at is times simply a byword for gender imbalances. Do you see this as a problem?

CW: I see this as a big problem. The whole guide is written to address the broad topic of diversity and we have deliberately chosen contributors to reflect these diverse perspectives, from LGBTQ founders, to people with cognitive and physical disabilities, to BAME founders and combinations of the above. Unfortunately the section on the “State of Diversity in Tech” is a reflection of the current frustrating lack of available data on any other aspect of diversity than gender diversity in the tech industry, which makes it very difficult to quantify the challenge.

This is something that Diversity VC and Atomico are working hard on. As an organization, Diversity VC is focused on Diversity & Inclusion in its broadest sense, and one of the big challenges that we set out to tackle was the lack of data on diversity in the VC industry. In 2019 we will be publishing the first-ever study on U.K. VCs that includes ethnicity data, educational backgrounds and career backgrounds, which will also help us understand the socio-economic backgrounds of the VC industry. Whilst this is not nearly enough, it goes some way to helping us understand diversity and inclusion beyond the narrow subject of gender imbalance.

TC: Related to this, socio-economic diversity, or the tech industry’s need to do a better job promoting social mobility as part of a D&I agenda, seems almost entirely lacking from the wider industry conversation and I’m not sure this guide does enough to change that. Isn’t this odd when it would seem evident to anyone who works in the tech industry that economic privilege and lack of social mobility is intrinsically linked to the marginalisation of many underrepresented groups?

CW: I agree that it’s hugely lacking in the conversation and that we need much more focus on this area. For me the biggest mindset shift required is to remove the rigid criteria of what hiring managers and recruiters are screening for when they are making hires. Our case study on Backstage Capital in section 3 is about recruiting through Twitter and Instagram, and having no set criteria for qualifications or subjects studied, and instead, hiring for aptitude and investing in training hires either on the job or through courses. Both apprenticeships and internships are an important part of this conversation and I’d like to see more done to promote these across the industry. At Diversity VC we are running an internship programme which aims to help people who don’t have qualifications (MBA or similar) which are sometimes sought by recruiters for venture capital. We’ve found this internship programme to be an effective way of getting young people into full-time jobs, despite the fact that a recruiter would probably have passed over their CV in a traditional recruitment process.

TC: I say this as a white male who comes from a middle class family (both my parents were teachers): You are a white woman who is private school and Oxbridge-educated and so some might say you are part of the problem as much as the solution. How do you square that circle in the important work you are doing at Diversity VC?

CW: Absolutely — this is something I’m very conscious of. I’ve been privileged in the opportunities I’ve had, which has given me an enormous leg up in getting into the industry. I find it completely unjust that others haven’t had the same chance which made me determined, almost as soon as I got into the industry, to get together with Travis, Lillian, Farooq and Anna, as well as our advisors, to do something about it. But, to echo a sentiment that I’m sure all of us share, the worst thing you can do in the face of something unjust is to stay silent.

The mission and the organization are also so much bigger than any individual. There are over 50 people across the industry that have volunteered on Diversity VC’s data projects, joined training programmes, mentored founders from diverse backgrounds, spoken at schools and universities, contributed to the Guide. In order for Diversity VC to be successful in its aims it is important that the leadership group is as diverse as possible, which is not the case today.

TC: Lastly, it is great to see a practical guide that has the potential to help produce some really tangible improvements in how tech companies approach D&I. If we look ahead, how different do you hope or expect the industry to be with regards to diversity and inclusion in one, five or 10 years?

CW: I hope that in one year’s time the industry is more comfortable and proactive in discussing the subject of diversity and inclusion, and that we have significantly more data than we do today to enable us to target solutions. In five and 10 years’ time I hope that the tech industry will have emerged as a leader in being inclusive and sets an example for other industries to follow. Since it is growing 5x faster than the economy, the impact that getting this right will make is hard to overstate.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Q&A with Diversity VC’s Check Warner on newly launched Diversity & Inclusion guide for tech companies

I’m heading back to Europe to run a pitch-off in Wroclaw and Warsaw, Poland. Are you ready?

The Wroclaw event, called In-Ference, is happening on December 17 and you can submit to pitch here. The team will notify you if you have been chosen. The winner will receive a table at TC Disrupt in San Francisco.

The Warsaw event, here, is on the 19th. You can sign up to pitch here. I’ll notify the folks I’ve chosen and the winner gets a table as well.

Special thanks to WeWork Labs in Warsaw for supplying some beer and pizza for the event and, as always, special thanks to Dermot Corr and Ahmad Piraiee for putting these things together. See you soon!

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Let’s meet in Poland next week

Where there is discovery in an app, there is paid discovery. Google helped you choose between links, then sold ads that promote a few. Facebook helped you choose between pieces of content, then sold ads that promote a few. And eventually, as Uber helps you choose between restaurants, it will sell ads that promote a few. It could become the marketing platform through which the physical world vies for your attention.

We got our first glimpse of this future last week when I reported that Uber Eats was offering restaurants in India bonus visibility in a Specials section if they’d offer discounts on meal bundles to Uber’s customers. Knock some rupees off the price of a sandwich, fries and a drink, and a restaurant wins itself some enhanced discoverability. Whether a chef wants to boost orders during slow hours, get rid of surplus food, preference high-margin items or just score new customers, there are plenty of reasons to pay Uber — even if currently only indirectly through discounts instead of a direct ad buy.

But now Uber’s senior director and head of Eats product Stephen Chau has confirmed to me the company’s intentions to become an ad company. “There’s a bunch of different ways we can work with restaurants over time. If we have all the restaurants on the marketplace and we give them tools to help them grow, then this will be a very efficient marketplace. They’re going to be spending those ad dollars somewhere,” Chau tells me. “One of the things we’ve been experimenting with is allowing retailers to create promotions themselves and show them within the product.”

This conversation emerged from TechCrunch spotting Uber’s latest effort to influence where people choose to eat. To be worthy of ad dollars, Uber has to build leverage over restaurants by accruing sway over how people decide between restaurants. And with Uber confidentially filing to go public last week, it needs to prep new revenue streams. So it’s created what’s effectively “Uber Eats Pool.”

Gaining leverage with Eats Pool

In response to our inquiry, Uber confirmed it’s now testing in some markets a system designed to batch to a single restaurant multiple orders from different customers nearby each other. That way, a single delivery driver can pick up all the orders at once and then speedily distribute them to neighbors or co-workers. Uber must incentivize customers who are close to each other to pick the same restaurant in rapid succession, so it offers a discount.

“$2 off your order — share a courier with a nearby order,” the promotion announces atop the Uber Eats home screen above a carousel of restaurants where you can grab the discount. It’s equipped with a countdown timer to when it will refresh the list of restaurants that follows users on an eatery’s order page. This triggers a sense of urgency to hurriedly buy through Uber Eats (and not check competitors), but also to ensure orders come in close enough together that the first one cooked won’t have to wait long for the last before they’re all scooped up for delivery.

Some customers actually play the Uber Eats Pool discounts like a game they can beat, waiting through several rounds of the timer until they spot one of their favorite restaurants, Chau says with a laugh. For now, passengers don’t ride alongside food orders, though that’s certainly a possibility in the future. And if Uber Eats can batch your order into a Pool with other customers, it will retroactively give you the discount.

“It’s similar to what we did with Uber Pool,” Chau tells me. “Generally people are coming in with an intent to eat but there are many, many options available to them. We’re giving you a discount on the food delivery by using machine learning to understand these are some restaurants it might make sense to order from. When multiple people order from the same restaurant, delivery drivers can pick up multiple people’s food.”

Therein lies the leverage. As Stratechery’s Ben Thompson writes about aggregation theory, internet companies are gaining great influence by becoming marketplaces that connect customers with suppliers when previously customers preemptively chose a particular supplier. These platforms not only gain enormous amounts of data on customer preferences, but they also hold the power to point customers to certain suppliers that are willing to play ball.

Uber builds a toll bridge

With all the data, the platforms know just who to show the ads to for a maximum conversion rate. And over time, as the aggregator’s perks lure in more customers, it can pit suppliers against each other to further drop their prices or pay more for ads. Spotify used its own playlists to control which songs became popular, and the artists and record labels became beholden to cutting it sweeter deals to stay visible. Amazon looks like the best place to shop because it makes merchants fiercely fight to offer the lowest prices and best customer experience. With Uber Eats Pool, Uber is flexing its ability to influence where you eat, training you to trust where it points you when businesses eventually pay directly to be ranked higher in its app.

“Eats proves the power and potential of the Uber platform, showing how our logistics expertise can create the easiest way to eat,” Chau tells me. “We partner with a wide selection of restaurants and bring our trademark speed and coverage to the food delivery experience. This feature shows how leveraging the Uber network allows us to offer people even more affordable dining options.” That quote is even more telling than at first glance. It’s the logistic network that accrues the power and creates leverage over the supplier to benefit customers with the lowest prices.

“We can see on Eats how much more business they’re bringing in and how much is incremental new business. Eventually we’ll be able to do very precise targeting. ‘People who haven’t tried my restaurant before, let’s give them a discount,’” Chau tells us. Restaurants are asking him how to grow delivery as a percentage of their orders. “We can see the types of food people are ordering right now but also what they’re searching or are not able to order [because that cuisine isn’t available nearby]. We’re working with them to create new options to fill that gap. They’re able to get much more utilization of their fixed assets and iterate on these concepts much faster than they’re used to.”

Uber demonstrated the data science it could dangle over restaurants with its review of Uber Eats 2018 trends it published this morning. It predicts clean eating, plant-based foods, smoothie bowls, milk alternatives, fermented items like kimchi and Instagrammably dark “goth food” will rise in popularity next year. Meanwhile, now-tired social media bait “rainbow-colored foods,” Brussels sprouts and seaweed are on the decline.

It becomes easy to imagine restaurants running Uber Eats software for tracking order trends and predicting spikes to better manage food and staffing resources, with a baked-in option to buy ads or give deeper discounts to get seen by more hungry people. Chau concludes, “Restaurants can think of Uber Eats as a platform that gives them this intelligence.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | How Uber will become an ad company, starting with Eats Pool

Verve, the word-of-mouth selling platform, has acquired Campus Vacations, a provider of “unforgettable” travel experiences to students across North America.

The thinking behind the acquisition is to increase Verve’s market share and competitive positioning in the North America and Canada markets. Specifically, Verve says it will provide the company with an entrance into the ski market, as well as key destinations like Punta Cana and Cancun.

Refreshingly, Verve is also disclosing the purchase price of Campus Vacations: $7 million in aggregate, consisting of a combination of cash, shares and “incentives” over time (presumably based on certain milestones and earn-outs being met).

It follows the acquisition of U.S.-based student travel company JusCollege for $25 million in April, as Verve continues to expand beyond its original focus on live music and sporting events, and into travel.

Members of the Campus Vacations team, including co-founder Justin Van Camp, are joining Verve as part of the acquisition. The other co-founders, Alex Handa and Eugene Winer, are to act as Verve advisors. With the assimilation of the Campus Vacations team, Verve now has more than 200 employees globally.

Formerly known as StreetTeam, Verve is a platform that enables people to sell experiences to their friends in exchange for rewards, such as event tickets, trips and backstage passes. It counts more than 25,000 active ambassadors and claims to be the global market leader in word-of-mouth sales for live entertainment and travel experiences.

The company works with more than 500 music, travel, hotel and sports brands across North America and Europe. Verve also has global partnerships with ticketing companies, including Ticketmaster, Eventbrite, Paylogic and Front Gate Tickets.

“Following the success of acquiring the collegiate travel company JusCollege, and the resulting organic growth, we are continuing our aggressive expansion,” say Verve founders Callum and Liam Negus-Fancey in a joint statement.

“Campus Vacations gives us access to incredible destinations, increases our East Coast presence, delivers us a beachhead into ski, and brings us an incredible team. Not only have they built a fast-growing company that sells high-quality student travel packages, but like us, they understand the unique power and opportunity of harnessing the power of enthusiasts to elevate experiences for them and their friends.”

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Verve, the word-of-mouth selling platform, acquires Campus Vacations for M

Waggel, a new ‘insurtech’ startup in the U.K., is officially launching today to offer what it describes as “fully digital” pet insurance.

Founded by Andrew Leal, and Ross Fretten (a contestant of The Apprentice 2017), the company wants to offer more transparent cover for your pet, where you’ll know exactly how much you’re paying and for what provision, as well as offer rewards for improving the care of your animal.

“The biggest problem in pet insurance and insurance in general is the lack of value that customers get with a policy,” says Leal. “You pay a monthly fee and get nothing in return except maybe a promise to pay out a claim in the future. On top of this, pet insurance has become extremely complicated for users with confusing policy names and jargon-rich wording. The industry is still largely paper based, slow and terrible at communicating with customers and as a result falling well short of todays consumer expectations. Insurance is very much a grudge purchase”.

Leal says that Waggel is attempting to solve this by offering a fully digital solution that puts the customer experience first “to alleviate the stress that is typical of insurance”.

You are able to get a quote within 30 seconds that explains in simple language what you’re getting for your money. You can also make a claim within the app and track that claim in real-time, while Waggel promises to be transparent on how much it is paying out and why.

“All without having to hear another minute of hold music!” quips the Waggel founder.

In addition to the startup’s core insurance product, Waggel offers a rewards programme that Leal says makes it easier and more affordable for customers to take preventative care of their pet through feeding them higher quality nutrition. This comes in the form of “discounts with our hand-picked quality pet food partners,” he says.

In terms of competition, Leal says there are numerous incumbents in the pet insurance space but cites PetPlan and Animal Friends as the main two.

“Pet insurance has gotten stuck in a vicious cycle,” he adds. “The market has developed in that competitors offer an extremely homogenous product. With not much separating the different offerings, price has become the main differentiator. On the other side, the average vet bills have continued to rise. This means that insurers are getting squeezed for profits and having to offer less and less value to their customers, whilst being stricter and stricter on claims.

“We want to bring a new fresh approach to the market in that we want to see our policyholders as members and their premium as a subscription, for which they can get continuous value for their monthly fee through our rewards programme”.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Waggel launches ‘fully digital’ pet insurance

Nigerian consumer data analytics firm Terragon Group acquired Asian mobile marketing company Bizense in a cash and stock deal. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Based in Singapore, with operations in India and Indonesia, Bizense specializes in “mobile ad platform[s] for Telco’s, large publishers, and [e-commerce] ad networks.”

Headquartered in Lagos, Terragon’s software services give its clients — primarily telecommunications and financial services companies — data on Africa’s growing consumer markets.

“Most of the problems we seek to solve for our clients in Africa also exist in places like South East Asia and Latin America,” Umeh told TechCrunch of the logic for the acquisition.

Umeh indicated the company is contemplating further expansion in Asia and Latin America, where Terragon already has consumer data research and development teams.

Tarragon has a team of 100 employees across Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana and South Africa. Clients include local firms, such as Honeywell, and global names, including Unilever, DHL and international agribusiness firm Olam.

Terragon’s acquisition in Singapore, and moves by several other Nigerian ventures this year, signal greater global possibilities for Sub-Saharan African startups.

African financial technology companies like Mines and Paga announced their intent to expand in and outside Africa. They would join e-commerce site MallforAfrica, which went global in July in a partnership with DHL.

Kenya’s Twiga Foods has raised $10 million and announced it will add to its product line-up processed food and fast-moving consumer goods.

The $10 million IFC and TLcom Capital co-led investment comes in the form of convertible notes, available later as equity, according to Wale Ayeni, regional head of IFC’s Africa VC practice.

Twiga Foods has built a B2B platform to improve the supply chain from farmers to markets. The startup now aims to scale additional merchandise on its digital network that coordinates pricing, payment, quality control and logistics across sellers and vendors.

CEO and co-founder Grant Brooke sees “a growth horizon…to build a B2B Amazon,” with produce as the base.

“If we can build a business around fresh fruit and vegetables, everything else after that is much simpler to add on,” he told TechCrunch in this feature.

Forging another link between Africa and China’s digital economies, the African-focused money transfer startup SimbaPay and Kenya’s Family Bank have launched an instant payment service from East Africa to China.

The new product — which piggy-backs on WeChat’s  messaging service — is aimed at Kenyan merchants that purchase goods from China, Kenya’s largest import source.

To be clear, SimbaPay isn’t partnering with WeChat on this service, neither to provide the payments nor to build the service.

Using QR codes, SimbaPay developed a third-party payment aggregator that enables funds delivery when the buyer and seller both use WeChat’s network, which today has more than 1 billion registered accounts.

Individuals and businesses can now send funds to China through Family Bank’s PesaPap app, Safaricom’s M-Pesa or by texting USSD using the code *325#.

The service opens a faster and less expensive money transfer option between Kenya and China through the Tencent-owned WeChat social media platform.

SimbaPay transfers funds to 11 countries — nine in Africa then to China and India. “Early next year we’ll increase this to 29 countries,” SimbaPay co-founder Sagini Onyancha told TechCrunch in this feature.

In case you missed it, TLcom Capital senior partner Omobola Johnson and Terragon CEO Elo Umeh joined TechCrunch editor Jon Shieber for a breakdown of African tech at Disrupt Berlin. They covered everything from digital skills to the pros and cons of Andela in African IT markets and Africa’s IPO prospects.

Umeh described how “copying and pasting” Silicon Valley models didn’t work for his Nigerian startup’s mission “to help…enterprise companies achieve value at scale.”

Johnson envisioned Africa’s next unicorn as “as a B2B — business to very small business and SMEs — company” that can solve small businesses challenges, across advertising, access to markets, and finance.

TechCrunch’s discussion of African tech with top founders, IT leaders, and VCs continues December 11 in Lagos for the second Startup Battlefield Africa. In addition to the pitch competition of 15 top early-stage startups, discussions are teed up on blockchain in Africa, unique VC models for the continent and solving Africa’s connectivity equation. Hopefully tickets aren’t sold out by the time you read this.

More Africa Related Stories @TechCrunch

• Announcing the agenda for TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa
• African investors and founders to judge Startup Battlefield competition in Nigeria
• Venture capital and the blockchain will be the talk at Startup Battlefield Africa

African Tech Around the Net

• MTN opens Mobile Money API as it unveils fund for Ugandan startups
• Nairobi’s iHub becomes Africa’s first tokenised tech incubator
• Carrefour signs deal with Jumia to offer online shopping in Kenya
• AfricArena predicts funding by African startups in 2018 will crack $1bn
• Google Impact Challenge Kenya, Nigeria, SA winners announced
• Mali’s first bike-hailing startup has the backing of Toyota’s Africa subsidiary
• Lara.ng Is Getting People Around Lagos In A Way That Google Maps Can’t
• Abisoye Ajayi-Akinfolarin [founder of Nigeria’s Pearls Africa Youth Foundation girls coding program]  makes CNN Heroes 2018

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Africa Roundup: Terragon’s Asia acquisition, Twiga Foods’ M raise, SimbaPay’s China payment service

When the hell did building a house become so complicated?

Don’t let the folks on HGTV fool you. The process of building a home nowadays is incredibly painful. Just applying for the necessary permits can be a soul-crushing undertaking that’ll have you running around the city, filling out useless forms, and waiting in motionless lines under fluorescent lights at City Hall wondering whether you should have just moved back in with your parents.

Consider this an ongoing discussion about Urban Tech, its intersection with regulation, issues of public service, and other complexities that people have full PHDs on. I’m just a bitter, born-and-bred New Yorker trying to figure out why I’ve been stuck in between subway stops for the last 15 minutes, so please reach out with your take on any of these thoughts: @Arman.Tabatabai@techcrunch.com.

And to actually get approval for those permits, your future home will have to satisfy a set of conditions that is a factorial of complex and conflicting federal, state and city building codes, separate sets of fire and energy requirements, and quasi-legal construction standards set by various independent agencies.

It wasn’t always this hard – remember when you’d hear people say “my grandparents built this house with their bare hands?” These proliferating rules have been among the main causes of the rapidly rising cost of housing in America and other developed nations. The good news is that a new generation of startups is identifying and simplifying these thickets of rules, and the future of housing may be determined as much by machine learning as woodworking.

When directions become deterrents

Photo by Bill Oxford via Getty Images

Cities once solely created the building codes that dictate the requirements for almost every aspect of a building’s design, and they structured those guidelines based on local terrain, climates and risks. Over time, townships, states, federally-recognized organizations and independent groups that sprouted from the insurance industry further created their own “model” building codes.

The complexity starts here. The federal codes and independent agency standards are optional for states, who have their own codes which are optional for cities, who have their own codes that are often inconsistent with the state’s and are optional for individual townships. Thus, local building codes are these ever-changing and constantly-swelling mutant books made up of whichever aspects of these different codes local governments choose to mix together. For instance, New York City’s building code is made up of five sections, 76 chapters and 35 appendices, alongside a separate set of 67 updates (The 2014 edition is available as a book for $155, and it makes a great gift for someone you never want to talk to again).

In short: what a shit show.

Because of the hyper-localized and overlapping nature of building codes, a home in one location can be subject to a completely different set of requirements than one elsewhere. So it’s really freaking difficult to even understand what you’re allowed to build, the conditions you need to satisfy, and how to best meet those conditions.

There are certain levels of complexity in housing codes that are hard to avoid. The structural integrity of a home is dependent on everything from walls to erosion and wind-flow. There are countless types of material and technology used in buildings, all of which are constantly evolving.

Thus, each thousand-page codebook from the various federal, state, city, township and independent agencies – all dictating interconnecting, location and structure-dependent needs – lead to an incredibly expansive decision tree that requires an endless set of simulations to fully understand all the options you have to reach compliance, and their respective cost-effectiveness and efficiency.

So homebuilders are often forced to turn to costly consultants or settle on designs that satisfy code but aren’t cost-efficient. And if construction issues cause you to fall short of the outcomes you expected, you could face hefty fines, delays or gigantic cost overruns from redesigns and rebuilds. All these costs flow through the lifecycle of a building, ultimately impacting affordability and access for homeowners and renters.

Startups are helping people crack the code

Photo by Caiaimage/Rafal Rodzoch via Getty Images

Strap on your hard hat – there may be hope for your dream home after all.

The friction, inefficiencies, and pure agony caused by our increasingly convoluted building codes have given rise to a growing set of companies that are helping people make sense of the home-building process by incorporating regulations directly into their software.

Using machine learning, their platforms run advanced scenario-analysis around interweaving building codes and inter-dependent structural variables, allowing users to create compliant designs and regulatory-informed decisions without having to ever encounter the regulations themselves.

For example, the prefab housing startup Cover is helping people figure out what kind of backyard homes they can design and build on their properties based on local zoning and permitting regulations.

Some startups are trying to provide similar services to developers of larger scale buildings as well. Just this past week, I covered the seed round for a startup called Cove.Tool, which analyzes local building energy codes – based on location and project-level characteristics specified by the developer – and spits out the most cost-effective and energy-efficient resource mix that can be built to hit local energy requirements.

And startups aren’t just simplifying the regulatory pains of the housing process through building codes. Envelope is helping developers make sense of our equally tortuous zoning codes, while Cover and companies like Camino are helping steer home and business-owners through arduous and analog permitting processes.

Look, I’m not saying codes are bad. In fact, I think building codes are good and necessary – no one wants to live in a home that might cave in on itself the next time it snows. But I still can’t help but ask myself why the hell does it take AI to figure out how to build a house? Why do we have building codes that take a supercomputer to figure out?

Ultimately, it would probably help to have more standardized building codes that we actually clean-up from time-to-time. More regional standardization would greatly reduce the number of conditional branches that exist. And if there was one set of accepted overarching codes that could still set precise requirements for all components of a building, there would still only be one path of regulations to follow, greatly reducing the knowledge and analysis necessary to efficiently build a home.

But housing’s inherent ties to geography make standardization unlikely. Each region has different land conditions, climates, priorities and political motivations that cause governments to want their own set of rules.

Instead, governments seem to be fine with sidestepping the issues caused by hyper-regional building codes and leaving it up to startups to help people wade through the ridiculousness that paves the home-building process, in the same way Concur aids employee with infuriating corporate expensing policies.

For now, we can count on startups that are unlocking value and making housing more accessible, simpler and cheaper just by making the rules easier to understand. And maybe one day my grandkids can tell their friends how their grandpa built his house with his own supercomputer.

And lastly, some reading while in transit:

• No One at the Wheel: Driverless Cars and the Road of the Future – PublicAffairs, Samuel I. Schwartz
• The Yellow Vests and Why There Are So Many Street Protests in France – The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik
• Congress Needs to Tighten Up AV Legislation – GovTech Future Structure, San Jose Mercury News & East Bay Times Editorial Board
• Uber Doesn’t Have to Follow Pan Am’s Tragic Arc – Bloomberg Opinion, Gillian Morris & Christina Heggie
• What Venice Can Teach American Cities – The Atlantic, James H. S. McGregor
• Blockchain Technology in the Energy Sector: A Systematic Review of Challenges and Opportunities – Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Merlinda Andoni, Valentin Robu, David Flynn, Simone Abram, Dale Geach, David Jenkins, Peter McCallum, Andrew Peacock

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Why you need a supercomputer to build a house

Rapper 2 Milly is suing Epic Games over Fortnite’s use of his dance move, the Milly Rock.

The lawsuit claims direct infringement of copyright, contributory infringement of copyright and violation of the Right of Publicity under California Common Law, among other things.

From the filing:

Defendants capitalized on the Milly Rock’s popularity, particularly with its younger fans, by selling the Milly Rock dance as an in-game purchase in Fortnite under the name “Swipe It,” which players can buy to customize their avatars for use in the game. This dance was immediately recognized by players and media worldwide as the Milly Rock. Although identical to the dance created, popularized, and demonstrated by Ferguson, Epic did not credit Ferguson nor seek his consent to use, display, reproduce, sell, or create a derivative work based upon Ferguson’s Milly Rock dance or likeness.

Unless you live under a rock, you’ve seen the Milly Rock. Rock dwellers can check it out below:

On Fortnite, the dance is called the Swipe It, and it looks like this:

Back in July, around the time that Fortnite unveiled the Swipe It dance, Chance the Rapper pointed out that Epic Games tends to use in the game dance moves popularized by famous artists. These emotes cost money, and heavily contribute to the hundreds of millions in revenue that Epic Games pulls in on a monthly basis via its free-to-play game.

Moreover, the default emote on Fortnite is the relatively famous little routine from actor Donald Faison on the show Scrubs.

This lawsuit is particularly complicated considering that it’s over a dance move, which is difficult to lock down with copyright. The Verge reported that this lawsuit is the first of its kind, in that it challenges the gaming industry’s use of pop culture as for-profit virtual items. NPR reports that the U.S. Copyright Office “can’t register short dance routines consisting of only a few movements or steps with minor linear or spatial variations, even if a routine is novel or distinctive.”

That doesn’t mean there is no way to protect choreographic works. Those works, however, must be defined as “a series of dance movements or patterns organized into an integrated, coherent, and expressive compositional whole,” according to NPR.

Concluding the 22-page filing is a request for injunctive relief, which would bar Epic Games from using 2 Milly’s likeness in the game, as well as financial compensation for the use of the Milly Rock dance.

We reached out to Epic Games and will update the story if/when we hear back.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | 2 Milly files a lawsuit against Fortnite maker Epic Games over dance move

Nigerian trucking logistics startup Kobo360 has raised $6 million to upgrade its platform and expand operations to Ghana, Togo and Cote D’Ivoire.

The company — with an Uber -like app that connects truckers and companies with freight needs — gained the equity financing in an IFC-led investment. The funding saw participation from others, including TLcom Capital and Y Combinator.

With the investment, Kobo360 aims to become more than a trucking transit app.

“We started off as an app, but our goal is to build a global logistics operating system. We’re no longer an app, we’re a platform,” founder Obi Ozor told TechCrunch.

In addition to connecting truckers, producers and distributors, the company is building that platform to offer supply chain management tools for enterprise customers.

“Large enterprises are asking us for very specific features related to movement, tracking and sales of their goods. We either integrate other services, like SAP, into Kobo or we build those solutions into our platform directly,” said Ozor.

Kobo360 will start by developing its API and opening it up to large enterprise customers.

“We want clients to be able to use our Kobo dashboard for everything; moving goods, tracking, sales and accounting…and tackling their challenges,” said Ozor.

Kobo360 will also build more physical presence throughout Nigeria to service its business. “We’ll open 100 hubs before the end of 2019…to be able to help operations collect proof of delivery, to monitor trucks on the roads and have closer access to truck owners for vehicle inspection and training,” said Ozor.

Kobo360 will add more warehousing capabilities, “to support our reverse logistics business” — one of the ways the company brings prices down by matching trucks with return freight after they drop their loads, rather than returning empty, according to Ozor.

Kobo360 will also use its $6 million investment to expand programs and services for its drivers, something Ozor sees as a strategic priority.

“The day you neglect your drivers you are not going to have a company, only issues. If Uber were more driver-focused it would be a trillion-dollar company today,” he said.

The startup offers drivers training and group programs on insurance, discounted petrol and vehicle financing (KoboWin). Drivers on the Kobo360 app earn on average of approximately $5,000 per month, according to Ozor.

Under KoboCare, Kobo360 has also created an HMO for drivers and an incentive-based program to pay for education. “We give school fee support, a 5,000 Naira bonus per trip for drivers toward educational expenses for their kids,” said Ozor.

Kobo360 will complete limited expansion into new markets Ghana, Togo and Cote D’Ivoire in 2019. “The expansion will be with existing customers, one in the port operations business, one in FMCG and another in agriculture,” said Ozor.

Ozor thinks the startup’s asset-free, digital platform and business model can outpace traditional long-haul 3PL providers in Nigeria by handling more volume at cheaper prices.

“Owning trucks is just too difficult to manage. The best scalable model is to aggregate trucks,” he told TechCrunch in a previous interview.

With the latest investment, IFC’s regional head for Africa Wale Ayeni and TLcom senior partner Omobola Johnson will join Kobo360’s board. “There’s a lot of inefficiencies in long-haul freight in Africa…and they’re building a platform that can help a lot of these issues,” said Ayeni of Kobo360’s appeal as an investment.

The company has served 900 businesses, aggregated a fleet of 8,000 drivers and moved 155 million kilograms, per company stats. Top clients include Honeywell, Olam, Unilever, Dangote and DHL.

MarketLine estimated the value of Nigeria’s transportation sector in 2016 at $6 billion, with 99.4 percent comprising road freight.

Logistics has become an active space in Africa’s tech sector, with startup entrepreneurs connecting digital to delivery models. In Nigeria, Jumia founder Tunde Kehinde departed and founded Africa Courier Express. Startup Max.ng is wrapping an app around motorcycles as an e-delivery platform. Nairobi-based Lori Systems has moved into digital coordination of trucking in East Africa. And U.S.-based Zipline — which launched drone delivery of commercial medical supplies in partnership with the government of Rwanda and support of UPS — is in “process of expanding to several other countries,” according to a spokesperson.

Kobo360 has plans for broader Africa expansion but would not name additional countries yet.

Ozor said the company is profitable, though the startup does not release financial results. Wale Ayeni also wouldn’t divulge revenue figures, but confirmed IFC’s did full “legal and financial due diligence on Kobo’s stats,” as part of the investment.

Ozor named Lori Systems as Kobo360’s closest African startup competitor.

On the biggest challenge to revenue generation, it’s all about service delivery and execution, according to Ozor.

“We already have volume and demand in the market. The biggest threat to revenues is if Kobo360’s platform doesn’t succeed in solving our client’s problems and bringing reliability to their needs,” he said.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Nigerian logistics startup Kobo360 raises M, expands in Africa

Contentful, a Berlin- and San Francisco-based startup that provides content management infrastructure for companies like Spotify, Nike, Lyft and others, today announced that it has raised a $33.5 million Series D funding round led by Sapphire Ventures, with participation from OMERS Ventures and Salesforce Ventures, as well as existing investors General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton Capital and Hercules. In total, the company has now raised $78.3 million.

It’s been less than a year since the company raised its Series C round and, as Contentful co-founder and CEO Sascha Konietzke told me, the company didn’t really need to raise right now. “We had just raised our last round about a year ago. We still had plenty of cash in our bank account and we didn’t need to raise as of now,” said Konietzke. “But we saw a lot of economic uncertainty, so we thought it might be a good moment in time to recharge. And at the same time, we already had some interesting conversations ongoing with Sapphire [formerly SAP Ventures] and Salesforce. So we saw the opportunity to add more funding and also start getting into a tight relationship with both of these players.”

The original plan for Contentful was to focus almost explicitly on mobile. As it turns out, though, the company’s customers also wanted to use the service to handle its web-based applications and these days, Contentful happily supports both. “What we’re seeing is that everything is becoming an application,” he told me. “We started with native mobile application, but even the websites nowadays are often an application.”

In its early days, Contentful focused only on developers. Now, however, that’s changing, and having these connections to large enterprise players like SAP and Salesforce surely isn’t going to hurt the company as it looks to bring on larger enterprise accounts.

Currently, the company’s focus is very much on Europe and North America, which account for about 80 percent of its customers. For now, Contentful plans to continue to focus on these regions, though it obviously supports customers anywhere in the world.

Contentful only exists as a hosted platform. As of now, the company doesn’t have any plans for offering a self-hosted version, though Konietzke noted that he does occasionally get requests for this.

What the company is planning to do in the near future, though, is to enable more integrations with existing enterprise tools. “Customers are asking for deeper integrations into their enterprise stack,” Konietzke said. “And that’s what we’re beginning to focus on and where we’re building a lot of capabilities around that.” In addition, support for GraphQL and an expanded rich text editing experience is coming up. The company also recently launched a new editing experience.

Source: Tech Crunch Startups | Contentful raises .5M for its headless CMS platform