| | | Saturday, June 15, 2019 By Danny Crichton |
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Let us know how you like this newsletter?    | | | | | | | | How to make remote work work | | | | | | | TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has an Extra Crunch-exclusive look on what it takes to get remote work working within an organization. Evans, who has been the remote CTO of technology consulting firm HappyFunCorp for many years, finds that "you need decisive confidence, clear direction, iterative targets, independent responsibilities, asynchronous communications, and cheerful chatter" to build out a harmonious remote work culture. Decisive confidence. Suppose Vivek in Delhi, Diego in Rio, and Miles in Berlin are all on a project. (An example I'm drawing from my real life.) It's late your time. You have to make a decision about the direction of their work. If you sleep on it, you're writing off multiple developer-days of productivity. Sometimes they have enough responsibilities to have other things to work on. (More on that below.) Sometimes you don't have to make the decision because they have enough responsibility to do so themselves. (More on that below.) But sometimes you have to make the business-level decision based on scant information. In cases like this, remember the military maxim: "Any decision is better than no decision." | | | | | | | | How to negotiate term sheets with strategic investors | | | | | | | pgraphis via Getty Images | | | Over the last few years, we've seen the rise of hundreds of strategic investors, typically large corporates with venture wings with the mission to invest in the next wave of startups targeting their existing business lines. While many of these funds are structured at least symbolically as traditional venture capital firms, their specific concerns during deal negotiation can be quite different. That's why we got Myia founder Alex Gold to write a guest post on how to negotiate a term sheet with strategics. Negotiating a deal means understanding how each party in the potential partnership can help the other: The best strategic investors are those that drive specific and relevant commercial milestones for your business. Essentially, this means basing the investment on a long-term commercial contract, at market rates, to deploy your product across the strategic investor's business. The strategic should be looking to do this as well because, as well – an investor first and foremost – their own traction will power the growth in valuation of their investment. For example, if your business is in the healthcare space, you should have a long-term commercial deal to deploy your product across different segments of the investors' business to capture the most long term value. A good example of this is Ascension Ventures' investment in Ingenious Med , which came in tandem with a long term rollout across all of Ascension's health system Limited Partners. | | | | | | | | Why is Andreessen Horowitz (and everyone else) investing in Latin America now? | | | | | | | KTSDESIGN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images | | | TechCrunch editor Jon Shieber has been spending a lot of time researching and reporting on VCs investing in Latin America, a huge growth center as Silicon Valley firms attempt to find the next great growth story. This week, Jon dives into why Andreessen Horowitz is plowing so much money in the region and what it means for startups and other VCs. The flood of capital is also responding to over a decade of groundbreaking work conducted by local and regional investors to lay the foundation upon which firms like SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz are now building their billion dollar businesses. It's hard to overstate the importance of firms like Kaszek Ventures and Monashees in the Latin American investment ecosystem. Endeavor, the non-profit organization focused on promoting entrepreneurship spent several years cultivating entrepreneurs, and early successes like MercadoLibre, PeixeUrbano, Globant and others continue to give back to their communities in ways large and small. | | | | | | | | You won the H-1B lottery: Don't lose your ticket when changing jobs | | | | | | | erhui1979 via Getty Images | | | The U.S. immigration system is inordinately complicated — and only becoming more so. We previously talked about how to handle immigration in the event of a romantic entanglement (which just happens to be one of our most popular posts to date). This week, Anjana Prasad and Xiao Wang of Boundless are back again, this time discussing how to handle switching employers while maintaining your legal immigration status. Don't take your transfer for granted. First, understand that an H-1B "transfer" is actually a brand new visa application, not a simple handover of your existing H-1B visa from one employer to another — there's no such thing. That's good news on some levels: It means you don't need your current employer's blessing. And they can't withhold records or otherwise interfere in the process. But because you're filing an entirely new H-1B application, rather than simply tweaking your existing visa, there's a real chance your application could be denied, even though your previous H-1B was approved without a problem. If that happens, your existing H-1B will remain valid — as long as you're still employed in your original job — so it's in your best interest to keep your transition plan under wraps from your employer. Bear in mind that if your new H-1B application is denied and you've already quit the job your previous H-1B was based on, you'll need to leave the United States or change your immigration status within 60 days (typically) or before the expiration date on your I-94, whichever is sooner. | | | | | | | | What do subscription services and streaming mean for the future of gaming? | | | | | | | gorodenkoff via Getty Images | | | The absolutely dizzying E3 conference was held this past week in LA, and our very own hardware editor Brian Heater was on the scene taking in all the major announcements from the video game world. Brian looked at the quickly arriving world of streaming video game services, riffing on Devin Coldewey's dive into the space a few months ago: I will say that I was overall impressed with the xCloud demo It got earlier this week at a Microsoft event. Lag wasn't imperceptible, but the implementation was impressive nonetheless. Several companies have attempted to offer similar experiences with varying effects, but Stadia and xCloud mark a clear step toward the dream of platform agnosticism. Granted, the experience was really augmented by the inclusion of a bluetooth Xbox controller, but getting a scaled down console experience was impressive, nonetheless. Certainly, it's easy to see the appeal of being able to take a high-end gaming experience anywhere. Portability and versatility are a big part of the Nintendo Switch's appeal, and smartphone gaming has come a long way in the last several years. But Sony Microsoft and the PC have the edge on the premium gaming experience for the time being. | | | | | | | | Uber's annual flying taxi summit reveals Uber Air has a ways to go | | | | | | | E3 is certainly an entertaining conference (after all, it's one of the three Es in the name), but the other big E conference this week was Uber's Elevate conference held in Washington DC. The goal of the summit was to show the world just how far Uber has come building out its aerial ambitions — and the company pushed hard that its Uber Air service is getting ready. Our transportation reporter Megan Rose Dickey was on the scene, and while enthusiastic about the direction of the product, she found that it was still a far ways off: A fully scaled operation would entail more than 10 flights a day on a single aircraft, she said. To make that economical, Mikolajczak said a lot of design will need to be done on the battery pack. "Otherwise, you're going to age your cells and within a few months you'll be changing the battery pack," she said. "But for really something that's commercial, that is mass production, we're really aiming for a battery pack that lasts about a year, so that means a lot more advanced design." Uber also wants Air to be fully autonomous. If you look at where Uber is with its self-driving car efforts, you can only imagine how long it will be until we see autonomous flying taxis. Ten years from now, that's when "we'll have the basis for pursuing autonomy," Uber Engineering Director of Aviation said at Elevate. But only when these vehicles are autonomous will consumers see the real economic benefits of it. | | | | | | | | Verified Expert Growth Marketing Agency: Right Side Up | | | | | | | Yvonne Leow continues our growth marketing Verified Experts series, this time interviewing founder Tyler Elliston of Right Side Up, which has worked with companies like Fitbit, DoorDash, and Wealthfront on paid ads and a host of growth strategies. Yvonne Leow: The structure for Right Side Up is pretty unique. Can you talk a little bit about why you decided to create a company with marketing residents, and how partnerships work? Tyler Elliston: There are a number of lessons that I learned as an in-house marketer and a founder, that have become the underpinning for how we operate the business. Great performance comes from great marketers, not from companies or brands. It's really about the person doing the work. So, our goal is to find the best marketers as they are today, instead of training junior talent, which is a common agency practice. We want to find the person who has cracked Snapchat and is spending half a million dollars a month on a channel that many think won't work on a direct response basis. We want that marketer. We're very marketer centric. This is why we always put our talent in front of a prospective client before ever asking them to sign an agreement. It's not like you sign an agreement with us and then you get whoever you get. | | | | | | | | Equity transcribed: Silicon Valley's founder fetish infantilizes public companies | | | | | | | Finally this week, we have the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, with co-hosts Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm talking about the latest startup news and CrowdStrike's IPO. We have an Extra Crunch exclusive transcript available for those who couldn't catch a listen. Wilhelm: And I think that's the mistake people make here. They presume that if a company's value shoots higher, it was under-priced. Wilhelm: The difference here is pick a story like Lyft. Lyft just went public. It had a sharp first day, if I recall correctly and now it's worth far less than its IPO price. So is that what Gurley wants? Because I presume that Crowdstrike is now overvalued, if you look at its valuation versus its inherent business. It's a great company in a lot of ways, but I wouldn't slap a $12 or $13 billion valuation on it. Clark: I agree with Bill Gurley that these IPOs have been under-priced. But, again, I don't like what he's saying about the way that we cover IPO pops. I mean, the reason we're covering them is because they're happening and they're worth reporting on. But it's not because we're saying, "Wow! This company is so successful! Look at this!" I mean we all expected Uber to have an IPO pop. It didn't. I think at the end of the day, we're all aware of that it's longterm that matters more. It's performance over a year versus two days. But again, these are events that are happening and they are events we're covering. | | | | | | | | ICYMI: Earlier this week: | | | | | | | To every member of Extra Crunch: thank you. You allow us to get off the ad-laden media churn conveyor belt and spend quality time on amazing ideas, people, and companies. If I can ever be of assistance, hit reply, or send an email to danny@techcrunch.com. | | | | | | | Let us know how you like this newsletter? | | | | | | | U.S. Region: Privacy Policy Oath Inc.: 701 First Avenue, Sunnyvale, CA 94089 Canada Region: Privacy Policy Oath (Canada) Corp: 99 Spadina Ave, Suite 200, Toronto ON M5 J1A7, Canada European Region: Privacy Policy Oath (EMEA) Limited: 5-7 Point Square, North Wall Quay, Dublin 1, Ireland |
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