| | | Saturday, June 22, 2019 By Danny Crichton |
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Let us know how you like this newsletter?    | | | | | | | | Ray Dalio on the Extra Crunch stage at Disrupt SF 2019 | | | | | | | This year at Disrupt SF, we will be hosting a special Extra Crunch stage focused on the issues that confront startup founders in building their companies. I am pleased to announce that Ray Dalio of Bridgewater fame will be sitting down for a fireside chat on the Extra Crunch stage to discuss his Principles, and how to build a startup culture. Building a strong culture early on is the hallmark of almost all successful startups, and it is great to have such a leading figure to chat on this critical topic. For tickets and more information, head over to our Disrupt SF event page. | | | | | | | | A chat with Niantic CEO John Hanke on the launch of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite | | | | | | | Steve Jennings/TechCrunch via Getty Images | | | Niantic dominated the mobile gaming world with its Pokémon Go augmented reality game. Now, the company is coming back for round two with the launch of its wizards-and-Hogwarts-themed game, Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. TechCrunch editor Greg Kumparak sat down with Niantic CEO John Hanke for an Extra Crunch launch day interview on the progress the team has made on the game, and his vision for what the game can become. And in case you missed it, don't miss Greg's deep dive EC-1 on Niantic from April, including our behind-the-scenes look at the design of Wizards Unite. Kumparak: There's already a bit of a community building up around this game. There's already Wizards Unite YouTubers. How does Niantic embrace that moving forward? Hanke: Yeah! They've been following the game for a while, actually. The community is both… there's a community of people on social media, and then there are the players that may or may not be a part of that. The way we'll embrace it is by drawing on things that have worked with Pokémon GO — things like… I'm not saying specifically that we'd do community days for Harry Potter [Note: "community days" are special, pre-announced days where certain rare Pokémon appear more frequently, and items that benefit all players around you work for hours rather than minutes. They're meant to encourage players to meet up at their local popular play spots for a specific three-hour window], but that's been really successful in galvanizing the community around GO. I hinted on stage that we'd do a big festival style event for Harry Potter. Those kinds of events… we've done a dozen or more of them for Pokémon GO, and they've been hugely important for bringing the community together. They give people the opportunity to meet other players from their area, and really form those local player groups that form the core of the player base around the world. They really keep it going — these are groups that are meeting up weekly, and making it a core part of their social life. It's great to see, and something we want to encourage in every way we can. | | | | | | | | Transitioning from engineering to product with Adobe's Anjul Bhambhri | | | | | | | Jeff Bottari/AP Images for Adobe | | | Product management is an attractive career path for people who are interested in bringing a multi-disciplinary background in engineering, design, and strategy to bear on customer problems. But if you are a software engineer today, how do you transition into the product world? I got the chance to sit down with Adobe's Anjul Bhambhri to discuss precisely how she made that transition. Bhambhri currently runs Adobe's Experience Platform, and formerly worked at IBM as well as Informix and Sybase as startups before they became massive billion-dollar businesses. Crichton: You've sort of done this "intrapreneur" route. I think that's a huge debate for a lot of people who read us is, do I fight the good fight internally? You're working at a large company. I'm not getting the attention I want. How did you think about that? How did you stay internally and feel good about that? Bhambhri: I got advice, that I have to attribute to one of my mentors because it's a genuine question that a lot of us have had. "If you can't convince the people that you work with, that you know that hopefully you have a good track record, if they cannot be convinced then that means either the idea is bad or you don't have good communication skills." So how will you convince someone when you are on your own with no support because even then you have to convince people. You're just convincing different people. You could be convincing VCs. You still have to advance your budget. You still have to convince customers that what you've built is what they need. So, this mentor of mine, his advice was so spot on that you can't just back off. The first "no" that you get, if you have conviction, bring back more detail. You often don't get "yes" the first time around, especially if you're trying to propose something very radical, very different, people will say, "Where did this come from?" If you haven't taken them along in the journey, or even if you have, the first time you talk to someone about an idea, people listen. They may or may not gravitate. But my mentor's advice was that unless you're just in some wrong place or something, but if you're surrounded by good smart people, then you have to think of how you are going to convince them and make it happen because having those skills is needed whether you do it inside a big company, or you want to do it on your own. | | | | | | | | Video and messaging enable remote work. But is it right for your company? | | | | | | | Remote work has garnered a huge amount of attention among startups these days seeking the best talent no matter where they might be located. But can you still build out a strong culture when everyone connects through screens and texts? Drift founder David Cancel, who has built a series of successful startups, investigates the question. In a guest post for Extra Crunch members, he discusses the options for founders, which he boils down to: there is no in-between. While Drift is 100% in-office, I've experimented with a hybrid approach. At Lookery, a company I founded in 2007, half the team was remote and the other half worked together in an office. This led to problems. No matter how hard we tried, the remote team members always ended up feeling second class. There were hallway conversations and sidebars that never made it back into our chat rooms or wikis. It just didn't work, in spite of our best efforts. So while I am against any hybrid approach, an entirely remote team can work if you're fully committed. And relying on the right messaging and video tools can make 100% remote work not just possible, but profitable. So the argument isn't so much "is remote work good or bad," but more about committing to one or the other. Especially since the jury is still out on whether working remotely or working in an office makes for happier teams. | | | | | | | | Three years after moving off AWS, Dropbox infrastructure continues to evolve | | | | | | | Vladimir_Timofeev via Getty Images | | | Dropbox famously moved off of AWS and the public cloud to run its file system on its own infrastructure. Several years later though, how does the company feel about the decision? TechCrunch's enterprise correspondent Ron Miller interviewed Dropbox's infrastructure team to get their thoughts on where things stand: Principal Engineer James Cowling says that even after moving from the cloud back to its data center, they don't have rigidity about their approach and will use the public cloud when it makes sense to do so. "The other thing that's interesting, we will choose to go the hybrid infrastructure route where it makes sense for our users. There's no hubris there. We announced storage for Japan and Australia where we partnered with Amazon S3, and deployed quite fast without having to wait for the time to ramp up it would have taken to build it ourselves," he said. | | | | | | | | Northzone's Paul Murphy goes deep on the next era of gaming | | | | | | | With the glow of the massive E3 gaming conference coming to a close, we had a chance to take a step back and assess where the gaming industry is heading in the coming years. Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham interviewed Paul Murphy of Northzone, which is perhaps most famous for its massively successful bet into Spotify, on what's next for gaming. Peckham:New mobile game studios that are launching all seem to fall under the sphere of influence of these bigger companies. They get a strategic investment from Supercell or another company. To your point, it's tough for a small startup to compete entirely on its own. Murphy: It's possible in mobile gaming still but it's really, really hard now. At the same time, what you've seen is the odds of winning are lower. It is hard to reach the same scale when it costs you $5.00 to acquire a user today, whereas when Candy Crush launched, it was $0.05 per user. So it's almost impossible to achieve King-like scale today. Therefore, you're looking at similar content risk with reduced upside, which makes that equation less attractive for venture capital. But it might be perfectly fine for an established company because they don't need to do the marketing, they have the audience already. The big gaming companies all struggle with the challenge of how to create the next hit IP. They have this machine that can bring any great game to market efficiently, with a large audience they can cross promote from and capital they can invest to build a big brand quickly. For them, the biggest challenge is getting the best content. | | | | | | | | Verified Expert Brand Designer: Stitzlein Studio | | | | | | | Yvonne Leow takes a short step back from our Verified Experts growth marketing series to head back to brand design. In her next Verified Experts profile, she looks at Stitzlein Studio, which has launched the brand identities of Cloudera, Dwell, Netflix and many other companies you might have heard of. She interviews founders and husband-and-wife pair Joe and Leslie Stitzlein. Yvonne Leow: A lot of designers and studios have a distinct vision for what makes good branding. What's yours? Joe Stitzlein: Our point of view is that brand is the company's DNA. We think about it in two ways: there's the way a brand is expressed; how a brand looks, how it shows up at events, and there's also the experience and behavior of a brand that doesn't get as much attention. Think about when you go to an Apple store, and you have a great experience with a sales associate, that's a behavior. Each brand has its own DNA, just as each person is unique. A company's DNA comes to life both on a surface level by how they look, but also how the brand interacts with people in the world." At Nike, it didn't matter how great the shoe was, if the shoe hurt you, it could damage your relationship with that customer for years to come. Our daughter's cross country coach still complains about Nikes for an injury he suffered 20 years ago. You have to think about both sides of the coin for brand to make a good relationship with a customer, and that's what we enjoy doing—going beyond the visual design and into the behavioral aspects of a company. | | | | | | | | Equity transcribed: Slack's IPO, the VCs behind Facebook Libra, founder salaries and trouble in scooter-land | | | | | | | Yours truly dropped in on TechCrunch's Equity podcast this week, replacing our good friend and Crunchbase editor Alex Wilhelm, who took the week off because he is busy getting married and Slack'd off. Our venture capital reporter Kate Clark hosted, and the two of us talked about all the big VC and financial news that hit the wires this week. If you didn't catch the audio, we have published an exclusive edited transcript for Extra Crunch members. Clark: Yeah, I think you're right. Ever since Uber and Lyft's IPOs did not perform as expected, there's been a lot of eyes on pretty much every exit coming out of Silicon Valley or coming out of the tech industry. Then given the fact that Slack is also pursuing a different form of a public offering, of course, even more people are watching. But I'm curious, Danny, how do you think Slack's direct listing will go? Crichton: I think that it's going to go better than the other ones. Slack is less - I don't want to say it's not an innovative company. But compared to ride-hailing or to fake-meat or artificial meat, Slack is a classic SaaS Company. It's used by a huge number of organizations. Its numbers are very, very strong for SaaS. I mean it's not inventing a new model to analyze it. You can compare it to every other SaaS company targeting the enterprise that's out there. So I think in terms of the analysts who are covering the stock, they have a much better handle on the strength of it, how to price it, how to look at growth over the coming months. And so assuming Slack actually continues its growth pattern, I don't expect to see the level of gyration that you've seen in some of those other shares. | | | | | | | | 'The Operators': Acceleprise partner Whitney Sales and Docsend CEO Russ Heddleston on how to grow your sales strategies | | | | | | | Meanwhile, we also occasionally offer edited transcripts of podcast episodes outside of TechCrunch we particularly enjoyed. One episode we enjoyed was the inaugural edition of 'The Operators' featuring Whitney Sales and Russ Heddleston (who Extra Crunch members may recognize from his guest post on what the data show investors read in pitch decks). The podcast is hosted by Neil Devani and Tim Hsia, and their goal is to cut through the prognostications to get to the important insights held by operators. Heddleston: And different products and different value propositions lend themselves to each of them. For DocSend we've got about 9,000 companies that are paying for it. And what's worked really well for us has been, the product spreads itself pretty well across a few different price points. We'll get into a company, and then in the sales team, we have these two different functions, SDR and AE. SDRs are booking meetings when people are interested. They're also looking at the data, seeing when a certain team is expanding, there are a number of seats on DocSend. They'll reach out, add value, make sure they know how it works, and they'll set up a call for an AE to try to get them upsold or making sure they're getting the most out of it. Or you can just introduce them directly to the customer success team we have that's all post sales. Or they're just going to help out with accounts that end up paying enough money for DocSend that we need someone in there to help manage that. | | | | | | | | 'This is Your Life in Silicon Valley': Nomiku Founder CEO Lisa Fetterman on why Silicon Valley doesn't care about female founders | | | | | | | And yes, we went a little bit podcast crazy this week. On the latest episode of 'This is Your Life in Silicon Valley,' founder and CEO of Nomiku Lisa Fetterman discusses the challenges of building a tech startup as a female entrepreneur. Rajaraman: What about outside of VC? I'm curious about this because, whatever, there's only a small subset of people who are VCs. Our audience is going to probably be mostly non-VCs. Just in general. Just day-to-day work Silicon Valley wherever. Fetterman: Don't ask women to do the hard work for you. Read a book, man. Read a book about feminism. Go on everydayfeminism.com. Tailor your media to learn about people of color and women and women of color. You've got to do the work. Don't ask a woman to please sit down and tell me what I need to do. | | | | | | | | 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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⊙Ⓢ▽〖@HuLu~〗 2019 Justicia del ártico PelÃcula Completa En LÃnea released 2019. story: Swifty, el zorro ártico, trabaja en la sala de corre...
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