| | | Saturday, September 28, 2019 By Danny Crichton |
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Let us know how you like this newsletter?    | | | | | | | | EC Editorial Announcements | | | TechCrunch Disrupt SF is this week: join us on the Extra Crunch stage TechCrunch's biggest event of the year is happening this coming week at the brand-new Moscone North convention center in SF. We have wall-to-wall programming on our inaugural Extra Crunch stage, where audience members can ask questions to our panelists on topics as diverse as growth marketing, recruiting, fundraising, legal quandaries, and more. If you want to join but haven't bought your ticket, remember that all Extra Crunch annual subscribers get 20% off our tickets by emailing extracrunch@techcrunch.com. And if you can't join, we will have synopses of some of the EC panels coming out in the following weeks. Transfer your Extra Crunch Brex Reward points to JetBlue A while back, we added an Extra Crunch member benefit where all EC members can receive 100,000 Brex Rewards points if they sign up for a new Brex account. Now, those points can also be transferred to JetBlue, perhaps for those fancy Mint seats between New York and SF. We are going to continue to add new member benefits, so do let us know if you have any interesting ideas or want to partner with us. Follow our new @extracrunch Twitter handle Finally, we now have a new Twitter handle for Extra Crunch: @extracrunch. We will be retweeting all EC articles on the handle, and later on, will be exploring other ways to engage with members through Twitter. Follow us! | | | | | | | | Inside the venture capital recruiting process | | | | | | | katleho Seisa / Getty Images | | | Top venture capital partner recruiter (among other verticals) Dan Miller of True Search describes what it takes to become an investor these days at a VC firm: If you are interviewing for operating roles in companies in parallel to interviewing with VC firms, you will get multiple offers (probably quite good ones) in the former category before you've made it far in the latter. It is exceedingly common in the VC Partner searches I run to find out that an excellent candidate has multiple strong offers in Product roles from big tech companies and hot startups, for example, before they've made it halfway through a VC interview process. | | | | | | | | This Week in Apps: AltStore, acquisitions and Google Play Pass | | | | | | | TechCrunch's apps maven Sarah Perez is starting a new, occasional series on the most important developments in the app world along with her analysis of what's taking place. This week, she explores AltStore, a new type of app store, iOS 13 adoption trends, an App Annie acquisition, and five or so other stories: The app industry shows no signs of slowing down, with 194 billion downloads in 2018 and over $100 billion in consumer spending. People spend 90% of their mobile time in apps and more time using their mobile devices than watching TV. In other words, apps aren't just a way to spend idle hours — they're a big business. And one that often seems to change overnight. In this new Extra Crunch series, we'll help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps — including everything from the OS's to the apps that run upon them, as well as the money that flows through it all. | | | | | | | | How Amazon is closing out competitors by opening up voice | | | | | | | Yagi Studio / Getty Images | | | Our London-based editor Ingrid Lunden explores the latest development in the voice assistant world, with Amazon announcing a new consortium this week called the Voice Interoperability Group. But why is Amazon trying to stay open, and is staying open really just a bid to close down and lock in Alexa as the voice leader? But if you think this sounds like a big move to breaking down territorial boundaries set by the biggest players in vertically integrated voice and hardware services, look closer and you will see some very notable absences. Namely, Google, Apple and Samsung are among the bigger companies that are not on board. | | | | | | | | Kobalt Pt. IV: Kobalt's edge in changing the music industry | | | | | | | Extra Crunch media columnist Eric Peckham concludes part 4 of his Kobalt EC-1 package, this time assessing Kobalt's strengths and weaknesses as an investment, and how it may transform the music industry in the future. This is Kobalt's dilemma in publishing: high-potential songwriters breaking into the industry want help securing the right co-writing sessions and cuts to put them on the map. Traditional publishers act as agents hustling to make this happen. Since Kobalt's economic stake in a new songwriter is so much smaller, it has to operate in a more scalable way until the writer has a track record that warrants more hands-on support. Traditional publishers will take bigger early-stage risks because they have much greater upside. | | | | | | | | 'We are seeing volume and interest in Peloton explode,' says company president on listing day | | | | | | | Peloton debuted on the stock market this week to relatively weak trading numbers, ending slightly down at $25.24 from its IPO price of $27. That's great for the company (first day trading pops are a bit of a bullshit exercise). TechCrunch VC reporter Kate Clark analyzed the company and also interviewed William Lynch, Peloton's president, about where the company stands today and what is in store for its future. Kate: Peloton opened about 5% down this morning. Was the IPO mispriced? William: We let the bankers sort all that out. We feel great about the bankers and this was a big day for Peloton and the team. It was primarily to raise capital, Kate. We are incredibly excited about today. The investors that have been along the ride with us, many of them were the biggest investors in the IPO. Seven of the 15 biggest buyers in this IPO have been in at least one to two rounds with us. We couldn't be more excited about today. This is as confident as we've ever been. | | | | | | | | Europe shows the way in online privacy | | | | | | | EQT Ventures partner Alastair Mitchell writes in with an Extra Crunch guest analysis about the opportunity that comes from Europe's tougher rules around online privacy: Could startups and app developers shake off the App Store shackles? Could a new recommendation engine like Canopy replace search from Google (I'm looking for the one that will!) — using data on our phones to deliver amazing recommendations for everything (like Spotify does for music) but with a "privacy-first" approach that does not store or own any data about us on their servers (like Permutive, [an EQT portfolio company])? Could a fledgling social network challenge Facebook by promising better respect for privacy? All of those once unthinkable scenarios now seem viable. | | | | | | | | Not all is predictable on Facebook's social Horizon | | | | | | | VR enthusiast and SF-based reporter Lucas Matney explores the development of Facebook's Horizon, a sort of massive multi-player online world with avatars: Horizon's debut this year included a flashy trailer for what quickly seemed to be the company's biggest gamble and first potential social hit, a massive multi-player online world. In introducing the software, Zuckerberg talked about people-centric software as Facebook's "bread-and-butter," noting, "We build a lot of the best social experiences for phones and computers, and we want to do this for virtual reality as well." But Facebook does not actually appear to hold that much of an advantage over much smaller game studios in terms of understanding how to make social virtual reality experience take off. | | | | | | | | TC's Greg Epstein and Kate Clark talk mental health startups and the 'Cult of the Founder' | | | | | | | weerapatkiatdumrong / Getty Images | | | Our resident Extra Crunch ethicist Greg Epstein sat down with Kate Clark to discuss a wide number of major tech developments this week, including mental health, the challenges at WeWork, grit and founders, and the perverse incentives in the VC industry: Epstein: Before we wrap up, is there an issue or story in tech and ethics that's come up for you lately, that we haven't discussed? Again, you've been very humble in not claiming to be an 'ethics person.' But just as a human being who is also an insider in tech and VC, what seems most urgent, that people aren't paying enough attention to? Clark: Well, I don't know, I mean how much of an ethics issue this is, but something I think about is the super-voting shares and the dual-class stock structure that gives founders, CEOs — and we talked about cult of the founder — it gives them power to make decisions, even when they take a company public and have sold all those shares to public shareholders. That is a really strange dynamic that is so accepted now for Silicon Valley companies. Google did it, and since then many people have done it. Is it fair? And if we're going to go about it that way, then is it even a publicly shared company if someone like Adam Neumann has 30 votes per every one vote that a public shareholder has, which was going to be the case [until] they changed that? | | | | | | | | Why Maxar CTO Walter Scott thinks now is the time to address the orbital traffic boom | | | | | | | NicoElNino / Getty Images | | | Finally this week, Darrell Etherington interviewed Walter Scott of Maxar, a publicly-traded space company, about the challenges posed by the increasing popularity of space. With more spacecraft and satellites reaching orbit every year, orbital traffic is a huge concern for operators concerned with safety and reliability. To date, there have been some initiatives to ensure that there's some kind of collaboration between business and other entities operating in near-Earth space. UNOOSA, as mentioned, monitors launches and active orbital objects, and oversees international laws and treaties that set ground rules for official outer space activities by state actors. But for a surprising amount of commercial space activity in particular, there's been almost an 'honor system' approach to avoiding conflict, whereby operators just have to hope their peers have good intentions and practices. "That's the classic tragedy of commons that has resulted in things like overfishing," Scott said. | | | | | | | | 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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