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| |  Image Credits: Nigel Sussman | | Alex Wilhelm broke out his book of spells yesterday for “some Monday morning mathmagic” to speculate about the potential valuation for Databricks, the cloud-based analytics platform. The firm is reportedly launching an IPO in the first half of 2021, so Alex performed “constructive financial surgery” to determine what a publicly-traded Databricks might be worth. Working backwards from the company’s YoY growth over the last few quarters, Alex found impressive run rates. By the end of Q2 2021, he concluded that a $10 billion valuation “seems pretty doable provided reasonable growth in the coming three quarters.”
Today at 11 a.m. Pacific/2 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. GMT, GV general partner M.G. Siegler joins us for an episode of Extra Crunch Live. Siegler, a TechCrunch alumnus who now focuses on early-stage startups, will share his observations about how the COVID-19 pandemic continues to impact VC in 2020. The chat is open to Extra Crunch members, so please bring your questions. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch this week; be well! Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
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| |  Image Credits: Nigel Sussman | | Today, Alex Wilhelm recapped his top ten startups from Techstars’ October cohorts in Atlanta, New York City, LA plus the Techstars & Western Union Accelerator, which focuses on startups hoping to disrupt the payments industry. “Unluckily for our goal of picking favorites, I liked nearly every startups' demo,” he writes, but I insisted that he narrow it down: - Meal Me
- Swivl
- Please Assist Me
- Treasure
- Ayana Therapy
- Pod People
- StatsHelix
- 1SM
- Cover
- OnePipe
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| |  Image Credits: Treedeo / Getty Images | | In his weekly security column, Zack Whittaker recounted how hackers spreading a cryptocurrency scam tricked remote Twitter employees into giving them access to their internal tools. The successful attack is an object lesson for any startup with remote workers: because so many Twitter employees have been having VPN issues, hackers got the access they needed by pretending to be from the company’s IT department. Also in Decrypted: - Open-source YouTube download tool hit by DMCA takedown, but backfires
- Meet Google security researcher Maddie Stone
- Funding rounds for security startups Grayshift, Cyberpion and Arctic Wolf
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| |  Image Credits: David Wall / Getty Images | | CircleUp co-founder and former CEO Ryan Caldbeck released a letter last week he’d written to a problematic former board member. So problematic, in fact, CircleUp bought out the unnamed investor’s firm. It’s not uncommon to butt heads with board members, but if a relationship becomes toxic, founders need to intervene, writes Silicon Valley reporter Connie Loizos. She interviewed venture recruiter Jon Holman and Joel Peterson, a VC and professor at Stanford's business school, about the best way to cope with problematic directors. “They might be absurdly smart," said Holman, but “what they know about building companies, raising money and management styles can be nothing whatsoever, and it's often the least confident people who make the most noise.” Read more | | | |
| |  | | Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm’s October report on Boston’s startup ecosystem found that Q3 2020 gave many companies a push and led “investors back into the check-writing arena.” According to PitchBook data for Q3, Boston raised $4.34 billion, NYC metro startups raised $4.45 billion and Los Angeles firms raised $3.90 billion. “Boston could start 2021 as the number-two place to raise venture capital in the country,” found Natasha and Alex. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Uppsala University | | With a focus on AI, Devin Coldewey’s recurring science column gathers recent technological breakthroughs and discusses their potential applications. In his latest edition of Deep Science: - Self-docking autonomous submersibles
- Predicting Alzheimer's through speech patterns
- Building quieter drones
- Space-based ML improves computer vision
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| |  Image Credits: Bryce Durbin | | When Quibi announced last week that it would shutter operations after operating for six months and raising $1.75 billion, “I told you sos” fell from the sky like raindrops. Thankfully, Brian Heater submitted a schadenfreude-free post-mortem that examines many of the (unvalidated) assumptions that pushed Quibi to market, noting chiefly that “Quibi's strategy primarily defined itself by its constraints.” Read more | | | |
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