Want to talk about the future? Join me on Technotopia

Technotopia is a podcast about the future. It assumes the world won’t fall into a dystopia and therefore is optimistic about our chances for human success. I’m looking for cool people to talk to and I’d like for you to join me.

I love guests who are are excited about the future and technology but I do not require a technology background. I want artists, writers, programmers, makers, and thinkers. I want to ask smart people why we shouldn’t despair.

Want to join in? Fill this out to schedule a time. PR people fill it out as if you were your client so I can contact them directly. I usually record a few episodes a week so I have a nice buffer during the month.

Before you come on:
1. Listen to at least one episode. You can check it out here.
2. Understand you are not pitching your company or project. This is a discussion about the future. No CMOs or PR people unless you also play a mean theremin.
3. The only question I really ask is “What will the world look like in 20 years?” Everything else stems from that. Be prepared for a conversation.
4. I prefer doers to marketers.
5. Please be energetic. I feed off of your energy. The worst podcasts are the ones where I get your in-booth pitch from whatever conference you just attended. The best ones are when you are ready and excited to talk about the future.

If you have any questions email me at john@techcrunch.com. Otherwise I’m looking forward to chatting with you.

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Twitter also sold data access to Cambridge Analytica researcher

Since it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the personal data of millions of Facebook users, one question has lingered in the minds of the public: What other data did Dr. Aleksandr Kogan gain access to?

Twitter confirmed to The Telegraph on Saturday that GSR, Kogan’s own commercial enterprise, had purchased one-time API access to a random sample of public tweets from a five-month period between December 2014 and April 2015. Twitter told Bloomberg that, following an internal review, the company did not find any access to private data about people who use Twitter.

Twitter sells API access to large organizations or enterprises for the purposes of surveying sentiment or opinion during various events, or around certain topics or ideas.

Here’s what a Twitter spokesperson said to The Telegraph:

Twitter has also made the policy decision to off-board advertising from all accounts owned and operated by Cambridge Analytica. This decision is based on our determination that Cambridge Analytica operates using a business model that inherently conflicts with acceptable Twitter Ads business practices. Cambridge Analytica may remain an organic user on our platform, in accordance with the Twitter Rules.

Obviously, this doesn’t have the same scope as the data harvested about users on Facebook. Twitter’s data on users is far less personal. Location on the platform is opt-in and generic at that, and users are not forced to use their real name on the platform.

Still, it shows just how broad the Cambridge Analytica data collection was ahead of the 2016 election.

We reached out to Twitter and will update when we hear back.

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From dorm room to Starbucks, Rip Van Wafels is bringing Euro-inspired snack to the masses

Rip Pruisken waffled in college (we got that pun safely out of the way for now). He was a student in the Ivy League at Brown University, and had focused on academics for much of his life. His parents were physicists, and “I thought I would study some sort of cookie-cutter path of studying something that I would use post-college,” he explained. “I didn’t really consider entrepreneurship to be a viable option because I was still in that frame of mind.“

It was during a study trip to Italy that he had an epiphany. He was inside an Italian bookstore looking through business books when he suddenly realized that he had discovered a new passion. “If you can build stuff at a profit, you can build more stuff, and how cool is that? That was my aha moment,” he said.

Being an entrepreneur was one thing, but it wasn’t clear what Pruisken should sell. He had grown up in Amsterdam, where he used to eat stroopwafel, a snack composed of two thin waffle pastries melded together with a syrup center. During his freshman year, he had brought over a large quantity of them to school, and “all of my friends devoured them.” Remembering their popularity, “I literally started making them in my dorm in college, and started selling them on campus” during his junior year.

Selling ‘Van Wafels’ at Brown University

That was 2010. Today, Rip Van Wafels can be found in 12,000 Starbucks locations, and is a popular snack at tech companies, with some larger companies going through tens of thousands of units a week.

Their popularity comes from the intersection of a number of food trends. The snacks are made with natural ingredients and are healthy, with low calorie counts and limited sugar. Perhaps most importantly, they taste great, with different flavors that are designed to strike different moods (a chocolate wafel can work as dessert, while the strawberry wafel feels more like breakfast). The company currently produces eight flavors.

While the startup food company has had tremendous success, none of this was planned a decade ago when Pruisken got started. He worked with co-founder and co-CEO Marco De Leon, who was two years behind Pruisken at Brown University and was a good friend from Brazil looking for a change of pace from his Morgan Stanley internship.

They spent two years on campus trying to improve product marketing and the quality of the snack, which in hindsight was an important iteration process with what would become the company’s core consumer: well-educated and health-conscious tech workers.

The two stumbled into their market and stumbled into their name. “It started as Rip Wafel,” Pruisken explained, “and we got a cease and desist letter from Van’s,” which makes frozen food waffles among other products. A professor suggested Rip van Winkle, and that inspired the company’s current name. Pruisken himself was so enamored with the brand he changed his own name — Abhishek, which he had grown up with in Amsterdam — to Rip.

After much work, the two founders discovered that a tech company was particularly enjoying the snacks. “We realized we found this insight that one of our customers in the northeast was a tech company, and we talked to them and they said that it was the perfect treat that was an alternative to a candy bar,” he explained. So Pruisken borrowed the couch of his brother and started going door-to-door selling these Euro snacks to every tech company he could find, eventually 80 of them in one summer.

As he sold wafels, the same pattern would hold up. An order for one case would become two cases, and then 10 and then 20 of them. Eventually, word-of-mouth and distributor partnerships got the snack into the mini-kitchens of dozens of tech companies in San Francisco, as well as in Peet’s Coffee, Whole Foods, and ultimately Starbucks.

Pruisken believes the company’s success has come from iterating on the snack much as a software engineer might fiddle with JavaScript. “We have been reinventing our product every two years,” he said. “We are trying to make our product healthier while providing this very indulgent taste.” That includes experimenting with new ingredients like tapioca syrup and chickpea powder that can provide better nutrition at reduced sugar levels.

He sees the future of the company much the same way. “You can only cut the cycle time down by so much even if you do everything in-house. There are certain components you need to source like certain ingredients or packaging foam,” Pruisken explained. “The way to get ahead is to plan way ahead. So work on the things you want to launch in two years right now.” That includes a number of new flavors, as well as potentially adding products that touch on the brain-enhancing nootropics space.

Ultimately, Pruisken wants to redefine the category of packaged foods. “Convenient foods have been associated with cheaper, lower qualities and generally unhealthy foods in the US,” he said. “I think it would be great if that was elevated not just in the food space but broader.” From a foreign food in a Brown University dorm room to redefining the products on every grocery store shelf, stumbling has paid off for Rip Van, which is taking over the world one wafel at a time.

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Emissary wants to make sales networking obsolete

There is nothing meritocratic about sales. A startup may have the best product, the best vision, and the most compelling presentation, only to discover that their sales team is talking to the wrong decision-maker or not making the right kind of small talk. Unfortunately, that critical information — that network intelligence — isn’t written down in a book somewhere or on an online forum, but generally is uncovered by extensive networking and gossip.

For David Hammer and his team at Emissary, that is a problem to solve. “I am not sure I want a world where the best networkers win,” he explained to me.

Emissary is a hybrid SaaS marketplace which connects sales teams on one side with people (called emissaries, naturally) who can guide them through the sales process at companies they are familiar with. The best emissaries are generally ex-executives and employees who have recently left the target company, and therefore understand the decision-making processes and the politics of the organization. “Our first mission is pretty simple: there should be an Emissary on every deal out there,” Hammer said.

Expert networks, such as GLG, have been around for years, but have traditionally focused on investors willing to shell out huge dollars to understand a company’s strategic thinking. Emissary’s goal is to be much more democratized, targeting a broader range of both decision-makers and customers. It’s product is designed to be intelligent, encouraging customers to ask for help before a sales process falters. The startup has raised $14 million to date according to Crunchbase, with Canaan leading the last series A round.

While Emissary is certainly a creative startup, its the questions spanning knowledge arbitrage, labor markets, and ethics it poses that I think are most interesting.

Sociologists of science generally distinguish between two forms of knowledge, concepts descended from the work of famed scholar Michael Polanyi. The first is explicit knowledge — the stuff you find in books and on TechCrunch. These are facts and figures — a funding round was this size, or the CEO of a company is this individual. The other form is tacit knowledge. The quintessential example is riding a bike — one has to learn by doing it, and no number of physics or mechanics textbooks are going to help a rider avoid falling down.

While org charts may be explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge is the core of all organizations. It’s the politics, the people, the interests, the culture. There is no handbook on these topics, but anyone who has worked in an organization long enough knows exactly the process for getting something done.

That knowledge is critical and rare, and thus ripe for monetization. That was the original inspiration for Hammer when he set out to build a new startup.“Why does Google ever make a bad decision?” Hammer asked at the time. Here you have the company with the most data in the world and the tools to search through it. “How do they not have the information they need?” The answer is that it has all the explicit knowledge in the world, but none of the implicit knowledge required.

That thinking eventually led into sales, where the information asymmetry between a customer and a salesperson was obvious. “The more I talked to sales people, the more I realized that they needed to understand how their account thinks,” Hammer said. Sales automation tools are great, but what message should someone be sending, and to who? That’s a much harder problem to solve, but ultimately the one that will lead to a signed deal. Hammer eventually realized that there were individuals who could arbitrage their valuable knowledge for a price.

That monetization creates a new labor market for these sorts of consultants. For employees at large companies, they can now leave, take a year off or even retire, and potentially get paid to talk about what they know about an organization. Hammer said that “people are fundamentally looking for ways to be helpful,” and while the pay is certainly a major highlight, a lot of people see an opportunity to just get engaged. Clearly that proposition is attractive, since the platform has more than 10,000 emissaries today.

What makes this market more fascinating long-term though is whether this can transition from a part-time, between-jobs gig into something more long-term and professional. Could people specialize in something like “how does Oracle purchase things,” much as how there is an infrastructure of people who support companies working through the government procurement system?

Hammer demurred a bit on this point, noting that “so much of that is being on the other side of those walls.” It’s not any easier for a potential consultant to learn the decision-making outside of a company than it is for a salesperson. Furthermore, the knowledge of an internal company’s processes degrades, albeit at different rates depending on the organization. Some companies experience rapid change and turnover, while knowledge of other companies may last a decade or more.

All that said, Hammer believes that there will come a tipping point when companies start to recommend emissaries to help salespeople through their own processes. Some companies who are self-aware and acknowledge their convoluted procurement procedures may eventually want salespeople to be advised by people who can smooth the process for all sides.

Obviously, with money and knowledge trading hands, there are significant concerns about ethics. “Ethics have to be at the center of what we do,” Hammer said. “They are not sharing deep confidential information, they’re sharing knowledge about the culture of the organization.” Emissary has put in place procedures to monitor ethics compliance. “Emissaries can not work with competitors at the same time,” he said. Furthermore, emissaries obviously have to have left their companies, so they can’t influence the buying decision itself.

Networking has been the millstone of every salesperson. It’s time consuming, and there is little data on what calls or coffees might improve a sale or not. If you take Emissary’s vision to its asymptote though, all that could potentially be replaced. Under the guidance of people in the know, the fits and starts of sales could be transformed into a smooth process with the right talking points at just the right time. Maybe the best products could win after all.

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CultureCrush breaks out of the swipe right box

Most dating apps are aimed at a general population, but people of color and immigrants are rarely well-represented. CultureCrush wants to fix that. This app, created by a team led by former attorney Amanda Spann, lets you search the dating pool by nationality, ethnicity and tribe in an effort to help fish out of water find a match.

“We have 24,000 users, 5% of which are premium paid users, and the app has generated revenue every month since its existence. Upon our relaunch, we anticipate this number to rapidly accelerate,” said Spann. “CultureCrush is the only app of its kind that enables you to search by nationality, ethnicity, and tribe. We have nearly 1,000 tribes from across the continent of Africa. Akin to JDate, CultureCrush allows users to connect with others from specific ethnic or national backgrounds. Anyone who grew up in a specific culture understands the magic of connecting with others from the same or similar background. CultureCrush improves upon the JDate model by establishing an inclusive ecosystem where all cultures can find and date each other, or any other culture they like.”

The app also supports friend-to-friend matchmaking and has a three-day message countdown that dumps matches after 72 hours. The app is similar to other niche dating services like BlackPeopleMeet, PlentyOfGeeks and even Trump.Dating. There’s someone for everyone, the thinking goes, but sometimes you have to shrink the pool.

Spann created the app in Chicago after talking with a friend of hers from Nigeria. She said her friend found it difficult to date especially because of the cultural divide she experienced on traditional dating apps. Further, Spann and her friend felt uncomfortable on traditional dating apps after getting fetish comments like “Hi Chocolate Goddess.” For her, enough was enough.

“It’s predicted that by the end of this year African-Americans will be the most represented out of any ethnic group online. Pairing this with the fact that African-Americans are currently spending nearly 48 billion on travel annually and 8.7 percent of the overall US black population is comprised of immigrants, we believe that 2018 is ripe with opportunity for CultureCrush,” she said. “We’re excited to see how our users respond to the new features and we are looking forward to focusing our energy and attention back into growing our user base after our initial setbacks.”

“We decided to pursue the project after observing that mainstream dating apps often fail to account for cultural preferences and rarely yield positive experiences for users of color,” said Spann. “Imagine being a Nigerian man who just moved from Lagos to Chicago for med school, it might be nice to meet a local woman from your tribe. Or being a Jamaican woman spending a week in Copenhagen for work who wants to grab a drink with someone of Caribbean descent. Or what if you are an African-American who lives in a predominately white community, having difficulty meeting other people of color,” she said.

The app is available now and you can sign up to be notified when the new app hits the stores.

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Aloe Bud is the adorable self-care app you’ve been waiting for

The buzz or chime of a push notification on your phone is, at best, a distraction, and at worst, a source of stress and anxiety. A new app called Aloe Bud wants to make those push notifications into something more welcome: gentle reminders to take care of yourself and your own needs. With its configurable reminders, Aloe Bud will encourage you to take a break, drink water, move your body, rest, breathe, and more.

The app is the latest to enter the booming “self-care” market, which caters to a largely younger demographic who are better handling the pressures of modern-day life by carving out time for themselves to mediate, relax, and practice other mindfulness techniques. Some older folks have scoffed at the movement, claiming millennials are too self-involved – or they just scratch their head in confusion. (“Mindfulness?”)

But there’s real demand for these self-care applications and services – in the first quarter of the year, the top ten self-care apps pulled in $15 million in revenue. Now who’s scoffing?

However, most of the self-care apps today are focused on meditation and calming techniques, not on the day-to-day aspects of self-care.

That’s where Aloe Bud comes in.

Even cynics will have to admit the app is kind of adorable with its soft color scheme and its original, retro-ish pixel art icons.

It’s also simple to use – there’s no sign-up process where you have to give your name, email or phone number. No “friend-finding” function, nor the competitive pressures of joining yet another social network, where people can track your activity and judge you accordingly. Instead, the app launches you right into a simple screen where you tap icons like “hydrate,” “breathe,” or “motivate” to set up when and how you want to be reminded. You can choose to use Aloe Bud without reminders by just checking in to those activities, if you prefer, and you can use it for journaling, too.

If you plan on using Aloe Bud long-term, you’ll probably want to pop for the $4.99 expansion pack which includes different versions of the reminder texts so your notifications’ messaging doesn’t become too routine. However, the app itself is free to use.

The idea for Aloe Bud – whose name is meant to invoke the soothing qualities of the Aloe plant – comes from Amber Discko.

Discko’s background in community, social, and development led to a number of opportunities over the years, including running social media for the popular Denny’s Twitter account, working as a creative strategist at Tumblr, founding the online publication and community Femsplain, and working on the digital organizing team for the Hillary for America campaign.

When the election was over, Discko needed to recover, and turned to self-care apps.

“I found myself destroyed mentally afterwards. I wasn’t leaving the house at all. I needed to find a way to get myself back to a grounded normal state,” they said.

Discko then tried a number of other self-care apps, but didn’t feel any of them did the trick.

“I didn’t find myself really keeping with it. I either forgot about the app, or I felt like they were shaming me, so I deleted them right away,” Discko said. “I couldn’t find one that felt like it worked for my personal needs – I’m a sensitive person. I work best with positive, encouraging reinforcement,” they added.

[gallery ids="1629784,1629785,1629786,1629787,1629788,1629789,1629790"]

Aloe Bud was born of these frustrations, but originally as an online community where people could check in with their self-care routines. However, there was growing demand to turn the self-care system into an app. To raise the funds for the app’s development, Discko ran a Kickstarter campaign, which led to 1,538 backers donating over $50,000 to the cause.

A year later, Aloe Bud officially arrived, with help from the development team Lickability (Houseparty, Jet, Meetup), user interface designer Tin Kadoic, and pixel art icon designer Katie Belton.

The app went up on the Apple App Store this week, and was pre-ordered by 1,000 people. By day one, it had already gained 5,000 downloads.

Aloe Bud is deceptively simple. A lot of care and research actually went into its making, as it turns out.

Discko worked with a mental health researcher to help craft the app, and referenced other research in the space, as well. They even carefully selected language in the app so it wouldn’t be triggering – for example, the reminders to eat aren’t referenced as “food,” which people have hang-ups about (or possibly even eating disorders). Instead, it’s referenced as “fuel.”

Aloe Bud is not for everyone, but it will make sense for those who appreciate little reminders to take care of ourselves – like those in Apple Watch, which now alerts you to stand and to breathe, for example.

And it could be especially useful for those who work online, or who face ongoing harassment because of their work – something Discko is familiar with, too.

“I was getting toxic push notifications and it was really destroying my sanity for a while. I deleted Twitter off my phone and replaced it with Aloe Bud,” said Discko. “I encourage a lot of people to do that.”

Aloe Bud is a free download for iOS.

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Meet the first four startups in the MetaProp Bridge international accelerator

Real estate-focused MetaProp NYC has been adding new programs on top of its core accelerator. The latest: The MetaProp Bridge at Columbia University.

It’s an international accelerator designed specifically for real estate and property tech-related startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa that are looking to expand into North America. Participants get access to MetaProp mentors, advisory services and up to $250,000 in financing.

The 14-week program begins with eight weeks in London before moving to New York City and concluding with a two-week, five-city roadshow across North America.

“From our first days on the ground in London, it was clear that this is a critical time for PropTech in EMEA,” said MetaProp’s Leila Collins in a statement. “There is an abundance of compelling technology for the real estate industry emerging from the region. We are happy to now have the infrastructure to partner with and support some of the most promising EMEA PropTech startups as they launch in North America.”

MetaProp says that less than 4 percent of applicants were admitted to this inaugural cohort. Here are the four participating startups:

• Airlite says it’s creating natural paint that also purifies of odors, bacteria and other air pollution. (UK, Switzerland and Italy)
• 720° is a cloud-based analytics service for monitoring indoor air and environmental quality. (Finland)
• Frontdoor offers business intelligence for real estate agents. (France)
• YourWelcome is building a technology hub for vacation rental owners — specifically a tablet where they can provide instructions for their guests and earn money by offering tickets and deals. (UK)

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Maverick, a social network for young women, launches with $2.7M in funding

While Bumble BFF and Hey! Vina help adult women find new friends, there isn’t a social network dedicated to young women.

But Brooke Chaffin and Catherine Connors are looking to change that with the introduction of Maverick, a social network that connects young girls with female mentors to express their creativity in a safe space.

Here’s how it works:

When a new user signs up, they can browse through various challenges set forth by Catalysts, inspiring role models selected specifically by the founders to inspire the younger demographic on the network. These challenges include things like making their own super hero, creating their own dance number or choosing a mantra.

Users, usually between the ages of 10 and 20, can post their response to a challenge via photo or a 30-second video and browse the responses of others. Interestingly, Maverick has done away with ‘likes’ and instead offers points for various types of engagement, like posting a response to a challenge, posting a comment, or giving someone a badge.

For now, there are four badges on the platform (unique, creative, unstoppable, and daring) and the company has plans to add more badges as it grows.

But Maverick isn’t just an app. The company also plans on holding a series of one-day live events across the country, highlighting young women emerging on the platform in categories like STEAM, entrepreneurship, comedy and music.

In fact, the first live event goes down tomorrow in Los Angeles, featuring “Founding Mavericks” or role models such as Chloe & Halle Baily, Brooklyn and Bailey McKnight, Daunnette Reyome, Laurie Hernandez and Ruby Karp.

For now, Maverick is a free app focused on growing its user base. But the founders see an opportunity to turn Maverick into a utility, not unlike LinkedIn, offering a subscription for premium features. And it makes sense that LinkedIn would serve as inspiration for Chaffin and Connors, as LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner is one of Maverick’s investors.

The company has raised $2.7 million in seed funding led by Matt Robinson of Heroic Ventures, with participatino from Susan Lyne and Nisha Dua of BBG Ventures as well as Jeff Weiner.

Here’s what co-founder and Chief Content Officer Catherine Connors had to say:

The research on girls’ social development has shown us the same thing for decades. During early adolescence, the majority of girls stop raising their hands, participating in sports and extra-curricular activities, taking risks, and stepping into leadership roles. In short, they stop believing in themselves. And it’s not because we don’t tell them that they should believe in themselves — it’s that they don’t get enough real opportunity to prove to themselves that they can.

Founders Chaffin and Connors met during their tenure at the Walt Disney Company and kept coming back to the idea of empowering girls through a new social network, and so Maverick was born.

The network is designed with a progression loop not unlike that of a game, where Mavericks can progress toward becoming a Catalyst and inspiring other young women.

The app launches out of beta today.

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Square is acquiring website builder Weebly for $365M

Square just announced that it’s reached an agreement to acquire Weebly for $365 million in cash and stock.

While Square is best known for its payment software and hardware, it’s also been expanding into other areas, for example with the acquisition of food delivery service Caviar and corporate catering startup Zesty.

Weebly, meanwhile, offers easy-to-use website building tools. While those tools can be used by individuals (my personal website is built on Weebly), the company has increasingly focused on serving small businesses and e-commerce companies.

Meanwhile, competitor Squarespace raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation at the end of last year.

Square says that by acquiring Weebly, it can create “one cohesive solution” for entrepreneurs looking to build an online and offline business. And since 40 percent of Weebly’s 625,000 paid subscribers are outside the U.S., the deal will help Square expand globally.

“Square and Weebly share a passion for empowering and celebrating entrepreneurs,” said Square CEO Jack Dorsey in the acquisition release. “Square began its journey with in-person solutions while Weebly began its journey online. Since then, we’ve both been building services to bridge these channels, and we can go even further and faster together.”

Weebly was founded in 2007 by David Rusenko, Chris Fanini and Dan Veltr. (Rusenko, who’s still the company’s CEO, is pictured above.) According to Crunchbase, the company raised $35.7 million in funding from Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, Baseline Ventures, Floodgate, Felicis, Ron Conway and Y Combinator.

Square says the acquisition price includes stock for Weebly founders and employees that will vest over a four-year period.

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MoviePass CEO says he doesn’t know if the one-movie-per-day subscription will ever return

MoviePass is known for a pricing model that sounds too good to be true — in exchange for paying $9.95 per month, subscribers get up to one movie ticket per day.

At least, they used to: If you try to sign up now, that isn’t quite what you’re offered. Instead, there’s a bundle that combines a three-month trial for iHeartRadio All Access with four tickets per month on MoviePass — still a pretty good deal (especially since MoviePass says 88 percent of users see fewer than two movies per month), but not quite as irresistible as the old plan.

Does this represent a permanent change in the MoviePass business model? Well, the company has experimented with bundling before, but when The Hollywood Reporter asked CEO Mitch Lowe whether the movie-per-day-plan might return, he replied, “I don’t know.”

“We just always try different things,” Lowe said. “Every time we try a new promotion, we never put a deadline on it.”

We reached out to a MoviePass spokesperson who confirmed that The Hollywood Reporter story is accurate. They also said that this doesn’t affect any of the subscribers who signed up under the old plan.

MoviePass’ parent company Helios and Matheson Analytics sold additional stock last week in what seemed like a move to raise money for the service. (By the way, TechCrunch’s parent company Verizon recently acquired a stake in Helios and Matheson.) At the same time, filings revealed that an independent auditor had raised “substantial doubt” about whether MoviePass would be able to continue operating as “a going concern.”

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The alternative to the four-hour workweek mindset

Often when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of the tech industry. Social media gurus, SEO “ninjas,” bloggers, etc. It’s a coterie of tech “club promoters.” The hype men of the industry.

“Hack your way to success.” “Meet the right people.” “Become a business superstar.” They’ve found their silver bullet. They boast of building a passive income from a web business, all while traveling the world as the rest of us mortals are slaving away at our 9-5 jobs.

In a world where we are searching for silver bullets, these people seem to have amassed an arsenal of them. Moreover, they’ve found audiences to sell their silver bullets to, en masse.

The most blatant example of this are some of the disciples of the 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss. The book itself is not really the issue. Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work. What is objectionable, however, is the hack-your-way-to-success mentality it has spawned in entrepreneurial circles.

It’s a mindset that is antithetical to everything I know about entrepreneurship; a mindset that I see when I hear people talk about having an amazing idea that they want to farm out to a young college student who can code, or outsourcing development of a product to a cheap dev house. It’s a mindset that assumes entrepreneurship is a series of networking events and fundraising meetings, or even some silver-bullet business connection they have, in lieu of a real distribution strategy. It’s taking a passive approach to a very difficult undertaking.

What is missed in all of this is the mindset of craftsmanship; that one’s expertise and deliberate focus on one’s craft is actually the primary driver for success — and not some crapshoot of a series of hacks.

What happens on the periphery  —  whether it be the towel slapping we see on Twitter from tech celebrities or headline gossip out of TechCrunch  —  is not actually meaningful as a foundation of a business or a profession. Neither are the number of coffee meetings you have scheduled or the amount of networking meetings you attend. These things are tertiary at best, and, at worst, just plain-old distractions.

Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute.

To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of expertise. This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander. It’s the experts that are the drivers — an expertise that is gained from a curiosity, and a mindset of treating one’s craft very seriously.

A startup is by nature a crash-course in developing expertise. What makes startups unique is the sheer dearth of resources. This dearth of resources forces founders to rapidly adapt their skills to meet the demands of the project.

“I didn’t know how to do x, so I just had to figure it out.” This is what I regularly hear from successful founders, whereas “I couldn’t find someone to do x, so I had to reconsider whether to pursue it at all” is a common refrain from unsuccessful founders.

If you step up to the challenge, you’ll realize that the startup is nothing more than a teacher. It, in fact, is a great teacher for no other reason than it demands the accumulation of knowledge quickly for the startup to survive.

A technical founder, whose experience may relegate her or him to a specialist role in a large company, for example, has to adapt and take on more expertise in adjacent technical areas. There simply aren’t the human resources to delegate these tasks to another specialist.

This is true for taking on tasks in other domains, whether that be sales, finance, marketing, management or design. You have to take an interest in these domains because there is no one else to fill these roles in your early-stage company.

It’s in exploring these unknown territories and facing the headwind of startup challenges that it becomes clear that the startup is merely a force of catalytic professional and character growth. With actual success of any given venture subject to the whim of outside forces, this growth is the non-monetary dividend that makes the experience priceless.

That is why the passive, 4-Hour Mindset is so self-defeating. To lounge on a beach or travel the world and not actively engage in building your arsenal of expertise is professional malpractice.

It’s also not practical. No serious company has been created passively — the passive mindset that leads people to say “I’ve got a great idea, I’ll hire a team to build it out” or “I have this great connection who will drive sales” while I play armchair visionary simply doesn’t work. Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason than ideas are not self-executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators.

Most importantly, to think of a business as a series of hacks and transactional relationships, you’ll never amass the expertise that your future self and future businesses need to succeed. Startups fail withstanding founder expertise, of course. It is certainly not sufficient to be an expert. However, expertise does make it possible to traverse the struggles of creating businesses over the course of a career. You’re not simply working on the idea in front of you, you’re building the knowledge to succeed at your next projects, as well.

It is the expertise and the mindset of craftsmanship that allows someone like Elon Musk to jump from project to project and sector to sector with the knowledge of how to execute on the highest-level problems. It’s not simply his ability to find interesting ideas — it’s his command of the domains of the business that allow him to execute the way he does. He is the epitome of an interdisciplinary student of his businesses.

If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long-term. Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft. There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career.

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DeepCode cleans your code with the power of AI

Zurich-based DeepCode claims that their system – essentially a tool for analyzing and improving code – is like Grammarly for programmers. The system, which uses a corpus of 250,000 rules, reads your public and private Github repositories and tells you how to fix problems, remain compatible, and generally improve your programs.

Founded by Veselin Raychev, advisor Martin Vechev, and Boris Paskalev, the team has extensive experience in machine learning and AI research. This project is a spinoff from ETH in Switzerland and is a standalone research project turned programming utility.

How does it work? Pretty well. I ran one of my public repositories through the system and received 49 suggestions in 449 files. The fixes range from literal code changes – changing name: String, to name: {type: String}, – to suggestions for code that might be actually missing in function calls. It’s an interesting tool, especially if you need help finding hidden bugs in your code. The advice this tool gives is also surprisingly precise. Because it can build its own recommendations based on large amounts of code it finds things humans might miss.

“We built a platform that understands the intent of the code,” said Paskalev. “We autonomously understand millions of repositories and note the changes developers are making. Then we train our AI engine with those changes and can provide unique suggestions to every single line of code analyzed by our platform.”

“Today we have more than 250K rules and growing daily,” said Paskalev. “Our competition has to manually create rules and the biggest competitor has 3-4,000 rules and they’ve been working for years.

The company is self-funded and recently raised $1.1 million from btov. The founders are serial entrepreneurs. Paskalev worked at Vistaprint and PPAG and Raychev worked for Google and is a researcher in the field of machine learning in programming language semantics.

More than a simple debugger, DeepCode “reads” and tries to compare code to other implementations, giving you best-of-class performance from every line. Now the team just has to get programmers to use it.

“We have a unique platform that understands software code the same way Grammarly understands written language,” Paskalev said. “This unique proposition is positioned us save billions of dollars within the software development community with our first service and then to be on the front end of transforming the industry towards fully autonomous code synthesis.”

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Meet 11 new startups launching out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator

Today, 11 new companies launch out of the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator based in NYC. This is the 14th cohort of startups to launch our of ERA, and each company has received $100,000 in seed funding from the accelerator.

These startups span a wide variety of industries, from hospitality to new retail to healthcare. So without any further ado, here are the 11 companies launching out of ERA:

Butler

Butler wants to handle room service and amenities for hotels, partnering with hotels to provide room service, catering and other food-based amenities from Butler’s various hubs across the city. Using SMS as a means of communication with guests, Butler can serve a larger number of hotels, letting hospitality establishments outsource services like room service. Right now, Butler serves 5,000 rooms in Manhattan.

Choosy

Leveraging machine learning algorithms that scour social media, Choosy quickly whips up fashion designs, sends them to China for manufacturing and offers flash-fashion items via Instagram. As brands like H&M and Top Shop continue to speed up their operations and offerings, Choosy looks to use tech to keep up the pace.

Flume Health

Flume Health works with self-insured employers and healthcare providers to ensure that employees are best utilizing their healthcare benefits. The comapny says that 78 percent of employees don’t understand how their benefits program works, costing companies up to 26 percent more for healthcare. Flume Health uses concierges to connect employees with the best healthcare at the lowest price based on their benefits plan, reducing healthcare costs by 20 percent to 60 percent.

HealthNow

HealNow wants to bridge the gap between healthcare professionals, pharmacies and patients, offering an ordering and payments platform for pharmacies. Patients can pay, schedule deliveries and enter medical information online to receive their prescription or equipment, while doctors and hospitals can offer on-demand delivery of the prescriptions they write.

Myro

Deodorant stops being optional around the age of 13, but many deodorants are made with potentially harmful chemicals and toxins. Myro offers an all-natural formula in a refillable container, letting users feel good about what they’re putting on their body as well as reducing plastic waste. Plus, they smell good. Myro launches later this summer.

Orcadex

Orcadex is a business intelligence platform focused on the blockchain and cryptocurrency verticals, collecting data via machine learning and natural language processing to offer analysis and insights to customers. The platform helps professionals create models and identify trends as the blockchain space continues to rapidly evolve. Orcadex launches to a closed group of institutional investors in June.

Spin Analytics

Spin Analytics is a fintech company focused on offering credit risk modeling for financial institutions. The company works with banks to offer actionable insights for meeting regulatory compliance and reporting requirements, reducing the time and cost of maintaining compliance.

Spryfit

Spryfit is where HQ meets the gym. Users connect their fitness trackers and try to achieve their fitness goals with the hopes of winning a cash prize. The idea is to use underutilized health data from wearables and smartphones to motivate users to get fit for the cash prize. The company currently has 50,000 users.

StellarEmploy

Hourly workers like waiters tend to churn in and out of positions often. StellarEmploy uses deep learning algorithms to match employee performance to job fundamentals, letting companies recruit hourly workers that will enjoy the job, do a great job, and stay put. Some of StellarEmploy’s customers include Home Chef and IBEX Global.

Welnys

Big companies understand that healthy employees are both more effective and more cost efficient, which is why many companies have implemented a wellness program for their workers. But Welnys wants to do the heavy lifting for those companies, offering a marketplace for workplace wellness vendors such as yoga and meditation instructors, nutritionists and more.

Young Alfred

Young Alfred wants to make buying home insurance as simple as possible. The platform lets users identify their needs, while a machine learning algorithm identifies customer risk and makes custom recommendations for home insurance that fit the users needs. Young Alfred has relationships with Progressive and Hippo, and users can check-out online direct from the Young Alfred website.

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Digital banking startup Revolut raises $250M at a valuation of $1.7B

Revolut, the London-based fintech that offers a digital banking account and sprawling set of other financial services, is disclosing that it has raised a whopping $250 million in Series C funding, less than three years since launching.

The new round, which gives the company a $1.7 billion post-money valuation — a five-fold increase in under a year, we’re told — was led by Hong Kong based DST Global, along with a group of new and existing investors that includes Index Ventures, and Ribbit Capital. In case you aren’t keeping up, it brings the total amount raised by Revolut to $340 million in less than 36 months.

To put this into context, TransferWise — London’s undisputed fintech darling and on some features a direct competitor to Revolut — recently announced $280 million in Series D investment, giving the company a reported post-money valuation of $1.6 billion. The difference? It took TransferWise seven years compared to Revolut’s three.

That’s testament to how much value investors are now placing on bank-disrupting fintech or perhaps signs of a fintech bubble. Or both. It is also worth remembering that these are private valuations with neither company yet to float on the public markets, even if TranserWise looks increasingly a candidate to do so.

Meanwhile, Revolut says the new round of funding and surge in valuation follows “incredible growth figures to date,” with the fintech now processing $1.8 billion through the platform each month and signing up between 6,000 and 8,000 new customers every day.

It claims nearly 2 million customers in total, of which 250,000 are daily active users, roughly 400,000 are weekly active users and 900,000 are monthly active users. The company says the target is 100 million customers in the next five years.

For a little more context, TransferWise has 3 million customers. I’m also told U.K. challenger bank Monzo now has 630,000 current account customers, of which 200,000 are daily active users, 360,000 are weekly active users and 500,000 are monthly active users. (In both Revolut and Monzo’s case, active users are defined as making at least one financial transaction.)

With the aim of persuading both consumers and businesses to ditch their traditional bank, Revolut offers most of the features you’d expect of a current account, including physical and virtual debit cards, direct debits and money transfer. Its “attack vector” (to borrow Monzo’s Tom Blomfield’s phrase) was originally low exchange fees when spending in a foreign currency, which undoubtedly fuelled much of the startup’s early growth and mindshare, but new features and products are being added at an increasingly fast pace.

Many of these are through partnerships with other fintech companies, and include travel insurance, phone insurance, credit, savings, and cryptocurrency. The latter looks like riding the hype cycle almost perfectly. Revolut is also applying for a European banking license, which would enable it to begin balance sheet lending, too.

To that end, Revolut says the Series C funding will be used to go beyond Europe and expand worldwide, starting with the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Australia this year. The company also expects to increase its workforce from 350 to around 800 employees in 2018.

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Adtech company BuySellAds reportedly acquires Digg

It looks like Digg has found a new home: digital advertising company BuySellAds.

While neither company has put out an official announcement, BuySellAds CEO Todd Garland confirmed the acquisition to Fast Company.  Fast Company also reports that Digg’s technology team was not part of the deal.

Garland seems very aware that Digg readers may be skeptical about a company called BuySellAds, but he said, “Don’t pay attention to the name, people.” He also said, “Our plan with Digg is to not screw it up.”

We’ve reached out to BuySellAds, Betaworks and Digg, and we’ll update if we hear back.

The news aggregator was founded in 2004, then acquired by startup studio Betaworks in 2012. It took on additional funding from Gannett a couple of years ago.

Now it seems that last month’s shut down of Digg Reader was a sign that there were changes in the works.

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Rookout raises $4.2M for its rapid production debugging platform

Few people get into coding because they enjoy debugging, but since there’s no such thing as perfect code, issues inevitably pop up. Israeli startup Rookout is tackling one aspect of this by helping developers track down issues in production code without forcing developers to do any additional coding to write additional tests and re-deploy their apps. As the company announced today, it has raised $4.2 million in seed funding from TLV Partners and Emerge.

Rookout co-founders Or Weis and Liran Haimovitch told me that their own experience in writing code led them to starting this project. Weis, who has taken the CEO role, with Haimovitch being the CTO, noted that only a few years ago, your code would run in its own box and you’d have full control over it. These days, however, your code may run in multiple locations and it’s virtually impossible to get access to the entire state of an application. So when bugs pop up in production — as they often do, despite all of the testing that happens throughout the development process — debugging becomes a real pain point.

Rookout’s solution for this is to instrument the code with “breakpoints that don’t break.” To make this work, you connect Rookout’s online IDE with your code repository on GitHub, Bitbucket or another git hosting service (or with your local file system). The IDE will pull in the code and let you browse it. Developers typically have a hunch about where a bug may be, so when you get to the suspect file, you use Rookout’s visual rule editor to set your virtual breakpoint. Once the production code runs again, all of the data is automatically pushed into the IDE so that you can examine the entire stack trace up to where you set the breakpoint.

All of this works for code that was written in Python and Node.js, as well as for Java virtual machine (JVM) languages like Scala or Kotlin. As for environments, the service currently works for code that’s deployed on AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and local servers, where it can be used with both serverless and containerized applications, too.

While Rookout focuses on collecting data, the team was pretty clear about the fact that Rookout doesn’t want to be an application performance monitoring tool. You can, however, forward your Rookout data to these kind of tools.

Weis and Haimovitch tell me the company now has 14 employees and “dozens” of customers in the pipeline. Looking ahead, the team plans to add support for Go and other languages as the requests come in, and gradually add more IDE support, too.

Like at many a startup, the founders are still working out their pricing model. The current plan is to focus it around the number of hosts that a company is using, though that could still change.

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The FDA is cracking down on Juul e-cig sales to minors

The FDA has its eye on Juul Labs, the e-cigarette company that has captured nearly half of the $2 billion e-cig market.

Yesterday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb announced a new initiative called the Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan. While the agency is focused on making sure kids don’t have easy access to any e-cigs, the Juul vaporizer seems to be of particular concern to them.

As part of the initiative, the FDA has sent a request for information to Juul Labs in an effort to understand why young people are so attracted to the product.

Over the past year, a number of reports have suggested that teen vape use, especially with the Juul, is steeply on the rise.

The request is for documents related to “product marketing; research on the health, toxicological, behavioral or physiologic effects of the products, including youth initiation and use; whether certain product design features, ingredients or specifications appeal to different age groups; and youth-related adverse events and consumer complaints associated with the products.”

In response, Juul Labs issued a press release announcing its plan to combat underage use. The strategy includes an initial investment of $30 million over the next three years going towards independent research, youth and parent education and community engagement efforts. Juul Labs also said it will support federal and state initiatives to raise the legal minimum purchase age to 21+. The company website has required that purchasers be 21 or older since August 2017.

Here’s what Juul CEO Kevin Burns had to say about it:

Our company’s mission is to eliminate cigarettes and help the more than one billion smokers worldwide switch to a better alternative. We are already seeing success in our efforts to enable adult smokers to transition away from cigarettes and believe our products have the potential over the long-term to contribute meaningfully to public health in the U.S. and around the world. At the same time, we are committed to deterring young people, as well as adults who do not currently smoke, from using our products. We cannot be more emphatic on this point: No young person or non-nicotine user should ever try JUUL.

Juul Labs is not the only organization that the FDA is cracking down on. The agency said it had sent out 40 warning letters to retailers selling e-cigs, including the Juul, to minors. Some of those retailers were caught as the result of a ‘blitz’ that has been underway since the beginning of April.

The agency has also asked eBay to take down all listings of Juul vaporizers, which run the risk of being sold to minors.

Alongside the FDA’s request for information from Juul Labs, the agency is also sending out similar letters to other e-cig manufacturers.

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Dolo delivers on the Foursquare prophecy of hyper-local tips

Dolo is the kindness of strangers as an app. Where’s the prettiest place in the park? What’s the best thing on the menu? How do I skip the line? Dolo lets you leave helpful suggestions for anyone nearby. The new social app launches out of beta today to augment the world with serendipitous tips from strangers. Built by two ex-Apple employees and backed with pre-seed funding from Floodgate, Dolo could reveal the secrets and potential friends hidden in the ether around us.

Like any new social app, Dolo will have a steep uphill climb to user growth. There are also apps like Foursquare, guide books like Lonely Planet, and social networks like Facebook and its Recommendations feature to compete with. But they’re often bloated, outdated, or unfocused. Dolo hopes to build a new community around turning the whole world into a bulletin board.

“If you take the construct of a cocktail party or a neighborhood bar, people feel more naturally ‘allowed’ to just mingle, eavesdrop, start a conversation, or even meet someone new” says Dolo co-founder and CEO Raja Haddad. “In larger spaces (a park, a neighborhood, a city), there are no vehicles today that allow such frictionless, comfortable, fun socializing.” That means a local expert’s knowledge ends up trapped while tourists and first-timers wander aimlessly.

Haddad and co-founder Benjamin Vigier met when they joined Apple in 2010 and worked on its Apple Store App before Haddad move on to Apple Watch marketing and Vigier helped develop Apple Pay. They later met Andy Mai at Coachella, who grew the Men’s Fashion Advice subreddit to over a million users. Together they set out “to enable serendipitous ways for people to socialize with other people around them, regardless of their pre-existing social bubbles.”

Dolo’s iOS and Android apps are now open everywhere, but it’s currently focusing on the San Francisco Bay Area where it centered its 4000 user beta. The app start with a feed of the closest tips that automatically re-sort as you move around. Anyone can post that “I need some info or a favor”, “folks need to know this!”, “I’m proposing an event”, or “just chatter and banter”. For example, my first contribution was that you can skip the line at famously overpopulated ice cream shop Bi-Rite Creamery by walking down the block to its soft-serve froyo window near SF’s Dolores Park.

That popular hipster picnic spot is actually where Dolo gets its name. And no, it’s not the same as the now defunct “bespoke app” called Dolo from 2013 that just helped you locate your friends in that park.

I was impressed by Dolo’s approach to safety and moderation that other anonymous and hyper-local apps like Yik Yak and Secret neglected until bullying led to their demise. You can use your real name or a pseudonym on Dolo, and choose a pixelated filter or mask sticker to obscure your face from the public. But then if you connect as friends with someone on the app, “the masks come off” Haddad says, and your profile’s bio is revealed. Meanwhile, users are empowered to moderate comments on their own posts by getting alerted to flags that Dolo reviews too. And all photos get reviewed by a crowdsourced moderation service.

Dolo smartly plans to “focus on achieving density vs. going directly for top-line scale” Haddad explains. That mirrors Facebook’s growth strategy that tried to get lots of users at specific colleges or locations so they don’t enter a ghost town, rather than immediately striving for global scale. It’s already raised $680,000 in a pre-seed round a year ago, but will try to raise a seed round early this summer. It hopes to put that cash into product development, and marketing activations at colleges and public places in the fall. 

Advertisers might be keen to reach potential customers when they’re super close-by and looking for local information. But that will require plenty of users as well as a tough-to-scale local ads sales team. Haddad admits “It’s obviously very challenging to get a social platform off the ground, particularly one that relies on location and density.”

NextDoor has at least proven that people are interested in local info, given it’s active in 160,000 neighborhoods. The question is if an app designed to alert you to what’s around you anywhere, rather than just close to home, will have the same legs. Dolo will also have to outlast specialized apps like Wildfire for celebrity sightings and safety alerts, Citizen for crime mapping, and Hive Social for interest-based communities.

It’s somewhat depressing, but an app like Facebook that already has ubiquity, frequent use, and local ad relationships might be better equipped to build this product than a startup. Dolo will have to figure out how to make adding and observing tips a constant enough behavior that users don’t forget about it.

But at least Dolo isn’t burdened by a hundred other features crowding out the local recommendations for attention, nor is it constrained by relying on your existing friend graph. A dedicated app for the insights of passersby holds the promise of not only illuminating what’s around us, but also mending our polarized society.

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Netflix picks up ‘Follow This’, a weekly series about BuzzFeed reporters

Netflix and BuzzFeed News are teaming up for a 20-episode documentary series called Follow This.

According to Variety, the show will be less focused on breaking news and more on taking us behind the scenes to show how BuzzFeed News reporters put together specific stories. For example, in the clip below, BuzzFeed’s Scaachi Koul talks about her reporting around ASMR.

Follow This will be produced by BuzzFeed News, with Jessica Harrop serving as showrunner and one of its executive producers. When it premieres on July 9, it won’t follow Netflix standard release strategy. Instead, a new 15-minute episode will come out every week.

Netflix executives have been emphatic about wanting to stay out of the live news business, but the streaming service has introduced more news-and reality-based programming over the past few years, including documentaries (like an upcoming film from Vice Media’s Motherboard) and talk shows.

BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has been creating video series for a variety of channels, including its AM to DM series for Twitter. The company told Variety it’s also pitching cable networks on a nightly news show.

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Video consultation service Doctor on Demand raised $74 million so everyone can see a doctor anytime

Healing America’s broken healthcare industry has been at the top of the priority list for almost every politician, entrepreneur and inventor for at least the past 40 years.

Costs continue to climb (roughly 5 percent this year) and spending is already 20 percent of the nation’s GDP. For the trillions of dollars Americans spend on healthcare, they’re getting declining services, more frequent ailments and a steadily diverging standard of care for the rich and the poor in the country.

Something needs to be done — and venture capitalists and some of the biggest names in finance led by Goldman Sachs are investing $74 million in a technology startup they see as a potential solution.

The company is Doctor On Demand, and its solution is video-based telemedicine.

The new funding, led by Goldman Sachs and Princeville Global (with participation from existing investors, including Venrock, Shasta Ventures and Tenaya Capital), will be used to continue the company’s rapid expansion in the U.S. and abroad — and brings the company’s total financing to $160 million.

“This trend of consumerization, which we’re leading, is really going to result in much greater patient-driven healthcare experiences, which will save the patient a lot of money,” says company chief executive Hill Ferguson.

Ferguson knows that the arc of internet services bends toward on demand and he says that healthcare should be no different. “Most people have no idea they can see a board-certified physician on their phone from their bed while they’re sick at two in the morning with a five-minute wait time,” he says.

That’s essentially the service that Doctor On Demand provides.

While the company’s consultations aren’t a panacea for everything that ails the healthcare industry, Ferguson claims his company’s board-certified staff can handle 90 percent of the consultations that happen every day in urgent-care facilities and for $300 less than insurers currently pay out.

While the service started out as something that consumers had to pay out of pocket, it has now transitioned to a more seamless (and cheaper) option for customers — it’s covered by most major insurance carriers.

“We’ve shifted from being a cash pay virtual practice to more of an enterprise player. We’re driving most of our volume through health insurance plans and employers,” Ferguson says.

The company employs its own doctors and staffs its video consultation service 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Ferguson says. Despite the workload — which sees the company’s virtual doctors consult with four patients each hour on average — the company’s 14-day readmission rate (a standard measure of effective diagnoses) is on par with brick and mortar services, Ferguson says.

Roughly 5 percent of the consultations involve patients who need to be referred to specialists, according to Ferguson.

The service also can refer patients to diagnostics and testing facilities to get blood work and other tests that can supplement an initial diagnosis.

Through its agreements with insurers, Doctor On Demand stipulates what kinds of conditions its video consultations can cover, and which ailments and maladies require immediate medical attention. Increasingly, customers are taking advantage of the company’s mental health services — an area that’s grown 240 percent since it was introduced, according to Ferguson.

Mental health is one growth area for the company, and its testing services provide another. In all, Ferguson thinks there’s a $50 billion addressable market in the U.S. alone. A figure, he says, that more than justifies the company’s $160 million (and counting) in funding.

Doctor On Demand isn’t profitable yet, and the new financing still sees the company valued under $1 billion, but Ferguson is confident about the future. “I gotta wear shades,” the chief executive said.

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Rocketrip raises $15 million to reward cost-saving employees

If your company lets you expense the nicest hotel when you travel, why wouldn’t you?

But what if you got to split the savings with your employer by selecting a less expensive hotel?

A New York-based startup called Rocketrip believes most employees will opt to save companies money if they are incentivized to do so. It’s built an enterprise platform that rewards employees with gift cards if they go under budget on travel and transportation.

After five years of signing up business clients like Twitter and Pandora, Rocketrip is raising $15 million in Series C funding led by GV (Google Ventures) to keep expanding. Existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Canaan Partners are also in the round.

Inspired by Google’s internal travel system, Rocketrip CEO Dan Ruch calls his solution a “behavioral change platform.”  Employees “always optimize for self preservation, self interest” and are likely to book a cheaper flight if it means a gift card at a place like Amazon, Bloomingdale’s, or Home Depot, Ruch claims. He said that the average business trip booked by Rocketrip saves companies $208.

Ruch believes that Rocketrip has built a currency that motivates teams. He says some employees even gift Rocketrip points to congratulate colleagues on birthdays and promotions.

When it comes to enterprise platforms, Rocketrip is “one of those unique situations where everyone is really excited to use it,” said Canaan Partners’ Michael Gilroy, who holds a board seat.

Yet Rocketrip is not the only startup looking to help employees make money by cutting on costs. TripActions and TravelBank have also created similar businesses. 

Gilroy insists that “Rocketrip was first” and that he views the others a “validation of the model.”

Rocketrip hopes to someday expand beyond travel to incentivize healthcare choices like quitting smoking. It also thinks companies will use Rocketrip points to reward employees for community service. “Any time we can motivate an employee,” there’s an opportunity for Rocketrip, Ruch believes.

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Gfycat ramps up its focus on game clips and highlights as it hits 180M monthly users

Gfycat is already a pretty popular host for lots of content like short clips from shows and movies, but there’s also a pretty substantial store of content centered around gaming — which is why the company is starting to put some extra focus on it.

Gfycat, which is centered around creator tools to make those short-form video clips and GIFs, said it’s going to create an interface specifically designed for gamers. Called “Gfycat for gaming,” the startup hopes to ride both the wave of ever-omnipresent GIFs getting shared around the internet and popular, highly shareable game titles like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Rocket League. GIFs serve as a pretty good vehicle for delivering highlight reel clips for those games, which is why it’s going to be putting some extra focus on that audience. Gaming is one of the most popular verticals on Gfycat, CEO Richard Rabbat said.

“As we were looking at different verticals, gaming is such a strong vertical, and we wanted gamers to get an experience that just really speaks to what they’re looking for,” he said. “We wanted to just focus on that as opposed to content that was much more mixed. You see a lot of teams or players that will play for hours, but that exciting moment was like 10 seconds or 20 seconds. They want to capture them and keep them, to chat about them, and share them.”

While the platforms are certainly a big component of this, creator tools for getting that content onto the Internet is also a pretty big segment. That’s what Gfycat focuses on, and the company says it has 180 million monthly active users, which is up from 130 million monthly active users in October last year. The service has more than 500 million page views every month, Rabbat said.

There are two changes that are coming with this update: first, there will be a direct home for gaming highlights on Gfycat, where users can follow creators in that area; second, the time limit for Gfycat clips is growing to around 60 seconds instead of just 15, which is a soft change the company made in the past few months. Both are geared toward making content more shareable in order to grab those highlights, which might not just fall into 15 second buckets. Down the line, the company will start working on subscribing to specific channel.

“A lot of gaming moments are created in 10 or 15 seconds,” Rabbat said. “Some of the gamers have been asking us for a longer period. We moved from 15 seconds to 60 seconds so people can share exciting experiences that take a little more time. GIFs are not only just a moment but also it’s a bit of storytelling. We wanted people to have the ability to do that storytelling.”

GIFs are already a big market, and there has even been some activity from the major players looking to dive further into that type of content. Earlier this month, Google acquired Tenor, a GIF platform that has its own keyboard and integrates with a variety of messenger services — even ones like LinkedIn. That a tool like Tenor or Giphy has grown to encompass all those messaging tools is just a further example of how much of an opportunity platforms centered around GIFs have.

The short-form video clips, as Gfycat likes to label them, are a good form factor for compressing a lot of information into a unit of content that’s easy to share among friends or an audience on the Internet. Rather than just sending a text message, a GIF can convey some element of emotion alongside just the typical information or response some user is trying to achieve. That’s led to a big boom for those companies, with Tenor hitting 12 billion GIF searches every month as an example.

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Drew Houston to upload his thoughts at TC Disrupt in September

Dropbox isn’t necessarily the sexiest tech tool in the world, but it is a critically important tool for more than 500 million people.

The company launched back in 2007 and founder and CEO Drew Houston has spent the last decade growing Dropbox to the behemoth it is today.

During that time, Houston has had to make some tough decisions.

A few years ago, Houston decided to move the Dropbox infrastructure off of AWS. In 2014, Houston chose to raise $500 million in debt financing to keep up pace with Box, which was considering an IPO at the time. And in March 2017, Dropbox took another $600 million in debt financing from JP Morgan.

Houston also reportedly turned down a nine-figure acquisition offer from Apple.

All the while, Houston led Dropbox to be cash-flow positive and grew the company to see a $1 billion revenue run rate as of last year.

And, of course, we can’t forget the decision to go public early this year.

Dropbox is now one of the biggest tech companies in the world, with 1,800 employees across 12 global offices.

Interestingly, Houston first told his story to a TechCrunch audience at TC50 in 2008 as part of the Startup Battlefield.

At Disrupt SF in September, we’re excited to sit down with Houston to discuss his journey thus far, the process of going public, and the future of Dropbox.

The show runs from September 5 to Septmeber 7, and for the next week, our super early bird tickets are still available.

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Hasura snares $1.6 M seed for developer-focused Kubernetes solution

Kubernetes has gained in popularity quickly over the last 18 months, but like many highly technical solutions it requires a level of expertise many companies are lacking. A Bangalore/San Francisco startup called Hasura hopes to simplify all of that with a managed Kubernetes solution built with developers in mind.

Today, the company announced a $1.6 million seed round led by Nexus Venture Partners with participation from GREE Ventures.

Kubernetes is a tool that helps companies running containers juggle or orchestrate them. This level of organization is required because the number of containers can grow quickly. If you think of a conductor telling the musicians when to come in and when to leave, Kubernetes plays a similar role for the container system. (For a more complete explanation of containers, see this article.)

The company has focused on getting developers up to speed with the latest technologies quickly. “Our focus from the beginning has been making the application development super fast. How we do that is placing our APIs on top of a PostGres database to deploy any kind of code,” Tanmai Gopal, Hasura CEO and co-founder explained.

Gopal says the idea is to be more than a managed Kubernetes provider by giving developers the tooling they need to get going without having to build the underlying code for every application. “We are going to be the last mile. We’re not just managing the Kubernetes cluster for you. You should have Kubernetes to have control [over your containerized applications], but you also need developer tooling to build on top of it faster,” he said. “We want to automate the unnecessary code writing kind of grunt work. We started off by saying, ‘let’s automate this piece so you don’t have to write this code again’,” he added.

Once they wrote that piece, they realized that this is relevant because this approach enables cloud native in way that wasn’t possible before. “We suddenly realized we were in the right place at the right time, and part of it was luck,” Gopal admitted. It was also skill in providing a set of tools developers could use to build on top of Kubernetes.

Sameer Brij Verma, managing director at lead investor Nexus Venture Partners sees Kubernetes quickly becoming a foundational technology for developers and Hasura is providing a way to get up and running with little expertise. “Using Hasura’s platform, developers can now create cloud-native, portable and “elastic” applications within a few minutes without knowing anything about Kubernetes in the beginning,” Verma said in a statement.

The company launched last year and is split between Bangalore, India and San Francisco.

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Rockerbox acquires calendar marketing startup Eventable

Rockerbox has acquired Eventable, bringing two digital marketing startups together.

Rockerbox’s technology includes attribution measurement to determine which ads are driving sales, as well as what it calls a Recency Marketing Platform, which targets advertising based on users’ most recent browsing behavior.

Eventable, meanwhile, is focused on bringing marketing to your’ calendar — its technology can be embedded in display ads, introducing an “add to calendar” button that allows marketers to send updates and personalized notifications to consumers who opt in.

Rockerbox founder and CEO Ron Jacobson said he connected with Eventable because both companies participated in the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (albeit in different years). When they started testing out ways to bring their services together, and Jacobson said it became clear this was a “one plus one equals three situation.”

“Using the calendar as a marketing channel made perfect sense,” Jacobson said. “And on the attribution side, the calendar is another touch point.”

Eventable co-founders Sameen Karim and Akash Malhotra are joining Rockerbox, and Jacobson told me he’s hoping to bring the entire Eventable team over.

The plan is for Eventable to continue operating as a separate brand and product. At the same time, the team will for ways to integrate their products and to sell Eventable customers on Rockerbox’s broader marketing suite.

“It allows us to give our customers a more complete marketing solution,” Karim said.

The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. Rockerbox had raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Alchemist Accelerator, Right Side Capital, Steelhead Ventures, Russ Holdstein and Howard Love.

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