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Docket, a platform for organizing meeting agendas and notes, wins Zoom’s Marketplace App competition

Published May 11, 2020

In an episode of Extra Crunch Live last week, Roelof Botha expressed excitement not only about the shift to teleconference platforms like Zoom, but the apps and bots that may spring up on top of the Zoom ecosystem.

Interestingly, Zoom just announced the results of its Marketplace App competition, with Docket taking first place.

Docket was founded in January of 2019 with a mission to bring common sense to meetings. The company claims that more than 70% of meetings, both in-person and remote, happen without an agenda circulated before the meeting begins.

Docket starts from the premise that every meeting should have a prioritized, circulated agenda and then kicks it up a notch. The platform allows you to build and share that agenda, as well as take notes on meeting minutes and decisions made to share those after the fact. Docket also has a Task Manager feature, so users can share action items after the meeting to the folks that need to get things done.

Of course, Docket manages in an archive the notes, to-do lists and agendas from each respective meeting so you can go back and review the important information you need, as well as evaluate the productivity of individual meetings.

Docket integrates with Evernote, Slack and Zoom (of course). With the Docket Bot for Zoom, much of the platform’s functionality actually lives within Zoom. The agenda and recap notes appear directly in the Zoom chat, and meeting guests can take collaborative notes about the meeting without ever leaving their Zoom chat window.

Docket also retrieves the Zoom transcription and recording and attaches it directly to the respective Docket meeting as an artifact, letting you go back and search for the exact wording around a decision or meeting topic.

According to Crunchbase, Docket has $1.5 million in seed funding from startup studio High Alpha, Simon Equity Partners, Elevate Ventures and Allos Ventures. Emergence Capital, Zoom’s largest investor, invested in High Alpha in 2015.

Zoom’s Marketplace App competition was announced at Zoomtopia in October of 2019. The winner, in this case Docket, was selected by Zoom, as well as a variety of Zoom’s investors, including Emergence, Horizons Ventures, Maven Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

Docket will receive up to $2 million in funding from these venture capital orgs, as well as an advisory session with Zoom’s top product leaders. The prize also includes priority development support from Zoom, a DTEN D7 55” all-in-one interactive whiteboard with a three-year Zoom Rooms license and 10 Zoom Pro licenses for three years.

Finalists from the competition include Ambition, Bloom, Discuss.io, Friday, iScribeHealth, Pledgeling, Session, Social27 and Tiled. All the finalists received a Logitech Pro Personal Video Collaboration Kit via a Logitech sponsorship of the competition.

Editor’s Note: This post has been updated to reflect Docket’s investment from High Alpha, which itself has investment from Emergence Capital.

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha is more optimistic about startups today than he was a year ago

Published May 10, 2020

“I just think change unfairly favors the startup, the nimble small company,” says Roelof Botha.

The Sequoia partner, whose portfolio includes Unity, 23andMe, Instagram, Instacart, Xoom and YouTube, says he’s hopeful about the opportunities this pandemic has created for companies across a variety of sectors, including healthcare, cloud computing, social and others.

We spoke for an hour with Botha about several topics, including how user behavior is rapidly evolving, trends he’s seeing, his outlook on economic recovery, how he’s evaluating new investments and how fundraising itself is changing. Fun fact: Sequoia has made 10 investments over Zoom since the coronavirus pandemic forced us to stay at home.

The full conversation was broadcast on YouTube, and the embed appears below.

Side note: Extra Crunch Live is our new virtual speaker series for Extra Crunch members. Folks can ask their own questions live during the chat, with guests that include Aileen Lee, Kirsten Green, Mark Cuban and many, many more. You can check out the schedule here.

Below, you’ll find a lightly edited transcript of our recent chat with Botha. Enjoy!

The differences in fundraising based on stage

When you’re listening to a seed-stage company, it’s often about the story. The founders paint a vision of the future. That’s part of what I love about my job, by the way. You’re sitting there and you’re trying to imagine what the world is going to look like one day and whether this company is on the right side of history. Or is it implausible that this will happen? It’s so much fun to sit there and think about that. At the seed stage, it’s about the story.

As you get to a Series A or Series B stage, the company will definitely start to have some metrics: usage numbers, early adoption numbers. If it’s an enterprise company, what are people willing to pay for your product? You start to get a sense of the metrics that back up the story. If the metrics don’t support the story, then you start to wonder if that company makes sense. In the long run, you need to have financials that flow from the metrics. But that’s typically at a Series C or later stage. And clearly, by the time a company goes public, you need to have connected story to metrics to financials.

Startups Weekly: SEC temporarily loosens crowdfunding regulations on small companies

Published May 9, 2020

Editor’s note: Get this weekly recap of TechCrunch news that any startup can use every Saturday morning by email (7am PT). Subscribe here.

A specific type of small startup has a window to raise crowdfunding in a somewhat less regulated way than normally required in the U.S., based on a temporary set of rule changes by the Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week. Excited yet?

The new terms are generally geared towards the millions of mom-and-pop businesses that were the intended recipients of the PPP grants, who did not actually receive those grants as needed, as Jon Shieber covered on TechCrunch this week. However, this grim fall-back measure to stave off disaster for a key part of the economy is also a way for small startups to start creating jobs a little faster, potentially. One of the main adjustments: if you’re looking to raise between $107,000 and $250,000, you don’t need to have your financial statements reviewed first by an outside auditor. Instead, the SEC says you just need “[f]inancial statements of the issuer and certain information from the issuer’s Federal income tax returns, both certified by the principal executive officer.”

The catch is you still have to follow a long list of other do’s and don’ts provided by the SEC, such as being in business least six months prior, and clear disclosures to investors about your financial reliance on this “relief.” The temporary permissiveness is set to expire by August 31.

Investors bet big on robotic automation during the pandemic

Automation will happen at an even more foundational level than one might guess as supply chains try to resolve huge new types of kinks. Here’s how Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital describes it, in a sample from one of our investor surveys on Extra Crunch this week.

COVID-19 revealed that our just-in-time manufacturing and logistics infrastructure cannot react to unexpected change. We expect the best practices of tech companies: rapidly adopting new tools and quickly iterating on their products and processes to become common in the realm of manufacturing and logistics. Engineers will be handed credit cards to try the latest tools, building on open source will be widely embraced, and making bets on products from startups will become the norm in this industry which has its roots in the industrial revolution.

Where are the opportunities? Here’s DCVC’s Kelly Chen:

Despite the storm, we are optimistic about a number of things:

As the crisis spotlighted, global supply chains are a delicate balance of factors that can easily be disrupted. In addition to growing labor costs, regulatory uncertainty, and higher international shipping costs, we believe companies will increasingly innovate on domestic manufacturing channels. “Bring manufacturing home” is a cry reverberating across many industries in many countries.

Online commodity retail is finally getting a kick in the tail. Last year, 4% of groceries were ordered online. In a recent large survey after COVID-19, a third of respondents ordered groceries online, many for the first time. The traditional two-day delivery will benefit, but we think momentum will shift to micro-fulfillment, where large hubs will service distributed local warehouses that are much closer to the customer, auto-fulfilling orders within hours.

Separate from fulfillment, we believe the hundreds of thousands of new manual delivery jobs will endure. We predict it will be years before tech allows for scalable automated door-to-door delivery.

As employers explore tech to automate labor in tough times, they find that humans are incredibly difficult to replace. At DCVC, we like tech that automates the kind of tasks that could never be done at human scale — things that scale the value of human skills, not replace them.

We also published a survey on media startup investing this week, and another on gaming technology infrastructure.

The benefits of a commercial real estate collapse in SF

Full-time CTO and long-time TechCrunch columnist Jon Evans has a fun muse for any reader who is looking to stay in the Bay Area and also pay less for housing. What is going to happen to all of the commercial real estate that is getting rendered obsolete as many companies go big on remote? Presumably a lot more housing stock. Here’s a taste of the full thing over on TechCrunch:

Consider San Francisco, everyone’s favorite overpriced, overcrowded, inequality poster child. It has roughly 150 million square feet of combined office and retail space at the moment. If the COVID-19 lockdown-then-recession eventually eats 20% of that — which is plausible between the retailpocalypse and what I will christen the “officepocalypse,” i.e. the revealed cost savings of working from home — that’s 30 million square feet of empty space.

If converted to housing, this could increase the city’s total housing stock by well over 10%. That would drive prices and rents, already pressured by the recession, way down — while presumably still remaining simultaneously profitable, since current prices are so high. Needless to say this conversion would also create a lot of jobs. (Although, in some cases, no conversion will be required.)

The rebirth of the vertical B2B marketplace startup

It was one of those seemingly guaranteed winners of the dot-com bubble, that got torched along with most other ideas around back then. Today, marketplaces for businesses in complex supply chains are back in vogue, Shieber writes for Extra Crunch this week. The original thesis was that “thousands of small businesses were making specialized products consumed by larger businesses in huge industries, but the reach of smaller players was limited by their dependence on a sales structure built on conferences and personal interactions.”

The opportunity has been clarified over the course of the past decade.

The first sign of life for the directory model came with the success of GoodRX back in 2011. The company proved that when information about pricing in a previously opaque industry becomes available, it can unleash a torrent of new demand.

“GoodRX did this to huge success,” said Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, who invested in Knowde, a marketplace that follows a similar model. “The idea of crawling the public internet and creating structured data and winning SEO or doing SEO for the first time for something so you get a lot of traffic from buyers so you have something to offer sellers so you can get the sellers to cooperate with you… that playbook can be taken to many different industries.”

Across the week

TechCrunch:

This early Facebook investor wants to find smart students a job at the next Facebook

We need more video games that are social platforms first, games second

Tech for good during COVID-19: Sky-high gifts, extra help and chips

Data shows which tech roles might be most vulnerable amid layoffs

Latin America Roundup: Big rounds, big mergers and a $3.8M pandemic fund from Nubank

Extra Crunch:

AR is the answer to plummeting retail sales during lockdown

TechCrunch’s top 16 picks from Techstars April virtual demo days

Longtime VC Todd Chaffee of IVP says late-stage scene is now ‘M&A world’

As private investment cools, enterprise startups may try tapping corporate dollars

The great unicorn retreat

Around TechCrunch

Student Discount: Join Extra Crunch for $50 per year

Extra Crunch Live: Join Kirsten Green for a Q&A next Tuesday at 8 a.m. ET/11 a.m PST/6 p.m. GMT

Hear how to build a sales team at Disrupt SF 2020

Grab your Disrupt Digital Pro Pass today for Disrupt SF 2020

#EquityPod

From Alex Wilhelm:

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Every week we write this post with some opening line akin to wow, what a week, huh? This is yet another one of those weeks. Perhaps this is just life now, and every week will stretch before us, similar to what Gandalf said after killing that Balrog, that “every day was as long as the life age of the Earth.”

Anyhoo, we recorded Equity to try and make a little sense of the week as there was a lot going on. So, Natasha, Danny, and Alex once again gathered to parse it all. Here’s a rough digest of the topics from this episode:

Techstars’ virtual demo days. Natasha and Alex are listening in to as many Techstars virtual demo confabs as they can along with other TC staff, pulling out favorites as we go. Today we dug into what is working, and what isn’t with virtual demo days.
While VC Twitter might make it seem like every firm is open for business, that is not the reality. We talk about signaling risk, external signs a firm is investing, and throw pro rata chat around in between.
Peanut, a social network for women, raised $12 million and that is the good news we needed this week. Think of it as a better, cleaner and more intimate version of your favorite Facebook group. About 1.6 million are on the platform.
Every Mother raised a small sum to bring safety and community to pre and post natal workouts for mothers.
Robinhood’s Series F. The new Robinhood round values the company at around $8.3 billion, a huge number but one that wasn’t as high as we might have expected, given how much its valuation used to grow between new funding events.
Airbnb cut 1,900 people in a devastating round of layoffs for the travel and hospitality company. We discuss o-founder and CEO Brian Chesky’s detailed blogpost about the cuts, and whether it is better to be a public or a private company during this pandemic.
Uber cut staff this week, and pumped money into a massive Lime downround that may see it offload its own micromobility business onto the smaller company. Not a good week for Uber, not a good week for Lime.

We didn’t get to chat API funding rounds or the unicorn retreat, or even really riff on earnings. There’s so much going on! But, we’ll be back Monday morning so sit tight.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

This Week in Apps: WWDC goes online, Android 11 delays, Facebook SDK turns into app kill switch

Published May 9, 2020

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.

The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 204 billion downloads and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.

In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.

This week we’re continuing to look at how the coronavirus outbreak is impacting the world of mobile applications, including the latest on countries’ various contact-tracing apps, the pandemic’s impact on gaming and fintech and more. We’re also looking at that big app crash caused by Facebook, plus new app releases from Facebook and Google, Android 11’s new timeline and Apple’s plans to move WWDC online, among other things.

Headlines

WWDC goes virtual June 22

Apple announced this week its plans for a virtual version of its Worldwide Developer Conference. The company will host its WWDC 2020 event beginning on June 22 in the Apple Developer app and on the Apple Developer website for free for all developers.

It will be interesting to see how successfully Apple is able to take its developer conference online. After all, developers could already access the sessions and keynotes through videos — but the real power of the event was in the networking and being able to talk to Apple engineers, ask questions, get hands-on help and see how other developers are using Apple technologies to innovate. Unless Apple is planning a big revamp of its developer site and app that would enable those connections, it seems this year’s event will lack some of WWDC’s magic.

The company also announced the Swift Student Challenge, an opportunity for student developers to showcase their coding by creating their own Swift playground.

As funding slows in Boston, its early-stage market could shine

Published May 8, 2020

Chris Lynch, a founder and former general partner at Boston-based seed-stage fund Accomplice, remembers “VC Mountain in Waltham.”

Back then, entrepreneurs on funding quests would visit a building overlooking the Waltham Reservoir near Boston where they pitched to a few investors: Matrix Partners, Charles River Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.

“And if they didn’t invest in you, you weren’t getting money to start your company,” Lynch said.

Since then, Lynch has watched the area’s startup ecosystem reach the point where seed-stage firms are ubiquitous, but in a city populated with firms waiting to make first bets, the scene is unsurprisingly undergoing a funding drought. Crunchbase data indicates that the city’s Q2 venture capital pace slowed dramatically, with April seeing far fewer rounds and dollars invested in 2020 than in 2019.

Boston saw just seven known equity funding rounds in April, investments worth a hair under $60 million. In the year-ago April, Boston recorded 24 equity funding rounds worth more than $500 million.

Yet, while the numbers are slow, some Boston tech leaders think seed startups will continue to thrive thanks to accelerators and a healthy base of local early-stage investors. And Lynch, who left Accomplice in 2017, says the venture slowdown might help firms recalibrate their appetite for new deals to a more healthy pace.

“The advantage of more access to capital without a proportional increase in great ideas really waters down the fort,” he said, referring to upmarkets. “A lot of money has been invested in companies before they even proved their ideas were right, and I think even I fell into a trap of competing so hard for deals that I lost sight of a good deal.” He estimates that in our COVID-19 world, investors will start to again take three months for due diligence on a deal, versus three weeks to a signed term sheet.

If Boston’s seed investors becomes more conservative, that means that accelerators — homes of the brightest founders, often before they even have their first customer — will be pressed to react.

Accelerators

Venture Lane, a co-working space and startup incubator for early-stage companies, was nearing its one-year anniversary in the heart of Boston when COVID-19 hit the city.

The incubator, which traditionally hosts 10 startups at a time, made its whole program virtual and reworked existing content to help navigate the climate. Plus, per founder Christian Magel, its tips and workshops were opened up to any early-stage founder, not just the ones enrolled with Venture Lane. Hundreds have signed up, he said.

Lucid Lane has developed a service to get patients off of pain meds and avoid addiction

Published May 8, 2020

Four years ago, Adnan Asar, the founder of the new addiction prevention service Lucid Lane, was enjoying a successful career working as the founding chief technology officer at Livongo Health. It was the serial senior tech executive’s most recent job after a long stint at Shutterfly and he was shepherding the company through the development of its suite of hardware and software for the management of chronic conditions.

But when Asar’s wife was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, he stepped away from the technology world to be with his family while she underwent treatment.

He did not know at the time that the decision would set him on the path to founding Lucid Lane. The company’s mission is to help give patients who have been prescribed medications to address pain and anxiety ways to wean themselves off those drugs and avoid addiction — and its purpose is born from the struggle Asar witnessed as his wife wrestled with how to stop taking the medication she was prescribed during her illness.

Asar’s wife isn’t alone. In 2018, there were roughly 168.2 million prescriptions for opioids written in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lucid Lane estimates that 50 million people are prescribed opioids and another 13 million are prescribed benzodiazepines each year either after surgery or in conjunction with cancer treatments — all without a plan for how to manage or taper the use of these highly addictive medications.

For Asar’s wife, it was the benzodiazepine prescribed as part of her cancer treatment that became an issue. “She was hit by very severe withdrawal symptoms and we didn’t know what was going on,” Asar said. When they consulted her physician he gave the couple two options — quitting cold turkey or remaining on the medication.

“My wife decided to go cold turkey,” Asar said. “It was really debilitating for the whole family.”

It took nine months of therapy and regular consultations with psychiatrists to help with tailoring medication dosages and tapering to get her off of the medication, said Asar. And that experience led to the launch of Lucid Lane.

“Our goal is to prevent and control medication and substance dependence,” Asar said.

The company’s telehealth solution is built on a proprietary treatment protocol meant to provide continuous daily support and interventions, along with proactive monitoring of a personalized treatment plan — all on an ongoing basis, said Asar.

And the COVID-19 pandemic is only accelerating the need for telehealth services. “COVID-19 has made telehealth a mandatory service instead of a discretionary service,” said Asar. “There’s a surge in anxiety, depression, substance use and medication use. We’re seeing a surge of patients who are reaching out to us.”

Asar sees Lucid Lane’s competitors as companies like Lyra Health and Ginger, or point solutions building digital diagnostics to detect anxiety and depression. But unlike some companies that are launching to treat addiction or addictive behaviors, Asar sees his startup as preventing dependency and addiction.

“A lot of people are sliding into these addictions through something that happens at the doctor’s office,” said Asar. ” Our solution does not prescribe any of these medications.”

The company is working on clinical studies that are set to start at the Palo Alto VA hospital, and has raised $4 million in seed funding from investors including Battery Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures, the investment firm founded by Jerry Yang.

“We see great potential for Lucid Lane, as it has developed a scalable solution to one of the biggest problems facing society today,” said Battery general partner Dharmesh Thakker, in a statement. “Telehealth solutions have emerged as highly capable of addressing complex problems, and Lucid Lane has embraced remote care from its beginning. Its design enables care anytime, anywhere for patients in their moment of need. This can make a tremendous difference in the battle between recovery and relapse. We believe that it will help millions of people lead better lives.”

Joining Asar in the development of the company and its healthcare protocols are a seasoned team of health professionals, including Dr. Ahmed Zaafran, a board certified anesthesiologist at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center and assistant professor of anesthesiology (affiliated) at Stanford University School of Medicine; and advisors like Dr. Vanila Singh, who was also previously chairperson of the HHS Task Force in conjunction with the DOD and the VA to address the opioid drug crisis; Dr. Carin Hagberg, the chair of anesthesiology, perioperative and pain medicine of MD Anderson Cancer Center; and Sherif Zaafran, the president of the Texas Medical Board and chair of multiple national committees on pain management, including the subcommittee Taskforce on Pain Management Services for HHS, as well as the department’s Pain Clinical Pathways Committee.

“Lucid Lane provides a patient-centered solution that allows for the best clinical outcomes for patients after surgery and those bravely finishing chemotherapy,” said Dr. Singh, in a statement. “For the many patients who require short-term opioids and benzodiazepine medications, Lucid Lane’s treatment can limit the risk of prolonged dependence of these medications while also ensuring effective pain control with a resulting improved quality of life and functioning.”

Your startup can still be seen and heard: Exhibit in Digital Startup Alley

Published May 8, 2020

We’re not letting this pandemic disrupt Disrupt SF 2020. Like any determined early-stage startup founder, we’re adapting and moving forward. Can’t join us in person on September 14-16? No problem. Take advantage of Digital Startup Alley, a completely new way to disrupt. Place your startup in front of influential movers and shakers and keep your business rolling.

For just $445, the Digital Startup Alley Package lets you exhibit your early-stage, pre-Series A company to thousands of potential investors, customers, journalists and technologists — from your home office. Even better, the Digital Startup Alley pass gives you months to pitch, demo, network and schedule meetings. You can rely on TechCrunch, with its extensive resources and industry connections, to translate the benefits of the live Startup Alley exhibit hall into a world-class virtual experience.

We packed a ton of value into the Digital Startup Alley Package. The price — which covers three people — includes everything in the Digital Pass Pro pass plus these features:

Leading Voices Webinars: How can you adapt and thrive during and after this pandemic? No one owns a crystal ball, but we’ve tapped the brightest industry minds to share their current thoughts and strategies to keep moving forward. Startup Alley exhibitors get exclusive access to this webinar series.

Pitch Coaching Par Excellence: Pour yourself a cold pitcher of something tasty and take your elevator pitch to the top floor. Join us for Pitchers and Pitches, an interactive opportunity to learn from the best — the TechCrunch editorial team that coaches the Startup Battlefield competitors.

Networking Made Easy: CrunchMatch, TechCrunch’s AI-powered networking platform, helps you find and connect with investors, founders and other startup influencers. Create your custom profile, and the platform searches for and connects you with like-minded people. You’ll save time by networking only with people who can move your business forward.

Investor Exposure: TechCrunch creates a deck with information about all exhibiting startups and makes it available exclusively to investors attending Disrupt SF 2020.

The Exhibitor Guide: The guide lists every exhibitor at Disrupt SF 2020 — both onsite and digital varieties. It’s the definitive resource to Startup Alley and Disrupt SF, and it makes a terrific long-term networking tool.

Bonus: Disrupt SF 2020 is still on track, and if it turns out that you can join us at the Moscone Center and exhibit in person, you can upgrade your package and still enjoy the benefits of Digital Startup Alley.

Unprecedented challenges require unprecedented thinking and action. Buy your Digital Startup Alley Package today and keep your startup dreams moving forward.

TechCrunch is mindful of the COVID-19 issue and its impact on live events. You can follow our updates here.

CRV’s Saar Gur wants to invest in a new wave of games built for VR, Twitch and Zoom

Published May 8, 2020

Saar Gur is adept at identifying the next big consumer trends earlier than most: The San Francisco-based general partner at CRV has led investments into leading consumer internet companies like Niantic, DoorDash, Bird, Dropbox, Patreon, Kapwing and ClassPass.

His own experience stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic spurred his interest in three new investment themes focused on the next generation of games: those built for VR, those built on top of Twitch and those built for video chat environments as a socializing tool.

TechCrunch: We’ve been in a “VR winter,” as it’s been called in the industry, following the 2014-2017 wave of VC funding into VR drying up as the market failed to gain massive consumer adoption. You think VR could soon be hot again. Why?

Saar Gur: If you track revenues of third-party games on Oculus, the numbers are getting interesting. And we think the Quest is not quite the Xbox moment for Facebook, but the device and market response to the Quest have been great. So we are more engaged in looking at VR gaming startups than ever before.

What do you mean by “the Xbox moment,” and what will that look like for VR? Facebook hasn’t been able to keep up with demand for Oculus Quest headsets, and most VR headsets seem to have sold out during this pandemic as people seek entertainment at home. This seems like progress. When will we cross the threshold?

Google’s Duo video chat app gets a family mode with doodles and masks

Published May 8, 2020

Google today launched an update to its Duo video chat app (which you definitely shouldn’t confuse with Hangouts or Google Meet, Google’s other video, audio and text chat apps).

There are plenty of jokes to be made about Google’s plethora of chat options, but Duo is trying to be a bit different from Hangouts and Meet in that it’s mobile-first and putting the emphasis on personal conversations. In its early days, it was very much only about one-on-one conversations (hence its name), but that has obviously changed (hence why Google will surely change its name sooner or later). This update shows this emphasis with the addition of what the company calls a “family mode.”

Once you activate this mode, you can start doodling on the screen, activate a number of new effects and virtually dress up with new masks. These effects and masks are now also available for one-on-one calls.

For Mother’s Day, Google is rolling out a special new effect that is sufficiently disturbing to make sure your mother will never want to use Duo again and immediately make her want to switch to Google Meet instead.

Only last month, Duo increased the maximum number of chat participants to 12 on Android and iOS. In the next few weeks, it’s also bringing this feature to the browser, where it will work for anyone with a Google account.

Google also launched a new ad for Duo. It’s what happens when marketers work from home.

VCs see opportunities for gaming infrastructure startups and incumbents

Published May 8, 2020

As the infrastructure for developing games becomes more advanced, studios have turned to buying best-in-class technology from others instead of building everything from scratch (often with inferior quality).

This shift underpinned Unity’s rise as the most popular game engine. The current focus on games as ever-evolving social hubs that can remain popular for a decade requires investment in “live ops” to keep updating the game with new features and experiences, only adding to a game studio’s responsibilities.

There are big movements in gaming right now to make games cross-platform (not just restricted to mobile or PC or one console), incorporate new types of chat (in-game or outside of it) and to automatically remove bullies and bots among other things. Optimizing games’ virtual economies is only getting more complex as trade of virtual goods becomes increasingly popular.

All this means more opportunity for startups (and large incumbents) that provide new tools and platforms to game developers and gamers. To gauge which opportunities are prime for entrepreneurs, I asked four leading early-stage investors who focus on the gaming sector to share their analysis:

Sam Englebardt, Galaxy Interactive
Gigi Levy Weiss, NFX
Amit Kumar, Accel
Anton Backman, Play Ventures

Sam Englebardt, Galaxy Interactive

Which areas within gaming infrastructure seem firmly dominated by large incumbents, versus open for new startups to rise up?

I’m always rooting for the startup, but some of the really big and expensive infrastructure challenges seem unlikely to be solved by a startup, especially where the incumbents have a lead in time, money and the personnel they’re throwing at the problem. I’m thinking here, for example, about something like cloud computing, storage solutions, etc.