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E3 slouches towards irrelevance again as Sony announces it’s skipping the show

Published November 16, 2018

I like E3 . I really do. But it’s also monumentally dumb: game companies spending millions to show off essentially faked content to an increasingly jaded audience. And it’s increasingly out of step with how the gaming industry works. So it should come as no surprise that Sony will be skipping the show more or less altogether this year, joining Nintendo in taking a step back from spectacle.

Sony has been a part of CES for 20 years and this will be the first one it’s ever missed. I’ve gone to their events every time I’ve attended; I was there for their historic putdown of Microsoft after the latter announced some hugely unpopular restrictions on used games. I think you can actually see me near the front in the broadcast of that one. (You can! I’m at 1:29.)

And E3 has been a part of Sony’s yearly cadence as well. Like other companies, for years Sony hoarded information to debut at E3, TGS and Gamescom, but E3 was generally where you saw new consoles and flagship titles debut. But as even E3’s organizers have admitted over and over again, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

Too often we have seen half-finished games onstage at E3 that end up cancelled before the year is out, or commitments made to dates the companies can’t possibly keep. Assigning a complex, creative industry to a yearly schedule of major announcements is a great way to burn them out, and that’s exactly what’s happening.

Variety first noticed Sony’s absence from ESA communications. In a statement issued to multiple outlets, Sony said:

As the industry evolves, Sony Interactive Entertainment continues to look for inventive opportunities to engage the community. PlayStation fans mean the world to us and we always want to innovate, think differently and experiment with new ways to delight gamers. As a result, we have decided not to participate in E3 in 2019. We are exploring new and familiar ways to engage our community in 2019 and can’t wait to share our plans with you.

They won’t be alone. Nintendo hasn’t had a real proper E3 press conference in years. Instead, they host a live stream around the event and have a big booth where people mainly just play games. Their Nintendo Direct videos come out throughout the year, when the titles and developers are good and ready.

Microsoft is still there, and still puts on quite a show. I remember the original announcement of the Kinect, probably one of the weirdest and dumbest things I’ve ever taken part in. It was memorable, at least.

That just happened: a survivor of the Natal/Kinect event tells his tale

But Microsoft is also doing its own thing, announcing throughout the year and on its own terms. The Xbox One X was only hinted at during E3, and announced in full much later. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft also announced they were taking it easy this year at E3 — though this might also be a good opportunity for them to double down. With the schedules these huge shows go on, they might already be committed to one course or another.

Sony actually has its own PlayStation Experience event where it announces things and lets gamers and press play the latest, but even that was cancelled ahead of its expected December date. Is Sony just getting shy?

More likely they are leveraging their dominance in the console market to be a market leader and “decider,” as they say. They have no shortage of amazing games coming out, including lots of hot-looking exclusives. What have they got to prove? Although Sony itself is not participating in E3, the developers it backs will almost certainly be there. What better way to school the competition than to not show up and still have everyone talking about you?

With the PS4 Pro out there and a solid line-up already confirmed, Sony is sitting pretty for 2019, and the company probably feels this is a safe time to experiment with “inventive opportunities to engage the community,” as the statement put it. E3 will still be big, and it will still be fun. But the trend is clear: it just won’t be necessary.

Overnight success now requires a little more time

Published November 15, 2018

Rishi Garg
Contributor

Rishi Garg is a partner at Mayfield who invests in driven, product-centric entrepreneurs looking to impact millions of lives. He led corporate development and strategy at Twitter, Square and MTV Networks.

Solving big problems

The last wave of breakout companies created interactive platforms (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) that have entertained many. They didn’t solve big societal problems. There’s now a big need — and big opportunity — for companies that can help people save time, money and sanity, even as they build great businesses.

Most of us now realize the major problems that a connected, mobile, always-on world has wrought. These include:

Income inequality. Lower-income Americans are struggling more than ever. Entrepreneurs should be thinking of ways to help folks where they need it the most: the pocketbook. That might mean unlocking found money, ensuring that available financial resources are being used wisely or saving consumers from the growing number of “gotchas” imposed by financial institutions.
Too many choices. When you can buy or choose anything, it’s hard to pick what you actually want. There are wide-open opportunities for concierges, curation and trusted guides.
A lack of intimacy. With everything online and available at the touch of a keypad, genuine human interaction has become more rare. There’s a need for companies that can provide real care and curation for matters that affect our daily lives.

Newly available resources

After a decade of building companies for mobile, there are now untold stories, battle scars and people available for future companies to learn from. This makes it easier for startups to assemble playbooks and experienced teams. It also reduces the downside risk for investors, opening new paths to capital for companies that need it.

For instance, it’s now clear that consumer brands must define, own and curate an end-to-end experience. A great new example is GOAT, the online sneakerhead marketplace. Faced with a sneaker market full of rampant knock-offs, the founders invested in a capital- and time-intensive process to manually inspect every shoe for authenticity. The result is an experience that every sneakerhead loves and a breakthrough consumer brand.

Building a breakout consumer platform will be more complex, more challenging and often more capital-intensive than it was for the prior generation.

There are also lots of executives and teams that know how to lead and manage complex operations, especially on the ground. This is crucial to scale logistically complex ideas like Opendoor, Instacart and others.

The other thing needed to help scale these companies is capital. And right now, there are two particularly relevant new kinds of investors: 1) mega equity funds like SoftBank Vision Fund, and 2) alternative lending funds that provide non-dilutive capital to companies to finance the acquisition of traditional assets. Those capital sources enable companies like Opendoor (disclosure: I’m a personal investor) to own and manage a truly delightful end-to-end experience.

Mobile today is not mobile tomorrow

Mobile devices have come a long way over the last decade. And there will be many more meaningful improvements in the near future, allowing for new uses and new companies.

I anticipate breakthroughs that will boost the ability of the chips and subsystems on a phone to perform optimally for far longer. Right now, these are throttled due to heating issues and other problems. As companies solve these issues, they’ll create order of magnitude improvements on what our phones are capable of, bringing technologies like VR and AR, to take two examples, far forward into everyday use.

On the network side, 5G and subsequent buildouts will meaningfully change what kinds of bandwidth we can handle, enabling even more data and compute to be in the cloud.

Mobile today is about one-to-many broadcast platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Tomorrow’s great consumer companies will leverage a better vector: one-to-one customer intimacy. Companies like Grove Collaborative (disclosure: Mayfield is an investor) are experiencing hypergrowth in part by using real people connecting with consumers over text to bring a curated, personalized experience to shopping for household staples. I expect this to be a major trend, with the companies that earn the right to communicate more with customers the ones that win.

Building a breakout consumer platform will be more complex, more challenging and often more capital-intensive than it was for certain titans of the prior generation. But for those with the vision and substance to bring a valuable service to the world that solves real problems, the resources and emerging technologies will be there to help create the next groundbreaking consumer brand.

FCC approval of Europe’s Galileo satellite signals may give your phone’s GPS a boost

Published November 15, 2018

The FCC’s space-focused meeting today had actions taken on SpaceX satellites and orbital debris reduction, but the decision most likely to affect users has to do with Galileo . No, not the astronomer — the global positioning satellite constellation put in place by the E.U. over the last few years. It’s now legal for U.S. phones to use, and a simple software update could soon give your GPS signal a major bump.

Galileo is one of several successors to the Global Positioning System that’s been in use since the ’90s. But because it is U.S.-managed and was for a long time artificially limited in accuracy to everyone but U.S. military, it should come as no surprise that European, Russian and Chinese authorities would want their own solutions. Russia’s GLONASS is operational and China is hard at work getting its BeiDou system online.

The E.U.’s answer to GPS was Galileo, and the 26 (out of 30 planned) satellites making up the constellation offer improved accuracy and other services, such as altitude positioning. Test satellites went up as early as 2005, but it wasn’t until 2016 that it began actually offering location services.

A Galileo satellite launch earlier this year.

Devices already existed that would take advantage of Galileo signals — all the way back to the iPhone 6s, the Samsung Galaxy S7 and many others from that era forward. It just depends on the wireless chip inside the phone or navigation unit, and it’s pretty much standard now. (There’s a partial list of smartphones supporting Galileo here.)

When a company sells a new phone, it’s much easier to just make a couple million of the same thing rather than make tiny changes like using a wireless chipset in U.S. models that doesn’t support Galileo. The trade-off in savings versus complexity of manufacturing and distribution just isn’t worthwhile.

The thing is, American phones couldn’t use Galileo because the FCC has regulations against having ground stations being in contact with foreign satellites. Which is exactly what using Galileo positioning is, though of course it’s nothing sinister.

If you’re in the U.S., then, your phone likely has the capability to use Galileo but it has been disabled in software. The FCC decision today lets device makers change that, and the result could be much-improved location services. (One band not very compatible with existing U.S. navigation services has been held back, but two of the three are now available.)

Interestingly enough, however, your phone may already be using Galileo without your or the FCC’s knowledge. Because the capability is behind a software lock, it’s possible that a user could install an app or service bringing it into use. Perhaps you travel to Europe a lot and use a French app store and navigation app designed to work with Galileo and it unlocked the bands. There’d be nothing wrong with that.

Or perhaps you installed a custom ROM that included the ability to check the Galileo signal. That’s technically illegal, but the thing is there’s basically no way for anyone to tell! The way these systems work, all you’d be doing is receiving a signal illegally that your phone already supports and that’s already hitting its antennas every second — so who’s going to report you?

It’s unlikely that phone makers have secretly enabled the Galileo frequencies on U.S. models, but as Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel pointed out in a statement accompanying the FCC action, that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening:

If you read the record in this proceeding and others like it, it becomes clear that many devices in the United States are already operating with foreign signals. But nowhere in our record is there a good picture of how many devices in this country are interacting with these foreign satellite systems, what it means for compliance with our rules, and what it means for the security of our systems. We should change that. Technology has gotten ahead of our approval policies and it’s time for a true-up.

She isn’t suggesting a crackdown — this is about regulation lagging behind consumer tech. Still, it is a little worrying that the FCC basically has no idea, and no way to find out, how many devices are illicitly tuning in to Galileo signals.

Expect an update to roll out to your phone sometime soon — Galileo signals will be of serious benefit to any location-based app, and to public services like 911, which are now officially allowed to use the more accurate service to determine location.

Uber joins Linux Foundation, cementing commitment to open-source tools

Published November 15, 2018

Uber announced today at the 2018 Uber Open Summit that it was joining the Linux Foundation as a Gold Member, making a firm commitment to using and contributing to open-source tools.

Uber CTO Thuan Pham sees the Linux Foundation as a place for companies like his to nurture and develop open-source projects. “Open source technology is the backbone of many of Uber’s core services and as we continue to mature, these solutions will become ever more important,” he said in a blog post announcing the partnership.

What’s surprising is not that they joined, but that it took so long. Uber has been long known for making use of open source in its core tools, working on over 320 open-source projects and repositories from 1,500 contributors involving over 70,000 commits, according to data provided by the company.

“Uber has made significant investments in shared software development and community collaboration through open source over the years, including contributing the popular open-source project Jaeger, a distributed tracing system, to the Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation in 2017,” an Uber spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin was certainly happy to welcome Uber into the fold. “Their expertise will be instrumental for our projects as we continue to advance open solutions for cloud native technologies, deep learning, data visualization and other technologies that are critical to businesses today,” Zemlin said in a statement.

The Linux Foundation is an umbrella group supporting myriad open-source projects and providing an organizational structure for companies like Uber to contribute and maintain open-source projects. It houses sub-organizations like the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Cloud Foundry Foundation, The Hyperledger Foundation and the Linux operating system, among others.

These open-source projects provide a base on top of which contributing companies and the community of developers can add value if they wish and build a business. Others like Uber, which uses these technologies to fuel their backend systems, won’t sell additional services, but can capitalize on the openness to help fuel their own requirements in the future, while also acting as a contributor to give as well as take.

Citrix pays $200M to acquire Sapho, which connects legacy software with ‘micro apps’

Published November 15, 2018

As large organizations grapple with adopting modern work practices without throwing out all of their legacy software, a company that works with them is making an acquisition that it hopes will help with that process. Citrix today is announcing that it has acquired Sapho, a startup that develops “micro apps” for legacy software so that workers could use them as they would more modern applications: in the cloud, on mobile and more.

We understand that the acquisition was for around $200 million in an all-cash deal. It’s a good return: Sapho had raised just under $28 million since 2014 from investors that included AME Cloud Ventures, Louie Alsop, Felicis Ventures and more. Including co-founders Fouad ElNaggar and Peter Yared, the whole team of 90 employees, based mainly in the Bay Area and a development office in Prague, will be joining Citrix.

Citrix, for its part, currently has a market cap of about $14 billion and has been seeing a surge of interest under new CEO David Henshall, who has repositioned it from focusing mainly on virtual private networking services to a more hybrid cloud model, following a wider trend in the world of enterprise IT.

Citrix will be bringing on all of Sapho’s existing business and products. The two companies already have a strong overlap in their customer bases, CEO ElNaggar said, and it was in fact several of those customers asking for more integrations with Citrix services that drove Citrix approaching Sapho for this deal.

“The largest companies in the world are using Citrix and have a massive hybrid environment where they need to provide a more engaging set of experiences for their employees,” Tim Minahan, EVP Business Strategy and CMO of Citrix, said in an interview. “It doesn’t mean they will rip everything out and put in new software, and Sappho provides a great way to leverage that infrastructure and make them more insightful in their decision making. We see it as a way to rethink the role that enterprise apps play in their environment.”

Typical tasks that Sapho today provides integrations for by tapping into legacy software include expense reporting, sales software, IT support tickets and HR tasks. It feeds data from these into services like Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle’s EBS, Salesforce and SAP ERP, Workday, Google Drive and more.

Ahead of Citrix buying Sapho we’d heard that IBM and Microsoft had eyed up the company and entered into early talks, underscoring the work Sapho had done, the deals it was winning and the gap in the market that it was filling.

Canonical plans to raise its first outside funding as it looks to a future IPO

Published November 15, 2018

It’s been 14 years since Mark Shuttleworth first founded and funded Canonical and the Ubuntu project. At the time, it was mostly a Linux distribution. Today, it’s a major enterprise player that offers a variety of products and services. Throughout the years, Shuttleworth self-funded the project and never showed much interest in taking outside money. Now, however, that’s changing.

As Shuttleworth told me, he’s now looking for investors as he looks to get the company on track to an IPO. It’s no secret that the company’s recent re-focusing on the enterprise — and shutting down projects like the Ubuntu phone and the Unity desktop environment — was all about that, after all. Shuttleworth sees raising money as a step in this direction — and as a way of getting the company in shape for going public.

“The first step would be private equity,” he told me. “And really, that’s because having outside investors with outside members of the board essentially starts to get you to have to report and be part of that program. I’ve got a set of things that I think we need to get right. That’s what we’re working towards now. Then there’s a set of things that private investors are looking for and the next set of things is when you’re doing a public offering, there’s a different level of discipline required.”

It’s no secret that Shuttleworth, who sports an impressive beard these days, was previously resistant to this, and he acknowledged as much. “I think that’s a fair characterization,” he said. “I enjoy my independence and I enjoy being able to make long-term calls. I still feel like I’ll have the ability to do that, but I do appreciate keenly the responsibility of taking other people’s money. When it’s your money, it’s slightly different.”

Refocusing Canonical on the enterprise business seems to be paying off already. “The numbers are looking good. The business is looking healthy. It’s not a charity. It’s not philanthropy,” he said. “There are some key metrics that I’m watching, which are the gate for me to take the next step, which would be growth equity.” Those metrics, he told me, are the size of the business and how diversified it is.

Shuttleworth likens this program of getting the company ready to IPO to getting fit. “There’s no point in saying: I haven’t done any exercise in the last 10 years but I’m going to sign up for tomorrow’s marathon,” he said.

The move from being a private company to taking outside investment and going public — especially after all these years of being self-funded — is treacherous, though, and Shuttleworth admitted as much, especially in terms of being forced to setting short-term goals to satisfy investors that aren’t necessarily in the best interest of the company in the long term. Shuttleworth thinks he can negotiate those issues, though.

Interestingly, he thinks the real danger is quite a different one. “I think the most dangerous thing in making that shift is the kind of shallowness of the unreasonably big impact that stock price has on people’s mood,” he said. “Today, at Canonical, it’s 600 people. You might have some that are having a really great day and some that are having a shitty day. And they have to figure out what’s real about both of those scenarios. But they can kind of support each other. […] But when you have a stock ticker, everybody thinks they’re having a great day, or everybody thinks they’re having a shitty day in a way that may be completely uncorrelated to how well they’re actually doing.”

Shuttleworth does not believe that IBM’s acquisition of its competitor Red Hat will have any immediate effect on its business, though. What he does think, however, is that this move is making a lot of people rethink for the first time in years the investment they’ve been making in Red Hat and its enterprise Linux distribution. Canonical’s promise is that Ubuntu, as well as its OpenStack tools and services, are not just competitive but also more cost-effective in the long run, and offer enterprises an added degree of agility. And if more businesses start looking at Canonical and Ubuntu, that can only speed up Shuttleworth’s (and his bankers’) schedule for hitting Canonical’s metrics for raising money and going public.

What the FDA’s restriction of e-cig flavors means for Juul

Published November 15, 2018

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has revealed his plans to combat underage use of e-cigs and nicotine, which has grown 78 percent among high school students from 2017 to 2018.

The commissioner today announced a plan that would remove all flavored electronic nicotine delivery system products — with the exception of tobacco, mint, menthol or non-flavored products — from any store where children under the age of 18 can see them.

So what does this mean for Juul, a company that reached a $10 billion valuation 4x faster than Facebook and currently owns more than 70 percent of the e-cig market?

One result is that Juul Labs is likely now just as desperate for minors to quit vaping as the FDA. The commissioner has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t see a significant decrease in underage use, he’s willing to pull the plug on the e-cig industry.

“I could take more aggressive steps,” Gottlieb said in a written statement. “I could propose eliminating any application enforcement discretion to any currently marketed ENDS product, which would result in the removal of ALL such products from the marketplace. At this time, I am not proposing this route, as I don’t want to foreclose opportunities for currently addicted adult smokers. But make no mistake. If the policy changes that we have outlined don’t reverse this epidemic, and if the manufacturers don’t do their part to help advance this cause, I’ll explore additional actions.”

Yes, it seems remarkable that we may live in a world where cigarettes, the country’s leading cause of preventable death, are available at grocery stores but e-cigarettes, which are said to be 95 percent less dangerous, are illegal.

y’all really got mango juul pods banned before AR15s

— (@souljaguac) November 14, 2018

But that’s exactly what might happen if the government, e-cig manufacturers and consumers don’t work together to end underage use of nicotine.

Though some critics would argue otherwise, Juul has maintained that it never intended to sell to minors. Which doesn’t change the fact that the company’s revenue is largely dependent on the nicotine addicted as a category.

The American economy was essentially created upon the back of Big Tobacco. And 50 years ago, the industry got away with marketing to young people and creating several generations of addicted adults to what may have been the most successful consumer product ever. To say that it was lucrative would be an understatement. It still is.

Fiscally, would Juul enjoy being the next Philip Morris? Undoubtedly. But it would rather be the next Nicoderm CQ or Nicorette than be illegal. Hell yes! Right now, the company is still hanging in there. But the only way to prevent the company from being officially banned in the U.S. is to find a way to get kids to stop vaping.

For this reason, Juul Labs is going a few steps further than the FDA’s new policy. Not only is the company removing non-tobacco flavors from convenience stores or other stores where people under 18 can shop, but it’s also removing all non-tobacco flavors from vape shops and age-restricted specialty stores. From here on out, the only place to buy Cucumber, Creme, Fruit and Mango (the most popular flavor) Juul pods is on the Juul website.

The company will also increase its secret shopper program from 500 visits/month to 2,000 visits/month at the more than 90,000 stores where Juul products are sold.

Juul’s plan, announced Tuesday, also includes removing the company’s Instagram and Facebook channels, and limiting its Twitter account to non-promotional information.

Alongside cracking down on flavored ENDS products, Gottlieb is also looking into banning from the market combustible menthol cigarettes and all flavored cigars. Mint and menthol ENDS products could also be on the chopping block.

“I’m deeply concerned about the availability of menthol-flavored cigarettes,” said Gottlieb in a written statement. “I believe these menthol-flavored products represent one of the most common and pernicious routes by which kids initiate on combustible cigarettes.”

Not only does the masking effect of menthol make combustible menthol cigarettes more attractive to youth, but Gottlieb went on to say that “they exacerbate troubling disparities in health related to race and socioeconomic status” and “disproportionately and adversely affect underserved communities.”

For these reasons, the FDA is taking a hard stance on menthol combustible cigarettes and flavored cigars, a move that will surely mobilize big tobacco in yet another battle in their decades-long war against regulators. Until restrictions can be enforced on these combustible products, however, the FDA is allowing menthol and mint-flavored ENDS products to be sold in convenience stores as well as vape shops.

But Gottlieb will be keeping a close watch on it:

“I’m also aware that there are potentially important distinctions even between mint- and menthol-flavored e-cigarette products,” he wrote. “I’m particularly concerned about mint-flavored products, based on evidence showing its relative popularity, compared to menthol, among kids. So, I want to be clear that, in light of these concerns, if evidence shows that kids’ use of mint or menthol e-cigarettes isn’t declining, I’ll revisit this aspect of the current compliance policy.”

In response to the FDA’s announced plan, a Juul Labs spokesperson had this to say:

Commissioner Gottlieb has made it clear that “preventing youth initiation on nicotine is a paramount imperative.” As we said earlier in the week, the numbers tell us underage use of e-cigarette products is a problem that requires immediate action. That is why we implemented our action plan. We are committed to working with FDA, state Attorneys General, local municipalities, and community organizations as a transparent and responsible partner in this effort.

The FDA statement, which is more than 4,000 words, thoroughly explains that the agency is trying to strike a balance between ensuring adult smokers have an alternative through ENDS and protecting a generation of young people from becoming addicted to nicotine.

In light of the FDA’s opposition to menthol, Gottlieb addresses the distinction between allowing menthol/mint and tobacco-flavored ENDS into convenience stores opposed to other flavors:

This distinction among flavors seeks to maintain access for adult users of these products, including adults who live in rural areas and may not have access to an age-restricted location, while evidence of their impacts continues to develop. It also recognizes that combustible cigarettes are currently available in menthol in retail locations that are not age-restricted. This approach is informed by the potential public health benefit for adult cigarette smokers who may use these ENDS products as part of a transition away from smoking.

As far as online sales go, the FDA is looking to ensure that all flavored ENDS products sold online go through a rigorous age-verification process.

Gottlieb also addressed the potential for new products to reverse the growth of underage ENDS use, and said that the agency would work to make the application review process more efficient.

“In the coming months, CTP plans to issue additional policies and procedures to further make sure that the process for reviewing these applications is efficient, science-based and transparent,” said Gottlieb. “We’ll also explore how to create a process to accelerate the development and review of products with features that can make it far less likely that kids can access an e-cigarette.”

Juul Labs has briefly discussed its vision for a next-generation e-cig, which the company has been working on for a year. The device would incorporate Bluetooth, letting users monitor and control their nicotine intake. However, Bluetooth might also allow for geofencing to prevent kids from using the product at school, as well as a smartphone-based lock that would only allow the Juul to be used by someone who has verified they’re over 21.

Meet Uber’s newly promoted chief product officer, Manik Gupta

Published November 15, 2018

Manik Gupta got his first taste of solving logistics nightmares when, fresh out of college, he was delivering Palm Pilots around Singapore. He’d started a precursor to Groupon called BuyItTogether. “We were a full-stack marketplace where we were also delivering the goods. That’s what caused us to not have good profit margins. Actually, zero profit margins,” he recalls with a laugh.

His new gig isn’t earning profits either. Uber lost nearly $1 billion last quarter. But the company sees Gupta’s experience with delivery and maps as crucial to building an app that caters to people’s every desire so they never stray and keep earning it money. That’s why today Uber announced that it’s promoted its VP of maps and marketplace Manik Gupta to become its new chief product officer.

“We look at ourself at Uber as the starting point of all your transportation needs” Gupta tells me. “Here’s a company that’s causing this interesting change in user behavior. With my own knowledge and capability, I thought I could help the company get to the next level of understanding the real world, which is very different from digital habits.” His first big projects will be augmenting GPS for more accurate pickups and making Uber’s new rider and driver loyalty program work in every market.

From entrepreneurship to the massive supply chain of HP, to the top of Google India and now at Uber, Gupta is one of those technologists who lives to eliminate frustration. He framed nearly every question I asked him in the sense of problems and solutions. In the messy physical realm of clogged streets, that mentality goes a long way.

“I grew up in India and things weren’t always very structured” Gupta says when asked where that philosophy came from. “I learned to manage uncertainty and the importance of having a Plan B at a very early age. I faced a lot of real-time micro-problems needing micro-solutions and I guess I’ve honed this skill over time.”

Back in 1999 with BuyItTogether, there were no logistics networks. “We couldn’t get the retailers to do the delivery themselves. So we had to do it,” Gupta remembers, seeming like he’s still a bit exhausted by the experience. He eventually sold BuyItTogether to a Norwegian company called CoShopper and spent a few years bringing the service to Europe. “That was my first foray into doing things in the real world and being focused how we can move things from point A to point B as fast as possible.”

Manik Gupta’s first startup, the very 1990s “BuyItTogether”

From there he joined Hewlett Packard as it struggled to match Dell’s direct-to-consumer sales model, which he says “required building tons of muscles for HP.” After getting an MBA, he joined Google India in Bangalore. “My first week, my manager asked me what are the things I’m interested in, and told me ‘There’s something called Maps that no one seems to be owning. Do you want to work on that?’”

That opportunity would set him on the path to Uber. He launched Google Maps in India and managed MapMaker, the crowdsourcing tool that gave Google feet on the ground in tiny towns around the world. Gupta moved to Mountain View in 2011 to oversee Google’s push to make its own maps, which after seven years at the company set him up to join as Uber’s VP of maps and marketplace in 2015.

Now after nearly three years, and spending the last five months filling in since Uber’s VP of Product Daniel Graf left, Gupta is in the top product spot at Uber. Its previous CPO Jeff Holden who’d focused on flying cars left in May. Gupta is humble about the new gig, repeating “I’m here to help,” rather than to lead or become some tech luminary. He seems happy leaving that to Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

Knowing that Uber is spread across so many culturally distinct places, Gupta wants his teams to build what’s right for the world around them rather than trying to make Uber the same everywhere. “One of the things I learned back at Google is that you really have to empower teams that are locally situated.” For example, the India team was fully responsible for the development of its new Uber Lite app for emerging markets with slow connections and old phones.

One thing I hope he develops a coherent cross-border strategy for is helmets. With Uber’s bikes and scooters proliferating, people around the world are increasingly hopping on and hopping off. But the spontaneous nature of the experience means many riders aren’t wearing helmets. If that practice continues, major injuries will stack up. Not only is it a moral imperative that Uber develop a helmet solution, like something collapsible or that attaches to the vehicle between rides, but its relationship with local governments will depend on keeping citizens safe.

As for Gupta’s personal roadmap, he’s concentrating on rolling out the Uber Rewards rider loyalty and Uber Pro driver loyalty initiatives. “Both of these programs are just getting started, so I’m focused on getting them installed in the communities we serve.”

Drawing on his Google Maps experience, Gupta is developing a new way to make sure drivers and riders can always find each other. “We’re rethinking GPS to solve a major pain point for riders and drivers: pick up location. These locations are particularly tricky for GPS to find when they’re in “urban jungles” or areas with a lot of tall buildings” Gupta explains. “The technology we’re piloting in a handful of cities improves GPS performance in these cities by using maps and satellite signal strengths to help drivers find pick up points more easily.” The means you might not have to run across four lanes of traffic to get to your ride.

But knowing Uber’s history of culture issues, Gupta wants to ensure his team lives by Dara’s new mantra of ‘Do the right thing. Period.’ “This is a super important topic as well. I believe that the way you set culture starts at the top. Dara has been a phenomenal agent of change within the company. Over the course of this year we have attracted excellent talent for the product team — from the Facebooks and Googles of the world. We have this melting pot of people from all different backgrounds.” To build for everyone, he knows each of those voices must be heard.

RPA startup Automation Anywhere nabs $300M from SoftBank at a $2.6B valuation

Published November 15, 2018

The market for RPA — Robotic Process Automation — is getting a hat trick of news this week: Automation Anywhere has today announced that it has raised $300 million from the SoftBank Vision Fund. This funding, which values Automation Anywhere at $2.6 billion post-money, is an extension to the Series A the company announced earlier this year, which was at a $1.8 billion valuation. It brings the total size of the round to $550 million.

The news comes just a day after one of the startup’s bigger competitors, UiPath, announced a $265 million raise at a $3 billion valuation; and a week after Kofax, another competitor, announced it would be acquiring a division of Nuance for $400 million to beef up its business.

It’s also yet one more example of a one-two punch in funding. It was only in July that Automation Anywhere announced its $250 million raise.

This latest round adds some significant investors to the company’s cap table, specifically from the SoftBank Vision Fund, which counts a number of tech giants like Apple and Qualcomm as LPs, along with others. Specifically, the fund has been under fire for the last few weeks because of the fact that a large swathe of its backing comes from Saudi money.

The Saudi Arabian government has been in the spotlight over its involvement in the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in its embassy in Turkey. By extension of that, there have been many questions raised in recent weeks over the ethics of taking money from the Vision Fund, with so many questions still in the air over that affair.

In an interview, Mihir Shukla, CEO and Co-Founder at Automation Anywhere, said that while what happened to Khashoggi was “not acceptable,” his conversations started with SoftBank before that and they did not impact the startup’s decision over whether to work with the Fund.

He declined to comment on the timing of the term sheet getting signed, when asked whether it was before or after the news broke of the murder.

What attracted us to SoftBank was that Masayoshi Son” — the CEO and founder of SoftBank — “has a vision and he is investing in foundational platforms that will change how we work and travel,” Shukla said. “We share that vision.”

He also pointed out that getting funding from SoftBank will “naturally” lead to more opportunities to partner with companies in SoftBank’s network of companies, which cover dozens of investments and outright ownerships.

While it feels like artificial intelligence is something that you see referenced at every turn these days in the tech world, RPA is an interesting area because it’s one of the more tangible applications of it, across a wide set of businesses.

In short, it’s a set of software-based “robots” that help companies automate mundane and repetitive tasks that would otherwise be done by human workers, employing AI-based technology in areas like computer vision and machine learning to get the work done.

Competition among companies to grab pole position in the space is fierce. Automation Anywhere has 1,400 organizations as customers, it says. By comparison, UiPath has 2,100 and claims an annual revenue run rate at the moment of $150 million. Shukla declined to disclose any financials for his company.

But in light of all that, the company will be using the funding to build out its business specifically ahead of rivals.

“With this additional capital, we are in a position to do far more than any other provider,” said Shukla in a statement. “We will not only continue to deliver the most advanced RPA to the market, but we will help bring AI to millions. Like the introduction of the PC, we see a world where every office employee will work alongside digital workers, amplifying human contributions. Today, employees must know how to use a PC and very soon employees will have to know how to build a bot.”

Automation Anywhere claims that its Bot Store is the industry’s largest marketplace for bot applications, designed both by itself and partners, to execute different business processes, with 65,000 users since launching in March 2018.

Propel accelerates with $18M Series B to manage product lifecycle

Published November 15, 2018

We hear so much about managing the customer relationship, but companies have to manage the products they sell, too. Propel, a Santa Clara startup, is taking a modern cloud approach to the problem, and today it landed an $18 million Series B investment.

The round was led by Norwest Venture Partners. Previous investors Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Salesforce Ventures and SignalFire also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to more than $28 million.

“We are focused on helping companies design and launch products, based on how you go through the life cycle of a product from concept to design to make, model, sell, service where everybody in a company gets involved in product processes at different points in time,” company co-founder and CEO Ray Hein told TechCrunch.

Hein says the company has three core products to help customers track products through their life. For starters, there is the product life cycle management tool (PLM), used by engineering and manufacturing. Next, they have product information management for sales and marketing. Finally, they have service personnel using the quality management component.

The company is built on top of the Salesforce platform, which could account for Salesforce Ventures’ interest in the startup. While Propel looks purely at the product, Salesforce is more interested in the customer, whether from a sales, service or marketing perspective.

These same employees need to understand the products they are developing and selling and that is where Propel comes into play. For instance, when sales people are filling out an order, they need access to the product catalog to get the right numbers or marketing needs to understand the products they are adding to an online store in an e-commerce environment.

Traditional PLM tools from companies like SAP and Oracle are on-prem or have been converted from on-prem to cloud services. Propel was born in the cloud and Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who will be joining the Propel board, sees this as a key differentiator for the startup.

“With Propel’s solution, companies can get up and running faster than with on-premise alternatives and pivot products in a matter of seconds based on real-time feedback gathered from marketing, engineering, sales, customers and the entire supply chain,” Jacobsohn said in a statement.

The company was founded in 2015. It currently has 35 employees; flush with these new funds, Hein intends to boost to 50 in the coming months.