Google Cloud makes some strong moves to differentiate itself from AWS and Microsoft
Google Cloud held its annual customer conference, Google Cloud Next, this week in San Francisco. It had a couple of purposes. For starters, it could introduce customers to new CEO Thomas Kurian for the first time since his hiring at the end of last year. And secondly, and perhaps more importantly, it could demonstrate that it can offer a value proposition that is distinct from AWS and Microsoft.
Kurian’s predecessor, Diane Greene, was fond of saying that it was still early days for the cloud market, and she’s still right, but while the pie has continued to grow substantially, Google’s share of the market has stayed stubbornly in single digits. It needed to use this week’s conference as at least a springboard to showcase its strengths.
Its lack of commercial cloud market clout has always been a bit of a puzzler. This is Google after all. It runs Google Search and YouTube and Google Maps and Google Docs. These are massive services that rarely go down. You would think being able to run these massive services would translate into massive commercial success, but so far it hasn’t.
Missing ingredients
Even though Greene brought her own considerable enterprise cred to GCP, having been a co-founder at VMware, the company that really made the cloud possible by popularizing the virtual machine, she wasn’t able to significantly change the company’s commercial cloud fortunes.
In a conversation with TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardinois, Kurian talked about missing ingredients, like having people to talk to (or maybe a throat to choke). “A number of customers told us ‘we just need more people from you to help us.’ So that’s what we’ll do,” Kurian told Lardinois.
But, of course, it’s never one thing when it comes to a market as complex as cloud infrastructure. Sure, you can add more bodies in customer support or sales, or more aggressively pursue high-value enterprise customers, or whatever Kurian has identified as holes in GCP’s approach up until now, but it still requires a compelling story, and Google took a big step toward having the ingredients for a new story this week.
Changing position
Google is trying to position itself in the same way as any cloud vendor going after AWS. They are selling themselves as the hybrid cloud company that can help with your digital transformation. It’s a common strategy, but Google did more than throw out the usual talking points this week. It walked the walk too.
For starters, it introduced Anthos, a single tool to manage your workloads wherever they live, even in a rival cloud. This is a big deal, and if it works as described, it does give that new beefed-up sales team at Google Cloud a stronger story to tell around integration. As my colleague, Frederic Lardinois described it:
So with Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds, all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That’s a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google’s approach from its competitors’. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure.
AWS hasn’t made made many friends in the open-source community of late, and Google reiterated that it was going to be the platform that is friendly to open-source projects. To that end, it announced a number of major partnerships.
Finally, the company took a serious look at verticals, trying to put together packages of Google Cloud services designed specifically for a given vertical. As an example, it put together a package for retailers that included special services to help keep you up and running during peak demand; tools to suggest if you like this, you might be interested in these items; contact center AI; and other tools specifically geared toward the retail market. You can expect the company will be doing more of this to make the platform more attractive to a given market space.
Photo: Michael Short/Bloomberg via Getty Images
All of this and more, way too much to summarize in one article, was exactly what Google Cloud needed to do this week. Now comes the hard part. They have come up with some good ideas and they have to go out and sell it.
Nobody has ever denied that Google lacked good technology. That has always been an inherently obvious strength, but it has struggled to translate that into substantial market share. That is Kurian’s challenge. As Greene used to say, in baseball terms, it’s still early innings. And it really still is, but the game is starting to move along, and Kurian needs to get the team moving in the right direction if it expects to be competitive.
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Verified Expert Brand Designer: Character
Character is celebrating its 20-year anniversary this year, and this SF-based branding and design agency has a lot to be proud of. Founded by Ben Pham, Tish Evangelista, and Rishi Shourie, Character has helped startups like Doordash, Glint, Molekule, and many others, launch their companies into the world. We interviewed co-founder Ben Pham about Character’s early days, their commitment to collaborating with mission-driven founders, and why relationships define who they are and what they do as a branding firm.
On working with entrepreneurs:
“When you have an opportunity to sit in the room, hear how passionate they are, how they left a cushy job, and this is their mission, it’s inspiring. Oftentimes, it’s not financially motivated for them. It’s not about their ego. You think about that, and you’re like, “Wow, I get to be in this room with someone that’s really passionate” and we start believing in it. We have to believe in what they’re creating, and we have to believe that they’re leaving a positive impact on our culture. We want to make sure founders are contributing in a positive way. We believe in the people that we’re working with and what they’re doing.”
“The Character team was extremely creative and easy to work with, always open to exploring new ideas.” Howard Nuk, SF, Co-founder at Palm
Character’s branding philosophy:
Great brands, for us, is about relationships. It’s a long-lasting relationship, and those relationships are earned. We think of brands like a character within a story. They have a unique characteristic about them. When you have dinner parties, you’re inviting people into your home who you’re going to enjoy the next three hours drinking wine, eating food, and just talking to them. You always know who you’re going to invite and the dynamic of the room. We think about brands in the same way.
Below, you’ll find the rest of the founder reviews, the full interview, and more details like pricing and fee structures. This profile is part of our ongoing series covering startup brand designers and agencies with whom founders love to work, based on this survey and our own research. The survey is open indefinitely, so please fill it out if you haven’t already.
Interview with Character’s Creative Director & Co-Founder Ben Pham
Yvonne Leow: What’s Character’s origin story? How did it get started?
Ben Pham: We started in 1999, and the reason why we started our agency was, in 1999 if you were in San Francisco, and practicing graphic design during that time, a lot of our work was coming from biotech, and technology companies. Those companies did not look like the life science, biotech companies that we see today, because they were not lifestyle companies. Tech companies, during that time, did not look like lifestyle companies. We’re like, “Well, that’s not an area that we’re really interested in.” We felt like, you know, in southern California to LA, and New York, a lot of branding agencies were focusing on consumer lifestyle brands. Fashion, apparel, interior, and nobody was really doing that in San Francisco, and that was something that we were interested in. So we were like, “Let’s do that.”
As a result, we landed our first project, which is branding for Pottery Barn Kids. That really was a very different way of thinking about branding for kids, because most time, people think of bright primary colors, jumbled type. We realized that kids are not our target audience, it’s really parents, so we made a smooth and sophisticated system. And that got a lot of attention for Character, and then we went on to work with Gary Friedman, the CEO of Restoration Hardware.
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ReachFive manages logins and accounts for e-commerce platforms
French startup ReachFive wants to become Stripe for account management. The company just raised a $10 million Series A funding round led by CapHorn Invest, with Dawn Capital and Ventech also participating — investment bank Avolta Partners handled the fundraising process.
When you buy something on an e-commerce website or app, chances are those companies asked you to create an account before entering your address and payment information. ReachFive creates the login module for dozens of e-commerce and transactional companies.
This isn’t just about storing an email and password. ReachFive lets you do interesting things with your customer database. For instance, ReachFive works across different channels.
If you shop on L’Occitane’s website and then purchase cosmetics in a store, they can find your account. This way, you get accurate information about your customers. ReachFive complies with GDPR.
ReachFive also supports social logins, such as Facebook Connect or “Sign in with Google.” The company also supports two-factor authentication. And, of course, you can integrate ReachFive with other services, such as a CRM, a CMS, a recommendation engine, etc.
If you’re creating a brand from scratch, you might rely heavily on newsletters and content. You can let people sign up to the newsletter without creating a full-fledged account. They can create an account when they make their first purchase later down the road — ReachFive will reconcile profiles.
Forty companies are using ReachFive, including Boulanger, Etam Group, L’Occitane, Hachette Group, Engie and La Redoute. The startup manages 40 million user accounts overall. The company uses a software-as-a-service pricing model, and you can be sure that each contract must be quite valuable.
ReachFive proves that an omnichannel strategy doesn’t just mean that you should merge your inventories and catalogs across your online and offline platforms. It also means that you should be able to provide a unified customer experience by understanding a customer from start to finish.
Big retail companies have already unified their user accounts — when you buy an Apple product in an Apple store, you can see the receipt in your online account. But ReachFive could become an essential widget for all mid-tier e-commerce platforms.
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Samsung Galaxy Fold pre-orders open tomorrow
There are early adopters, and then there are early adopters. Anyone who bites the bullet and picks up Samsung’s $1,980 and up Galaxy Fold falls into the former category. And then there are those who’ll be the first to Samsung’s site when the company opens up pre-orders on its inaugural foldable tomorrow.
Samsung is really squeezing as much out of this as possible — and understandably so. This thing was a long time in the making. Yesterday, it announced that it had begun mass production on foldable OLEDs for the device. A couple of weeks back, it showed its fold testing in action via video.
As for the devices themselves, we haven’t seen much beyond what Samsung showed off onstage at an event in San Francisco earlier this year. That includes the behind-glass debut at Mobile World Congress a week later — certainly not the same sort of confidence Huawei displayed with its own device announced at that show.
Not the kind of thing that lends a lot of confidence to such a pricey purchase, but such is the plight of the early early adopter.
The Galaxy S10 5G, meanwhile (a product we’ve actually seen in person, mind), will be available through the company’s site next month.
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Public health startup Cityblock raises $65M Series B
Redpoint Ventures has led a $65 million Series B in Cityblock, a healthcare company focused on providing improved care to low-income neighborhoods.
The business launched roughly 18 months ago out of Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs, an urban innovation incubator known for projects like mobility data startup Coord, which itself raised a $5 million round in October.
“We’re a tech-enabled services company focused on caring for a population that has been traditionally overlooked by the innovation community and generally underserved across healthcare,” co-founder and chief executive officer Iyah Romm told TechCrunch. “We believe we can fundamentally redefine the way that health services are built across the country for low-income populations. These are populations that have never been prioritized.”
Romm has spent his entire career in the public health sector. Prior to joining Sidewalk Labs as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2017, he spent one year as the chief transformation officer of the Commonwealth Care Alliance, a nonprofit medical care delivery organization.
Cityblock provides personalized medical and behavioral health and social services across a growing number of clinics on the East Coast. The company will use the investment to open additional clinics and continue the development of its core platform, Commons. The care delivery platform helps care workers collaborate and stay up to date on patients, with real-time hospital admission alerts to tools for tracking treatment progress.
Cityblock opened its first clinic, or “neighborhood hub,” in Brooklyn, New York after forging a partnership with EmblemHealth, a New York neighborhood health insurance business. They’ve since expanded to Connecticut via a partnership with ConnectiCare, a Connecticut insurance provider. Cityblock will open clinics in North Carolina later this year. Cityblock’s services come at no additional costs to members covered by partner insurance businesses.
The startup’s hope is to get these low-income demographics regular access to more affordable care. Preventative care, after all, is a whole lot cheaper than emergency room visits.
“People end up going to the ER when problems are really bad, for conditions that can be managed,” Redpoint partner and newly appointed Cityblock board member Elliot Geidt told TechCrunch. “There are 75 million people on Medicaid alone and a good portion of these people are living in the inner cities. It’s a problem that has a scope larger than most things that we see in the venture community. The big problem with this population is the existing healthcare system doesn’t work for them, it falls short on so many levels.”
New investors 8VC, Echo Health Ventures and StartUp Health also participated in the latest round, as did existing investors including Sidewalk Labs, Thrive Capital, Maverick Ventures, Town Hall Ventures and EmblemHealth.
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Much to Oracle’s chagrin, Pentagon names Microsoft and Amazon as $10B JEDI cloud contract finalists
Yesterday, the Pentagon announced two finalists in the $10 billion, decade-long JEDI cloud contract process — and Oracle was not one of them. In spite of lawsuits, official protests and even back-channel complaining to the president, the two finalists are Microsoft and Amazon.
“After evaluating all of the proposals received, the Department of Defense has made a competitive range determination for the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud request for proposals, in accordance with all applicable laws and regulations. The two companies within the competitive range will participate further in the procurement process,” Elissa Smith, DoD spokesperson for Public Affairs Operations told TechCrunch. She added that those two finalists were in fact Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS, the cloud computing arm of Amazon).
This contract procurement process has caught the attention of the cloud computing market for a number of reasons. For starters, it’s a large amount of money, but perhaps the biggest reason it had cloud companies going nuts was that it is a winner-take-all proposition.
It is important to keep in mind that whether it’s Microsoft or Amazon that is ultimately chosen for this contract, the winner may never see $10 billion, and it may not last 10 years, because there are a number of points where the DoD could back out — but the idea of a single winner has been irksome for participants in the process from the start.
Over the course of the last year, Google dropped out of the running, while IBM and Oracle have been complaining to anyone who will listen that the contract unfairly favored Amazon. Others have questioned the wisdom of even going with a single-vendor approach. Even at $10 billion, an astronomical sum to be sure, we have pointed out that in the scheme of the cloud business, it’s not all that much money — but there is more at stake here than money.
There is a belief here that the winner could have an upper hand in other government contracts, that this is an entrée into a much bigger pot of money. After all, if you are building the cloud for the Department of Defense and preparing it for a modern approach to computing in a highly secure way, you would be in a pretty good position to argue for other contracts with similar requirements.
In the end, in spite of the protests of the other companies involved, the Pentagon probably got this right. The two finalists are the most qualified to carry out the contract’s requirements. They are the top two cloud infrastructure vendors on the market, although Microsoft is far behind with around 13 or 14 percent market share. Amazon is far head, with around 33 percent, according to several companies that track such things.
Microsoft in particular has tools and resources that would be very appealing, especially Azure Stack — a mini private version of Azure, that you can stand up anywhere, an approach that would have great appeal to the military — but both companies have experience with government contracts, and both bring strengths and weaknesses to the table. It will undoubtedly be a tough decision.
In February, the contract drama took yet another turn when the department reported it was investigating new evidence of conflict of interest by a former Amazon employee who was involved in the RFP process for a time before returning to the company. Smith reports that the department found no such conflict, but there could be some ethical violations they are looking into.
“The department’s investigation has determined that there is no adverse impact on the integrity of the acquisition process. However, the investigation also uncovered potential ethical violations, which have been further referred to DOD IG,” Smith explained.
The DoD is supposed to announce the winner this month, but the drama has continued non-stop.
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Rasa raises $13M led by Accel for its developer-friendly open-source approach to chatbots
Conversational AI and the use of chatbots have been through multiple cycles of hype and disillusionment in the tech world. You know the story: first you get a launch from the likes of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Google or any number of other companies, and then you get the many examples of how their services don’t work as intended at the slightest challenge. But time brings improvements and more focused expectations, and today a startup that has been harnessing all those learnings is announcing funding to take to the next level its own approach to conversational AI.
Rasa, which has built an open-source platform for third parties to design and manage their own conversational (text or voice) AI chatbots, is today announcing that it has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding led by Accel, with participation from Basis Set Ventures, Greg Brockman (co-founder & CTO OpenAI), Daniel Dines (founder & CEO UiPath) and Mitchell Hashimoto (co-founder & CTO Hashicorp).
Rasa was founded in Berlin, but with this round, it will be moving its headquarters to San Francisco, with a plan to hire more people there in sales, marketing and business development; and to continue its tech development with its roadmap including plans to expand the platform to cover images, too.
The company was founded 2.5 years ago, by co-founder/CEO Alex Weidauer’s own admission “when chatbot hype was at its peak.”
Rasa itself was not immune to it, too: “Everyone wanted to automate conversations, and so we set out to build something, too,” he said. “But we quickly realised it was extremely hard to do and that the developer tools were just not there yet.”
Rather than posing an insurmountable roadblock, the shortcomings of chatbots became the problem that Rasa set out to fix.
Alan Nichols, the co-founder who is now the CTO, is an AI PhD, not in natural language as you might expect, but in machine learning.
“What we do is more is address this as a mathematical, machine learning problem rather than one of language,” Weidauer said. Specifically, that means building a model that can be used by any company to tap its own resources to train their bots, in particular with unstructured information, which has been one of the trickier problems to solve in conversational AI.
At a time when many have raised concerns about who might “own” the progress of artificial intelligence, and specifically the data that goes into building these systems, Rasa’s approach is a refreshing one.
Typically, when an organization wants to build an AI chatbot either to interact with customers or to run something in the back end of their business, their developers most commonly opt for third-party cloud APIs that have restrictions on how they can be customized, or they build their own from scratch — but if the organization is not already a large tech company, it will be challenged to have the human or other resources to execute this.
Rasa underscores an emerging trend for a strong third contender. The company has built a stack of tools that it has open-sourced, meaning that anyone can (and thousands of developers do) use it for free, with a paid enterprise version that includes extra tools, including customer support, testing and training tools, and production container deployment. (It’s priced depending on size of organization and usage.)
Importantly, whichever package is used, the tools run on a company’s own training data; and the company can ultimately host their bots wherever they choose, which have been some of the unique selling points for those using Rasa’s platform, when they are less interested in working with organizations that might also be competitors.
Adobe’s new AI assistant for searching on Adobe Stock, which has some 100 million images, was built on Rasa.
“We wanted to give our users an AI assistant that lets them search with natural language commands,” said Brett Butterfield, director of software development at Adobe, in a statement. “We looked at several online services, and, in the end, Rasa was the clear choice because we were able to host our own servers and protect our user’s data privacy. Being able to automate full conversations and the fact it is open source were key elements for us.”
Other customers include Parallon and TalkSpace, Zurich and Allianz, Telekom and UBS.
Open source has become big business in the last several years, and so a startup that’s built an AI platform that has a very direct application in the enterprise built on it presents an obvious attraction for VCs.
“Automation is the next battleground for the enterprise, and while this is a very difficult space to win, especially for unstructured information like text and voice, we are confident Rasa has what it takes given their impressive adoption by developers,” said Andrei Brasoveanu, partner at Accel, in a statement.
“Existing solutions don’t let in-house developer teams control their own automation destiny. Rasa is applying commercial open source software solutions for AI environments similarly to what open source leaders such as Cloudera, Mulesoft, and Hashicorp have done for others.”
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Armis nabs $65M Series C as IoT security biz grows in leaps and bounds
Armis is helping companies protect IoT devices on the network without using an agent, and it’s apparently a problem that is resonating with the market, as the startup reports 700 percent growth in the last year. That caught the attention of investors, who awarded them a $65 million Series C investment to help keep accelerating that growth.
Sequoia Capital led the round with help from new investors Insight Venture Partners and Intermountain Ventures. Returning investors Bain Capital Ventures, Red Dot Capital Partners and Tenaya Capital also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $112 million, according to the company.
The company is solving a hard problem around device management on a network. If you have devices where you cannot apply an agent to track them, how do you manage them? Nadir Izrael, company co-founder and CTO, says you have to do it very carefully because even scanning for ports could be too much for older devices and they could shut down. Instead, he says that Armis takes a passive approach to security, watching and learning and understanding what normal device behavior looks like — a kind of behavioral fingerprinting.
“We observe what devices do on the network. We look at their behavior, and we figure out from that everything we need to know,” Izrael told TechCrunch. He adds, “Armis in a nutshell is a giant device behavior crowdsourcing engine. Basically, every client of Armis is constantly learning how devices behave. And those statistical models, those machine learning models, they get merged into master models.”
Whatever they are doing, they seem to have hit upon a security pain point. They announced a $30 million Series B almost exactly a year ago, and they went back for more because they were growing quickly and needed the capital to hire people to keep up.
That kind of growth is a challenge for any startup. The company expects to double its 125-person work force before the end of the year, but the company is working to put systems in place to incorporate those new people and service all of those new customers.
The company plans to hire more people in sales and marketing, of course, but they will concentrate on customer support and building out partnership programs to get some help from systems integrators, ISVs and MSPs, who can do some of the customer hand-holding for them.
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With consumer G+ dead, Currents hopes to make waves in the enterprise
Google today announced that Google+ in G Suite, the last remaining remnants of what was once Google’s attempt to rival Facebook and Twitter, will now be called Currents. We don’t need to belabor the fact that Google+ was a flop and that its death was probably long overdue. We’ve done that. Now it’s time to look ahead and talk about what’s next for Currents. To do that, I sat down with David Thacker, the VP of Product Management for G Suite, at Google’s Cloud Next conference.
As Thacker told me, Google has shifted its resources to have the former Google+ team focus on Currents instead. But before we get to what that teams plans to do, let’s talk about the name first. Currents, after all, was also the name of the predecessor of Google Play Newsstand, the app that was the predecessor of the Google News app.
The official line is that “Currents” is meant to evoke the flow of information. Thacker also noted that the team did a lot of research around the name and that it had “very low recognition.” I guess that’s fair. It also allows Google to reuse an old trademark without having to jump through too many hoops. Since the Google+ name obviously now carries some baggage, changing the name makes sense anyway. “The enterprise version is distinct and separate now and it was causing confusion among our customers,” said Thacker.
“This allows us to do new things and move much faster in the enterprise,” Thacker explained. “To run a consumer social network at the scale of consumer G+ requires a lot of resources and efforts, as you can imagine. And that’s partially the reason we decided to sunset that product, as we just didn’t feel it was worth that investment given the user base on that. But it basically frees up that team to focus on the enterprise vision.”
Now, however, with consumer G+ gone, the company is going to invest in Currents. “We’re moving consumer resources into the enterprise,” he said.
The plan here clearly isn’t to just let Currents linger but to improve it for business users. And while Google has never publicly shared user numbers, Thacker argues that those businesses that do use it tend to use it expensively. The hope, though, surely, is to increase that number — whatever it may be — significantly over time. “If you look at our top G Suite customers, most of them use the product actively as a way to connect really broad organizations,” Thacker said.
Thacker also noted that this move now removes a lot of constraints since the team doesn’t have to think about consumer features anymore. “When Google+ was first designed, it was never designed for that [enterprise] use case, but organizations had the same need to break down silos and help spread ideas and knowledge in their company,” Thacker explained. “So while Google+ didn’t succeed as a consumer product, it will certainly live on in the enterprise.”
What will that future look like? As Thacker told me, the team started with revamping the posting workflow, which was heavily focused on image sharing, for example, which isn’t exactly all that important in a business context.
But there are other features the team is planning to launch, too, including better analytics. “Analytics is a really important part of it,” said Thacker. “When people are posting on Currents, whether it’s executives trying to engage their employee base, they want to see how that’s resonating. And so we built in some pretty rich analytics.”
The team also built a new set of administrative controls that help manage how organizations can control and manage their usage of Currents.
Going forward then, we may actually see a bit of innovation in Currents — something that was sorely lacking from Google+ while it was lingering in limbo. Google Cloud’s CEO Thomas Kurian told me that he wants to make collaboration one of his focus areas. Currents is an obvious fit there, and there are plenty of ways to integrate it with the rest of G Suite still.
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InVision announces new integrations with Jira
Today InVision announced even deeper integrations with Jira, letting users embed actual InVision prototypes right within a Jira ticket. The company also announced the Jira app for InVision Studio, letting designers in Studio see interactive Jira tickets in real time.
InVision has already had lighter integrations with Atlassian products, including Jira, Confluence and Trello. It’s also worth noting that Atlassian participated in InVision’s $115 million Series F funding round.
The partnership makes sense. Atlassian provides a parallel product to InVision, except instead of serving designers, Atlassian serves engineers.
But it brings up an interesting challenge for InVision, last valued at $1.9 billion. The company went from creating its own market with a paid prototyping and collaboration tool to competing with giants and startups alike as it introduced new products.
InVision Studio, for instance, is meant to compete with the likes of Adobe XD, Sketch, and Figma, among others.
At the same time, InVision’s strategy has always been to become a connective tissue for the broader design landscape. CEO Clark Valberg has said in the past that he sees InVision becoming the Salesforce of the design world, with a broad array of partnerships and integrations across the industry to handle each, nuanced fraction of the process in a single, fluid place.
“Up until now we’ve been a fairly horizontal player,” said VP of Product Mike Davidson. “We created the market for prototyping. There was no paid market for a prototyping tool until InVision came along. Now that you see us provide a more vertical stack of tools, we don’t want to lose the great thing we’ve built with the InVision Prototyping tool. It’s been more popular than we could have ever imagined.”
Davidson added that InVision now serves 100 of the Fortune 100 companies.
And since its launch in 2011, InVision has maintained that original strategic course of staying open, particularly with Atlassian. But InVision isn’t just friendly with Atlassian. The company also introduced an App Store and Asset Store in InVision Studio (partnerships include Slack, Dribbble, and Getty), with plans to launch a developer API so anyone can build apps for InVision Studio. Plus, InVision has made a handful of acquisitions, and launched the Design Forward Fund, which allocates $5 million toward investing in design startups.
VP of Partnerships and Community Mike Davidson believes that balancing this open garden philosophy with the desire to provide the very best products across the entire process (automatically putting InVision in competition with other design startups) is one of the company’s greatest challenges.
“We want to provide a first-cclass experience from beginning to end but we also want to provide a system that’s open enough where you can use your tool of choice for any one of the particular functions,” said Davidson. “It’s a difficult balance. We want to allow for designers and developers to choose which tools they use for whatever job they’re trying to do, but we also want to be the best choice for each one of those functions.”
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