Fundings & Exits
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Malaysian on-demand work platform GoGet lands $2 million Series A
GoGet, a Malaysian on-demand work platform, announced today that it has raised a $2 million Series A led by Monk’s Hill Ventures. The platform currently has 20,000 gig workers, who are called “GoGetters,” and has onboarded 5,000 businesses, including Lazada Malaysia, IKEA Malaysia, Foodpanda and flower delivery service BloomThis.
While Malaysia has other on-demand work platforms, including Supahands and Kaodim, each has its own niche. Supahands focuses on online tasks, while Kaodim offers professional services like home repairs, catering and fitness training. GoGet is more similar to TaskRabbit, with GoGetters performing errands or temp work like deliveries, moving large items, catering at events, data entry and office administration.
Chief executive officer and co-founder Francesca Chia founded GoGet in 2014. The startup decided to focus on gig workers because there is a labor gap in ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) countries, she told TechCrunch.
“Today, the majority of ASEAN’s labor market are low- to middle-skilled, and the majority are not protected with job security, future career paths and financial services such as insurance and savings,” she said. “At the other end of the spectrum, over 70% of employment in ASEAN are from SMEs, who seek to scale without scaling full-time costs, and find it difficult to train and maintain a reliable pool of staff.”
GoGet wants to bridge the gap by connecting businesses with verified flexible workers, she added. GoGetters are able to switch between different categories of work, which Chia said gives the ability to learn new skills. Companies are provided with management features that include the ability to create a list of GoGetters they want to work with again and tools for recruiting, training and payment.
The Series A will be used to expand GoGet in Malaysia. One of the things many companies whose business models revolve around the gig economy need to grapple with as they scale include workers who are frustrated by uneven work, low pay and the lack of benefits they would receive as full-time employees. In California, for example, this has resulted in a political battle as companies like Uber, DoorDash and Lyft try to roll back legislation that would force them to classify more gig workers as full-time employees.
Chia said GoGet’s “vision is to bring flexible work to the world in a sustainable manner.” Part of this entails giving GoGet’s gig workers access to benefits like on-demand savings and insurance plans that are similar to what full-time employees receive. GoGet’s platform also has career-building features, including online trainings and networking tools, so workers can prepare for jobs that require different skill sets.
While GoGet’s short-term plan is to focus on growth in Malaysia, it eventually plans to enter other ASEAN countries, too.
In a press statement about the investment, Monk’s Hill Ventures co-founder and managing partner Kuo-Yi Lim said, “The nature of work is being redefined as companies and workers seek both flexibility and fit. This trend has been accelerated by the pandemic, as businesses are transforming in response and require more elastic workforce. GoGet provides a community of motivated and well-trained workers, but more importantly, its platform extends the corporate people management systems to ensure quality, compliance and seamless workflow.”
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With thousands of subscribers, The Juggernaut raises $2 million for a South Asian-focused news outlet
As paid newsletters grow in popularity, Snigdha Sur, the founder of South Asian-focused media company The Juggernaut, has no qualms about avoiding the approach entirely. In October 2017, Sur started The Juggernaut as a free newsletter, called InkMango. As she searched for news on the South Asian diaspora, she found that articles lacked original reporting, aggregation was becoming repetitive and mainstream news organizations weren’t answering big questions.
Then InkMango crossed 700 free readers, and Sur saw an opportunity for a full-bodied media company, not just a newsletter.
One year and a Y Combinator graduation later, The Juggernaut has worked with more than 100 contributors (both journalists and illustrators) to provide analysis on South Asian news. Recent headlines on The Juggernaut include: The Evolution of Padma Lakshmi; How Ancestry Test Results Became Browner; and How the Death of a Bollywood Actor Became a Political Proxy War. The network approach, instead of a single newesletter approach,aggreff is working so far: Sur says that The Juggernaut has garnered “thousands of subscribers.” During COVID-19, The Juggernaut’s net subscribers have grown 20% to 30% month over month, she said.
On the heels of this growth, The Juggernaut announced today that it has raised a $2 million seed round led by Precursor Ventures to hire editors and a full-time growth engineer, and expand new editorial projects. Other investors in the round include Unpopular Ventures, Backstage Capital, New Media Ventures and Old Town Media. Angels include former Andreessen Horowitz general partner Balaji Srinivasan; co-founder of Kabam, Holly Liu; and co-founder of sports-focused publication The Athletic, Adam Hansmann.
Currently, The Juggernaut charges $3.99 a month for an annual subscription, $9.99 a month for a monthly subscription and $249.99 for a lifetime subscription to the news outlet. It also offers a seven-day free trial (with a conversation rate to paid at over 80%) and has a free newsletter, which Sur says will remain free to bring in top-of-the-funnel customers.
The Juggernaut is part of a growing number of media companies trying to directly monetize off of subscriptions instead of advertisements, such as The Information, The Athletic, and even our very own Extra Crunch. If successful, the hope is that paid subscriptions will prove more sustainable and lucrative than advertising, which still dominates in media.
But Sur is purposely pacing herself when it comes to expenses in the early days. The team currently has only three full-time staff, including Sur, culture editor Imaan Sheikh and one full-time writer, Michaela Stone Cross.
Snigdha Sur, the founder of The Juggernaut.
“Sometimes at media companies people over-hire and over-promise, and then don’t deliver on the profitability or return,” she said. For this reason, The Juggernaut largely works with “freelancers who would probably never join any specific publication,” Sur said. While The Juggernaut hopes to have full-time staff writers eventually, the contributor approach helps temper spending.
Beyond pace, The Juggernaut is looking to build up its subscriber base by writing stories that require deep, creative thinking. The publication intentionally does not cover commoditized breaking news, which could have the potential to bring in more inbound traffic, or anything that doesn’t have a South Asian connection.
Sur is living the stories that she is working to tell. Born in Chhattisgarh, India, she grew up in the Bronx and Queens in New York City, and spent time living and working in Mumbai, India. Since founding The Juggernaut, her goal for the publication has been to be a place for not just South Asians, but for “anyone who has a form of curiosity and appreciation” for South Asian culture.
“We try not to translate words we don’t have to do, we’re not trying to dumb this down, we’re not trying to write for the white teen,” she said. “We’re trying to write for the smart, curious person. And we’re going to assume you know stuff.”
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Yotascale raises a $13M Series B to help companies track and manage their cloud spends
These days when you found a startup, you don’t go out and buy a rack of servers. And you don’t build an in-house data center team. Instead, you farm out your infrastructure needs to the major cloud platforms, namely Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
That’s all well and good, but over time, any startup’s cloud setup will become more complex, varied and perhaps multi-provider. Throw in microservices and one can wind up with a big muddle, and an even bigger bill. That’s the problem that Yotascale wants to attack.
And there’s money backing the startup’s progress, including $13 million in new capital. The round, a Series B, was led by Aydin Senkut at Felicis, with participation from other capital pools, including Engineering Capital, Pelion Ventures and Crosslink Capital. Yotascale has now raised $25 million in total.
The funding event caught my eye, as I’ve heard startup CEOs discuss their public cloud spends in somewhat bitter terms; it’s hard for most startups to change infrastructure direction after they get off the ground, which means that as they grow, so too does their outflow of dollars to the major tech companies — the same megacaps that might turn around and compete with the very same startups that are pumping up their revenues and margins.
So spending less on AWS or Azure would be nice for startups. Yotascale wants to be the helper for lots of companies to better understand and attribute that spend to the correct part of their platform or service, perhaps lowering aggregate spend at the same time.
Let’s talk about how Yotascale got to where it is today.
The startup’s CEO, Asim Razzaq, talked TechCrunch through his company’s history, which didn’t get started until after he had wrapped up tenure at both another startup and PayPal.
When he set out to found Yotascale, Razzaq didn’t fire up a deck, raise capital and then get right to building. Instead, he first went out to do customer discovery work. That effort led him to the perspective that current solutions aimed at understanding cloud spend were insufficient and led to data being used against infrastructure teams in arguments for lower spend when it wasn’t a good idea (cutting backup expenses, for example).
During that time he also determined who Yotascale’s target customer is, namely the head of platform engineering at a company.
The startup self-funded for a while, with Razzaq telling TechCrunch that he wanted to be completely sure that he had conviction concerning the project before moving ahead.
After starting to work on Yotascale in mid 2015, the company raised some capital in 2016. It set out to solve the spend attribution problem that companies with public cloud contracts deal with — including having to contend with modern architecture and its related issues — while earning the trust of engineers, according to Razzaq.
From its period of customer discovery to working on product market fit after raising funds from Engineering Capital, Yotascale raised a Series A in mid-2018. Why? Because, Razzaq, told TechCrunch, as ones gains conviction, one must scale their team. And thus more capital was required.
During our chat with the CEO, it was notable how sequential his company-building process has proven. From talking to potential customers, to working to understand who his buyer is, to waiting on scaling the startup’s go-to-market efforts until he was confident in product-market fit, Yotascale seems to follow the inverse of the “raise lots and spend fast and try to win right away” model that became quite popular during the unicorn era.
How did Yotascale know when it found product market fit? According to its CEO, when companies started pulling the startup into their operations, and not the other way around.
Yotascale reported 4x year-over-year annual recurring revenue (ARR) growth at some point this year, though Razzaq was diffident about sharing specifics concerning the metric.
Sticking to the theme of reasonableness and caution, when asked about why his Series B is modest in size, Razzaq said that he was not interested in raising big rounds, and that $13 million is an amount of money that can move his company forward. What’s coming from the company? Yotascale wants to add support for Azure and Google Cloud in addition to its AWS work of today, to pick an example.
(You can find other hints that Yotascale is perhaps more mature than its peers at its current age. For example, in 2018 the company hired a new chief revenue officer, even putting out a release on the matter.)
That’s enough on this particular round. What will prove interesting is how far Yotascale can push its ARR up by the end of Q3 2021. And if it raises again before then.
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2020 IPO report card: Are tech’s newest public companies meeting expectations?
As the American election looms and the IPO cycle slows some, it’s a good time to review how well the public offerings we have seen thus far have performed.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
Welcome to a Monday morning data rundown discussing how well the latest-stage startups that went public this year have performed after their first day. We’ll be awarding letter grades for post-IPO performance as well, because we can.
So, how did Snowflake do compared to Vroom, both stacked next to JFrog and One Medical? Let’s find out.
Ranking 2020’s IPOs
The fine folks at my former publication Crunchbase News have a running list of 2020 IPOs, which will help us not miss any names. Of course, we’re not going to include every possible deal; there have been some marginal debuts that we can leave behind.
But, the majors matter. So let’s get into them now:
- Snowflake: It priced above its raised range. Then it went up sharply. From an IPO price of $120 per share, Snowflake is worth $250 per share today. That’s so expensive, compared to the data-focused Snowflake’s revenue, that I can hardly figure out what the hell its price means. The company’s valuation got so rich that we wrote that all tech companies should go public to take advantage of the rich market. This year’s standout IPO. A+.
- Unity: Unity’s IPO was a source of wonder for those curious about the economics of the gaming world. For us finance dorks, it was also a right corker. We were impressed. So were investors. After setting a $34 and $42 per share IPO range, Unity raised it to $44 and $48 per share. Then it went public at $52 per share. Today it’s worth $94.50 per share, or around $25 billion. It was priced at $6 billion, give or take, in its final private round. A huge win of an IPO. A.
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Equity Monday: Twilio buys Segment, and Airkit raises $28M for its low-code platform
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.
So, what was on our minds this morning?
- Headlines: The Twilio-Segment deal is real, happening and priced about where we expected. Big names in the ex-China internet want to make encryption worse. And, how the United States government would break up Google is becoming clearer by the week.
- On the Twilio-Segment deal, as TechCrunch and Forbes anticipated, the transaction came in around $3.2 billion, forming something of an API monster from their combined form. As we noted on the show, a lot of investors made a mint from the transaction.
- Airkit has raised $28 million while in stealth since 2017. What does it do? Per Forbes, it’s a “low-code platform” that wants to “improve customer engagement.” That’s notably similar to what Segment does.
- Flash Express raised $200 million, as the on-demand and delivery spaces stay hot.
- And Razorpay raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, meaning that we have just witnessed the birth of yet another fintech unicorn.
- And, finally, warm public markets mean that the startup and VC game will stay afoot, even if we see a pre-election dip in IPOs.
We hope that you are well and warm and full of good spirits. Back soon!
Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
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Twilio is buying customer data startup Segment for between $3B and $4B
Sources have told TechCrunch that Twilio intends to acquire customer data startup Segment for between $3 and $4 billion. Forbes broke the story on Friday night, reporting a price tag of $3.2 billion.
We have heard from a couple of industry sources that the deal is in the works and could be announced as early as Monday.
Twilio and Segment are both API companies. That means they create an easy way for developers to tap into a specific type of functionality without writing a lot of code. As I wrote in a 2017 article on Segment, it provides a set of APIs to pull together customer data from a variety of sources:
Segment has made a name for itself by providing a set of APIs that enable it to gather data about a customer from a variety of sources like your CRM tool, customer service application and website and pull that all together into a single view of the customer, something that is the goal of every company in the customer information business.
While Twilio’s main focus since it launched in 2008 has been on making it easy to embed communications functionality into any app, it signaled a switch in direction when it released the Flex customer service API in March 2018. Later that same year, it bought SendGrid, an email marketing API company for $2 billion.
Twilio’s market cap as of Friday was an impressive $45 billion. You could see how it can afford to flex its financial muscles to combine Twilio’s core API mission, especially Flex, with the ability to pull customer data with Segment and create customized email or ads with SendGrid.
This could enable Twilio to expand beyond pure core communications capabilities and it could come at the cost of around $5 billion for the two companies, a good deal for what could turn out to be a substantial business as more and more companies look for ways to understand and communicate with their customers in more relevant ways across multiple channels.
As Semil Shah from early stage VC firm Haystack wrote in the company blog yesterday, Segment saw a different way to gather customer data, and Twilio was wise to swoop in and buy it.
Segment’s belief was that a traditional CRM wasn’t robust enough for the enterprise to properly manage its pipe. Segment entered to provide customer data infrastructure to offer a more unified experience. Now under the Twilio umbrella, Segment can continue to build key integrations (like they have for Twilio data), which is being used globally inside Fortune 500 companies already.
Segment was founded in 2011 and raised over $283 million, according to Crunchbase data. Its most recent raise was $175 million in April on a $1.5 billion valuation.
Twilio stock closed at $306.24 per share on Friday up $2.39%.
Segment declined to comment on this story. We also sent a request for comment to Twilio, but hadn’t heard back by the time we published. If that changes, we will update the story.
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Venture capital gets less diverse in 2020
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. You can subscribe here.
First, a big congrats on making it through the week. If you live in the United States, you just endured one of the wildest news weeks ever. Rapid-fire headlines and nigh-panic have been our lot since last Friday when the president announced he was COVID-19 positive. We’re all very tired. You get points for just surviving.
Second, I wanted to bring you something uplifting this weekend, as you deserve it. Sadly, that’s not what we’re going to talk about.
On Friday, The Exchange covered new data concerning the venture capital results of female founders during the third quarter. The data set was U.S.-focused, but we can presume that it is illustrative of global trends. Regardless of that nuance, the data was depressing.
In the third quarter, U.S.-based female founders and co-founders raised 136 rounds worth $434 million, per PitchBook data. That was a handful more rounds than Q2 2020, but far fewer dollars. And it was down across the board compared to Q3 2019. Even more, as we noted in the piece, the aggregate venture capital world did very well.
Here’s some PwC data making that point, and a bit more from my old employer Crunchbase. What matters is that female founders are doing worse when VCs are super active. This will only perpetuate inequalities and inequities in the startup market.
Speaking of which, here’s some more bad news. Vern Howard Jr., the co-founder and CEO of Hallo, a startup that has raised nearly $2 million, according to Crunchbase, compiled some data on Black founders’ VC performance in Q3. Here’s what he set out to do:
[W]e wanted to put hard numbers behind the promises of so many venture capitalists and create a benchmark for how we can track the investment into black founders over time. So our team pulled a list from Crunchbase of all the startups globally with a total funding amount of $500,000 — $20,000,000 and who raised a round between July 1 and October 1. There were over 1383 companies here and our team went through one by one, to see how many Black founders there were.
There were 31.
Now, you could open up the funding bands to include both smaller and larger funding events, but regardless of the data boundaries, the resulting number — just 2.2% of the total — is a disgrace.
Market Notes
- The OpenDoor-SPAC deal became clearer this week as we got a scratch at its financials. Some of the data is rough. Some of it is good. But we can now understand the bull case for its future, which helps.
- Affirm announced that it has filed privately to go public, while Root filed publicly to go public. More on the Affirm news here and a dig into the Root S-1 here.
- Make sure to check out YCharts’ exit to a PE firm. The startup told TechCrunch that it will pass $15 million in annual recurring revenue this year. Which should mean that it sold for a pretty penny.
- Greycroft raised an ocean of new capital, to the tune of $678 million spread between a $310 million fund for early-stage checks, and a $368 million fund targeting growth-stage deals.
- Why do we care about Greycroft? We don’t, per se, but it is worth noting that VCs are still able to raise during the current crisis. We often talk about how founders are managing to raise during COVID, and this is something that VCs have to do, as well.
- TechCrunch dug into the API startup space, talking to VCs and founders alike about the space and why it’s blowing up in 2020.
- Airbnb’s summer was painful, but its rebound may prove legendary. The Exchange examined how it managed to bounce back so quickly.
- And finally, from Market Notes, some rounds that you should not miss: Zira.ai raised $3.1 million, Grid AI raised $18.6 million to help machine learning devs do more, Instacart raised $200 million more at a valuation of nearly $18 billion, mmhmm raised $21 million in the best-named round of the week, Unqork raised $207 million and we dug into what that means for the no-code market, and GoPuff raised $380 million more in an epic round that values the delivery startup at $3.9 billion.
Various and Sundry
- Continuing our coverage of the savings and investing boom that fintech startups around the world have been riding this year, Freetrade, a British Robinhood if you will, told The Exchange that it crossed £1 billion in September order volume. That’s not bad!
- Freetrade also recently launched a paid version of its service, as the payment-for-order-flow method of generating revenue that Robinhood is growing on the back of is not allowed across the pond.
- Sticking to the fintech world, Yotta Savings is a startup that provides a savings option to its users, with the added chance of winning a big monetary prize for having stored their money with the startup. Folks have been whispering in my ear about the company for a bit, but I’ve held off writing about it until now as it was not clear to me if the model was merely a gimmick, or something that would actually attract customers.
- Well, Yotta grew from 8,000 accounts to more than 30,000 in the past few weeks and has reached the $100 million deposit mark. So, I guess we now care.
- Coinbase lost one in 20 employees to its new strategy of standing neutral during political times on anything that its CEO deems as unrelated to its core mission, which, as a for-profit company with tectonic financial backing, is making money.
- On the same topic, Can from The Margins made a salient point that “no politics is a political stance.” Correct, and it is a very conservative one at that.
- Even more, Coinbase’s CEO made noise about how his company will “work to create an environment where everyone is welcome and can do their best work, regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc.” Whether he likes it or not, this is a political stance, and one that has nothing to do with the company’s stated core mission. And a political fight earned it — namely, equal access to the workplace.
- I’ll toss in a plug for this piece on the matter from a VC that TechCrunch published, and these thoughts from a tech denizen on how to guarantee that your company lands on the wrong side of history on essentially everything.
- Wrapping our grab-bag this week, Ping Identity bought ShoCard. Ping is now a public company, so normally its deals would land outside our wheelhouse. But we care in this case because TechCrunch has covered ShoCard (2015: “ShoCard Is A Digital Identity Card On The Blockchain”), and because the startup does crypto-related work.
- Seeing a public company snap up a blockchain startup for real money, on purpose and out loud, doesn’t happen every day. More here if you want to read about the deal.
Wrapping, this newsletter is a lot of fun and I appreciate your reading it. It is, also, a work in progress. So feel free to hit respond to it and let me know what you want to see more of. Or hit respond and send me a cute pic of your pet. Either is fine by me.
Chat soon,
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YCharts sells to PE firm in all-cash transaction as it looks to pass $15M ARR this year
This morning, YCharts, a financial data and charting service, announced that it has been purchased by LLR Partners, a private equity firm.
The companies are dubbing the transaction a “growth recapitalization,” indicating that the smaller firm won’t be stripped of its talent in hopes of driving near-term positive EBITDA. The deal was an all-cash transaction, TechCrunch confirmed.
Digging into YCharts itself, the company told TechCrunch via email that it expects to “surpass” $15 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) this year, and that it has been growing top line at a compound annual growth rate of 30 to 40% for “the past several years.”
Those figures imply that YCharts did not sell for cheap. At the market’s current multiples, YCharts was likely worth between 10 and 20x times its ARR, making the deal (presuming, say, $13.5 million ARR at the time of the sale) worth between $135 million and $270 million, unless LLR managed to secure a discount, or the firm’s economics were worse than we’d imagine from our current remove.
The companies declined to share details of the transaction, including price.
As a somewhat long-term YCharts user — the startup set up custom colors in my account so that I could share charts in TechCrunch green, which was fun — the deal is notable in that I’ve come to appreciate what the service is capable of; it’s a great tool to create charts that encompass a wealth of financial data to make a clear point, like the historical trends in Tesla’s price/sales ratio compared to other automotive players, for example.
Financial tooling that is accessible, and shareable, is rare in our Bloomberg world. So here’s to hoping that the transactions promised investment into YCharts bears out.
Turning to the why, I asked YCharts why it didn’t merely raise external capital instead of selling itself. YCharts’ CEO Sean Brown wrote that he’s “found that capital is easy to get,” but that “LLR Partners provides [YCharts] with much more than just capital.” The investing group, Brown continued, shares his company’s vision, has “strong domain experience,” along with “a dedicated team focused on fintech, and a ton of relevant strategic and operational expertise.”
The CEO also stressed LLR’s prior investments into other fintech companies, and said that “as part of the buyout of our existing shareholders, LLR will be funding capital to YCharts’ balance sheet to support continued investment in product and sales [and] marketing.”
YCharts raised capital as an independent company across a number of rounds, including a 2010 Series A led by Hyde Park Angels and I2A Fund, and a Series B and C led by Morningstar. The company had around $15 million in known capital raised, according to Crunchbase data.
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Funding for female founders falls to 2017 levels as pandemic shakes up the VC market
So much for progress.
New data out this week from PitchBook indicates that the number of rounds raised by female-founded and co-founded companies fell year-over-year, with dollars invested in those rounds collapsing to 2017-era levels.
The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.
It’s a disappointing quarter that comes after a few years in which female founders saw an increase in the amount of capital they were able to raise. In 2016, PitchBook data shows quarterly results for female founders totaling around 100 to 125 rounds, and between $300 and $400 million in value. By 2019, those figures rose to 150 to 200 rounds per quarter, worth between $700 million and $950 million.
To see Q3 2020 manage just 136 rounds worth just $434 million is a sharp disappointment.
The depressing results come not during a time of sharply lower aggregate venture capital results, notably. Recent data concerning Q3 2020 compiled by PwC indicates that the quarter was relatively rich. Certainly, overall deal volume in the United States is down slightly compared to year-ago periods, but female founders fared worse.
In short, a fear that well-known seed investor Charles Hudson discussed with TechCrunch during an Extra Crunch Live session back in April has come true. Let’s talk about it.
A diversity downturn?
Cards on the table, I think it’s better when venture capital is more diversely distributed. Why? Because when there’s more general access to funds, we’ll see a more varied set of products built to attack a more diverse set of issues and problems. Even more, venture capital can be a pathway to financial success for founders and employees, so investing it in all sorts of folks instead of one particular demographic set can spread the wealth around more equitably.
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Join Yext’s Howard Lerman for a Q&A October 13 at 2 pm ET/11 am PT
Heading into the third quarter and earnings season, TechCrunch is excited to announce that Yext CEO Howard Lerman will join us for a live Q&A next Tuesday as part of our continuing Extra Crunch Live series.
The series recently hosted pairs of investors from Accel and Index Ventures and has hosted business leaders, from Mark Cuban to Roelof Botha. Lerman will be one of the few guests who is the CEO of a public company.
But Lerman is no regular public CEO — his company debuted at a TechCrunch event back in 2009, quickly raising capital after the pitch. Yext’s 2017 IPO was therefore an event of interest here at TechCrunch.
What will we talk about? There are a number of things that come to mind, but we’ll certainly get into the impact of COVID-19 on small businesses and how Yext is handling an uneven market. We’ll dig into search, a rising product and revenue area for the company, and how Yext has managed to broaden its product mix without diluting its focus.
We’ll also discuss what changes for a tech CEO heading into the public markets and what advice he might have for companies either considering, or actively going public in 2020. It has been a busy year for startup liquidity, pushing a great number of startups into the public sphere with varying results.
And we’ll riff on where Lerman is seeing the most interesting startups being built, along with your questions. As with all Extra Crunch Live sessions, we’ll snag a few questions from the audience. So make sure your Extra Crunch Live subscription is live and prep your thoughts.
Details follow after the jump. See everyone Tuesday!
Details
Below are links to add the event to your calendar and to save the Zoom link. We’ll share the YouTube link on the day of the discussion:
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