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Substack faces backlash over the writers it supports with big advances
Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it’s not a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.
For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias) who’d accepted “substantial” advances, and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.
However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun arguing that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions subject to scrutiny and criticism.
Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie deBoer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances [ … ] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”
Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.
Science journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. As part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”
Substack has responded with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlined the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that year, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)
“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No one writes for Substack — they write for their own publications.”
The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” — without actually naming names.
“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals — coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program — has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.
As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”
Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose position boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself and my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”
But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.
“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”
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Snowflake gave up its dual-class shares. Should you?
Snowflake announced earlier this month that it would give up its dual-class shareholder structure, a corporate governance setup that often gives founders and executives superior voting rights, typically involving 10 times as many votes for their own shares as others receive. The mechanism can enable founders to maintain control despite later dilution and may sometimes even grant ironclad control to an individual in perpetuity.
For many companies, these supervoting shares represent a highly powerful tool, allowing founders to have their cake and eat it, too — to go public and receive the advantages of being a public company while limiting the power of external shareholders to influence how they run the company once it floats.
Some founders and their investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the short-term whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted.
Some founders and their investors argue that these preferred shares protect them from the short-term whims of the market, but the perspective isn’t universally accepted. Dual-class shares are a controversial governance structure, and some wonder if they are setting up an unfair playing field by allowing a cabal to wield outsized power.
Why would Snowflake give up such a powerful tool a mere six months after it went public? We decided to look at the notion of dual-class shares and why Snowflake may have been willing to let them go.
Snowflake’s decision
If one of the primary purposes of dual-class shares is to consolidate CEO power, then perhaps Snowflake felt they weren’t necessary, given the history of CEO-shuffling at the company. While Snowflake’s founders are still part of the organization, they hired Sutter Hill investor Mike Speiser to be their first CEO, followed by former Microsoft exec Bob Muglia before finally bringing in veteran CEO Frank Slootman to take their company public.
Without an all-powerful CEO founder in place, perhaps the company felt that supervoting shares weren’t necessary. Regardless, Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli framed the move as a decision that works for all parties when he announced that his company would abandon the special shares during its earnings call earlier this month.
“Today, we announced that on March 1st, 2021, our Class B shareholders in accordance with our governing documents converted all of our Class B common stock to Class A common stock, eliminating the dual-class structure of our common stock and ensuring that each share has an equal vote. We view this as operationally beneficial to the company and our shareholders,” Scarpelli said during the call.
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Introducing Startup Alley+ at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021
Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.
We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a curated experience available to only 50 early-stage startups who exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021. All exhibiting startups are eligible, and the TechCrunch team will ultimately select which companies earn a spot. What’s in store for the Startup Alley+ cohort? So glad you asked.
Let’s get the money issue out of the way. You won’t pay anything beyond what you paid for your Startup Alley Pass. Sweet! Now get ready because Startup Alley+ provides plenty of opportunities for exposure and business growth — before Disrupt 2021 even begins.
Get set up for success with access to founder masterclasses. Warm up your pitching arm because you’ll take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live and receive invaluable feedback. What’s more, TechCrunch will introduce you to top investors within the startup community through our inaugural VC match-making program. A warm introduction beats a cold pitch any day, amirite?
And the perks just keep coming. Startup Alley+ gives participants a healthy head start on their Disrupt experience. How healthy? It begins in July at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, a virtual event the Startup Alley+ cohort attends for free.
With all those experiences under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the virtual ground running — and reap the rewards — when you set up shop in the Alley at Disrupt.
Don’t forget about the many benefits available to all Startup Alley exhibitors. The virtual nature of Disrupt means thousands of people from around the globe will attend — influencers of every stripe including tech icons, leading founders, top investors, engineers, job seeking talent and entrepreneurs.
We’ve created more ways to add value and to draw attention to Startup Alley. For instance, every exhibiting startup gets to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of those Disrupt attendees we mentioned earlier.
We’re also rolling out the Startup Alley Crawl experience again. Every tech category will have an hour-long crawl posted in the agenda. Team TechCrunch will go live from the Disrupt Stage and interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from each category. This could be you.
As a Startup Alley participant, you might just be selected to be a Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.
Grab every advantage. Don’t miss your chance to participate in Startup Alley+, which kicks off in July. Apply for your Startup Alley Pass now and get ready to make the most of your time at in September at Disrupt 2021.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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MaaS transit: The business of mobility as a service
In 2019, St. Louis Metro Transit was struggling to keep customers. Uber and Lyft, along with dockless shared bikes and scooters, had flooded streets, causing ridership to fall more than 7% in a single year.
The agency didn’t try to fight for attention. Instead, it embraced its competitors.
Metro Transit dropped its internal trip-planning app, which had been developed with the Trapeze Group and directed riders to Transit, a private third-party app that offers mapping and real-time transit data in more than 200 cities. That app also included micromobility and ride-hailing information, allowing customers to not just look up bus schedules, but see how they might get to and from stops — or ignore the bus altogether.
The following year, Metro Transit partnered with mobile ticketing company Masabi and added a payment option on some bus routes. Now, the agency is planning an all-in-one app — via third-party providers Transit and Masabi — where customers could plan and book end-to-end trips across trains, buses, bikes, scooters and taxis.
“What we do best is transporting large volumes of people on vehicles and managing mass transit,” said Metro Transit executive director Jessica Mefford-Miller. “On the software side, there are a lot of players out there doing great stuff that can help us meet our customers where they are and make trip planning as easy as possible.”
St. Louis Metro Transit isn’t an outlier. As transit agencies seek to win back riders, a flurry of platforms — some backed by giants like Uber, Intel and BMW — are offering new technology partnerships. Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling these mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.
Whether it’s bundling bookings, payments or just trip planning, startups are selling mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) offerings as a lifeline to make transit agencies the backbone of urban mobility.
Third-party platforms have become more appealing to transit agencies as they scramble to keep buses, trains and rail full of customers. According to the American Public Transportation Association (APTA), ridership and total miles traveled has declined since 2014, including a 2.5% drop from 2017 to 2018. The COVID-19 pandemic could accelerate this trend as more people continue working from home or shy away from crowding into buses and trains.
“This is like Expedia, the idea of seeing multiple airlines in one place to comparison shop,” said Regina Clewlow, CEO of transportation management firm Populus. “A lot of operators are looking at the question of whether that would give them more rides.”
But that the private growth could come at a cost, potentially injecting private concerns into what should be a public good, Metro Transit’s Mefford-Miller cautioned.
“If we let the market handle this planning on its own, a company might only do it for someone with a digital device or a bank account or only help people who don’t need special accommodation,” Mefford-Miller said. “That’s why we have as an underpinning an equitable and accessible system. It’s the underpinning before we choose any tools we use.”
The players
Amid the swarm of new startups there are a few giants. One of the biggest established players is Cubic Corp., a San Diego-based defense and public transportation company. The firm already controls payments and back-end software for hundreds of transit agencies, including in Chicago, New York and San Francisco, and in January launched a suite of new products under the brand name Umo to expand their offerings.
The package includes a customer-facing multimodal app, a fare collection platform, a contactless payment system, a rewards program, a behind-the-scenes management platform and a MaaS marketplace for public and private offerings. Mick Spiers, general manager of Umo, said the goal is to offer a “connected, integrated journey.”
“We’re uniquely placed as an independent, trusted third party that can be the data broker for a journey focused around the needs of the user,” Spiers added. “The journey we create has no commercial interest for us.”
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Slapdash raises $3.7M seed to ship a workplace apps command bar
The explosion in productivity software amid a broader remote work boom has been one of the pandemic’s clearest tech impacts. But learning to use a dozen new programs while having to decipher which data is hosted where can sometimes seem to have an adverse effect on worker productivity. It’s all time that users can take for granted, even when carrying out common tasks like navigating to the calendar to view more info to click a link to open the browser to redirect to the native app to open a Zoom call.
Slapdash is aiming to carve a new niche out for itself among workplace software tools, pushing a desire for peak performance to the forefront with a product that shaves seconds off each instance where a user needs to find data hosted in a cloud app or carry out an action. While most of the integration-heavy software suites to emerge during the remote work boom have focused on promoting visibility or re-skinning workflows across the tangled weave of SaaS apps, Slapdash founder Ivan Kanevski hopes that the company’s efforts to engineer a quicker path to information will push tech workers to integrate another tool into their workflow.
The team tells TechCrunch that they’ve raised $3.7 million in seed funding from investors that include S28 Capital, Quiet Capital, Quarry Ventures, UP2398 and Twenty Two Ventures. Angels participating in the round include co-founders at companies like Patreon, Docker and Zynga.
Image Credits: Slapdash
Kanevski says the team sought to emulate the success of popular apps like Superhuman, which have pushed low-latency command line interface navigation while emulating some of the sleek internal tools used at companies like Facebook, where he spent nearly six years as a software engineer.
Slapdash’s command line widget can be pulled up anywhere, once installed, with a quick keyboard shortcut. From there, users can search through a laundry list of indexable apps including Slack, Zoom, Jira and about 20 others. Beyond command line access, users can create folders of files and actions inside the full desktop app or create their own keyboard shortcuts to quickly hammer out a task. The app is available on Mac, Windows, Linux and the web.
“We’re not trying to displace the applications that you connect to Slapdash,” he says. “You won’t see us, for example, building document editing, you won’t see us building project management, just because our sort of philosophy is that we’re a neutral platform.”
The company offers a free tier for users indexing up to five apps and creating 10 commands and spaces; any more than that and you level up into a $12 per month paid plan. Things look more customized for enterprise-wide pricing. As the team hopes to make the tool essential to startups, Kanevski sees the app’s hefty utility for individual users as a clear asset in scaling up.
“If you anticipate rolling this out to larger organizations, you would want the people that are using the software to have a blast with it,” he says. “We have quite a lot of confidence that even at this sort of individual atomic level, we built something pretty joyful and helpful.”
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Kuda raises $25M more led by Valar to become the neobank for ‘every African on the planet’
Challenger banks continue to make significant advances in attracting customers away from the big incumbents by providing more modern, user-friendly tools to manage their money. Today, one of the trailblazers in this area, Kuda Technologies, is announcing funding to continue building out its specific ambition: to provide a modern banking service for Africans and the African diaspora, or as co-founder and CEO Babs Ogundeyi describes them, “every African on the planet, wherever you are in the world.”
The company, which currently offers mobile-first banking services in Nigeria, has picked up $25 million in a Series A being led by Valar Ventures, the firm co-founded and backed by Peter Thiel, with Target Global and other unnamed investors participating. This is the first time that Valar — which has invested in a number of fintech startups, including N26, TransferWise, Stash and, just in the last week, BlockFi and BitPanda — has backed an African startup.
Kuda currently provides services for consumers to save and spend money, and it has recently introduced overdrafts (essentially revolving credit for individuals). Ogundeyi said in an interview that the plan is to use these new funds to continue expanding its credit offerings, to build out services for businesses, to add in more integrations and to move into more markets.
The funding is coming on the heels of very strong growth for Kuda, which is co-headquartered in London and Lagos.
When we last wrote about the startup, four months ago, it had just closed a seed round of $10 million led by Target Global. That was, at the time — and I think still is — the largest-ever seed round raised by a startup out of Africa, and thus as much of a milestone for the tech industry there as it was for Kuda itself.
At the time of the seed round, Kuda had registered 300,000 customers: now, that figure has more than doubled to 650,000, and tellingly, that base is spending more money through the Kuda app.
“In November we were doing about $500 million in transactions per month,” Ogundeyi said, for services like bill payments, card transactions and phone top-ups. “We closed February at $2.2 billion.”
Image Credits: Kuda
Kuda, as we described in our profile of the company when covering its seed round, is following in the footsteps of a number of other so-called “neobanks”, building a suite of banking services with a more accessible user interface and a more modern approach: you interact with the bank using a mobile app, and in addition to basic banking services, it provides tools to help people manage their money more intelligently.
But Kuda is also different from many of these, specifically because it taps into some financial practices that are unique to its market.
As Ogundeyi describes it, most people who are employed by companies will have “salary accounts” at banks, where companies pay in a person’s wages on a regular basis. These will typically be at incumbent banks, but they do not offer the same ranges of services to customers. No mobile apps, no facilities to buy mobile top-ups or make other kinds of bill payments, no AI-based calculators to figure out your monthly spend and provide suggestions on how to manage your budget, and so on.
That has opened a gap in the market for others to provide those services in their place. Kuda’s deposits, Ogundeyi said, typically start as basic transfers that people make from those “salary accounts” elsewhere. These start out small, maybe 20% of a person’s wages, but as those users find themselves using Kuda’s payment and other tools more, they are increasing how much they transfer in each payment period.
“As the trust increases you’re naturally more comfortable having money with Kuda,” he said. The next stage from that will be people depositing money directly with Kuda. A small minority already do this, he added, although the startup “has a bit more work to do” to get more companies integrated into its platform. (This is one of the areas that will be developed with this latest round of funding.)
In turn, having more money in Kuda accounts is likely to spur another wave of services being turned on at the startup, such as loans with more competitive interest rates, because they will not just be based on how much money people have but also their spending histories on the platform. “We can offer loans to salaried customers instantly as long as their salary is with Kuda,” he said.
Much of this is being enabled because of how Kuda is built. A lot of challenger banks have tapped into a world of finance and banking APIs built by another wave of fintech startups, partnering with other banks to provide backend deposit and other services: their value-add is in building efficient customer service and tools to help people manage and borrow money in smarter ways.
Kuda, on the other hand, has its own microfinance banking license from the central bank of Nigeria. This means that on top of building those same money management services, Kuda can also issue debit cards (in partnership with Visa and Mastercard), manage payments and transfers, and build all of the services in the stack itself, including those salary account services and loans. (Kuda does have partnerships with incumbent banks, specifically Zenith Bank, Guaranteed Trust and Access Bank, for people to come in for physical deposits and withdrawals when needed.)
While the service is still only live in Nigeria, the “vision is still to serve all Africans in Africa as well as outside of it,” Ogundeyi said.
The first step of that will likely be Nigerians outside of Nigeria — most likely in the U.K., where Kuda already has a headquarters, and where it has a ready market: London alone has been estimated to be home to upwards of 1 million Nigerian immigrants and people of Nigerian descent (the number of U.K. residents actually born in Nigeria is considerably smaller, more like 200,000: that is the diaspora at work).
He added that the startup is also at work on preparing for the next countries on the continent to expand its service, another area where this funding will go: “It will let us fast-track teams, on-the-ground operational teams,” he said.
The bigger picture is that the market for financial services targeting Africans has been on a significant upswing and so we will be seeing a lot more activity coming out of the region, not just from home-grown startups, but also out of other tech companies increasingly doing more business in that part of the world.
Cases in point: In addition to Stripe acquiring Nigerian payments company Paystack last year, just earlier this week, PayPal announced a deal with Flutterwave to bring PayPal services to more merchants in the region — specifically so that PayPal customers can pay merchants in the region using PayPal rails. Square’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, meanwhile, never did make his intended move to the continent — COVID-19 has derailed many plans, as we all know — but it shows that the company is trying not to overlook opportunities there, either.
PayPal, to be clear, has been active in Nigeria since 2014, but partnering with a significant player in the region represents an important step for it: Flutterwave itself earlier this month raised $170 million and became Africa’s latest unicorn, in what is still a pretty small list.
The fact that there is so much more to be done with payments and more financial services leaves the door open wide for Kuda to move in a number of different directions if it chooses. Having customers in two countries, especially with one foot in the developed market and another in an emerging market, for example, gives the company an interesting window into the world of remittances.
Money transfer has been one of the very biggest, and most important financial services for African diasporas — alongside those from many other emerging markets.
Even in cases where people are “unbanked” and have no other financial footprints, they have been turning to remittance services to send money home to their families from abroad. Kuda, with its integrations into people’s salaries, could easily become an efficient, one-stop-shop conduit for that activity too. (That’s one reason, likely, that remittance startup, Remitly, has also moved into starting to offer accounts to its users in originating countries.)
All of this to say that Valar’s making a new kind of bet here, but one laden with possibilities and a differentiated approach compared to the rest of its investment activities.
“Nigeria is at a tipping point in the adoption of digital banking,” noted Andrew McCormack, a general partner and co-founder at Valar, who led its investment here. “With the rapidly growing, youthful population who are open to new financial alternatives, Kuda is well-positioned to benefit and will transform the landscape of African banking. We are excited to lead their Series A and continue on the journey alongside Kuda.”
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SecurityScorecard snags $180M Series E to measure a company’s security risk
SecurityScorecard has been helping companies understand the security risk of its vendors since 2014 by providing each one with a letter grade based on a number of dimensions. Today, the company announced a $180 million Series E.
The round includes new investors Silver Lake Waterman, T. Rowe Price, Kayne Anderson Rudnick and Fitch Venture, along with existing investors Evolution Equity Partners, Accomplice, Riverwood Capital, Intel Capital, NGP Capital, AXA Venture Partners, GV (Google Ventures) and Boldstart Ventures. The company reports it has now raised $290 million.
Co-founder and CEO Aleksandr Yampolskiy says the company’s mission has not changed since it launched. “The idea that we started the company was a realization that when I was CISO and CTO I had no metrics at my disposal. I invested in all kinds of solutions where I was completely in the dark about how I’m doing compared to the industry and how my vendors and suppliers were doing compared to me,” Yampolskiy told me.
He and his co-founder COO Sam Kassoumeh likened this to a banker looking at a mortgage application and having no credit score to check. The company changed that by starting a system of scoring the security posture of different companies and giving them a letter grade of A-F just like at school.
Today, it has ratings on more than 2 million companies worldwide, giving companies a way to understand how secure their vendors are. Yampolskiy says that his company’s solution can rate a new company not in the data set in just five minutes. Every company can see its own scorecard for free along with advice on how to improve that score.
He notes that the disastrous SolarWinds hack was entirely predictable based on SecurityScorecard’s rating system. “SolarWinds’ score has been lagging below the industry average for quite a long time, so we weren’t really particularly surprised about them,” he said.
The industry average is around 85 or a solid B in the letter grade system, whereas SolarWinds was sitting at 70 or a C for quite some time, indicating its security posture was suspect, he reports.
While Yampolskiy didn’t want to discuss valuation or revenue or even growth numbers, he did say the company has 17,000 customers worldwide, including 7 of the 10 top pharmaceutical companies in the world.
The company has reached a point where this could be the last private fundraise it does before going public, but Yampolskiy kept his cards close on timing, saying it could happen some time in the next couple of years.
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Saleor scores $2.5M seed round for its ‘headless’ e-commerce platform
Saleor, a Poland and U.S.-based startup that offers a “headless” e-commerce platform to make it easier for developers to build better online shopping experiences, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding.
The round is led by Berlin’s Cherry Ventures, with participation from various angels. They include Guillermo Rauch (Vercel CEO and inventor of Next.js), Chris Schagen (former CMO of Contentful) and Kevin Mahaffey (co-founder of Lookout).
Saleor says the injection of capital will be invested in further developing Saleor‘s headless e-commerce platform, including a soon-to-launch cloud product and GraphQL API for front-end engineers.
Founded in 2020 but with a history going back to 2013, years before founders Mirek Mencel and Patryk Zawadzki spun out the product separate from their agency, Saleor is described as an “API-first” e-commerce platform that takes a “headless” approach. The idea is that the platform does the back-end heavy lifting so that developers can focus on the front end where most of the value is created for users.
“Saleor was born of necessity when our agency work at Mirumee Software required more modular, flexible and scalable e-commerce software,” Saleor co-founder Mirek Mencel recalls. “Most solutions for bigger brands came with proprietary baggage like vendor lock-in, slow adoption of new technologies and commercial certification programs. On the open-source side, we didn’t enjoy Magento’s developer experience and felt alternatives weren’t viable at scale”.
And so Saleor was conceived as an open-source platform focused on “technical excellence and quality” that could deliver greater scalability and extensibility than existing proprietary software. By 2016, the product had grown from something Mencel and Zawadzki’s agency used internally into a platform used by developers around the world.
“We could have stopped there, but saw brands pressing for more revolutionary front-end experiences,” Mencel says. “Decoupling Saleor’s core from its presentation layer was the obvious path to revolutionary front-ends. As difficult as it was, we tore down what was a rather good open-source e-commerce platform and rebuilt it API-first”.
Beyond their early headless conviction, the pair also came to the realisation that GraphQL delivered “more power, precision and developer happiness” than REST. Reasoning that most developers prefer “a few things done superbly to many things done well,” they committed exclusively to Saleor’s GraphQL API. “We have never looked back,” says Mencel.
In 2018, the original six-person team shipped Saleor 2.0. Now with a headcount of 20, Mencel says Saleor has a simple vision of developer-first commerce: open-source, GraphQL and “fair-priced” cloud — a vision that Cherry Ventures has clearly bought into.
“We are currently witnessing a paradigm shift with developers switching to headless commerce solutions, allowing more flexible, differentiated shopping experiences,” says Filip Dames, founding partner of Cherry. “Mirek, Patryk, and their team are at the forefront of this development and will enable innovative merchants to build state-of-the-art shopping experiences that scale across all consumer touch points and devices”.
“We decided to pursue venture backing as a way to increase the Saleor core team size and accelerate buildout of Saleor Cloud, which we’ll launch this year,” adds Mencel.
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Cymbio raises $7M to help brands expand to more e-commerce markets
Cymbio, a Tel Aviv-based startup focused on what it calls “brand-to-retailer connectivity,” announced today that it has raised $7 million in Series A funding.
CEO Roy Avidor, who founded the company with Mor Lavi and Gilad Zirkel, told me that the platform is designed to help brands sell their products on any e-commerce marketplace that they want. Whereas adding a new market might normally require a cost-benefit analysis (“How much money will it cost me to set up this retailer? How much sales will this retailer drive? Will the margins justify this?”), Avidor said Cymbio turns the process into a “no brainer” with immediate integration.
That’s because the platform automatically handles all the differences between marketplaces, whether that involves the taxonomy of the product pages or the background color of the product images, as well as inventory syncing, tracking and returns. It allows the brand to fulfill orders using drop shipping — so the brand stores and ships the products, rather than the marketplace, getting access to customer names and addresses in the process.
Avidor said that increasingly, brands realize “they need to be where the customers are.” That doesn’t mean they’ll sell on every single marketplace, but with Cymbio, “brand perception and visibility” are the main limitations, rather than time and money.
Cymbio founders. Image Credits: Cymbio
In 2020, the company says that its customer count increased 12x and now includes Steve Madden, Marchesa, Camper and Micro Kickboard. The company also says that it reduces the time to launch on a new marketplace by 91%, while increasing digital revenue for the average customer by 65%.
The company says the Series A will allow it to expand its sales and marketing team while continuing to develop the product — on the product front, Avidor said the team is working on “a no-code integration where anyone can connect to anything quickly, no developers needed.”
The new funding was led by Vertex Ventures, with participation from Udian Investments, Payoneer founder Yuval Tal and Sapiens co-founder Ron Zuckerman.
“We believe deeply that Cymbio’s technology will fundamentally change the game for brands that sell online, making long, cumbersome integrations a thing of the past,” said Emanuel Timor, general partner at Vertex Ventures Israel, in a statement.
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How to recruit data scientists without paying top dollar
When it comes to building a data science team, many companies fail at the first step — creating a job posting. These mistakes have been amplified in the age of COVID-19.
The increasing demand for AI and data science experts, driven in part by the pandemic’s economic impact, is showing no sign of abating. Many employers are failing to identify viable job candidates, much less interviewing or hiring them.
What’s the biggest obstacle holding them back? In our experience, it is often a poorly drafted job posting. And with the pandemic completely stopping all in-person recruiting events, hiring success hinges on an effective job rec. Previously tolerable mistakes are now fatal.
At The Data Incubator, a data science training and placement firm, we’ve helped hundreds of companies successfully hire data science teams. Honestly, it pains me to see amazing companies undersell themselves in this area.
When it comes to building a data science team, many companies fail at the first step — creating a job posting.
Companies inevitably gravitate toward the same generic buzzwords, promoting themselves as “cutting edge,” “creative,” “collaborative,” “data driven,” “passionate” or “insightful” (just peruse Indeed for examples of these lackluster postings). Or they delve into industry jargon, which may be lost on candidates who are not familiar with the industry.
To streamline the writing process, we recommend that clients break down their competitive advantage into three buckets: compensation, mission and tech. Only by understanding where their strength lies can they successfully market their job openings.
Compensation
Compensation is an important component of making a position competitive. Managers certainly need to fight to ensure their remuneration range is appropriate for their data science roles. However, budget constraints are difficult to overcome, especially given the ability of tech and finance to pay top dollar for these sought-after skills. How to combat this when you don’t have the same budget? Consider listing compensation in job ads.
If you’re one of (the majority of) employers who cannot afford to compete on salary, this will help job seekers understand what to expect. Neither you, nor a potential candidate, wants to spend hours interviewing just to discover that it would have never worked out because of compensation. Save yourself the time and frustration by listing remuneration upfront.
What if you are one of the few employers able to pay major-league salaries? Congratulations, but don’t throw away your hard-won budget! Companies develop reputations for compensation. Unless you are one of the select firms with a reputation for paying top dollar, you will need to signal that to top talent. Otherwise, strong candidates may assume the remuneration is low and not apply, defeating the purpose of paying a high salary in the first place.
Obviously, listing salaries is controversial and there are plenty of reasons why employers are weary of listing salary ranges. However, a recent survey by SHRM found that 70% of professionals want to hear about salary upfront and Glassdoor.com reports that salary is the No. 1 consideration for 67% of job seekers. With all these benefits, employers should seriously consider being more upfront and transparent about what they are able to pay, if only to save themselves time and frustration.
Mission
In the COVID-19 workplace, employees are finding themselves increasingly isolated. With work from home poised to stay even after the virus has dissipated, the risk of isolation will continue. Companies need to double down on articulating their mission and galvanizing employees around that. This doesn’t just start with employment but the very first step of the hiring process: the job posting. Emphasizing mission in the job posting will attract employees.
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