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Minted.com CEO Mariam Naficy shares ‘the biggest surprise about entrepreneurship’
At TechCrunch Early Stage, Minted CEO and serial founder Mariam Naficy got into the weeds with us on some of the topics founders don’t often discuss. What’s the difference between expectations and reality when it comes to entrepreneurialism? How do you split responsibilities between co-founders? What’s the key to being great at hiring?
We also talked about some of the harder parts of being a leader, including how to handle layoffs and what to do with an employee who likes to rock the boat.
Minted is an e-commerce platform that connects indie designers with customers for products like stationary, art and home goods. The company has raised nearly $300 million and generates hundreds of millions in revenue. And it’s not Naficy’s first stint as a founder: she previously co-founded Eve, which she eventually sold for $100 million+, according to reports.
We covered a lot of ground in the interview, including some questions from the audience, which you can check out in the video below. You’ll also find a lightly edited transcript of the conversation.
The most surprising part of being an entrepreneur
I didn’t realize what was, I think, one of the biggest differences, which is how much, if you are successful, you become a leader of people, whether you are a reluctant leader of people or an enthusiastic leader of people. If you’re successful, your company will inevitably grow and you end up, believe it or not, being a role model for people. People actually look at you and they emulate your behavior and that is not something that I expected.
I thought I was just going to be making products and selling products. I just didn’t think that it was gonna be such a people job — a management job, a talent development job, a leadership job — and that people would care when you walked in the building every day whether you said hello to them in the morning. They would actually notice whether you said “hi” or not to them at the coffee bar when you’re half asleep. What you do every minute actually matters. Every minute of the day. So I think that’s probably the biggest surprise about entrepreneurship.
Being a sole founder versus starting out with a co-founder
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Labster lands new cash to bring its virtual reality science lab software to Asia
You could Zoom call into your science class, or you could conduct a lab experiment in virtual reality. During the coronavirus pandemic, the latter has never felt more full of potential.
The global need for learning solutions beyond Zoom is precisely why Labster, a Copenhagen-based startup that helps individuals engage in STEM lab scenarios using virtual reality, is growing rapidly. Since March, the usage of Labster’s VR product has increased 15X.
On the heels of this unprecedented momentum, Labster joins a chorus of edtech startups raising right now, and announced it has brought on $9 million in equity venture funding. The round was led by GGV, with participation from existing investors Owl Ventures, Balderton and Northzone.
“COVID-19 has been a great awareness builder of Labster, opening teachers’ eyes to the good sides of online learning as opposed to Zoom-only learning, which is largely failing,” CEO and co-founder Michael Jensen told TechCrunch.
Labster sells its e-learning solution to support and enhance in-person courses. Based on the subscription an institution chooses, participants can get differing degrees of access to a virtual laboratory. Imagine a range of experiments, from understanding bacterial growth and isolation to exploring the biodiversity of an exoplanet. Along with each simulation, Labster offers 3D animations for certain concepts, re-plays of simulations, quiz questions and a virtual learning assistant.
Photo credit: Labster.
While the majority of Labster’s customers are private institutions, the company landed a deal with all of California’s community colleges during the pandemic. The partnership added 2.1 million students to Labster’s customer base, which Jensen said has been bolstered by a broader growth in annual license deals and partnerships.
With GGV on board, Labster is looking to strengthen position in Asia. Breaking into new markets often requires a strategic investor with eyes on the ground on how that market works, thinks and, most importantly, learns. Asian markets are specifically lucrative for edtech companies because consumer spend is higher compared to the North American market.
Jenny Lee, a Shanghai-based partner with GGV, will take a board seat at Labster.
Lee has expressed interest in how automation, virtual and AI-based teachers can help bridge the gap between K-12 markets and lack of good-quality teachers everywhere.
Jensen said that the capital will also be used to bolster the company’s mobile offering, since Asian markets have high mobile usage compared to North American and European markets.
The round is significantly smaller than Labster’s previous $21 million Series B, closed in April of 2019. And it contrasts sharply to the momentum that has benefited edtech companies like MasterClass, Coursera and, reportedly, Udemy into raising nine-figure rounds.
So naturally, I asked Jensen: why the conservative raise?
Jensen says that the $9 million check was a strategic growth check to bring on GGV (all existing investors in Labster also participated in the round). Since being founded in 2012, the company has been relatively conservative in raising cash. To date, inclusive of this round, Labster has raised $40 million in venture capital.
He argues the new money, thus, is offensive capital instead of defensive capital. It’s a strategic check to open a global door.
This isn’t the first time an edtech company has raised a smaller round than expected during the coronavirus pandemic. In April, edtech unicorn Duolingo raised a short $10 million to expand into Asia and bring on General Atlantic as an investor to expand into global markets.
Duolingo, however, is cash-flow positive. Jensen did not comment on if Labster has turned a profit, but adds that it was a “significant up round” that brought the company’s valuation to above $100 million.
“Our primary objectives continue to be rapid growth and global impact, not profits,” he told TechCrunch.
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What’s different about hiring data scientists in 2020?
Tianhui Michael Li is founder of The Data Incubator, an eight-week fellowship to help PhDs and postdocs transition from academia into industry. Previously, he headed monetization data science at Foursquare and has worked at Google, Andreessen Horowitz, J.P. Morgan and D.E. Shaw.
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It’s 2020 and the world has changed remarkably, including in how companies screen data science candidates. While many things have changed, there is one change that stands out above the rest. At The Data Incubator, we run a data science fellowship and are responsible for hundreds of data science hires each year. We have observed these hires go from a rare practice to being standard for over 80% of hiring companies. Many of the holdouts tend to be the largest (and traditionally most cautious) enterprises. At this point, they are at a serious competitive disadvantage in hiring.
Historically, data science hiring practices evolved from software engineering. A hallmark of software engineering interviewing is the dreaded brain teaser, puzzles like “How many golf balls would fit inside a Boeing 747?” or “Implement the quick-sort algorithm on the whiteboard.” Candidates will study for weeks or months for these and the hiring website Glassdoor has an entire section devoted to them. In data science, the traditional coding brain teaser has been supplemented with statistics ones as well — “What is the probability that the sum of two dice rolls is divisible by three?” Over the years, companies are starting to realize that these brain teasers are not terribly effective and have started cutting down their usage.
In their place, firms are focusing on project-based data assessments. These ask data science candidates to analyze real-world data provided by the company. Rather than having a single correct answer, project-based assessments are often more open-ended, encouraging exploration. Interviewees typically submit code and a write-up of their results. These have a number of advantages, both in terms of form and substance.
First, the environment for data assessments is far more realistic. Brain teasers unnecessarily put candidates on the spot or compel them to awkwardly code on a whiteboard. Because answers to brain teasers are readily Google-able, internet resources are off-limits. On the job, it is unlikely that you’ll be asked to code on a whiteboard or perform mental math with someone peering over your shoulder. It is incomprehensible that you’ll be denied internet access during work hours. Data assessments also allow the applicants to complete the assessment at a more realistic pace, using their favorite IDE or coding environment.
“Take-home challenges give you a chance to simulate how the candidate will perform on the job more realistically than with puzzle interview questions,” said Sean Gerrish, an engineering manager and author of “How Smart Machines Think.”
Second, the substance of data assessments is also more realistic. By design, brainteasers are tricky or test knowledge of well-known algorithms. In real life, one would never write these algorithms by hand (you would use one of the dozens of solutions freely available on the internet) and the problems encountered on the job are rarely tricky in the same way. By giving candidates real data they might work with and structuring the deliverable in line with how results are actually shared at the company, data projects are more closely aligned with actual job skills.
Jesse Anderson, an industry veteran and author of “Data Teams,” is a big fan of data assessments: “It’s a mutually beneficial setup. Interviewees are given a fighting chance that mimics the real-world. Managers get closer to an on-the-job look at a candidate’s work and abilities.” Project-based assessments have the added benefit of assessing written communication strength, an increasingly important skill in the work-from-home world of COVID-19.
Finally, written technical project work can help avoid bias by de-emphasizing traditional but prejudicially fraught aspects of the hiring process. Resumes with Hispanic and African American names receive fewer callbacks than the same resume with white names. In response, minority candidates deliberately “whiten” their resumes to compensate. In-person interviews often rely on similarly problematic gut feel. By emphasizing an assessment closely tied to job performance, interviewers can focus their energies on actual qualifications, rather than relying on potentially biased “instincts.” Companies looking to embrace #BLM and #MeToo beyond hashtagging may consider how tweaking their hiring processes can lead to greater equality.
The exact form of data assessments vary. At The Data Incubator, we found that over 60% of firms provide take-home data assessments. These best simulate the actual work environment, allowing the candidate to work from home (typically) over the course of a few days. Another roughly 20% require interview data projects, where candidates analyze data as a part of the interview process. While candidates face more time pressure from these, they also do not feel the pressure to ceaselessly work on the assessment. “Take-home challenges take a lot of time,” explains Field Cady, an experienced data scientist and author of “The Data Science Handbook.” “This is a big chore for candidates and can be unfair (for example) to people with family commitments who can’t afford to spend many evening hours on the challenge.”
To reduce the number of custom data projects, smart candidates are preemptively building their own portfolio projects to showcase their skills and companies are increasingly accepting these in lieu of custom work.
Companies relying on old-fashioned brainteasers are a vanishing breed. Of the recalcitrant 20% of employers still sticking with brainteasers, most are the larger, more established enterprises that are usually slower to adapt to change. They need to realize that the antiquated hiring process doesn’t just look quaint, it’s actively driving candidates away. At a recent virtual conference, one of my fellow panelists was a data science new hire who explained that he had turned down opportunities based on the firm’s poor screening process.
How strong can the team be if the hiring process is so outmoded? This sentiment is also widely shared by the Ph.D.s completing The Data Incubator’s data science fellowship. Companies that fail to embrace the new reality are losing the battle for top talent.
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Dog food startup Sundays launches its air-dried kibble alternative
Michael Waxman, co-founder and CEO of dog food startup Sundays, acknowledged that dog owners have no shortage of options when it comes to feeding their beloved pets — but he still thinks there’s room for something new.
“There’s a sort of ‘Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink’ phenomenon,” Waxman said. “There are over 3,000 dog foods, and yet I think there isn’t really one that is the no-brainer, compelling answer.”
Sundays “soft launched” its first product in February and now has around 1,000 paying customers. It’s launching more broadly today and is also announcing that it has raised $2.27 million in funding from Red Sea Ventures, Box Group, Great Oaks Ventures, Matt Salzberg, Zach Klein and others.
Waxman’s past startups include dating app Grouper, while his wife/co-founder Tory Waxman is a veterinarian (and serves as the startup’s chief veterinary officer). He told me that the two of them became interested in pet food a couple years ago when one of their dogs started to have stomach issues, and they “went down this rabbit hole of trying to find the best dog food.”
The market can be divided two broad categories, Waxman said. There’s kibble, which is relatively cheap and affordable but not as healthy. Then there’s refrigerated food, including direct-to-consumer options like The Farmer’s Dog, which are healthier but also pricier and require more preparation.
“Those are so unbelievably inconvenient,” Waxman argued. “You’re not going to find too many people crazier about their dogs than we are, and we would do literally anything for our dogs — except prepare their food for an hour a day.”
Image Credits: Sundays
So he’s pitching Sundays as a “new, third category of dog food between kibble and refrigerated.” It’s supposed to be human-grade dog food that’s 90% fresh meat, organs and bones, created through a unique air drying process.
For dog owners who rely on kibble, Waxman said the startup offers “a much higher-quality product that tastes much better and doesn’t compromise on the convenience that you’re used to,” while for owners who currently pay for refrigerated options, he promised “an all-around unbelievable increase in convenience, without any compromise in quality and taste.”
Several early customers compared the food to beef jerky in their reviews. Waxman added that in taste tests, dogs preferred Sundays to premium kibble 40-to-0.
The food is available for both one-time and subscription purchase. A single 40-ounce box currently costs $75, while the same box costs $59 via subscription.
Waxman suggested that it hasn’t been easy getting to this point — with a new process for creating dog food, “there were no supply chains set up for this.” Ultimately, he said Sundays selected a “USDA-monitored jerky kitchen in the U.S. to create this new form factor.”
“It took us much longer than we expected,” he admitted. “However, the short-term headache is a long-term feature that we’re really excited about. Ultimately, it should serve as a pretty deep moat to prevent would-be competitors from offering similarly high quality and differentiated products.”
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The race to building a fully functional quantum stack
David Cowan is a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and one of the world’s leading investors across cloud infrastructure, cybersecurity, consumer and space technology.
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Tomer Diari is a vice president at Bessemer Venture Partners, where he focuses primarily on cybersecurity, big data and deep tech opportunities.
Quantum computers exploit the seemingly bizarre yet proven nature of the universe that until a particle interacts with another, its position, speed, color, spin and other quantum properties coexist simultaneously as a probability distribution over all possibilities in a state known as superposition. Quantum computers use isolated particles as their most basic building blocks, relying on any one of these quantum properties to represent the state of a quantum bit (or “qubit”). So while classical computer bits always exist in a mutually exclusive state of either 0 (low energy) or 1 (high energy), qubits in superposition coexist simultaneously in both states as 0 and 1.
Things get interesting at a larger scale, as QC systems are capable of isolating a group of entangled particles, which all share a single state of superposition. While a single qubit coexists in two states, a set of eight entangled qubits (or “8Q”), for example, simultaneously occupies all 2^8 (or 256) possible states, effectively processing all these states in parallel. It would take 57Q (representing 2^57 parallel states) for a QC to outperform even the world’s strongest classical supercomputer. A 64Q computer would surpass it by 100x (clearly achieving quantum advantage) and a 128Q computer would surpass it a quintillion times.
In the race to develop these computers, nature has inserted two major speed bumps. First, isolated quantum particles are highly unstable, and so quantum circuits must execute within extremely short periods of coherence. Second, measuring the output energy level of subatomic qubits requires extreme levels of accuracy that tiny deviations commonly thwart. Informed by university research, leading QC companies like IBM, Google, Honeywell and Rigetti develop quantum engineering and error-correction methods to overcome these challenges as they scale the number of qubits they can process.
Following the challenge to create working hardware, software must be developed to harvest the benefits of parallelism even though we cannot see what is happening inside a quantum circuit without losing superposition. When we measure the output value of a quantum circuit’s entangled qubits, the superposition collapses into just one of the many possible outcomes. Sometimes, though, the output yields clues that qubits weirdly interfered with themselves (that is, with their probabilistic counterparts) inside the circuit.
QC scientists at UC Berkeley, University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, UT Sydney and elsewhere are now developing a fundamentally new class of algorithms that detect the absence or presence of interference patterns in QC output to cleverly glean information about what happened inside.
The QC stack
A fully functional QC must, therefore, incorporate several layers of a novel technology stack, incorporating both hardware and software components. At the top of the stack sits the application software for solving problems in chemistry, logistics, etc. The application typically makes API calls to a software layer beneath it (loosely referred to as a “compiler”) that translates function calls into circuits to implement them. Beneath the compiler sits a classical computer that feeds circuit changes and inputs to the Quantum Processing Unit (QPU) beneath it. The QPU typically has an error-correction layer, an analog processing unit to transmit analog inputs to the quantum circuit and measure its analog outputs, and the quantum processor itself, which houses the isolated, entangled particles.
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Merico raises $4.1M for its developer analytics platform
Merico, a startup that gives companies deeper insights into their developers’ productivity and code quality, today announced that it has raised a $4.1 million seed round led by GGV Capital, with participation from Legend Star and previous investor Polychain Capital. The company was originally funded by the open source-centric firm OSS Capital.
“The mission of Merico is to empower every developer to build better and realize more value. We are excited that GGV Capital and our other investors see the importance of bringing more useful data to the software development process,” said Merico founder and CEO Jinglei Ren. “In today’s world, enabling remote contribution is more important than ever, and we at Merico are excited to continue our pursuit of bringing the most insightful and practical metrics to support both enterprise and open-source software teams.”
Merico head of business development Maxim Wheatley tells me that the company plans to use the new funding to enhance and expand its existing technology and marketing efforts. As a remote-first startup, Merico already has team members in the U.S., Brazil, France, Canada, India and China.
“In keeping with our roots and mission in open source, we will be focusing some of these new resources to engage more collaboratively with open-source foundations, contributors and maintainers,” he added.
The idea behind Merico was born out of two key observations, Wheatley said. First of all, the team wanted to create a better way to analyze developer productivity and the quality of the code they generate. Some companies still simply use the number of lines of code generated by a developer to allocate bonuses for their teams, for example, which isn’t a great metric by any means. In addition, the team also wanted to find ways to better allocate income and recognition to the community members of open-source projects based on the quality of their contributions.
The company’s tool is systems agnostic because it bases its analysis on the codebase and workflow tools instead of looking at lines of codes or commit counts, for example.
“Merico evaluates the actual code, in addition to related processes, and places productivity in the context of quality and impact,” said Merico CTO Hezheng Yin . “In this process, we evaluate impact leveraging dependency relationships and examine fundamental indicators of quality including bug density, redundancy, modularity, test-coverage, documentation-coverage, code-smell and more. By compiling these signals into a single point of truth, Merico can determine the quality and the productivity of a developer or a team in a manner that more accurately reflects the nature of the work.”
As of now, Merico supports code written in Java, JavaScript (Vue.js and React.js), TypeScript, Go, C, C++, Ruby and Python, with support for other languages coming later.
“Merico’s technology delivers the most advanced code analytics that we’ve seen on the market,” said GGV’s Jenny Lee . “With the Merico team, we saw an opportunity to empower the organizations of tomorrow with insight. In this era of remote transformation, there’s never been a more critical time to bring this visibility to the enterprise and to open source; we can’t wait to see how this technology drives innovation in both technology and management.”
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Dear Sophie: How can we sponsor H-1B transfers and extensions?
Sophie Alcorn is the founder of Alcorn Immigration Law in Silicon Valley and 2019 Global Law Experts Awards’ “Law Firm of the Year in California for Entrepreneur Immigration Services.” She connects people with the businesses and opportunities that expand their lives.
Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.
“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”
“Dear Sophie” columns are accessible for Extra Crunch subscribers; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.
Dear Sophie:
I work in people ops at a startup. We have no experience with H-1B visas. We recently received applications for job openings from a couple of strong applicants who are on H-1B visas with other companies. What should we know about hiring an H-1B visa holder?
One of the job applicants will need to have her H-1B renewed next year. What should we know about filing for a renewal? Are H-1B transfers and renewals still possible given that H-1B visas are no longer being issued at consulates?
—Newbie in Newark
Dear Newbie,
Exciting that your company is hiring. Congrats! Yes, H-1B transfers and renewals are still possible. The only current restriction is that H-1B visas can generally not be issued to people outside the U.S. right now. They were halted through at least the end of 2020 under last month’s executive proclamation.
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Corp card startup Ramp launches expense management software
TechCrunch caught wind of corporate card startup Ramp back in August of 2019, when the company raised an early round of $7 million. Corp card rival Brex had put together a $100 million round just a few months before, and was en route to raising a huge debt round later in the year.
Ramp building a rival service to Brex wasn’t a huge surprise. Startups often appear in waves, leading to groups of startups battling it out for similar customers. We’ve seen this in the file-storage space of yore, to insurtech marketplaces earlier this year.
Ramp launched in early 2020, added more capital, and is today announcing an expansion of the software side of its business by making its card-integrated expense management available to all of its customers.
The startup’s early twist on corporate cards was simple cash back, and a software tool that helped root out duplicate and unnecessary expenses to help companies lower their total expenses. Given that spend-centered startups often generate revenue from customers using their cards, helping those same customers cut costs was an interesting angle on its market.
Now with the expansion of its expense management system to all its customers, Ramp is taking another step in a software-like direction. And as the company also claimed quick growth in a release it shared with TechCrunch, we got back on the phone with its co-founder and CEO Eric Glyman to dig a little.
Spend during a pandemic
2020’s COVID-19 pandemic brought with itself a host of economic disruptions to both consumer and corporate spend. You can easily infer that some startups that provide cards and generate interchange revenue — incomes stemming from users putting their provided cards down at gas stations, restaurants and cloud infra providers — had a bumpy summer.
In contrast to that reasonable expectation, Ramp has seen regular growth, with Glyman telling TechCrunch that his company’s “30-day purchase volume” result has been “growing (month over month) in the double digits each month fairly consistently.” (In related news, online payments-as-a-service provider Finix has also seen quick volume growth in recent months.)
He credits Ramp’s focus on cost control as a driver of its growth.
Which brings us back to the expense management product that Ramp is rolling out to its customer base as a whole today. It’s been in beta for a minute. Per the CEO, some customers have been trialing the product since March, with Ramp “shipping updates weekly based on customer feedback” and slowly expanding access. (Brex also offers expense management tooling.)
Ramp provides both expense software and cards, while many companies have have disparate vendors for each of those services. This allows the loop between spend and expense management for Ramp customers to be pretty tight. The result of the vertical integration allows Ramp customers to save five working days each month, according to the company.
Expense management is a famously poor area of technology. You, reading this, probably have an expense that you need to file. And I bet you’ve eaten at least one bill in the last year because getting it through the corporate-provided system was just too much to handle (is this on purpose?). Hell, I forgot to file an expense earlier this year after travel stopped, and I wound up paying a late fee, and then late fees stemming from that first late fee that I didn’t notice. (Ha ha ha ha, that was great! That was a great use of $150 of my own money!)
Anything that can be done to make the employee-corporate-card expense cycle faster and simpler is good news in my book, even if my employer isn’t a Ramp customer; pushing for a better experience in one part of the market should force all participants to do better over time.
Closing on this bit of news, I wonder if cards aren’t de facto commoditized by this point. Is there really that much ∆ between how different corporate credit providers underwrite, or vet spend risk on charge cards? And, aren’t most consumer cards within a few degrees of one another? And then does the software that surrounds the physical or virtual card take on more precedence? Maybe. If so, Ramp is probably heading in the right direction.
More when a provider in the space is willing to share new, material growth figures.
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Find out how TechCrunch is taking Disrupt virtual this Friday
Talk about a pivot. The global pandemic rewrote the rules for in-person events, and it set us on a crash course to transform TechCrunch’s annual three-day Disrupt — a conference that draws more than 10,000 attendees — into a 100% virtual experience. Daunting? You bet. Challenging? Heck yeah.
It’s been quite a process, and we’re guessing you might have a few burning questions about what to expect from a virtual Disrupt 2020 experience. Join us for a special Ask Me Anything session on Friday, August 14 at 12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET for a chat with TechCrunch’s editorial manager, Jordan Crook; director of Operations, Joey Hinson; and director of Marketing, Alexandra Ames.
They’ll discuss the physical-to-virtual transition, how the virtual format works and how you can participate in Disrupt — for the first time — from anywhere around the world. Yes, a virtual Disrupt will look and feel different than a physical one, but the benefits and opportunities remain as numerous, real and viable as ever.
Disrupt 2020 — September 14-18 — spans five full days, giving you more time to meet investors, introduce innovative products to a global market and discover hundreds of new startups in Digital Startup Alley. Connect with tech journalists eager for a great story, build partnerships and brand awareness, schedule 1:1 video meetings and attend speed-networking events. Cheer on international competitors in the Startup Battlefield and interact with some of the most influential people in the startup world.
Got questions about the first-ever online Disrupt? Register today for our AMA session this Friday, August 14 at 12 p.m. PT / 3 p.m. ET and get the answers from the people who made it happen. You can even submit your questions here in advance. Then buy your Disrupt pass, buckle up and tap into a world-class opportunity to keep your business moving in the right direction.
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.
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Stacklet launches cloud governance platform with $4M seed investment
Stacklet co-founders Travis Stanfield and Kapil Thangavelu met while both were working at Capital One several years ago. Thangavelu helped create the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance project. The two eventually got together and decided to build a startup based on that project and today the company launched out of stealth with a $4 million seed investment from Foundation Capital and Addition.
Stanfield, who is CEO at the young startup, says that Cloud Custodian came about as Capital One was moving to a fully cloud approach in around 2013. As the company looked for ways to deal with compliance and governance, it found that organizations like theirs were forced to do one-off scripts and they were looking for a way that could be repeatable and scale.
“Cloud Custodian was developed as a way of understanding what all those one-off scripts were doing, looking at the cloud control plane, finding the interesting set of resources, and then taking sensitive actions on them,” he explained.
After leaving Capital One, and going off in different directions for a time, the two came together this year to start Stacklet as a way to nurture the underlying open-source project Thangavelu helped build, and build a commercial company to add some functionality to make it easier for enterprises to implement and understand.
While cloud administrators can download and figure out how to use the raw open source, Stacklet is attempting to make that easier by providing an administrative layer to manage usage across thousands of cloud accounts along with pre-packaged sets of common kinds of compliance requirements out of the box, analytics to understand how the tool is doing and what it’s finding in terms of issues, and finally a resources database to understand all of the cloud resources under management.
The company has just three employees, including the two founders, but will be adding a couple of more shortly with a goal of having a team of 10 by year’s end. The open-source project has 270 contributors from around the world. The startup is looking to build diversity through being fully remote. Not being limited by geography means they can hire from anywhere, and that can help lead to a more diverse group of employees.
The founders admit that it’s a tough time to start a company and to be fundraising, but on the bright side, they didn’t have to be on a plane to San Francisco every week during the process.
In fact, Sid Trivedi, partner at Foundation Capital, said that this was his first investment where he never met the founders in person, but he said through long discussions he learned “their passion for the opportunity at hand, experience of the market dynamics and vision for how they would solve the problem of meeting the needs of both IT/security admins and developers.”
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