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Legged lunar rover startup Spacebit taps Latin American partners for Moon mission
U.K.-based lunar rover startup Spacebit, a company developing robotic exploration hardware for use on the Moon, announced two new partners that will help it develop and finalize its technology ahead of its target mission date of 2021. The Ecuadorian Civilian Space Agency (EXA) and Mexico’s Dereum will be providing the technology that Spacebit will employ on both its deployer and the robot rover it’s preparing for use on the Moon.
This marks the first time that Latin American companies will participate in a mission to the lunar surface, and Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk was joined by Dereum CEO Carlos Mariscal and EXA COO Ronnie Nader to talk about the news at the International Astronautical Congress in Washington, D.C.
“We have Ecuador and Mexico as our technical partners,” Tanasyuk said. “So in addition to this being the first lunar mission from the U.K., it also is the first Latin American mission with a consortium of Latin American countries participating along with the U.K.”
Both the EXA and Dereum have strong technical chops when it comes to spacecraft and space-based robotics, with the EXA focusing on developing technology that is “efficient, cheap and reliable,” according to Nader, while Dereum’s Mariscal said that his organization is well-known globally for its work on building robots for use in space, with an extensive track record. Their expertise should help a lot in Spacebit’s efforts to build, test and validate its robotic lunar rover, which employs a novel walking system for getting around, whereas all rovers to date have used wheels for transportation.
Spacebit CEO Pavlo Tanasyuk
“We are planning on doing a swarm technology exploration plan, where we have multiple small spider walking rovers deployed from a wheeled mothership, along with being able to have some redundancy and the ability to do 3D lidar scanning of the interior lunar caves and lava tubes,” Tanasyuk said.
“It’s essentially a data as a service business model,” he added, explaining how they’ll seek to monetize the business. “Our primary focus for early missions are to do exploration and mapping of lunar lava tubes to be able to characterize the lunar subsurface environment for potential suitability for future human habitation.”
Spacebit, founded in 2014, is funded privately via Tanasyuk himself, along with a couple of other private investors. He said that his company is fully funded through its first mission, a berth aboard the Peregrine Moon lander being launched by Astrobotic in 2021 (which itself has a price tag of $1.7 million he said). The first mission won’t be an entire swarm, but a single rover sent up as a demonstration unit to prove out its technology.
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Vendr, already profitable, raises $2M to replace your enterprise sales team
Vendr has developed an enterprise SaaS solution for managing enterprise SaaS.
The new startup, founded by InVision’s former head of enterprise sales Ryan Neu, is another standout from Y Combinator’s latest batch. Contrary to the majority of those businesses, however, Vendr is already profitable.
In classic YC fashion, the company has created software to sell to other startups, and, as such, it was quick to gain the confidence of top venture capital investors. Headquartered in Boston, Vendr has raised a $2 million round led by F-Prime Capital, with participation from Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Joe Montana’s Liquid2 Ventures, Garage VC and angel investors including Canva co-founder and chief operating officer Cliff Obrecht and HubSpot COO JD Sherman.
The company offers subscription-based software, priced depending on company headcount, that helps fast-growing businesses buy and manage enterprise SaaS. In short, the product cuts the human out of the sales process, allowing companies to purchase or upgrade software using software. The goal isn’t to eliminate the sales profession, rather to put an end to “persuasion driven” sales, Neu explains, and to make enterprise software purchases as easy as consumer product purchases.
Boston-based Vendr graduated from the Y Combinator startup accelerator earlier this year
“We see software sales actually going away because most people are tired of being sold to, they are tired of being persuaded, they want to transact,” Neu, who previously led sales at HubSpot, tells TechCruch. “Vendr was created to allow people to transact software without actually having to talk to people.”
Founded 14 months ago, Vendr has reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue, which, for context, has historically been amongst the benchmarks necessary for a SaaS startup to raise its Series A. Neu says the company is growing 15% month-over-month with monthly recurring revenue currently sitting at $96,500. Already profitable, Neu says they want to put themselves in a position in which they don’t have to raise any additional outside capital.
“I can’t imagine looking at the bank account every month and watching it deplete,” Neu said. “We want to be in a position where we can control our own destiny.”
Vendr currently operates with a team of six employees and 19 customers, including Canva, Grammarly, GitLab, Brex, HubSpot and InVision. The company is also backed by Okta’s general counsel Jon Runyan, AppDynamics’ COO Dan Wright and YC partner Aaron Epstein.
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Substance abuse affects about 15% of American employees, Path wants to ensure they get help
America has an addiction problem.
It’s a problem that serial entrepreneur Josh Bruno has seen first hand. And it’s why he has launched a new company called Path, which pitches access to specialized substance addiction treatment professionals as an employee health benefit, to do something about it.
“I have unfortunately lost five friends now to alcohol and opioid overdoses. I went to five funerals in three years,” says Bruno. “Every time I would end up talking to friends and family afterwards… and everyone would ask, ‘What could we have done?’ “
Now Bruno is doing something.
While Alcoholics Anonymous and rehabilitation facilities provide one solution, Bruno says that neither one has the scope to address the enormity of the problem.
Bruno thinks Path may be the avenue to best address the issue. The idea is to provide near-instant access to specialized providers of substance abuse treatment as a benefit that employers can offer to their staff.
As the founder of HomeTeam, which provided in-home senior care and a software toolkit to manage that care, Bruno already has an understanding of the healthcare marketplace.
“We plug in to an employer and provide a holistic solution for the employees. We bring a doctor, a therapy and a coach,” says Bruno of the new service he’s launching. “We’re not a provider ourselves and we bring a network of providers.”
The business model evolved as Bruno began researching how things are currently done. “I have volunteered at AA and rehab facilities [and] I talked to labor union leaders across the country,” says Bruno. He also reached out to the nation’s 23 largest employers and shadowed treatment specialists to see how substance abuse treatment is currently handled.
“The first thing I saw is that 10% — or one in 10 adults across the U.S. — have a substance abuse disorder,” says Bruno. “That shocked people because it’s more than diabetes.”
What’s more, about 33% of mental health issues are actually addiction-related, which can add additional stress on an employers’ healthcare costs.
The founding team at Path, which includes Bruno and Gabriel Diop, who heads partnerships, and Greg Moore, who leads product development, all think of substance abuse treatment as an access issue. People looking for treatment simply don’t know where to go to get the most effective and affordable help.
“Today the health insurance company would give a list of in-network providers and it’s up to the patient to figure out where to go [and] 50% of time they go out of network,” says Bruno.
When Path works with a large employer, a phone call is made directly to the company and that call goes to a clinical social worker, who handles the intake of a prospective patient. The company has deals with addiction doctors in the geographies where it operates and can ensure that an assessment can be done within 48 hours.
After the assessment, a treatment plan is drawn up and the company will manage that process for the employer, and the physician as well.
Path is already talking to two Fortune 100 companies about deploying its service. “It’s a targeted, regional service,” says Bruno. “Not a national service.”
The Los Angeles-based company has raised $5.35 million to date in a round of funding led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from Sequoia Benefits, Radian Street Capital and angel investors including Barbara Wachsman, the former head of benefits at Disney; Amy Shannon, the former head of benefits at Chevron; and Howard Cherny, the former head of benefits at Cisco.
“Put simply, Path plans to work with the best addiction treatment providers across the continuum in the U.S., which is exactly what is needed. Finally, a team is focusing on core issues of quality and cost-effective treatment,” said Kelly Clark, a member of the Path Clinical Advisory Board, and the former president of the American Society of Addiction Medicine.
Not only can Path help to roll out access to treatment at scale, but the company can also reduce healthcare costs for companies, according to Bruno.
“It will lower the expense to the plan,” he says. “Approximately 30% to 50% of employees are going out of network for addiction treatment… that’s $25,000 to $50,000 per month.”
Path’s costs are substantially lower, and the company is only paid if members use the network, he said.
“Employers have made a commitment to the health and well-being of their employees. If mental health is a top priority for your organization, you can’t ignore [substance use disorders],” said Wachsman, in a statement.
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Small rocket launch startup Firefly teams up with Aerojet Rocketdyne
In a perfect example of a small, new space startup teaming up with a legacy industry heavyweight with plenty of experience, Firefly is teaming up with Aerojet Rocketdyne. Firefly Aerospace was founded in 2013 and has raised $21.6 million so far to bring its first product, the Alpha small satellite launch vehicle, to market.
Firefly is on track to make its crucial first launch in time for the February to March time frame next year, according to Firefly founder and CEO Dr. Tom Markusic, who spoke at the International Astronautical Congress this year in Washington, D.C., to provide an update on his company’s progress and talk about the newly formed partnership between Firefly and Aerojet Rocketdyne.
Firefly founder and CEO Tom Markusic
Markusic was joined by Aerojet Rocketdyne SVP of Space Business Jim Maser, and the two executives explained how Aerojet will provide engines for Firefly to use on its next-generation launch vehicle, aptly named “Beta,” the full development of which will follow once Alpha has launched and enters into regular commercial service.
Beta will be a medium launch vehicle, with greater cargo capacity compared to Alpha and a maximum load of around 8.5 metric tons. Alpha, the startup’s first rocket, will be able to take 1 metric ton to orbit, which Markusic said his company has identified as the “sweet spot” for current unaddressed demand.
That medium band is also underserved, Markusic said, and because it’ll need a bigger booster to transport that larger cargo capacity to orbit, they looked around for solutions and found that Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 Engine, which can produce 500,000 pounds of thrust, was the perfect solution.
In general, Markusic and Maser both expressed the opinion that startup and younger companies just getting into the industry are prime partners for older companies like Aerojet, which was founded in 1942 and has been serving the rocket and missile industry ever since.
Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle
“It’s okay to move fast and it’s okay to make mistakes, but let’s not make other peoples’ mistakes and let’s not make our own mistakes twice,” Markusic said, characterizing the benefits of teaming up with someone with lots more experience. This partnership goes beyond just the engine supply arrangement, Markusic said, and will provide more far-ranging benefits for the startup.
“Aerojet Rocketdyne has a whole corral of amazing in-space propulsion options, for example the XR-5,” Markusic said, “which is a five kilowatt hull thruster that can be utilized on our OTV (orbital transfer vehicle), and advanced OTV, we could do some heavier missions in cis-lunar space, and they also have a large corral of flight proven by proposed chemical thrusters that can be used on these other stages as well.”
Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 engine undergoing a preburner test
Firefly plans to do an orbital transfer vehicle to provide more advanced launch capabilities, and its ambitions extend even beyond launchers and to in-space manufacturing, which Markusic said is attractive to the company since the ultimate way to reduce launch costs is to obviate the need for launch costs altogether. The company’s ultimate goal is to get more commercial satellites into orbit, regardless of method. Still, there’s plenty of opportunity, but Markusic says ultimately, the company’s biggest challenge right now is remaining focused on their most immediate, and most important goal.
“There are at least 100 companies like Firefly talking about going to space,” he said. “We’re in that crowd of talkers right now, and it is my focus with this company to get us out of that crowd of people talking about it as soon as possible, and into the elite crowd of people that are actually flying a spacecraft to space.”
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Sick of your ISP? Wander is rolling out in LA with a $25-per-month, wireless high-speed service
Harnessing new networking technologies that can turn any real estate developer into their own wireless internet service provider, Wander is launching a $25 per month high-speed networking service for the lucky citizens of Santa Monica, Calif.
The brainchild of a former Disney analyst, David Fields, and a former Intuit engineer, Dan Rahmel, Wander uses low-cost wireless hardware and proprietary software to bring last-mile wireless Internet to a customer’s home.
“The idea behind Wander was created around some deep frustration with the net neutrality repeal,” says Fields. “We could look at utilizing some of the existing wireless infrastructure and cover that last mile at a fraction of the cost… we have a strong perspective on the data demands of consumers.”
The problem, as Fields sees it, is that internet service providers are over-billing for capacity that most consumers don’t even use. As an August report from The Wall Street Journal revealed, high-speed internet just isn’t worth it.
Traditional internet service providers are marketing high-speed internet at 200 to 1K megabits per second, while average homes use less than 5 megabits per second during peak usage times, according to a report from the networking infrastructure technology provider, Cisco.
Even with streaming services, the average customer is going to use less than 15 megabits per second by 2022, according to some projections. Wander’s existing service will provide 50 megabits per second.
“We see an ability to come out in market and deliver to 99% of consumers something that is a package that more than covers their streaming needs, their connected home needs,” says Fields.
Using existing fiber infrastructure and low-cost wireless transmitters from companies like Ubiquiti, Wander is driving down costs and pitching real estate developers on a new way to make money.
The company already has signed deals with property managers and developers to gain access to 200 buildings across Santa Monica and Van Nuys, Calif. Those locations will be the first commercial testing grounds for Wander’s pitch.
Shutters and the Santa Monica Pier during 2006 TV Land Awards – Affiliate Dinner at Shutters on the Beach in Santa Monica, Calif., United States (Photo by Jason Merritt/FilmMagic for Nickelodeon Television)
“Think of the way we partner with them as a two-pronged approach. For the value of bringing the rooftop real estate to the Wander network, they get a share of the subscribers that are tapping into that rooftop real estate. They can have their property management teams acquire customers for us and that revenue share is incremental for them,” Fields says.
Basically, Wander owns and operates the network and gives real estate owners a share of the revenue coming in.
At launch, Wander will be able to cover about 20,000 homes in the Santa Monica area using the company’s point to multi-point networking services, which have a range of about half-a-mile.
Fields stresses that improving customer service is just as important as lowering prices at Wander. The company gives users access to a Wander dashboard that provides information about network performance and uptimes, and the average megabits per second that a home uses, as well as its peak consumption.
“That dashboard provides you with a look into the network as well,” says Fields.
The service costs $25 per month along with a $3 fee for the company’s proprietary, mesh-capable router (which is important because to ensure uptimes Wander built software that monitors and resolves performance issues on the fly, the company said).
The company raised a small, strategic round of financing from venture investors and strategic angel investors, including: Distributed Global, an infrastructure-focused investment firm, and individuals like Eric Bender, co-founder of Wilcon, fiber and data center business which sold to Crown Castle; and Michael Barker, founder and CEO of Barker Pacific Group, a real estate holding company. Other angels include Louis Beryl, founder and CEO of Earnest, and Jeff Morris Jr., former director of Product at Tinder.
“With 97% profit margins, it’s no secret that traditional ISPs overcharge and underdeliver,” said Bender, in a statement. “Wander’s unique and affordable model is bringing next-generation internet to an industry that has relied on dated technology, outrageous and unexpected fees and poor customer service. I’m excited to be supporting Wander as a pioneering internet provider that is equally focused on building a happy customer base.”
While Santa Monica, and greater Los Angeles are the company’s first markets, Wander intends to… well… wander to other parts of the country where its services can make the most sense.
“We want to use a data-driven approach to the next set of sub-markets that we’re going to go into,” says Fields. “Some of these places will be less interesting than the suburban to urban mix where 5G is not going to propagate, where they have one or at most two internet options today.”
To see if a home is among the lucky few that qualifies for Wander’s low-cost services now, check out wander.net/live. Subscribers who sign up within the next 30 days will get their first month free.
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A bike lover’s take on the Cowboy e-bike
Electric-bike maker Cowboy recently let me spend a couple of weeks with one of their e-bikes. It’s a well-designed e-bike that makes biking effortless, even if you’re going uphill.
Cowboy is a Brussels-based startup. The company raised a $3 million seed round a couple of years ago and an $11.1 million (€10 million) Series A round last year.
The company designs e-bikes from scratch. Components feel more integrated than in a normal e-bike. And it also opens up some possibilities when it comes to connectivity and smart features.
Cowboy sells its bikes directly to consumers on its online store. It is currently available in Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Austria for €2,000 ($2,220).
I rode 70 kilometers (43 miles) in the streets of Paris to try it out. For context, riding a bike in Paris is nothing new for me. I primarily use my non-electric bike to go from point A to point B — bikes are commuting devices for me. And given that Cowboy is primarily designed for densely populated cities, I thought I’d give it a try.
From the outside, the Cowboy e-bike is a sleek bike. It features a seamless triangle-shaped aluminum frame, integrated lights and a low-key Cowboy logo near the saddle. The handlebar is perfectly straight like on a mountain bike. The only sign that this is an e-bike is that the frame is much larger below the saddle.
The e-bike is relatively light at 16 kg (35 lbs). Most of the weight is at the back of the Cowboy e-bike because of the battery. But an investor in the startup told me that it wasn’t a problem and that he was even able to attach a baby seat at the back.
There are two things you’re going to notice quite quickly: there are no gears and there’s a rubber and fiberglass belt. Cowboy has opted for an automatic transmission — motor assistance kicks in automatically when you need it the most, such as when you start pedaling, accelerate or go uphill.
If you usually ride on a normal bike, this feels weird at first. I constantly shift from one gear to another. With the Cowboy e-bike, you have to trust the bike and forget about gears.
The electric motor kicks in a second after you start pedaling. It means that you are much faster than people using regular bikes. And you can reach a speed of 30 to 35 kmph in no time (18 to 22 mph). Yes, this bike is fast.
Fortunately, the brakes work surprisingly well. You have to be careful with them. If you’re braking too hard, you’ll skid, especially if it’s raining.
I was able to ride from one end of Paris to another without breaking a sweat. Sure, the Cowboy e-bike is fast, but I only saved a few minutes compared to my non-electric bike. You still spend a lot of time waiting at big intersections.
In fact, riding the Cowboy e-bike felt more like riding a moped-style scooter. You start your engine at a green light, ride as quickly as possible, brake aggressively at a red light and spend more time waiting at intersections. I believe an e-bike makes more sense in larger cities with huge hills. Paris is much, much smaller than London or Berlin, after all.
You may have noticed that the Cowboy e-bike doesn’t have fenders. Cowboy will start selling custom-designed fenders for €89 in a few weeks ($100).
Another thing worth noting is that you have to be relatively tall to use the Cowboy e-bike. I’m 1.75 m tall (5’ 8”) and I lowered the saddle as much as possible. If you’re just a tiny bit smaller than me, chances are it’s going to be too high for you. Similarly, naming your brand “Cowboy” doesn’t make your bike particularly attractive for women.
When it comes to connectivity, the Cowboy e-bike isn’t just an electric bike — it’s also a smart bike. It has built-in GPS tracking and an integrated SIM card.
After pairing the bike with your phone using Bluetooth, you can control it from a mobile app. In particular, you can lock and unlock the bike, turn on and off the lights and check the battery. It would have been nice to put a light sensor on the bike itself as you may forget to turn on the lights at night. You also can get a rough idea of the current battery level without the mobile app — there are five LEDs on the frame of the device.
Thanks to GPS capabilities and the integrated SIM card, you can locate your bike using a feature called “Find my Bike.” The company also sells insurance packages for €8 to €10 per month with theft insurance and optionally damage insurance.
I recharged the battery once during my testing. According to the company, you can get up to 70 km on a single charge (43 miles). I got less than that, but I also tried the off-road mode, which consumes more battery. Unless you’re going on a long bike trip, range isn’t an issue for city rides.
When it’s time to recharge the battery, you can detach the battery with a key and bring it back home. This is a great feature for people living in apartments, as you can leave your bike at its normal parking spot and plug in the battery at home. The battery was full after three to four hours.
Cowboy battery charger; tomato for scale
Overall, the Cowboy e-bike is the perfect commuting bike for people living in large cities. It’s a smooth and well-designed experience. If you’re looking for an e-bike, you should definitely consider the Cowboy e-bike as one of your options. I recommend you book a test ride before buying one though.
If you’re happy with a normal bike like me, the Cowboy e-bike is 100% an e-bike. Don’t expect to get the same experience on a Cowboy e-bike. It’s a completely different thing. But I’m glad e-bikes exist, because they are going to convince more people to ditch their cars and moped-style scooters.
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Sense Photonics brings its fancy new flash lidar to market
There’s no shortage of lidar solutions available for autonomous vehicles, drones and robots — theoretically, anyway. But getting a lidar unit from theory to mass production might be harder than coming up with the theory in the first place. Sense Photonics appears to have made it past that part of the journey, and is now offering its advanced flash lidar for pre-order.
Lidar comes in a variety of form factors, but the spinning type we’ve seen so much of is on its way out, and more compact, reliable planar types are on the way in; Luminar is making moves to get ahead, but Sense Photonics isn’t sitting still — and anyway, the two companies have different strengths.
While Luminar and some other companies aim to create a forward-facing lidar that can detect shapes hundreds of feet ahead in a relatively narrow field of view, Sense is going after the short-range, wide-angle side of things. And because they sync up with regular cameras, it’s easy as pie to map depth onto the RGB image:
Sense Photonics makes it easy to match traditional camera views with depth data
These are lidars that you’d want mounted on the rear or sides of the vehicles, able to cover a wide slice of the surroundings and get accurate detection of things like animals, kids and bikes quickly and accurately. But I went through all this when they came out of stealth.
The news today is that these units have gone from prototype to production design. The devices have been ruggedized so they can be attached outside of enclosures even in dusty or rainy environments. And performance has been improved, bumping the maximum range in some cases out to more than 40 meters, well over what was promised before.
The base price of $2,900 covers a unit with an 80×30 degree field of view, but others cover wider areas, up to 95×75 degrees — a large amount by lidar standards, and in higher fidelity than other flash lidars out there. You do give up some other properties in return for the wide view, though. The proprietary tech created by the company lets the lidar’s detector be located elsewhere than the laser emitter, too, which makes designing around the things easier (if not exactly easy).
Obviously if people are meant to order these online from the company these are not going to be appearing in next year’s autonomous vehicles. No, it’s more for bulk purchases by companies doing serious testing in industry settings.
Whether the Sense Photonics kit or some other lucky lidar company’s ends up on the robo-fleets of tomorrow is up in the air, but it does help for your product to actually exist. You can find out more about the company’s lidar platform here.
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Demodesk scores $2.3M seed for sales-focused online meetings
Demodesk, an early-stage startup that wants to change how sales meetings are conducted online, announced a $2.3 million seed investment today.
Investors included GFC, FundersClub, Y Combinator, Kleiner Perkins and an unnamed group of angel investors. The company was a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 cohort.
CEO and co-founder Veronika Riederle says that the fact it’s so closely focused on sales separates it from other more general meeting tools like Zoom, WebEx or GoToMeeting. “We are building the first intelligent online meeting tool for customer-facing conversations. So that is for inside sales and customer service professionals,” Riederle explained.
One of the key pieces of technology is what Riederle calls “a unique approach to screen sharing.” Whereas most meeting software involves downloading software to use the tool, Demodesk doesn’t do this. You simply click a link and you’re in. The two parties online are seeing a live screen and each can interact with it. It’s not just a show and tell.
What’s more, in a sales scenario with a slide presentation, the customer sees the same live screen as the salesperson, but while the salesperson can see their presentation notes, the customer cannot.
She said while this could work for any number of scenarios, from customer service to IT Help desks, at this stage in the company’s development she wants to concentrate on the sales scenario, then expand the vision over time. The service works on a subscription model with tiered per user pricing starting at $19 per user, per month.
When they got to Y Combinator, the company already had a working product and paying customers, but Riederle says the experience has helped them grow the business to moew than 100 customers. “YC was extremely important for us because we immediately got access to an extremely valuable network of founders and potential customers, and also just a base for us to really [develop] the business.
Riederle founded the company with CTO Alex Popp in 2017 in Munich. Prior to this seed round, the founders mostly bootstrapped the company. With the $2.3 million, it should be able to hire more people and begin building out the product further, while investing in sales and marketing to expand its customer base.
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Plug and Play launches an accelerator to develop technologies addressing plastic waste
The Plug and Play network of accelerator programs is partnering with the nonprofit organization Alliance to End Plastic Waste to create an accelerator focused on developing technologies to reduce, remove or replace plastics in the industrial ecosystem.
Like Techstars, Plug and Play operates a number of industry-focused accelerator programs around the world, and for this program, targeting solutions that will lower the impact of plastic waste on the environment, the accelerator will operate two programs annually in three different regions — Silicon Valley, Paris and Singapore.
For its part, the Alliance to End Plastic Waste will work with the companies that support the organization, which include some of the largest chemical companies and manufacturers of plastic waste, to select focus areas and source specific startups working on solutions.
Representative members of the organization include: BASF, Berry Global, Braskem, Chevron Phillips Chemical Company LLC, Dow, ExxonMobil, Formosa Plastics Corporation USA, Gemini Corporation, Geocycle, Grupo Phoenix, Henkel, LyondellBasell, Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings, Mitsui Chemicals, PepsiCo, PolyOne, Pregis, Procter & Gamble, Sealed Air Corporation, Shell, Sinopec, SKC co., ltd., Storopack, SUEZ, Sumitomo Chemical, TOMRA and Total.
Industrial companies don’t have the best history when it comes to reinventing their entire business models with new technologies, but at least there’s some effort being put toward these initiatives.
Each program will run for 12 weeks and accept 10 startups. In true accelerator fashion there will be a demo day where AEPW and Plug and Play would have the opportunity to invest in participating companies.
“I believe when we bring together all the stakeholders—large corporations, entrepreneurs, startups, and universities—you can create real change,” said said Saeed Amidi, founder and chief executive of Plug and Play, in a statement. “By devoting resources and attention to this global issue of plastic waste, we can make a difference in the environment. Through this platform I commit to spend more of my time on sustainability-focused initiatives and will invest in 20 startups in this space per year.”
Applications are now open for the first program, which will run from February through May 2020.
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Drift CEO shares insights from 20+ years of startup experience
Why do serial entrepreneurs keep jumping back in? What things might you learn the third, fourth, or fifth time around?
To find out, Extra Crunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon spoke to Drift CEO and founder David Cancel at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco. Cancel has spent more than 20 years founding SaaS companies, with exits including Compete (acquired by TNS), Lookery (Acknowledge), Ghostery (Evidon), and Performable (Hubspot.)
In their thirty-minute conversation, they cover everything from finding your first customers, to what he’s seen change over the last two decades in the industry, to why he’s willing to cut a check to employees who want to leave. Rather watch them talk for yourself? We’ve embedded a video of their chat at the end of this article.
To find what people really want, ask for money — any money.
One thing Cancel says he’s learned over the years: when you’re just getting started, you need to charge for your product right off the bat because you never know how someone really feels about a product until you ask for money.
“If you’re creating a paid-for product, you have to start charging from day one,” he says.
He outlines an experiment he calls the ‘dollar test,’ where if someone seems interested in a product before it’s even available, he’ll promise them lifetime access if they’ll hand over whatever’s in their pocket — be it a dollar, ten, twenty, whatever.
“What it teaches the entrepreneur is that most of the people who will tell you that they love this thing will not give you a dollar,” actionable information that can save time, money and stress. The dollar test “shortcuts things; most people will end up spending so much time coming back to you because you keep telling [them] you love it, because you’re a nice person and you don’t want to hurt [their] feelings.”
Cancel also uses this approach after a product launches, using it to gauge which new feature requests customers find most important.
“They’d say ‘I love your product, but it doesn’t do X, Y, or Z. My company is special, we need X, Y, or Z feature.’”
“Let’s say they were paying us $5,000 a month. I’d say, ‘it’s only going to be $20 more a month, then we’re going to build it for you and you’ll be the first ones to have it.’”
“What would happen, almost every single time, is there would be this awkward pause. They’d say ‘I have to go talk to my manager, I need to go talk to someone, I’ll get right back to you,’” he said, adding “Almost every single time that person continued to be a customer and never asked for that feature again.”
“When it’s free to ask for anything,” says David, “people will just keep asking.”
Letting people go isn’t always a bad thing
If someone asks David for a recommendation on an engineer, he’s willing to recommend his own employees.
His reasoning is twofold; on one side, it means he knows his teams are made up of people who want to be there; on the other, it means employees know he’s looking out for them.
“I want people on the team who want to be on the team. If people ask me, ‘hey, do you know a really great engineer who does X, Y, Z?’” I say ‘Eric does, and Eric’s on my team.’ I’m like, you should talk to him. And if Eric wants to go, he should go, because we only want people who actually [want] to be there. Then that person knows that I’m looking out for the best interests of them, for them — and even if they go, we may end up working together again later.”
Similarly, if an employee says they want to leave and start their own company, David says he’s often the first to write a check:
“We would attract, in the early days, people who wanted to learn how to start their own company. One of the things I would say, and I still say to everyone: Look, if you come on board, and work with us for some days, if you want to leave at any point and start a company, myself and my co-founder Elias will be the first checks in whatever you want to start, no questions asked.”
“And so we have done that for companies in Boston, companies in San Francisco, companies all over the place. And we continue to do that.”
For finding customers and employees, he turns to LinkedIn
Thanks to recruiter spam and “work anniversary” notifications, LinkedIn tends to be the butt of a lot of jokes — but Cancel says, used right, it’s still quite valuable.
“We built a lot of marketing within LinkedIn, which I think is a place that I would advise people to go spend time on now. You can find your buyers, you can find the people that you recruit.”
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