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Parsley Health picks up $10 million to reimagine healthcare
According to Parsley Health, the average adult spends 19 minutes with their physician every year. Seventy percent of the time, these short visits result in the prescription of a medication.
“According to the CDC, 70% of diseases in our country are chronic and lifestyle-driven,” said Parsley Health founder and CEO Dr. Robin Berzin. “And yet instead of addressing the root causes of health problems, medicine’s toolkit is limited to prescriptions and procedures, driving up costs while the average person gets sicker. The answer isn’t just another pill.”
Parsley Health, an annual membership service ($150/month), reimagines what medicine can be. The company focuses on the cause of an illness rather than simply throwing Band-Aids at the problem. But in order to do this, your doctor needs far more than 19 minutes of your time each year.
Today, Parsley announced the close of a $10 million Series A funding led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from Amplo, Trail Mix Ventures, Combine and The Chernin Group. Individual investors such as Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine; Nat Turner, CEO of Flatiron Health; Neil Parikh, co-founder of Casper; and Dave Gilboa, co-founder of Warby Parker, also invested in the round.
As part of the financing, FirstMark Capital partner Catherine Ulrich will join the board.
Here’s how Parsley works:
When a user first signs up online, they enter in a wide range of data about themselves, from family health history to past procedures to symptoms and lifestyle. The user then schedules their first visit with their new doctor, which will last for 75 minutes, during which time the doctor will exhaustively go through that information to download a full picture of that patient’s health.
After that visit, the user has full transparency into their medical data and the doctor’s notes. The patient also leaves with a health plan, including lifestyle nutritional advice, and access to their own health coach. Parsley also writes prescriptions, when necessary, and refers patients to top-of-the-line specialists, if needed.
Membership includes five annual visits with their doctors (which rounds out to about four hours), as well as five sessions with their certified health coach. These coaches help patients stay on their health plan, whether it’s advice on physical exercise or getting better sleep or finding take-out places and menu items near their office to eat healthier meals.
Throughout a patient’s membership, they have full access to their medical data and doctor’s notes online, as well as unlimited direct messaging with their doctor. At Parsley, there is always a doctor on call to answer questions about semi-urgent issues like a UTI or a sinus infection.
All of Parsley’s doctors and health coaches are full-time employees at Parsley, and Dr. Berzin told TechCrunch that the company sees a lot of inbound from doctors who want to spend more time with patients and help solve the root of their problems.
Parsley also trains their doctors in functional medicine, which uses a systems-biology approach to better resolve and manage modern chronic disease, as part of Parsley’s clinical fellowship, where they are trained in evaluating thousands of biomarkers to diagnose and treat diseases at their origin.
Parsley is not the first in the space. Forward and One Medical also look to change the way that healthcare is provided in this country, while NextHealth Technologies is focused on supplemental treatments like IV treatments and cryo.
“When I tell people about Parsley, they say ‘wow! That’s what medicine should be’,” said Dr. Berzin. “People are really searching for something better than feeling like they’re paying more and more for healthcare while getting less and less. People are excited to invest in their health and wellness and to have a team that’s working to care for them.”
Parsley has clinics in San Francisco, New York and Los Angeles.
Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Parsley Health costs $150/year.
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This tiny agtech company thinks it has figured out something its better-capitalized rivals haven’t
In November, we told you about Farmers Business Network, a social network for farmers that invites them to share their data, pool their know-how and bargain more effectively for better pricing from manufacturing companies. At the time, FBN, as it’s known, had just closed on $110 million in new funding in a round that brought its funding to roughly $200 million altogether.
That kind of financial backing might dissuade newcomers to the space, but a months-old startup called AgVend has just raised $1.75 million in seed funding on the premise that, well, FBN is doing it wrong. Specifically, AgVend’s pitch is that manufacturers aren’t so crazy about FBN getting between their offerings and their end users — in large part because FBN is able to secure group discounts on those users’ behalf.
AgVend is instead planning to work directly with manufacturers and retailers, selling their goods through its own site as well as helping them develop their own web shops. The idea is to “protect their channel pricing power,” explains CEO Alexander Reichert, who previously spent more than four years with Euclid Analytics, a company that helps brands monitor and understand their foot traffice. AgVend is their white knight, coming to save them from getting disrupted out of business. “Why cut them out of the equation?” he asks.
Whether farmers will go along is the question. Those who’ve joined FBN can ostensibly save money on seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and more by being invited to comparison shop through FBN’s own online store. It’s not the easiest sell, though. FBN charges farmers $600 per year to access its platform, which is presumably a hurdle for some.
AgVend meanwhile is embracing good-old-fashioned opacity. While it invites farmers to search for products at its own site based on the farmers’ needs and location, it’s only after someone has purchased something that the retailer who sold the items is revealed. The reason: retailers don’t necessarily want to put all of their pricing online and be bound to those numbers, explains Reichert.
Naturally, AgVend insists that it’s not just better for retailers and the manufacturers standing behind them. For one thing, says Reichert, AgVend’s farming customers are sometimes offered rebates. Customers are also better informed about the products they’re buying because the information is coming from the retailers and not a third party, he insists. “When a third party like FBN comes in and tries going around the retailers, the manufacturers can’t guarantee that FBN is giving the right guidance about their products.”
In the end, its customers will decide. But the market looks big enough to support a number of players if they figure out how to play it. According to USDA data from last year, U.S. farms spent an estimated $346.9 billion in 2016 on farm production expenditures.
That’s a lot of feed and fertilizer. It’s no wonder that founders, and the VCs who are writing them checks, see fertile ground. This particular deal was led by 8VC and included the participation of Precursor Ventures, Green Bay Ventures, FJ Labs and House Fund, among others.
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Guestfriend automates chatbot creation for restaurants
While chatbots might sound like an interesting experiment for restaurants and other small businesses, they probably can’t devote much time or money to building them. So a startup called Guestfriend is planning to make the process as fast and easy as possible.
The company has raised $5 million in seed funding from Primary Venture Partners, Techstars Ventures and betaworks. It’s led by Bo Peabody, a venture partner and entrepreneur in residence at Greycroft who also co-owns the Mezze Restaurant Group. Peabody compared the current moment to the year 2000, when “every small business woke up and said, ‘I need a website.’”
“That moment is coming for chatbots,” he predicted.
But rather than asking a restaurant owner or employee to go online and design the conversational flow of a chatbot themselves, Guestfriend can automatically create a chatbot based on information that’s already online — hours, menu, support for dietary restrictions and so on. In that sense, Peabody said, “It’s really just a website that you talk to.”
“The ah-ha moment was when I realized that building a bot for my restaurant was virtually impossible to do as a one-off, but all of the answers to almost any question are available online, mostly in structured APIs,” he said.
Peabody suggested that the real challenge was building natural language technology that could support the range of questions that someone might ask — for example, all the different ways that people might ask about the dress code. That’s one reason why it was important to target a specific industry, though he eventually plans to expand into home services, retail, spas/salons/exercise and hotels. (“It’s really the Yelp verticals.”)
Guestfriend chatbots work across platforms, including SMS, Facebook, Twitter and Google search results (via Google My Business), with plans to support speech platforms like Amazon Alexa and Google Home.
The company is actually building these chatbots without waiting for restaurants to sign up. (You can try them out on the Guestfriend website.) The idea is that publishers with restaurant listings can also incorporate them as a new way to interact with their sites.
At the same time, restaurants can come in and claim their chatbots, which will be updated accordingly everywhere that they’re available. The restaurant can then be as hands-on or as hands-off as they want.
I brought up the fact that I often visit restaurants’ Facebook Pages in the hopes of answering more timely questions, like whether or not a restaurant is staying open despite bad weather or a holiday. Peabody suggested that as with social media or a website, the up-to-dateness of the information will depend on the restaurant — some of them might want to update every day with things like daily specials. For others, a completely automated approach might be the most appealing.
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Resy rolls out a new suite of tools for restaurants
Resy launched in the summer of 2014 with a simple premise: If you want a premium reservation at a restaurant on short notice, you should be able to pay for it. Four years and 160 markets later, Resy has changed a lot since then.
But today, the company is about to change things up even more.
This morning, Resy has announced a brand new suite of tools for restaurants, including a new inventory management system called ResyFly.
As it stands now, restaurants have two options when it comes to inventory management for their reservations. They can choose a slot system, where diners are seated at 6pm, 8pm and 10pm, or they can opt for a flex system, where they take reservations as they’re called in and build the night’s reservations based off what comes in first.
Unfortunately, most restaurants have to choose between these two systems, as there are no inventory management systems that offer the ability to do both, according to Resy.
ResyFly uses Resy’s troves of data to determine the best way for restaurants to eliminate gaps in their inventory throughout a given night, taking into account things like date, time, weather and even the average time spent eating at a given restaurant. The tool gives restaurants the ability to schedule different floor plans, reservation grids and hours of operation for special days like Valentine’s Day.
Alongside ResyFly, the company is also introducing Business Intelligence, a window into important information like KPIs, revenue and ratings with third-party information from platforms like Foursquare layered in and integrated with POS software providers to offer real-time revenue reporting.
But sometimes you want direct feedback from the customer. To that end, Resy is launching Resy Surveys, which gives a restaurant the opportunity to send a custom survey to customers about their experience. Resy is also integrating with Upserve, giving Resy’s restaurant partners insights into their guests’ preferences and favorite dishes, as well as info on dining companions, frequency of bookings and historical spend.
And while Resy is focused on refining the product, the company is also focused on growth. That’s why Resy has announced the launch of Resy Global Service, which lets Resy distribute inventory to partners like Airbnb. (It’s worth noting that Airbnb led Resy’s $13 million funding round in 2017.)
Finally, Resy is working on a new membership loyalty program called Resy Select, which will launch at the end of the month. Resy Select is an invite-only program that gives restaurants insights into Resy’s hungriest users, and gives those users benefits such as exclusive booking windows, priority waitlist, early access tickets to events and other exclusive experiences like meeting the chef or touring the kitchen.
Resy books more than 1 million reservations on the platform each week. The company no longer charges users for reservations, but rather charges restaurants by feature, instead of cover, with three tiers ranging from $189/month to $899/month. That said, the company is not yet self-serve on the restaurant side, but founder and CEO Ben Leventhal said the team is thinking about introducing it in the future.
“The key challenge and key opportunity is to do everything we can to make the right choices about what we build and the order we build it in,” said Leventhal. “Our goal is to stay focused on restaurants, as a significant amount of the tech we build is built in conjunction with our restaurant partners.”
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Drift raises $60 million to be an Amazon for businesses
When you’re raising venture capital, it helps if you’ve had “exits.” In other words, if your company has been acquired or you’ve taken one public, investors are more inclined to take a bet on anything you do.
Boston -based serial entrepreneur David Cancel has sold not just one, but four companies. And after a few years running product for HubSpot, he’s in the midst of building number five.
That startup, Drift, managed to raise $47 million in its first three years. Now it’s announcing another $60 million led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from existing investors CRV and General Catalyst. The valuation is undisclosed.
So what is Drift? It’s “changing the way businesses buy from businesses,” said Cancel. He wants to eventually build an alternative to Amazon to make it easier for companies to make large orders.
Currently, Drift subscribers can use chatbots to help turn web visits into sales. It has 100,000 clients including Zenefits, MongoDB, Zuora and AdRoll.
Drift “turns those conversations into customers,” Cancel explained. He said that technology is comparable to what is commonly used for customer service. It’s the “same messaging that was used for support, but used in the sales context.”
In the long-run, Cancel says he hopes Drift will expand its offerings to compete with Salesforce.
The company wouldn’t disclose revenue, but says it is ten times better compared to whatever it was in the past year. And it’s on track to grow another five times this year. This, of course, means little without hard numbers.
Yet we’re told that the new round means that Drift will have $90 million in the bank. It plans to use some of the funding to make acquisitions in voice and video technology. Drift also plans to expand its teams in both Boston and San Francisco, with new offices for both. The company presently has 130 employees.
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Elon Musk’s Boring Co. raises $113 million to chase a pipe dream
Elon Musk’s tunneling startup The Boring Company has raised $113 million to fund its vision of the near/distant future of transportation, according to newly filed SEC docs first spotted by CNBC.
The startup, which is centered around the goal of creating underground tunnels, plays a central part in Musk’s integrated view of urban transportation that he hopes will shape how the public moves about in a quick and efficient way. Last month, Musk announced that the company would be adjusting its plans to prioritize pedestrian traffic over vehicles.
A major part of the company’s early efforts have been in fighting for permits and contracts with city governments. Though Musk has indicated that he hopes to use the company to alleviate the problems of LA traffic, the company is also currently actively engaged in working with cities across the U.S.
Today’s documents don’t offer much insight into the details of the round beyond the cash amount and the fact that there were 31 undisclosed participants in the equity funding. The company has gotten some press for its less than conventional “fundraising methods” so far, where it has sold pre-orders of branded hats and, yes, flamethrowers.
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Utah’s Pluralsight unveils IPO filing
Pluralsight, the Utah-based education technology company, has revealed its IPO filing.
Given the timing of the unveiling, the company is likely targeting a May public debut.
Its core business is online software development courses, helping people improve their skills in categories like IT, data and security. Businesses small and large pay Pluralsight to help train their employees. It also has offerings for individual subscribers.
In the filing, the company acknowledges that it is a competitive landscape, and names Cornerstone OnDemand, Udacity, Udemy, LinkedIn Learning as others in a comparable market. It also mentions General Assembly, which was recently acquired by Adecco for $413 million.
This is the first glimpse we get at Pluralsight’s financials. For 2017, the company brought in $166.8 million in revenue, up from $131.8 million in 2016 and $108.4 million in 2015.
Losses are growing, however. This is partly due to a sizeable increase in sales and marketing expenditures. For 2017, the company lost $96.5 million. This is up from losses of $20.6 million in 2016 and $26.4 million in 2015.
Pluralsight has been around since 2004. Like many startups outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, the company bootstrapped its business and didn’t raise significant outside funding until 2013. Pluralsight previously raised nearly $200 million in financing.
The largest shareholder is Insight Venture Partners, which owned 46.1 percent of the shares prior to the IPO, an unusually high percentage. Co-founder and CEO Aaron Skonnard owned 13.4 percent and investment group ICONIQ owned 8.1 percent.
Morgan Stanley and J.P. Morgan served as lead underwriters. Wilson Sonsini and Goodwin Procter served as counsel.
Pluralsight plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “PS.”
A provision in the JOBS Act from 2012 helped make it so that companies could file confidentially and then reveal financials and other business information just weeks before making public debuts. This helps companies avoid too much scrutiny in the months leading up to an IPO. There is also a quiet period in this time, meaning that companies are limited in what they can say publicly about their businesses.
Like most tech companies, Pluralsight chose to take advantage of this confidential filing provision. But it also announced that it filed, something that companies don’t usually do. Most choose to stay quiet about IPO plans until they make the filings public, unless reporters break the news first.
It was no surprise to those who have been following Utah’s tech scene that Pluralsight is planning to list on the stock market this year. The venture-backed “unicorn” has been a late-stage company for several years now, with a reported valuation of $1 billion as of 2014.
After a slow first couple of months, there has been a flurry of tech IPO activity in recent weeks. Dropbox, Spotify and Zuora recently debuted. Pivotal, Smartsheet and Carbon Black are amongst the companies expected to list in the coming weeks.
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Kolide raises $8M to turn application and device management into a smart database
More devices are coming onto the Internet every single day, and that’s especially true within organizations that have a fleet of devices with access to sensitive data — which means there are even more holes for potential security breaches.
That’s the goal of Kolide. The aim is to ensure that companies have access to tools that give them the ability to get a thorough analysis of every bit of data they have — and where they have it. The Kolide Cloud, its initial major rollout for Mac and Linux devices, turns an entire fleet of apps and devices into what’s basically a table that anyone can query to get an up-to-date look at what’s happening within their business. Kolide looks to provide a robust set of tools that help analyze that data. By doing that, companies may have a better shot at detecting security breaches that might come from even mundane miscalculations or employees being careless about the security of that data. The company said today it has raised $8 million in new venture financing in a round led by Matrix Partners.
“It’s not just an independent event,” Kolide CEO Jason Meller said. “The way I think about it, if you look at any organization, there’s a pathway to a massive security incident, and the pathway is rather innocuous. Let’s say I’m a developer that works at one of these organizations and I need to fix a bug, and pull the production database. Now I have a laptop with this data on this, and I did this and didn’t realize my disk wasn’t encrypted. I went from these innocuous activities to something existentially concerning which could have been prevented if you knew which devices weren’t encrypted and had customer data. A lot of organizations are focused on these very rare events, but the reality is the risk that they face is mishandling of customer data or sensitive information and not thinking about the basics.”
Kolide is built on top of Osquery, a toolkit that allows organizations to essentially view all their devices or operations as if it were a single database. That means that companies can query all of these incidents or any changes in the way employees use data or the way that data is structured. You could run a simple select query for, say, apps and see what is installed where. It allows for a level of granularity that could help drill down into those little innocuous incidents Meller talks about, but all that still needs some simpler approach or interface for larger companies that are frantically trying to handle edge cases but may be overlooking the basics.
Like other companies looking to build a business on top of open source technology, the company looks to offer ways to calibrate those tools for a company’s niche needs that they necessarily don’t actively cover. The argument here is that by basing the company and tools on open source software, they’ll be able to lean on that community to rapidly adapt to a changing environment when it comes to security, and that will allow them to be more agile and have a better sales pitch to larger companies.
There’s going to be a lot of competition in terms of application monitoring and management, especially as companies adopt more and more devices in order to handle their operations. That opens up more and more holes for potential breaches, and in the end, Kolide hopes to create a more granular bird’s-eye view of what’s happening rather than just creating a flagging system without actually explaining what’s happening. There are some startups attacking device management tools, like Fleetsmith does for Apple devices (which raised $7.7 million), and to be sure provisioning and management is one part of the equation. But Kolide hopes to provide a strong toolkit that eventually creates a powerful monitoring system for organizations as they get bigger and bigger.
“We believe data collection is an absolute commodity,” Meller said. “That’s a fundamentally different approach, they believe the actual collection tools are proprietary. We feel this is a solved problem. Our goal isn’t to take info and regurgitate it in a fancy user interface. We believe we should be paid based on the insights and help manage their fleet better. We can tell the whole industry is swinging this way due to the traction OSQuery had. It’s not a new trend, it’s really the end point as a result of companies that have suffered from this black box situation.”
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Facebook shouldn’t block you from finding friends on competitors
Twitter, Vine, Voxer, MessageMe. Facebook has repeatedly cut off competitors from its feature for finding your Facebook friends on their apps… after jumpstarting its own social graph by convincing people to upload their Gmail contacts. Meanwhile, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool merely exports a text list of friends’ names you can’t use elsewhere.
As Congress considers potential regulation following Mark Zuckerberg’s testimonies, it should prioritize leveling the playing field for aspiring alternatives to Facebook and letting consumers choose where to social network. And as a show of good faith and argument against it abusing its monopoly, Facebook should make our friend list truly portable.
It’s time to free the social graph — to treat it as a fundamental digital possession, the way the Telecommunications Act of 1996 protects your right to bring your phone number with you to a new network.
The two most powerful ways to do this would be for Facebook to stop, or Congress to stop it from, blocking friend finding on competitors like it’s done in the past to Twitter and more. And Facebook should change its Download Your Information tool to export our friend list in a truly interoperable format. When you friend someone on Facebook, they’re not just a name. They’re someone specific amongst often many with the same name, and Facebook should be open to us getting connected with them elsewhere.
Facebook takes data it won’t give
While it continues til this day, back in 2010 Facebook goaded users to import their Gmail address books so they could add them as Facebook friends. But it refused to let users export the email addresses of their friends to use elsewhere. That led Google to change its policy and require data portability reciprocity from any app using its Contacts API.
So did Facebook back off? No. It built a workaround, giving users a deep link to download their Gmail contacts from Google’s honorable export tool. Facebook then painstakingly explained to users how to upload that file so it could suggest they friend all those contacts.
Google didn’t want to stop users from legitimately exporting their contacts, so it just put up a strongly worded warning to Gmail users: “Trap my contacts now: Hold on a second. Are you super sure you want to import your contact information for your friends into a service that won’t let you get it out? . . . Although we strongly disagree with this data protectionism, the choice is yours. Because, after all, you should have control over your data.” And Google offered to let you “Register a complaint over data protectionism.”
Eight years later, Facebook has grown from a scrappy upstart chasing Google to become one of the biggest, most powerful players on the internet. And it’s still teaching users how to snatch their Gmail contacts’ email addresses while only letting you export the names of your friends — unless they opt-in through an obscure setting, because it considers contact info they’ve shared as their data, not yours. Whether you should be allowed to upload other people’s contact info to a social network is a bigger question. But it is blatant data portability hypocrisy for Facebook to encourage users to import that data from other apps but not export it.
In some respects, it’s good that you can’t mass-export the email addresses of all your Facebook friends. That could enable spamming, which probably isn’t what someone had in mind when they added you as friend on Facebook. They could always block, unfriend or mute you, but they can’t get their email address back. Facebook is already enduring criticism about how it handled data privacy in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Yet the idea that you could find your Facebook friends on other apps is a legitimate reason for the platform to exist. It’s one of the things that’s made Facebook Login so useful and popular. Facebook’s API lets certain apps check to see if your Facebook friends have already signed up, so you can easily follow them or send them a connection request. But Facebook has rescinded that option when it senses true competition.
Data protectionism
Twitter is the biggest example. Facebook didn’t and still doesn’t let you see which of your Facebook friends are on Twitter, even though it has seven times as many users. Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, frustrated in 2010, said that “They see their social graph as their core asset, and they want to make sure there’s a win-win relationship with anybody who accesses it.”
Facebook went on to establish a formal policy that said that apps that wanted to use its Find Friends tool had to abide by these rules:
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If you use any Facebook APIs to build personalized or social experiences, you must also enable people to easily share their experiences back with people on Facebook.
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You may not use Facebook Platform to promote, or to export user data to, a product or service that replicates a core Facebook product or service without our permission.
Essentially, apps that piggybacked on Facebook’s social graph had to let you share back to Facebook, and couldn’t compete with it. It’s a bit ironic, given Facebook’s overarching strategy for years has been “replicate core functionality.” From cloning Twitter’s asymmetrical follow and Trending Topics to Snapchat’s Stories and augmented reality filters, all the way back to cribbing FriendFeed’s News Feed and Facebook’s start as a rip-off of the Winklevii’s HarvardConnection.
Restrictions against replicating core functionality aren’t unheard of in tech. Apple’s iOS won’t let you run an App Store from inside an app, for example. But Facebook’s selective enforcement of the policy is troubling. It simply ignores competing apps that never get popular. Yet if they start to grow into potential rivals, Facebook has swiftly enforced this policy and removed their Find Friends access, often inhibiting further growth and engagement.
Here are few of examples of times Facebook has cut off competitors from its graph:
- Voxer was one of the hottest messaging apps of 2012, climbing the charts and raising a $30 million round with its walkie-talkie-style functionality. In early January 2013, Facebook copied Voxer by adding voice messaging into Messenger. Two weeks later, Facebook cut off Voxer’s Find Friends access. Voxer CEO Tom Katis told me at the time that Facebook stated his app with tens of millions of users was a “competitive social network” and wasn’t sharing content back to Facebook. Katis told us he thought that was hypocritical. By June, Voxer had pivoted toward business communications, tumbling down the app charts and leaving Facebook Messenger to thrive.
- MessageMe had a well-built chat app that was growing quickly after launching in 2013, posing a threat to Facebook Messenger. Shortly before reaching 1 million users, Facebook cut off MessageMe‘s Find Friends access. The app ended up selling for a paltry double-digit millions price tag to Yahoo before disintegrating.
- Phhhoto and its fate show how Facebook’s data protectionism encompasses Instagram. Phhhoto’s app that let you shoot animated GIFs was growing popular. But soon after it hit 1 million users, it got cut off from Instagram’s social graph in April 2015. Six months later, Instagram launched Boomerang, a blatant clone of Phhhoto. Within two years, Phhhoto shut down its app, blaming Facebook and Instagram. “We watched [Instagram CEO Kevin] Systrom and his product team quietly using PHHHOTO almost a year before Boomerang was released. So it wasn’t a surprise at all . . . I’m not sure Instagram has a creative bone in their entire body.”
- Vine had a real shot at being the future of short-form video. The day the Twitter-owned app launched, though, Facebook shut off Vine’s Find Friends access. Vine let you share back to Facebook, and its six-second loops you shot in the app were a far cry from Facebook’s heavyweight video file uploader. Still, Facebook cut it off, and by late 2016, Twitter announced it was shutting down Vine.
As I wrote in 2013, “Enforcement of these policies could create a moat around Facebook. It creates a barrier to engagement, retention, and growth for competing companies.” But in 2018, amongst whispers of anti-trust action, Facebook restricting access to its social graph to protect the dominance of its News Feed seems egregiously anti-competitive.
That’s why Facebook should pledge to stop banning competitors from using its Find Friends tool. If not, congress should tell Facebook that this kind of behavior could lead to more stringent regulation.
Friends aren’t just names
When Senator John Neely Kennedy asked Zuckerberg this week, “are you willing to give me the right to take my data on Facebook and move it to another social media platform?”, Zuckerberg claimed that “Senator, you can already do that. We have a Download Your Information tool where you can go get a file of all the content there, and then do whatever you want with it.”
But that’s not exactly true. You can export your photos that can be easily uploaded elsewhere. But your social graph — all those confirmed friend requests — gets reduced to a useless string of text. Download Your Information spits out merely a list of your friends’ names and the dates on which you got connected. There’s no unique username. No link to their Facebook profile. Nothing you can use to find them on another social network beyond manually typing in their names.
That’s especially problematic if your friends have common names. There are tons of John Smiths on Facebook, so finding him on another social network with just a name will require a lot of sleuthing, or guess-work. Depending on where you live, locating a particular Garcia, Smirnov or Lee could be quite difficult. Facebook even built a short-lived feature called Friendshake to help you friend someone nearby amongst everyone in their overlapping name space.
When I asked about this, Facebook told me that users can opt-in to having their email or phone number included in the Download Your Information export. But this privacy setting is buried and little-known. Just 4 percent of my friends, centered around tech savvy San Francisco, had enabled it.
As I criticized way back in 2010 when Download Your Information launched, “The data can be used as a diary, or to replace other information from a hard drive crash or stolen computer — but not necessarily to switch to a different social network.”
Given Facebook’s iron grip on the Find Friends API, users deserve decentralized data portability — a way to take their friends with them that Facebook can’t take back. That’s what Download Your Information should offer, but doesn’t.
Social graph portability
This is why I’m calling on Facebook to improve the data portability of your friend connections. Give us the same consumer protections that make phone numbers portable.
At the very least Facebook should include your friends’ unique Facebook username and URL. But true portability would mean you could upload the list to another social network to find your friends there.
One option would be for Facebook’s export to include a privacy-safe, hashed version of your friends’ email address that they signed up with and share with you. Facebook could build a hashed email lookup tool so that if you uploaded these nonsensical strings of characters to another app, they could cross-reference them against Facebook’s database of your friends. If there’s a match, the app could surface that person as someone with whom you might want to reconnect. Effectively, this would let you find friends elsewhere via email address without Facebook ever giving you or other apps a human-readable list of their contact info.
If you can’t take your social graph with you, there’s little chance for a viable alternative to Facebook to arise. It doesn’t matter if a better social network emerges, or if Facebook disrespects your privacy, because there’s nowhere to go. Opening up the social graph would require Facebook to compete on the merit of its product and policies. Trying to force the company’s hand with a variety of privacy regulations won’t solve the core issue. But the prospect of users actually being able to leave would let the market compel Facebook to treat us better.
For more on Facebook’s challenges with data privacy, check out TechCrunch’s feature stories:
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Zuora’s IPO is another step in golden age of enterprise SaaS
Zuroa’s founder and CEO Tien Tzuo had a vision of a subscription economy long before most people ever considered the notion. He knew that for companies to succeed with subscriptions, they needed a bookkeeping system that understood how they collected and reported money. The company went public yesterday, another clear sign post on the road to SaaS maturation.
Tzuo was an early employee at Salesforce and their first CMO. He worked there in the early days in the late 90s when Salesforce’s Marc Benioff famously rented an apartment to launch the company. Tzuo was at Salesforce 9 years, and it helped him understand the nature of subscription-based businesses like Salesforce.
“We created a great environment for building, marketing and delivering software. We rewrote the rules, the way it was built, marketed and sold,” Tzuo told me in an interview in 2016.
He saw a fundamental problem with traditional accounting methods, which were designed for selling a widget and declaring the revenue. A subscription was an entirely different model and it required a new way to track revenue and communicate with customers. Tzuo took the long view when he started his company in early 2007, leaving a secure job at a growing company like Salesforce.
He did it because he had the vision, long before anyone else, that SaaS companies would require a subscription bookkeeping system, but before long, so would other unrelated businesses.
Building a subscription system
As he put it in that 2016 interview, if you commit to pay me $1 for 10 years, you know that $1 was coming in come hell or high water, that’s $10 I know I’m getting, but I can’t declare the money until I get it. That recurring revenue still has value though because my investors know that I’m secure for 10 years, even though it’s not on the books yet. That’s where Zuora came in. It could account for that recurring revenue when nobody else could. What’s more, it could track the billing over time, and send out reminders, help the companies stay engaged with their customers.
Photo: Lukas Kurka/Getty Images
As Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research put it, they pioneered the whole idea of a subscription economy, and not just for SaaS companies. Over the last several years, we’ve heard companies talking about selling services and SLAs (service/uptime agreements) instead of a one-time sale of an item, but not that long ago it wasn’t something a lot of companies were thinking about.
“They pioneered how companies can think about monetization,” Wang said. “So large companies like a GE could go from selling a wind turbine one time to selling a subscription to deliver a certain number of Kw/hr of green energy at peak hours from 1 to 5 pm with 98 percent uptime.” There wasn’t any way to do this before Zuora came along.
Jason Lemkin, founder at SaaStr, a firm that invests in SaaS startups, says Tzuo was a genuine visionary and helped create the underlying system for SaaS subscriptions to work. “The most interesting part of Zuora is that it is a “second” order SaaS play. It could only thrive once SaaS became mainstream, and could only scale on top of other recurring revenue businesses. Zuora started off as a niche player helping SaaS companies do billing, and it dramatically expanded and thrived as SaaS became … Software.”
Market catches up with idea
When he launched the company in 2007, perhaps he saw that extension of his idea out on the distant horizon. He certainly saw companies like Salesforce needing a service like the one he had decided to create. The early investors must have recognized that his vision was early and it would take a slow, steady climb on the way to exiting. It took 11 years and $242 million in venture capital before they saw the payoff. The revenue after 11 years was a reported $167 million. There is plenty of room to grow.
But yesterday the company had its initial public offering, and it was by any measure a huge success. According TechCrunch’s Katie Roof, “After pricing its IPO at $14 and raising $154 million, the company closed at $20, valuing the company around $2 billion.” Today it was up a bit more as of this writing.
When you consider the Tzuo’s former company has become a $10 billion company, that companies like Box, Zendesk, Workday and Dropbox have all gone public, and others like DocuSign and Smartsheet are not far behind, it’s pretty clear that we are in a golden age of SaaS — and chances are it’s only going to get better.
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