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User blogs
Sometimes you’ve just got to confirm an unannounced product to put the rumors to bed, I guess. That was Google’s strategy this afternoon, following earlier rumors from Android Central that a chip shortage had put the kibosh on the mid-budget phone.
In a comment to TechCrunch, a Google spokesperson noted, “Pixel 5a 5G is not cancelled. It will be available later this year in the U.S. and Japan and announced in line with when last year’s a-series phone was introduced.”
That time frame would put the device’s arrival around late-summer, meaning it won’t arrive in time for Google I/O in May, as some speculated. Interestingly, the company appears to be limiting the device’s availability to two countries — at least at launch. That could, perhaps, be due to earlier-reported component shortages.
As The Verge notes, the company hasn’t been particularly precious when it comes to product announcements. The company took a similar approach ahead of the release of the Pixel. Either way, this isn’t exactly the standard big company approach to rumor denial, which is to either not answer or otherwise deflect.
Google may well be on edge about its Pixel line these days. The phone line hasn’t exactly taken the mobile world be storm, resulting in longstanding rumors that the company is looking to shake things up. That, in part, has seemingly been confirmed by some fairly high-profile exits.
Still, even while there have been issues on the premium side, the company’s budget “a” line has helped buoy its overall numbers. No word yet on specific specs, but the handset is not expected to be a radical departure from its predecessor.
Melissa Bradley wears many hats. She’s the co-founder of a startup called Ureeka, an investor at 1863 Ventures, and a professor at Georgetown’s business school. So it’s not an understatement to say that she understands the fundraising process from every angle. And moreover, she has both invested and fundraised for her own startup during this last year, where the landscape has shifted drastically. At TechCrunch Early Stage, she led a session on how to nail your virtual pitch meeting.
Bradley covered how to allocate your time during the meeting, how to prepare, how to close out the meetings with a clear list of action items, and what to avoid.
You can watch the session or check out the full transcript below, but I’ve also pulled out a few highlights from the talk just for you.
Enjoy!
Conversation > Pitching
One of the greatest shifts in the pitch landscape during the pandemic was the nature of meetings themselves. Because investors and founders can take 30 meetings a day from the comfort of their home, it means that conversation has been prioritized over presentation. Adding to the need for conversation is the fact that investors aren’t ‘getting to know you’ IRL as they would in the past, and so how you interact (not just the content of your pitch) is critically important.
Bradley explained that planning for extra time to answer questions and go deep on strategy is more important now than ever.
Now is the time to really have a conversation and deeply engage the investor in your story and your vision. You want to be conversational in nature, but still formal in tone. So you want to be respectful; you want to avoid jargon; you want to make sure it’s clear what you’re talking about. But it’s really much more of a two-way conversation than we’ve probably seen before. I think again, pace yourself, be really clear in advance how much time you have. One-third of the time should be spent on your pitch, and the other two-thirds, you should be prepared to field questions and really have that conversation. Pace yourself. Don’t rush through. If you only have 30 minutes, it’s probably not the best time to do a demo. You might want to follow up with a recorded demo or make an offer to do a demo afterwards. (Timestamp – 6:03)
Strategy > Projections
Open-source software gave birth to a slew of useful software in recent years. Many of the great technologies that we use today were born out of open-source development: Android, Firefox, VLC media player, MongoDB, Linux, Docker and Python, just to name a few, with many of these also developing into very successful for-profit companies.
While there are some dedicated open-source investors such as the Apache Software Foundation incubator and OSS Capital, the majority of open-source companies will raise from traditional venture capital firms.
Our team has raised from traditional venture capital firms like Speedinvest, open-source-specific firms like OSS, and even from more hybrid firms like OpenOcean, which was created by the founders and senior leadership teams at MariaDB and MySQL. These companies understandably have a significant but not exclusive open-source focus.
Our area of innovation is an open-source AutoML server that reduces model training complexity and brings machine learning to the source of the data. Ultimately, we feel democratizing machine learning has the potential to truly transform the modern business world. As such, we successfully raised $5 million in seed funding to help bring our vision to the current marketplace.
Here, we aim to provide insights and advice for open-source startups that hope to follow a similar path for securing funding, and also detail some of the important risks your team needs to consider when crafting a business model to attract investment.
Strategies for acquiring open-source seed funding
Obviously, venture capitalists find many open-source software initiatives to be worthy investments. However, they need to understand any inherent risks involved when successfully commercializing an innovative idea. Finding low-risk investments that lead to lucrative business opportunities remains an important goal for these firms.
In our experience, we found these risks fall into three major categories: market risk, execution risk, and founders’ risk. Explaining all three to potential investors in a concise manner helps dispel their fears. In the end, low-risk, high-reward scenarios obviously attract tangible interest from sources of venture capital.
Ultimately, investment companies want startups to generate enough revenue to reach a valuation exceeding $1 billion. While that number is likely to increase over time, it remains a good starting point for initial funding discussions with investors. Annual revenue of $100 million serves as a good benchmark for achieving that valuation level.
Market risks in open-source initiatives
Market risks for open-source organizations tend to be different when compared to traditional businesses seeking funding. Notably, investors in these traditional startups are taking a larger leap of faith.
However the outcome of today’s vote count turned out, there was one thing we knew for certain: it wasn’t going to mark the end of the battle between Amazon and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. With voting having broken overwhelmingly in Amazon’s favor, the union was quick to challenge the results.
The RWDSU was quick to offer TechCrunch a statement from President Stuart Appelbaum after no votes broke the 50% threshold, noting, “We demand a comprehensive investigation over Amazon’s behavior in corrupting this election.”
Amazon, unsurprisingly, was quick to take a victory lap. In a blog post credited to “Amazon Staff,” the company writes:
Thank you to employees at our BHM1 fulfillment center in Alabama for participating in the election. There’s been a lot of noise over the past few months, and we’re glad that your collective voices were finally heard. In the end, less than 16% of the employees at BHM1 voted to join the RWDSU union. It’s easy to predict the union will say that Amazon won this election because we intimidated employees, but that’s not true.
While the company was quick to state that the election is “over,” the RWDSU is hopeful, both in terms of future organizing at the Bessemer warehouse and for what the movement will mean for unionizing efforts at Amazon, going forward.
In a press conference held earlier today, Appelbaum suggested that Amazon told workers that they would have to vote against the union if they wanted to keep their jobs.
“We believe a rerun election is going to be very likely,” the union president told media. “I think that if Amazon considers this a victory, they may want to reconsider it. At best, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. Look at what happened during this period. We exposed atrocious working conditions at Amazon for everybody to see.”
Appelbaum’s comments seem to refer, in part, to numerous reports of workers urinating in bottles over concerns about stringent quotas. In the midst of an aggressive social media campaign at the apparent behest of CEO Jeff Bezos, the company initially denied reports, before conceding they may apply to some drivers. Amazon was quick to deflect blame to broader industry issues, however.
“Amazon didn’t win—our employees made the choice to vote against joining a union,” the company added in its post. “Our employees are the heart and soul of Amazon, and we’ve always worked hard to listen to them, take their feedback, make continuous improvements, and invest heavily to offer great pay and benefits in a safe and inclusive workplace. We’re not perfect, but we’re proud of our team and what we offer, and will keep working to get better every day.”
A key part to the RWDSU’s challenge is a ballot box the company reportedly pressured the USPS to install, in defiance of a National Labor Relations Board ruling. Appelbaum said the box “creates the impression of surveillance.”
He added that the union has already been in communication with workers at other Amazon facilities, explaining, “We have already started talking to workers at other facilities, as well, before this election.”
