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Uber today notified employees that it will extend its work from home policy through September 13.
“In considering the extension, we took into account the latest scientific data and experts’ views; the fact that different countries are at different stages of recovery; and the start of the school year,” Uber Chief People Officer Nikki Krish wrote in an email, viewed by TechCrunch, to employees. “[…] We know that some CommOps, IT, or other roles require physical presence in an office, so please continue to work within the policies your teams have developed—however, as always, we won’t force anyone to go into the office if they have medical concerns.”
Uber is also encouraging employees to get vaccinated when it’s possible to do so. In the email, Krish said Uber employees will be able to take time off in order to get vaccinated.
In August, Uber notified employees that they should expect to work from home through June 2021. As for other tech companies, Google in July extended its work from home policy through the end of June 2021, while Facebook in August extended its remote work policy until July 2021.
Post-COVID, Uber will likely have a hybrid work model, Krish said, but it’s still a work in progress.
“We’re taking a number of aspects into consideration, such as how being physically together benefits or reduces productivity, collaboration, and engagement,” she wrote. “We’ll update you on where things stand in a few weeks, and along the way as we make progress.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/uber-extends-work-from-home-policy-through-mid-september/
If you use Office, Microsoft would really, really, really like you to buy a cloud-enabled subscription to Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365). But as the company promised, it will continue to make a stand-alone, perpetual license for Office available for the foreseeable future. A while back, it launched Office 2019, which includes the standard suite of Office tools, but is frozen in time and without the benefit of the regular feature updates and cloud-based tools that come with the subscription offering.
Today, Microsoft is announcing what is now called the Microsoft Office LTSC (Long Term Servicing Channel). It’ll be available as a commercial preview in April and will be available on both Mac and Windows, in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions.
And like with the previous version, it’s clear that Microsoft would really prefer if you just moved to the cloud already. But it also knows that not everybody can do that, so it now calls this version with its perpetual license that you pay for once and then use for as long as you want to (or have compatible hardware) a “specialty product for specific scenarios. Those scenarios, Microsoft agrees, include situations where you have a regulated device that can’t accept feature updates for years at a time, process control devices on a manufacturing floor and other devices that simply can’t be connected to the internet.
“We expect that most customers who use Office LTSC won’t do it across their entire organization, but only in specific scenarios,” Microsoft’s CVP for Microsoft 365, Jared Spataro, writes in today’s announcement.
Because it’s a specialty product, Microsoft will also raise the price for Office Professional Plus, Office Standard, and the individual Office apps by up to 10%.
“To fuel the work of the future, we need the power of the cloud,” writes Spataro. “The cloud is where we invest, where we innovate, where we discover the solutions that help our customers empower everyone in their organization – even as we all adjust to a new world of work. But we also acknowledge that some of our customers need to enable a limited set of locked-in-time scenarios, and these updates reflect our commitment to helping them meet this need.”
If you have one of these special use cases, the price increase will not likely deter you and you’ll likely be happy to hear that Microsoft is committing to another release in this long-term channel in the future, too.
As for the new features in this release, Spataro notes that will have dark mode support, new capabilities like Dynamic Arrays and XLOOKUP in Excel, and performance improvements across the board. One other change worth calling out is that it will not ship with Skype for Business but the Microsoft Teams app (though you can still download Skype for Business if you need it).
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/microsoft-announces-the-next-perpetual-release-of-office/
Photomath, the popular mobile app that helps you solve equations, has raised a $23 million Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures. The app is a massive consumer success, and chances are you might already know about it if you have a teenager in your household.
The app lets you point your phone’s camera at a math problem. It recognizes what’s written and gives you a step-by-step explanation to solve the problem. You might think that it’s the perfect app for lazy students.
But there are many different use cases for Photomath. For instance, you can write an equation in your notebook and use Photomath to draw a graph.
Typing an equation on a keyboard is quite difficult. That’s why bridging the gap between the physical world and your smartphone is key to Photomath’s success. You can just grab a pen and write something down on a piece of paper. Essentially, it’s an AR calculator.
GSV Ventures, Learn Capital, Cherubic Ventures and Goodwater Capital are also participating in today’s funding round.
Behind the app’s success, there’s an interesting story. Photomath was originally designed as a demo app for another company called MicroBlink. At the time, the team was working on text recognition technology. It planned to sell its core technology to other companies that might find it useful.
In 2014, they pitched MicroBlink at TechCrunch Disrupt in London. And things changed drastically overnight as Photomath reached the first spot of the iOS App Store.
Photomath has now attracted over 220 million downloads. As of this writing, it is still #59 in the U.S. App Store, one rank above Tinder. Other companies tried to build competitors, but it seems like they didn’t manage to crush the tiny European startup.
The app seems even more relevant as many kids are spending more time studying at home. They can’t simply raise their hand to call the teacher for some help.
Photomath is free and users can optionally pay for Photomath Plus, a premium version with more features, such as dynamic illustrations and animated tutorials.
Extra Crunch Live is off to a kick-ass start this year. Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt taught us how to nail the narrative. Felicis Ventures’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque showed us how valuable a simple pitch deck can be. And just yesterday, Accel’s Steve Loughlin and Ironclad’s Jason Boehmig discussed the challenges of pricing and packaging your product. Next week, we’ll sit down with Bain Capital Ventures’ Matt Harris and Justworks’ Isaac Oats.
For those of you who followed the series last year, Extra Crunch Live is a brand new beast in 2021: we take a look at early stage funding deals through the eyes of the founders and investors who made them happen, and those same tech leaders go through your pitch decks and give feedback and advice. Every single Wednesday at 12 p.m. PST/3 p.m. EST!
Extra Crunch Live is available for EC members only. It is but one of the many reasons to join Extra Crunch, including but not limited to Investor Surveys, Market Maps, and the EC Perks Program. Interested? Hit up this link to get started.
Today, I’m thrilled to announce the March slate for Extra Crunch Live. (Registration info for these events is at the bottom of the post.)
Sarah Kunst (Cleo Capital) + Julia Collins (Planet FWD)
March 10, 12pm PT/3pm ET
Julia Collins built a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics-focused pizza startup. Her latest venture, Planet FWD, has raised $2.7 million for climate-friendly food. Sarah Kunst, managing director of Cleo Capital invested in the round, adding Planet FWD to a portfolio that includes mmhmm, Lunch Club, StyleSeat and more. Hear why they chose one another, what matters most in the relationship between an investor and a founder, and get their live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks.
Emmalyn Shaw (Flourish Ventures) + Adam Roseman (Steady)
March 17, 12pm PT/3pm ET
Emmalyn Shaw co-manages a $500 million fintech fund in Flourish Capital, with portfolio companies that include Brigit, Chime, Clerkie, Cushion, EarnUp, Kin, Propel, and SeedFi. She also led the Series A deal for Steady, founded by Adam Roseman, back in 2018. Hear from Emmalyn and Adam about how they came together, what it takes to get funding and be successful in the fintech space, and get their live feedback on audience-submitted pitch decks.
Navin Chaddha (Mayfield) + Manish Chandra (Poshmark)
March 24, 12pm PT/3pm ET
Poshmark raised upwards of $150 million before filing to go public in 2019. Today, it has a market cap north of $5 billion. Mayfield’s Navin Chaddha led the company’s Series A all the way back in 2011, back when Poshmark was called Gosh Posh. Hear Chaddha and Poshmark founder Manish Chandra discuss a decade of growth, and walk us through how they came together more than ten years ago. Then the duo will take a look at pitch decks submitted by audience members.
As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is available for EC members only. It is but one of the many reasons to join Extra Crunch, including but not limited to Investor Surveys, Market Maps, and the EC Perks Program. Interested? Hit up this link to get started.
Register for the March episodes of Extra Crunch Live below.
See you there!
Queenly, a marketplace for formalwear, launched into a world where its core product of dresses and gowns had a massive competitor, bigger and more elusive than Poshmark: quarantine.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused the fancy in-person events that one might attend, such as award shows, pageants, proms and weddings to be canceled to limit spread. But despite the fact that you might be rocking sweats over slacks, Queenly co-founders Trisha Bantigue and Kathy Zhou say that they had half a million in sales last year, and over 100,000 people visit their website everyday.
“So many women bought dresses to just dress up and feel normal at home, when everything else around the world was not,” Bantigue said. “It helped them feel grounded and stabilize themselves in this crazy chaotic pandemic environment.” The canceled events have also found new homes, such as Zoom weddings, Twitch pageants, socially distant proms and graduation car parades. The co-founder added that content creators on TikTok and YouTube have also bought Queenly dresses.
Pandemic growth added a surprising dimension to Queenly’s business, and the Bay Area startup is currently partaking in the Y Combinator winter cohort to navigate it. So far, it has raised $800,000 to date from investors including Mike Smith, former COO of Stitch Fix, Thuan Pham, former CTO of Uber, and Kelly Thompson, former COO of Samsclub.com and Walmart.com. The goal, the co-founders tell me, is to become the StockX for formalwear.
Queenly is a marketplace for buying and selling formal dresses, from wedding dresses to pageant gowns. The 50,000 dresses on the platform are either new or resale, and sellers get paid 80% of the price that the gowns go for.
Part of the company’s biggest sell, according to the co-founders, is its algorithm that matches buyers to dresses. Before Queenly, Zhou was a former software engineer at Pinterest who helped build content creation flows and the back end of the platform. She took the same focus that her and her Pinterest co-workers had on data-driven search and development and applied it to Queenly.
The search engine can go deeper than a normal dress search on Macy’s can, which might create options based on size, color and cut. In contrast, Queenly can help offer more diverse insights with a larger range of sizes, silhouette options and different shades of the same color.
Last week, a seller sold her wedding dress with a tag that says the dark mesh on the dress is for a darker skin tone. Queenly is beta-testing a feature that lets you search medium skin tone sheer options or dark skin tone sheer options. The team says that skin-tone filters are one of the important long-term goals of their search engine.
“These are just some things that we know because we’re women, and we know how to build this product for women,” Zhou said. “As opposed to if this was a male founder, they would not know that that would even be something that women would search for.”
Currently, there are over 50,000 dresses for sale on the Queenly platform, ranging from $70 to $4,000 and going up to size 32.
Image Credits: Queenly
With these search insights, Queenly says that it is able to sell dresses within two weeks, claiming that some users say that their same dresses spent five months on the Poshmark platform.
The diversity of dresses, from a price and range perspective, is one of the ways that Queenly stays competitive with large retail brands like Nordstrom.
“Buying and carrying inventory is very capital intensive for any startup,” Bantigue said. “As female minority founders it was hard for us to raise in the beginning.” As a result, the startup doesn’t keep a physical inventory of dresses, but instead relies on users to help get dresses from owner to buyer. If a dress is under $200, Queenly sends a prepaid shipping label to the seller to mail directly to the end buyer. If a dress is over $200, Queenly gets the dress sent directly to the company, does light dry cleaning and authentication, and then sends it right to the user.
Bringing the users into the transaction process adds a layer of risk because it depends on people to do things for the startup to be successful. The incentive here is that sellers make 80% of their sale price, and Queenly pockets the other 20%.
The startup’s biggest cost is shipping. To limit these costs, Queenly currently doesn’t accept or honor any returns, unless the dress upon arrival is not what was described in the sales post.
While this is a sensical business decision, it could be a hurdle for the startups’ clientele. Sizes are complicated and inconsistent, so the inability to return a dress might stifle a customer’s appetite to buy in the first place.
“We were actually worried about this before, but for two years now we [have not] had a complaint about sizing,” Bantigue said.
The co-founders say that many buyers are comfortable tailoring a dress post-purchase, and sellers are required to post pictures so expectations are set pre-purchase. There have been no cases of counterfeit brands to date, Bantigue said.
Queenly’s next plan is to bring on boutique stores and dress designers for Queenly partners, a program started to help small boutique businesses digitize their inventory through the Queenly platform.
“For years, the formalwear industry has been mostly offline, with only big name players being available online,” Bantigue said. “We want to change this.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/18/yc-backed-queenly-launches-a-marketplace-for-formalwear/
