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The only people who truly understand a relationship are the ones who are in it. Luckily for us, we’re going to have a candid conversation with both parties in the relationship between Ironclad CEO and cofounder Jason Boehmig and his investor and board member Accel partner Steve Loughlin.
Loughlin led Ironclad’s Series A deal back in 2017, making it one of his first Series A deals after returning to Accel.
This episode of Extra Crunch Live goes down on Wednesday at 3pm ET/12pm PT, just like usual.
We’ll talk to the duo about how they met, what made them ‘choose’ each other, and how they’ve operated as a duo since. How they built trust, maintain honesty, and talk strategy are also on the table as part of the discussion.
Loughlin was an entrepreneur before he was an investor, founding RelateIQ (an Accel-backed company) in 2011. The company was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million and later became Salesforce IQ. Loughlin then “came back home” to Accel in 2016, and has led investments in companies like Airkit, Ascend.io, Clockwise, Ironclad, Monte Carlo, Nines, Productiv, Split.io, and Vivun.
Not entirely unsurprising for a man who has dominated the legal tech sphere, Jason Boehmig is a California barred attorney who practiced law at Fenwick & West and was also an adjunct professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Ironclad launched in 2014 and today the company has raised more than $180 million and, according to reports, is valued just under $1 billion.
Not only will we peel back the curtain on how this investor/founder relationship works, but we’ll also hear from these two tech leaders on their thoughts around bigger enterprise trends in the ecosystem.
Then, it’s time for the Pitch Deck Teardown. On each episode of Extra Crunch Live, we take a look at pitch decks submitted by the audience and our experienced guests give their live feedback. If you want to throw your hat pitch deck in the ring, you can hit this link to submit your deck for a future episode.
As with just about everything we do here at TechCrunch, audience members can also ask their own questions to our guests.
Extra Crunch Live has left room for you to network (you gotta network to get work, amirite?). Networking is open starting at 2:30pm ET/11:30am PT and stays open a half hour after the episode ends. Make a friend!
As a reminder, Extra Crunch Live is a members-only series that aims to give founders and tech operators actionable advice and insights from leaders across the tech industry. If you’re not an Extra Crunch member yet, what are you waiting for?
Loughlin and Boehmig join a stellar cast of speakers on Extra Crunch Live, including Lightspeed’s Gaurav Gupta and Grafana’s Raj Dutt, as well as Felicis’ Aydin Senkut and Guideline’s Kevin Busque. Extra Crunch members can catch every episode of Extra Crunch Live on demand right here.
You can find details for this episode (and upcoming episodes) after the jump below.
See you on Wednesday!
The tech industry has long grappled with an overwhelming lack of diversity among employees, executives, venture-backed founders, venture capital firms and board members. And despite recent efforts to increase diversity throughout the industry, tech still remains predominantly white and male.
Over the years, many have argued that the lack of diversity in tech is caused by a so-called pipeline problem: that there is little diversity in tech because there is not enough qualified talent from diverse backgrounds.
Today, there is well-established data that proves the lack of diversity in tech cannot be attributed to a pipeline problem, Uber Chief Diversity Officer Bo Young Lee told TechCrunch.
“If we want to claim that it’s a pipeline issue, we would first have to claim that we’ve hired what is available in the pipeline,” she said. “It’s not a pipeline issue as much as it is a recruiting process challenge.”
But the notion that there is a pipeline problem, despite the evidence showing there is not one, at least partly remains in the public psyche. Courri Brady, director at diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm Paradigm, recognizes there are still some folks who have yet to rid themselves of the myth of the pipeline problem.
“There’s still a perception to some degree that there’s a pipeline problem within some companies that I’m personally supporting,” Brady told TechCrunch. “But there are a couple of dynamics at play.
One of those dynamics, Brady said, pertains to recruiting processes, which are relatively fixed inside tech companies.
If companies are convinced only certain schools, programs or other companies are the only places that produce good talent, and those people are not diverse, Brady said, “then those issues are going to perpetuate themselves.”
Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a research lead for gender, race and power in artificial intelligence at the AI Now Institute, is actively researching the history of the pipeline problem. In the next six months, the plan is to publish it as a report and potentially turn it into a book. Rankin was kind of enough to give TechCrunch a sneak peek into some of her research so far.
“The very high-level view is, people have been talking about a pipeline problem in some form since the seventies,” Rankin told me. “And before that, often, it was like a quote, manpower problem, by focusing on who has PhDs or master’s degrees in a field or who has elite jobs in a field. But that focus is always on individuals. It’s on tracking people, not institutions and not structures. So this is why I think it continues to be a convenient excuse for a host of sins, because talking about a pipeline makes it seem as if all things are equal in the United States, and we just have to find a way to keep people in. But the truth is, when we think about a STEM pipeline, we don’t talk about the fact that education in the United States is by no means equal from birth onwards.”
There are, of course, programs like Black Girls Code, Girls Who Code, Code.org and others that aim to step in to help introduce kids to technology. But these issues go deeper than just STEM education, Rankin said.
“For a long time, it was you had to have a certain SAT score to get in somewhere or a certain GRE score for graduate school,” Rankin said. “But we know, literally decades of research have shown SATs correlate in no way with how you’re going to do in college or how you might be as a student, but correlate everything with how wealthy your family is, which also then correlates with race and access to all other sorts of things like tutoring and etc. But that same time of credentialing pops up time and time again.”
The entire education system has historically functioned as a gatekeeper to knowledge through credentialing, she said.
“Credentialing is a form of gatekeeping and protecting who has access to power and who doesn’t,” she said. “There’s this term that I think was coined a few years ago about how Silicon Valley tech companies are not meritocracies, but ‘mirrortocracies,’ so you’re hiring people who have similar credentials to you, had the same sort of schooling, etcetera. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re more qualified. We know that all sorts of diversity often yields better work and better outcomes in a variety of situations, but focusing on certain types of quote, qualifications and credentials, don’t reflect that.”
Beyond education, however, there are also other pipelines at play. There’s the cradle to prison pipeline, which I’ve referred to as “the other pipeline,” as well as “the revolving door of H1B visa workers who are treated with lower status,” Rankin said.
“The pipeline is a way to silo all of that out and say, ‘we just need to get more Black women in tech,’ as opposed to saying, ‘actually, these companies are and have been racist and white supremacist and misogynist, and it’s those institutions and larger societal and global capitalist structures that need to change.”
What the idea of the pipeline also doesn’t capture is the fact that women were often tasked with doing manual computing in the 1950s and sixties, Rankin said. Back then, many considered coding to be a woman’s job.
“And it was only as it became clear how socially and economically and politically important that computing would be, that the profession over a decade or so became masculine. […] It clearly shows that as certain types of computing and programming became culturally valuable, more of those jobs that were better paying went to men. And it wasn’t that the work was any different but that because there was a prestige shift, there was also a shift in how it was gendered.”
Those are just some of the ideas Rankin will outline in her research paper, which she hopes will help to change the conversation happening in the tech industry about diversity, equity and inclusion. Instead of relying on the pipeline as an excuse, Rankin said she hopes the tech industry will focus more on inequities, structural racism, misogyny and how micro-inequities can lead to macro problems.
Rankin’s report will also have some recommendations, such as working to make education truly equitable and addressing surveillance, as well as the school to prison pipeline. She also believes salary data should be public information.
“As soon as we have more transparency around salaries, we can have more meaningful conversations,” she said.
Last week, former Pinterest employee Ifeoma Ozoma introduced legislation with the backing of California State Senator Connie Leyva to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. The Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment.
“That’s certainly a step in the right direction,” Rankin said.
The proposed bill would expand the current protections workers have through the Stand Together Against Non-Disclosures Act, also authored by Leyva, that went into effect in 2019. Ozoma, along with former co-worker Aerica Shimizu Banks, came forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination last year. They eventually settled with Pinterest, but the STAND Act technically only protected them for speaking out about gender discrimination. This new bill would ensure workers are also protected when speaking out about racial discrimination.
“It would be huge and not just for tech, but for your industry as well,” Ozoma told me earlier this week. “I believe that we don’t have real progress unless we approach things intersectionally and that’s the lesson from all of us.”
Meredith Whittaker, AI Now Faculty Director and co-organizer of the 2018 Google walkout, said this type of legislation absolutely necessary.
“From a structural perspective, it’s really evident we’re not going to change toxic, discriminatory tech environments without naming the problems,” Whittaker told TechCrunch. “We have decades of failed DEI PR, decades of people blaming the pipeline and decades of brilliant people like Ifeoma, Aerica and Timnit being harassed and pushed out of these environments. And oftentimes, people aren’t able to speak about their experiences so that the deep toxicity of these environments — the way it’s built into the structural operating procedures of these companies and workplaces — doesn’t get aired.”
There also needs to be more transparency around hiring and corporate recruiting, Rankin said. Pinterest, which was one of the first companies to set goals around diversity, disclosed last year that its hiring rates for women engineers, underrepresented minority engineers and underrepresented employees. But there’s room for even more transparency, like how many new hires come from those programs.
In Uber’s most recent diversity report, Uber talks about university recruiting, diversifying internship programs and more but the company’s reported data does not disclose how many hires came from those efforts.
Uber’s Bo Young Lee says the company is working on better tracking its top-of-funnel pipeline to ensure it’s representative of the available talent. This is called the Mansfield rule, which takes the Rooney Rule a couple of steps further. If Uber gets this right, then 14% of its recruiting pipeline would be Black and Hispanic, Lee said, citing a 2016 New York Times article about engineering graduates. It’s early days for Uber’s implementation of the Mansfield Rule, but the plan is to publish some of the data, Lee said. Though, she hasn’t yet decided exactly what that will look like.
Meanwhile, in Google’s latest diversity report, the company outlined how more than 1,300 women in Latin America were trained on web development and UX design with the help of Google volunteers and a Google.org grant. As a result, Google said 75% of the women who participated found jobs in tech. What Google did not mention, however, was how many women found jobs at Google.
In that same report, Google mentioned that it hired from 15 Historically Black College and Universities (HBCUs), 39 Hispanic-serving institutions and nine women’s colleges in the U.S. That all sounds good, but in December, former Google diversity recruiter April Curley came forward about how she was fired after she “became aware of all the racist shit put in place to keep black and brown students out of their pipeline.”
“We have a large team of recruiters who work incredibly hard to increase the hiring of Black+ and other underrepresented talent at Google, including a dedicated team that partners and strengthens our relationships with HBCUs,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement to TechCrunch. “This work is critical – in 2019 we welcomed graduates from 19 HBCUs and over the past decade, we’ve expanded our recruiting efforts to more than 800 schools. At the same time, we are absolutely committed to maintaining an inclusive and supportive workplace. We don’t agree with the way April describes her termination, but it’s not appropriate for us to provide a commentary about her claims.”
Despite what may have happened at Google or what happens at other tech companies, it’s the overall lack of transparency around recruiting processes with which Rankin takes issue.
“It’s its own form of pipeline that is problematic and inequitable,” Rankin said. “[…] But how do you break down the scale of the problem so that it’s not just focusing on individuals.”
Rankin does not work inside tech companies and can’t speak to the inner workings of DEI departments, but said she does believe there are good people who are trying to make things better.
“I think this is a larger problem of education and perspective and how you can get to a point where you have an engineering degree or you get hired by a tech company and you’ve never had to think about race as a deeply rooted historical, structural problem,” she said. “[…] I think it’s convenient to disregard some of these larger issues and at some point, ignorance isn’t an excuse, especially given the events of the past few years.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/14/examining-the-pipeline-problem/
The new Netflix series “Lupin” is a loose adaptation of the Arséne Lupin stories by Maurice Leblanc, but it’s set in the present day, with a hero who’s inspired by the exploits of Leblanc’s fictional “gentleman thief.”
Through flashbacks, we meet Assane Diop (played by Omar Sy) as a young Senegalese immigrant who has recently arrived in Paris with his father. As an adult, he’s transformed himself into an impossible-to-catch thief and master of disguise.
While some of Assane’s schemes have a satisfying clockwork intricacy, others rely more on his willingness to walk into any room and act as if he belongs there. As the series’ five episodes continue (with more to come), Assane is pulled into a mystery around the crime that put his father in prison.
As we explain on the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, enjoying “Lupin” requires some suspension of disbelief — Assane’s success depends on both an astonishingly incompetent police force and his ability to disappear in a way that’s hard to imagine in contemporary society. But if you can go that far, the show is a joy to watch, thanks in large part to Sy’s charismatic performance, as well as the character’s delightful confidence and ingenuity.
We open the episode by discussing a very different show with the same setting, “Emily in Paris,” which was recently (and controversially) nominated for two Golden Globes.
You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)
If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Lupin review
0:34 Golden Globe discussion
18:08 Lupin review
34:57 Lupin spoiler discussion
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/14/original-content-podcast-netflixs-lupin-is-a-twisty-delight/
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There’s some new legislation that hopes to prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment. That would be huge for the tech industry, where NDAs have become commonplace in severance agreements.
Meanwhile, All Raise, Coursera and Niantic announced some new initiatives designed to increase diversity in tech.
I’ve also included an early look of a story I’m working on about the pipeline myth. Lots more to discuss so let’s get to it.
New legislation seeks to get rid of NDAs in cases of harassment or discrimination
Ifeoma Ozoma, a former Pinterest employee who alleged racial and gender discrimination at the company, is co-leading new legislation with California State Senator Connie Leyva and others to empower those who experience workplace discrimination and/or harassment. The Silenced No More Act (SB 331) would prevent the use of non-disclosure agreements in workplace situations involving all forms of discrimination and harassment.
“It was a legal gamble,” Ozoma told TechCrunch about coming forward with claims of both racial and gender discrimination, despite having signed an NDA. Pinterest could’ve decided to sue both Ozoma and Banks, Ozoma said, but that would’ve required the company to admit wrongdoing.
Meredith Whittaker, faculty director at AI Now and Google walkout co-organizer on SB 331
I also caught up with Whittaker, who said this type of legislation is absolutely necessary:
From a structural perspective, it’s really evident we’re not going to change toxic, discriminatory tech environments without naming the problems. We have decades of failed DEI PR, decades of people blaming the pipeline and decades of brilliant people like Ifeoma, Aerica and Timnit being harassed and pushed out of these environments. And oftentimes, people aren’t able to speak about their experiences so that the deep toxicity of these environments — the way it’s built into the structural operating procedures of these companies and workplaces — doesn’t get aired.
Musings on the pipeline problem
My conversation with Whittaker led to me being introduced to Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a research lead for gender, race and power in artificial intelligence at the AI Now Institute. She’s actively researching the history of the pipeline problem and took some time to chat with me about it. I’m not done with the story yet, but here’s a little teaser:
The very high-level view is, people have been talking about a pipeline problem in some form since the seventies,” Rankin told me. “And before that, often, it was like a quote, manpower problem, by focusing on who has PhDs or master’s degrees in a field or who has elite jobs in a field. But that focus is always on individuals. It’s on tracking people, not institutions and not structures. So this is why I think it continues to be a convenient excuse for a host of sins, because talking about a pipeline makes it seem as if all things are equal in the United States, and we just have to find a way to keep people in. But the truth is, when we think about a STEM pipeline, we don’t talk about the fact that education in the United States is by no means equal from birth onwards.
Ex-Salesforce manager alleges microaggressions and inequity
Cynthia Perry, a former design research senior manager at Salesforce who left earlier this month, posted her resignation letter on LinkedIn that detailed her negative treatment at the company. In it, Perry, a Black woman, alleges she experienced “countless microaggressions and inequity” during her time there.
Ultimately, Perry said she left her job because she had been “Gaslit, manipulated, bullied, neglected, and mostly unsupported” by folks she chose not to name.
Salesforce provided the following statement to TechCrunch:
For privacy reasons, we can’t comment on individual employee matters but Equality is one of our highest values and we have been dedicated to its advancement both inside and outside of our company since we were founded almost 22 years ago.
All Raise aims to increase diversity at the board level
Despite recent efforts to improve diversity at the board level, the number of Black, brown and women board members is still low. All Raise is looking to fix that with the recent launch of Board Xcelerate. Already, its 90-day search process has resulted in the placement of five independent board members.
Here’s the gist of the program:
We start by talking with investors, talent partners, and CEOs who want to fill their open independent board seats. Then, we kick off a fast, 90-day closed search process through a pool of talent sourced from our own network and an external advisory committee, supported and executed by a retained executive search firm. Finally, we connect the companies and candidates to interview and determine the best fit.
Coursera makes some Black History Month commitments
Ed tech company Coursera partnered with Howard University, a historically Black university, to beef up its social justice content on the online platform. Coursera also partnered with Facebook to provide scholarships to Black folks who would like to learn more about social media marketing. Lastly, Coursera partnered with non-profit Black Girls Code to offer up to 2,000 young Black girls free access to the Coursera catalog.
Niantic launches Black Developers Initiative
Niantic, the augmented reality company behind Pokemon Go, launched a new initiative to fund new projects from Black game developers. The Black Developers Initiative aims to not only fund those projects, but also offer resources and mentorship to Black game and AR developers.
Alphabet Workers Union has its first win
Last week, AWU filed a complaint with the NLRB alleging Google contract workers were silenced about pay and that the company fired a worker for speaking out about it. Now, the worker in question, Shannon Wait, is back at work.
“Shannon’s back at work b/c she had a union to turn to when she was illegally suspended,” AWU said in a tweet. “She came to us, we raised hell, & a week later, she’s back.”
Amazon warehouse worker union vote begins
Earlier this week, Amazon warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama began voting to decide whether or not they will unionize with the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. The beginning of the vote came shortly after the National Labor Relations Board rejected Amazon’s attempt to delay the vote.
By unionizing, Amazon workers hope to gain the right to collectively bargain over their working conditions, like safety standards, pay, breaks and other issues. Unionizing would also enable workers to potentially become “just cause” employees versus at-will, depending on how the negotiations go.
Mail-in voting ends March 29, with the NLRB set to begin counting ballots the following day on a virtual platform.
The latest in Prop 22 battles
Despite the CA Supreme Court rejecting to hear the lawsuit challenging Prop 22’s constitutionality, the Service Employees International Union filed a similar suit in a lower court, the Alameda County Superior Court.
Meanwhile, the CA Supreme Court rejected Uber and Lyft’s request for it to review a lower court’s decision about whether they misclassified their drivers as independent contractors. The decision in question stated that drivers should be classified as employees, but then Prop 22 passed and made it so, moving forward, Uber and Lyft are legally able to classify their drivers as independent contractors.
TechCrunch Sessions: Justice agenda is out!
We released the agenda for the upcoming Justice event on March 3. We’re pumped to be able to host Backstage Capital founder and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton, Gig Workers Collective’s Vanessa Bain, Alphabet Workers Union Executive Chair Parul Koul, Color of Change President Rashad Robinson, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt and others.
Tickets are just $5.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/13/human-capital-doing-away-with-the-nda/
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Earlier this week TechCrunch broke the news that Public, a consumer stock trading service, was in the process of raising more money. Business Insider quickly filled in details surrounding the round, that it could be around $200 million at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Tiger could lead.
Public wants to be the anti-Robinhood. With a focus on social, and a recent move away from generating payment for order flow (PFOF) revenues that have driven Robinhood’s business model, and attracted criticism, Public has laid its bets. And investors, in the wake of its rival’s troubles, are ready to make it a unicorn.
Of course, the Public round comes on the heels of Robinhood’s epic $3.4 billion raise, a deal that was shocking for both its scale and speed. The trading service’s investors came in force to ensure it had the capital it needed to continue supporting consumer trades. Thanks to Robinhood’s strong Q4 2020 results, and implied growth in Q1 2021, the boosted investment made sense.
As does the Public money, provided that 1) The company is seeing lots of user growth, and 2) That it figures out its forever business model in time. We cannot comment on the second, but we can say a bit about the first point.
Thanks not to Public, really, but M1 Finance, a Midwest-based consumer fintech that has a stock-buying function amongst its other services (more on it here). It told TechCrunch that it saw a quadrupling of signups in January as compared to December. And in the last two weeks, it saw six times as many signups as the preceding two weeks.
Given that M1 doesn’t allow for trading — something that its team repeatedly stressed in notes to TechCrunch — we can’t draw a perfect line between M1 and Public and Robinhood, but we can infer that there is huge consumer interest in investing of late. Which helps explain why Public, which is hunting up a way to generate long-term incomes, can raise another round just months after it closed a different investment.
Our notes last year on how savings and investing were the new thing last year are accidentally becoming even more true than we expected.
Market Notes
As the week came to a close, Coupang filed to go public. You can read our first look here, but it’s going to be big news. Also on the IPO beat, Matterport is going out via a SPAC, I chatted with Metromile CEO Dan Preston about his insurtech public offering this week that also came via a SPAC, and so on.
Oscar Health filed, and it doesn’t look super strong. So its impending valuation is going to test public traders. That’s not a problem that Bumble had when it priced above-range this week and then skyrocketed after it started to trade. Natasha and I (she’s on Equity, as well) have some notes from Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd that we’ll get to you early next week. (Also I chatted about the IPO with the BBC a few times, which was neat, the first of which you can check out here if you’d like.)
Roblox’s impending public debut was also back in the news this week. The company was a bit bigger than it thought last year (cool), but may delay its direct listing to March (not cool).
Near to the IPO beat, Carta started to allow its own shares to trade recently, on the back of news that its revenues have scaled to around $150 million. Not bad Carta, but how about a real IPO instead of staying private? The company’s valuation more than doubled during the secondary transitions.
And then there were so very many cool venture capital rounds that I couldn’t get to this week. This Koa Health round, for example. And whatever this Slync.io news is. (If you want some earlier-stage stuff, check out recent rounds from Treinta, Level, Ramp and Monte Carlo.
And to close, a small callout to Ontic, which provides “protective intelligence software” and said that its revenue grew 177% last year. I appreciate the sharing of the numbers, so wanted to highlight the figure.
Various and Sundry
Wrapping this week, I have a final bit for you to chew on from Mark Mader, the CEO of Smartsheet, a public company — former startup, it’s worth noting — that plays in the no-code, automation and collaboration markets. That’s a rough summary. Anyhoo, I asked Mader about no-code trends in 2021, as I have my eyes on the space. Here’s what he wrote for us:
If you thought the sudden shift to remote work sped up corporate America’s shift to digital, you haven’t seen anything yet. Digital transformation is going to accelerate even more rapidly in 2021. Last year, the workforce was exposed to many different types of technology all at once. For example, a company may have deployed Zoom or DocuSign for the first time. But much of this shift involved taking analog processes like meetings or document signing and approval and bringing them online. Things like this are merely a first step. 2021 is the year the companies will begin to connect large-scale digital events to infrastructure that can make them automated and repeatable. It’s the difference between one person signing a document and hundreds of people signing hundreds of documents, with different rules for each one. And that’s just one example. Another use case could involve linking HR software to project management software for automated, real-time resource allocation that allows a company to get more out of both platforms, as well as its people. The businesses that can automate and simplify complex workflows like these will see dramatically improved efficiency and return on their technology investments, putting them on the path to true transformation and improved profitability.
We shall see!
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/13/there-is-infinite-money-for-stock-trading-startups/
