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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This week felt oddly comforting from a tech news perspective: Facebook is copying something, early-stage startup data is flawed enough to talk about and sweet DoorDash is buying robots for undisclosed sums.

So, here’s a rundown of the tech news we got into (as always, jokes aren’t previewed so you’ll have to listen to the actual show to get our critique and Award Winning Analysis*):

• Ethena raising $2 million more for corporate training that is not awful, and Zeta raising $1.5 million for couples’ banking. Natasha has been killing the early-stage beat lately.
• How seed data could be getting harder and harder to parse from Alex’s desk, and why VC data in general is dicey, from Danny’s. We discuss if directional data is useful, and why the limited numbers could have a cultural impact on signal.
• Reddit raises $250 million, but doesn’t tell us who the investors are and what the money is precisely going to. Still, the company has had quite a year so far, so the capital comes at an interesting time.
• Justo, an online grocery based in Mexico, raises $65 million as the pandemic continues to shake up the way we live and shop.
• DoorDash buys a salad robot, which brings Natasha nostalgia and Danny anger.
• The inverted SoftBank J-Curve thesis is a must-listen and read.
• And from the world of dating, a big M&A deal that caught our attention, and the latest from the Bumble IPO.

In good news, long-time Equity producer Chris Gates is back starting next week, which means we’ll have our biggest crew ever helping get the show put together. And, in other good news, there’s going to be more Equity than ever for you to hear. Coming soon.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

*OK, so not award-winning yet. But soon enough, because manifestation works.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/does-softbank-have-20-more-doordashes/

The world has spent most of 2020 adapting to ever-changing guidelines and restrictions (with no end in sight, even as the vaccines start to roll out). Board meetings are quickly increasing in their significance to foster consistent and vital interactions as an organization. It’s essential for companies to capitalize on the essential time together during these uncertain times.

While we might look like the Brady Bunch while sharing a Zoom window, are you actually communicating more like the family from “Succession?”

Are your meetings organized? Do people talk over one another? Do you usually run over time? Are you giving people time to digest information?

As we move into 2021 and Q1 meetings are being put onto calendars, take some time to modernize how you conduct your board meetings.

Having served on public company boards, growth-stage businesses and Series A startups, an observation I have made in boards that are later stage are more about financial analysis and governance. Whereas earlier-stage board discussions hinge more on product strategy, key partnerships, sharing best practices to help develop founders as executives and important hiring decisions.

Since the nature of the discussions is more, let’s call it … creative in earlier-stage businesses, where the focus is on where they’ve been particularly impacted by reduced bandwidth for collaboration while meeting remotely.

As said best by Mike Maples and paraphrased by Jeff Bonforte — there are only four things a board really needs to consider:

• Has the market changed since we last met? If so, did it affect us negatively or positively?
• Has the team changed? For better or worse?
• Has our position in the market changed?
• Can we do what we said we would?

Collecting data around those points is the job. In the meeting, the team can add color.

Remember the board works for you, so be sure to put them to work. Sharing materials with participants about three days ahead of time tends to be the best. Any later and they may not get enough time to digest, send earlier and the information might be out of date by the time you meet. It’s most common to format as a deck, but lately I’m seeing more written format and even magazine-style.

The number one request I get from early-stage companies is “help find me more customers.”

Other common requests are “help me find or land this type of talent, help me with industry benchmarks for this type of business deal or compensation structure, connect me to people that have experience with X so I can learn ways we could structure our process.” It’s helpful to put these asks in the materials you send ahead because sometimes board members might not be able to react quickly and now “homework” comes up spontaneously in the discussions.

Another purpose of these meetings is to build working relationships so when strategic decisions need to be made, board members are used to working together. Sometimes it is a forum for executives to gain exposure to board members and for board members to have the opportunity to evaluate and provide input on executives. For that reason execs are often invited to participate in certain discussions.

Like the product person who presents a roadmap or a market analysis, the head of sales should give color on pipeline and competitive deals, the marketing person may lead a discussion on ABM or channel marketing tactics, the engineering lead might ask for feedback on their metrics versus other companies, etc. Generally, CEOs also bring forth an interesting topic to have a discussion, such as channel strategy, market mapping/sizing, hiring plan and related issues.

Logistics

As far as logistics, we reserve two hours in calendars but we try to hit 90 minutes. I suggest something like this for a 90-minute session:

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/best-practices-for-zoom-board-meetings-at-early-stage-startups/

Building off TechCrunch’s coverage of the recent 500 Startups demo day, we’re back today to talk about some favorites from three more accelerator classes. This time we’re digging into Techstars’ latest three accelerator classes.

What follows are four favorites from the Techstars’ Boston, Chicago and “workforce development” programs. As a team we tuned into the accelerator live pitches and dug into recordings when we needed to.

As always, these are just our favorites, but don’t just take our word for it. Dig into the pitches yourself, as there’s never a bad time to check out some super-early-stage startups.

Four favs from Techstars Boston

Everyday Life

• What: A platform that wants to make life insurance flexible and personalized.
• Why we like it: The insurtech wave, from auto insurance to home insurance, has underscored the need for more consumer-friendly plans. Life insurance still feels like an untapped part of the equation, and Everyday Life wants to use technology to make the process cheaper and simpler.
  The founding team says that there’s solid interest in life insurance amid the coronavirus pandemic, which amounts to a $20 billion market opportunity.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/techcrunchs-favorites-from-techstars-boston-chicago-and-workforce-accelerators/

We take an in-depth look at TikTok usage in Russia, Facebook’s Oversight Board looks beyond Facebook and Sesame Workshop backs an edtech fund. This is your Daily Crunch for February 11, 2021.

The big story: TikTok becomes a political battleground in Russia

Russia has a small but fast-growing and vocal group of TikTok users. And while activity has been largely apolitical in the past, a battle appears to be brewing between the government and young activists who support the anti-corruption, anti-Putin politician Alexei Navalny.

“Before Navalny’s return, Russian TikTok was all about dancing, pranks and post-Soviet trash aesthetics,” said food blogger Egor Khodasevich. “All of a sudden, political videos have started to appear across all categories — humor, beauty, sport.”

The tech giants

Facebook Oversight Board says other social networks ‘welcome to join’ if project succeeds — The Facebook Oversight Board has only been operational for a short time, but the nascent project is already looking ahead.

Apple launches a new AR experience tied to ‘For All Mankind’ — Even for those of you who aren’t fans of the Apple TV+ show, the app is still noteworthy as another sign of Apple’s interest in AR.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Robinhood’s pain is Public’s gain as VCs rush to give it more money — The San Francisco-based fintech aims to give people the ability to invest in companies using any amount of money, with a focus on community activity over active trading.

Goldman Sachs and Sesame Workshop pour money into this edtech firm’s newest fund — Reach Capital III is a $165 million investment vehicle.

Reduct.Video raises $4M to simplify video editing — The startup’s technology is already used by customers including Intuit, Autodesk, Facebook, Dell, Spotify, Indeed, Superhuman and IDEO.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

As more insurtech offerings loom, CEO Dan Preston discusses Metromile’s SPAC-led debut — Metromile began trading as a public company yesterday.

Commercializing deep tech startups: A practical guide for founders and investors — Deep tech startups go through a different evolution cycle than a typical B2B or B2C company.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Racial disparity in Chicago cops’ use of force laid bare in new data — This rare apples-to-apples comparison supports the idea that improving diversity in law enforcement may also improve the quality of policing.

A webcam app left thousands of user accounts exposed online — The database in question belonged to Adorcam, an app for viewing and controlling several webcam models.

Top 100 subscription apps grew 34% to $13B in 2020, share of total spend remained the same — A growing part of app spend took the form of subscription payments last year, according to a new report from Sensor Tower.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/daily-crunch-tiktok-becomes-a-political-battleground-in-russia/

The Facebook Oversight Board has only been operational for a short time, but the nascent project is already looking ahead.

In a conversation hosted by the Carnegie Endowment Thursday, Oversight Board co-chair and former Prime Minister of Denmark Helle Thorning-Schmidt painted a more expansive vision for the group that could go beyond making policy decisions for Facebook.

The board co-chair said that if the project proves to be a success, “other platforms and other tech companies are more than welcome to join and be part of the oversight that we will be able to provide.”

Thorning-Schmidt emphasized that a broader vision for this kind of moderation body would happen well in the future, but the board’s current mission was to move away from policy decisions getting made in a “closed box” at the company.

“Until now, content moderation was basically done by the last person at Facebook or Twitter as we have seen — either Mark Zuckerberg or the other platform directors,” Thorning-Schmidt said.

“For the first time in history, we actually have content moderation being done outside one of the big social media platforms. That in itself… I don’t hesitate to call it historic.”

Those comments may capture broader aspirations for Facebook’s Oversight Board, which refers to itself only as the “Oversight Board” without an explicit reference to Facebook on its website.

Throughout the panel, those involved with the Oversight Board defended the project. The group has come under criticism from skeptics wary that its origins with Facebook make real autonomy from the company impossible.

“A lot of people want to immediately dismiss the Oversight Board and look for something new,” Oversight Board Head of Communications Dex Hunter-Torricke said.

Hunter-Torricke, who spent four years working on the Facebook executive communications team and served as a speechwriter for both Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, also hinted at a more expansive vision for the board.

“This is a model that we’re testing here to see if this is the kind of institution that can have an impact in one sphere of Facebook and the content moderation challenges they face,” Hunter-Torricke said. He added that the board intends to “evolve and grow” using what it learns from handling Facebook moderation cases.

“… As we build up our expertise and our body of experience in dealing with Facebook I expect there will be more capabilities that come onto the board,” Hunter-Torricke said. “We are on a journey. It’s not something [where] we necessarily know the final destination yet but we are looking to test this model and refine it further.”

TechCrunch reached out to the Oversight Board to ask if the group sees its future as an external governing body for social networks beyond Facebook.

Facebook’ Oversight Board is currently facing the hugely consequential case of whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump, who was removed from Facebook after inciting the violent mob that attacked the U.S. Capitol in early January.

Five of the group’s 20 members will evaluate the Trump case, though the board will not disclose which members evaluate which cases. Once the five reach their decision, the broader board must pass the decision in a majority vote. The board’s verdict is expected within the next two months.

The Facebook Oversight Board’s most prominent Trump critic, legal scholar Pamela Karlan, left her role at the board to join the Biden administration last week and won’t be involved in the decision. Karlan testified at Trump’s first impeachment hearing, arguing that Trump’s actions constituted impeachable offenses.

The board is accepting comments on the Trump case through Friday in an effort to consider “diverse perspectives” in its decision process.

On Thursday, former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos signed onto a public letter urging the Oversight Board to keep Facebook’s decision to remove Trump in place. “Without social media spreading Trump’s statements, it seems extremely unlikely these events would have occurred,” the comment’s authors wrote.

“There no doubt will be close calls under a policy that allows the deplatforming of political leaders in extreme circumstances. This was not one of them.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/11/facebook-oversight-board-other-social-networks-beyond-facebook/