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Last year I penned a post positing that Salesforce’s propensity to purchase mature enterprise companies not only provided new technology, but was also helping to produce a profusion of executive talent.. As though to prove my point, the company announced today that it was promoting former Vlocity CEO, David Schmaier to president and chief product officer.

Schmaier came to the organization last year when Salesforce acquired his company for $1.33 billion. It seemed like a good match given that Vlocity sold Salesforce solutions designed for certain niches like financial services, health, energy and utilities and government and nonprofits.

As a result, Schmaier knew the product set and the company well. Last June, he was named CEO of the Salesforce Industries division, which was created after the Vlocity acquisition. The connection was clear to Schmaier as he told me at the time of his promotion last year:

“I’ve been involved in various mergers and acquisitions over my 30-year career, and this is the most unique one I’ve ever seen because the products are already 100% integrated because we built our six vertical applications on top of the Salesforce platform. So they’re already 100% Salesforce, which is really kind of amazing. So that’s going to make this that much simpler,” he said.

Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says that Schmaier’s history in building Vlocity makes this promotion pretty easy given the direction of the company, as well as the industry. “Over the last several years we’ve seen just how important developing industry-specific solutions have become to the major players in the space, and Schmaier’s promotion reaffirms this while illustrating how important creating verticals is to their platform [and] to the future of Salesforce,” he told me.

In a Q&A on the Salesforce website announcing the promotion, Schmaier talked about the challenges companies faced in the last year. “There’s no question 2020 was a challenging year. We are operating in this all-digital, work from anywhere world and things won’t go back to where they were, nor should they. One of the silver linings has been seeing what companies can do when there is no alternative and the imperative is to connect with their customers in entirely new ways,”

In his new position it will be Schmaier’s job to figure out how to help them do that.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/salesforce-promotes-former-vlocity-ceo-david-schmaier-to-president-and-cpo/

Soon all tech news will be fintech news, all fintech news will be trading platform news and all trading platform news will concern the business mechanics of such services.

So, after looking into Robinhood’s fourth-quarter payment for order flow (PFOF) revenues this morning, we’re back with a related story. This time, however, we’re talking about Public.

Public, like Robinhood, is a zero-cost trading service. Its founders have worked to build a community-first platform, including offering ways to let groups chat about their investments.

And like Robinhood, Public has seen its growth skyrocket in recent days. Company representatives told TechCrunch today it was seeing “steady ~30%” month-over-month growth until Thursday, when “new user signups went up 20x.”

Both share strong backing from investors: Robinhood raised billions in new capital this week to ensure it has enough cash to meet clearinghouse deposit requirements. It managed to do so in part because its Q4 2020 numbers show that its PFOF business is ticking along nicely.

Public, flush with a recent $65 million Series C, took a different tack this morning and announced it would “stop participating in the practice of Payment for Order Flow.”

To which we say … all right.

On one level, this is neat. Public is not going to sell its order flow to market makers for fees. That’s good for users, but how will it make up the lost revenue? Tips, which will prove an interesting experiment in monetization.

TechCrunch asked the company if it believes tips will compensate for PFOF revenue, to which founders Leif Abraham and Jannick Malling replied via email that they were “optimistic that the difference will be offset by the optional tipping feature.”

However, dropping payment for order flow is only so brave a move from Public. After all, Public was not making Robinhood-level amounts of fetti from its PFOF business. Indeed, as we wrote when Public raised its Series C:

Before chatting with Public, I dug into its trading partner Apex’s filings to learn about its payment for order flow results from its recent filings. The resulting sums are somewhat modest for Apex’s collected clients. This means that Public’s revenue metrics, a portion of the aggregate sums, are even more unassuming.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/trading-app-public-drops-payment-for-order-flow-in-favor-of-tips/

Nathalie Walton almost didn’t become a mother. Her risky pregnancy caused her placenta to burst during childbirth, almost killing her and her son last year. Walton, who feels lucky to have survived, says the haunting experience made her an example of a reality she had long known: To be a pregnant Black woman is to be at risk, regardless of economic background.

The stress of her pregnancy led Walton to download Expectful, a meditation and sleep app for new mothers. She recalls stabilizing, emotionally and physically, within a week, bringing an otherwise “soft landing” to a volatile pregnancy.

Weeks after delivering her son, Everett, Walton just so happened to hear of an advisory role opening at Expectful. Even though she was mid-maternity leave from her managerial role at Airbnb, she jumped at the opportunity.

“I definitely had a full-time job, I had a newborn baby,” Walton said. But, she says, it was an opportunity to be entrepreneurial in a sector she cared about. Even if it was just for a few months.

And now, Walton is the chief executive of the company. The business is pivoting its product strategy to grow beyond recorded meditations. Walton helped it raise its first millions in venture capital, making her one of the few dozen Black female founders to do so. New financing and the boom of the mental health focus amid the coronavirus pandemic puts Expectful in a coveted spot. And it puts Walton, who is at the helm of a company for the first time, in a pressure-cooker spotlight.

Even in the world of startups, going from user to chief executive in less than a year is a remarkable feat. But it’s not one that she rushed.

A quarter-life crisis

Walton graduated from Georgetown and immediately joined the New York banking world. After a few years as an analyst at JP Morgan, though, she became unsatisfied with the work.

“I think I had a quarter-life crisis,” Walton said. Searching for new opportunities, she ended up at a prospective students day at Stanford University in what would become a pivotal moment in her life.

“For the first time, I met entrepreneurs and saw an actual concept that you can pursue a career you like, be successful and make a difference in the world,” she said. Walton eventually applied, and got accepted, to Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB), a prestigious program that produces founders and top executives. It was then that she realized she wanted to be a chief executive one day.

“I admired them, but I just didn’t see the pathway for me to get there,” she said, of the entrepreneurs she met, who were then largely white and male. “I didn’t have the confidence.”

So, she set that hope aside and pursued intrapreneurship, which would let her join a stable organization and act as a mini-founder within it. Employees in this role are tasked with building a startup within a startup, whether that is rooting an innovative idea or leading an experiential team. Corporations have long embraced this idea to bring momentum to otherwise red-tapey processes.

Walton joined eBay and soon rose to work as the head of business operations and development. Her work helped the company break into 3D printing.

Over the years, this has been the defining characteristic of Walton: join an organization, build a scrappy idea from scratch, and then do it all over again. She has held roles in Airbnb and Google that all required her to have the agility of a founder convincing people on a moonshot vision, and the rigor of a manager who can get a deal done.

She had the same vision heading into an advisory role at Expectful. But when Walton landed a key Expectful partnership with Johnson & Johnson, then-CEO and founder Mark Krassner had an idea.

‘It was on my mind from day No. 1’

Before starting Expectful, Krassner experienced the benefits of meditation firsthand. He also saw his mother face depression, which made him realize how meditation could have a positive impact on others. After seeing research that showed how meditation could positively impact a pregnancy, he began thinking of a solution in this cross-section. He eventually started a course on Teachable, a startup that lets anyone create and monetize an online class, with 15 moms and a guided meditation.

Over time, the idea stuck. Krassner eventually turned his course into a 12-person startup. Under his leadership, Expectful grew to profitability and over 13,000 paid users. Its conversion rate from free to paid users was five times higher than industry standards, the company claims.

That said, from the moment Mark Krassner started Expectful, he knew he was an unlikely founder. He doesn’t have any children, so leading a meditation and sleep app for new mothers comes with its own hurdles.

“As a male founder with no kids, it was on my mind from day No. 1,” Krassner said. He eventually wanted to put a female at the head of the company, he says. Walton was the obvious choice.

Walton returned to Airbnb after her maternity leave right as Airbnb had aggressive COVID-19 layoffs. While her job was saved, her team disappeared as part of the cuts. She started looking for jobs, and received lucrative offers from Facebook, Apple, Google and Amazon. When she told Krassner she was leaning toward a lead product manager position at Amazon, he replied with an offer to take over Expectful’s entire business.

“I think it caught her off guard,” Krassner said, who is still a board member at the company. “Usually you don’t think a CEO is looking for [a new CEO] unless things are going to hell in a handbasket.”

The new Expectful

Expectful began as a guided meditation library, which will continue to be its core. But now, Walton wants to take advantage of that momentum and evolve the company into a “go-to wellness resource for hopeful, expecting and new parents.”

The language suggests that the startup is evolving in how it markets itself. Right now, the site has a number of references to “motherhood” and women. But Walton says Expectful defines a mother by anyone who identifies themselves as one. While the startup primarily has content geared toward the gestational parent, or the one who gives birth to the child, Walton says they have a “a partner’s library for non-gestational parents that identify as non-gestational mothers, fathers, or however they choose to identify.”

Walton plans to pivot the startup in three phases: content, marketplace and community.

For content, Expectful wants to organize pregnancy-related information. Currently, a lot of information or advice around pregnancy lives in books or in-person classes. But the learning experience, which Walton says is similar to middle school-style lectures, doesn’t feel built for this century.

The next step in her plan is digitizing the service providers that help women through pregnancy. In simpler words, replace the disorganized recommendations in Facebook groups for parents.

“When I went to ask my OB-GYN for recommendations for a doula, she gave me a sheet of paper with the names of 10 doulas,” she said. “You have to text the doula, ask them questions and if they want to meet up — it all feels yucky.” Expectful wants to put all that information in one platform so moms can access tips and recommendations from the ease of their homes.

The end-product here would be a peer-reviewed platform that can help a mom find everything from a therapist to a live-in nanny, with reviews built-in.

Finally, Walton wants to invest in the community. Expectful recently launched Mother Circles, which connects postpartum mothers into support cohorts led by a doula facilitator. The circles include six weekly video calls, a group chat and 500 hours of on-demand doula support.

Image Credits: Expectful

Part of Walton’s focus through all of these priorities is to invest in Black maternal health outcomes. Her own experience, she says, showed her how even a “Stanford-educated wellness junkie” such as herself can be at a high-risk for pregnancy because of her skin color.

It’s a lofty goal, even with the promising growth and strong library of guided meditations. The competition is steep. One of Expectful’s closest competitors is Peanut, a social network for moms used by over 1.2 million people. Mahmee, a digital support network for postpartum mothers, has raised $3 million and views itself as complementary to Expectful. Headspace has launched its own motherhood meditation series, but it is not as comprehensive as Expectful’s.

“I think we’re able to connect with women in a way that some of these other companies aren’t,” Walton said. “People are paying for the service, so they clearly need it.”

While Walton declined to share new user metrics, she said that the company’s revenue has grown 100% since March 2020.

Long-term, Expectful wants to mimic Peloton’s playbook in terms of getting premium content and community to the right audience. Still, growing from a startup to a venture business requires more than just ambition and market fit. It requires the ability to exponentially grow and keep growing.

A handful of investors believe that Walton’s Expectful can do it. Expectful raised $3 million in a seed financing round led by Harlem Capital. Indicator Ventures, Sequoia Scout Fund, Joyance Partners, Break Trail Ventures, Chinagona Ventures, Powerhouse Capital, AVG Basecamp Fund and Babylist also participated. Angel investors included Ellen Pao, Mike Smith and Ashley Mayer. The round also included $1.2 million in convertible SAFE notes, making the financing round a total of $4.2 million.

“Historically when I look at what black women raise fundraising, I feel fortunate that I’ve been able to raise this round,” Walton said.

Harlem Capital founding partner Henri Pierre-Jacques said that “obviously, given our focus we weren’t going to invest in a white male.” Walton’s “founder-market fit” is what made the firm invest, even with the hairy dynamic of an exiting CEO.

Mayer, head of communications at Glossier, was the one who introduced Walton to the woman who told her about the advisory role of Expectful. She says that Nathalie’s “path to entrepreneurship feels inevitable.

“It was always just a question of finding the space where her passions collided,” Mayer said.

As a new mother and new founder, Walton has had a busy balancing act of a year.

“I’m working more now than I have really in the last decade,” she said. “But I’ve never been more fulfilled because, as someone who went through this, and I’m still going through this, I feel so personally the level of pain that so many women suffer through.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/nathalie-walton-expectful-seed/

When Google originally announced Stadia, its cloud gaming service, the company also announced a first-party game studio. Stadia Games and Entertainment was supposed to release exclusive titles for the new platform. And yet, Google has changed its mind and is now shutting down its internal game studios.

“Given our focus on building on the proven technology of Stadia as well as deepening our business partnerships, we’ve decided that we will not be investing further in bringing exclusive content from our internal development team SG&E, beyond any near-term planned games,” Google Stadia VP and GM Phil Harrison wrote in a blog post.

That’s right, the company has yet to release a single game under the Stadia brand but it’s already over. This is an odd move as Google has made some significant investments in the space. It originally created a studio in Montreal Canada and acquired Typhoon Studios. It then opened another studio in Los Angeles.

Jade Raymond was leading Google’s first-party studios. She has been working in the video game industry for more than 15 years. In particular, she was a producer for Ubisoft in Montreal working on the first Assassin’s Creed games. She also worked for Electronic Arts on an unreleased single-player Star Wars video game.

Today’s news also means that Raymond is leaving Google. Other Google employees working for Stadia Games and Entertainment will move on to new roles.

Going forward, Stadia will focus on third-party games. The company says that Cyberpunk 2077 has been quite popular on the cloud gaming platform for instance. It lets you launch the game on a server in a data center near you and stream the video feed to your device.

Many readers will likely think that Google might shut down Stadia soon as the company has shut down many, many services in the past. The company tries to be reassuring.

“We’re committed to the future of cloud gaming, and will continue to do our part to drive this industry forward. Our goal remains focused on creating the best possible platform for gamers and technology for our partners, bringing these experiences to life for people everywhere,” Harrison writes.

But do you believe him?

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/google-shuts-down-its-internal-stadia-game-studios/

Otonomo, the cloud-based software startup that help companies capture and monetize connected car data, is headed to the public market. The Israeli-based startup said Monday it has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition company Software Acquisition Group Inc. II with a valuation of $1.4 billion.

Otonomo is joining a growing pool of automotive startups that have sidestepped the traditional IPO path in favor of merging with a SPAC, or blank check company.  Arrival, Canoo, Lordstown Motors, Luminar, ChargePoint, The Lion Electric and Proterra are just some of the transportation-related companies that have announced or closed their SPAC mergers in the past several months.

The capital provided by public markets has become too tempting for companies that either have capitally intensive projects — like attempting to become a vehicle manufacturer — or for those that are hoping to speed up their growth. Otonomo falls in the latter camp.

Otonomo said it raised $172.5 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, from investors that included Fidelity Management & Research Company LLC, BNP Paribas Asset Management Energy Transition Fund and Senvest Management LLC, with support from strategic investors Dell Technologies Capital, and Hearst Ventures. Current Otonomo shareholders will own a majority of the combined company at closing. Otonomo will have more than $307 million in cash proceeds once the companies combine.

Otonomo said it plans to use cash proceeds from the transaction to fund growth and accelerate its entry into new markets and use cases.

Otonomo launched in 2015 with a cloud-based software platform that can capture and anonymize vehicle data, which can then be used to create apps to provide services such as electric vehicle management, mapping, subscription-based services, parking, usage-based insurance, traffic management, media and emergency services. The company’s platform is used by 16 vehicle manufacturers, fleets and more than 100 service providers, according to Otonomo.

The company has landed a dozens of customers on its pitch that it can help companies monetize all the date running through their connected vehicles. Otonomo says it securely collects the data, where its then modified so companies can use it to develop apps and services for fleets, smart cities and individual customers. The platform also enables GDPR, CCPA and other privacy regulation-compliant solutions using both personal and aggregate data.

Otonomo’s growth can be measured — at least in one way — by examining the number of data points that run through the platform. A year ago, the company said its platform was taking in 2.6 billion data points a day from more than 20 million vehicles through partnerships with automakers, fleets and farm and construction manufacturers. Today, the company said the platform ingests more than 4 billion data points per day from over 40 million global connected vehicles. 

The merger is expected to close in the second quarter of 2021. Ben Volkow continuing to serve as CEO of Otonomo, which will trade on the NASDAQ exchange.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/02/01/data-automotive-startup-otonomo-to-go-public-via-spac/