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French startup Mooncard is partnering with Flying Blue to offer Air France miles to its customers. This is the first time you can earn miles with a payment card in France that isn’t an American Express card.
Mooncard provides corporate payment cards to streamline your expenses. Most companies in France don’t use corporate cards. But fintech startups have created corporate cards that can help you streamline expenses.
In addition to Visa cards, Mooncard lets you easily take a photo of your receipts, add details and submit expenses to your accounting team. You can set up different limits and validation processes.
Today’s news is interesting as American Express has been in a monopolistic position for decades with its partnership with Flying Blue. In France, companies had to choose American Express if they wanted miles as perks.
When it comes to pricing, it looks pretty similar to what American Express offers:
There’s one big difference — Mooncard relies on the Visa network. As many restaurants and shops don’t support American Express, it could be enough to lure customers away from American Express. Employees can use their miles for personal trips.
There are 3,000 companies using Mooncard as well as many public institutions.
Joanne Chen just became the second general partner in the history of the now 26-year-old, Silicon Valley venture firm, Foundation Capital.
Were she still alive, Foundation’s founder, Kathyrn Gould, would undoubtedly cheer the development.
Known for her big personality, Gould first met Chen when Chen was an an MBA student at the University of Chicago. Gould was recovering from a bout with cancer at the time, and after being introduced to Chen through one of Chen’s professors, she initially advised Chen not to go into venture. As Gould herself discovered early on, doors open more easily to men in the venture world, which is why she’d started her own firm in the first place.
Yet, like Gould, being dissuaded only motivated Chen more. Though she began her career as an engineer at Cisco, she’d always been interested in finance, jumping into a banking analyst role with Jeffries, then working as an associate with the capital advisory firm Probitas before cofounding a mobile gaming company she’d later wind down.
Grad school in Chicago — and meeting Gould — only reinforced for Chen how much she wanted to become a VC, and following stints at Formation 8 and Hyde Park Angels, she landed at Foundation in 2014. (Sadly, Gould passed away in 2015.)
Certainly, Chen has brought a fresh perspective to a firm that features 10 investors altogether, the rest men.
Aside from being the only woman in the group, Chen has a strong point of view, for example, on the entrepreneurial potential of students from U.C. Berkeley, where she studied as an undergraduate. While the university is not nearly so organized as Stanford when it comes to minting founders, in her view it has just as much talent and, as a result, it’s a network into which she invests a lot of time and energy as an investor.
Chen, who was born in China and great up in Montreal, also spends a lot of time thinking about AI, both as an investor and also simply a person in the world. Her father, who received his PhD from the University of Montreal, went on to work at Bell Labs as a researcher, and her mother is a computer programmer and “DevOps person” who Chen routinely talks with about software tools. But their background isn’t so simple.
Like many immigrants, her parents fled China during the Cultural Revolution. Because her grandfather helped architect a major telecom company in China, he was persecuted by the Communist Party, stripped of all his responsibilities and titles and, as an “intellectual,” says Chen, thrown in jail. Meanwhile, his son (her father) wasn’t allowed to start college until he was 21, and it was only because he was a good student that was he invited abroad to obtain his master’s degree.
Today, her family’s experience combined with China’s use of artificial intelligence — including to track its Muslim minority — is top of mind for Chen in ways it may not be for someone with a lesser grasp of the lengths to which authoritarian regimes will go, and how quickly they can act.
It’s why most of Chen’s work centers on understanding how AI, from how machines evolve from organizing activity to replacing humans (which will definitely happen, says Chen); to how to recognize and counter malicious applications of AI with AI (such as through recruiting software that screens out names and gender to eliminate human bias); and how to otherwise make sure that AI is used to improve human life, she suggests.
Of course, Chen isn’t exactly alone in her interest in AI. Nearly every startup today incorporates — or says it does — AI into its offerings, from lending companies to startups that help remote teams work more effectively. And investors, including at Foundation, have funded many of them.
Asked how she deals with competition for many of these deals, Chen says she moves as fast when there’s a decision to be made. She engages with VPs of engineering and technical founders who share ideas through Slack communities and elsewhere. She also notes that Foundation provides capital to roughly 30 operators who write angel checks and help steer the firm’s attention to interesting deals.
Mostly, suggests Chen, she focuses on whatever is not landing in her inbox — a lesson learned in part from Gould years ago.
It’s easy to believe. As Gould once told this editor of the advice she gives to other VCs: “It not the calls you take. It’s the calls you make. Everyone is calling you with dumb startup ideas, and you can stay hugely busy sorting through that crap. My advice instead is to figure out who are the 10 to 20 smartest people you know and call them. One of them is always starting a company.”
eFounders is expanding its focus by creating a second startup studio called Logic Founders. This time, Logic Founders is going to focus on fintech startups exclusively. Camille Tyan (pictured above) is going to lead the new studio.
Over the past ten years, eFounders has launched dozens of software-as-a-service companies trying to improve the way we work. Portfolio companies include Front, Aircall and Spendesk.
Camille Tyan previously co-founded PayPlug, a payments company that was acquired by Natixis (Groupe BPCE). He plans to follow the eFounders model centered around a new vertical. Logic Founders will come up with ideas for new startups. It’ll recruit two co-founders and start working on the product for the first 12 to 18 months of the company.
Ideally, the startup finds product-market fit and raises a seed round after this initial phase. The startup studio keeps a stake in the startup but it moves on so that it can focus on new projects.
If you’ve been following eFounders closely, the startup studio has already worked on several fintech companies, such as Spendesk, Upflow, Multis and Swan. New fintech projects will likely fall under the Logic Founders umbrella.
The studio says it will launch API-first financial products. It is riding the embedded finance trend — many believe financial products will be distributed by platforms that aren’t primarily focused on finance but could benefit from fintech features. You can expect companies working on payments orchestration, asset securitization, lending APIs, crypto and B2B identity.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/saas-startup-studio-efounders-launches-a-fintech-startup-studio/
Chinese internet giant ByteDance has told employees in India that it is reducing the size of its team in the country after New Delhi retained ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps last week, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The company, which employs more than 2,000 people in India, shared the news with employees in the country at 10am local time and said only critical jobs will be retained in the country, the source, company, and an internal memo obtained by TechCrunch said. ByteDance said it was left with no choice after the Indian government, which banned its marquee app late June last year, had offered no clear direction on when TikTok could make return in the nation, the source said on the condition of anonymity.
“It is deeply regretful that after supporting our 2000+ employees in India for more than half a year, we have no choice but to scale back the size of our workforce. We look forward to receiving the opportunity to relaunch TikTok and support the hundreds of millions of users, artists, story-tellers, educators and performers in India,” a TikTok spokesperson told TechCrunch.
Prior to the ban, India was the biggest international market for TikTok, which had amassed over 200 million monthly active users in the world’s second largest internet market. India blocked over 200 apps with links to China last year amid geopolitical tension between the two nations. New Delhi has said that these apps engaged in activities that posed threats to “national security and defence of India, which ultimately impinges upon the sovereignty and integrity of India.”
Last week, New Delhi told ByteDance and dozens of other Chinese firms that it maintains the concerns it had originally charged against them and would retain the ban.
TikTok CEO Vanessa Pappas and VP of Global Business Blake Chandlee shared more context about the move in a memo to India employees today. “We initially hoped that this situation would be short-lived, and that we would be able to resolve this quickly. Seven months later, we find that has not been the case. Many of you have patiently waited to hear how this would play out, which has been very stressful. Thank you for your continued belief and trust in us,” they wrote.
“As you can imagine, a decision of this magnitude is not easy. For the last several months, our management team has worked tirelessly to avoid having to separate anyone from the company. We’ve cut expenses, while still paying benefits. However, we simply cannot responsibly stay fully staffed while our apps remain un-operational. We are fully aware of the impact that this decision has for all of our employees in India, and we empathize with our team.”
Today’s move caps some of the strangest and confusing months for ByteDance employees in India. Following the ban, the employees were told to focus on developing a range of other apps from the Chinese giant such as the productivity suite Lark that had not been blocked in India.
But they were asked to not talk about these apps in the public to avoid putting risk of other ByteDance properties also getting the limelight. The source said ByteDance also stopped all marketing efforts in India to promote its other services in the country.
“While we don’t know when we will make a comeback in India, we are confident in our resilience, and desire to do so in times to come,” Pappas and Chandlee wrote in the memo.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/bytedance-to-cut-jobs-in-india-amid-tiktok-ban/
Chinese internet giant ByteDance has told employees in India that it will be reducing the size of its team in the country after New Delhi retained ban on TikTok and other Chinese apps in the country, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The company shared the news with employees in the country at 10am local time and said only critical jobs will be retained in the country. ByteDance said the Indian government has offered no clear direction on when the app would be able to make a return, the source said on the condition of anonymity.
ByteDance did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
This is breaking news. Check back for more information.
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/26/bytedance-to-cut-jobs-in-india-amid-tiktok-ban/
