User blogs

If you’ve been following the gaming space – or just the state of the world, generally – over the past 12 months, this shouldn’t come as a major surprise. Spending saw big increases pretty much across the board in 2020, as a homebound populace sought comfort and distraction in gaming. This comes in stark contrast to much of the rest of the consumer electronics space, in which economic uncertainty  curtailed purchasing on non-essentials.

According to the latest figures from NPD, spending on gaming hardware, software and accessories was up 25% in December and 27% for the full year. Hardware specifically increased 38% year-over-year for December to $1.35 billion, with the arrival of next gen consoles from Sony and Microsoft.

That’s the highest figure since the $1.37 billion hit in December 2013, the year the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 arrived. In spite of this year’s new arrivals (which were hampered by limited availability), Nintendo’s Switch once again dominated sales for the month, with the PS5 grabbing the number two spot. The Switch’s 2020 was the second highest annual performance for a console, after the Wii in 2008.

The Switch – which turns three this March – got off to a slow start, courtesy of its own limited availability. But the arrival of a new Animal Crossing title helped rocket it to the top, as isolated consumers looked for new venues for social gaming. That title took the number three spot for the year, finishing behind Call of Duty: Black Ops: Cold War and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (the former also topping the list for December).

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/video-game-spending-increased-27-in-2020/

The pandemic might have wiped out whole swaths of the economy, but one area that is pulsating with activity is home sales. Driven by remote work and changing commute patterns, home sales skyrocketed last year, with the National Association of Realtors predicting that the total volume when fully calculated will be the highest in 14 years.

That’s been great news for Better Mortgage (which generally brands itself as Better.com for presumably that SEO love). According to the company, it is now underwriting $3 billion per month in mortgage loans, and that’s led to huge VC interest, including most recently a $200 million round a few weeks ago led by L Catterton at a $4 billion valuation. The company has also hired more than 4,000 employees since the start of the pandemic last March.

One of those new hires is Diane Yu, who is joining the company as CTO to lead engineering and technical strategy. She has had extensive experience in advertising networks, having led engineering as CTO at Comcast for its Advanced Advertising Group. She came to Comcast via the cable and media conglomerate’s acquisition of her startup FreeWheel, which designed tools for ad management and optimization. Prior to that, she worked for nearly a decade in engineering leadership at DoubleClick.

Her addition to the C-suite follows the hiring of Kevin Ryan as CFO, who joined in October of last year. Ryan is a former long-time Morgan Stanley investment banker who led the IPO for Rocket Mortgage, one of the many neo-mortgage lenders that have risen up in recent years.

All of these hires are presumably preparation for an IPO, which has been rumored for the past few months and intensified after Ryan’s hiring. With home sales at a peak, underwriting growing rapidly, and a fleshed-out management team, Better hopes its turn to shine in the public markets has finally arrived.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/diane-yu-joins-better-mortgage/

Last year, a number of startups building OKR-focused software raised lots of venture capital, drawing TechCrunch’s attention.

Why is everyone making software that measures objectives and key results? we wondered with tongue in cheek. After all, how big could the OKR software market really be?

It’s a sub-niche of corporate planning tools! In a world where every company already pays for Google or Microsoft’s productivity suite, and some big software companies offer similar planning support, how substantial could demand prove for pure-play OKR startups?

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Pretty substantial, we’re finding out. After OKR-focused Gtmhub announced its $30 million Series B the other day, The Exchange reached out to a number of OKR-focused startups we’ve previously covered and asked about their 2020 growth.

Gtmhub had released new growth metrics along with its funding news, plus we had historical growth data from some other players in the space. So let’s peek at new and historical numbers from Gthmhub, Perdoo, WorkBoard, Ally.io, Koan and WeekDone.

Growth (and some caveats)

A startup growing 400% in a year from a $50,000 ARR base is not impressive. It would be much more impressive to grow 200% from $1 million ARR, or 150% from $5 million.

So, percentage growth is only so good, as metrics go. But it’s also one that private companies are more likely to share than hard numbers, as the market has taught startups that sharing real data is akin to drowning themselves. Alas.

As we view the following, bear in mind that a simply higher percentage growth number does not indicate that a company added more net ARR than another; it could be growing faster from a smaller base. And some companies in the mix did not share ARR growth, but instead disclosed other bits of data. We got what we could.

Gtmhub:

• 400% ARR growth, 2019
• 300% ARR growth, 2020
• More: The company has seen strong ACV growth and its reportedly strong gross margins from 2019 held up in 2020, it said.
• TechCrunch coverage

Perdoo:

• 240% paid customer growth, 2020
• 340% user base growth, 2020
• Given strong market demand, a company representative told The Exchange that Perdoo had to restrict its free tier to 10 users.
• TechCrunch coverage

WorkBoard:

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/rapid-growth-in-2020-reveals-okr-software-markets-untapped-potential/

Apple has planned new upgraded MacBook Pros for launch “later this year” according to a new report from Bloomberg. These new models would come in both 14-inch and 16-inch sizes, with new and improved Apple Silicon processors like those that Apple debuted on the new MacBook Air and 13-inch MacBook Pro model late last year. They would also see the return of Apple’s MagSafe charger, a magnetic dedicated charging port that would replace USB-C for power, and they could potentially do away with the Touch Bar, the small strip of OLED display built in to the keyboard on modern MacBook Pros.

Bloomberg’s report suggests that these MacBook Pro models will have processors with more cores and better graphics capabilities than the existing M1 chips that power Apple’s current notebooks with in-house silicon, and that they’ll also have displays with brighter panels that offer higher contrast. Physically, they’ll resemble existing notebooks, according to the report’s sources, but they’ll see the return of MagSafe, the dedicated magnetic charging interface that Apple used prior to switching power delivery over to USB-C on its laptops.

MagSafe had the advantage of easily disconnecting in case of anyone accidentally tripping across the power cord while plugged in, without yanking the computer with it. It also meant that it kept all data ports free for accessories. Bloomberg says that the revitalized MagSafe for new notebooks will also offer faster charging vs. USB-C, in addition to those other benefits.

As for the Touch Bar, it has been a topic of debate since its introduction. Pro users in particular seem to dislike the interface option, especially because it replaces a row of dedicated physical keys that could be useful in professional workflows. The report claims that Apple has “tested versions that remove the Touch Bar,” so it seems less clear that Apple will finally unring that particular bell, but I personally know a lot of people who would be excited if that does come to pass.

Finally, Bloomberg says Apple is also planning a new redesigned MacBook Air. That was updated most recently just a couple of months ago, and the report says it’ll only follow “long after” these new MacBook Pros, so it seems unlikely to arrive in 2021.

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/apple-said-to-be-planning-new-14-and-16-inch-macbook-pros-with-magsafe-and-apple-processors/

“Most people don’t even know that a job in tech sales is even a possibility,” says Shaan Hathiramani, the founder and chief executive of Flockjay, a company offering a tech sales training curriculum to the masses.

Hathiramani sees his startup as an onramp to the tech industry for legions of workers who have the skillsets to work in tech, but lack the network to see themselves in the business. Just like coding bootcamps have enabled thousands to get jobs as programmers in the tech business, Flockjay can get talented people who had never considered a job in tech into the industry.

The company, which had previously raised $3 million from investors including Serena Williams and Will Smith, along with tech industry luminaries like Microsoft chairman John Thompson; Airtable head of sales Liat Bycel; Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit; and former Netflix CPO Tom Willerer, has just raised new capital to expand its business in a time when accelerated onramps to new jobs have never been more important.

The healthcare response to the ongoing COVID-19 epidemic, which has closed businesses and torn through the American economy. The unemployment rate in the country sits at 6.4% and the nation lost 140,000 jobs again in December — with all of those job losses coming from women.

A former financier with the multi-billion dollar investment firm, Citadel, Hathiramani sees Flockjay, and the business of tech sales as a way for a number of people to transform their lives.

“We provide a premier sales academy,” Hathiramani said. “It costs zero dollars if you take the course and don’t get a job and costs 10% of your income for the first year if you do get a job. That nets out to 6 or 7K.”

A few hundred students have gone through the program so far, Hathiramani said, and the goal is to train 1,000 people over the course of 2021. The average income of a student before they go through Flockjay’s training program is $30,000 to $35,000 typically, Hathiramani said.

Upon graduation, those students can expect to make between $75,000 and $85,000, he said.

Increasing access among those students who have not necessarily been exposed to the tech world is critical for what Hathiramani wants to do with his sales bootcamp.

Flockjay founder Shaan Hathiramani. Image Credit: Flockjay

The entrepreneur said roughly 40% of students don’t have a four-year college degree; half of the students identify as female or non-binary, and half of the company’s students identify as Black or hispanic. About 80% of the company’s students find a job within the first six months of graduation.

These are students like Elise Cox, a former Bojangles’ manager and Flockjay graduate, who moved from Georgia to Denver to be a sales tech representative for Gusto. Tripling her salary from $13 an hour in the food service industry to a salaried position with wages and benefits.

“I enjoy being able to generate revenue for the company,” Cox, a 41-year-old grandmother, whose five-year plans include a sales leadership role, told Fast Company two years ago. “The revenue is the lifeblood of the company and being part of the team gives me sense of fulfillment.”

Partnerships with Opportunity@Work, Hidden Genius Project, Peninsula Bridge, and TechHire Oakland, help to ensure a diverse pool of applicants and a more diverse workforce for the tech industry — where diversity is still a huge problem.

As Hathiramani looks to take his company from training a couple of hundred students to over a thousand, the founder has raised new cash from previous investors including Lightspeed, Coatue, and Y Combinator, and new investors like eVentures, Salesforce Ventures, along with the Impact America Fund, Cleo Capital and Gabrielle Union.

For the New Jersey-born entrepreneur, Flockjay was a way to give back to a community that he knew intimately. After his family settled in New Jersey after immigrating to the United States, Hathiramani went first to Horace Mann on a scholarship and then attended Harvard before getting his job at Citadel.

Even while he was working at the pinnacle of the financial services world he started non-profits like the Big Shoulders Fund and taught financial literacy.

After a while, he moved to the Bay Area to begin plotting a way to merge his twin interests in education and financial inclusion.

“That led to me spending a year helping startups for free and trying to understand their problems with hiring and training” said Hathiramani. “It helped me surface this economic waste in plain sight. There were all these people talking to customers and they were spending three months on the job learning the job and they didn’t want to do the job or they weren’t very good at it.”

Tech salesforces were a point of entry in the system that almost anyone could access, if they could get in through the door, Hathiramani said. Flockjay wants to be the key to opening the door.

So, the company now has $11 million in new funding to bring its sales training bootcamp to a larger audience. Hathiramani also wants to make the bootcamp model more of a community with continuous development after a student completes the program. “I view education as a membership and not a transaction,” he said. “We focus on continuous learning and continuous up-skilling.”

Part of that is the flywheel of building up networks in a manner similar to YCombinator, the accelerator program from which Flockjay graduated in 2019.

“We went through YC to learn… how they manufacture the privilege in the world that they have afforded,” said Hathiramani. “How do you take some of that and provide it to someone who is starting their careers in tech. You get better at your job the more connections you have. As we accelerate the alumni piece… they can draw on other alums that they’re selling into.”

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2021/01/15/backed-by-marc-benioff-flockjay-pitches-its-sales-training-service-as-an-onramp-to-tech-careers/