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From the earliest days of the pandemic, it was no secret that video chat was about to become a very hot space.

Over the past several months investors have bankrolled a handful of video startups with specific niches, ranging from always-on office surveillance to platforms that encouraged plenty of mini calls to avoid the need for more lengthy team-wide meetings. As the pandemic wanes and plenty of startups begin to look towards hybrid office models, there are others who have decided to lean into embracing a fully remote workforce, a strategy that may require new tools.

PingPong, a recent launch from Y Combinator’s latest batch, is building an asynchronous video chat app for the workplace. We selected PingPong as one of our favorite startups that debuted last week.

The company’s central sell is that for remote teams, there needs to be a better alternative to Slack or email for catching up with co-workers across time zones. While Zoom calls might be able to convey a company’s culture better than a post in a company-wide Slack channel, for fully remote teams operating on different continents, scheduling a company-wide meeting is often a non-starter.

PingPong is selling its service as an addendum to Slack that helps remote product teams collaborate and convey what they’re working on. Users can capture a short video of themselves and share their screen in lieu of a standup presentation and then they can get caught up on each other’s progress on their own time. PingPong’s hope is that users find more value in brainstorming, conducting design reviews, reporting bugs and more inside while using asynchronous video than they would with text.

“We have a lot to do before we can replace Slack, so right now we kind of emphasize playing nice with Slack,” PingPong CEO Jeff Whitlock tells TechCrunch. “Our longer term vision is that what young people are doing in their consumer lives, they bring into the enterprise when they graduate into the workforce. You and I were using Instant Messenger all the time in the early 2000s and then we got to the workplace, that was the opportunity for Slack… We believe in the next five or so years, something that’s a richer, more asynchronous video-based Slack alternative will have a lot more interest.”

Building a chat app specifically designed for remote product teams operating in multiple time zones is a tight niche for now, but Whitlock believes that this will become a more common problem as companies embrace the benefits of remote teams post-pandemic. PingPong costs $100 per user per year.

Sarah Kunst, founding partner at Cleo Capital, has worn many hats. She’s been an entrepreneur, served on plenty of boards, is a contributing author at Marie Clare, has been a senior advisor to Bumble and worked as a consultant in marketing, business development and more.

With all that experience, she knows all too well that the process of fundraising starts well before your first pitch meeting. That’s why we’re so excited to have Kunst join us at Early Stage in July to discuss how to get ready to fundraise.

This isn’t the first time Kunst has discussed the topic with us. On a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Kunst and one of her portfolio company founders Julia Collins described how to conduct the process of fundraising.

For example, there is a story to tell, metrics to share and an art to building momentum before you ever start filling your calendar. That all requires preparation, and Kunst will outline how to go about that at our event in July.

Early Stage is going down twice this year, with our first event taking place tomorrow! Here’s a look at some of the topics we’ll be covering:

Fundraising

• Bootstrapping Best Practices (Tope Awotona and Blake Bartlett, Calendly)
• Four Things to Think About Before Raising a Series A (Bucky Moore, Kleiner Perkins)
• How to Get An Investor’s Attention (Marlon Nichols, MaC Venture Capital)
• How to Nail Your Virtual Pitch Meeting (Melissa Bradley, Ureeka)
• How Founders Can Think Like a VC (Lisa Wu, Norwest Venture Partners)
• The All-22 View, or Never Losing Perspective (Eghosa Omoigui, EchoVC Partners)

Operations:

• Finance for Founders (Alexa von Tobel, Inspired Capital)
• Building and Leading a Sales Team (Ryan Azus, Zoom CRO)
• 10 Things NOT to Do When Starting a Company (Leah Solivan, Fuel Capital)
• Leadership Culture and Good Governance (David Easton, Generation Investment Management)

The cool thing about Early Stage is that it’s heavy on audience Q&A, ensuring that everyone gets the chance to ask their own specific questions. Oh, and ticket holders get free access to Extra Crunch.

Interested? You can buy a ticket here.

On the same day that Deliveroo’s IPO fizzled at the start of trading, Compass announced via a fresh S-1 filing that it will reduce the number of shares in its impending flotation and sell them at a lower price.

The move by Compass, a venture-backed residential brokerage, to lower its implied public-market valuation and sell fewer shares is a rebuke of the company’s earlier optimism regarding its valuation and ability to raise capital. The company’s IPO is still slated to generate as much as a half-billion dollars, so it can hardly be called a failure if it executes at its rejiggered price range, but the cuts matter.

Especially when we consider several other factors. The Deliveroo IPO, as discussed this morning, was impacted by more than mere economics. And there are questions regarding how interested seemingly more conservative countries’ stock exchanges will prove in growth-oriented, unprofitable companies.

But added to the mix are recent declines in the valuation of public software companies, effectively repricing the value of high-margin, recurring revenue. The reasons behind that particular change are several, but may include a rotation by public investors into other asset categories, or an air-letting from a sector that may have enjoyed some valuation inflation in the last year.

In that vein, SMB cloud provider DigitalOcean’s own post-IPO declines from its offering price are a bit more understandable, as is a lack of a higher price interval from Kaltura, a video-focused software company, as it looks to list.

Taken together, the various market signs could point to a modest to moderate cooling in the tech IPO market. For a host of companies looking to debut via a SPAC, that could prove to be bad news.

Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump promoted a new interview with the former president on Facebook and Instagram Tuesday, but a workaround to Trump’s ban on two of the world’s most popular social networks wasn’t long for this world.

She was apparently swiftly cautioned by Facebook that anything posted “in the voice of President Trump” is not currently allowed on Facebook or Instagram and would be subject to removal. Trump himself remains banned on Facebook pending a decision by the Oversight Board, the external governing body the company set up to tackle it thorniest platform policy decisions.

Those rules apply to any accounts or pages associated with the Trump campaign as well as any belonging to former surrogates for the campaign, two categories that Lara Trump’s account falls into. Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch that screenshots depicting emails from the company were legitimate.

Facebook does still make a news exemption for Trump, presumably for something more akin to a 60 Minutes interview, but in this case he was being interviewed by someone involved in his campaign who then planned to promote the video on a campaign-associated account.

While Facebook won’t host the video itself, Lara Trump opted for a workaround to the workaround, linking to the interview on Rumble, a video sharing website that saw an influx of Trump supporters late last year.

She also posted to the video on The Right View, a web-based show previously produced by the Trump campaign that the Washington Post describes as “a sort of pro-Trump answer to ABC’s ‘The View.'”

Fox News announced this week that it would bring Lara Trump into the fold, hiring the member of the Trump family on as a paid contributor.

Picture it. It’s September, and you’re at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 about to present your virtual elevator pitch to thousands of attendees around the world. In the short span of 120 seconds, your company will become known to a rapt audience of early-startup influencers including potential customers, investors, tech icons and the media.

An awesome opportunity, amirite? Don’t just picture it — make it happen by exhibiting in Startup Alley. Yes, it really is that easy. Every early-stage startup that exhibits in Startup Alley gets to pitch to the Disrupt audience.

It’s not only a tremendous opportunity to practice, pitching at Disrupt can have long-term benefits. Don’t just take our word for it. Jessica McLean, the director of marketing and communications at Infinite-Compute, talks about her company’s experience pitching last year at Disrupt 2020.

“Startup Alley exhibitors got to pitch to attendees, and we were thrilled with how it went. I recorded the pitch, and now we just shoot potential investors a quick video saying, “take a look at our CEO pitching at Disrupt 2020.” It’s a great piece of marketing collateral.”

Along with the epic exposure that comes from pitching at Disrupt, Startup Alley exhibitors also have a shot at being interviewed during one of the many hour-long Startup Alley Crawls. Each tech category gets its own crawl — we’ll post the specific times in the agenda closer to the show’s opening — and TechCrunch journalists will interview a select number of exhibiting founders from each category.

Here’s yet another reason to buy a Startup Alley Pass sooner rather than later. Your pass makes you eligible to participate in Startup Alley+, a curated experience designed to help founders increase their opportunities for exposure and business growth. Only 50 companies — chosen by TechCrunch — will form this cohort, and there’s no additional cost. Here’s the kicker — the benefits start months before Disrupt 2021 begins. Learn more about the Startup+ experience here.

Did you know that TechCrunch editors award two Startup Alley exhibitors with a Startup Battlefield Wild Card? Those founders get to compete for $100,000 in the always-epic Startup Battlefield competition. Who knows? You might follow in the steps of RecordGram. That startup, chosen from Startup Alley as a Wild Card, went on to win the Startup Battlefield competition.

Bottom line: Exhibiting in Startup Alley is a savvy strategy. You’ll pitch your company to a global audience, gain valuable exposure, meet and connect with influencers and potential customers. Win-win-win.

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 takes place on September 21-23. If you want to take advantage of every opportunity, there’s just one item to cross off your to-do list. Apply for Startup Alley before the early-bird price ($199) expires on May 13 at 11:59 pm (PST).

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Disrupt 2021? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.