User blogs

Let’s stipulate the storm of user media (social audio, newsletters, live streaming) is evidence of something real and lasting. When this citizen media migrates to small business and the enterprise, we see that as confirmation, validation. Most of these efforts are in the investment phase, where startups and platforms consolidate ecosystems around the various disruptions.

Clubhouse is moving to a more careful onboarding process that eschews mandatory gobbling of your contacts data and your phone number as a requirement for invitations. Twitter is surprisingly far along on integrating a suite of pilot projects — its Clubhouse clone Spaces, the Revue newsletter creation and distribution tool, and whatever happens to the Periscope live video streaming services the company has abandoned as a standalone.

As the smoke clears, what emerges is a hybrid of work from anywhere and post-pandemic digital collaboration solutions. At the top of the stack, social audio delivers some real leadership in the casual way it captures user attention. While commuting listening is proscribed for at least the next quarter, exercise and mental health breaks pick up a lot of that deficit. Some of the resulting content is appointment focused, keynote events with industry leaders and celebrities. Smaller sessions are organized around self- and group-help concerns, and the usual assortment of get-rich schemes. Much of this competes directly with cable news and podcasts, and will likely absorb the older networks into the new paradigm over time.

You can see this at play in the streaming realignment, where cable-cutting is driving us toward broadband-based consumption of so-called linear television programming. Last night, we ended up switching from Comcast’s video access to CBS’s Grammy coverage in favor of IP streaming via the CBS All Access app (now renamed Paramount +.) The Comcast CBS channel was full of glitches and pixillation; the streaming version rock solid with what seemed like better video and audio quality. On the appointment television side of the equation, old-style network shows like This Is Us and Grey’s Anatomy are finding it more difficult to compete with Netflix, Prime, and other streaming originals. And then there are the kids, who refuse to even recognize anything they can’t stream as relevant.

Moving down the stack from streaming audio (I like that better than social audio as a thing) to the newsletter services, we discover what happens when fragmentation of the media produces too much content and not enough loyalty to a manageable number of suppliers. That loyalty thing is perhaps the new eyeballs, where the stickiness of the relationship is much more desirable for its ongoing lifetime value. Newsletters at their inception were aggregators built to skim the cream of relevant media, in effect replacing the home page and adding a social layer of authority. Now the glut has moved from posts and podcasts to the newsletters themselves.

To differentiate and encourage paid subscriptions, creators are now being wined and dined with tools for managing these microapp sites and competing with magazines and publishers for marquee authors. Newsletter stars start appearing on streaming audio in much the same way that Washington Post and New York Times reporters populate the CNN and MSNBC roundtables. Newsletter’s role as a blend of must reads is shifting to original material and a marketing channel for influence with the streaming audio communities. Twitter’s Revue newsletter tool already lets you drag and drop tweets into the latest issue. It seems a small tweak to use the newsletter as a calendar for upcoming Spaces notifications of events. The company has announced plans for Super Followers who can produce and receive subscribed content via this path between the platform and satellite services.

Twitter hasn’t been Super Clear on how or what video services they will maintain after they sunset Periscope, but closing the loop between streaming audio and on demand video programming gives Twitter a powerful advantage over services like Clubhouse that have fewer pieces of the puzzle. On the other hand, Twitter has to demonstrate newfound ability to launch and integrate the pieces to stay competitive with competitors both visible and in stealth. They include Facebook, Amazon and its growing ad platform, and streaming “Plus” services at a time where subscribers are dropping subscriptions to add new offerings from Disney, Apple, HBO Max, Paramount, and the cheaper free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) networks like Peacock and Hulu.

Working from anywhere is accelerating the streaming media transition. News becomes a notification-driven stream to dip in and out of as the vaccines begin to take hold. Work promotes attention and care of our values, while home brings a time of relearning how to breathe, treasuring our family and friends, and putting time into exploring things we have been fighting to keep alive: the rhythms of history, genealogy, climate change, the possibility that government can work for a change. As our anxiety moderates, we can dip into music, movies, sports, and other expressive uses of the powerful network we turned on to survive. Turn on, tune in, stay home.

Streaming audio can work for marketing, learning, sharing, and monetizing. It can also work for extending our collaboration with music, painting, storytelling, a kind of virtual comedy club, book club, and debating society. I can imagine the return of liner notes to the music experience, a kind of Prairie Home Companion writ small. The Grammys last night were awkward, strained by the exigencies of the virus. But the performances were bunched together, with the wonderful touch of the group of artists sitting on stools campfire-style after their song to listen and rock to the music of their fellow nominees. Clubhouse style.

We’re on the cusp of a powerful change in the way we live and work. Not just out of necessity but of a desire to fulfill the promise of global communication. We’ve laid the tracks of this new age of collaboration. Now we have to figure out what to do with it.

from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter

__________________

The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, March 12, 2021.

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang

Subscribe to the new Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.

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There’s been quite a bit of movement in the additive manufacturing space in recent months. If I had to pinpoint a reason, I would say that — much like robotics (another space I follow fairly closely) — the category has gotten a boost in interest from the pandemic. Medical applications are understandably of interest lately, as is alternative manufacturing.

Desktop Metal, Markforged and new-comer Mantel have all made pretty big announcements in recent weeks, and now Fortify is making the round with a significant raise. The Boston-based startup announced a $20 million Series B equity round, led by Cota Capital with additional participation from Accel Partners, Neotribe Ventures and Prelude Ventures.

Fortify is attempting to stake out a claim in material deposits. Using digital light processing (DLP) tech, the company can mix and print in a variety of different materials, with a wide range of properties. The list includes some useful traits, including electromagnetic and thermal.

Like Mantel, the company looks to be targeting manufacturing tools, including injection molding.

“Fortify has been focused on proving the viability of our product and market opportunity over the past 18+ months, and exceeded our goals set at the beginning of 2020,” CEO Josh Martin said in a release. “This next round will expand our go-to-market footprint in key verticals such as injection mold tooling while enabling us to capture market share in end-use electronic devices.”

Recent months have also found the company enlisting other 3D printing vets. Paul Dresens (ex Desktop Metal) signed on as VP of Engineering, while former GrabCad (a Stratasys acquisition) market exec Rob Stevens has signed on as an advisor.

MrBeast’s management company is getting into the venture business.

Night Media, the six-year-old, Dallas-based multimedia talent management company, is closing a debut fund with $20 million in capital commitments from the same, powerful, family-friendly online influencers who it manages, along with other social media stars.

The idea, says Night Media CEO Reed Duchscher, is to write initial checks of up to $300,000 into three categories: consumer-facing startups; gaming startups, especially those centered around user-generated content; and the creator economy, including startups supporting the creator economy.

The last is a world that Duchscher knows particularly well.

A native North Dakotan who was a wide receiver for North Dakota State University, Duchscher was working for a sports agency after graduating when he stumbled across a comedy group online called Dude Perfect. He so loved their work that he reached out to better understand who its members are and how they made money; within months, Duchscher struck on his own to work full-time with the group and seize on what appeared to be a big opportunity.

It was a savvy move. While Night Media no longer works with Dude Perfect, it now manages 16 other top influencer groups, with YouTube stars that include ZHC (19.7 million subscribers), Preston (15.6 million), Matt Stonie (13.7 million), Unspeakable (10.8 million), Azzyland (13.3 million), Typical Gamer (11.4 million) and Carter Sharer (7.6 million). Duchscher also notably represents MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, and who has amassed 55 million subscribers on YouTube and whose videos routinely rack up at least 30 million views. (He posts two to three each month.)

In a Bloomberg piece in December about Donaldson, who now oversees a team of 50, famed filmmaker Casey Neistat said of him: “He lives on a different planet than the rest of the YouTube world.”

Some might settle for that level of success. But Duchscher — who met Donaldson after sending him a direct message on Twitter —  has instead been helping Donaldson and his other clients think about next steps and where to invest the money they make from their social media endeavors.

Last year, toward that end, Night Media created a venture studio to incubate companies that its stars can help shape and grow. As part of one of those efforts, Donaldson has partnered with 300 ghost kitchens around the country to make and sell so-called Beast Burgers and other items that can be order through a dedicated app. Donaldson has also put his stamp on the second iteration of a game called Finger on the App.

Asked if MrBeastBurger or the app might be open to follow-on funding, Duchscher suggests that’s not necessarily the plan for the startups in the venture studio, though they are open to outside funding “depending on what we’d do with all that capital.”

Venture-type investment, he (somewhat refreshingly) adds, could create unnecessary “complexity” in some cases.

Still, Night Media’s talent is interested in learning, molding, and capitalizing from the trends impacting their industry. Enter the new venture fund, which could be the start of a much bigger business eventually.

Indeed, though Duchscher says a professional investor is joining the outfit this spring, he has himself been running the show and spending time with “people in the Valley and L.A. who have been in industry for 20 years and been through multiple funds and financial crises” in order to learn more about institutional investing. He cites Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners, for example, of firms that are already sending him deal flow.

Asked if he’s also in conversation with the growing number of celebrity investors on the startup scene, Duchscher says there’s less of that, though he says he has talked quite a bit with Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and even pulled the firm into a few deals, including Backbone, a company that makes a sleek game controller for iPhones.

It’s one of roughly a dozen startups that Night Media has helped fund to date. Another bet is a rewards app that pays users in bitcoin called Lolli and which is also backed by Craft Ventures and famed talent agent Guy Oseary. Another investment is Pearpop, an startup that invites fans to bid for shared screen time with their favorite TikTok. Italic, a marketplace that invites shoppers to buy luxury products directly from the manufacturers behind top brands, is also a portfolio company.

All have agreed to work with Night Media in exchange for access to its creators and their know-how — assets that Duchscher believes gives the outfit an edge that most VCs can’t offer.

Whether it all leads to a bigger fund down the road is the big question, not that Duchscher is spending much energy on it right now, he suggests. “It would depend on fund one and how quickly it gets deployed,” he says. “We’re not going to raise because we can. That’s never been the way we think or operate.”

He has more pressing concerns, in any case. A big part of his job is figuring out what to do with inbound interest in his clients, and there’s far more demand right now than there is inventory.

“Usually, people want to work with a specific creator” he notes, and there are only so many hours in the day.

Substack has attracted a number of high-profile writers to its newsletter platform — and it hasn’t been a secret that the venture-backed startup has lured some of them with sizable payments.

For example, a New Yorker article late last year identified several writers (Anne Helen Petersen, Matthew Yglesias)  who’d accepted “substantial” advances and others (Robert Christgau, Alison Roman) who’d started Substack newsletters without striking deals with the company.

However, a number of writers publishing via Substack have begun pointing out that this strategy makes the company seem less like a technology platform and more like a media company (a familiar debate around Facebook and other online giants) — or at the very least, like a technology platform that also makes editorial decisions which are subject to criticism.

Last week, the writer Jude Ellison Sady Doyle pointed to writers like Yglesias, Glenn Greenwald and Freddie de Boer (several of whom departed larger publications, supposedly turning to Substack for greater editorial independence) and suggested that the platform has become “famous for giving massive advances […] to people who actively hate trans people and women, argue ceaselessly against our civil rights, and in many cases, have a public history of directly, viciously abusing trans people and/or cis women in their industry.”

Doyle initially said that they would continue publishing via Substack but would not charge a subscription fee to any readers who (like Doyle) identify as trans. Later, they added an update saying they’d be moving to a different platform called Ghost.

Similarly, science journalist and science fiction writer Annalee Newitz wrote yesterday that they would be leaving the platform as well. And as part of their farewell, they described Substack as a “scam”: “For all we know, every single one of Substack’s top newsletters is supported by money from Substack. Until Substack reveals who exactly is on its payroll, its promises that anyone can make money on a newsletter are tainted.”

Substack has responded in with two posts of its own. In the first, published last week, co-founder Hamish McKenzie outlines the details of what the company calls its Substack Pro program — it offers select writers an advance payment for their first year on the platform, then keeps 85% of the writers’ subscription revenue. After that, there’s no guaranteed payment, but writers get to keep 90% of their revenue. (The company also offers legal support and healthcare stipends.)

“We see these deals as business decisions, not editorial ones,” McKenzie wrote. “We don’t commission or edit stories. We don’t hire writers, or manage them. The writers, not Substack, are the owners. No-one writes for Substack – they write for their own publications.”

The second post (bylined by McKenzie and his co-founders Chris Best and Jairaj Sethi) provides additional details about who’s in the program — more than half women, more than one-third people of color, diverse viewpoints but “none that can be reasonably construed as anti-trans” —without actually naming names.

“So far, the small number of writers who have chosen to share their deals – coupled with some wrong assumptions about who might be part of the program – has created a distorted perception of the overall makeup of the group, leading to incorrect inferences about Substack’s business strategy,” the Substack founders wrote.

As for whether those writers are being held to any standards, the founders said, “We will continue to require all writers to abide by Substack’s content guidelines, which guard against harassment and threats. But we will also stick to a hands-off approach to censorship, as laid out in our statement about our content moderation philosophy.”

Greenwald, for his part, dismissed the criticism as “petty Substack censors” whose position boils down to, “because you refuse to remove from your platform the writers I hate who have built a very large readership of their own, I’m taking myself & my couple of dozen readers elsewhere in protest.”

But when I reached out to Newitz (a friend of mine) via email, they told me that the key issue is transparency.

“If Substack won’t tell us who they are paying, we can’t figure out who on the site has grown their audience organically, and who is getting juiced,” Newitz said. “It’s blatantly misleading for people who are trying to figure out whether they can make money on the platform. Plus, keeping their Pro list secret means we can’t verify Substack’s claims about how its staff writers are on ‘all sides’ of the political spectrum.”

Determined early-stage startup founders (are there really any other kind?) always keep a sharp eye out for advantages that help them build better and faster. Well, heads up folks because this is a brand-new opportunity like no other, and it takes place at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 on September 21-23.

We’re talking about Startup Alley+, a curated experience available to only 50 early-stage startups who exhibit in Startup Alley at Disrupt 2021. All exhibiting startups are eligible, and the TechCrunch team will ultimately select which companies earn a spot. What’s in store for the Startup Alley+ cohort? So glad you asked.

Let’s get the money issue out of the way. You won’t pay anything beyond what you paid for your Startup Alley Pass. Sweet! Now get ready because Startup Alley+ provides plenty of opportunities for exposure and business growth — before Disrupt 2021 even begins.

Get set up for success with access to founder masterclasses. Warm up your pitching arm because you’ll take part in a pitch-off at Extra Crunch Live and receive invaluable feedback. What’s more, TechCrunch will introduce you to top investors within the startup community through our inaugural VC match-making program . A warm introduction beats a cold pitch any day, amirite?

And the perks just keep coming. Startup Alley+ gives participants a healthy headstart on their Disrupt experience. How healthy? It begins in July at TechCrunch Early Stage: Marketing and Fundraising, a virtual event the Startup Alley+ cohort attends for free.

With all those experiences under your belt, you’ll be ready to hit the virtual ground running — and reap the rewards — when you set up shop in the Alley at Disrupt.

Don’t forget about the many benefits available to all Startup Alley exhibitors. The virtual nature of Disrupt means thousands of people from around the globe will attend — influencers of every stripe including tech icons, leading founders, top investors, engineers, job seeking talent, and entrepreneurs.

We’ve created more ways to add value and to draw attention to Startup Alley. For instance, every exhibiting startup gets to deliver a 60-second elevator pitch during a breakout feedback session. Your audience? TechCrunch staff and thousands of those Disrupt attendees we mentioned earlier.

We’re also rolling out the Startup Alley Crawl experience again. Every tech category will have an hour-long crawl posted in the agenda. Team TechCrunch will go live from the Disrupt Stage and interview a select number of founders in Startup Alley from each category. This could be you.

As a Startup Alley participant, you might just be selected to be a Startup Battlefield Wild Card. The Startup Battlefield is the stuff of legend. Past winners include the likes of Vurb, Dropbox, Mint and Yammer. Two Startup Alley exhibitors — chosen by the TechCrunch Editorial team — will compete in this year’s Battlefield and have a shot at the $100,000 (equity-free) cash.

Grab every advantage. Don’t miss your chance to participate in Startup Alley+, which kicks off in July. Apply for your Startup Alley Pass now and get ready to make the most of your time at in September at Disrupt 2021.

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