Tech News

You know what I miss about working in an office? Literally nothing, apart from having access to a fancy coffee machine. It turns out that the magic of the liquid black gold is within reach even for work-from-home keyboard warriors. You don’t even need to spend ridiculous amounts of money for a tasty hot beverage to have you jittering your way through the day.

Got any caffeine-fiends or coffee lovers in your life who might want to up their coffee game? Here’s our top six gift ideas, from super affordable to… not.

This article contains links to affiliate partners where available. When you buy through these links, TechCrunch may earn an affiliate commission.

1 – Start with the beans

It’s pretty rare that a great holiday gift comes at a reasonable price, but in the coffee category, you’re in luck. Go to a specialty coffee store near you, and you can get a great, high-end holiday gift in the $12-25 range. High-quality, freshly roasted beans is the first step to making amazing coffee at home, provided that your recipient has a grinder. If they don’t, you can buy pre-ground coffee, but be aware that it goes stale far faster.

I’m a sucker for coffee subscriptions that focus on variety, and most third-wave coffee roasters have a subscription plan you can gift. Atlas Coffee Club is one of my favorites; the bags are only for subscription, so they don’t have to worry about how the bags look on the shelf. The upshot of that is that they always have some fresh and funky designs.

Each pack they ship comes with a postcard with tasting notes. The company charges $109 for six months worth of gift subscriptions, including shipping. If Atlas doesn’t do it for you, Trade has a broader selection of choices, or if that seems too overwhelming and adventurous, the stalwarts of the industry such as Blue Bottle, Peets and Equator all have giftable subscription plans too.

Price:Varies depending on brand and subscription type

2 – Cheap is great: the AeroPress

Launched back in 2005, designed by a guy better known for inventing the Aerobie frisbee, the AeroPress continues to be one of the best devices for coffee making at home. It makes a rich, smooth coffee that tastes somewhere between an espresso, a french press, and a drip coffee. At just $40, it’s It’s by far the cheapest way to make a respectable cup of coffee. It’s almost indestructible (I’ve owned mine for more than 10 years, and it’s still going strong), and can make great coffee wherever you can get water up to a certain temperature. The trick is to use cooler water than you’d expect (175˚ F/80˚ C), which requires a kettle with good temperature control, but overall, it’s hard to screw up a cup of AeroPress. Get some good beans and grind them a tiny bit more coarsely than you would for espresso. If you buy pre-ground beans, espresso grind works just fine.

Price:$40 from AeroPress

3 – From beans to powder: Ode Brew Grinder 2

This might come as a surprise, but for great coffee at home, your first upgrade probably shouldn’t be your machine, but your grinder. Or rather: Make sure you buy fresh, high-quality beans, and then grind them with as much precision as you can: An uniform grind is what you’re looking for. Fellow is perhaps best known for its high-precision EKG electric kettle, which has more or less become the industry standard for high-end baristas making pour-over.

In this guide, however, I wanted to give the Ode Brew Grinder a bit of love. At $345, it is astonishingly expensive, but it is one of the best grinders money can buy.

The original version was well reviewed, and the Gen 2 improves on a winning formula: It has anti-static technology which means less of a mess. It has a cup that goes under the grinder that is held in place magnetically. You grind just enough beans for however much coffee you are going to make, and the grinder stops automatically once your beans are shredded to the appropriate size. The major difference is that the grinding burrs have been completely redesigned; the Gen 2 brew burrs are capable of grinding as fine as 250 microns, while the Standard brew burrs that come stock in the original Ode Brew Grinder can grind as fine as 500 microns. If you love espresso drinks, Fellow warns that this isn’t the grinder for you, but if you’re more of a pour-over person, you can’t go wrong.

Price: $345 from Fellow

4 – Bringing the science: Acaia Pearl coffee scale

Is it sane to pay $150 for Acaia’s specialized set of Pearl digital coffee scales, when Amazon will sell you a just-as-accurate scale for a tenth that? Well, the Acaia scale does more than just measuring the coffee grinds itself; it can also show you the pour rate you are using for your pour-over brews, helping you fine-adjust and make your brews more repeatable.

Accurately measuring the amount of coffee you put into espresso is a crucial part of fine-tuning your coffee recipes: A double shot of espresso, called a doppio, requires 14 to 18 grams of coffee and produces 60 ml (two fluid ounces) of coffee. From there, you esperiment with the pressure your espresso machine is calibrated to, your tamping, the coarseness of your grind, and… Oh dear, my coffee nerdery is showing, isn’t it?

All I’m saying that if your coffee-loving gift recipient doesn’t use scales to make espresso, they either don’t really care about coffee, or they haven’t figured out how important it is for consistency. Whether you pick up the $150 Acaia, the $50 Timemore, or the $17 KitchenTour scale, a precision set of scales is a crucial step toward coffee nirvana.

Price:$150 from Acaia

5 – For the tinkerers: Gaggia Classic

If you love espresso drinks and are an epic coffee nerd, you eventually fall deep enough into the coffee hole that you start learning to make your own espresso drinks from scratch. That means getting a grinder, some scales, and a good machine. The Gaggia Classic wouldn’t stand up to the intense requirements of a busy cafe, but for home use, at under $500, it is a remarkably affordable machine for anyone wanting to make coffee-shop quality espresso.

The machine has the most important features that baristas look for: it cranks out up to 12 bars of pressure, and it’s been around for 30 years. Spare parts are easily and readily available, and YouTube is overflowing with guides for how to take it apart and repair it if something should go wrong with it. The steam wand means that you can steam milk to create more creative espresso drinks; lattes, flat whites, macchiatos; they are all some experimentation and an internet tutorial away.

Price: $425 from Amazon

6 – Just make the coffee for me already: Breville Oracle Touch

If the thought of measuring your grinds to the nearest milligram makes you twitch, and fine-adjusting the coarseness of the grind fills you with a sense of dread, there are luckily fully automatic solutions too. Keurig’s K-cups and Nespresso pods are a good option if you want minimum hassle and don’t care about having some coffee cred. For the lazy aficionado, however, there’s the $2,800 Breville Oracle Touch. Yes, it is eye-wateringly expensive, but it’s capable of making any coffee drink you can imagine. If you’re the kind of person who’s utterly malfunctioning before you have your first cup of coffee, the Oracle Touch makes it as fool proof as it gets: Pour in some beans, water, and milk, then use the touch screen to look for the picture of the drink you want. No hassle, no mess, no skill required. The machine grinds, doses, stamps, heats, pumps, and steams. Sure, there are cheaper bean-to-cup machines out there, but that’s not what we are optimizing for here: This is all about ease of use and a jolt of caffeine while involving as few brain cells as possible.

Price: $2,800 from Breville

6 gifts for coffee lovers looking to up their game by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

Welcome back to Chain Reaction.

It’s still a pretty busy time in the wild, wild world of crypto. But it felt somewhat more tame than the whirlwind the industry has experienced in the past few weeks, and for that, I thank the crypto gods (for now.)

If you’re keeping up with the news cycle, then you know FTX’s former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried has gone on quite a bit of a media campaign.

He’s done a number of interviews with organizations, ranging from Good Morning America to The Block, in the past week, and even jumped on a handful of less formal Twitter spaces (with thousands of listeners) for impromptu conversations. While he has rambled his thoughts and circumnavigated questions, he’s caught the attention of regulators — who want to hear from him now, too.

In a back-and-forth tweet exchange, the Chairwoman of the House of Financial Services Committee Maxine Waters invited SBF to join their hearing on December 13, to which, SBF basically replied “not right now.”

That didn’t bode well with the chairwoman and she came back swinging and said, “Based on your role as CEO and your media interviews over the past few weeks, it’s clear to us that the information you have thus far is sufficient for testimony.” In a separate tweet, Waters also said a subpoena is “definitely on the table.”

With a couple days until the hearing, we’ll see if SBF saddles up and testifies, by choice or by order. But the former seems unlikely.

Meanwhile, an excel spreadsheet showed Alameda’s private equity portfolio with some FTX positions included. It was a doozy of a document, which had our team wondering how they had time to do anything other than invest given the massive number of deals recorded across a handful of sectors. More deets below.

If someone forwarded you this message, you can subscribe on TechCrunch’s newsletter page.

this week in web3

Here are some of the biggest crypto stories TechCrunch has covered this week.

FTX and Alameda’s massive investments will take a long time to unwind from crypto industry (TC+)

FTX and its sister company (or parent company, depending on how you look at it) Alameda had their hands in a bunch of different startups. The depth of its roster wasn’t very transparent until now. A spreadsheet with Alameda’s private equity portfolio and some FTX positions includes just shy of 500 investments across 10 holding companies for a total of $5.276 billion. This spreadsheet, dated from early November, raises a number of concerns surrounding the extent to which FTX and Alameda — and their affiliated companies — invested in the crypto industry.

Thoughts on the demise of Circle’s SPAC deal (TC+)

Circle Internet Financial (Circle), the company behind the popular USDC stablecoin, called off its merger with a blank check company, ending its SPAC-led run toward going public. Circle’s SPAC deal made news when announced last year and earlier this year when it was repriced. Last we heard, Circle had renegotiated its SPAC transaction, boosting its enterprise value from $4.5 billion to $9 billion. So what happened between then and now to get us from a new, higher deal price to a termination?

Seoul court rejects warrants for former Terraform Labs employees and investors over Luna collapse

A Seoul court rejected a request from prosecutors for warrants to detain eight people related to Terraform Labs, including the co-founder of Terraform Labs, Daniel Shin, early investors and former engineers. The court dismissed the warrants, saying the eight people need to have rights to defend their cases against accusations. Shin is being charged with taking illegal profits worth about $105 million by selling Luna tokens when it was near its all-time high without disclosing this move to investors, prior to the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna earlier this year.

Mastercard director sees FTX collapse as chance for the crypto market to reset

Even though one of the largest crypto exchanges, FTX, collapsed and filed for bankruptcy, some market participants aren’t worried about whether the meltdown will alter institutional interest in crypto. “I feel like once you get the momentum for an institution up and running, it’s hard to get them to turn their head and pivot,” Grace Berkery, director of startup engagement at Mastercard, said at an event on Wednesday. “So if they’re going to enter, they’re going to stay in the space.”

Ledger’s latest crypto wallet taps iPod designer in bid to boost accessibility

Ledger, a security-focused firm that sells crypto hardware wallets, has partnered with the designer behind the iPod, Tony Fadell, in hopes of creating an easier, more accessible way for users to secure their crypto assets. The new credit card-sized crypto wallet can manage NFT collections as well as over 500 coins and digital assets.

the latest pod

As a friendly reminder, Chain Reaction’s first season ended last week and we’ll be bringing new content back in the New Year.

ICYMI: Last week, in Chain Reaction’s Tuesday episode, Alchemy’s CEO Nikil Viswanathan had a lot to say about how the industry and developer’s focus on infrastructure has shifted, what will drive the next wave of consumer interest and which blockchains he’s seeing the most developer activity on.

Subscribe to Chain Reaction on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the latest episodes, and please leave us a review if you like what you hear!

follow the money

Tea, an open source package manager for developers, raises $8.9 million in seed funding
NFT-focused startup Metagood raises $5 million toward “social good” impact
Uniswap-based protocol Panoptic raises $4.5 million for decentralized perpetual options
Crypto accounting-focused Bitwave raises $15 million in a Series A round led by Hack VC and Blockchain Capital
Perennial, a DeFi protocol for derivative trading, raises $12 million in a seed round co-led by Polychain Capital and Variant

This list was compiled with information from Messari as well as TechCrunch’s own reporting.

Will SBF saddle up for a testimony after his media tour? by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

We’ve heard an awful lot over the past couple of weeks about the executives who are leaving Salesforce, but not a heck of a lot about the woman who is taking over for Stewart Butterfield as CEO at Slack when he takes off to spend some time gardening. It’s time we changed that.

Her name is Lidiane Jones, a woman with a deep background in enterprise software. (I requested an interview with Jones for this piece, but the company was not making her available to speak with the press.) Surprisingly, many of the analysts I confer with about Salesforce knew little about her, but that could be because she just hasn’t been made available on analysts’ days.

That will likely change when she takes over at the end of next month.

But she didn’t come out of nowhere. Jones, who lives in the Boston area, has been at Salesforce for three years and quickly rose up the ranks: She started as head of product for Commerce Cloud, then was bumped up to GM of Commerce Cloud before — prior to her promotion this week — holding the title of GM of Commerce Cloud, Marketing Cloud and Experience Cloud, which basically encompasses the company’s entire B2C business.

Before that, she spent 13 years at Microsoft working on a variety of products, from Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Project to Enterprise Application Virtualization, Office Collaboration and finally Azure Machine Learning.

She also spent almost four years at Sonos as VP of product management. Her unique mix of enterprise and consumer experience should prepare her well for her new job running Slack, where she will have to walk a fine line between user experience and enterprise requirements.

In Butterfield’s farewell Slack announcement, made available to TechCrunch by sources earlier this week (was it only this week?), he effusively praised his replacement. While he could be trying to sell her to a skeptical group used to his decade of steady leadership, it sounds like he also genuinely likes her:

So, about this Lidiane. You’re going to love her. She’s pragmatic and practical, insightful, passionate, creative, kind, and curious. She’s right at that little diamond-shaped heart in the four-circle Venn diagram of Smart, Humble, Hardworking, and Collaborative. Before Salesforce she spent four years leading product at Sonos where she fell in love with Slack. She has a deep respect for our approach to product, our customer obsession, and our unique culture. She’s one of us.

That’s a pretty strong welcome, and Anand Thaker, a marketing technology advisor and the founder of several startups who follows Salesforce closely, also believes that she’s a good fit for Slack.

“She has a solid technical and management background, and the projects and groups she has been working on within Salesforce — experience, marketing, commerce — were all places Slack would fit and drive the best value. Each of these has strong consumer commerce elements where the larger growth (or less churn) will likely come and is in line (reading the tea leaves) with where Beinoff has wanted Salesforce to go,” Thaker told TechCrunch.

Butterfield added that her roles inside Salesforce will make her a strong voice for Slack inside the larger organization, which could come in handy as the leadership handover occurs.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, founder and principal analyst at the firm Deep Analysis, said that in many ways, she is better prepared for this job than some longtime CEOs.

“I don’t know Lidiane personally, but she seems the logical option as she seemed to do a good job running the Marketing, Experience, Commerce Clouds, and running those is not much different from running multiple large businesses, so ironically she has more true CEO experience as a first-time CEO than many experienced CEOs. Plus she was with Microsoft a long time — and might bring some of their rigor to the table,” he said.

Jones certainly has big shoes to fill, taking over for a founder-CEO in the midst of a big transition for the company, but with a couple of decades of tech experience behind her, she seems more than prepared for the challenge.

Slack’s new CEO, Lidiane Jones, brings two decades of product experience to the job by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

After FTX collapsed, a number of crypto entities once tied to the bankrupt crypto exchange are trying to pick up the pieces and move forward. As for Solana — a prominent layer-1 blockchain that was backed by FTX and its outspoken founder, Sam Bankman-Fried — its co-founders see this downturn as an opportunity for its team and developers to build and ignore the noise.

“It’s just a time of immense fear, but there’s immense opportunity,” Raj Gokal, co-founder of Solana, said to TechCrunch. “There’s a lot of signal and a lot of noise.”

Developers in the space who weathered the last crypto market cycle see Solana’s ability to handle high levels of transaction throughput as an advantage over some other blockchains and remain bullish on the underlying technology more generally, Gokal explained. “They’re not just paying attention to what’s happening in the market. What they’re excited about is what they can build, and they’re still building it.

“A lot of them feel the urgency to be ready with their products [for] the next cycle so when that next market cycle comes, there will be a lot of new users trying to experiment with products in crypto and we expect that to happen in the next year.”

Solana founders see now as a time to bridge the blockchain and the physical world by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

As part of Airtable’s decision to cut 20% of staff, or 254 employees, three executives are “parting ways” with the company as well, a spokesperson confirmed over email. The chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer are no longer with the company.

Airtable’s chief revenue officer, Seth Shaw, joined in November 2020 just one month before Airtable’s chief product officer Peter Deng came on board. Airtable’s chief people officer, Johanna Jackman, joined Airtable in May 2021 with an ambitious goal to double the company’s headcount to 1,000 in 12 months. The three executives are departing today as a mutual decision with Airtable, but will advise the company through the next phase of transition, the company says. All three executives were reached out to for further comment and this story will be updated with their responses if given.

An Airtable spokesperson declined to comment on if the executives were offered severance pay. The positions will be succeeded by internal employees, introduced at an all-hands meeting to be held this Friday.

Executive departures at this scale are rare, even if the overall company is going through a heavy round of cuts. But CEO and founder Howie Liu emphasized, in an email sent to staff but seen by TechCrunch, that the decision – Airtable’s first-ever lay off in its decade-long history – was made following Airtable’s choice to pivot to a more “narrowly focused mode of execution.”

In the email, Liu described Airtable’s goal – first unveiled in October – to capture enterprise clients with connected apps. Now, instead of the bottom-up adoption that first fueled Airtable’s rise, the company wants to be more focused in this new direction. Liu’s e-mail indicates that the startup will devote a majority of its resources toward “landing and expanding large enterprise companies with at least 1k FTEs – where our connected apps vision will deliver the most differentiated value.”

The lean mindset comes after Airtable reduced spend in marketing media, real estate, business technology and infrastructure, the e-mail indicates. “In trying to do too many things at once, we have grown our organization at a breakneck pace over the past few years. We will continue to emphasize growth, but do so by investing heavily in the levers that yield the highest growth relative to their cost,” Liu wrote.

Airtable seems to be emphasizing that its reduced spend doesn’t come with less ambition, or ability to execute. A spokesperson added over e-mail that all of Airtable’s funds from its $735 million Series F are “still intact.” They also said that the startup’s enterprise side, which makes up the majority of Airtable’s revenue, is growing more than 100% year over year; the product move today just doubles down on that exact cohort.

Current and former Airtable employees can reach out to Natasha Mascarenhas on Signal, a secure encrypted messaging app, at 925 271 0912. You can also DM her on Twitter, @nmasc_.

Airtable chief revenue officer, chief people officer and chief product officer are out by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch

If you told me that a company that’s charging $70 per month for multivitamins would be able to raise a $10 million round, I’d demand to see the receipts, and I’d be very curious indeed to see its pitch deck. It looks like today is my lucky day!

Rootine is the company, and the founders were gracious enough to share their pitch deck with me. Let’s figure out what the investors saw in this startup.

The company first turned up in TechCrunch’s coverage as part of the Techstars accelerator back in 2018. Anthony Ha reported that the company had 1,500 paying customers in Europe and was gunning for a U.S. expansion. It looks like that was a long journey that ultimately worked out.

Rootine’s deck is my 30th teardown — time flies! You can see the rest of them here, in case today’s read isn’t quite enough pitch decking for you.

We’re looking for more unique pitch decks to tear down, so if you want to submit your own, here’s how you can do that.

Slides in this deck

The Rootine deck consists of 29 slides, and the team tells me there have been no omissions or redactions — this is what the investors saw when they were getting pitched!

Cover slide
Summary slide
Traction summary slide
Team slide
“Why” slide
Market context slide
Market size and market trajectory slide
Problem slide
Solution slide
“Community enhances member experience” — community slide
Business model slide
“The Precision Multivitamin”— product slide
“Supported by a variety of at-home lab tests”— product slide
“Innovative form factor for nutrition products”— product slide
Technology slide
“Feedback loop”— product slide
“How it works” slide — tracking member outcomes
Customer (“member”) results slide
Product traction slide
Customer traction slide
Partnership traction slide
Competitive landscape slide
Vision slide
Product road map slide
Revenue projection slide
Go-to-market evolution slide
Advisors slide
The ask and use of funds slide
Contact info slide

Three things to love

Rootine’s slide deck is a masterclass; it covers everything I would expect in a deck. It does go deeper than I would have liked into the product, but when I looked through it again, there’s not a lot I can remove from this deck to make itmuch better. Incidentally, there’s also not a lot I would add. That’s a great sign. Let’s check out some of the highlights.

An “ask” slide

By quite some considerable margin, the “ask and use of funds” slide is the most frequently screwed-up slide in pitch decks, in my experience. This one isn’t perfect, but I’m so glad it’s there, because it helps lead the conversation for what happens next.

I wish the company had included how much money it was raising on this slide to give it a sliver of additional context. But that’s an aside; I love the clarity here. Increasing ARR and membership numbers 3x and launching eight new products is a great set of goals. I wish the company had included deadlines (yes, 3x ARR … but when?), and “key hires” and “expand teams” are too fluffy. But most startups don’t include any of this, so very well done there.

One little detail, though: 30% growth, 40% tech, 20% community, 20% ops. Oops. I love the realism that everything in startups can run over budget, and I believe in the wisdom of raising more than you think you’ll need, but I’m pretty sure most investors would prefer the use of funds to add up to 100%.

As a startup, the lesson here is to show that you have clarity aroundwhy you are raising money, as well as what you’re going to accomplish with the money. It’s embarrassingly rare to see either of these things clearly outlined — and it’s literally the whole purpose of a pitch deck. Rootine’s example above is a good jumping-off point. Make it your own; make it good.

Traction galore

Rootine has a few traction slides in its deck (one that makes me unhappy, but we’ll get to that one), but I love how it flexes its numbers in various ways to show how well the company is doing. Slide 19 showcases some really cool traction:

An 18x increase in two years is objectively powerful. Not having numbers on the axes is a bit of a cheat (why‽), but the trend is clear, so that’s encouraging. The slide I really want to celebrate Rootine for, though, is the “summary” slide far earlier in the deck. Slide 2:

I’m a sucker for a good business-by-the-numbers-type slide. I’m a little confused by the inconsistencies. TechCrunch reported that the company had 1,500 or so customers back in 2018, so the 2019 “launch” seems odd. It’s also risky to show projected numbers as part of slides; having it in two colors (blue for “real” numbers and perhaps gray for the projected numbers) might have felt more honest.

I’d also have liked to see more detail about the numbers behind the numbers. Acquisition costs, margins and all the numbers that drive a business forward. Especially at a Series A, where a company is explicitly setting itself up for growth, it would be good to have more detailed breakdowns of how the various key metrics have evolved over time.

How has the customer acquisition cost (CAC) evolved over time? How has the initial spend per customer and assumed lifetime value per customer shifted? What about the costs of goods sold (COGS), etc.? As an investor, this is where I would spend a lot of my due diligence time, so it makes sense to include most — if not all — of that as part of the presentation. If you’re positioning yourself as being ready for growth, show that the numbers support that!

As a startup, consider how you can use the numbers driving your company to tell the story, both of what you have done and what you are about to do. If you have meaningful numbers that truly show the growth of your company — use ’em to ram that point home. What you are doing is hard; brag, brag, brag!

The path to $1 billion

The whole purpose of a startup is to scale outrageously fast. The exponential curve Rootine is showing in this curve looks impressive, and I am unsurprised that the investors got excited. I also suspect investors would ask how at this point. I think making a claim to be a $1 billion business within six years is bold and exciting. But you’d best show up with the receipts.

I hinted at that above; I’d want to see the numbers that drive this aggressive curve. Doubts aside; if you’re playing the VC game and you’re raising growth capital, this is precisely the sort of claim you need to be able to make, backed with some confidence and the numbers to back it up.

In the rest of this teardown, we’ll take a look at three things Rootine could have improved or done differently, along with its full pitch deck!

Pitch Deck Teardown: Rootine’s $10M Series A deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

The FTC announced Thursday that it would sue to block Microsoft’s acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard. Microsoft announced plans to buy the company, which has been plagued by sexual harassment and discrimination allegations and labor disputes, back in January for $68.7 billion.

The deal would be mark a seismic shift in the gaming industry — Activision Blizzard owns hugely popular games like the Call of Duty franchise and World of Warcraft — but the massive size of the deal and the prevailing anti-consolidation sentiment meant that it was due for some intense regulatory scrutiny from day one.

In its statement, the FTC cites concerns that the deal would “enable Microsoft to suppress competitors” to Xbox, including its paid Game Pass subscription service and cloud gaming services.

“Microsoft has already shown that it can and will withhold content from its gaming rivals,” FTC’s Bureau of Competition Director Holly Vedova said. “Today we seek to stop Microsoft from gaining control over a leading independent game studio and using it to harm competition in multiple dynamic and fast-growing gaming markets.”

PlayStation maker Sony, Microsoft’s console rival, has loudly objected to the proposed merger, which would consolidate some of the world’s most popular games under the Xbox’s banner. In recent weeks, Microsoft has been attempting to stave off the regulatory threat by promising to give Call of Duty equal treatment on the PlayStation and even agreeing to bring the franchise to Nintendoif the deal goes through.

The FTC is suing to block Microsoft from buying Activision by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch

Greetings from…somewhere. As I mentioned the other week, I’m taking a few weeks off. It’s the first time off I’ve had this year and the most consecutive days I’ve taken off in 15+ years of being a tech journalist. It’s been a hard/weird last few years, and burnout has a way of sneaking up on you while you’re not looking.

I’m trying to ignore the creeping sense of guilt about not doing a couple of proper year-end newsletters this time out. I’ll be back right after the Christmas break, though, and we can debrief on 2022 then, just as we ease into full freak-out mode pre-CES (the level of real robotics news at what is ostensibly a consumer show always feels like a bit of a crapshoot).

I also have some passing thoughts about the need for more focused robotics journalism out there that I’ve been wanting to get down on paper. That’s not to say there aren’t good people out there doing good work. But there’s a lot more that needs to be done to mainstream coverage. Apologies for pasting some thoughts over from LinkedIn. If you read those posts, feel free to skip the next couple of grafs. Consider this a minor manifesto of sorts.

Quoting myself here (I know, I know):

If you run a robotics startup and want coverage, come ready to answer difficult questions. Categories like crypto have been done a disservice by some breathless coverage. It’s our job to ask some hard and sometimes uncomfortable questions.

A good investor will have already prepared you for some of them, like market fit and ROI. Even seemingly simple questions like “Why does this need to exist?” and “Why are you the right person/team to execute it?” can be difficult for many founders to answer.

They shouldn’t be. You should be asking yourself these questions every day. If you can’t find meaningful answers, you might not be the right person for the job. Accepting that and pivoting isn’t failure. Ignoring it and carrying on ultimately might be, however.

I’ve been genuinely surprised that more major publications aren’t investing in robotics coverage. Now is the time to starting building coverage of robotics/automation. The category has largely been done a disservice, as it’s been more of an afterthought. I got my start writing about gadgets (it’s still a big part of my role at TechCrunch), so I completely understand the impulse to fall back on Skynet and Black Mirror jokes, rather than having a nuanced conversation.

But questions about ethics, automation/labor and the like are important to bake into these conversations. Asking difficult questions isn’t combative. It’s not doing the industry a disservice (unless said industry can’t stand up to scrutiny). It’s an important part of growing. Otherwise one day you wake up and have a Theranos or FTX on your hands.

Sometimes these things are scams from the outset, but oftentimes it’s the product of someone who believed in their mission, but ultimately didn’t get enough pushback along the way and began believing their own lies.

Asking the right questions comes with being immersed in a topic. Knowing the lay of the land, talking to the right people and finely honing your BS detector. I’m not here to be anyone’s cheerleader, but I’m also not in the business of criticizing for criticism’s sake. Coverage should reflect the product and the people who make it — for better and worse.

All right, that’s enough bloviating from me for a while. For the next couple of weeks, I’m leaving you in some very capable hands. We’ve got some insight from some very smart folks in the space. Coming up over the next couple of weeks are PlayGround Global’s Peter Barrett and UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg.

Q&A with Joyce Sidopoulos

Today we’re kicking things off with MassRobotics’ chief of operations, Joyce Sidopoulos, who was also a great help for my recent trip to Boston. See you on the other side.

TC: What was the biggest robotics story of 2022?

JS: There are a number of stories that are changing the landscape of the robotics industry, such as Hyundai’s announcement of a $400 million AI and robotics institute powered by Boston Dynamics, but one of the most impactful stories is Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot.

What are your biggest robotics predictions for 2023?

The adoption of robotics will continue to grow at a rapid pace, in spite of, or possibly due to, the predicted economic downturn. The last few years have proven the worth of many robot systems, such as those used in warehouses.

How profound of an impact has the pandemic had on robotics?

Very. The pandemic highlighted the value that robotics can provide, and spurred on more development and commercialization. The pandemic led to the realization that domestic manufacturing needs help and our supply chain is broken, areas which robotics can help solve. Industries began to adopt collaborative robots to help with workforce shortfalls and that will continue.

How much of an impact has the macroeconomic environment had on robotics investing?

We are definitely seeing that it is taking startups longer to raise rounds, but so far there are funds still available. MassRobotics recently held an investor demo day for about 30 of our startups and we had a great turnout of interested investors.

What underaddressed category deserves more focus from robotics startups and investors?

Climate change and sustainability. We will need to make significant strides in using technology to impact some of our global challenges, and we believe robotics can play a growing role, from wind turbine inspection to automated recycling.

How will automation impact the workforce of the future?

The best applications for robots today are where robots work in conjunction with human workers. Companies that have been successful in deploying robots have increased their workforce. Robots will replace dull, dirty and dangerous jobs. Those are the undesirable jobs that are not easily filled.

Are home robotics finally having their moment?

We are watching Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot closely. We believe there are plenty of opportunities for robots in the home in the future.

What more can/should the U.S. do to foster innovation in the category?

Increase the support for the startup community by investing in innovation centers (like MassRobotics) and create incentives for small and midsized firms to adopt robotics to allow them to be competitive on the world stage.

Critical mass by Brian Heater originally published on TechCrunch

Quick commerce grocery delivery companies are having a moment, and not necessarily a good one.

An industry that was on fire at the beginning of the global pandemic, mainly due to people forgoing IRL grocery shopping, has slowed as shoppers returned to brick-and-mortar stores.

As a result, several so-called q-commerce companies pumped the brakes. Gorillas said it would acquire competitor Getir and plans to inject $100 million into the company to help it out. In May, Getir announced layoffs. Gopuff announced plans to pull back in Europe, while JOKR left the U.S. and abandoned two Latin American markets as well. Perhaps most notably, Instacart paused its IPO.

While these kinds of announcements became more frequent this year, Duffl co-founder and CEO David Lin believes his quick commerce startup is an outlier in the sector.

How, you ask? By tapping into a model that focuses on 10-minute delivery of higher-margin goods, like snacks and convenience items, via e-scooter in more dense areas, enabling college students, called “Admirals,” to lead and run their own seven-figure businesses on campus.

That strategy has paid off so far: Duffl went through Y Combinator in Winter 2020 and has since raised over $13 million, including a $12 million Series A, led by Volition Capital in October 2021.

Duffl started off at UCLA, where Lin was an undergrad, and is now on the campuses of Arizona State University, University of Arizona and University of Texas, some of which are already cash-positive. Admirals and their employees fielded 35,000 orders in September from 11,000 students across those campuses and managed 69% growth in new customers from referrals during the same month, Lin said.

He spoke with TechCrunch about how he’s made quick commerce work for Duffl while others struggled. The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: We’ve seen some quick commerce companies struggle lately. What are the challenges to this market and how have some companies gotten it wrong?

David Lin: It’s certainly a difficult time for everyone, but especially players in this space, and in a down market, where you’re fundamentally dealing with low-gross-margin products, like groceries, produce and perishables. In addition, dealing with such a small time frame for delivery, you run into a lot of labor-related expenses, like transport, pick and pack costs, insurance and real estate overhead, that are very difficult to scale.

It sounds like it has much to do with the way a delivery company sets up its business model, correct?

Certainly. I would say that history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I started doing this in 2018, and it was quite interesting to watch the evolution through the pandemic.

Duffl’s David Lin dishes on why traditional rapid grocery delivery is not working by Christine Hall originally published on TechCrunch

When Ankur Nagpal sold Teachable for a quarter of a billion dollars, he felt lucky. Then, he quickly felt lost when trying to navigate the financial systems of a country he wasn’t born in and learn the institutional language often only spoken fluently by the historically wealthy.

It would be a few years of self-employment, and building a venture firm later, before Nagpal returned to the moment as one of the early catalysts for his newest startup, Ocho. The company, launching publicly today, wants to make it easier for business owners to set up and manage their own 401(k) retirement accounts.

Personal finance is hard – and that’s a tale as old, and difficult to disrupt, as time. And while Nagpal agrees that there’s no “north star” company that has shown how to tackle finance literacy at scale, he’s hoping that Ocho’s 10-person team may just have a not-so-boring wedge that changes that.

Ocho is joining the several fintech companies out there that aim to modernize, and really rebrand, the retirement account away from traditional providers like Charles Schwab or Fidelity, or expensive solutions like lawyers and consultants.

“I’ve started exploring the space, and we realize everyone – like Robinhood to Coinbase – is just spending unsustainable amounts of money to acquire customers, but are making no money themselves and continually sort of need these large funding rounds just to exist,” Nagpal said. “I’m actually expecting there to be a very rough 6, 12 or 18 months for fintech companies specifically.”

Ocho’s twist from competition, he thinks, is in its market focus. “There’s so many companies targeting startup founders and their wealth – there’s literally a new one launching every month or two all backed by big name VCs, but no one is focused on the business owner that is otherwise doing well but is not a startup founder or a startup employee,” he said.

Instead, Ocho is leaning into Nagpal’s background of working with creators when he was building Teachable. Teachable helped creators build revenue streams, Ocho wants to help those same creators take their earnings and invest, harvest and scale them in a smart way.

“At Teachable, we helped these people make money online and now there’s lots of places for creators, freelancers and entrepreneurs to make money online – but how do we help them think about building wealth?” Nagpal said. The long-term vision for Ocho is to offer products, beyond solo 401(k)s, that help business owners build wealth.

Human Interest is one of Ocho’s closest competitors; raising $200 million at a $1 billion valuation last year. Nagpal says that Ocho differentiates itself because its focused more on individuals, freelancers and creators, instead of Human Interest’s target of small and medium-sized businesses.

For now, Ocho is charging a flat $199 annual fee to help individuals start their retirement account. It takes about 10 minutes to set up, and 48 hours to get final confirmation.

The big challenge for the startup is getting the right solopreneurs to care about their retirement accounts. Its look for people who have income-generating businesses, but don’t have any full-time employees. If you have a side gig alongside your full-time job, you can create a 401(k) just for the side hustle, but can’t put full-time income into the retirement account.

Nagpal thinks he can nail early adoption through smart education material and outreach, referring to personal finance trends on TikTok as an example of consumer demand for more information. He says that 40% of the Ocho staff is working on marketing or education, and that the balance will be retained even as the company scales.

If education is so important to getting Ocho to work, one may wonder why it’s launching with a fintech product. The answer is simple: deadlines. Users need to make a retirement account by December 31, 2022, if they want one for 2023 – which puts the fintech in a relevant, but time pressed, position.

Nagpal isn’t worried about the seasonality of the 401(k) product because of the upcoming product roadmap, which includes the education product, investment flows into the retirement product like being able to invest in startups and ETFs, and even HSAs, often described as a 401(k) for healthcare.

To power that ambitious product spree, Ocho has raised $2.5 million from Nagpal’s own venture firm, Vibe Capital. The entrepreneur says that he raised the $60 million debut fund for Vibe Capital with the idea that he would incubate a startup or two out of the firm, which materialized today now that it owns 20% of Ocho.

Nagpal admitted that the idea of a founder using his own venture firm to seed his own startup may appear to be the “mother of all conflicts of interest” but reasoned that it was everything but. He emailed all LPs in his fund about the investment, got a unanimous yes, and ended up raising at a much lower price for the startup than if they had gone out into the fair market. It’s still uncommon to see founders sell a company, start a venture firm and then use that same venture firm to seed their next company.

Perhaps the unique connection between Nagpal’s first company, to his firm, to his newest startup, could hint at what his approach to personal finance may be: diversify across multiple vehicles, redefine what a supercharged investment could look like, and keep on learning.

Ocho wants to rethink (and rebrand) personal finance for business owners by Natasha Mascarenhas originally published on TechCrunch