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For founders winding down from a challenging year and planning for the new year, this is an excellent time to reevaluate your relationships with the investors you work with.

I am fortunate to be able to work with almost a dozen early-stage startups directly and get to observe the interactions between several dozen investors and founders. From all this, I have seen some founders do a better job than others tapping their investors’ strengths and wisdom while watching out for trouble.

What can founders do to revitalize their relationships with investors? Here’s a short list of dos and don’ts gleaned from what I’ve learned over the years:

Know your investor

As in any long-term relationship, knowing who you have chosen to work with is vital.

Investors, like all people, have distinct personality traits and sometimes associated shortcomings. This can be hard to gauge initially, but make sure you don’t ignore it.

Here are some examples of personality traits I have seen and how founders can learn to work with them:

Some investors could improve at follow-through. Maybe they have made too many investments and need more time, or they are just scatterbrained. No matter the reason, if you need something from them, it is your job to be organized about your requests and then regularly follow up.
Some investors react too sharply and unproductively at the first sign of weak business performance. They may see doom and gloom everywhere and echo every negative market sentiment. It is tough to have a balanced and open conversation with such people. It is best to have a few well-thought-out options written down before engaging with them.
Some investors may have a huge ego that will surface when you disagree with them. This trait is the toughest one to deal with, because any discussion is not based on substance but on power dynamics. If you have such an investor, make sure to have fact-based talks and draw the line (often and early) about whose decision this will be.

Tap investors for breadth over depth, but be careful how you do it

If you have an investor actively investing and engaged with their portfolio, they will be well versed in market and industry trends.

They can be a valuable source of information for questions such as:

How are other companies at my stage growing annually?
Who is the best sales recruiter for a B2B software company?
What valuations are companies at my stage getting?
What is the sentiment about investing in my space these days?

However, founders may want to have deeper conversations with their investors. Here is a typical example of a deep topic and some practical dos and don’ts:

How to make the most of your investor relationships in 2023 by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Nine days after being arrested in the Bahamas on a handful of criminal charges from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is heading back to the United States to face them.

Bankman-Fried was being held in the Bahamas Department of Correctional Services’ Fox Hill jail after being denied bail and was supposed to remain there until his next hearing on February 8, 2023. But he could now arrive in New York as soon as Wednesday afternoon to be arraigned in the Federal District Court in Manhattan, according to numerous reports.

The charges came after Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, which was once one of the largest globally, collapsed last month as a liquidity crisis unfolded and the company withheld withdrawals. The allegations include wire fraud, securities fraud and money laundering.

Bankman-Fried signed documents on Tuesday surrendering himself to the U.S., according to Bahamas Acting Commissioner of Corrections Doan Cleare. He’s expected to sign a separate group of documents finalizing his waiver of rights to fight extradition to the U.S. at Nassau’s Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday.

According to Bloomberg News, Bankman-Fried will be brought back to the U.S. on a private plane alongside FBI agents. Plans call for him to go from the prison to court Wednesday morning.

His arrival in the U.S. could expedite both prosecutors and legislators alike to dive deeper into the FTX collapse and uncover what truly happened to the once-valued $32 billion company.

Last week, when asked whether the entities will bring charges against other individuals allegedly involved in the FTX collapse, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said during the event, “I can only say this: Clearly, we are not done.” There haven’t been any new charges announced since.

On December 13, the U.S. House Financial Services Committee held a hearing on the FTX collapse with one witness: new FTX CEO John J. Ray III. During the four-hour hearing, Ray answered a number of questions from government officials and shared some new information around the situation, which you could read about here.

SBF is headed back to the U.S. to face a number of criminal charges by Jacquelyn Melinek originally published on TechCrunch

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

TechCrunch+ members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

We co-founded a startup in Colombia, and we’re thinking about opening a sales office in the U.S.! I would be moving, and my co-founder will continue to run our engineering team from Colombia.

I’m currently considering both the E-2 investor and L-1A executive visas. What are the pros and cons of each?

— Courageous Colombian

Dear Courageous,

What an exciting time and opportunity for you and your team! Congratulations on your U.S. expansion and for all the growth that got you to this stage. These visas are two great options for startup founders to move to the United States to expand their businesses.

Let me start by giving an overview of both the E-2 visa for treaty investors and the L-1A visa for intracompany transferee executives and managers. The visa applications for both are heavily scrutinized by immigration officials, so I recommend working with an immigration attorney to present a strong case.

E-2 visa

The E-2 visa provides a great option for international founders whose home country has a trade and commerce treaty with the U.S. The U.S. Department of State maintains a list of treaty countries. Colombia and more than 75 countries, including Pakistan and Taiwan, are on the list, but other countries such as China and India do not currently have the requisite treaties in place. The E-2 enables international founders to live and work in the United States while investing substantial capital to build a business here.

For a founder to qualify for an E-2 visa as an investor or essential employee, at least half of the U.S. business must be owned by people or companies from your country of citizenship. This can get complicated for startups after several rounds of dilution from U.S. investors. However, if you are forming a subsidiary of an already-profitable Colombian business and not planning to raise VC capital in the U.S., that might not be a big deal for you. Talk to a lawyer about your global corporate structure and your fundraising plans to confirm.

Although the E-2 requirements don’t specify a particular minimum amount of capital that must be invested into the U.S. entity, immigration officers look for large, upfront investments in office space, equipment and inventory, usually in the $100,000 range. Receiving a pre-seed or Series A round in the U.S. or another country can help streamline this portion of your case, but it’s not absolutely necessary. Some founders have succeeded in qualifying for an E-2 with even a transfer of valued intellectual property to their U.S. company.

While the E-2 does not require a U.S. business to create jobs in the future, immigration officials may consider it to be marginal without job creation, which would not bode well for E-2 approval. Already having U.S. employees or having a business plan that includes hiring in the U.S. can aid in the approval of your E-2.

Dear Sophie: What are the pros and cons of the E-2 and L-1A visas? by Ram Iyer originally published on TechCrunch

Whether you’re singing “Take This Job and Shove It” while workin’ “9 to 5”or you’re a fledgling startup founder, TechCrunch Early Stage 2023 is the bootstrapping bootcamp designed just for you. The daylong founder-focused summit — on April 20 in Boston, Massachusetts — covers the essential building blocks you need to build a solid foundation for startup success.

Early action equals super savings: We have a limited number of passes for a special launch price of $149. Buy one before they’re gone, and you’ll save $300!

TC Early Stage features a mix of panel discussions, workshops and small-group roundtable discussions that provide plenty of time for Q&A. You’ll engage with and learn from successful founders and industry experts across a range of core entrepreneurial skills.

Topics in previous years have included:

Understanding product-market fit — and how to find it
Building your brand
Attracting media attention
Scaling your customer base
Funding — from unconventional ways to Series A

This conference is all about you. We call it Early Stage, but that also includes folks who just have an idea they want to grow into a startup. Of our past attendees, 50% were bootstrapping, 65% worked at a startup and 49% were newly minted founders. Wherever you fall on the early-stage continuum, this is where you need to be to take your business to the next level.

TC Early Stage also focuses on networking — crucial for building a startup, and even more so at this stage. Don’t underestimate the reassurance that comes from connecting with a like-minded community and knowing you’re not alone. Plus, you just might meet the perfect co-founder or an engineer who can help you turn your idea into a viable product.

Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what one attendee told us about her experience:

“What you learn at Early Stage is so much better than the random information you find on YouTube. You get to interact with industry experts and ask them specific questions. It’s like a mini bootcamp, and you’re going to walk away with a lot of knowledge.” — Chloe Leaaetoa, founder, Socicraft.

TC Early Stage 2023, which takes place on April 20, 2023, in Boston, Massachusetts, provides access to essential information, resources and community connection to help nascent entrepreneurs and fledgling founders reach their potential. Buy a pass now — just $149 while supplies last — and join us in Boston!

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Early Stage 2023? Contact our sponsorship sales team byfilling out this form.

TechCrunch Early Stage focuses on fledgling founders by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch

Snapchat is introducing three new features for its paid subscription service, Snapchat+, which costs $3.99 per month. Subscribers can now make the look and feel of the app more personalized by customizing the camera capture button, app icons and more. Users can change the camera capture button to a specific color or shape, such as a heart or a soccer ball.

Subscribers can now also add a custom background to their chats with the new “Chat Wallpapers” feature. Chat Wallpapers were arguably first made popular by Meta’s WhatsApp, which has had the feature for quite some time now. Snapchat+ subscribers can now change their chat wallpapers to standard backgrounds available in the app or to an image from their camera roll.

Last, subscribers can now send a Snapchat+ subscription to a friend for the holidays with a new “Gifting” feature. The launch of this feature isn’t a surprise, given that Snapchat said back in October that this feature would be rolling out this month. With Gifting, you can send a 12-month Snapchat+ subscription to a friend for $39.99.

The social network’s previous Snapchat+ feature drop in October gave users the ability to have their Snapchat Stories expire at different intervals instead of 24 hours. With the update, Snapchat+ subscribers gained the ability to set Snaps on their Story to expire after either one hour, six hours, 12 hours, 24 hours, two days, three days or one week. It also gave subscribers the option to use different custom notification sounds for when a friend Snaps them.

Snapchat introduced its paid subscription back in June with exclusive, experimental and pre-release features. Snapchat+ unlocks the ability to see who has rewatched your story, along with a special badge and the ability to pin a friend as your No. 1 friend. Among other things, the subscription also includes the ability to see “the general direction of travel for where friends have moved recently.” In the first month since its launch, Snapchat+ had helped the app rake in over $5 million in revenue, according to estimates.

Snapchat+ adds new customization features and the option to gift a subscription by Aisha Malik originally published on TechCrunch

Software spend is becoming a prime target for cuts as it grows into a larger line item in enterprises’ budgets. According to one recent report, customers are putting 53% more toward software-as-a-service (SaaS) licensing compared to five years ago. Management has come down aggressively; 57% of IT teams told Workato in a 2022 poll that they’re under pressure to significantly reduce software spend at their organizations.

Cutting software spend is a task that’s easier said than done in companies where teams and even entire divisions rely on specific software to get their work done. The solution, Mark Ghermezian argues, is avoiding cuts in the first place — with business loans. But not just any loans — business loans specifically made out for software and infrastructure purchases.

Ghermezian is the founder of Gynger, a New York-based platform that offers companies capital to procure software and services products for their bespoke tech stacks. Gynger emerged from stealth today with $10 million in debt from Upper90 and $11.7 million in seed funding co-led by Upper90 and Vine Ventures with participation from Gradient Ventures (Google’s AI-focused venture fund), m]x[v Capital, Quiet Capital and Deciens Capital.

Ghermezian previously founded Braze, a cloud-based customer engagement platform for multichannel marketing. There, he says, he saw how difficult it was to sell software and — on the flip side — how difficult it was for buyers to purchase the software.

“Going through those pains while managing our budgets and thinking of cash flow and runway, I experienced the shortcomings of the business-to-business SaaS market firsthand,” Ghermezian told TechCrunch in an email interview. “As a founder, you raise all this money and immediately need to spend a lot of capital to build your tech stack. We wanted a way to combine software with capital to service the startup ecosystem and help them get the best software while extending and managing their cash flow.”

Gynger’s core product is an automated underwriting model for financing software and infrastructure purchases. The company provides a line of credit and debt financing to corporate customers, allowing them to pay their SaaS bills upfront while paying back Gynger later. (Ghermezian says that the debt Gynger raised will be used to finance these, although Gynger can — and has — loaned off its balance sheet.)

Ghermezian lists what he sees as the top benefits of Gynger’s platform, including giving customers access to upfront payment discounts from vendors and the ability to spread out lump sum payments over the course of three to 12 months. Gynger also provides a unified dashboard for SaaS expenses that consolidates them into a single monthly payment.

There’s some customizability with Gynger. Customers can choose to pay vendors the full year upfront in exchange for a discount or spread out existing bills, for example, and decide which contracts they want Gynger to finance on their behalves. Ghermezian says that Gynger’s decisioning algorithm looks at cash, burn rate and revenue to determine how much capital a company is eligible for.

The alterative financing market has exploded as macroeconomic headwinds spur companies to seek out nondilutive forms of capital. Ghermezian sees Gynger competing closely with fintechs like Pipe and Capchase, both of which provide businesses funding outside of equity and venture debt. But he notes that many loaners focus on purchasing a company’s receivables (i.e. funds owed goods and services) and lending against their annual recurring revenue. While Gynger considers revenue in making its loan decisions, it doesn’t require a company to have it.

“Companies of all sizes can benefit from Gynger, but we’ve seen particular success with pre-Series B companies,” Ghermezian said. “With Gynger, any company of any size can access non-dilutive capital, purchase the software and infrastructure they need to run their business and pay on their terms.

Lending to a company without revenue might sound risky. And Gynger’s website pitches the platform as a way for vendors to upsell customers by using flexible financing as an incentive for larger purchases, which also seems risk-seeking.

But Gradient Ventures’ Darian Shirazi said he believes that Gynger is taking a measured approach to doling out capital.

“The per-seat annual billing software model is evolving and we believe Gynger is offering new ways for companies to buy software that best suits their financial situation,” Shirazi added in a statement. “Many have attempted to innovate on the underwriting model for software financing, but the real multi-billion dollar opportunity is in offering a myriad of payment and financing workflows depending on customer need. Gynger is revolutionizing how customers pay for and purchase software and we’re thrilled to partner with them.”

In any case — setting the risks aside — lending for software spend seems like a decently safe business model bet, given that worldwide IT spending is expected to grow 4% to $4.5 trillion by the end of 2022, according to Gartner. That’s certainly a large and growing addressable market.

To date, Ghermezian says that Gynger has financed SaaS contracts as small as $1,000 to as high as $1 million from vendors including Airtable, Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services, Slack and Zoom. He declined to reveal Gynger’s revenue, but claimed that the 13-person company is “super healthy” in terms of cash flow.

Gynger launches out of stealth to loan companies cash for software by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Solid Power, one of the leaders in the race to commercialize all-solid-state lithium-ion batteries, has been stumbling of late. But a new deal with BMW might give it the boost it needs.

After going public via SPAC in late 2021, Solid Power’s share price followed the all-too-familiar SPAC bump then bust, trading for much of this year at a discount to its $10 debut. Then, in late November, its co-founder and CEO, Douglas Campbell, announced that he was stepping down, hastening the stock’s slide.

Campbell said that while the company had been able to deliver sample cells to partners BMW and Ford on time, it was having trouble finding talent to staff its facilities and high-quality materials to make its batteries.

Solid Power was founded in 2011, the year before battery pioneer A123 Systems collapsed. The larger company’s bankruptcy undoubtedly left an impression on the founding team. Instead of trying to compete with large battery manufacturers like LG, CATL, and SK Innovation, Solid Power has long sought to supply larger companies with battery materials that would enable denser, lighter cells.

Still, to win those large, long-term contracts, Solid Power still has to prove that its materials can be mass-produced. Hand-crafting a breakthrough cell in a lab is one thing; making hundreds or thousands of them in short order is another.

Solid Power has been making progress, unveiling a pilot production line in June that went on to make the cells for BMW and Ford. But that line apparently hit a few snags, and production hasn’t been proceeding as quickly as the company would like. It still has plenty of money — over $370 million in cash and securities, according to filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission — but it needs manufacturing expertise to surmount whatever barriers it’s encountered.

Enter BMW: Today, the two companies announced an expanded joint development agreement in which BMW pays Solid Power $20 million in exchange for the company’s manufacturing know-how. BMW will replicate Solid Power’s pilot production line in Germany, and it will also send battery and manufacturing experts to Colorado to help troubleshoot the original pilot line.

Solid Power and BMW’s R&D deal offers a sneak peek into the battery industry’s future by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch

Hello and welcome back toEquity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Mary Ann is taking the reins with another favorite from the TechCrunch Disrupt stage. She sat down with Brex CEO and co-founder, Henrique Dubugras, and Anu Hariharan, YC’s managing director for continuity and an early Brex investor, to expose the context around this whirlwind of a year.

The conversation candidly uncovers details behind the fintech’s pandemic pivot, layoffs, and going remote. If you love the conversation, share it with a friend. And if you want more on Brex, Mary Ann dove deeper into the conversation last month.

Equity drops every Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 7 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, ashow that details how our stories come togetherand more!

Brex’s 2022 reality by Theresa Loconsolo originally published on TechCrunch

We gift each other a lot of books each year. It’s a good practice, as having more books makes you a more handsome individual, and buying books helps support the arts. Or at least quasi-vanity business book publishers.

Regardless, we’re wrapping up the TechCrunch Book-A-Thon today with a series of recommendations from founders. Recounting the best books that entrepreneurs read in 2022 follows our list of recommendations from venture capitalists andthe TechCrunch staff.

Naturally, you’ll find a good number of business books below. There are also recommendations from founders that stray into the autobiographical and fiction realms. If you need even more book ideas, you can check out both parts of our 2021 list hereand here.

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

Founder book favorites, 2022 edition

Process Mining: Data Science in Actionby Wil van der Aalst

Recommended by Alex Rinke, co-founder and co-CEO of Celonis.

His research changed my life and the course of my career. Reading that book opened my eyes to a new way of running processes to companies everywhere — an adventure that involved my co-founders and me hand-writing over a thousand letters to top executives, driving all over Germany in a beat-up Opel Astra and so much more.

The best books that startup founders read in 2022 by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

You’d have thought that the quantified self movement was stalling out, but Metriport would like to tell you otherwise, thank-you-very-much. We covered the company back in February, and now it has raised $2.4 million to evolve to the next level.

The company went through Y Combinator, and in the process discovered how fractured the healthcare IT space was.

“One major issue that exists in the U.S. today is the fact that many individuals still aren’t able to access their own medical data, largely due to gatekeeping by hospitals and other medical providers. This is because these hospitals and providers use proprietary software systems that make it difficult for patients to access their own medical records or to share them with other providers,” says Colin Elsinga, co-founder & COO at Metriport, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We realized that there was so much work to be done in this space to make the data more accessible and that hardly anyone in the space was working on an open source, non-proprietary solution. Since we’ve always been mission-driven founders, having previously built a consumer health app, we decided to go after this larger problem with the goal of democratizing access to healthcare data and ultimately improve patient health outcomes.”

The funding round came together with investment from Y Combinator, Triple Impact Ventures, Nueterra Capital, Leonis Investissement, Zillionize, VentureSouq, Stonks and MyAsiaVC, along with a number of angel investors.

“The fundraise allowed us to grow our team and accelerate our engineering velocity, which is great since we have a lot of product to build. Additionally, it allows us to pave our way through the various compliance and legal fees tied to entering the healthcare space, which is extremely regulated. Today we’re excited to have launched our first product, our Health Device API, which allows digital health companies to gain access to their users’ consumer health data from various wearables, RPM devices and mHealth apps,” says Elsinga. “The next steps for us in the near term will be launching our second main product, our Medical API, which will allow companies to gain both access to their patients’ medical records and interface with EHRs. Both of these products are open source, which is a huge differentiator in the market.”

The company tells me it raised a $2.4 million seed round at a $20 million valuation, all on post-money SAFEs, and are working to launch its Medical API in 2023.

“Being the first open source solution of its kind, we’re really excited to see what sort of community contributions will come out of this, and how it will enable new companies to make innovations in the space that weren’t previously possible. We will set a new standard for dev-friendliness, transparency and accessibility in the health tech data space,” Elsinga explains.

The company thinks of itself as the medtech equivalent of what Plaid did for fintech; opening up a door for emerging digital health companies to get access to the data they need to grow and scale quickly.

“Based on the volume of customers lining up eager to use our product, we ask ourselves the same thing,” says Elsinga, when asked why nobody is doing this already. “The way we see it is that in every industry, when the existing players stagnate from being comfortable off of profits from the status quo, the market is open for disruption by younger, hungrier and more modern companies. That time is now in the healthcare data space, we know this needs to be built, and we’ll be the company to spearhead those efforts — setting industry standards along the way.”

Healthcare data is a mess and Metriport is here with a broom by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch