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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 3, 2022. We have the latest from how the technology world is responding to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as well as a review of the Theranos show, notes from New Zealand venture capital and more.
Our city spotlight series is back, and we are going to Austin. The company is worth $8.6 billion, so it's fun that the co- founder will be at the event. See you at all three!
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Startups and VC
There is a lot to talk about today, but let's start with some non-financial fare. We watched the Theranos show, and we have thoughts about it. We have notes on the latest and greatest in virtual reality fitness products. The two that are there are from our own. You can follow her on social media.
- Lido wants to help stake Ethereum: I won’t get into the proof of work versus proof of stake argument here, so suffice it to say that more eth needs to get staked for the blockchain to evolve. Per our reporting, Lido “is the market leader for Ethereum liquid staking” and just raised $70 million from a16z. That’s a lot of coin, frankly, but if startups are expensive these days, crypto startups are doubleplusexpensive.
- OSOM’s phone debut delayed for new chip: From the ashes of Essentials, an effort to build a new smartphone, OSOM was born. But instead of showing its latest and greatest at the recent phone event (MWC), the startup was “convinced that pushing things back to launch a new device with the latest Qualcomm chip would be a prudent business decision.”
- New Zealand gets new venture fund: If you are building a startup in Australia or New Zealand, you might feel somewhat distant from Silicon Valley. And that’s fair. It’s a long flight. But in good news, “Mark Pavlyukovskyy, Ajay Gupta and Glen Anderson formed New Zealand’s first operator-run fund, NZVC, over the last year,” we write, and the fund just reached a first close worth $10 million.
- Consolidation in the transcription space: We love a startup deal here at TechCrunch, so we took the time to write up Verbit (“AI-powered transcription and captioning service”) buying Take Note (“transcription, captioning and note-taking services”). Otter.ai is also in the market, and DeepGram fits in somewhere as well.
- Decipad wants to make you an Excel wizard: OK not precisely, but the startup does want to help folks do more with numbers. Given how important spreadsheets and other methods for housing and tinkering with numbers are to the global economy, no one is going to be able to say that Decipad lacks TAM. And the startup just raised $5 million for its work.
Apollo.io raised $110 million for its sales intelligence and engagement, and MyPlace raised nearly $6 million for a home-sharing social network.
To achieve enterprise sales success, tailor your approach to CIOs
You are more likely to close a sale if you have a good idea of the customer's needs. That presents a special problem for enterprise startups.
Unless you are a former CIO who has a clear understanding of the decision-making process, you can only fall back on basic best practices that will usually result in a generic pitch.
Yousuf Khan is a partner at Ridge and he wrote a column about what CIOs look for in solutions and how you can tailor your sales approach accordingly.
Customers can be turned into assets if a founder takes a conscious approach.
Good relationships with executive buyers can help shape your company as it grows, ultimately serving as an unofficial advisory board of the top leaders and experts within your customer base.
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To achieve enterprise sales success, tailor your approach to CIOs
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- Rivian partially retracts price hikes: Early reviews look good for Rivian’s trucks, but announced price hikes were not well-received by the market. Now the public EV company is saying that if you ordered your vehicle before the start of March, no price hikes for you!
- Yet more spyware is out there, stealing your data: Sadly, the name of the Android spyware that is sucking up folks’ information is called TeaBot, which is a super-cute moniker. Regardless, it’s out in the market racking up downloads, which is pretty bad.
- Twitter expands its Birdwatch program: Can community fact-checking make Twitter a better place? The company hopes so, and is expanding its “community-based fact-checking initiative” called Birdwatch to work on just that.
TechCrunch Experts
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