Category: startups

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Trifo raises $15M, announces new robot vacuum

Just over two years ago, PerceptIn announced an $8 million Series A. The funding followed a $2 million seed round, and found the startup essentially coming out of stealth to showcase the sensors it was building for a wide range of form factors, from cars to robot vacuums.

The company’s been quite busy in the meantime. In fact, it even went so as changing its name. PerceptIn is now “Trifo” — a punchier name, if not quite as memorable. The company’s currently on its third robotic vacuum, announced today and set to be officially unveiled at CES in a few days.

Along with the arrival of “Lucy,” comes some more big funding from the Samsung Ventures-supported startup. Trifo has just raised a $15 million Series B, bringing its total funding up to $26 million. The round includes backing from Yidu Cloud, Tsinghua AI Fund and Matrix Partners, with a focus on producing more hardware and software solutions in the home robotics space, additional hiring and pushing into the U.S. and European markets.

For now, robot vacuums appear to be the company’s primary public facing output. It’s a tough market — one that’s traditionally been dominated by one player (iRobot). Still, there’s no shortage of alternatives from players big and small looking to crack it.

As for what sets Lucy apart, there are a pair of cameras on board — that could either be a plus or minus, depending on where you land on matters of privacy. The pair combine 1080p color images with depth sensing to provide home surveillance and mapping in light and dark settings. The robot can also be designed to “patrol” the home in pre defined routes. 

Lucy also features built-in obstacle avoidance for objects as short as one inch, room-by-room cleaning and and a 5,200mAh battery for up to two hours of cleaning on a charge. Pricing is $799, putting it in line with iRobot’s offerings. It’s set to arrive at some point in Q1. 

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Airbnb’s New Year’s Eve guest volume shows its falling growth rate

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.

It’s finally 2020, the year that should bring us a direct listing from home-sharing giant Airbnb, a technology company valued at tens of billions of dollars. The company’s flotation will be a key event in this coming year’s technology exit market. Expect the NYSE and Nasdaq to compete for the listing, bankers to queue to take part, and endless media coverage.

Given that that’s ahead, we’re going to take periodic looks at Airbnb as we tick closer to its eventual public market debut. And that means that this morning we’re looking back through time to see how fast the company has grown by using a quirky data point.

Airbnb releases a regular tally of its expected “guest stays” for New Year’s Eve each year, including 2019. We can therefore look back in time, tracking how quickly (or not) Airbnb’s New Year Eve guest tally has risen. This exercise will provide a loose, but fun proxy for the company’s growth as a whole.

The numbers

Before we look into the figures themselves, keep in mind that we are looking at a guest figure which is at best a proxy for revenue. We don’t know the revenue mix of the guest stays, for example, meaning that Airbnb could have seen a 10% drop in per-guest revenue this New Year’s Eve — even with more guest stays — and we’d have no idea.

So, the cliche about grains of salt and taking, please.

But as more guests tends to mean more rentals which points towards more revenue, the New Year’s Eve figures are useful as we work to understand how quickly Airbnb is growing now compared to how fast it grew in the past. The faster the company is expanding today, the more it’s worth. And given recent news that the company has ditched profitability in favor of boosting its sales and marketing spend (leading to sharp, regular deficits in its quarterly results), how fast Airbnb can grow through higher spend is a key question for the highly-backed, San Francisco-based private company.

Here’s the tally of guest stays in Airbnb’s during New Years Eve (data via CNBC, Jon Erlichman, Airbnb), and their resulting year-over-year growth rates:

  • 2009: 1,400
  • 2010: 6,000 (+329%)
  • 2011: 3,1000 (+417%)
  • 2012: 108,000 (248%)
  • 2013: 250,000 (+131%)
  • 2014: 540,000 (+116%)
  • 2015: 1,100,000 (+104%)
  • 2016: 2,000,000 (+82%)
  • 2017: 3,000,000 (+50%)
  • 2018: 3,700,000 (+23%)
  • 2019: 4,500,000 (+22%)

In chart form, that looks like this:

Let’s talk about a few things that stand out. First is that the company’s growth rate managed to stay over 100% for as long as it did. In case you’re a SaaS fan, what Airbnb pulled off in its early years (again, using this fun proxy for revenue growth) was far better than a triple-triple-double-double-double.

Next, the company’s growth rate in percentage terms has slowed dramatically, including in 2019. At the same time the firm managed to re-accelerate its gross guest growth in 2019. In numerical terms, Airbnb added 1,000,000 New Year’s Eve guest stays in 2017, 700,000 in 2018, and 800,000 in 2019. So 2019’s gross adds was not a record, but it was a better result than its year-ago tally.

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Keeping Your Startup CEO & CTO from Thrashing

Q: How are startup CEOs (and CTOs) like seagulls?

A: They both fly by, swoop in, ruin your lunch, shit on you, and leave.

Ahh, the Startup CEO and CTO. God bless 'em. The ones that are capable enough to grow their company to the point where they hire product managers (usually after closing A-series funding or later), well, they tend to be of a certain personality type:

  • Driven, intense
  • Smart as hell
  • Attracted to bright, shiny objects and the latest ideas suggested by a sales prospect or potential investor or that they read in a magazine article
  • Memory-challenged; cannot recall fundamental strategic decisions s/he made 2 days ago that were based on extensive research and discussion with their team.
  • Over-confident in his/her own abilities and their team's ability to deliver even more than what they have already committed
  • Full of ideas -- both great ones and shitty ones
  • Somewhat schizophrenic, with a permanent reality distortion field around them. These folks often change minds very often, yet they will insist that whatever they believe this very moment is what they have ALWAYS believed (even if they said EXACTLY the opposite thing yesterday).

These characteristics helped these visionary, entrepreneurial types get to where they are today, and helped your startup get to where it is right now. If they were NOT like this, you probably would not be employed right now. Otherwise, they would have given up on the company long before needing Product Management.

In fact, your CEO's/CTO's lovable qualities might be exactly why YOU, product manager extraordinaire, were brought on -- in order to insulate the Engineering team (and the rest of the team) from strategic thrashing and daily massive changes in the product direction.

So, next time your boss or some other ne'er-do-well comes by your desk and says something misguided like:

"Instead of focusing on market segment , can you shift the target to 'everyone with a computer or mobile phone?' I don't want us leaving money on the table."

or

"Can't we just port the entire enterprise server product so it runs on an iPhone as a standalone app? Within a month? That would be SO COOL and a really awesome demo!"

or

"I know that our target market is officially healthcare and insurance providers, but there are some great opportunities in the kids' toy market. Can you figure out what features we need for that and add them on the roadmap?" [1]

Well, Just Don't.

Don't entertain these crazy-assed notions. Not at first, anyway. Things that "visionary" type execs say when they are walking by your desk are not to be taken seriously until you're sure they are not just fixated on the latest shiny, new object. One of Product Management's vital functions is insulating development from the never-ending ideastorm that plague many company execs. ESPECIALLY startup CEOs and CTOs. Coming up with random ideas, forgetting all previous decisions, and wanting to act immediately is part of the personality profile for these folks.

However, don't provide a long-winded answer about why this idea is not possible, un-researched, counter to decisions the same person made just 2 days ago, inhumane, or whatever -- even if they are true. Don't bother. At best, you'll seem like you have no vision and just like to say 'no' all the time. At worst, you'll have to move forward with the insane idea.

INSTEAD, I recommend you use a technique that I have perfected as the mother of two small kids:

DISTRACTION.

That's right. Distract 'em. Get this person focused on some other 'critically important' issue that requires this derailer's boundless experience, profound business sense, and executive judgement.

And DON'T feel guilty about it. Because if this person's idea truly IS important, you will not be able to distract the idea out of their head. If this person comes back to you two or three times about this idea, well, time to take it seriously and do some research.

If you can't think of any distraction activities on the fly, here are some suggestions.

  1. The "tag line" for your product, and its exact buzzwords ("What do you think of calling this the Capitalist Analytic Cloud?").
  2. Code names and numbering schemes for releases
  3. The marketing website's color scheme
  4. Whether you are really doing Agile Development, Modified Agile, or Not-At-All-Agile-But-Claims-It-Is.
  5. How much product development and product management process is too much, and how much is too little.
  6. How AWESOME that new professional-grade espresso maker thing is -- you know, the one that the Executive in question spent about 3 days painstakingly researching?

  1. This last one is a real quote from one of my former CTOs. ↩︎