Product Management Confabulation
What Product Managers are talking about.
PayPal is gaining a new CEO, the payments giant announced this morning. Effective September 27, 2023, senior Intuit executive Alex Chriss will become PayPal’s President and CEO, replacing current CEO Dan Schulman, members of PayPal’s board shared this morning in a press release.
The appointment was made after a months-long CEO search process focused on finding a new leader for who had experience with global payments, product and technology.
Like Schulman, Chriss was a long-serving member of his former employer, having joined Intuit 19 years ago, then growing his responsibilities over time. Since January 2019, he served as Executive Vice President and General Manager of Intuit’s Small Business and Self-Employed Group, responsible for more than half of Intuit’s revenue. He’s overseen a global organization with thousands of employees tasked with delivering products like QuickBooks and Mailchimp to thousands of customers.
In his most recent leadership role, he grew its customers and revenues at a compound annual growth rate of 20% and 23%, respectively, the board’s announcement states. He also led Intuit’s $12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp in 2021.
Chriss has the unanimous support of PayPal’s board and its CEO search committee, who were tasked with finding a replacement for longtime CEO Schulman, who informed PayPal of its plans to retire at the end of last year. CNBC reports Chriss was chosen from a pool of nine candidates. The board also met with over 20 investors, including activist investor Elliott Management, its report noted.
“With his depth of experience in product development, his passion for serving customers and his longstanding commitment to empowering and enabling small businesses, and his proven track record of developing and inspiring his team, Alex is the perfect leader to take PayPal forward and accelerate the company’s growth opportunities,” said John Donahoe, Chair of the PayPal Board of Directors, in a statement. “The Board search committee worked diligently and thoroughly to find the right candidate to take PayPal into its next stage of growth and expansion, and we are confident Alex is that person.”
Chriss joins PayPal at a time when the company has been restructuring, having announced in February it was laying off 2,000 full-time employees, or 7% of its workforce, citing the macroeconomic environment. It said its savings of roughly $600 million would be reinvested in projects like passwordless checkout, one-click in-app experiences, and leveraging AI for advanced checkout flows, among other things.
Donahoe also thanked current CEO Schulman for his “outstanding leadership during PayPal’s eight years of growth as an independent company.”
“Dan made many major contributions to PayPal and helped establish the strong foundation for the future,” he said.
Exiting CEO Schulman first joined PayPal in 2014, following its separation from eBay. Under his leadership, Paypal grew its revenues from $9.2 billion in 2015 to $27.5 billion in 2022, with total active accounts more than doubling to over 430 million in 200 markets. Total payment volume also increased 5x from $288 billion in 2015 to $1.36 trillion in 2022.
“I’m proud of what we have accomplished at PayPal and of the incredibly talented and committed people I work with every day,” said Schulman, in a statement. “Together, we have reimagined financial services and e-commerce, and worked to improve the financial health of our customers. PayPal makes a difference every day for its customers and communities and the Company is positioned for a great future. It has been a huge privilege to have the opportunity to lead this great company for the past 8 1/2 years. However, I’m at a point in my life where I want to devote more time to my passions outside the workplace. I remain 100 percent committed to working closely with the Board and my eventual successor for a smooth transition and to ensure we keep our positive momentum on track,” he said.
Schulman will remain on PayPal’s board until its next annual meeting of stockholders in May 2024.
Investors are reacting favorably to PayPal’s news, as the stock is up nearly 2% so far this morning.
When you think about replacing a CEO, what springs to mind? The drastic action of a desperate board struggling to right a listing company? Buying an entire company just so you can get Ring’s ex-founder as your new CEO?
When I spoke with Troy Bannister about why he replaced himself as CEO of Particle Health, I became curious about how people go through such a process.
CEOs are replaced for all sorts of reasons: because they’ve found a new challenge, because the company has outgrown them, or because the board has lost confidence in the CEO.
And it’s not uncommon, either, as Crunchbase reported last year. In 2015, only one-third of startups that reached IPO had their founders as CEOs. Perhaps one of the biggest success stories of a founder walking away from their startup to watch it go on and achieve marvelous things is Marc Randolph at Netflix. But there’s Slack and Pipe and Fairphone and OnlyFans and Tubi, which all have new CEOs this year. Oh, and we heard Twitter has a new CEO as well.
As daunting as it might seem to step back as CEO and let go of the thing that you love, it’s often the right thing to do. It’s also something for which there isn’t necessarily that much guidance. DeeDee DeMan at Bench International, a life sciences and healthcare executive search firm, has been eagerly reaching for the bait when CEO-fishing season opens for more than 50 years. She joked that your CEO search ought to be more like “Finding Nemo” than “No Country for Old Men.”
Building a startup from the first flickers of an idea into a company with a product and staff and a payroll is an indisputably brutal process. For some founders, the self-inflicted stress is no longer tolerable. Others realize that they can’t take the company any further with their skill set.
“In the majority of cases, there comes a time that you need to have a professionally credentialed CEO to take the company to the next level,” DeMan said. “And that’s completely dependent upon the acceptance and the mentality of the founding CEO. They understand that their wealth of information is more a tradable asset as a domain expert, but that they still need the CEO on board to drive it. A professional CEO can [put] the rigor into the business to make it a ‘real’ business.”
After Elon Musk completed his Twitter takeover, multiple reports and tweets from company employees suggested that he fired CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, general counsel Sean Edgett, and head of legal policy, trust and safety Vijaya Gadde were leaving the company immediately. Now he might take over the top job — at least for now.
A report from Bloomberg suggested that Musk will take up the CEO position, but will hand it over to someone else in the long term. As a CEO he will have to take care of different challenges like user growth, revenue growth and content moderation hurdles.
Agrawal, who took over from Jack Dorsey last year after the Twitter co-founder left the company, has had a strenuous relationship with Musk. The Tesla CEO famously tweeted a poop emoji in reply to Agarwal’s lengthy thread about spam on the platform. The process leading up to the Twitter v. Musk trial revealed a trove of texts between different investors and executives. While Agarwal and Musk began their conversation cordially, their relationship soured over time.
Bloomberg’s report also mentioned that Musk plans to lift lifelong bans on users. Twitter famously banned former President Donald Trump last year for breaking the platform’s rules and over the “risk of further incitement of violence” following the U.S. Capitol attack. This step of unbanning all users might draw mixed reactions across the political spectrum, and will test the billionaire’s efforts as to how far he wants to go to make Twitter the “digital town square” he wants it to be.
We have heard a lot about Musk’s ideas as the top man of Twitter. That included suggestions of building “X, an everything app” to monetizing tweets in different ways. There has been a lot of uncertainty around how the Tesla CEO will handle layoffs and restructure teams at the social network during the course of the whole takeover deal starting from April.
While Twitter’s CEO, CFO, and top lawyers were fired today, several top executives including former GM of consumer, Keyvon Beykpour and former revenue product lead Bruce Falck have left the company since Musk initiated the deal. Given so many empty seats at top management, Musk has to bring in some top talent to execute things he wants to achieve at Twitter.
Elon Musk will reportedly take the CEO role after exec exodus by Ivan Mehta originally published on TechCrunch
Between the climate crisis and global pandemics, we’re living in remarkably fraught times. Undaunted by the magnitude of the challenges, Silicon Valley has been hard at work seeking to mitigate the threats, extend help to the overlooked, and prepare for a new kind of future. Some of the most promising and cutting-edge advancements in climate tech and health tech will be on display at Disrupt 2022, set for October 18–20 in San Francisco.
For founders, engineers, VCs and leaders working to save the world, Disrupt 2022 will be a three-day festival of hope. There are tracks for both climate tech and health tech, with presentations, roundtables, startup exhibitions and networking opportunities in each part of the convention. Disrupt 2022 will have a huge list of distinguished speakers and sessions — check them out here:
TechCrunch Disrupt takes place in San Francisco on October 18–20 with an online day on October 21. Buy your pass now, and you’ll save up to $700 over full-price admission before prices go up October 15.
Disrupt 2022’s climate tech and health tech sessions by Lauren Simonds originally published on TechCrunch
Web Summit, one of the world’s largest events centered around technology startups, is to launch a brand new venture capital vehicle consisting of two new funds, TechCrunch understands. The move follows an acrimonious fall-out between Web Summit’s co-founders, who first started the now-defunct Amaranthine VC fund in 2018, in part to join the ballooning investment ecosystem which had grown up around the Web Summit events.
While it’s been previously reported that Web Summit cofounder, Paddy Cosgrave, will imminently launch his new vehicle, Web Summit Ventures (WSV), the nature and size of the fund has not, until now, been revealed.
TechCrunch understands that WSV will command $40 million in funding, split into two $20 million funds. They will be dubbed “Web Summit Ventures Seed” and “Web Summit Ventures Growth,” respectively . The Seed fund will invest at the early stage and Series A, while the Growth fund will invest at the ‘Series B and beyond’ stages. Both will be ‘follow-on’ funds and are not intended to lead funding rounds, say sources. This mirrors the previous Amaranthine strategy.
Further confirmation of the funds’ existence comes in the form of a new job posting advertising for a for an Associate for the fund.
It’s understood that WSV is intended to replace Cosgrave’s previous attempt to enter the investing game, after the Amaranthine Ventures vehicle ended up embroiled in a series of byzantine legal fights amongst its founders and partners.
As previously reported in the Irish media, documents filed in the Companies Registration Office in Dublin, Ireland, where Web Summit was originally launched, show that Cosgrave, Web Summit CEO, is listed as a director of the Web Summit Ventures Management Ltd.
It’s understood that only Cosgrave and Chris Murphy and will be partners in Web Summit Ventures. Murphy is a former Web Summit employee, who went on to work for the Amaranthine Fund for nearly three years as its Managing Director.
A well-placed source told TechCrunch that one of the main differences with the new WSV fund is that a number of tech founders will join as LPs, include some of the founders of Twitter, Tinder, N26, Checkout.com, Rappi, Algolia, Lightricks and Wise, along with a handful of GPs at some VC funds who said to be investing personally, although this has not been independently confirmed.
The story of Web Summit’s attempts to participate in the vast ecosystem of startups it was amassing begins in 2018.
The Amaranthine Fund was set up by Cosgrave, David Kelly, a Web Summit co-founder, and Patrick Murphy, a fund manager, in 2018. But while it managed to back, among others, Hopin (the online events startup, the valuation of which soared to $5.6 billion during the remote-working era of the pandemic) a series of bitter disagreements led to Cosgrave suing Kelly and Murphy in the US courts.
The $50 million Amaranthine fund has since rebranded at Tapestry after the lawsuits were filed.
But the acrimony is not just confined to the US.
Cosgrave is also suing Kelly in the Irish High Court. Kelly and Murphy deny the allegations, while Kelly is separately suing Cosgrave in the High Court over alleged minority shareholder oppression. Cosgrave denies the claims.
A spokeperson for Web Summit declined to comment on the launch of WSV, citing regulatory restrictions.
Sources say Web Summit Ventures will be a new $40M follow-on fund by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
Web Summit, one of the world’s largest events centered around technology startups, is to launch a brand new venture capital vehicle consisting of two new funds, TechCrunch understands. The move follows an acrimonious fall-out between Web Summit’s co-founders, who first started the now-defunct Amaranthine VC fund in 2018, in part to join the ballooning investment ecosystem which had grown up around the Web Summit events.
While it’s been previously reported that Web Summit cofounder, Paddy Cosgrave, will imminently launch his new vehicle, Web Summit Ventures (WSV), the nature and size of the fund has not, until now, been revealed.
TechCrunch understands that WSV will command $40 million in funding, split into two $20 million funds. They will be dubbed “Web Summit Ventures Seed” and “Web Summit Ventures Growth,” respectively . The Seed fund will invest at the early stage and Series A, while the Growth fund will invest at the ‘Series B and beyond’ stages. Both will be ‘follow-on’ funds and are not intended to lead funding rounds, say sources. This mirrors the previous Amaranthine strategy.
Further confirmation of the funds’ existence comes in the form of a new job posting advertising for a for an Associate for the fund.
It’s understood that WSV is intended to replace Cosgrave’s previous attempt to enter the investing game, after the Amaranthine Ventures vehicle ended up embroiled in a series of byzantine legal fights amongst its founders and partners.
As previously reported in the Irish media, documents filed in the Companies Registration Office in Dublin, Ireland, where Web Summit was originally launched, show that Cosgrave, Web Summit CEO, is listed as a director of the Web Summit Ventures Management Ltd.
It’s understood that only Cosgrave and Chris Murphy and will be partners in Web Summit Ventures. Murphy is a former Web Summit employee, who went on to work for the Amaranthine Fund for nearly three years as its Managing Director.
A well-placed source told TechCrunch that one of the main differences with the new WSV fund is that a number of tech founders will join as LPs, include some of the founders of Twitter, Tinder, N26, Checkout.com, Rappi, Algolia, Lightricks and Wise, along with a handful of GPs at some VC funds who said to be investing personally, although this has not been independently confirmed.
The story of Web Summit’s attempts to participate in the vast ecosystem of startups it was amassing begins in 2018.
The Amaranthine Fund was set up by Cosgrave, David Kelly, a Web Summit co-founder, and Patrick Murphy, a fund manager, in 2018. But while it managed to back, among others, Hopin (the online events startup, the valuation of which soared to $5.6 billion during the remote-working era of the pandemic) a series of bitter disagreements led to Cosgrave suing Kelly and Murphy in the US courts.
The $50 million Amaranthine fund has since rebranded at Tapestry after the lawsuits were filed.
But the acrimony is not just confined to the US.
Cosgrave is also suing Kelly in the Irish High Court. Kelly and Murphy deny the allegations, while Kelly is separately suing Cosgrave in the High Court over alleged minority shareholder oppression. Cosgrave denies the claims.
A spokeperson for Web Summit declined to comment on the launch of WSV, citing regulatory restrictions.
Sources say Web Summit Ventures will be a new $40M follow-on fund by Mike Butcher originally published on TechCrunch
One of the alternative social networks to emerge out of the social media backlash of the Trump era is apparently going to try something new.
Parler announced Friday that it has acquired a cloud company called Dynascale in order to expand its vision beyond offering an (ostensibly) anything-goes social app to providing infrastructure for businesses that run the risk of getting the boot from mainstream providers.
The social app Parler will now operate under a new parent company known as Parlement Technologies, which also announced a fresh round of $16 million for the pivot toward infrastructure. The company didn’t name who contributed the new money, but previously received key investment from the deep-pocketed Republican donor Rebekah Mercer.
Parler’s CEO George Farmer, who will also lead the new parent company, told the Wall Street Journal that Parlement is “talking to a large range of conservative businesses” that could use its new cloud services. Farmer took over at Parler following the ouster of John Matze, a change of leadership apparently orchestrated by Mercer.
Parler topped App Store charts in early January 2021 after Twitter and Facebook banned President Trump for inciting violence at the U.S. Capitol. But that success was short lived — Apple and Google removed the app from their respective software stores after drawing a line between Parler and the January 6 violence. Amazon also pulled its web hosting, a trifecta of consequences that clearly made an impact on the company, even after it returned to tech giants’ good graces.
Apple reinstated Parler in April 2021 after the app promised to moderate additional content on iOS, bringing it into compliance with the company’s standards. Google only allowed the app back into the Play Store earlier this month, indicating that Parler adjusted the Android app to meet the company’s requirements for “robust” moderation.
Parler returns to a more crowded landscape of platforms catering to conservatives ready to jump ship from mainstream social networks. Trump launched his own app, Truth Social, in February, luring his supporters with the promise of unfiltered tweet-like posts.
Trump remains banned from Twitter for life, but the company’s reluctant new owner-to-be previous declared that he would reverse the decision, opening the door for Trump to return to his former platform of choice, likely at the expense of his current one.
Parler forms a new parent company to offer ‘uncancelable’ cloud services by Taylor Hatmaker originally published on TechCrunch
Graph databases, which store information in nodes and relationships instead of tables like Excel sheets, have grown in popularity amid an explosion of data across industries. While TigerGraph and Neo4j have dominated the Western market, China is seeing its own homegrown pioneers in the space.
NebulaGraph is one of China’s fastest-growing startups offering graph databases with open-source and enterprise subscription options. Two years after we covered its $8 million funding round, the company announced this week that it has closed a Series A round led by Jeneration Capital. The company did not specify how much it has raised, only saying it’s in the “low tens of millions” of dollars.
Other investors in the round include Matrix Partner China, Redpoint China Ventures, and Source Code Capital.
NebulaGraph has recorded some encouraging growth over the last two years, during which its user number soared to over 900 from just 60, including freemium and paid ones. The types of users have also broadened. Two years ago, customers were mainly using NebulaGraph to explore data relationships on social media, e-commerce, and fintech platforms. Since then, the startup has attracted companies from the manufacturing sector, the most surprising ones being electric vehicle and airplane makers.
The EV supply chain is highly sophisticated and each car sale can generate reams of data from the design stage to after it ships, said founder and CEO Sherman Yu, who previously worked at Ant Group and Meta. Even a small defect in a nail could have a big ripple effect on the vehicle, so manufacturers keep a mountain of information detailing the conditions of various parts, such as which supplier and even worker is responsible for them.
That’s not the end of data collection. In today’s hyper customization, internet-connected vehicles are also learning driver and passenger behavior. That means auto companies need more robust tools to process the ocean of data they own, which is where graph databases come into play.
“You could still find relationships in data before, but relational databases become very slow as the data set grows,” explained Yu. Much of what NebulaGraph does for its customers is real-time, like shopping recommendations, so speed is critical.
Other emerging user cases for NebulaGraph include AI-based drug discovery and chip design, Yu added.
Some 90% of the company’s users are in China, but like many maturing open source SaaS firms, NebulaGraph has a vision of venturing into the West and building a global developer community. The company’s plan to open an office in the U.S. was “stalled” by the COVID-19 pandemic, Yu said, but it’s retooling resources to bring back global expansion in 2023.
While many of China’s consumer-oriented startups are going global as regulatory uncertainties rise at home, NebulaGraph wants a piece of the Western SaaS market because it’s “more mature,” said Yu.
With the world’s largest internet population, China clearly has an abundance of data to mine. The problem is that from scrappy startups to deep-pocketed corporations, the willingness to pay for SaaS remains low. That’s in part due to China’s long history of software piracy and its relatively low labor costs, which make workplace automation less urgent than in the West.
There’s also a legacy accounting issue, Yu explained. Till today, China still hasn’t formally classified computer software — whether it should be categorized as assets or costs, making it tricky for companies to do their books.
NebulaGraph reaps from China’s growing appetite for graph databases by Rita Liao originally published on TechCrunch
SoftBank’s retreat from its past investing exuberance continues apace. This morning, Kahoot, the Norwegian startup that provides a popular platform for people to build and use education-focused games, announced that General Atlantic is buying out SoftBank’s entire 15% stake in the company. SoftBank is exiting at a loss. The firm sunk at least $215 million into the company in the last several years. However, 15% of Kahoot’s current market cap (10.415 billion Norwegian Krone) works out to about $152 million (1,562,250,000 NOK).
This looks like an all-secondary round: no new investment coming in alongside the buyout. (We’re confirming this with Kahoot and will update as we learn more.) “Kahoot plans to partner with General Atlantic to accelerate further growth initiatives, drive innovation, and expand its global footprint in homes, schools, and corporations,” the company said in a statement.
Nevertheless, the deal comes as Kahoot, like many other tech companies, continues to feel the pinch of the general downturn in technology stocks and the wider technology market. A year ago, its shares were trading at 70.25 NOK on the Oslo Stock Exchange. They are now worth only 22.77 NOK. And that is with a bump of nearly 27% that Kahoot had this morning on the news of the investment/divestment.
SoftBank, meanwhile, has been in hot water itself, facing up to big losses in its splashy Vision Fund investment vehicles on the back of those wider tech industry doldrums. In August, Vision Fund I reported a loss of over $17 billion for just one quarter (Q1). Vision Fund 2 is reportedly down in value by some 19% on the funds that have been invested so far. Amid layoffs and big executive changes, no surprise, then, that it is now divesting stakes that are underperforming. (It’s still working on a Vision Fund 3 though, so never say die in the world of tech.)
“We are very grateful to SoftBank for their partnership over the past two years. As Kahoot! continues to pursue its mission to improve lifelong learning by building a leading global learning and engagement platform, we are thrilled to add a partner of General Atlantic’s caliber,” Eilert Hanoa, CEO of Kahoot, said in a statement. “The team at GA brings deep experience in scaling global education technology and software businesses and positioning market leaders for long-term success, and we look forward to our next phase of momentum in empowering the learning ecosystem around the world.”
“We believe Kahoot has significant potential for further growth as digital learning solutions continue to be adopted across its work, school, and home markets,” added Chris Caulkin, MD and head of technology for EMEA at General Atlantic. “With its much-loved brand, product-centric approach, and engaged global user base, Kahoot is well positioned to scale, and we look forward to supporting Eilert and the full Kahoot! team in the years to come as they reach and engage ever more users worldwide.” General Atlantic and SoftBank have partnered on many deals in the past, so there was clearly already a relationship between the two and that may have played a factor here as well.
To be fair, since SB Northstar (the SoftBank Group fund making the investment) made its first investment in Kahoot nearly two years ago, in October 2020, Kahoot has grown a lot. It had 1.3 billion users (“participating players”) at that time; now that number is 8 billion.
What started as a “YouTube for education”- style model (big emphasis on user-created content and a way of using what you have made for yourself or your own learning group, but also dipping in and using material made by others) has worked to diversify deeper into enterprise and more. It said today that Kahoot! at Work is used in 97% of Fortune 500 companies for corporate learning and engagement, and that Kahoot! at School is used by approximately 9 million teachers in the classroom. And Kahoot! at Home & Study has over 18 million users as an “at-home gamified learning solution.”
Indeed, the company went large during the Covid-19 pandemic, doubling down on being one of the platforms to help fill the gap of amusement and engagement for students who were no longer in classrooms; and ditto for remote workers as a way of team building and more.
But as with many companies that found business ballooning because of market conditions, now as more people return to the office, students are back in the classroom, and generally budgets are all being reined in in the current economic climate, it will be having an effect on Kahoot as well.
We’ll update this post as we learn more.
General Atlantic buys out SoftBank’s 15% stake in edtech Kahoot, now valued at about $152M vs the $215M SoftBank ponied up 2 years ago by Ingrid Lunden originally published on TechCrunch