Tag: EC Media

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Pitch Deck Teardown: MiO Marketplace’s $550K angel deck

Welcome to our 40th Pitch Deck Teardown! Goodness, time flies.

Of those 40, just three were angel rounds, so today, we’ll take apart the angel deck of MiO Marketplace, a platform for media publishers and buyers. The company raised $550,000 at a $3.6 million pre-money valuation.

Breakdown of the pitch deck teardowns to date. Image Credits: TechCrunch / Haje Kamps

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

MiO Marketplace comes out of the gate hard and just keeps going. The deck didn’t include all the important bits, however, and I wish the company had done a few things differently, but we’ll get to that. For now, here are the 16 slides that make up its angel deck:

  1. Cover slide
  2. History slide (“Evolution of online marketplaces”)
  3. Vision and mission slide
  4. Problem slide
  5. Solution slide
  6. Opportunity slide
  7. Market-size slide
  8. Competition slide (“B2B SaaS for Media Buyers/Sellers”)
  9. Value proposition slide 1 (“Features for buyers”)
  10.   Value proposition slide 2 (“Intelligence for sellers”)
  11.  Business model slide (labeled as “Go-to-market”)
  12.  Traction slide
  13.  Financial slide (labeled as “Projections”)
  14.  Team slide (“Founder”)
  15.  Board of directors slide
  16.  Contact slide

Three things to love

MiO nails its pitch in a few really important parts, which is ever so delightful. Its team slide focuses on all the right things, it does a good job explaining its value prop and including the company’s mission helps solidify how it views the landscape.

Really promising team slide

[Slide 14] That’s how you show founder-market fit. Image Credits: MiO Marketplace

At the earliest stages of a new business, investors don’t have a lot to go on: There’s not much of a product yet, there isn’t much traction — there’s really not much of anything. So, how do you evaluate an early-stage company? You look at things like whether there’s a big enough market, problem and opportunity for return, but most importantly, you have to consider whether this is the right team to bring this product to market. On paper, CEO and founder Sean Halter is a good bet. He claims to have decades of experience and appears to have deep market understanding. Those are all useful. So what does a VC do next? A bit of light due diligence to see if what’s on the slide matches up.

Pitch Deck Teardown: MiO Marketplace’s $550K angel deck by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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How the NYT is building a modern tech stack to drive every part of its media biz

If every company has become a tech company, then The New York Times is a prime example. Although it launched as a print newspaper 171 years ago, in 1851, today that same company is very much a tech-driven media business.

While the transition has been ongoing to some extent for decades, the NYT brought in Jason Sobel in the summer of 2021 as chief technology officer to accelerate the transformation into a modern tech organization.

Sobel brings 15 years of pure engineering expertise to the job, including long stints at Airbnb and Facebook, where he helped to lead infrastructure. The Times brought in an engineer with this kind of expertise precisely because it needed someone to build the same kind of technology that was being built by the biggest tech companies.

In fact, Sobel said that he has found that the technical side of things isn’t all that different from his prior experience, except that everything he does is done in service of the editorial business.

“So it’s funny — it actually isn’t that different. I mean, the newsroom does make a difference in some ways. There’s obviously the strong editorial voice that’s always going to be important in the kinds of content we write and how we deliver it,” Sobel told TechCrunch.

But when it comes to building a technology organization, Sobel said what the paper of record is building actually feels quite familiar. “We have a cross-functional team of designers, engineers and product managers all working together to ship websites and apps and back-end tech. So I’ve been surprised at how similar it is,” he said.

How the NYT is building a modern tech stack to drive every part of its media biz by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch

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Can Korean digital storytelling platforms captivate North American and European audiences?

Korean storytelling companies want to kindle the popularity of webtoons and web novels in the West on the back of their success in East Asia.

Serialized digital comics, also known as webtoons in South Korea, are optimized for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets or websites, which read top to bottom.

Digital comics gained broad popularity throughout South Korea and Japan in the early 2000s and caught on in the U.S. in the 2010s. In 2014, Amazon acquired Comixology, the largest marketplace for digital comics in the U.S., and last year, the largest bookseller in the world incorporated the Comixology app into Kindle, allowing digital comics to be read on their smartphone or Kindle.

Some comic apps, such as Madefire and the Archie comics app, shut down in 2021, while Comixology was affected by Amazon’s recent layoffs.

Still, some big digital comics firms believe switching the medium from print to digital could enable the revival of web- or app-based serialized storytelling like webtoons and web novels. And some South Korea-based Big Tech companies have ambitions beyond the comics and novels world.

Earlier this month, Kakao Entertainment, which operates storytelling platforms and a music streaming service, announced it received $966 million in funding from sovereign wealth funds, including Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and Singapore’s GIC (Pwarp Investment). The new money will go toward extending its global storytelling content and intellectual properties, around which original series and movies are based, specifically in North America, Kakao pointed out. The funding comes roughly two years after it acquired two U.S.-based storytelling platforms, Tapas and serialized fiction app Radish.

I caught up with industry sources, including Naver-owned WEBTOON global CEO Junkoo Kim, who founded WEBTOON in 2004, and Kakao Entertainment‘s global business director, Jayden Kang, to learn more about the webtoon industry and why they want to bet on the business of storytelling.

Are webtoons the next blockbuster?

Naver and Kakao, the two largest Korean internet firms, believe storytelling platforms could be the next entertainment blockbuster, coming hot on the heels of the global popularity of K-pop boy band BTS and Netflix’s “Squid Game.”

Can Korean digital storytelling platforms captivate North American and European audiences? by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch

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Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity

Twitter finally broke its silence over the first security incident of the Musk era: an alleged data breach that exposed the contact information of millions of users.

In late December, a poster on a popular cybercrime forum claimed to have scraped the email addresses and phone numbers of 400 million Twitter users by way of a zero-day security flaw in Twitter’s systems, previously blamed for exposing at least 5 million Twitter accounts before it was fixed in January 2022. The subsequent sale of another, smaller dataset containing the email addresses associated with more than 235 million Twitter accounts is said to be a cleaned-up version of the alleged dataset of 400 million Twitter users. Researchers warned that the email addresses, which included the details of politicians, journalists and public figures, could be used to dox pseudonymous accounts.

Twitter, or what’s left of the company, addressed the situation last week.

In an unattributed blog post, Twitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that the data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter’s systems. An absence of evidence, however, is not vindication, as it’s unclear if Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if any user data was exfiltrated. Rather, the company said that hackers had likely been circulating a collection of data pulled from past breaches and said the data did not correlate to any of the data obtained by way of exploiting the bug that was fixed in January 2022.

What Twitter is saying may very well be true, but it’s difficult to have confidence in the company’s statement. Twitter’s erratic response raises many of the same questions that regulators will want to know: Who was tasked with investigating this breach, and does Twitter have the resources to do a thorough job?

An important lesson in what not to do

Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

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Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity

Twitter finally broke its silence over the first security incident of the Musk era: an alleged data breach that exposed the contact information of millions of users.

In late December, a poster on a popular cybercrime forum claimed to have scraped the email addresses and phone numbers of 400 million Twitter users by way of a zero-day security flaw in Twitter’s systems, previously blamed for exposing at least 5 million Twitter accounts before it was fixed in January 2022. The subsequent sale of another, smaller dataset containing the email addresses associated with more than 235 million Twitter accounts is said to be a cleaned-up version of the alleged dataset of 400 million Twitter users. Researchers warned that the email addresses, which included the details of politicians, journalists and public figures, could be used to dox pseudonymous accounts.

Twitter, or what’s left of the company, addressed the situation last week.

In an unattributed blog post, Twitter said it had conducted a “thorough investigation” and found “no evidence” that the data sold online was obtained by exploiting a vulnerability of Twitter’s systems. An absence of evidence, however, is not vindication, as it’s unclear if Twitter has the technical means, such as logs, to determine if any user data was exfiltrated. Rather, the company said that hackers had likely been circulating a collection of data pulled from past breaches and said the data did not correlate to any of the data obtained by way of exploiting the bug that was fixed in January 2022.

What Twitter is saying may very well be true, but it’s difficult to have confidence in the company’s statement. Twitter’s erratic response raises many of the same questions that regulators will want to know: Who was tasked with investigating this breach, and does Twitter have the resources to do a thorough job?

An important lesson in what not to do

Twitter’s data leak response is a lesson in how not to do cybersecurity by Carly Page originally published on TechCrunch

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The best books that startup founders read in 2022

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 and the 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 here and 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 Action by 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

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Censorship, lockdowns, arbitrary bans — Twitter is turning into the China of social media

Wow, that was quick.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter and took it private in October, I figured we’d have a while before things took a turn. Then, after he laid off about half the company’s employees, that estimate shortened a bit.

Now, after last night’s Spaces brouhaha, during which Musk confronted journalists he banned for retweeting links about the ElonJet tracker and then abruptly killed the feature entirely, that timeline has moved up considerably.

To be clear: Twitter isn’t going to die tomorrow or next week or even next year. But given how the last few days have gone on the platform, I’m not quite sure how long Twitter will remain a viable platform. It’s turning into the China of social media, full of censorship, arbitrary bans and groups of users/accounts that leap to Musk’s defense whenever they feel his narrative is being undermined.

Censorship, lockdowns, arbitrary bans — Twitter is turning into the China of social media by Tim De Chant originally published on TechCrunch