The TechCrunch Exchange – Product Management Confabulation

September 17, 2022

No money for shelfware

Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here.

Too many subscriptions? Many of us are feeling this way, and so are companies: In a downturn, cutting unnecessary expenses is more important than ever. Is this why SaaS management solutions have become ubiquitous? Let’s explore. — Anna

Fighting SaaS sprawl

“SaaS sprawl is a natural consequence of the SaaS revolution,” TechCrunch contributors Mark Settle and Tomer Y. Avni wrote in a guest column last November. Paying for and managing myriad SaaS subscriptions may be natural, but it is still a headache for companies, which likely explains why solutions helping them manage this pain point are quite popular among investors.

The consequences of SaaS sprawl: A real-world study

Just this week, British SaaS management company Cledara announced a $20 million Series A round of funding, TechCrunch’s Paul Sawers reported. This follows earlier pre-seed and seed rounds, bringing the startup’s total funding to date to some $24 million.

As weird as it feels to write this, $20 million is no longer a ton of money in our strange little world. But Cledara’s Series A round was closed in a downturn. And it’s the SaaS management category as a whole that VCs are betting on: Several Cledara competitors have also raised noteworthy amounts of venture capital over the last couple of years.

No money for shelfware by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

September 10, 2022

Has France cracked the YC recipe?

For the first time, France was one of the top represented countries in Y Combinator’s Summer 22 batch. Three of the eight French startups selected by YC are also former residents of the Station F campus in Paris, so we chatted with its director, Roxanne Varza, to understand how that happened and what others could learn from it. Let’s dive in. — Anna

Meet the French

France was among the top five countries represented in YC’s S22 batch, with eight of its startups joining the accelerator’s latest cohort. That was fewer than the U.S., India, the U.K. and Israel. But it was more than Germany, which sent six startups to YC this year — a near-record for the country, but also less comparatively impressive given its larger population than France’s own.

Where is Y Combinator startup-hunting in 2022?

In absolute terms, France is only equaling its own S21 record, but that batch had 390 participants. As TechCrunch reported last month, the YC S22 batch was much smaller, with some 240 teams. This means that French representation is proportionally on the rise, a good omen for France’s goal to be home to 100 unicorns by 2030.

Let’s add a caveat that we are following YC in using “French” loosely here — almost every single one of these eight teams has a remote component, and some also have a presence in the U.S. or other countries. However, this isn’t specific to France, as YC noted that among the startups in its latest batch, 35% were remote and 37% were remote-friendly.

Has France cracked the YC recipe? by Anna Heim originally published on TechCrunch

September 3, 2022

It’s not just you: The freemium bar is shifting

In recent weeks, several companies tweaked the free tiers of their products, from Slack and Otter.ai to Google Meet and Heroku. This ties back into a crucial question for freemium businesses: When should you start charging? And does that look different in a downturn? Let’s explore. — Anna

No time for freebies?

Oh, how things have changed.

You are already used to reading this on The Exchange, whether we are talking about public markets, venture capital or macroeconomic indicators. But now there’s another sign of the times: Free tiers are becoming less generous.

An email I received from Google made it clear that we are in a very different mindset than when the pandemic started. “To help us all stay connected,” the email read, “two years ago we offered the premium version of Google Meet to everyone and announced that we would temporarily not enforce the 1-hour time limit for group meetings. Beginning this month, group meetings with three or more participants will revert to having a 1-hour limit.”

If you’d like to host longer group meetings on Google Meet, you will have to sign up for a paid plan. In other words, Google is cutting down on its largesse.

August 27, 2022

More venture funds are betting on Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern Europe have had less venture capital at their disposal than their GDP or population could warrant. But with new funds lured in by their startups’ talent pool, global mindset, and capital efficiency, this could be starting to change. Let’s explore. — Anna

What do UiPath, Vinted and Wise have in common?

Startup founders in Central and Eastern Europe will soon have more dry powder to chase.

In recent weeks, we learned that Underline Ventures was halfway through raising a €20 million fund to invest in Romania and nearby countries; that Poland-based Inovo VC was targeting €100 million for its third fund; and that Spanish-born Demium was launching a new fund to invest into Central European startups, with plans for a second close of €30 million to €40 million in September.

August 20, 2022

German startups could use more venture capital, but Germany’s government has a plan

Reading recently about Germany’s €30 billion plan for its startups, I was intrigued. Did the country start to envy La French Tech? Is it hoping to rival post-Brexit U.K.? Perhaps both, but it also has a national goal — making sure that profits from homegrown successes stay home. Let’s explore. — Anna

Second, third, or eighteenth?

European startups have been weathering the venture capital downturn quite well, and funding declined only slightly in the second quarter compared to the first three months of 2022.

German startups, however, had it worse: According to EY, they collectively attracted 20% less capital in the first half of 2022 than during the same period last year. This includes private equity, but venture capital declined even more sharply, from €4.44 billion to €2.89 billion (which is roughly the same amount in U.S. dollars.)

August 13, 2022

Is the future of the microchip industry going to be Made in America?

With all eyes on Taiwan and worries mounting around semiconductor supply, the U.S. CHIPS Act is particularly timely. But it is not unique: Other countries similarly aspire to reduce their reliance on imported chips. Let’s explore. — Anna

From cheap as chips to billion-dollar incentives

U.S. president Joe Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 into law earlier this week after the bill received broad bipartisan support in the House and Senate.

The H and I in CHIPS stand for “Helpful Incentives,” hinting at the main component of the initiative: $52.7 billion in public subsidies.

The passage of the CHIPS Act could launch another US startup renaissance

Biden described the new bill on Twitter as “a once-in-a-generation law that invests in America by supercharging our efforts to make semiconductors here at home.”

August 6, 2022

Who you gonna call? Good question

Young startups often thrill early adopters by offering outstanding customer service with a personal touch. Many Big Tech companies, on the other hand, are notoriously hard to get a hold of when running into any sort of problem. Let’s look into why this is happening, and whether it might change any time soon. — Anna

Faceless

“Customer complaints handling at scale is broken at most tech companies,” author and engineer Gergely Orosz wrote in a blog post.

Like many tech employees, Orosz learned of customer service struggles firsthand while working at Skype and Uber: “As soon as you update your LinkedIn profile to the new gig, you start to get messages from friends of friends asking to solve one of their problems.”

If people are desperate to find a connection inside tech companies who can help them with an issue, it is because of how hard it otherwise is to get a human in the loop. Meta is a blatant example of this: “Facebook and Instagram serve nearly 3 billion users a day with a help desk that numbers closer to zero,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

July 30, 2022

Stocks with friends

Several startups want to make it easier and friendlier for individuals to buy stocks. But isn’t pandemic-era stock picking just a bad habit that’d better be left behind? And what would safer bets look like? Let’s jump in. — Anna

Connecting new retail investors

From Netflix to Peloton, companies that enjoyed strong tailwinds at the peak of the pandemic aren’t exactly doing great right now. And yet, investors don’t seem to think that neobrokers will follow the same path.

July 23, 2022

Cash is nice — as an option

When I visited London recently, I found it hard to spend even one pound in cash: Cashless transactions were more than encouraged — they were often mandatory. However, cash payments are still very much a reality for American cannabis dispensaries and in emerging countries. But are we ready for the end of cash? Let’s explore. — Anna

Forced to pay by card, or forced to pay cash?

There is no doubt that the COVID-19 pandemic has made it less common for people to use cash to pay for their everyday purchases.

Because of hygiene and social distancing measures, merchants who used to frown upon letting customers pay small amounts by card are now encouraging contactless transactions. And with many outdoor activities simply out of the question, cash was more often hoarded than it was spent.

July 16, 2022

Empowering a new wave of health tech startups — with data

Spotting new trends is one of my favorite parts of my job. But I like it even more when several trends converge into a transformative wave. That’s exactly what’s happening in health tech right now, as the sector benefits not only from the rise of open data, but also from the democratization of data analytics and privacy-preserving synthetic data. Let’s explore. — Anna

Data for health tech builders

When I heard that synthetic healthcare data startup Syntegra would release free datasets with realistic-but-fake patient data, it caught my attention. Not because it was releasing open data, not because it was sharing synthetic data and not because it’s a health tech company — but because it was doing all of those things at once.

You wouldn’t be wrong to think open data is cool in itself. For instance, I loved hearing earlier this week about the launch of BigScience’s large language model, BLOOM, a free and open alternative to OpenAI’s GPT-3. But the expectation is that BLOOM will mostly be used by researchers. In contrast, the datasets made available by Syntegra and Tuva Health are meant for health tech startups.