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My son was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in the first grade. As a mother, it took an ecosystem of support from schools, counselors and family members to ensure that we understood his needs and provided support for his learning and personal development.

Through our own journey, I’ve seen firsthand the challenges that people with neurological variations like autism face on a daily basis, but perhaps one of the biggest hurdles is overcoming society’s underestimation of this incredibly gifted population.

In my experience, people with neurodiversity are consistently underestimated for their knowledge and skills — but if my son is any indication of the value they can bring to the tech industry, then business leaders are missing out until they prioritize cognitive diversity.

Why is neurodiversity important in the technology industry?

One of the key factors in making each of us different is our neurological makeup. This difference can result in people interpreting, understanding and reacting differently in certain situations within personal and working life. And it often creates different skills and talents within people, such as heightened levels of analytical and creative processing.

The technology industry spans various roles and functions, from data scientists to developers, analysts and many more – not to mention the jobs that have yet to be created as we approach the Fifth Industrial Revolution and our world undergoes a significant digital transformation.

As an industry, we need to work harder to educate how talent can be leveraged in different ways to fulfill these roles, because employees are often a company’s greatest asset.

Throughout history, we’ve relied on our ability as a society to think differently in order to survive and thrive. With differences in thinking, neurodiverse people can bring alternative perspectives that may not have been explored before. It’s critical that businesses continue to prioritize cognitive diversity in their workforce, as every individual brings unique knowledge, experiences, and skills to the table and can help drive progress in technological innovation.

How can the tech sector recognize and recruit neurodiverse talent?

One of the first barriers to entry for someone who is neurodiverse is the interview process. Traditional interviews take into consideration things like body language and awareness of social cues that can put a neurodiverse person at a disadvantage.

Neurodiversity might affect the way that someone communicates; for example, the inability to read non-verbal social cues, resulting in limited eye contact and limited language softening. This behavior could lead to the removal of neurodiverse people from candidacy based on “cultural fit.” In reality, this is a much larger miscommunication that’s likely to screen out neurodiverse talent from positions in which they could excel.

Chemistry and character-based stages of the hiring process tend to take place first, before digging into the more technical elements of a role, where neurodiverse people can display their advanced skills. This leads us to ask: Are businesses doing enough to support diversity, equity and inclusion if they aren’t giving equal opportunity to neurodiverse people?

One way businesses can address this challenge is by partnering with community organizations to gain expert guidance, education, and best practices around talent acquisition and talent nurturing.

For example, across Stanley Black & Decker, we’re collaborating with the National Organization on Disability and Autism Speaks to establish a hiring program that helps us recruit and retain talent of all abilities. As a leading global company, we have a responsibility to ensure our future is developed for everyone, by everyone, and that means taking steps to ensure our workforce is diverse and inclusive of people of all abilities, including neurodiverse people.

By taking steps to understand how we can all implement inclusive hiring practices, the tech industry can greatly benefit from a talent pool that might have otherwise been untapped. This could provide at least part of the solution to the technology talent shortage that continues to impact the industry.

Job mobility and career advancement within the neurodiverse community can also be explored and developed to ensure that career advancement is not limited to lower-skilled positions.

We must keep in mind the limitations on soft skills and associated characteristics stereotypically looked for in management and leadership roles, such as self-awareness and interpersonal communication.

When you look at case studies of neurodiverse teams, there is a distinct uplift in productivity, particularly in analytical roles. As such, I’d encourage leaders to identify opportunities for all talent to excel in their areas of expertise.

Can the tech sector help optimize the future of the workplace for neurodiverse people?

During the past 18 months, we have seen a dramatic shift in requirements from leadership. Employees have more autonomy than ever before, and the same goes for people who are neurodiverse.

They now have the ability to request workplace accommodations that might not have been considered “essential” in the past — for example, more flexible working arrangements or the availability of choices to support alternative requirements to thrive in their working day. This could include variety in their immediate work environment and spaces for limited social interaction, noise or distraction, as well as the availability of headphones to limit auditory overstimulation.

Not only that, but the virtual world in which we’re living presents an added opportunity for people who are neurodiverse because it requires fewer of the typical in-person social skills that were previously expected within the workplace. This means that now more than ever, there are many flexible processes and policies that organizations can put in place to meet employees where they are.

A great way to provide additional support to employees is by encouraging engagement in employee resource groups (ERGs). In 2018, I co-founded our Abilities Network, a global ERG committed to supporting employees with disabilities, employee family caregivers of those with disabilities and the greater global community. It provides them with an engaging environment where they can pursue advancement, bring their full selves to work and thrive.

It was my personal experience that inspired me to establish this ecosystem of support — I knew how essential it was in helping our family advocate for our son. I did this through charity partnerships such as Autism Speaks. First initiated in 2018, we wanted to provide guidance for our workforce and leverage the National Organization on Disabilities to enhance our education and progress in this area.

By developing these communities, we can open conversations around neurodiversity and create more inclusive environments in which all employees have the tools, resources and support they need to succeed.

This also allows us to support employees as the business adapts. For example, during the pandemic, we saw a large increase in employees suffering from anxiety. Therefore, the Abilities Network partnered with Understanding Anxiety to offer support and tools to employees who need it.

It’s important that we bring best practices in inclusivity to all elements of the business, from hiring to marketing and everything in between.

From a marketing perspective, this means creating, for example, accessible website experiences across a company’s digital platforms to ensure people of all abilities are able to access and experience the company’s information. We’ve been successful in deploying numerous digital experiences with “accessibility by design” through the support of the Abilities Network ERG.

By tracking the progress of the employee experience through employment statistics and employee objectives in a Disability Employment Tracker, we have seen a 54% increase in talent sourcing and a 20% increase in “people, policies and practices” leading to an overall cultural accessibility increase of 105%.

My son has been a tremendous help throughout this process, acting as a sounding board to help me drive toward a more inclusive future, and I’m forever grateful for his partnership. He has been the inspiration behind my passion to ensure inclusivity remains at the heart of everything that I do.

Neurodiversity presents business opportunities

Technology changes the world and shapes the future of all industries. As leaders in this space, we have a responsibility to ensure that this future is inclusive and representative of all of us. We must ensure diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives aid not only new talent, but the neurodiverse people already within the talent pool.

My son, now 19 years old, is studying biotechnology and molecular bioscience at a technology university. When he was first diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, we were met with low expectations for his personal and professional development — a collective underestimation of the value his unique skills could bring to the table.

This has driven my passion and efforts to ensure that we at Stanley Black & Decker — and other companies — provide inclusive opportunities for all people.

Neurodiversity presents a huge opening for leaders to bring in unique talent with different skill sets to ultimately drive progress in the tech industry and beyond. And unless we’re tapping into this pool of talent, companies are missing out.

There’s a new venture studio in the world that looks rather different from earlier venture studios from a structural standpoint. Unlike renowned outfits like Atomic or Science or Expa that create companies that then sell equity to VCs who expect that equity to rise in value, this new studio, SuperLayer, plans to spin up consumer projects then instead of sell equity to VCs, it will invite the communities that use these products that invest in them by acquiring tokens, which can then be bought or sold or used to participate in other projects.

Indeed, in the case of SuperLayer, the tokens might all look a bit different, but they will all be tied to a blockchain network called Rally that SuperLayer’s founders created earlier and want to help popularize by creating more interesting apps atop it.

It’s part of what early crypto adherents have labeled Web3 and describe as the internet owned by the builders and users and orchestrated with tokens. It’s also a world that many venture firms continue to shy from. But they may well miss the boat as more outfits like SuperLayer begin to emerge, many of them created by battle-tested founders.

In the case of Superlayer, that founder is Kevin Chou, who sold his gaming company, Kabam, for $800 million back in 2018 and almost immediately jumped headlong into the world of blockchain technologies, which he believes can unlock new economic opportunities, including for gamers and or creators.

In fact, before spinning up SuperLayer, Chou cofounded the blockchain gaming startup called Forte; he is also the cofounder of Rally, a launchpad for creators to build and distribute their own digital currencies that are essentially white-labeled versions of the RLY coin, as it’s called.

Chou has had the support along the way of investors like Coinbase Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz, and they’ve already seen meaningful upside. Those RLY coins, worth five cents when all 15 billion of them were minted, are now trading on Coinbase and several other exchanges for roughly $.052. Investors and team members reportedly control more than three-quarters of that supply right now — so they have to hold them or tank their price — but the idea is for the community to own 70% once all are distributed over time.

If all goes as planned, it could make a lot of wealthy people wealthier, and enrich many less wealthy token holders, too. Consider: just about 7% of the coins are in circulation, giving the currency a market cap of $800 million. But if all 15 billion coins were released at today’s price, the coins’ fully diluted market cap would be $7.9 billion.

The efforts of Chou and company to decentralize its social token infrastructure is interesting on its own. Still, the real story here may be the opportunities and challenges that an organization like SuperLayer is beginning to pose to venture firms because of its relative complexity compared with traditional equity investments.

It’s largely why  Sequoia Capital announced earlier this week that it is becoming a registered investment advisor. As Roelof Botha, the head of Sequoia’s U.S. operations, wrote Tuesday on Medium, becoming an RIA expands the firm’s flexibility in a number of ways; it also enables Sequoia to further increase its investments in emerging assets classes, such as cryptocurrencies.

Chou doesn’t necessarily think Sequoia is restructuring itself because of its growing interest in crypto deals. But he does think more firms will need to follow suit if they want to capitalize on endeavors like his own.

“In a world where there are these new types of technology platforms that are being created that are powered by these tokens with a very different business model and very different technology architecture,” smart firms recognize that “We have to do that,” says Chou.

By “that,” he means, evolve. One of the biggest challenges of traditional funds, notes Chou, is that once an investment becomes liquid, a firm’s obligation to its own investors is to either give them the cash from that “exit,” of distribute their shares in the entity, at which point, their investors can decide if they want to hold them or sell them.

But in the world of crypto, the idea is often to use the tokens from one project and to use them to participate in the growth of another project. It can mean buying and selling and being both an active — and sometimes very patient — participant. And it’s work that comparatively few venture firms right now fully understand, Chou suggests.

They may come to regret it, as Chou says that crypto founders are running out of patience with traditional VCs — and just as more blockchains and their applications are beginning to reach mainstream adoption. While a few years ago, entrepreneurs didn’t mind having to hold investors’ hands, he says, “More and more in 2021, a founder of a cryptocurrency that’s getting some traction and is trying to raise money is not going to go to the traditional Sand Hill Road firm.”

It’s not worth the time and effort, says Chou. Many have strict limitations around tokens, and most still need a whole lot of hand-holding. He knows, having lived it. “We’ve had to spend a lot of time with finance [teams] that [have] never done a crypto investment. We’ve had to do investment committee meetings, CFO meetings, lawyer meetings — just to give them delivery of their tokens. Then [you have] to help them set up their security and operations around how does the general partnership hold the tokens and how does it disperse the tokens to their LPs…”

The process, he says, was “really painful.”

Earlier this year, a report from the EU showed that 42% of companies exaggerate their level of sustainability. This “greenwashing” is now so prevalent that one organization has launched a platform to calculate businesses’ true environmental impact and avoid misleading marketing.

Today’s global impact investment market is valued at $715 billion and growing. But as VCs, angels and celebrities rush to put their dollars in businesses that do good, they’re not doing sufficient due diligence.

For some founders, tying themselves to impact is a way to play into trends and get noticed by investors. It’s why some people identify themselves as an “impactpreneur.”

There’s a fine line between impact and pushing a narrative for marketing purposes, and misjudging a startup’s genuineness can cost investors money as well as their reputation. During my time working with thousands of startups, I’ve picked up on these three signs that a startup is using impact to gain traction on the public stage — not make real change.

They aren’t recording and tracking impact metrics

If a company isn’t measuring the impact they claim to focus on, that’s a red flag. Startups that are really striving for impact will have a clear definition of what their goals are, how they’re getting there and what metrics are monitored along the way.

At Founder Institute, we have defined several “impact KPIs” that help startups track their incremental impact steps.

For example, a women-led accelerator program that hopes to increase the number of successful female founders could have metrics around the number of female attendees per month and year, the number of attendees that launch a business and how much funding those businesses received. No impact is created overnight, but by breaking the journey into granular chunks, businesses demonstrate that they’re committed to building and refining their path to impact.

Tracking metrics also forces companies to be fully accountable for the impact they advertise. The companies that publish their metrics even when they aren’t positive tend to conduct deep dives into what went wrong and put in place plans to remedy the situation.

A great example is Duke Energy, which shared a report acknowledging that it fell short on team diversity goals last year. To improve the metrics, the company hired a new chief diversity and inclusion officer and committed $4 million to advocate for equality in the communities it serves.

We investors also have to ensure that metrics are present throughout a company — that startups practice what they preach. If a business has stated that it wants to improve access to education for more people, the founder should be able to provide metrics around in-house training programs, course offerings, development plans and promotions.

If they don’t have this information, that could be a sign that the company’s impact only targets lateral goals and isn’t built into internal operations.

The CMO is responsible for the impact strategy

Impact should ultimately fall on the shoulders of the CEO. It may sound obvious, but if the chief marketing officer is the go-to person for conversations and reporting about impact, that’s a problem.

When impact exists solely in the marketing realm, it can be easy for people to have accidental or convenient impact — where they retrospectively look at data and celebrate successes that weren’t the direct result of an impact strategy. For example: A startup claims that it reduced its carbon footprint by 10% in 2020, when really the drop was due to operations being shut down during the pandemic.

Likewise, if a startup’s impact objectives seem too good to be true, they usually are. Marketing departments go big when they want to make a splash (see: Theranos), but with impact, companies need to be acting at the ground level before they shoot for the moon.

Take ExxonMobil, which advertised its experimental algae biofuels as a means to reduce transport emissions. Consumers were quick to point out that the company had made no pledge to net zero carbon emissions before shooting for “sexier” impact alternatives.

They’re about projections, not progress

It’s natural that when founders are fundraising, they emphasize their most disruptive edge. That they can end poverty, close inequality gaps or reduce the effects of climate change. These promises can raise investor eyebrows, but they have to be rooted in the how.

Every investor knows the feeling of glossing over the financial projections in a startup pitch deck. It’s not so much the figures that matter, but the process behind them. It’s exactly the same with impact.

If a startup’s whole identity is the future numbers of their impact goals, investors should be wary. The methodology is far more telling than the statistics.

For example, GSK has announced ambitious plans to be net zero carbon by 2030, but its breakdown of key activities like switching to renewable electricity, electric cars and green chemistry is what confirms that the company is actually moving toward that impact. If the company doesn’t reach total net zero status, the intent is still clearly there, and progress will be made — but perhaps at a slower pace.

If Theranos has taught us anything, it’s that companies are wise to the allure of impact when raising funds. For investors, being able to distinguish real impact from marketing ploys not only protects them, it helps their capital go to places that can really make a difference.

Is Southeast Asia about to hit an inflection point for tech startups?

Four hundred million people in the region already use the internet, but by year’s end, one estimate suggests that 80% of the population over the age of 15 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will be digital consumers.

“As per Jungle Ventures’ calculations, the total value of the region’s digital companies is around $340 billion today and is estimated to grow to $1 trillion by 2025,” says founding partner Amit Anand.

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E-commerce, fintechs and the rapid digitization of the region’s SME workforce are a few of the factors reshaping the landscape for Southeast Asia’s startups, but supply chain technology is also a major opportunity, Anand says.

“With new deals and intentions to list in the U.S. being announced more frequently, the region shows no sign of slowing down and the birth of many more unicorns is on the horizon.”

Thanks very much for reading TechCrunch+ this week!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
@yourprotagonist

The Bowery Farming TC-1

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Just over a tenth of Americans have jobs in food and agriculture, so it’s easy to see why many of us lack a keen awareness about what we’re eating or where it comes from.

Our food supply isn’t as secure or predictable as we assumed: Climate change, safety recalls, the COVID-19 pandemic and even immigration policies can directly impact what’s available at the store.

The technological leaps that made it possible to feed (most of) the world will not see us through the next century unless we change course.

Plant-based protein has gotten a lot of press, but vertical farming that leans on hardware and robotics has reached scale, reports Brian Heater, TechCrunch hardware editor.

In a four-part series, he explores the origins and operations of Bowery Farming, a profitable startup that has raised almost $500 million since 2015 to create new tech and facilities that raise leafy greens sold in nearly 900 markets.

Part 1: Bowery Farming is forcing us all to look up at the future of vertical agriculture

Part 2: Hacking lettuce for taste and profit

Part 3: Can LEDs ultimately replace the sun?

Part 4: The voracious fight for your salad bowl

Since Big Tech came to Denver, investors can’t buy enough local startups

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Denver, Colorado is nicknamed the Mile High City, but enthusiastic investors don’t seem to mind the thin air.

“Per a recent CB Insights report, Denver-based startups raised around $2.7 billion in all of 2020,” report Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm in today’s edition of The Exchange.

“The same dataset says that startups in the city have raised $3.1 billion through Q3 of 2021 — more capital in less time.”

Colorado’s central location and quality of life have made Denver and nearby Boulder attractive hubs for Big Tech firms. Now that remote work has become the norm, remote investment in the area has dialed up as well.

“Denver was ready for the Zoom boom, and is reaping the — venture capital — rewards.”

Credit card and payments companies compete for a slice of the growing BNPL market

Image Credits: Photo Concepts (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Giving consumers the convenience of deferring payment for a product is not a new idea, but now that upstarts like Klarna, Afterpay and Affirm have taken the concept to the next level, legacy credit card companies and payment firms are taking notice.

Mary Ann Azevedo and Ryan Lawler have identified a “slow emergence” in the BNPL space “of a symbiotic relationship between traditional financial institutions, payments upstarts and leading companies.”

Visa announced this week that many companies are using its technology to power point-of-sale BNPL solutions; last month, its rival rolled out Mastercard Installments, its bespoke offering.

“It’s not really a surprise that these credit card companies are stepping it up when it comes to BNPL,” reported Ryan and Mary Ann. “If anything, it’s a wonder that it took them this long.”

Dear Sophie: Any advice for living my dreams in Silicon Valley?

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

Dear Sophie,

After trying to find an H-1B job to immigrate to the United States for several years, I took a senior software engineer position with a company in Canada.

My dream is to immigrate to Silicon Valley to start my own venture. Any advice?

— Eager Entrepreneur

Heavily VC-backed salad chain Sweetgreen heads toward public markets

Image Credits: Adam Glanzman/Bloomberg / Getty Images / Getty Images

At a previous job, I worked near a Sweetgreen location, stopping in once each week to pick up our startup’s lunch order.

The salads were delicious, but the prices definitely made me appreciate our free lunch policy. While reading Alex Wilhelm’s review of Sweetgreen’s S-1, I recalled something else: whenever I visited, I was usually the only customer waiting for a pickup.

Heavily reliant on digital orders and office workers, Sweetgreen “is rather unprofitable and doesn’t appear to be on the cusp of a rapid march toward profitability,” writes Alex.

At the same time, “the company’s overall business plan appears sound on paper.”

How to root out shadow IT and maximize SaaS investments

Image Credits: MirageC (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

In a modern, mostly remote workplace, unapproved SaaS applications used by individual employees may lead to duplicate subscriptions, wasted IT spend and greater risk of a data breach.

How do you chase away the shadows? Just shine a light on your SaaS portfolio, according to CEO and co-founder of Zylo, Eric Christopher.

“Once IT has a line of sight into all applications in use and how they are used, they are positioned to optimize investments,” he says. “Implementing self-service SaaS at your organization is easier than you may think.”

Robinhood’s nasty quarter shows the ups, downs of trading incomes

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Any stock that trades on the prospect of a company’s growth rather than its current business value is treading on thin ice.

So when trading platform Robinhood reported worse-than-expected Q3 revenue and profit, and predicted Q4 revenue also below analysts’ expectations, the market responded.

In an in-depth examination of the company’s Q3 results, Alex Wilhelm found that Robinhood’s user base, crypto trading revenues and revenue per user all fell, which led to its profitability “taking a beating.”

If competitor Coinbase “has seen even a fraction of the downturn that Robinhood has experienced in terms of crypto transaction incomes, it could have a tough quarter,” he says.

How 2 companies leveraged organic and inorganic growth

Image Credits: Ivan Bajic (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Taking a thoughtful, balanced approach to combining organic growth with the booster shot of a merger or acquisition can unlock sustainable growth, writes Progress Partners’ senior managing director, Chris Legg.

He highlights two examples of successful M&A strategies:

• Outside Inc.’s aggressive vertical acquisition spree to expand its offerings while entering completely new markets.
• Trusted Media Brands’ deal with Jukin Media to diversify its content and increase its advertising base.

Crafting a pitch deck that can’t be ignored

Image Credits: Boris SV (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

To find out what a pitch deck needs to stand out, Managing Editor Danny Crichton hosted a panel at TechCrunch Disrupt featuring Mar Hershenson, the founding MD of Pear VC; Mercedes Bent, a partner at Lightspeed, and Saba Karim, who heads the global startup pipeline at TechStars.

Their chat contains valuable insights into how pitches have evolved over the past year, the VCs’ thought process when reading decks and what founders should focus on if they don’t want to be ignored.

“The decks are getting better and better in terms of design,” said Bent. “I think more and more people have realized that the visual representation of your deck is just as important as the material and the content that’s in there.

Originality definitely helps an entrepreneur break apart from the crowd, said Karim.

The best pitch deck that I got in a different format would be from a company that recently got into TechStars — it was actually a podcast version of their pitch deck that had my face on it. I went into Apple Podcasts and it said, “Hey, Saba, here’s my pitch.” That was amazing! But the second or third time that happens, it might not be as impressive because I’ve seen it before.

Allbirds flotation should help the market sort the value of tech-enabled IPOs

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

I’ve always had an interest in the origin of words: We use “bellwether” as a term to describe trendsetters, but it originally referred to a sheep with a bell tied around its neck, which encouraged the rest of the flock to follow.

Similarly, IPO filings offer a glimpse into a company’s inner workings, but they can also offer insight into prevailing market trends.

Tech-enabled footwear maker Allbirds’ IPO filing serves both purposes quite well, reports Alex Wilhelm: The company expects to debut between $12-$14 per share, which would value it about $2 billion at the upper end of the range — not far from where Rent the Runway debuted at in its IPO this week.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for October 29, 2021. If you feel a little snowed-under after all the news from the week, we understand. This week saw Facebook change its name, new hardware from Google and Samsung, Apple laptops reviews, Sequoia revamping its entire structure, Big Tech earnings, issues at Ro, and eighty-eleven startup funding rounds and product launches.

But we made it through, so let’s go back over today’s biggest news and then get right into this weekend! —Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Public cloud revenues reach $45B: In the third quarter, the value of public cloud revenues from Google, Microsoft and Amazon hit $45 billion, a figure good for a $180 billion run rate. That figure underscores how far the cloud has come in recent years and represents spend from a host of companies big and small, tech and otherwise. TechCrunch dug into what impact the chip shortage is, and isn’t, having on growth amongst the public cloud lords, in case you were curious about that particular dynamic.
• Trump’s social network already in trouble: Sure, it was mocked when it was announced. And, yes, pranksters got busy in a hurry. But the biggest threat to former U.S. President Trump’s Truth Social product is an open source project that you’ve not heard from in some time, namely Mastodon. Per TechCrunch, the social project “alleges that Truth Social is passing open source software off as its own and has given them 30 days to fix this.”
• The American heartland is startup-central: After our look into the larger Midwest startup market in the United States, TechCrunch took the time today to parse results from the city of Denver. Along with regional siblings, startups in the Mile High City are raising huge amounts of capital. But what we learned is that Denver’s startup boom came after a long period of investments in its local technology scene from the industry’s biggest players.
• And, for something lighter, Google’s partnership with Jio to create and sell a budget smartphone in India is bearing hardware fruit.

Startups/VC

• Kurly targets $5.9B IPO: Grocery delivery comes in a few forms. There’s the “instant” players, the two-hour delivery crew and then what Kurly is up to in Korea, namely delivering foodstuffs the next day. The slower model hasn’t harmed the unicorn, which intends to list next year at a valuation that could reach nearly six billion dollars.
• Celebrities back electric boat venture: A bit like how venture capitalists will keep backing email startups in hopes of eventually solving their personal communications crisis, a number of celebrities are backing Arc, which makes a very snazzy, if expensive electric boat. With a price tag around $300,000, it’s not a surprise that well-known celebrities-cum-investors Will Smith, Kevin Durant and Diddy are backing the company given that its product is inside their price range. You and I will have to get by with a Matchbox version.
• Patreon wants to say yes to crypto: Creator payments and content platform Patreon may get in on the crypto boom. TechCrunch repots that the company is looking into how crypto might intersect with its creator-heavy user base.
• Social Chat bets consumers want higher-touch digital shopping experiences: Personally one of the best things about online shopping is not having to talk to other humans. However, many consumers disagree, Social Chat appears to be arguing. The company just raised $6 million to help make online shopping more like buying stuff IRL.
• And in case you want to know which three funding rounds the Equity crew thought were the hottest of the week, well, we have your back.

Predicting the next wave of Southeast Asia tech giants

Is Southeast Asia about to hit an inflection point for tech startups?

Four hundred million people in the region already use the internet, but by year’s end, one estimate suggests that 80% of the population over the age of 15 in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam will be digital consumers.

“As per Jungle Ventures’ calculations, the total value of the region’s digital companies is around $340 billion today and is estimated to grow to $1 trillion by 2025,” says founding partner Amit Anand.

E-commerce, fintechs and the rapid digitization of the region’s SME workforce are a few of the factors reshaping the landscape for Southeast Asia’s startups, but supply chain technology is also a major opportunity, Anand says.

“With new deals and intentions to list in the U.S. being announced more frequently, the region shows no sign of slowing down and the birth of many more unicorns is on the horizon.”

(TechCrunch+ is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• If you are on iOS, you now have access to Super Follows: Twitter’s product barrage has generated hits (Spaces) and flops (Fleets). But Twitter is forging ahead with more product work on its Super Follow product, regardless of early momentum or a lack thereof. Now all iOS users – globally! – can pay to “Super” follow creators.
• German company to invest more in chip production: In the future, chip independence will replace food independence in terms of national security precedence. And Germany might sit pretty when it does, as domestic concern Robert Bosch GmbH is dropping nearly a half-billion into boosting chip output. More of this, please.

TechCrunch Experts

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If you have a software consultant that you think other startup founders should know about, fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we’ve received below!

Consultant: 729 Solutions

Recommended by: Stuart Harris, AltaFoodcraft

Testimonial: “They excel at defining the problem, mapping out a strategy, setting expectations and managing the project to completion. They allowed us to complete and launch new products on time and within budget. Having a reliable partner that can uphold their piece of the project is critical to successful execution.”

The global help desk automation industry is expected to grow to $11 billion by 2023 as support automation empowers companies to serve their customers more effectively. By automating repetitive tasks and FAQs, companies give employees more time to spend on more human tasks that involve building relationships and generating revenue.

Customers are also increasingly valuing self-service options. Chatbots allow customers to quickly address concerns at any time of the day without needing to pick up the phone. However, adding a human touch to that process will always be helpful.

Consider these three ways to humanize your support automation.

Give your bot a name and personality in line with your brand

Your bot is an extension of your company and is likely to be the first interaction a customer will have on your website or app. Use this opportunity to showcase the qualities your customers want to encounter. Design the chatbot to introduce itself with a memorable name that fits into your brand. Consider the voice your company uses across channels and incorporate the tone into your chatbot’s scripting. Feel free to include jokes or emojis — but only if they are consistent with the voice of your brand.

Your chatbot will feel more human if its responses are thoughtful rather than robotic. An AI-powered chatbot can ask more open-ended questions, which frees the user from the restraints of a few generic options. Your bot should use the customer’s name in conversation and explain if it’s searching for an answer or needs additional details to make the conversation feel more natural. Creating that comfortable dialogue will humanize your chatbot and separate it from the crowd.

Your bot’s personality should include the ability to react to written expressions of emotion. It should ask clarifying questions and confirm the details of a customer’s problem or question. Such guided conversations help a customer feel heard and understood. A natural-sounding diction and a personality that matches your brand will keep customers and potential customers from closing the tab.

Connect to a knowledgeable human for help

For a chatbot to be effective, it’s important that it asks follow-up questions and respond in thoughtful ways, but it should also be able to escalate a problem to a human expert. A chatbot that’s a dead end is not a true solution. When a customer thinks you’ve replaced traditional, human customer service with an inadequate substitute, they’ll feel undervalued.

Edtech unicorn Udemy priced its IPO at $29 per share, the upper end of its IPO range. Using a simple share count, the company was worth around $4 billion at its IPO price and a few hundred million more if a full -diluted share count is employed in our valuation calculations.

For edtech, the Udemy IPO might seem like good news. After all, the company sold more than $420 million worth of its stock while going public at a price that surpassed its final private-market price. And yet.

In trading today, shares of Udemy declined $1.80 per share as of the time of writing, just over 6%. As far as IPO results go, that’s not the sort of opening day CEOs dream of.

Investors, either.

After tracking the company’s financial evolution and its pricing in some detail, this afternoon we wanted to offer a few observations regarding the final accounting of the Udemy IPO as it has been written thus far.

Shifting to business sales isn’t a panacea

Inclusive of its trading declines, Reuters pegs the Udemy’s value at $3.7 billion. Recall that based on its own estimates, Udemy had revenues between $125.7 million and $130.9 million in the third quarter. That figure puts Udemy on a run rate of $523.6 million. Or, in multiples terms, Udemy is worth 7x its present revenues.

For software companies that sell to other businesses, that’s far lower than we’d usually see. The company’s somewhat flat revenues in 2021 compared to 2020 are likely to blame for why that number is so low compared to SaaS norms. But muted growth expectations for coming years are also a factor — and edtech in a post-pandemic context, at least from an investor mindset perspective, may be at play.

So, sure, it’s good that Udemy is shifting to selling to stickier, and likely more lucrative corporations, but until that proves to unlock net revenue growth, the company’s valuation appears ready to hold fast in second gear.

Private-market edtech valuations may have plateaued

Crunchbase pegs the final Udemy private-market price at $3.25 billion. PitchBook has it down to $3.3 billion. Regardless, the company did manage to surpass its final private price. But only by so much.