In a recent episode of Extra Crunch Live, Retail Zipline founder Melissa Wong and Emergence Capital investor Lotti Siniscalco accompanied Managing Editor Jordan Crook to guide attendees through Zipline’s Series A deck.
Interestingly, the conversation revealed that Wong declined an invitation to a virtual pitch and insisted on a face-to-face meeting.
“She was one of the few, if not the only CEO, who ever stood up to showcase the entire team,” said Siniscalco.
“She pointed to the screen projected behind her to help us get the most relevant information. The way she did it really made us want to stick with her. We couldn’t break the eye contact. “
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In addition to Wong’s pitch technique, this post also examines some of the key “customer love” metrics that helped Zipline win, such as CAC, churn rates, and net promoter score.
“In hindsight, I really underestimated the industry’s competitive advantage,” said Wong. “But it led to the numbers in our deck because I know what customers want, what they want to buy next, how to make them happy, and I’ve been able to be a lot more capital efficient.”
Read our recap of the highlights of their conversation or click to watch a video of their entire chat.
Thank you for reading Extra Crunch this week!
Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist
Investors don’t expect the US startup funding market to slow
Photo credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)
Global venture capital reached $ 156 billion in the second quarter of 2021, up 157% year over year. A record number of unicorns has gained a foothold in the same period and ratings have risen across the board, report Anna Heim and Alex Wilhelm in today’s issue of The Exchange.
While lap numbers didn’t hit all-time highs, “the general sentiment of the venture capital data for the second quarter was clear: It’s a great time for startups looking to raise capital.”
Anna and Alex interview VCs in different regions to find out why they are so generous and upbeat. Today they started with the following US investors:
- Amy Cheetham, director, Costanoa Ventures
- Marlon Nichols, Founding General Manager, MaC Venture Capital
- Vanessa Larco, Partner, New Enterprise Associates
- Jeff Grabow, Head of Venture Capital, EY US
Despite the hype, the construction technology will be difficult to disrupt
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The construction industry may seem like an industry that wants innovation, writes David Ward, CEO and founder of Safe Site Check In, in a guest column, but there are unique challenges that cause construction companies to be slow to adapt to new technology.
From the way construction projects are funded to complicated local regulations, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the technical problems facing the construction industry.
Construction technology may be attractive to investors, Ward writes, but it needs to be “easy to use, easy to deploy, or accessible on a construction site, and improve productivity almost instantly.”
3 analysts weigh up: What are Andy Jassy’s priorities as the new CEO of Amazon?
Photo credits: AP Photo / Isaac Brekken / John Locher
Now that he’s pulling out of AWS and taking over Jeff Bezos, what are the biggest challenges facing Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon?
Company reporter Ron Miller reached out to three analysts for their opinion:
- Robin Ody, Canalys
- Sucharita Kodali, Forrester
- Ed Anderson, Gartner
Amazon ranks second in the Fortune 500, but it’s not all sunshine and roses – sustaining growth, unionizing, and the potential for antitrust regulation domestically and internationally are just a few of its roles.
“I think the biggest challenge is to keep the company moving in the last few years,” says Kodali. “He’s got to make sure they don’t lose that. If he does that, I mean, he’ll win. “
The most important API metric is the time to first call
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Publishing an API is not enough for a startup: once it’s published, the hard work of maintaining a developer base begins.
Postman’s Head of Developer Relations, Joyce Lin, wrote a guest post for Extra Crunch based on the results of a study aimed at increasing adoption of APIs that use a public workspace.
Lin found that the most important metric for a public API is time to first call (TTFC). It makes sense – faster TTFC allows developers to quickly start using new tools. As a result, “TTFC’s legitimate streamlining is leading to a greater market potential of more educated users for the later stages of your developer journey,” Lin writes.
This post isn’t just aimed at the developers in our audience: TTFC is a metric that product and growth teams should also keep an eye on, they suggest.
“Even if your market is defined as a limited subset of the developer community, any improvements you make to TTFC correspond to a larger available market.”
Q3 IPO cycle starts strongly with Couchbase prices and Kaltura new listing
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Couchbase and Kaltura offered new submissions on Monday, with NoSQL vendor Couchbase setting an initial price range for its IPO and Kaltura revitalizing its public offering with a new price range and new financial information.
“Both news items should help us to understand how the IPO cycle will look like at the beginning of the third quarter of 2021,” writes Alex Wilhelm.
5 Advanced SEO Tactics to Win in 2021
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Mark Spera, head of growth marketing at Minted, offers SEO tips to help smaller websites stand out.
In a guest column, he writes that Google’s algorithm is “on the safe side,” which means that the search engine favors larger, more established websites.
“The cards are not in your favor, so you have to be even more strategic than the big ones,” he writes. “This means that you are running some state-of-the-art hacks to increase your SEO throughput and take advantage of some of the arbitrage that remains in organic search. I call these five tactics ‘advanced’ because none of them are complicated, but all of them are of paramount importance for search engine marketing in 2021. “
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