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| | | This was going to be a short week for me; on Thursday night, I’d planned to fly from San Francisco to Austin to moderate a panel discussion at SXSW. I canceled those plans last week. By the time I’d shared my decision with the organizers, one panelist had already dropped out, another said they were 20% likely to attend and the remaining person was 50/50 on whether they’d make the trip. Less than 12 hours later, the entire festival was canceled. Approximately 417,000 people traveled to Austin last year for SXSW. I can only imagine the economic, social and emotional impact on locals who depend on the event to make a living — not to mention the creatives, entrepreneurs and investors who were hoping to do business. Many of the stories we’ve recently published on Extra Crunch address some aspect of the novel coronavirus outbreak. We recapped a letter Sequoia Capital sent last week to founders describing the coronavirus as a “black swan” event and have stepped up our coverage about building and managing distributed teams. “The daily stream of news is terrifying, and we are going to learn even more in the coming weeks,” writes TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton. “Do what you can with what you have. That's all you can ever be expected to do.” You’ll find general news and information in the public interest about the coronavirus and COVID-19 on TechCrunch. On Extra Crunch, we’re continuing to track the outbreak’s impact on public markets, fundraising, remote work and other areas. Thanks for reading, Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Tempura / Getty Images | | Many companies are asking staff to work from home, but many workers don’t have the experience — or the skills — to be productive outside of an office setting. Ron Miller spoke to Alan Lepofsky (VP of Salesforce Quip) and Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a principal analyst at advisory firm Deep Analysis, to find out how to create an action plan for distributed teams. Read more | | | |
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| |  | | Efforts to stem the spread of coronavirus led SXSW and Google I/O to cancel their annual events, but the outbreak is having other impacts on the app industry, reports Sarah Perez. Also this week: Apple rolls out more stringent rules for App Store developers, Twitter tests a new type of post that disappears after 24 hours, TikTok’s parent company launched a new streaming app, and several other stories. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: GM | | General Motors’ EV day was a return to its roots. By announcing plans to deploy its new flexible battery architecture across every brand, it hopes to create "a car for every purse and purpose,” the slogan of early president and CEO Alfred Sloan. Read more | | | |
| |  | | Last week, Sequoia Capital sent a letter to founders advising them to "brace themselves for turbulence" as concerns over coronavirus begin to disrupt more aspects of our lives. To get a sense of how “the coronavirus effect is rippling throughout the tech world,” we recapped Sequoia’s warning letter, along with other advice from VCs who are predicting a bumpy road ahead. Read more | | | |
| |  | | “We started as a side project… and side projects can't afford offices,” says Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster. One of Y Combinator’s most valuable companies, Zapier was founded by three friends from Columbia, Missouri. The trio moved to the Bay Area, but after one returned home to support a partner in law school, “we were remote by necessity,” he says. Today, Zapier has about 300 employees, so Greg Kumparek interviewed Foster about the challenges of building a far-flung team of contributors. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: 10'000 Hours / Getty Images | | For the last century or so, audiences have watched commercials in exchange for being entertained. But the ascendance of social media, gaming and influencers has broken that model; spending on TV ads peaked in 2018 at $72.4 billion. Last year, Instagram and YouTube captured $35 billion in ad revenue and TV’s market share of advertising is expected to keep falling, so media reporter Jon Shieber looked at some of the innovations and opportunities that are reshaping adtech. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Kevin Butz / Unsplash | | Alex Wilhelm didn’t pull any punches in Monday’s morning column: “The world is a mess today. Everything that trades is down, and sentiment is in the toilet.” He doesn’t claim to predict the future, but he does make several guesses about how the current selloff will impact startups, including SaaS valuations, D2C and a slowdown in the venture market. Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Anton Petrus / Getty Images | | Given the uncertainty created by the novel coronavirus outbreak, the pressures facing startup entrepreneurs have been dramatically magnified. TechCrunch Managing Editor Danny Crichton writes that stock market volatility will cause some VCs to pull back, but investors are in “a hyper-competitive market like we have never seen before,” and “the coronavirus outbreak has not changed this basic thesis.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: nonchai | | Colleges and universities are closing classrooms and dormitories to limit the spread of COVID-19, but many higher education institutions don’t have systems in place to support remote learning. In her first story for Extra Crunch, reporter Natasha Mascarenhas asks, “can edtech startups help legacy institutions rapidly adopt online teaching services? And perhaps more tellingly, can they do so in a seamless way?” Read more | | | |
| |  | | Shares in “styling service” StitchFix were trading above $29 per share in February, but this morning, it opened at $14.75. It’s a profitable, growing company, but Alex Wilhelm says its declines offer some lessons for other tech-enabled “startups whose gross margins are under 50%.” Read more | | | |
| |  Image Credits: Unsplash under a Sarah Kilian license. | | Sequoia led a $35 million round into payments infrastructure player Finix, but it returned its information rights, board seat and its entire investment after determining that it had a conflict of interest due to its prior backing of Plaid (now worth about $35 billion). Alex Wilhelm interviewed Finix CEO Richie Serna to “find out if there's enough space between the two startups to absolve Sequoia of its faux pas.” Read more | | | |
| |  | | TechCrunch Managing Editor Eric Eldon sat down with Graphite founder Ethan Smith and partner Marcos Ciarrocchi to learn more about their growth marketing consultancy. Nailing down SEO, data science and conversion optimization “can be the main difference for a company that has a few rounds of funding and big unrealized dreams,” writes Eric, and Smith “has a vision to change the relationship between growth marketers and companies.” Read more | | | |
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