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Salesforce today dominates the world of CRM with its cloud-based, wide-ranging portfolio of software as a service. Now, a company founded by one of its alums thinks it can take it on with a more modern approach.

Kustomer — an “omni-channel” customer support platform that can call in data from just about any other software and apps that a company uses, either to manage its business internally or speak to customers externally — has raised $35 million as it expands beyond SMBs to target larger enterprise customers.

The company, based out of New York, had always seen itself as a competitor to Zendesk, co-founder and CEO Brad Birnbaum said in an interview, “but now we are starting to take on a bunch of Oracle and Salesforce conversions, larger enterprises.” He claims that these bigger companies are operating on legacy systems that are “15 years too old” and that is why it’s getting its foot in the door.

(He knows first hand about what at least one of his competitors is using, because he helped build it. With Kustomer co-founder Jeremy Suriel, Birnbaum once co-founded Assistly, which also aimed to provide a merged-view of customers to agents. The startup eventually sold to Salesforce and became a part of Desk.com.)

The Series C — led by Battery Ventures, with Redpoint Ventures, Canaan Partners, Boldstart Ventures, Social Leverage (Howard Lindzon’s fund) and Cisco Investments also participating — comes just seven months after the company raised a Series B of $26 million, one mark of Kustomer’s rapid rise. Another is that it’s claiming that it is currently seeing growth of 500 percent on year-over-year revenues.

(Valuation is not being disclosed, Birnbaum said, but I understand that it’s significantly up on the previous round, yet is still less than $500 million. In total, the company has raised $73.5 million since 2016.)

When Kustomer first came out of stealth in 2016, the company’s original mission was to create a CRM system so easy to use and full of data that essentially anyone in a business could be in a position to help a customer — appealing to the smaller organizations Kustomer originally targeted that might not have dedicated customer teams.

Fast-forward to 2018/2019, and customer relations specialists are now the primary users — customers include Ring, Rent the Runway, Glovo, Glossier, Away, Slice, Sweetgreen and UNTUCKit — with all that data harnessed into one place to make their jobs easier.

You can think of what Kustomer does as the CRM descendant of the “Slack effect.” The wildly successful workplace chat platform has found a lot of traction with businesses by making it possible to discuss anything work-related by way of integrations and feeds from hundreds of different apps. Kustomer is trying to create a similar effect for its own end: a company can incorporate any platform where customers are already contacting companies, along with any app that already tracks sales, complaints, questions and more.

The number of apps is on a different level from Slack — Birnbaum said the average number for a typical customer is about 10 feeds of information — but the final effect is similar, in that it creates an “omni-channel” single view — in its case where customers’ histories and live questions exist together, so that agents can have a full picture and deal with the customer more efficiently (and hopefully more effectively). Birnbaum adds that on top of this there also is a machine learning wrapper to understand what is going on to provide the most relevant information to agents at the point of contact.

While the platform is being used largely for support queries and sales, Birnbaum said that one growing usage is in marketing.

“A retailer, for example, might integrate its e-commerce backend. And where we have it we can proactively engage against that,” he said. That could involve proactively contacting customers who might have a specific product that has been found with a fault. Or it could mean running sentiment analysis across social media and offering customers free coupons for goods based on what they purchased from you before, as a response to something unearthed in that analysis.

“We have this data for support, but we think customers can use it for marketing and engagement, too,” he said.

Kustomer’s funding underscores another trend that we have seen appearing a number of times throughout the startup world, but particularly I’d say in enterprise tech startups.

In a market where we’re seeing a number of VCs continue to raise large funds and continue to look for smart places to invest that money, that Series C is also an example of how startups are raising money not when they need it, but when the offer comes along from the right people.

“To be honest, we’ve been capital-efficient,” said Birnbaum. “But around November, there was a tremendous amount of inbound interest after we exceeded our quarterly revenue goals by quite a large amount. We decided to take this opportunity led by Battery Ventures because it’s probably one of the best partners we could have,” he said, referring the the company’s track record with enterprise software.

With this round, Battery partner Neeraj Agrawal is joining the board.

“We’ve been closely following Kustomer’s impressive growth and see a large opportunity for the company to become one of the top players in this market—owing mainly to its powerful platform, experienced team and ability to execute on its vision,” he said in a statement. “We’re excited to leverage Battery’s global network and company-scaling expertise to partner with Brad and the rest of the Kustomer team to help the company expand further into the enterprise market.”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2B2CVpX

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Verily Life Sciences, the healthcare subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is expanding the investment and collaboration program — called Partner Space — that it launched in 2017 to work with startups.

The Partner Space already houses somewhere between six and eight companies (of which only two are publicly disclosed). That number could almost double to between 12 and 15 companies, according to Verily Life Sciences’ head of business and corporate development and ventures lead, Andy Harrison.

Verily’s move to expand its work with startups in healthcare comes on the heels of the company’s $1 billion cash infusion at the beginning of January.

That round, led by the technology-focused private equity investment firm Silver Lake, and including the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, was designed to support growth in key strategic areas, including partnerships, business development and potential acquisitions, according to a statement.

“The companies that are in that space we are equity owners of,” says Harrison. “We want some upside from the things that we contribute that could enhance their business.”

Harrison described Verily’s Partner Space investments as typical Series A or B deals, where the opportunity to work from the company’s South San Francisco campus was a complementary perk, but not a prerequisite for taking Verily’s cash.

Two companies that have taken Verily up on its offer are Freenome, which uses artificial intelligence and genomic information for better cancer screening and diagnostics tests, and Culture Robotics, which uses automation and robotics to improve cell cultivation.

“The main thesis is digital health,” said Harrison of the company’s investment strategy. “Combining complex biological processes with very sophisticated informatics. It’s the nexus of biology and informatics that we tend to focus on. We are interested in healthcare innovations that the world needs. That humanity needs.”

The Partner Space is an embodiment of that interest, according to Harrison. Or, as the company put it in a blog post back when it launched the initiative:

Through Partner Space, Verily aims to foster a rich ecosystem for innovation and idea sharing by offering office and lab space, exposure to the Verily team and other collaboration partners, and access to shared amenities.

….

Verily Partner Space is an expansion of the way we have worked at Verily since our inception – inviting our partners, from Onduo, Galvani and Verb for example, to share our workplace, eliminating the natural boundaries of space and distance. In so doing, we can more quickly advance our initiatives and solve really challenging problems in healthcare. We are excited, through Verily Partner Space, to extend our physical space to the start-up community and bring other like-minded entities into our fold with the goal to collectively pursue better health outcomes for humanity.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2R8Qyc5

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Microsoft today announced that it has acquired Citus Data, a company that focused on making PostgreSQL database faster and more scalable. Citus’ open source PostgreSQL extension essentially turns the application into a distributed database and while there has been a lot of hype around the NoSQL movement and document stores, relational database — and especially PostgreSQL — are still a growing market, in part because of tools from companies like Citus that overcome some of their earlier limitations.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft plans to work with the Citus Data team to “accelerate the delivery of key, enterprise-ready features from Azure to PostgreSQL and enable critical PostgreSQL workloads to run on Azure with confidence.” The Citus co-founders echo this in their own statement, noting that “as part of Microsoft, we will stay focused on building an amazing database on top of PostgreSQL that gives our users the game-changing scale, performance, and resilience they need. We will continue to drive innovation in this space.”

PostgreSQL is obviously an open source tool and while the fact that Microsoft is now a major open source contributor doesn’t come as a surprise anymore, it’s worth noting that the company stresses that it will continue to work with the PostgreSQL community. In an email, a Microsoft spokesperson also noted that “the acquisition is a proof point in the company’s commitment to open source and accelerating Azure PostgreSQL performance and scale.”

Current Citus customers include the likes of real-time analytics service Chartbeat, email security service Agari and PushOwl, though the company notes that it also counts a number of Fortune 100 companies among its users (they tend to stay anonymous). The company offers both a   database as a service, an on-premises enterprise version and the free open source edition. For the time being, it seems like that’s not changing, though over time, I would suspect that Microsoft will transition users of the hosted service to Azure.

The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Citus Data, which was founded in 2010 and graduated from the Y Combinator program, previously raised over $13 million from the likes of Khosla Ventures, SV Angel and Data Collective.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Hw8zlj

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What if instead of just accepting Uber rides, gig workers could pick from higher paying skilled tasks around town like stocking shelves, checking inventory, or driving a forklift at a local grocer? When they work quickly and accurately or learn new trades, they get to choose between more complex jobs. That’s the idea that’s racked up $400 million in staffing contracts for Jyve, an on-demand labor platform that’s coming out of stealth today after 3.5 years.

“I believe the skill economy is way bigger than the gig economy” says CEO Brad Oberwager. He sees Uber driving as just the low-expertise beginning of a massive new job type where people with specializations or experience are efficiently matched to retail work. Jyve’s secret sauce is the work quality review system built into its app for managers and stores that lets it know who got the job done right and deserves even better opportunities.

Jyve’s potential to become the skilled labor marketplace has quietly attracted $35 million in funding across a seed and Series A round raised over the past few years led by SignalFire and joined by Crosscut Ventures and Ridge Ventures. “Jyve is one of the fastest-growing companies we’ve seen, having already reached $400 million in bookings in three short years” writes Chris Farmer, CEO of SignalFire. “They are creating a new economic class.”

It’s all because Safeway hasn’t touched a bag of Doritos in 50 years, CEO Brad Oberwager tells me. Grocery stores have long outsourced the shelving and arrangement of products to the big brands that make them, which is why the retail consumer packaged good industry employs 10 million people in the US, or over 10% of the country’s workforce. But instead of relying on one person to drive goods to the store, load them in, and shelve them, Jyve can divide those tasks up and match them to neraby people with sufficient skills to cut costs.

“Retail isn’t dying, it’s changing, and brands that are thriving are the ones investing in their in-store experience as well as owning their e-commerce initiatives,” observed Brad Oberwager, CEO and founder of Jyve. “The question we must ask then is how do we fill this labor shortage and also enable people to refine special skills that are multi-dimensional and rewarding.”

Oberwager knows the tribulations of grocery shelving well. He built online drugstore More.com before the dot com boom, then started making his own food products. He created True Fruit Cups, one of the country’s largest importer of grapefruit, and founded and sold his Bare apple chips company. Competing for shelf space with big brands paying workers to setup elaborate displays in grocers, he saw a chance to reimagine retail labor.

But it was when his daughter got sick and he realized the surgeon who performed the operation was essentially a high-skilled mercenary that he seized on the opportunity beyond grocers. “He walks in, does the surgery, walks out. He’s a gig worker, but it’s a skill I’m willing to pay a lot for” says Oberwager.

He created Jyve to aggregate the demand from different stores and the skills from different workers. When somene signs up for Jyve, they start with easier tasks like moving boxes in the backroom. If they do that well, they could unlock higher paying shelf stocking and display arrangement, then product ordering and brand abassadorship. At each step, they take photos and leave comments about their work that are reviewed by a combination of store and brand managers, as well as Jyve’s machine vision algorithms and human quality control team. It can quickly tell if someone puts the Cheerios box on the shelf the wrong way, and won’t give them public-facing tasks if they don’t improve

“70% of our market managers were originally drivers, and they become w2 workers” Oberwager says proudly. Jyve even makes it easy for brands and retailers to hire its top giggers for full-time jobs. Why would the startup allow that? “I want to put it on  billboard, “Work hard, get promoted” he tells me. The fact that Oberwager’s last name could be interpreted as “higher wages” in German makes Jyve seem like his destiny.

Keeping work quality up to snuff will be a challenge, but by dangling higher wages, Jyve aligns its incentives with its workers. The bigger hurdle may be convincing big brands and retail institutions to change the way they’ve done staffing forever. Oberwager professes that it takes a long time to onboard, but also a long time to offboard so it could build a solid moat if it’s the first to win this market. Jyve is now in over 1200 cities across the US, and a real-time map showed a plethora of gigs available around San Francisco during the demo.

Oberwager admthat the unskilled gig economy is “a little dehumanizing. It makes people a cog in a machine.” But he hopes each “Jyver” as he calls them can become more like a circuit – a complex machine of its own that powers something bigger.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2R9MF6Q

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What if instead of just accepting Uber rides, gig workers could pick from higher paying skilled tasks around town like stocking shelves, checking inventory, or driving a forklift at a local grocer? When they work quickly and accurately or learn new trades, they get to choose between more complex jobs. That’s the idea that’s racked up $400 million in staffing contracts for Jyve, an on-demand labor platform that’s coming out of stealth today after 3.5 years.

“I believe the skill economy is way bigger than the gig economy” says CEO Brad Oberwager. He sees Uber driving as just the low-expertise beginning of a massive new job type where people with specializations or experience are efficiently matched to retail work. Jyve’s secret sauce is the work quality review system built into its app for managers and stores that lets it know who got the job done right and deserves even better opportunities.

Jyve’s potential to become the skilled labor marketplace has quietly attracted $35 million in funding across a seed and Series A round raised over the past few years led by SignalFire and joined by Crosscut Ventures and Ridge Ventures. “Jyve is one of the fastest-growing companies we’ve seen, having already reached $400 million in bookings in three short years” writes Chris Farmer, CEO of SignalFire. “They are creating a new economic class.”

It’s all because Safeway hasn’t touched a bag of Doritos in 50 years, CEO Brad Oberwager tells me. Grocery stores have long outsourced the shelving and arrangement of products to the big brands that make them, which is why the retail consumer packaged good industry employs 10 million people in the US, or over 10% of the country’s workforce. But instead of relying on one person to drive goods to the store, load them in, and shelve them, Jyve can divide those tasks up and match them to neraby people with sufficient skills to cut costs.

“Retail isn’t dying, it’s changing, and brands that are thriving are the ones investing in their in-store experience as well as owning their e-commerce initiatives,” observed Brad Oberwager, CEO and founder of Jyve. “The question we must ask then is how do we fill this labor shortage and also enable people to refine special skills that are multi-dimensional and rewarding.”

Oberwager knows the tribulations of grocery shelving well. He built online drugstore More.com before the dot com boom, then started making his own food products. He created True Fruit Cups, one of the country’s largest importer of grapefruit, and founded and sold his Bare apple chips company. Competing for shelf space with big brands paying workers to setup elaborate displays in grocers, he saw a chance to reimagine retail labor.

But it was when his daughter got sick and he realized the surgeon who performed the operation was essentially a high-skilled mercenary that he seized on the opportunity beyond grocers. “He walks in, does the surgery, walks out. He’s a gig worker, but it’s a skill I’m willing to pay a lot for” says Oberwager.

He created Jyve to aggregate the demand from different stores and the skills from different workers. When somene signs up for Jyve, they start with easier tasks like moving boxes in the backroom. If they do that well, they could unlock higher paying shelf stocking and display arrangement, then product ordering and brand abassadorship. At each step, they take photos and leave comments about their work that are reviewed by a combination of store and brand managers, as well as Jyve’s machine vision algorithms and human quality control team. It can quickly tell if someone puts the Cheerios box on the shelf the wrong way, and won’t give them public-facing tasks if they don’t improve

“70% of our market managers were originally drivers, and they become w2 workers” Oberwager says proudly. Jyve even makes it easy for brands and retailers to hire its top giggers for full-time jobs. Why would the startup allow that? “I want to put it on  billboard, “Work hard, get promoted” he tells me. The fact that Oberwager’s last name could be interpreted as “higher wages” in German makes Jyve seem like his destiny.

Keeping work quality up to snuff will be a challenge, but by dangling higher wages, Jyve aligns its incentives with its workers. The bigger hurdle may be convincing big brands and retail institutions to change the way they’ve done staffing forever. Oberwager professes that it takes a long time to onboard, but also a long time to offboard so it could build a solid moat if it’s the first to win this market. Jyve is now in over 1200 cities across the US, and a real-time map showed a plethora of gigs available around San Francisco during the demo.

Oberwager admthat the unskilled gig economy is “a little dehumanizing. It makes people a cog in a machine.” But he hopes each “Jyver” as he calls them can become more like a circuit – a complex machine of its own that powers something bigger.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2R9MF6Q

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Munchery’s vendors claim the food delivery startup took advantage of them in its final hours, knowingly allowing them to continue making deliveries it couldn’t pay for.

Earlier this week, Munchery surprised customers with an email announcing it would cease operations, effective immediately. It did not, however, notify any of its vendors of the news, according to the owners of several small San Francisco-based businesses, who told TechCrunch they are owed thousands in overdue Munchery payments.

Charles Farriér, the owner of Crumble & Whisk Patisserie, is waiting on a $1,700 payment from Munchery. Lenore Estrada of Three Babes Bakeshop said she’s owed more than $20,000. Melissa Cohen of Salty Sweet Cookies, Jennifer Roy of Dandelion Chocolate and Jennifer Nguyen of Native Baking Co. are expecting a total of $16,417.50.

Munchery was founded in 2010 by former chief executive officer Tri Tran and Conrad Chu, who have both since left the company. It had raised a total of $125 million in venture capital funding, reaching a valuation of $300 million at its peak. Supported by notable Silicon Valley investors, including Greycroft, Menlo Ventures and Sherpa Capital, the high-flying startup failed to deploy capital efficiently, then crumbled. 

Now, three days after its sudden announcement, several vendors are waiting anxiously for their final invoice checks, and say they weren’t notified of Munchery’s end, nor has the business responded to persistent requests for explanations.

Munchery has not responded to multiple requests for comment from TechCrunch . As of Thursday morning, Munchery had not officially filed for bankruptcy in the Federal Court or in the Superior Court of San Francisco.

Munchery chief executive officer James Beriker joined the startup in 2016.

Gone without a trace

Days before Christmas, Farriér was told to slow down production of his artisan cheesecakes, which he had been servicing to Munchery for three years.

Munchery provided prepared meals to residents in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and New York. In addition to preparing ingredients in-house in its South San Francisco headquarters, the startup also partnered with local businesses, like Crumble & Whisk, whose baked goods were included with its meals.

Unlike the other business owners TechCrunch spoke with, Farriér said he had caught on to Munchery’s financial struggles after multiple late payments, and was on the verge of ending his relationship with the business entirely. Little did he know they were just weeks away from an implosion, that, according to sources, even some Munchery employees weren’t aware of until 24 hours before the end of business announcement was sent to customers.

Charles Farriér, the owner of San Francisco-based bakery Crumble & Whisk Patisserie.

“Today, with a heavy heart, we’re reaching out to announce that Munchery is closing its doors,” the business wrote in an email signed “Team Munchery.” “More than anything, we want to say thank you. Thank you for all of the love and support you have shown us over the years, for sharing us with your friends and family, and for including us in your special life moments.”

Beriker, who joined the startup as CEO in November 2016 after a four-year stint as the chief executive of recruitment firm Simply Hired, was missing from the signature of the email. Beriker has gone dark, opting not to respond to media requests, as well as emails and phone calls from vendors looking for payment.

When Farriér heard the news on Monday, he went to Munchery’s headquarters seeking his final payment. To his surprise, no one, except another aggravated vendor, was there. The $1,700 Farriér is owed may be equivalent to the cost of a dinner with colleagues for some Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but for him, it’s meant being forced to take out a loan to pay his employees.

“They just expect us to sit back and take it but we need that money to keep our businesses afloat,” Farriér told TechCrunch. “It may be pennies to them but it’s money to us, we cannot stay afloat without being paid. It hurt my business; I had to take out a loan; I had to tell my staff I couldn’t pay them this week.”

Farriér has worked with a number of tech-enabled food delivery platforms, including Good Eggs and Sprig, which similarly went out of business in May 2017. Contrary to how Munchery has handled its sudden ending, however, Sprig, he said, ensured all vendors were paid the same day the startup notified them that it would cease operations.

“The sad part about this whole situation is [Munchery] didn’t even have the courtesy or the respect to let the vendors know,” Farriér added. “It’s a real slap in the face.”

Bakers await payments

Estrada of Three Babes Bakeshop said she’s heard nothing from Munchery about its shutdown or the $20,000 owed her. Cohen, Roy and Nguyen similarly told TechCrunch they’ve attempted to reach out to Munchery, to no avail.

Dandelion Chocolate owner Jennifer Roy says Munchery owes her $6,000.

“The thing that’s really baffling to me is why they didn’t call it earlier,” Estrada told TechCrunch. “When I was there [Tuesday], there was a truck leaving with food that had been donated. Munchery ran into a wall rather than planning to shut down in an orderly fashion. That’s just crazy, as I’m sure they knew how much runway they had.”

Estrada and Nguyen said Munchery had standing orders with both Three Babes Bakery and Native Baking Co. Three Babes had planned to make their delivery Tuesday, one day after Munchery announced they were going out of business. Munchery never canceled the standing order. Native Baking Co. completed their standing order delivery Monday morning, the same day Munchery said it would cease operations.

“I’ve been hounding them to pay me for old invoices for the whole month of January,” Nguyen told TechCrunch. “During the holidays, we are so busy, so as a small business owner I wasn’t totally on top of keeping up with [payments]. I just thought I will get to January, then I will deal with it.”

Nguyen ultimately learned of Munchery’s shut down Tuesday morning from an article in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Munchery, as mentioned, had raised roughly $125 million in VC funding across rounds that closed in 2013, 2014 and 2015. Munchery didn’t raise any capital under Beriker, who was appointed amid reports the business had been struggling to improve its margins, aside from a $5 million financing in 2017.

“For a company that had raised so much money, it’s shocking to me that the CEO and the board weren’t more on top of calling it with enough time to pay their vendors,” Estrada added. “I personally will go without pay to pay my employees because of this situation. Will the Munchery CEO be doing the same? Most likely not.”

According to a 2016 report from Bloomberg, Munchery was making way too much food — much of which was thrown out — and was spending “hundreds of thousands of dollars” distributing discount flyers. For what it’s worth, Munchery told TechCrunch at the time of those reports that its “customer base and revenue [were] growing” and that it was profitable in San Francisco and “contribution margin positive” in its three other markets.

This was, however, before Munchery laid off 257 employees, or 30 percent of its workforce, and shut down its Seattle, Los Angeles and New York operations. In May 2018, at the time of the layoffs, the company said it planned to double down on the San Francisco market, “achieve profitability” and “build a long-term, sustainable business.”

Why Munchery and CEO James Beriker decided not to communicate its demise with vendors is unclear, as is what ultimately forced it to shutter so suddenly. What is clear is that Munchery ran into a brick wall and fast, left without enough cash to settle even its smallest debts.

“This feels like these guys locked the doors and ran off to another country,” Nguyen said. “I only have a couple of employees and I want to pay them. Nine-grand isn’t much to a giant company, but it makes a huge difference at our company. It feels as if we’ve been taken advantage of by the big guy and it sucks.”

Of the five businesses that spoke to TechCrunch, Munchery owes nearly $40,000 in overdue bills. What’s next? Munchery will inevitably officially file for bankruptcy and the small business owners — collateral damage of a startup that failed to overcome the brutal economics of the central kitchen model — will go without payment.

“I basically mean nothing to [Munchery],” Farriér said. “I’m just there to make sure [them] look good on paper. I’m just a number to [them].”

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CKgshr

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No one likes to think about death (least of all startup founders), but wills, trusts and estate planning are crucial for ensuring that your material assets get passed to whatever people or organizations you care about. Yet, few processes are more paper-driven than the legal process of getting your affairs in order.

Finally, the estate planning industry itself is getting its digital affairs in order. San Diego-based Trust & Will, a startup that guides users through the process of creating legal guardians, wills and trusts, partnered with Boston-based Notarize to execute the first digital will for Cory McCormick, a police officer in Nevada. Nevada is the only state today that allows for digital wills, although the legal community is increasingly exploring whether computers are here to stay.

Trust & Will also announced that they have closed on a combined $2 million in funding led by Revolution’s Rise of the Rest seed fund, which includes $500,000 in pre-seed from TechStars and others. The startup was founded by Cody Bardo along with Daniel Goldstein and Brian Lamb.

From a product perspective, estate planning faces the same challenges as most consumer-oriented fintech startups: there is an incredibly high cost to acquire customers. Plus, unlike credit cards or budgeting, most of us aren’t thinking about how we are going to die every single day, and so the company has to reach users at precisely the moment they are starting to think about planning their estates.

What Bardo and his team have learned over time is that new mothers are one of the key demographics for their business. One of the big challenges with having children is setting up legal guardian status for children, a legal process that, like wills, is almost exclusively based on paper. So Trust & Wills launched a new product called Guardian that allows parents to get that paperwork in order for $39.

Trust & Will’s Guardian product asks single questions to make it easy for users to choose the options they’re most comfortable with.

The goal is that by drawing parents into thinking about legal guardianship, a broader conversation about estate planning and inheritance can take place.

While estate planning has certainly seen its share of startups over the past few years including companies like Willing, Bardo’s vision for the future is competing with traditional trust asset management behemoths like State Street and Northern Trust. “We are trying to take market share by targeting digital-first customers,” Bardo said, “We can transition and evolve into a modern trust banking platform.”

In trust management and banking, fees are taken on the assets under management, rather than straight fees for services. Trust & Will believes that with all digital processes and a renewed focus on fees, it can offer a much better product with significantly lower fees than incumbents.

I talked a bit about a bankruptcy non-profit startup last week. The lesson from all of this is that there remains huge swaths of the economy that don’t have well-designed products, or aren’t even digital in the first place.

In addition to Rise of the Rest’s seed fund and TechStars, Trust & Will was funded by Western Technology Investment, Haolgen Ventures, Luma Launch, and angels.

Share your feedback on your startup’s attorney

My colleague Eric Eldon and I are reaching out to startup founders and execs about their experiences with their attorneys. Our goal is to identify the leading lights of the industry and help spark discussions around best practices. If you have an attorney you thought did a fantastic job for your startup, let us know using this short Google Forms survey and also spread the word. We will share the results and more in the coming weeks.

Stray Thoughts (aka, what I am reading)

Short summaries and analysis of important news stories

Palantir CEO lashes out over Silicon Valley’s anti-defense stance

Alex Karp, the long-time CEO of Palantir, condemned anti-defense tech employees on CNBC. He’s referring to the protests over projects like Google’s Pentagon contract which have withered under sustained protest from Bay Area opponents of the defense industry. Palantir obviously gets huge dollars from defense budgets, and so this isn’t surprising, but it is interesting how Karp frames the debate: “That is a loser position. It is not intelligible. It is not intelligible to the average person. It’s academically not sustainable. And I am very happy we’re not on that side of the debate.”

Meanwhile in Wired, David Samuels argues that Big Tech = Big Brother and the right to privacy is dying quickly as big data merges with the national security apparatus. That’s probably a world that suits Palantir just fine.

Tencent gets to publish a video game while Microsoft can’t get people to Bing

China has cracked down on Microsoft, blocking access to Bing. Despite the hardi-har-har of the announcement (did anyone notice that Bing was unavailable?), the reality is that even a relatively unpopular search engine is no longer safe from Beijing’s censors. Meanwhile, after months of delays in video game licenses, China’s administration has approved two new video games from Tencent. Tencent stock has been hammered over the freeze, and this bit of thaw may push the stock into more positive territory.

Google fights hackers

Not surprising for sure, but the Wall Street Journal has an interesting profile of an elite unit within Google that works to fight off hackers targeting its systems. From the article: “The 27-person team tracks more than 200 hacker groups that pose a threat to Google and its users, analyzing hacking techniques and clues to the groups’ identities to head off attacks.” At Google scale, this makes absolute sense, but how do early-stage startups protect their systems from advanced persistent threats? That to me remains a very important open question in cybersecurity.

What’s next & obsessions

• Arman and I are still focused on societal resilience startups. Send us your ideas and thoughts.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HvvKw4

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Postmates has made two new hires, both of which hail from Pinterest, in the form of Eric Edge and Andreas Lieber.

Edge joins Postmates as the SVP of Brand & Communications while Lieber joins as SVP of business development and corporate development.

Both come to Postmates from Pinterest where they served as Head of Global Marketing Communications and Head of Consumer Business Development respectively.

“Postmates has a deep understanding of its own business metrics and how to optimize them,” said Lieber. “In the Bay Area, you’ll see different variations of that understanding across companies. But what I saw in terms of level of diligence and understanding what drives the business and how to grow it was really attractive to me.”

In September, Postmates raised $300 million at a reported valuation of $1.2 billion. As part of the announcement, Postmates revealed that it is profitable in 90 percent of its markets and that gross margins improved to nearly 50 percent.

“The biggest challenge for Postmates is to continue to differentiate in a very busy space,” said Edge. “Postmates has become a brand that is synonymous with on-demand. It’s being used as a verb. So as far as being integrated into people’s lifestyle, we’re far ahead of the competition on that.”

Both Edge and Lieber will report directly to CEO Bastian Lehmann .

This past year, Postmates added 250 new cities to the service, bringing the total to 575 cities. The company also said it completed 5 million deliveries since launch.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2TgRehL