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Houzz, a $4 billion-valued home improvement startup that recently laid off 10 percent of its staff, has admitted a data breach.

A reader contacted TechCrunch on Thursday with a copy of an email sent by the company. It doesn’t say much — such as when the breach happened, what was stolen, or if a hacker to blame or if it was a data exposure that the company could’ve prevented.

Houzz spokesperson Gabriela Hebert would not comment beyond an FAQ posted on the company’s website, citing an ongoing investigation.

In that FAQ, the company said it “recently learned that a file containing some of our user data was obtained by an unauthorized third party.” It added: “We immediately launched an investigation and engaged with a leading forensics firm to assist in our investigation, containment, and remediation efforts.”

The company said it was notifiying all of its users who may have been affected.

An email from a Houzz user. (Image: supplied)

Houzz said some publicly visible information from a user’s Houzz profile, such as name, citiy, state, country and profile description, along with internal identifiers and fields “that have no discernible meaning to anyone outside of Houzz,” such as the region and location of the user and if they have a profile image, for example, the company said.

The company also said that usernames and scrambled passwords were also taken.

Houzz said that the passwords were scrambled and salted using a one-way hashing algorithm, but did not provide specifics on what kind of hashing algorithm was used. Some algorithms, like MD5, are old and outdated but still in use, while newer hashing algorithms — like bcrypt — are stronger and can be more difficult to crack, depending on the number of rounds the passwords go through.

Regardless, the company recommended users change their passwords.

No financial information was taken, according to the FAQ.

The company was last year among many mocked for sending out emails to users alerting them of mandatory changes to their privacy policies ahead of the 2018-introduced EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, saying it “value[s]” its customers privacy. “Their opening lines offer a glimpse of the way legal policy and user experience are colliding under the new regulations,” said Fast Company.

But it’s not clear if the company will face penalties — up to four percent of its global revenue — as a result of the regulation, only that the company “notified EU authorities within the statutory period,” said the spokesperson.

Another day, another breach.

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

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A new mobile banking startup called Step wants to help bring teenagers and other young adults into the cashless era. Today, cash is used less often, as more consumers shop online and send money to one another through payment apps like Venmo. But teenagers in particular are still heavily burdened with cash — even though they, too, want to spend their money on things that require a payment card, like Amazon.com purchases or mobile gaming, for example.

That’s where Step comes in.

The company aims to address the needs of what it believes is an underserved market in mobile banking — the 75 million children and young adults under the age of 21 in the U.S., who are still being forced to use cash.

This market isn’t the “unbanked,” it’s the “pre-banked,” explains Step CEO CJ MacDonald, whose previous startup, mobile gift card platform Gyft, sold to First Data several years ago.

Above: Step CEO, CJ MacDonald

“We’re building an all-in-one banking solution that primarily focuses on teens and parents,” he says. “We want it to be a teen’s first bank account. We want to be a teen’s first spending card. And we want to teach financial literacy and responsibility firsthand.”

MacDonald, along with CTO Alexey Kalinichenko, previously of Square and financial services startup Token, founded Step in May 2018. The 10-person team also includes several prior Gyft employees.

Last summer, Step closed on $3.8 million in seed funding from Sesame Ventures, Crosslink Capital and Collaborative Fund. Crosslink general partner Eric Chin sits on the board.

While there are a number of mobile banking apps out there today — like Chime, Monzo, Simple, Revolut and others — Step will specifically target teens, 13 and up, and other young adults with its marketing. Teens under 18 still need parents’ approval to sign up, of course. But the goal is to encourage the teens to bring the idea to their parents — not the other way around.

Step’s focus on this younger demographic puts it in a different space, where there are fewer competitors. Its more direct rivals are not the bigger mobile banks, but rather startups like teen debit card and bank app Current, or the parent-managed debit card for kids from Greenlight.

The mobile banking service Step provides will also aim to be more comprehensive than just a debit card. It will offer a combination of checking, savings and a Visa card that works as both credit and debit.

The card includes Visa’s Zero Liability Protection on all purchases from unauthorized use, and allows parents to set spending limits.

Parents will also be able to connect their own bank accounts to Step to instantly transfer in funds, which can then be distributed to kids’ accounts for things like allowances and chores, or other everyday spending needs. Step’s bank account itself is backed by Evolve Bank, so it’s FDIC-insured up to $250,000.

Unlike Current, which charges a subscription to use its service, Step aims to be a fee-free bank for consumers. Users don’t have to pay for their account, and there are no fees for things like overdrafts. Instead, Step’s plan is to generate revenue through traditional means — like interchange fees and by way of lending practices, once it has established a deposit base.

The company pays a 2.5 percent interest rate on deposits, offers a round-up savings feature and a range of budgeting tools and supports free instant transfers between Step accounts. It also provides access to a network of 35,000 ATMs with no fees.

Beyond simply facilitating mobile banking, Step’s bigger goal is to teach teens to become financially responsible.

“Schools do not teach kids about money. A lot of families don’t talk about money. And it’s a crucial life skill that’s not really addressed properly when people are growing up,” says MacDonald, who says he was lacking in life skills in this area, even as a young college grad.

“There were ‘Money 101’ skills that I had not learned — that no one had talked to me about. Things like building credit, how many credit cards you should have, debt to income ratio,” he continues. “A lot of people get released into the real world without experience [in those areas],” he says.

Long-term, after solving the needs associated with everyday banking transactions, Step wants to layer on other products and services — like tools that allow a family to save together for college, for example.

The company is launching the banking service under an invite-only system to scale up.

Today, it’s opening a waitlist and referral program. When you invite a friend, you each receive one dollar. Access will then be rolled out on a first-come, first-serve basis this spring. Users can join Step through the website, iOS or Android application.

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

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The founders of Dadi — pronounced daddy — think men are in need of a wake-up call.

“Men [have] a biological clock just like women, which is something that people don’t talk about,” Dadi co-founder and chief executive officer Tom Smith told TechCrunch. “Infertility isn’t a women’s issue; It’s both a men’s and women’s issue.”

Smith believes Dadi, the provider of a temperature-controlled at-home fertility test and sperm collection kit, will encourage men to contribute to family planning conversations and become more aware of their reproductive health. The startup is officially launching its kit and long-term sperm storage service today with nearly $2 million in venture capital funding from London-based seed fund firstminute capital and New York-based Third Kind Venture Capital.

“Our mission is to normalize the conversation around male fertility and reproductive health, and empower men with knowledge of fertility so they can have that conversation with their family,” Smith said.

Here’s how it works: Dadi customers order a kit online, masturbate and collect their sperm within the comfort of their own homes, drop it off with FedEx and wait for a full fertility report, which comes with a microscopic video of the each man’s actual sperm. To survive the trip to the startup’s laboratory — the New England Cryogenic Center — the Dadi-designed container injects preservatives, which are nested in the lid of the cup, into the sperm sample.

Headquartered in Brooklyn, Dadi’s service is FDA-licensed in all 50 states and costs a total of $198, including a test and one-year of sperm storage.

Dadi’s co-founding team includes Mackey Saturday, a graphic designer who created Instagram’s logo, and Gordon von Steiner, a former creative director in the fashion industry. The team has prioritized design and messaging of the product, in addition to security, privacy and high medical standards.

“We aren’t trying to sell hair pills, we are actually interacting with customers at a very vulnerable part of their life,” Smith said. “We feel like our value set, approach and thoughtfulness really differentiate us from anyone else in the space.”

One in 6 U.S. couples struggles with fertility, with male factor infertility a cause of 30 percent of those cases, per ReproductiveFacts.org. Startups want to improve these statistics, targeting an industry that’s trapped in the 1980s.

“We are in the direct-to-consumer era,” Smith said. “We reached peak app a couple years ago and I think a lot of the innovation that’s happening in the space comes down to individualized services.”

Dadi joins a cadre of privately-funded male fertility or men’s health businesses. Hims, the provider of direct-to-consumer erectile dysfunction (ED) and hair loss medication, leads the pact. The 2-year-old business entered the unicorn club last week with a $100 million investment. Ro, formerly known only as Roman, sells ED medication online, too, and has raised a total of $91 million. Legacy, which freezes men’s sperm, recently won TechCrunch’s very own Startup Battlefield competition in Berlin. And Manual, an educational portal and treatment platform for men’s issues, raised a £5 million seed round earlier this month from Felix Capital, Cherry Ventures and Cassius Capital.

It’s clear that VCs have woken up to the opportunity to disrupt fertility with tech-enabled solutions to age-old issues and now, entrepreneurs passionate about helping men broach sensitive topics, from infertility to erectile dysfunction to hair loss and more, are able to gain ground.

Here’s to more funding for women’s health businesses, which are in dire need of innovation, too.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2CSMc3Q

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At the end of last year, Grand Central Tech announced plans to work with the Milstein real estate family to transform a midtown Manhttan high-rise into a tech hub called Company. And startups remain an important part of the mix — in fact, Company is unveiling a list of 20 startups participating in this year’s GCT Startup-in-Residence program.

What does Startup-in-Residence mean? Well, Company CEO Matthew Harrigan said the program will continue to offer what it’s always offered — desk space, as well as access to events and amenities, for a select group of early-stage entrepreneurs. And participants don’t have to give up equity or pay rent.

The deal might seem too good to be true, but Harrigan argued that the startups make Company more appealing to its enterprise tenants: “We are retrofitting this building to look and feel and operate like a brand new building … but the one amenity that cannot be simply rolled out is people.”

He also said the program is only taking up 15,000 square feet of the building’s 150,000 square foot total.

“It sounds like an exceptionally generous offering and it isn’t,” he said. “It sounds like it doesn’t make a ton of business sense but that’s actually wrong … Fifteen thousand square feet of space to great early-stage founders helps establish a truly remarkable program and campus in New York City. Those are resources are well spent.”

In the past, we’ve written about Grand Central Tech as an accelerator program, but Harrigan said, “We weren’t and aren’t an accelerator” — it just used “the nomenclature that’s known.” Now the program is taking on a more fitting name, though it sounds like the operations won’t be changing too dramatically.

“We typically have very sophisticated founding teams, giving them an ideal environment in which to work,” Harrigan said. “By and large, our companies are left to their own devices — we don’t presume to create a curriculum or some series of programming. It’s a somewhat passive approach, but we make sure all people in the community are linked up with each other.”

Also worth noting: This year’s class consists of 40 percent women founders and CEOs, and it covers industries like energy, mental health, e-commerce, biotech, adtech and food.

Here’s a list of the companies, with descriptions provided by Company (and edited by me for clarity and length). We’ve also written about a number of them before, so I’m including links to past coverage when possible.

• Dandelion Energy​ ​is a geothermal energy company that’s building a scalable and cost-efficient geothermal heating solution for the U.S. residential housing market. The company is a spinout of Alphabet and GoogleX.

• • Octave​ ​is a full-stack mental health provider, purpose-built to capitalize on evolving consumer habits and a new wave of interest in the space.
  • Vowel ​is a multi-user enterprise voice platform operating in stealth. The company enables businesses to analyze, manage and drive actionable insights from audio data generated in the workplace/meetings.
  • Nara Organics​ ​is a natural baby food company that is manufacturing the first biodynamic infant formula in the US.
  • Twine Labs​ ​is a workforce analytics platform that’s creating a single source of truth on employee data across various disaggregated internal corporate databases. Data is then benchmarked against industry standards to help Chief People Officers gain vital, previously unavailable perspective.
  • Taskade​ ​is a new workplace collaboration platform that enables more efficient team management and product workflows.
  • Oova​ is a biomedical technology company for women’s health that uses smart connected devices to actively monitor hormone levels and help manage women’s fertility health. The company is a spinout of Mt. Sinai.
  • Summer​ ​is a next-generation student loan management and repayment platform providing users with a comprehensive view of their debt and targeted recommendations on how to alleviate it which evolve based on their current life circumstances.
  • Chartable​ ​is creating a new enterprise adtech and analytics platform for audio. It’s aiming to do something similar to what DoubleClick, AppAnnie, Flurry and others did when apps were first introduced.
  • Particle Health​ ​is creating a new medical record data company, leveraging blockchain technology to enable a single health record tying together previously disparate information from a patient’s various doctors, and yielding valuable data insights in the process.
  • Project OTC ​is a holistic new consumer brand targeting outdated over-the-counter brands and products such as antacids, Vitamin-C/immunity support and headache relief. The company is operating in stealth.

• Moved​ ​is building a new concierge layer on top of the disorganized, disaggregated moving services supply chain. A user calls Moved, shares details and is given a concierge who manages the move and coordinates across all the various service providers, including the landlord or real estate owner.
• Hydra​ ​is a ​new network of membership-based wellness spaces in metropolitan areas that complements the growth of small format fitness classes and provides its members areas to refresh, regroup and recharge.
• GoodTalk​ ​is a new consumer app meant to distill and amplify one of primary aspects of social platforms. For example, five experts on a given topic can form a chat thread, which other users of the app can view but not comment on.
• Otis​ is building a new investment platform to enable distributed ownership in fine art and collectibles.
• Snackable​ ​uses natural language processing to intelligently digest podcasts into “snackable” 30-60 second moments to enable easier social sharing of podcast content — something which has plagued the burgeoning podcast space.


Lolli allows users to receive Bitcoin for their online purchases

• Lolli​ ​is building a new ecommerce platform that allows customers to accumulate Bitcoin rewards through simple brand and retail purchases by capturing the rebate/coupon value already broadly distributed throughout ecommerce.
• RaisedByUs​ ​is a nonprofit workplace social good program for companies that already includes Casper, Squarespace, Shutterstock, Seatgeek, Sailthru, Birchbox, MongoDB, DigitalOcean among others. RaisedByUs helps teams do meaningful, team-building, vetted volunteer work easily.
• Nesterly​ ​i​s a home sharing platform that is working to bring affordable housing to the next generation by allowing senior homeowners to easily rent out their extra space.
• Bokksu​ ​is a subscription-based food company that curates exclusive artisan snacks in local markets and uses video and written storytelling to detail origin stories through an immersive customer experience.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2UyiZ5D

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When considering the structural impact of technology companies on our economy and society, we tend to focus on questions of scale and monopoly.

It’s true that the FAANG companies and more recent winners (Airbnb, Uber) have surfed a combination of network effects, preferential access to capital and classic efficiencies of scale to generate tremendous value for their shareholders—to the detriment of new entrants who attempt to unseat them.

At their high water mark in mid-2018, FAANG alone made up 11% of the total market cap of the S&P 500 and 38% of the index’s year-to-date gain, representing a doubling in their influence in only five years. The question of regulating technology companies—to the point of instituting anti-trust actions—has even become a rare point of relative concord between Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

But is the narrative of tech companies in the 2010s only a story of economic consolidation and growing inequality? Many of the most successful B2B startups of the last decade are aligned by a theme that paints a different picture. By transforming the nature of the costs required to start a business, these startups are reducing the influence of capital and leveling the playing field for new entrants to share in the surplus generated by the secular shift to a tech-mediated economy.

Source: Getty Images/MIKIEKWOODS

A Path To Equal Opportunity: Turning Fixed Costs Into Variable Costs

What do AWS, WeWork, Stord, Gusto and RocketLawyer have in common? They provide cloud computing services, office space, warehouse storage, payroll management and access to legal templates, respectively—at first glance, not a particularly congruent set of services.

But they are alike in the economic purpose they serve for their customers. Each of these services takes a fixed cost—a bank of servers, a lease, a legal retainer—and transforms it into a variable cost. As a refresher, a fixed cost stays constant regardless of output, and variable costs scale with the output of a business.

When my father started his software consulting business in the early 1990s, I remember the giant boxes of AIX servers that arrived at our apartment, and tagging along to office tours in central New Jersey before he decided to run the company out of our spare bedroom. Back then, starting almost any kind of business was hard because of high fixed costs. Without AWS or WeWork, you shelled out up front for hardware and a lease.

Access to capital, whether in the form of a bank loan, savings, or friends and family was a prerequisite for entrepreneurship.

Today, startups make it possible to start and scale almost any kind of business while incurring few fixed costs. Want to found an ecommerce store? Start with a free Shopify account and dropship your inventory. Want to become a freelance designer? Put a shingle up on Fiverr and meet clients at a Breather you rent by the hour.

Whether software or hardware or labor, building a business is way easier when overhead is transformed into a string of flexible microservices that you only pay for as you grow.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

Lower Fixed Costs Means Capital Matters Less

Taken together, startups that turn fixed costs into variable costs make it less capital intensive to start a business. This decreases the influence of gatekeepers and aggregators of capital—an impact evident in the way entrepreneurs think about starting businesses today.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of B2B startups fitting this theme has coincided with the bootstrap movement, in which tech entrepreneurs with major ambitions demur from raising venture funding because—well, they don’t need the money anymore.

It has also coincided with a renaissance in freelance entrepreneurship: 56.7 million Americans freelanced in 2018. Beyond the economic benefits of working for yourself—the fastest growing segment of freelancers earns over $75,000 a year—freelancers can access the lifestyle and health benefits of owning their destiny, which aren’t directly captured but play a role in the economic picture. 51% of freelancers said no amount of money would lure them into a traditional job, and 64% reported feeling healthier and happier.

When capital plays a reduced role in new business formation, access to capital plays a smaller role in determining who will succeed. More companies are founded, and the economy becomes more likely to birth new Davids that will unseat the Goliaths. Economics 101: lower barriers to entry create markets that converge on perfect competition instead of oligarchic concentration.

Sourlce: Getty Images/ERHUI1979

Variable Costs Don’t Scale, But That’s OK

Variable costs have their downsides. A startup with a relatively higher proportion of fixed costs—the profile of the classic high-tech software business—can achieve higher profit margins as it scales. Compare Microsoft or Google, which pay high fixed costs in the form of salaries and servers but few costs in delivering their services and achieve operating margins of 25-30%, to Costco, which takes in more than $100B of annual revenue but earns an operating margin in the single digits.

That’s OK. Neither type of cost is “better” or “worse,” but having the option to decide how to structure costs through a company’s lifecycle can meaningfully impact an entrepreneur’s ability to execute a business idea.
Founders investigating startup ideas—and politicians debating the impact of technology—would do well to pay attention to how B2B companies have democratized access to entrepreneurship.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2S0HRWP

//

When considering the structural impact of technology companies on our economy and society, we tend to focus on questions of scale and monopoly.

It’s true that the FAANG companies and more recent winners (Airbnb, Uber) have surfed a combination of network effects, preferential access to capital and classic efficiencies of scale to generate tremendous value for their shareholders—to the detriment of new entrants who attempt to unseat them.

At their high water mark in mid-2018, FAANG alone made up 11% of the total market cap of the S&P 500 and 38% of the index’s year-to-date gain, representing a doubling in their influence in only five years. The question of regulating technology companies—to the point of instituting anti-trust actions—has even become a rare point of relative concord between Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

But is the narrative of tech companies in the 2010s only a story of economic consolidation and growing inequality? Many of the most successful B2B startups of the last decade are aligned by a theme that paints a different picture. By transforming the nature of the costs required to start a business, these startups are reducing the influence of capital and leveling the playing field for new entrants to share in the surplus generated by the secular shift to a tech-mediated economy.

Source: Getty Images/MIKIEKWOODS

A Path To Equal Opportunity: Turning Fixed Costs Into Variable Costs

What do AWS, WeWork, Stord, Gusto and RocketLawyer have in common? They provide cloud computing services, office space, warehouse storage, payroll management and access to legal templates, respectively—at first glance, not a particularly congruent set of services.

But they are alike in the economic purpose they serve for their customers. Each of these services takes a fixed cost—a bank of servers, a lease, a legal retainer—and transforms it into a variable cost. As a refresher, a fixed cost stays constant regardless of output, and variable costs scale with the output of a business.

When my father started his software consulting business in the early 1990s, I remember the giant boxes of AIX servers that arrived at our apartment, and tagging along to office tours in central New Jersey before he decided to run the company out of our spare bedroom. Back then, starting almost any kind of business was hard because of high fixed costs. Without AWS or WeWork, you shelled out up front for hardware and a lease.

Access to capital, whether in the form of a bank loan, savings, or friends and family was a prerequisite for entrepreneurship.

Today, startups make it possible to start and scale almost any kind of business while incurring few fixed costs. Want to found an ecommerce store? Start with a free Shopify account and dropship your inventory. Want to become a freelance designer? Put a shingle up on Fiverr and meet clients at a Breather you rent by the hour.

Whether software or hardware or labor, building a business is way easier when overhead is transformed into a string of flexible microservices that you only pay for as you grow.

Image courtesy of Getty Images

Lower Fixed Costs Means Capital Matters Less

Taken together, startups that turn fixed costs into variable costs make it less capital intensive to start a business. This decreases the influence of gatekeepers and aggregators of capital—an impact evident in the way entrepreneurs think about starting businesses today.

It’s no coincidence that the rise of B2B startups fitting this theme has coincided with the bootstrap movement, in which tech entrepreneurs with major ambitions demur from raising venture funding because—well, they don’t need the money anymore.

It has also coincided with a renaissance in freelance entrepreneurship: 56.7 million Americans freelanced in 2018. Beyond the economic benefits of working for yourself—the fastest growing segment of freelancers earns over $75,000 a year—freelancers can access the lifestyle and health benefits of owning their destiny, which aren’t directly captured but play a role in the economic picture. 51% of freelancers said no amount of money would lure them into a traditional job, and 64% reported feeling healthier and happier.

When capital plays a reduced role in new business formation, access to capital plays a smaller role in determining who will succeed. More companies are founded, and the economy becomes more likely to birth new Davids that will unseat the Goliaths. Economics 101: lower barriers to entry create markets that converge on perfect competition instead of oligarchic concentration.

Sourlce: Getty Images/ERHUI1979

Variable Costs Don’t Scale, But That’s OK

Variable costs have their downsides. A startup with a relatively higher proportion of fixed costs—the profile of the classic high-tech software business—can achieve higher profit margins as it scales. Compare Microsoft or Google, which pay high fixed costs in the form of salaries and servers but few costs in delivering their services and achieve operating margins of 25-30%, to Costco, which takes in more than $100B of annual revenue but earns an operating margin in the single digits.

That’s OK. Neither type of cost is “better” or “worse,” but having the option to decide how to structure costs through a company’s lifecycle can meaningfully impact an entrepreneur’s ability to execute a business idea.
Founders investigating startup ideas—and politicians debating the impact of technology—would do well to pay attention to how B2B companies have democratized access to entrepreneurship.

from Startups – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2S0HRWP

//

Nine years after launching its online magazine, and three years after diversifying into the subscription box business, FabFitFun has raised $80 million in a growth round of funding, led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from its previous investors Upfront Ventures and NEA. 

The Los Angeles-based company has steadily expanded its retail and lifestyle empire through subscription boxes, video… and even an augmented reality app.

Last year the company crossed $200 million in revenue and managed to net more than 1 million subscribers for the service.

In a statement the company said the new financing would be used to expand FabFitFun membership offerings and consolidate its position as a marketing partner and platform for brands.

As a result of the investment, Kleiner Perkins general partners Mood Rowghani and Mary Meeker will join as board member and observer, respectively.

It’s been a long ride for co-founders Daniel and Michael Broukhim and Katie Rosen Kitchens. From a newsletter and blog to the subscription box to the launch of live programming last year.

For brands, the pitch is a new way to find customers and engage with them. The seasonally curated boxes and special exclusive co-branded box opportunities with Los Angeles’ pool of influencers results in hundreds of millions of targeted impressions, according to the company.

“FabFitFun has emerged into an exciting and entirely new distribution channel that brings retail to the platforms where consumers are most engaged,” said Mood Rowghani, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins, in a statement. “The company’s personalized connection with its community allows brands to better understand and interact with consumers – establishing a long-term relationship rather than simply a transaction.”

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

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It’s been just about a year since the relaunch of WeWork Labs, an accelerator-type program operating under the WeWork umbrella. Since then, it’s grown to 37 locations in 22 cities. And it’s truly international, operating in 12 countries, including Brazil, China, Germany and India.

These Labs offices are often — but not always — housed within a larger WeWork space, and, like an accelerator, they offer mentorship and programming. However, WeWork doesn’t take any equity; instead, it simply makes money by charging rent. (In New York, a desk costs between $450 and $550 a month, but the price varies by location.)

I spoke to Roee Adler, the program’s global head, about how the program has evolved over the past year. Adler actually has a long history with startups — in fact, his company Soluto won the very first Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt. He’s held a number of positions at WeWork, including chief product officer, and he said that as his role was evolving, he found himself asking, “What is the next startup we can build inside WeWork?”

The answer: “We decided to reevaluate our level of commitment and investment with the earliest of stages for startups.”

WeWork actually had a startup program called WeWork Labs back in 2011, but it languished in the years since. Adler relaunched the program with its first New York space in January of last year, and he’s been opening locations at a furious pace since then.

Roee Adler

Each Labs office is supervised by a Labs Manager, who Adler said is usually “a former entrepreneur whose life’s mission is to manage startups.” For example, before Mor Barak joined the program last year to launch Labs in Tel Aviv, she was the general manager of Israel’s oldest accelerator program, The Junction.

“I got to a point where I felt like I finally found what I loved to do, which is to work with startups and to support startups and understand how our connections and our network can help them move forward,” Barak said. “And then I wanted to take that and do that on a bigger scale, as part of a company that can reach new geographies and bring forward local entrepreneurs.”

As a Labs Manager, Barak said her main role is to “be that that business connector for the startups,” which means meeting with the entrepreneurs on a weekly basis to understand their needs and challenges. At the same time, she emphasized that Labs is a global program: “As a Labs Manager in Tel Aviv, I can quite easily connect to my colleagues around the world find the people that I need to get to in order to help the startup.”

Adler made a similar point about sharing resources between the different locations.

“A lecture that is at our Najing Xi Lu Road space in Shanghai will get captured, summarized, translated and become available to all of the entrepreneurs around the world,” he said. “Does that mean every piece of information is relevant for everyone? No. But truthfully, who knows?”

Adriana Vazquez of Lilu

To celebrate the one-year anniversary, WeWork Labs held a pitch competition at the company’s New York City headquarters last week, with $250,000 in funding distributed among the winners. The $150,000 grand prize went to Lilu, a startup making a compression bra that helps mothers pump milk. (It’s another Startup Battlefield alum.)

CEO and co-founder Adriana Vazquez told me that Lilu has been working out of the WeWork Labs in Dumbo since August. Vazquez has participated in other accelerator programs and worked out of other coworking spaces, and she said Labs is different from either — it allows you to “get the community of an accelerator without the prescribed schedule,” and it offers a very different feeling from a coworking space.

“There is that understanding and respect everyone’s really busy and has fires to put out,” she said. “We had a brief stay at another coworking space with creatives and small businesses, and there wasn’t that camaraderie, where you see someone that’s working on a weekend and you know you’re not here because they want to hang out on a Friday. It’s almost an unspoken understanding: Yeah, I know what you’re going through.”

As for what Adler has planned for Labs’ second year, he said he wants to do more work connecting startups with larger corporations: “WeWork has really become the only natural nexus in the world where you can have a three-month-old startup entrepreneur bumping shoulders with a senior vice president of Microsoft going to get coffee from the same machine and engaging in a conversation about the future.”

WeWork Labs Dumbo

And of course, he plans to open more offices, with the goal of reaching 100 locations by the end of 2019.

“The three of us are sitting in Manhattan right now, one of the wealthiest cities in the world … but it’s not about here,” Adler said said. “It’s about the people who aren’t sitting in the big tech hubs or bubbles. That is exciting.”

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