Feed aggregator

Before it was worth $7.6 billion, the original idea for Robinhood was a stock-trading social network. At my kitchen table in San Francisco in 2013, the founders envisioned an app for sharing hot tips to a feed complete with a leaderboard of whose predictions were most accurate. Once they had SEC approval, they pivoted toward the real money maker: letting people buy and sell stocks in the app, and pay to borrow cash to do so.

Now, seven years later, Robinhood is subtly taking the first steps back to its start. Today it’s launching Profiles. For now, they let users see analytics about their portfolio, like how concentrated they are in stocks versus options versus cryptocurrency, as well as across different business sectors. Complete with usernames and a photo, Profiles let you follow self-made or Robinhood-provided lists of stocks and other assets.

Profiles could give Robinhood’s customers the confidence to trade more, and create a sense of lock-in that stops them from straying to other brokerages that have dropped their per-trade fees to zero to match the startup, like Charles Schwab, Ameritrade and E-Trade, which was acquired for $13 billion today by Morgan Stanley, as reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The Profile features certainly sound helpful. They could reveal that your portfolio is too centered around tech, media and telecom stocks, or that you’re ignoring cryptocurrency or corporations from your home state. Lists also makes it easier to track specific business verticals, save stocks to buy when you have the cash or set aside some for deeper research. Robinhood pulls info from FactSet, Morningstar and other trusted sources to figure out which stocks and ETFs go into sector lists, or you can make and name your own. Profiles and lists begin to roll out to all users next week.

But what’s most interesting is how profiles lay the foundation for Robinhood as a social network. It’s easy to imagine letting users follow other accounts or lists they create. The original Robinhood app let users make predictions like “17% increase in Facebook share price over the next 11 weeks,” with comments to explain why. It showed users’ prediction accuracy, their average holding time for assets, a point score for smart foresight and community BUY or SELL ratings on stocks.

If Robinhood rebuilt some of these features, it might lessen the need for an expensive financial advisor or having enough cash to qualify for one with a different brokerage. Robinhood could let you crowdsource advice. “We understand the connotation of taking something from the rich and giving it to the poor. Robinhood is liberating information that’s locked up with professionals and giving it to the people,” Robinhood co-founder and co-CEO Vlad Tenev told me back in 2013.

Robinhood would certainly need to be careful about scammy tips going viral. Improper safeguards could lead to pump and dump schemes where those late to buy in get screwed when prices snap back to reality.

But embracing social could leverage some of its strongest assets: the youthfulness of its user base and the depth of connection to its users. The median age of a Robinhood customer is 30, and half say they’re first-time investors. Being able to turn to friends or experts within the app might convince them to pull the trigger on trades.

Most online brokerages are somewhat undifferentiated beyond differences in pricing, while their clunky, unstylized products don’t generate the same brand affinity as people have for Robinhood. Unsatisfied users could bail for a competitor at any time. Robinhood’s users are accustomed to social networking and the way it locks in users, because they don’t want to abandon their community.

When I asked Robinhood Profiles’ product manager Shanthi Shanmugam directly about whether this was the start of more social trading features, they suspiciously dodged the question, telling me, “When thinking about how to reflect who you are as an investor, we looked at how other apps represent you and it felt natural to leverage a design that felt more like a profile. When helping people group their investment ideas, it was easy to envision this as a playlist you might find on your favorite music app.”

That’s far from a denial. Offering social validation for trading could help Robinhood earn more from its customers despite their small total account balances. While Robinhood might have more than 10 million accounts versus E-Trade’s 5.2 million and Morgan Stanley’s 3 million, E-Trade’s average account size is $69,230 and Morgan Stanley’s is $900,000, while a survey found most of Robinhood’s held $1,000 to $5,000.

That all means that Robinhood earns less on interest sitting in users’ accounts than the old incumbents. But Robinhood earns the majority of its money on selling order flow and through its subscription Robinhood Gold feature that lets users pay monthly so they can borrow cash to trade with. Profiles and lists, and then eventually more social features, could get Robinhood’s users trading more so there’s more order flow to sell and more reason for them to buy subscriptions.

“Democratizing access is about lowering fees, minimums and other barriers people face — like confidence. Profiles and lists make finance easier to understand and more familiar for people,” says Shanmugam. More social features built safely, more reassurance, more trading, more revenue. Robinhood has raised $910 million. But to outgun larger competitors like the newly assembled Morgan Stanley/E-Trade that’s matched its zero-fee pricing, Robinhood will have to win with product.

What the $13B E-Trade deal says about Robinhood’s valuation

ChartHop, a startup that aims to modernize and automate the organizational chart, announced a $5 million seed investment today led by Andreessen Horowitz.

A big crowd of other investors also participated including Abstract Ventures, the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund, CoFound, Cowboy Ventures, Flybridge Capital, Shrug Capital, Work Life Ventures and a number of unnamed individual investors, as well.

Founder, CEO and CTO, Ian White says that at previous jobs including as CTO and co-founder at Sailthru, he found himself frustrated by the available tools for organizational planning, something that he says every company needs to get a grip on.

White did what any good entrepreneur would do. He left his previous job and spent the last couple of years building the kind of software he felt was missing in the market. “ChartHop is the first org management platform. It’s really a new type of HR software that brings all the different people data together in one place, so that companies can plan, analyze and visualize their organizations in a completely new way,” White told TechCrunch.

While he acknowledges that among his early customers, the Head of HR is a core user, White doesn’t see this as purely an HR issue. “It’s a problem for any executive, leader or manager in any organization that’s growing and trying to plan what the organization is going to look like more strategically,” he explained.

Lead investor at a16z David Ulevitch, also sees this kind of planning as essential to any organization. “How you structure and grow your organization has a tremendous amount of influence on how your company operates. This sounds so obvious, and yet most organizations don’t act thoughtfully when it comes to organizational planning and design,” Ulevitch wrote in a blog post announcing the investment.

The way it works is that out of the box it connects to 15 or 20 standard types of company systems like BambooHR, Carta, ADP and Workday, and based on this information it can build an organizational chart. The company can then slice and dice the data by department, open recs, gender, salary, geography and so forth. There is also a detailed reporting component that gives companies insight into the current makeup and future state of the organization.

The visual org chart itself is set up so that you can scrub through time to see how your company has changed. He says that while it is designed to hide sensitive information like salaries, he does see it as a way of helping employees across the organization understand where they fit and how they relate to other people they might not even know because the size of the company makes that impossible.

ChartHop org chart organized by gender. Screenshot: ChartHop

White says that he has dozens of customers already, who are paying ChartHop by the employee on a subscription basis. While his target market is companies with more than 100 employees, at some point he may offer a version for early-stage startups who could benefit from this type of planning, and could then have a complete history of the organization over the life of the company.

Today, the company has 9 employees, and he only began hiring in the fall when this seed money came through. He expects to double that number in the next year.

Six months ago or thereabouts, a group of engineers and developers with backgrounds from the National Security Agency, Google and Amazon Web Services had an idea.

Data is valuable for helping developers and engineers to build new features and better innovate. But that data is often highly sensitive and out of reach, kept under lock and key by red tape and compliance, which can take weeks to get approval. So, the engineers started Gretel, an early-stage startup that aims to help developers safely share and collaborate with sensitive data in real time.

It’s not as niche of a problem as you might think, said Alex Watson, one of the co-founders. Developers can face this problem at any company, he said. Often, developers don’t need full access to a bank of user data — they just need a portion or a sample to work with. In many cases, developers could suffice with data that looks like real user data.

“It starts with making data safe to share,” Watson said. “There’s all these really cool use cases that people have been able to do with data.” He said companies like GitHub, a widely used source code sharing platform, helped to make source code accessible and collaboration easy. “But there’s no GitHub equivalent for data,” he said.

And that’s how Watson and his co-founders, John Myers, Ali Golshan and Laszlo Bock came up with Gretel.

“We’re building right now software that enables developers to automatically check out an anonymized version of the data set,” said Watson. This so-called “synthetic data” is essentially artificial data that looks and works just like regular sensitive user data. Gretel uses machine learning to categorize the data — like names, addresses and other customer identifiers — and classify as many labels to the data as possible. Once that data is labeled, it can be applied access policies. Then, the platform applies differential privacy — a technique used to anonymize vast amounts of data — so that it’s no longer tied to customer information. “It’s an entirely fake data set that was generated by machine learning,” said Watson.

It’s a pitch that’s already gathering attention. The startup has raised $3.5 million in seed funding to get the platform off the ground, led by Greylock Partners, and with participation from Moonshots Capital, Village Global and several angel investors.

“At Google, we had to build our own tools to enable our developers to safely access data, because the tools that we needed didn’t exist,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, a former Google executive, and now a partner at Greylock.

Gretel said it will charge customers based on consumption — a similar structure to how Amazon prices access to its cloud computing services.

“Right now, it’s very heads-down and building,” said Watson. The startup plans to ramp up its engagement with the developer community in the coming weeks, with an eye on making Gretel available in the next six months, he said.

Meet 5 cybersecurity unicorns that could IPO in 2020

HungryPanda, a food delivery service for Chinese communities in cities around the world, announced today it has raised $20 million in funding. The round was led by investors 83North and Felix Capital and will be used on hiring, product development and global expansion, particularly in the United States. The startup, which did not disclose its current valuation, said its goal is to reach an annual run rate of $200 million by May.

Founded in the United Kingdom, where its service first launched in Nottingham, HungryPanda is now available in 31 cities in the U.K., Italy, France, Australia, New Zealand and the U.S.

Food delivery is a competitive space with tight margins, but HungryPanda is carving out its own niche, and differentiating from competitors like UberEats, Deliveroo and FoodPanda, by tailoring its platform for Chinese-language users, including business owners, and focusing on Chinese food and grocery deliveries. It also accepts payment services like Alipay and WeChat Pay, and uses WeChat for marketing.

Chinese communities around the world present a major market opportunity and HungryPanda says its operations in the United Kingdom and New York City are already profitable. According to a U.S. Census Bureau report published last year, the Chinese diaspora around the world ranges from about 10 million, when counting people born in China, to about 45 million under a wider definition that also includes second-generation immigrants and other groups.

In a press statement, HungryPanda CEO Eric Liu said “we are delighted to secure the backing of 83North and Felix Capital to bring our unique service to more people in more places. Their unrivaled industry investment experience, coupled with our ability to focus on the precise needs of our customers and launch in every new city within a two-week window, means we are in an ideal position to significantly scale to the business to meet the huge level of demand created by Chinese cuisine.”

Both 83North and Felix Capital already have other food delivery startups in their portfolios. 83North is an investor and Just Eat and Helsinki-based Wolt, while Felix Capital has backed Deliveroo and Frichti, a French startup that makes all its meals in-house.

It sounds like Liquid Death has won over investors with its promise to “murder your thirst.” The startup is announcing that it’s raised $9 million in Series A funding.

Liquid Death sells water in a tallboy aluminum can, and it’s expanding the lineup with a sparkling water can that it plans to start shipping in March. A 12-pack of either regular or sparkling mountain water currently costs $18.99 on the Liquid Death website.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Cessario has worked as a creative director and copywriter at companies like VaynerMedia, and he told me that his goal is to create a brand that’s healthy and sustainable while being “just as exciting, if not more exciting, than energy drinks, soda, alcohol and candy.”

Hence the “murder your thirst” tagline, as well as a generally tongue-in-cheek approach to marketing, including aggressive, heavy metal-influenced art. The startup is expanding those efforts with a new “Keep the Underworld Beautiful” campaign that asks customers to save Hell itself from plastic bottles.

“When you’re launching a new brand, if you don’t have millions and millions of dollars to push it out there with [advertising], your only chance of survival is the product itself has to be insanely shareable,” Cessario said. “You’re going to have a hard enough time funding production. You’re not going to have the money to compete with the Cokes and the Pepsis, so the only way get it out there is if people organically want to share it because of the funny, irreverent marketing.”

As one piece of evidence that the message is resonating, the company says there are at least 20 “random customers” who have received Liquid Death tattoos.

The emphasis on branding left me wondering whether the water itself was a bit of a sidenote. Cessario responded that when it comes to food and beverage products, branding is the biggest differentiator, because “consumers aren’t stupid.” They don’t actually believe that one product is dramatically better than the other; it’s more about which brand they feel affinity with.

At the same time, he said that when it comes to turning Liquid Death into more than a one-time novelty purchase, “The most important thing, first and foremost, is that when someone buys it, they enjoy drinking this water from a can. When they actually have a freezing cold can of Liquid Death, people will continue to come back because they like the product experience.”

I’ll note that I’ve tried out Liquid Death myself and can confirm that it’s perfectly fine water. Most notably, there’s something genuinely fun and satisfying about cracking open a new can (though if you do it at work, you’ll probably get some suspicious or amused stares from your coworkers).

Cessario also argued that the brand is about “so much more than loud marketing, it’s about sustainability.” The company makes a big point out of the fact that its aluminum cans are made out of more than 70% recycled material, and that aluminum is “infinitely recyclable,” making the packaging much more environmentally friendly than plastic bottles. Liquid Death also donates 5 cents for every can sold to nonprofits like 5 Gyres (which fights plastic pollution) and Thirst Project (which works on providing access to clean drinking around the world).

The sustainability message has prompted criticism around the fact that packaged water — even if it’s in an aluminum can — is less sustainable than simply filling up a reusable container with tap water.

“We’re definitely not against reusable bottles,” Cessario said when I brought this up. “But the reality is: Do you think it’s possible to actually get 300 million people, people in the Midwest, to do that 100 percent of the time? It’s highly unrealistic.”

Instead, he suggested that he’s happy for people to drink tap water from reusable bottles when it makes sense, and they can turn to Liquid Death at other times — “at a concert venue, when you’re having a house party, when you’re at a bar.”

Liquid Death’s Series A was led by Velvet Sea Ventures, a new firm created by Buddy Media co-founder Michael Lazerow. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, TOMS founding members Jake Strom and Blake Mycoskie, GirlBoss founder/CEO Sophia Amoruso and Thrive Market CEO Nick Green also participated, as did existing investors Science Inc. and Away co-founder Jen Rubio. Liquid Death has now raised a total of $11.25 million.

Cessario said that until now, the majority of the startup’s sales have either come from its website or from Amazon, but one of the main aims with the funding is to get the cans into brick-and-mortar stores. In fact, it’s already taking a big step in that direction, with nationwide availability in Whole Foods stores planned for next month.

A brand called Liquid Death wants to sell mountain water to the cool kids