Sprinklr, the unicorn startup best known for helping customers interpret social signals has been moving into the broader customer experience market in the last year. Today it announced is was hiring a heavy hitter as Chief Operating Officer, bringing in former federal CIO and Salesforce executive Vivek Kundra. He began working at his new position just this week.

Kundra says that he sees a company that is in a good position and poised for growth. It will be part of his job to work with CEO Ragy Thomas to make sure that happens. “When I look at the 1200 customers we have today, I see a massive opportunity to provide technology to change the way [our users] interact with customers,” Kundra told TechCrunch.

He says that, with his background, whether working under President Obama or with Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, the focus has always been on the customer, however you defined that, whether in the context of delivering government services or selling cloud software.

He said that to achieve that you have to be ruthlessly focused on execution. “Ideas are cheap, but how do you bring them to life in a way that inspires and motivates? I think that’s really important,” he said.

It’s worth noting that Kundra is not the first COO, however. The company hired Tim Page, who was a founder and COO at VCE before joining Sprinklr in 2016. That was apparently not a good fit.

Thomas says that landing Kundra was part of an extensive 9-month executive search where they looked at people who had worked at SaaS companies that had scaled over a billion dollars in revenue, concentrating on Salesforce, Workday and ServiceNow. “If you look at people in the driver’s seat at those companies, there is a finite number of people. Salesforce is a great company and a great partner. That experience is relevant and unique,” Thomas said.

Kundra pointed out that as part of his responsibilities at Salesforce he built a business unit from scratch that included driving adoption for the company’s Government Cloud and other verticals. “Now I have ability to draw on those experiences,” he said.

Firming up the COO position, much like the CFO, is crucial ahead of going public. With the company valued at $1.8 billion in 2016, they would seem to be of sufficient size to make that move, but Thomas wasn’t ready to commit to anything definitive (much as you would expect).

Instead, he talked of building a strong foundation as preparation to become a public company at some point. “It’s a question of when, not if [we go public], but for a company of our size and scale, it’s logical for us to go public. We aren’t talking about when and how, and we are trying to pour a strong foundation [before we do]” he said. Bringing in Kundra appears to be part of that.

It takes a lot more than a good idea and the right timing to build a billion-dollar company. Talent, focus, operational effectiveness and a healthy dose of luck are all components of a successful tech startup. Many of the most successful (or, at least, highest-valued) tech unicorns today didn’t get there alone.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) can be a major growth vector for rapidly scaling, highly valued technology companies. It’s a topic that we’ve covered off and on since the very first post on Crunchbase News in March 2017. Nearly two years later, we wanted to revisit that first post because things move quickly, and there is a new crop of companies in the unicorn spotlight these days. Which ones are the most active in the M&A market these days?

The most acquisitive U.S. unicorns today

Before displaying the U.S. unicorns with the most acquisitions to date, we first have to answer the question, “What is a unicorn?” The term is generally applied to venture-backed technology companies that have earned a valuation of $1 billion or more. Crunchbase tracks these companies in its Unicorns hub. The original definition of the term, first applied in a VC setting by Aileen Lee of Cowboy Ventures back in late 2011, specifies that unicorns were founded in or after 2003, following the first tech bubble. That’s the working definition we’ll be using here.

In the chart below, we display the number of known acquisitions made by U.S.-based unicorns that haven’t gone public or gotten acquired (yet). Keep in mind this is based on a snapshot of Crunchbase data, so the numbers and ranking may have changed by the time you read this. To maintain legibility and a reasonable size, we cut off the chart at companies that made seven or more acquisitions.

As one would expect, these rankings are somewhat different from the one we did two years ago. Several companies counted back in early March 2017 have since graduated to public markets or have been acquired.

Who’s gone?

Dropbox, which had acquired 23 companies at the time of our last analysis, went public weeks later and has since acquired two more companies (HelloSign for $230 million in late January 2019 and Verst for an undisclosed sum in November 2017) since doing so. SurveyMonkey, which went public in September 2018, made six known acquisitions before making its exit via IPO.

Who stayed?

Which companies are still in the top ranks? Travel accommodations marketplace giant Airbnb jumped from number four to claim Dropbox’s vacancy as the most acquisitive private U.S. unicorn in the market. Airbnb made six more acquisitions since March 2017, most recently Danish event space and meeting venue marketplace Gaest.com. The still-pending deal was announced in January 2019.

WordPress developer and hosting company Automattic is still ranked number two. Automattic  href="https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/automattic-acquires-atavist--912abccd">acquired one more company — digital publication platform Atavist — since we last profiled unicorn M&A. Open-source software containerization company Docker, photo-sharing and search site Pinterest, enterprise social media management company Sprinklr and venture-backed media company Vox Media remain, as well.

Who’s new?

There are some notable newcomers in these rankings. We’ll focus on the most notable three: The We Company, Coinbase and Lyft. (Honorable mention goes to Stripe and Unity Technologies, which are also new to this list.)

The We Company (the holding entity for WeWork) has made 10 acquisitions over the past two years. Earlier this month, The We Company bought Euclid, a company that analyzes physical space utilization and tracks visitors using Wi-Fi fingerprinting. Other buyouts include Meetup (a story broken by Crunchbase News in November 2017) reportedly for $200 million. Also in late 2017, The We Company acquired coding and design training program Flatiron School, giving the company a permanent tenant in some of its commercial spaces.

In its bid to solidify its position as the dominant consumer cryptocurrency player, Coinbase has been on quite the M&A tear lately. The company recently announced its plans to acquire Neutrino, a blockchain analytics and intelligence platform company based in Italy. As we covered, Coinbase likely made the deal to improve its compliance efforts. In January, Coinbase acquired data analysis company Blockspring, also for an undisclosed sum. The crypto company’s other most notable deal to date was its April 2018 buyout of the bitcoin mining hardware turned cryptocurrency micro-transaction platform Earn.com, which Coinbase acquired for $120 million.

And finally, there’s Lyft, the more exclusively U.S.-focused ride-hailing and transportation service company. Lyft has made 10 known acquisitions since it was founded in 2012. Its latest M&A deal was urban bike service Motivate, which Lyft acquired in June 2018. Lyft’s principal rival, Uber, has acquired six companies at the time of writing. Uber bought a bike company of its own, JUMP Bikes, at a price of $200 million, a couple of months prior to Lyft’s Motivate purchase. Here too, the Lyft-Uber rivalry manifests in structural sameness. Fierce competition drove Uber and Lyft to raise money in lock-step with one another, and drove M&A strategy as well.

What to take away

With long-term business success, it’s often a chicken-and-egg question. Is a company successful because of the startups it bought along the way? Or did it buy companies because it was successful and had an opening to expand? Oftentimes, it’s a little of both.

The unicorn companies that dominate the private funding landscape today (if not in the number of deals, then in dollar volume for sure) continue to raise money in the name of growth. Growth can come the old-fashioned way, by establishing a market position and expanding it. Or, in the name of rapid scaling and ostensibly maximizing investor returns, M&A provides a lateral route into new markets or a way to further entrench the status quo. We’ll see how that strategy pays off when these companies eventually find the exit door .

At last year’s Microsoft Ignite conference, the CEOs of Microsoft, Adobe and SAP took the stage to announce the launch of the Open Data Initiative. The idea behind this effort was to make it easier for their customers to move data between each others’ services by standardizing on a common data format and helping them move their data out of their respective silos and into a single customer-chosen data lake. At this week’s Adobe Summit, the three companies today announced how they plan to expand this program as they look to bring in additional partners.

“The intent of the companies joining forces was really to solve a common customer problem that we hear time and time again, which is that there are high-value business data tends to be very siloed in a variety of different applications,” Alysa Taylor, Microsoft’s corporate vice president, Business Applications & Global Industry, told me. “Being able to extract that data, reason over that data, garner intelligence from that data, is very cost-prohibitive and it’s very manual and time-consuming.”

The core principle of the alliance is that the customers own their data and they should be able to get as much value out of it as they can. Ideally, having this common data schema means that the customer doesn’t have to figure out ways to transform the data from these vendors and can simply flow all of it into a single data lake that then in turn feeds the various analytics services, machine learning systems and other tools that these companies offer.

At the Adobe Summit today, the three companies showed their first customer use case based on how Unilever is making use of this common data standard. More importantly, though, they also stressed that the Open Data Initiative is indeed open to others. As a first step, the three companies today announced the formation of a partner advisory council.

“What this basically means is that we’ve extended it out to key participants in the ecosystem to come and join us as part of this ODI effort,” Adobe’s VP of Ecosystem Development Amit Ahuja told me. “What we’re starting with is really a focus around two big groups of partners. Number one is, who are the other really interesting ISVs who have a lot of this core data that we want to make sure we can bring into this kind of single unified view. And the second piece is who are the major players out there that are trying to help these customers around their enterprise architecture.”

The first 12 partners that are joining this new council include Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Change Healthcare, Cognizant, EY, Finastra, Genesys, Hootsuite, Inmobi, Sprinklr and WPP . This is very much a first step, though. Over time, the group expects to expand far beyond this first set of partners and include a much larger group of stakeholders.

“We really want to make this really broad in a way that we can quickly make progress and demonstrate that what we’re talking about from a conceptual process has really hard customer benefits attached to it,” Abhay Kumar, SAP’s global vice president, Global Business Development & Ecosystem, noted. The use cases the alliance has identified focus on market intelligence, sales intelligence and services intelligence, he added.

Today, as enterprises often pull in data from dozens of disparate systems, making sense of all that information is hard enough, but to even get to this point, enterprises first have to transform it and make it usable. To do so, they then have to deploy another set of applications that massages the data. “I don’t want to go and buy another 15 or 20 applications to make that work,” Ahuja said. “I want to realize the investment and the ROI of the applications that I’ve already bought.”

All three stressed that this is very much a collaborative effort that spans the engineering, sales and product marketing groups.

It’s been four years since TechCrunch published my blog post The SaaS Adventure, which introduced the concept of a “T2D3” roadmap to help SaaS companies scale — and, as an aside, explored how well my mom understood my job as an “adventure capitalist.” The piece detailed seven distinct stages that enterprise cloud startups must navigate to achieve $100 million in annualized revenue. Specifically, the post encouraged companies to “triple, triple, double, double, double” their revenue as they hit certain milestones.

I was blown away by the response to the piece and gratified that so many founders and investors found the T2D3 framework helpful. Looking back now, I think a lot of the advice has stood the test of time. But plenty has also changed in the broader tech and software markets since 2015, and I wanted to update this advice for founders of hyper-growth companies in light of the market shifts that have occurred.

Perhaps the most notable change in the last four years is that the number of playbooks for companies to follow as they sell software has expanded. Today, more companies are embracing product-led growth and a less-formal, bottoms-up model — employees are swiping credit cards to buy a product, and not necessarily interacting with a human salesperson.

Many of the most high-profile, recent software IPOs structure their go-to-market operations this way. T2D3’s stages, by contrast, focus quite a bit on scaling a company’s internal sales function to grow. Indeed, both a product-led and a sales-led approach are viable in today’s growing B2B-tech market.

What’s more, the revenue needed for a software company to go public has increased dramatically in the last four years. This means that software founders need to focus not only on building a scalable product and finding scalable go-to-market channels, but also building a scalable org chart. These days, what is scarce for software founders isn’t money from investors; it’s great human talent.

So in addition to T2D3, my firm and I are now focusing on another founder journey: F2C, or the transition from founder/CEO to CEO/founder. This journey can take many paths, but ideally it starts with the traditional hustle to find early product/market fit.

Sprinklr has been busy the last few years acquiring a dozen companies, then rewriting their code base and incorporating them into the company’s customer experience platform. Today, the late-stage startup went back to the fundraising well for the first time in four years, and it was a doozy, raising $200 million on a $2.7 billion valuation.

The money came from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, which also invested $300 million in buying back secondary shares. Meanwhile the company also announced $150 million in convertible securities from Sixth Street Growth. That’s a lot of action for a company that’s been quiet on the fundraising front for years.

Company founder and CEO Ragy Thomas says he sought the investment now because after building a customer experience platform, he was ready to accelerate and he needed the money to do it. He expects the company to hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue by year’s end and he says that he sees a much bigger opportunity on the horizon.

“We think it’s a $100 billion opportunity and our large public competitors have validated that and continue to do so in the customer experience management space,” he said. Those large competitors include Salesforce and Adobe.

He sees customer experience management as having the kind of growth that CRM has had in the past, and this money gives him more options to grow faster, while working with a big private equity firm.

“So what was appealing in this market for us was not just putting some more money in the bank and being a little more aggressive in growth, innovation, go to market and potential M&A, but what was also appealing is the opportunity to bring someone like a Hellman & Friedman to the table,” Thomas said.

The company has 1,000 clients, some spending millions of dollars a year. They currently have 1,900 employees in 25 offices around the world, and Thomas wants to add another 500 over the next 12 months — and he believes that $1 billion in ARR is a realistic goal for the company.

As he builds the company, Thomas, who is a person of color, has codified diversity and inclusion into the company’s charter, what he calls the “Sprinklr Way.” “For us, diversity and inclusion is not impossible. It is not something that you do to check a box and market yourself. It’s deep in our DNA,” he said.

Tarim Wasim a partner at investor Hellman & Friedman, sees a company with tremendous potential to lead a growing market. “Sprinklr has a unique opportunity to lead a Customer Experience Management market that’s already massive — and growing — as enterprises continue to realize the urgent need to put CXM at the heart of their digital transformation strategy,” Wasim said in a statement.

Sprinklr was founded in 2009. Before today, it last raised $105 million in 2016 led by Temasek Holdings. Past investors include Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Intel Capital.

Sprinklr, a New York-based customer experience company, announced today it has filed a confidential S-1 ahead of a possible IPO.

“Sprinklr today announced that it has confidentially submitted a draft registration statement on Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the ‘SEC”) relating to the proposed initial public offering of its common stock,” the company said in a statement.

It also indicated that it will determine the exact number of shares and the price range at a later point after it receives approval from the SEC to go public.

The company most recently raised $200 million on a $2.7 billion valuation last year. It was its first fundraise in 4 years. At the time, founder and CEO Ragy Thomas said his company expected to end 2020 with $400 million in ARR, certainly a healthy number on which to embark as a public company.

He also said that Sprinklr’s next fundraise would be an IPO, making him true to his word. “I’ve been public about the pathway around this, and the path is that the next financial milestone will be an IPO,” he told me at the time of the $200 million round. He said that with COVID, it probably was a year or so away, but the timing appears to have sped up.

Sprinklr sees customer experience management as a natural extension of CRM, and as such a huge market potentially worth $100 billion, according to Thomas. But he also admitted that he was up against some big competitors like Salesforce and Adobe, helping explain why he fundraised last year.

Sprinklr was founded in 2009 with a focus on social media listening, but it announced a hard push into customer experience in 2017 when it added marketing, advertising, research, customer and e-commerce to its social efforts.

The company has raised $585 million to date, and has also been highly acquisitive, buying 11 companies along the way as it added functionality to the base platform, according to Crunchbase data.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday Tuesday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

We are back from a long weekend here in America. But no break here in the States can stop the flow of global tech news. So, here’s the rundown:

• The Weekend: Tata bought BigBasket, setting up a fascinating e-commerce war in India. China is cracking down on edtech companies, leading to an IPO freeze. And Wejo is going public via a SPAC. You can read its investor deck here.
• This Morning: The are a zillion funding rounds in Europe and globally this morning, the start of what could be a super busy week’s cycle. Private Equity is buying Cloudera, which is a surprise. Nio had chip shortage issues that impacted its delivery cadence. The Chinese EV company does expect to meet its Q2 delivery goal, however.
• Funding Rounds: Truebill raised $45 million. Chipper Cash raised $100 million. Zenyum raised $40 million. WeFox raised $650 million. Malt raised $97 million. Sennder raised $80 million. Idwall raised $38 million. Belvo raised $43 million. And that was not even close to all the big ones.
• Riff: Late last week we missed the Sprinklr filing. You can read it here. Quite a number of VCs have money riding on the IPO.

Welcome back, America, to the week. It’s nice to see you, everyone else. Maybe Robinhood will file this week.

Another week, another unicorn IPO. This time, Sprinklr is taking on the public markets.

The New York-based software company works in what it describes as the customer experience market. After attracting over $400 million in capital while private, its impending debut will not only provide key returns to a host of venture capitalists but also more evidence that New York’s startup scene has reached maturity. (More evidence here.)

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. 

Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Sprinklr last raised a $200 million round at a $2.7 billion valuation in September 2020. That round, as TechCrunch reported, also included a host of secondary shares and $150 million in convertible notes. Inclusive of the latter instrument, Sprinklr’s total capital raised to date soars above the $500 million mark.

Temasek Holdings, Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital, Intel Capital and others have plugged funds into Sprinklr during its startup days.

Sure, Robinhood didn’t file last week as many folks hoped, but the Sprinklr IPO ensures that we’ll have more than just SPACs to chat about in the coming days. But one thing at a time. Let’s discuss what Sprinklr does for a living.

Sprinklr’s business

Sprinklr’s IPO filing and corporate website suffer from a slight case of corporate speak, so we have some work to do this morning to determine what the company does. Here’s what the company says about itself in its filing:

Sprinklr empowers the world’s largest and most loved brands to make their customers happier.

We do this with a new category of enterprise software — Unified Customer Experience Management, or Unified-CXM — that enables every customer-facing function across the front office, from Customer Care to Marketing, to collaborate across internal silos, communicate across digital channels, and leverage a complete suite of modern capabilities to deliver better, more human customer experiences at scale — all on one unified, AI-powered platform.

Not very clear, yeah? Don’t worry, I’ve got you. Here’s what the company actually does:

Customers have been “experiencing” business since the ancient Romans browsed the Forum for produce, pottery and leather goods. But digitization has radically recalibrated the buyer-seller dynamic, fueling the rise of one of the most talked-about industry acronyms: CX (customer experience).

Part paradigm, part category and part multibillion-dollar market, CX is a broad term used across a myriad of contexts. But great CX boils down to delighting every customer on an emotional level, anytime and anywhere a business interaction takes place.

Optimizing CX requires a sophisticated tool stack. Customer behavior should be tracked, their needs must be understood, and opportunities to engage proactively must be identified. Wall Street, for one, is taking note: Qualtrics, the creator of “XM” (experience management) as a category, was spun-out from SAP and IPO’d in January, and Sprinklr, a social media listening solution that has expanded into a “Digital CXM” platform, recently filed to go public.

Thinking critically about customer experience is hardly a new concept, but a few factors are spurring an inflection point in investment by enterprises and VCs.

Firstly, brands are now expected to create a consistent, cohesive experience across multiple channels, both online and offline, with an ever-increasing focus on the former. Customer experience and the digital customer experience are rapidly becoming synonymous.

The sheer volume of customer data has also reached new heights. As a McKinsey report put it, “Today, companies can regularly, lawfully, and seamlessly collect smartphone and interaction data from across their customer, financial, and operations systems, yielding deep insights about their customers … These companies can better understand their interactions with customers and even preempt problems in customer journeys. Their customers are reaping benefits: Think quick compensation for a flight delay, or outreach from an insurance company when a patient is having trouble resolving a problem.”

Moreover, the app economy continues to raise the bar on user experience, and end users have less patience than ever before. Each time Netflix displays just the right movie, Instagram recommends just the right shoes, or TikTok plays just the right dog video, people are being trained to demand just a bit more magic.

Despite a recent history of uneven cash flow and moderate growth, SaaS customer experience management platform Sprinklr has filed to go public.

In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm pores over the New York-based unicorn’s S-1 to better understand exactly what Sprinklr offers: “Marketing and comms software, with some machine learning built in.”

Despite 19% growth in revenue over the last fiscal year, its deficits increased during the same period. But with more than $250 million in cash available, “Sprinklr is not going public because it needs the money,” says Alex.

Since we were off yesterday for Memorial Day, today’s roundup is brief, but we’ll have much more to recap on Friday. Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch!

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members.
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription.

Once a buzzword, digital transformation is reshaping markets

Image Credits: metamorworks / Getty Images

The changes brought by a global shift to remote work and schooling are myriad, but in the business realm, they have yielded a change in corporate behavior and consumer expectations — changes that showed up in a bushel of earnings reports last week.

Startups have told us for several quarters that their markets are picking up momentum as customers shake up buying behavior with a distinct advantage for companies helping users move into the digital realm.

Public company results are now confirming the startups’ perspective. The accelerating digital transformation is real, and we have the data to prove it.

3 views on the future of meetings

Image Credits: Yann Maignan (opens in a new window) / Unsplash (opens in a new window)

In a recent episode of TechCrunch Equity, hosts Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and Alex Wilhelm connected the dots between multiple funding rounds to sketch out three perspectives on the future of workplace meetings.

Each agreed that the traditional meeting is broken, so we gathered their perspectives about where the industry is heading and which aspects are ripe for disruption:

• Alex Wilhelm: Faster information throughput, please.
• Natasha Mascarenhas: Meetings should be ongoing, not in calendar invites.
• Danny Crichton: Redesign meetings for flow.

Prospective contributors regularly ask us about which topics Extra Crunch subscribers would like to hear more about, and the answer is always the same:

• Actionable advice that is backed up by data and/or experience.
• Strategic insights that go beyond best practices and offer specific recommendations readers can try out for themselves.
• Industry analysis that paints a clear picture of the companies, products and services that characterize individual tech sectors.

Our submission guidelines haven’t changed, but Managing Editor Eric Eldon and I wrote a short post that identifies the topics we’re prioritizing at the moment:

• How-to articles for early-stage founders.
• Market analysis of different tech sectors.
• Growth marketing strategies.
• Alternative fundraising.
• Quality of life (personal health, sustainability, proptech, transportation).

If you’re a skillful entrepreneur, founder or investor who’s interested in helping someone else build their business, please read our latest guidelines, then send your ideas to guestcolumns@techcrunch.com.

Thanks for reading; I hope you have a great weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Full Extra Crunch articles are only available to members
Use discount code ECFriday to save 20% off a one- or two-year subscription

Opting for a debt round can take you from Series A startup to Series B unicorn

Image Credits: olegkalina (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Debt is a tool, and like any other — be it a hammer or handsaw — it’s extremely valuable when used skillfully but can cause a lot of pain when mismanaged. This is a story about how it can go right.

Mario Ciabarra, the founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, breaks down how his company was on a “tremendous growth curve” — and then the pandemic hit.

“As the weeks following the initial shelter-in-place orders ticked by, the rush toward digital grew exponentially, and opportunities to secure new customers started piling up,” Ciabarra writes. “A solution to our money problems, perhaps? Not so fast — it was a classic case of needing to spend in order to make.”

If companies want to preserve equity, debt can be an advantageous choice. Here’s how Quantum Metric did it.

4 proven approaches to CX strategy that make customers feel loved

Image Credits: mucahiddin / Getty Images

People have been working to optimize customer experiences (CX) since we began selling things to each other.

A famous San Francisco bakery has an exhaust fan at street level; each morning, its neighbors awake to the scent of orange-cinnamon morning buns wafting down the block. Similarly, savvy hairstylists know to greet returning customers by asking if they want a repeat or something new.

Online, CX may encompass anything from recommending the right shoes to AI that knows when to send a frustrated traveler an upgrade for a delayed flight.

In light of Qualtrics’ spinout and IPO and Sprinklr’s recent S-1, Rebecca Liu-Doyle, principal at Insight Partners, describes four key attributes shared by “companies that have upped their CX game.”

Twitter’s acquisition strategy: Eat the public conversation

Image Credits: We Are (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

What is a microblogging service doing buying a social podcasting company and a newsletter tool while also building a live broadcasting sub-app? Is there even a strategy at all?

Yes. Twitter is trying to revitalize itself by adding more contexts for discourse to its repertoire. The result, if everything goes right, will be an influence superapp that hasn’t existed anywhere before. The alternative is nothing less than the destruction of Twitter into a link-forwarding service.

Let’s talk about how Twitter is trying to eat the public conversation.

Reading the IPO market’s tea leaves

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman (opens in a new window)

Although it was a truncated holiday week here in the United States, there was a bushel of IPO news. We sorted through the updates and came up with a series of sentiment calls regarding these public offerings.

Earlier this week, we took a look at:

• Marqeta‘s first IPO price range (fintech).
• 1st Dibs‘ first IPO price range (e-commerce).
• Zeta Global‘s IPO pricing (martech).
• The start of SoFi trading post-SPAC (fintech).
• The latest from BarkBox (e-commerce).

How Expensify hacked its way to a robust, scalable tech stack

Image Credits: Nigel Sussman

Part 4 of Expensify’s EC-1 digs into the company’s engineering and technology, with Anna Heim noting that the group of P2P pirates/hackers set out to build an expense management app by sticking to their gut and making their own rules.

They asked questions few considered, like: Why have lots of employees when you can find a way to get work done and reach impressive profitability with a few? Why work from an office in San Francisco when the internet lets you work from anywhere, even a sailboat in the Caribbean?

It makes sense in a way: If you’re a pirate, to hell with the rules, right?

With that in mind, one could assume Expensify decided to ask itself: Why not build our own totally custom tech stack?

Indeed, Expensify has made several tech decisions that were met with disbelief, but its belief in its own choices has paid off over the years, and the company is ready to IPO any day now.

How much of a tech advantage Expensify enjoys owing to such choices is an open question, but one thing is clear: These choices are key to understanding Expensify and its roadmap. Let’s take a look.

Etsy asks, ‘How do you do, fellow kids?’ with $1.6B Depop purchase

Image Credits: Getty Images

The news this week that e-commerce marketplace Etsy will buy Depop, a startup that provides a secondhand e-commerce marketplace, for more than $1.6 billion may not have made a large impact on the acquiring company’s share price thus far, but it provides a fascinating look into what brands may be willing to pay for access to the Gen Z market.

Etsy is buying Gen Z love. Think about it — Gen Z is probably not the first demographic that comes to mind when you consider Etsy, so you can see why the deal may pencil out in the larger company’s mind.

But it isn’t cheap. The lesson from the Etsy-Depop deal appears to be that large e-commerce players are willing to splash out for youth-approved marketplaces. That’s good news for yet-private companies that are popular with the budding generation.

Confluent’s IPO brings a high-growth, high-burn SaaS model to the public markets

Image Credits: Andriy Onufriyenko / Getty Images

Confluent became the latest company to announce its intent to take the IPO route, officially filing its S-1 paperwork this week.

The company, which has raised over $455 million since it launched in 2014, was most recently valued at just over $4.5 billion when it raised $250 million last April.

What does Confluent do? It built a streaming data platform on top of the open-source Apache Kafka project. In addition to its open-source roots, Confluent has a free tier of its commercial cloud offering to complement its paid products, helping generate top-of-funnel inflows that it converts to sales.

What we can see in Confluent is nearly an old-school, high-burn SaaS business. It has taken on oodles of capital and used it in an increasingly expensive sales model.

How to win consulting, board and deal roles with PE and VC funds

Image Credits: Orla (opens in a new window) / Getty Images

Would you like to work with private equity and venture capital funds?

There are relatively few jobs directly inside private equity and venture capital funds, and those jobs are highly competitive.

However, there are many other ways you can work and earn money within the industry — as a consultant, an interim executive, a board member, a deal executive partnering to buy a company, an executive in residence or as an entrepreneur in residence.

Let’s take a look at the different ways you can work with the investment community.

The existential cost of decelerated growth

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Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.

Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.

Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.

Even among the most valuable tech shops, shareholder return is concentrated in share price appreciation, and buybacks, which is the same thing to a degree.

Slowly growing tech companies worth single-digit billions can’t play the buyback game to the same degree as the majors. And they are growing more slowly, so even a similar buyback program in relative scale would excite less.

Grow or die, in other words. Or at least grow or come under heavy fire from external investors who want to oust the founder-CEO and “reform” the company. But if you can grow quickly, welcome to the land of milk and honey.

Hormonal health is a massive opportunity: Where are the unicorns?

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There is a growing group of entrepreneurs who are betting that hormonal health is the key wedge into the digital health boom.

Hormones are fluctuating, ever-evolving, and diverse — but these founders say they’re also key to solving many health conditions that disproportionately impact women, from diabetes to infertility to mental health challenges.

Many believe it’s that complexity that underscores the opportunity. Hormonal health sits at the center of conversations around personalized medicine and women’s health: By 2025, women’s health could be a $50 billion industry, and by 2026, digital health more broadly is estimated to hit $221 billion.

Still, as funding for women’s health startups drops and stigma continues to impact where venture dollars go, it’s unclear whether the sector will remain in its infancy or hit a true inflection point.

3 lessons we learned after raising $6.3M from 50 investors

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Two years ago, founders of calendar assistant platform Reclaim were looking for a “mango” seed round — a boodle of cash large enough to help them transition from the prototype phase to staffing up for a public launch.

Although the team received offers, co-founder Henry Shapiro says the few that materialized were poor options, partially because Reclaim was still pre-product.

“So one summer morning, my co-founder and I sat down in his garage — where we’d been prototyping, pitching and iterating for the past year — and realized that as hard as it was, we would have to walk away entirely and do a full reset on our fundraising strategy,” he writes.

Shapiro shares what he learned from embracing failure and offers three conclusions “every founder should consider before they decide to go out and pitch investors.”

For SaaS startups, differentiation is an iterative process

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Although software as a service has been thriving as a sector for years, it has gone into overdrive in the past year as businesses responded to the pandemic by speeding up the migration of important functions to the cloud, ActiveCampaign founder and CEO Jason VandeBoom writes in a guest column.

“We’ve all seen the news of SaaS startups raising large funding rounds, with deal sizes and valuations steadily climbing. But as tech industry watchers know only too well, large funding rounds and valuations are not foolproof indicators of sustainable growth and longevity.”

VandeBoom notes that to scale sustainably, SaaS startups need to “stand apart from the herd at every phase of development. Failure to do so means a poor outcome for founders and investors.”

“As a founder who pivoted from on-premise to SaaS back in 2016, I have focused on scaling my company (most recently crossing 145,000 customers) and in the process, learned quite a bit about making a mark,” VandeBoom writes. “Here is some advice on differentiation at the various stages in the life of a SaaS startup.”

Turning the page from the early-stage venture capital market to the super late-stage exit market, this morning we’re talking about endpoint security company SentinelOne’s IPO in the context of Sprinklr’s own. We’ll have more on the public offering market later today when Doximity and Confluent price their respective IPOs after the close of trading.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

SentinelOne’s IPO, expected to price on June 29 and trade June 30, is a fascinating debut. Why? Because the company sports a combination of rapid growth and expanding losses that make it a good heat check for the IPO market. Its debut will allow us to answer whether public investors still value growth above all else. And this week, the company gave us an early dataset regarding its market value in the form of an IPO price range. This means we can do some unpacking and thinking.

A reminder regarding why we dwell on the exit market for unicorns: We care because the value of late-stage startups when they reach a liquidity point helps set valuation comps for myriad smaller startups. Furthermore, the level of public-market enthusiasm for loss-making, growth-focused companies will determine the scale of returns for many a venture capitalist, founder and early employee.

So, let’s talk about SentinelOne’s cybersecurity IPO price range; Sprinklr’s social-media software debut will play foil.

The price of growth

It can make good sense to pay up for a quickly growing company’s shares. This is why you may hear of a startup raising an early-stage round at a very high revenue multiple.

Why put a $50 million price tag on a startup that just crossed the $1 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold? If it’s growing sufficiently quickly, the math can pencil out. If that startup was growing at 300% per year, say, the revenue multiple that you paid in the round valuing the startup at $50 million would fall sharply over the next year, at which point other investors would probably scramble to put more capital into the firm at a higher price.

Bingo! You just got a markup on your initial investment, and the company has found someone else to lead their next round at a higher price, giving it even more capital to keep its growth game going and make your early investment appear prescient. See? Venture capital is easy.¹

The same general idea applies to companies going public. Growth matters, and the more rapidly a company is adding revenue, the more money it will be worth because investors can anticipate its future scale (within reason). Some companies that sport quick growth can have other issues that impact their value. Extensive debt, for example, a history of uneven growth, or deteriorating economics could come into play. Or simply very high losses.

Machine learning will have a barbell effect on the technology landscape. On one hand, it will democratize basic intelligence through the commoditization and diffusion of services like image recognition and translation into software broadly. On the other, it will concentrate higher-order intelligence in the hands of a relatively small number of incumbents that control most of their industry’s data.

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New York marketing tech firm Sprinklr has acquired Portland-based Little Bird, according to Sprinklr founder and CEO Ragy Thomas. Little Bird was founded in 2011 to help researchers quickly find the top experts and influencers on any given subject via Twitter. It raised from Mark Cuban, Jason Calacanis, Oregon Angel Fund and other individual investors […]

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Sprinklr, the unicorn startup with a valuation of $1.8 billion, announced a major update today, which shifts the company’s focus from a pure social signals platform to customer experience management. While it still uses social as a central processing point, the idea is to bring a typical set of marketing tasks under a single umbrella they are […]

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As content delivery networks (CDN) market leaders grapple with technological shifts, some innovators are making rapid advances. The CDN market, estimated at $5 billion today, is anticipated to be more than $10 billion by 2019. While the market is growing rapidly, can the giants learn to dance? How are the startups aiming slingshots at the legacy Goliaths?

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Figuring out how to organize your marketing stack is almost like putting together a 1,000 piece blank jigsaw puzzle -- impossible.

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From the beginning, the firm was out to let founders know that they didn’t fit the typical "Sand Hill Road model" of venture capital firms.

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TikTok is extending its Marketing Partner Program to add new content marketing partners, the company told TechCrunch. The expansion will allow marketers to manage their TikTok accounts without leaving their third-party content marketing platforms. The short-form video app is partnering with Sprout Social, Hootsuite, Sprinklr, Emplifi, Dash Hudson, Khoros, Brandwatch and Later for the initial launch. […]

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Customer experience firm Sprinklr has laid off roughly 4% of its global workforce — or more than 100 employees — as it realigns its headcount amid the ongoing economic slowdown. Sprinklr started the layoff drive last week and is cutting its workforce in India, the U.S. and other regions, TechCrunch learned from people familiar with […]

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