🌌 Iterate, Infinite, Impact.
Getting Cozy, African Startup Ecosystems, some tech stuff we're watching and more.
Welcome back. Here’s our take on this week’s tech trends, COVID silver-linings and some other things to round out your week—
Tired of Zoom? Me too. How about a Cozyroom? I sat down with Azlen Elza to talk education, online meetups and spatial interfaces in the time of COVID-19. Azlen studies design at Emily Carr university in Vancouver and likes making things.
His idea for this proximity-based audio chat came from a doodle. After posting designs to Twitter and getting great feedback, he built it during a hackathon. Check it out. Next, you can expect to see scriptable objects, improved chat function and more!
@azlen I also love that your name is a palindrome. Thanks for chatting :)
Fostering a Global Mindset w/ Chika Umeadi:
Chika Umeadi is a product manager by day, investor by night. He focuses on investing and building things that scale impact and improve the world.
What have you learned from software and product that you can bring to the world of investing?
Product has helped create a solid framework and perspective on how to:
Identify people who can ship quickly and iterate by asking the right questions
Keep users/stakeholders in mind. Part of investing is understanding your customer (companies, investors, etc) and what is important to each of them
Product management trains you to be good at seeing the forest for the trees. This helps me to better understand how opportunities can be bigger than the founder or the market realizes.
Are there any trends you see with early-stage companies in Africa not common in US-based companies?
Early-stage companies in Africa, for better or worse, are more capital-efficient than US-based companies. Scarcity sucks but I'd say startups in African markets, by necessity, are more sustainable.
I also see a lot of early-stage companies thinking local but acting global. Early-stage companies see greater opportunity to scale outside their borders.
What general tech trends are you following?
I'm doubling down on unsexy digital and physical infrastructure. Globally, I'm looking to invest in companies where building physical or digital infrastructure has the biggest opportunity to provide scale and impact. For example, you can build a healthcare app but what does it matter if the hospital or clinic can't do anything with the data? How do we get different stakeholders talking to each other in ways that creates value for everyone?
Another area I'm exploring is social e-commerce. It's done pretty well in places like India and China. I'm exploring what this will look like in Brazil, the US, and some African countries.
What's an exciting project you're working on right now?
I'm advising a company right now that's building the infrastructure to truly blend traditional finance and crypto. We've seen a lot of companies be purely crypto companies or operate in the traditional financial sector. This company is essentially building the technology infrastructure to allow companies to blend the best of crypto and blockchain and apply it to already existing financial products without having to hire a team of blockchain engineers. I'm excited about this company because if they can do this right, they will change the financial industry forever.
*Thanks Chika for taking the time to talk with us. Your insights are unparalleled and we’re looking forward to seeing your advisee disrupt financial services 👀
Tech Trends & Startups we’re watching:
Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality changing the future of work/business
Global Blockchain in FinTech market’s 75.2% CAGR (2017-2023)
Sync Energy 🔋 (Bootstrapped) - AI-based Emergency Response and Decision Support
Charityvest 💰 (Seed, $1.1M) - Donate to over 1.4 million US non-profits from one tax-deductible account, for free
Vendia (Seed, $5.1M) - multi-cloud serverless platform for sharing distributed data in real-time
New Accelerators, Impact, Future of Work:
This week, we wanted to highlight some of the positives in the tech and vc world coming out of the last few months. A deadly global virus, oddly enough, was the perfect storm to get some good conversations going (yes, even amid Clubhouse and political drama on Twitter).
Another group of students and recent grads got together to form Envision, a new-concept startup accelerator focused on helping diverse and underrepresented founders, equity-free. They provide mentorship, $10K in grant funding and an 8-week launch pad for new companies, culminating in an invite-only demo day.
There is no better time to follow Envision’s example and look at how we can improve as people, organizations and a society. Allraise amplifies female voices in tech and venture. VCs like Seneca, Array, Dreamit, Backstage, Precursor and more focus on underrepresented groups and impact investment.
The world is in a weird spot right now. Early companies are hurting. Product-market fit is a flexible term as products pivot and markets evolve with every new development. The future of work is in flux as many companies continue to work remote with no end in sight. Consumer confidence fluctuates with no pattern and a “new normal” dominates conversation.
Check out this Forbes article for more ramifications of remote work.
NoCode Tools of the Week:
DronaHQ - UI/UX builder, workflow automation, convertible to code
Parabola - automate processing and enrichment of data in a variety of ways
Internal - easy builds (dashboards, CRM, workflow, CRUD, data mapping, etc.)
Our Light Bulbs 💡:
-Doordash to enter grocery retail with “dark convenience stores”, expediting delivery
-After ban in India, TikTok is probed by US on privacy violations
-Anduril raises $200M Series C, establishing itself as a defense tech giant and boosting its post-money valuation to $1.9B
-Harry Stebbings podcast with Neha Sampat, on building Contentstack, scaling to $1M ARR without funding and her life as a sommelier
-Oversimplified - Conor Dewey’s writings, readings and the best things on the internet
-USC, Georgetown & Harvard, among other schools, are online in the fall. Who’s next?
Thing of the week:
“Morning Retriever”. Someone has been sending me pictures of golden retrievers over the last week every day, precisely at 11:00 AM. I’m not complaining ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Here are some highlights:
If you missed last week’s newsletter, find it here!
Hi! 👋 Thanks for reading The Void. We’re Zach and Jack, Partners @ Practicum and Students @ WashU + Georgetown. Leave some feedback, check us out on LinkedIn or contact us!