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Dropbox Acquires Mobile Coupon Startup Endorse A Month After Shutdown
About a month after it shut down its app, mobile coupon startup Endorse has been acquired by Dropbox, the team announced on its blog today. The deal follows a number of other recent acquisition Dropbox has been making, as it looks to add headcount in an increasingly constrained talent market.
Endorse had raised $4.25 million from Accel and SV Angel in 2010, and launched a web version of the product before moving to mobile with the launch of an iPhone app last August. The mobile coupon service was shut down a month ago, with Endorse announcing on its blog that users would have until the end of June to transfer cash that they’d accrued to their bank accounts.
Importantly, we’ve heard that this was an acquisition and not an acqui-hire of the company’s talent, although terms haven’t been disclosed and no one’s really budging on price. (If we can find out more, of course, we’ll update this post.) Last we heard, Endorse had about a dozen employees, the majority of which will be joining the Dropbox team in the acquisition.
That includes Steve Carpenter, who founded the company as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Accel after selling Cake Financial to Etrade in 2010. Other notable members of the Endorse team include CTO Erik Klein, who had held engineering roles at SofaLabs and YouTube; Jiten Vaidya, lead engineer and former SRS/DBA manager at Youtube; and Franck Chastagnol, former lead engineer for YouTube ads.
Dropbox has been on a bit of a hiring and acquisition spree over the last year, as it purchased photo storage startup Snapjoy, as well as email management company Mailbox. It’s also made a number of significant hires, including Instagram Designer Tim Van Damme, Google’s Guido Van Rossum, and veteran Facebook designer Soleio Cuervo.
Bay Area Tech Wages Are The Nation's Highest At $123K, But Should Entrepreneurs Look Elsewhere As Costs Rise?
The San Francisco Bay Area pays the highest median tech wage, at $123,497, but comes with higher taxes and housing costs, according to data assembled by Good April, an online tax-planning startup based in SF.
Despite the significant gap in wages and costs between the Bay Area and other tech hubs, it doesn’t look like it’s causing a significant talent exodus yet.
The median wage for tech workers in San Francisco, Marin, and San Mateo counties is nearly 21% higher than the second highest, Boston, at $102,230. However, while this wage is good for top flight engineers, it leads to significantly higher costs for entrepreneurs.
Good April found that salaries for a 10 person team, on average, would total $1,234,970 in San Francisco, but only $932,490 in Austin, Texas. The difference in how much equity a founder has to give up can be substantial. If you were raising capital at a $5 million valuation to run your company for one year, you would have to give up 27% equity to hire the hypothetical San Francisco team versus only 20% for the Austin team.
The high taxes and pricey housing market in San Francisco can hurt both entrepreneurs and employees. Good April co-founder Mitchell Fox argues that companies have to pay a higher salary in order to offset the higher cost of living in the Bay Area; then those higher salaries lead to a higher willingness to pay for a house or apartment.
The cost of buying a home in San Francisco dwarf other tech hubs, according to median sale prices from Zillow. San Francisco’s houses went for $805,500, a 50% increase over New York’s $535,900, and nearly four times the median sale price in Austin, $206,600. The rental market isn’t any better, with the median rental price for an apartment in San Francisco reaching $3,295 in June.
Fox says he recently met an entrepreneur whose moving his business to Austin, saying, “The business case to move is just too compelling. Austin has everything we need at a much lower cost.”
Matt Mickiewicz, the co-founder of DeveloperAuction, a startup that enables startups to bid on engineers and designers, says data from the platform shows “nobody is leaving SF because of the high costs so far.” He adds that 87% of the developers on the site end up taking jobs with a company that did not make them the highest salary offer.
Map via GoodApril.
Why 3D Printing Will Work In Fashion
In case you haven’t heard, 3D printing has entered the mainstream, and it will disrupt every industry’s manufacturing processes slightly differently. Let’s talk about why it will work in fashion.
3D printing is not entirely new to the fashion industry, as jewelry designers have for years outsourced quick modeling jobs to printing companies. But as 3D-printed pieces begin to pop up on the runway and in presentations outside of fashion week as the finished product, it’s worth asking why the method stands a chance of proliferating among designers.
Catherine Wales, a designer trained in classic garment cutting at Yves Saint Laurent and Emanuel Ungaro, is currently exhibiting a collection of masks, corsets and helmets at the Arnhem Mode Biennale in the Netherlands. Designers Frances Bitonti and Michael Schmidt collaborated with Shapeways to produce a 3D-printed gown modeled by the burlesque icon Dita Von Teese at a presentation in February.
The results are beautiful. Comprising 3,000 articulated joints and dotted with 12,000 Swarovski crystals, Dita’s gown fits her curves like a glittering Chinese finger trap. Wales’s feathered shoulder piece fluffs and falls like the real thing.
This is art. It isn’t wearable, but it suggests that 3D printing has the finesse necessary to break into an industry known for its attention to quality craft.
It is becoming more and more wearable.
Printers are getting closer to producing good fabric-like materials, using interlocking structures to create weaves and stitches. Duann Scott, Shapeways‘ “Designer Evangelist,” said that once more fashion designers start using 3D printing, it will make a case for 3D manufacturers to develop more breathable, wearable materials. This is, of course, a chicken and egg situation, as designers aren’t going to want to migrate to 3D printing until they know it’s as good if not better than their current methods.
At the moment, 3D printing may be most compelling to designers when used in conjunction with organic materials. Bitonti told me that he’s currently working on 3D-printed handbags finished with stingray leather, an idea that has a lot of potential. Designers and consumers have a strong historical and emotional affinity to non-synthetic materials like leather, silk and cotton, and they aren’t going anywhere. It wouldn’t be surprising to see designers incorporating complex printed elements with traditional materials in the near future.
It could save young designers.
If 3D printing disrupts mass fashion production, it will do so because it will have become cheaper and more efficient than current manufacturing methods. Ready-to-wear, however, with its smaller production runs, financial insecurity and impulse toward the artistic, is the ideal space for 3D printing to take root now.
The designer Kimberly Ovitz, who showed a small range of Shapeways-printed nylon jewelry with her ready-to-wear collection at New York Fashion Week in February, said that 3D printing revolutionized her production timetable. Consumers could buy the jewelry immediately after her show and receive the product in two weeks.
“I found that there are so many benefits for small designers. You don’t have to deal with minimum or volume issues. You can design as many prototypes as you want as intricately as you want, and it doesn’t affect anything the way it does with clothes.”
For small, young brands, which have a failure rate not unlike tech startups, 3D printing offers the previously unheard-of option to manufacture exactly to order. In a world where botched manufacturing runs and over-estimated interest in an item leads to unusable and unsold stock, printing minimizes risk in a way that never existed before for fashion designers.
It can find a happy medium with handmade.
One of the obvious challenges facing mainstream adoption of 3D printing in the clothing industry is a longstanding appreciation for handcrafted pieces. Would a Birkin bag cost as much as it does if it were not stitched by human hands?
Scott argues that the traditional idea of handcraft is romanticized. Manipulating code to make a dress flow and fall over the human form is the new craft, he said.
But Scott is a Shapeways guy, and not all classically trained designers would agree. Anna Sheffield, a New York-based jewelry designer who experimented with printing finished products for an event sponsored by Shapeways at the Ace Hotel in February, told me that while she sees the advantages of using 3D printing to create a finished product, it’s not right for her brand. She likes the slivers of imperfections that can result from casting.
“In some ways it can be used to enhance the design,” she said. “But in other ways I think it leaves a generic motif on all of the goods, and to me it would be better to make the product and make a mold and cast it and finish or change it in some way. Hammer it. Something that gives it a more sensory feel. I’m a bit of a purist.”
3D printing is, however, part of Sheffield’s arsenal. While she often hand-makes wax models, Sheffield will go digital for repeating patterns, as on a ring of overlapping wheat sheaths. Scaling and altering designs on a CAD file reduces her workload by hours. For designers with an interest in preserving the uniqueness of handcrafted pieces, 3D printing could simply be a standard design tool to be used as needed.
If 3D printing is making moves on manufacturing in general, you can bet fashion won’t be exempt, even if it is initially treated by the press as a futuristic conceit. It’s dubious that the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons will start training their students as coders just yet, but printing could easily make inroads in accessories, shoes and non-fabric elements of clothing in the near future. It isn’t hard to imagine that some of fashion’s more avant-garde talents would be willing to experiment with printing in a more substantial way soon.
CrunchWeek: Microsoft Stock Nosedives, Path Raising Again, Netflix's Emmy Nods
Welcome one and all to a brand new episode of CrunchWeek, the show that brings a few of us writers together in front of the TechCrunch TV cameras to dish on some of the more interesting stories from the past seven days.
This time around, I was joined by Billy Gallagher and Ryan Lawler to talk about Microsoft’s massive stock price downturn after its disappointing earnings release, the latest rumors of Path raising new funding, and tech taking over Hollywood with Netflix’s bunch of Emmy nominations.
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