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At TechCrunch Italy, MUBI Launches Its Film Streaming Service In The Land Of Fellini
MUBI, the global curated film streaming service, has been in the process of rolling out its platform to multiple countries and today, at the TechCrunch Italy conference in Rome, it launches its service in Italy (here) and also goes live on the MUBI iPad.
The launch brings the number of countries served by MUBI to ten, including the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Norway, Australia and New Zealand. Each country has a localized film library (with original language and local subtitles). Their service is very simple by design: there is no search, recommendations and large catalogs which can sometimes confuse users.
MUBI says it is different to Netflix and all the other Video on Demand streaming services out there, in that it uses film experts to handpick its daily output library, which is available at €4.99 per month.
Founder Efe Cakarel says he thinks “only Netflix and MUBI will eventually win, and everybody else (including telco’s) will get squeezed out.”
Why is this? Well, take the case of Telenor, the incumbent telco in Scandinavia. Two weeks ago it announced it was getting out of the VOD business.
And in the case of services like Lovefilm or wuaki.tv, they are coming under pressure from Netflix because they provide an identical service without the benefit of Netflix’s guaranteed economies of scale.
By contrast MUBI’s pitch is that it complements the Netflix experience rather than competes with it, focusing on quality rather than quantity and simplicity. Cakarel says this emphasis on simplicity has lead to greater conversion rates.
“Since we launched this model, we see conversion from signup to trial (with a credit card) of 20% compared with 0.8% before, when we had an offering like Netflix. That’s an unbelievable number that is now statistically significant. 20 out of 100 people who signup to MUBI give us their credit card within 7 days. We grew our paying subscribers by 90% over the past 6 months in UK, our biggest market,” he told me.
And that’s with zero advertising dollars.
That said, the streaming game is not over yet, and newer upstairs like wuaki.tv are doing their damnedest to prove a hybrid model of subscription mixed with a-la-carte can work in this space.
The $400 Deltaprintr Is A Cheap Way To Make Really Big 3D Prints
Another day, another 3D printer. This time we have a model that comes from SUNY Purchase College where they are working on a laser-cut, compact 3D printer that can make extra tall models simply by swapping out a few pieces.
The printer pumps out plastic at 100 microns, a more than acceptable resolution, and uses very few moving parts. You’ll notice that the print head rides up three rails. This would allow you to add longer bars or extensions to bring things bigger than the platform.
Created by students Shai Schechter, Andrey Kovalev, Yasick Nemenov and Eugene Sokolov, the project is currently in pre-beta and they aim to launch a crowdunding campaign in November. You can sign up for updates here.
The team hopes to make the product completely open source and because it uses very few expensive parts they’re able to price it very aggressively. While I love projects like these, I’m anxious to see how they build their software – one of the most important parts of a 3D printing package. As long as it’s solid I’d totally be down with this cool rig.
How Twitter And Uber Backer Benchmark Is Winning At Early-Stage Investing And Staying Lean
Benchmark has stayed lean in a new world where Sand Hill Road is clamoring to offer its own value-added services. It seems like every venture capital firm is adding marketing, PR, recruiting, finance or content partners, but Benchmark comprises only investment partners. While some firms haven’t been able to survive in the top-tier, post-Andreessen Horowitz generation, Benchmark has remained consistent in its ability to bet on the right entrepreneurs and founders at the Series A stage (in Twitter, it was even earlier, when the company only had twenty-plus employees). In fact, the firm has only four partners, yet has been the lead on investments in some of the most iconic companies of the past decade, including Twitter, Instagram, OpenTable, Uber, Nextdoor, Zendesk, Snapchat, Yelp, ResearchGate, New Relic and many, many others. What makes Benchmark different?
As Benchmark partner and early Facebook and LinkedIn employee Matt Cohler explains, each partner focuses on one thing so it’s easy to do it well. “We work shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs we partner with and we have to be pretty selective about which companies we back, and how many investments we make,” he explains. “We try to do one thing and do it well, and that means staying small and focused.” The firm’s partnership includes Cohler, Bill Gurley, Peter Fenton and Mitch Lasky.
And were excited to reveal that the entire partnership will be joining us on stage at Disrupt Europe in late October, in Berlin, with a conversation with TechCrunch founder and CrunchFund partner Michael Arrington.
If you look at some of the data behind Benchmark’s portfolio, it’s clear the firm has proven that its model works. With $3 billion raised and $13 billion in value generated, Benchmark has backed more than 25 companies since its inception in 1995. Since that year, the firm has seen 36 IPOs and 90 M&A exits. And 21 of those exits took place since the beginning of 2011 (seven IPOs and 14 M&As which represented a total market value of more than $9 billion). The IPO number should go up with Twitter’s impending IPO this year, as well as the potential IPOs of Zendesk and New Relic in the coming year. The total market value created by companies that Benchmark is involved with is more than $100 billion, the firm says.
While some large VC firms have started actively seed investing, Benchmark has remained steadfast in not implementing a spray and pray model of seed investing. The firm focuses squarely on Series A and Series B funding and doesn’t dabble in growth-stage financing. Cohler says that the firm focuses mainly on backing startups in San Francisco (there are exceptions, he adds, such as Snapchat, which is based in LA and ResearchGate, which is based in Berlin). And the firm is focused on backing companies in the consumer, mobile, SaaS and infrastructure industries. While other firms have followed the Andreessen Horowitz model in raising massive funds at $1 billion or more, Benchmark has kept its fund size at $425 million for its seventh fund.
As Cohler sees it, Benchmark is a small fund relative to the firm’s peers and colleagues. He maintains that that other models may work for other VCs and operators, but “we see ourselves as craftspeople and artisans. Benchmark as a firm reflects our individual values, mission and strategy.” It’s this strong belief in the Benchmark model that ties the partnership together, he adds.
Nirav Tolia, a former Benchmark EIR and the founder of Benchmark-backed Epinions, Fanbase and most recently, private social network for neighborhoods Nextdoor, says that its the firm’s singular focus on early stage investing that makes Benchmark so unique. “They are not generalists in how they invest–they know and get early stage startups and how to tackle problems like finding product market fit, scaling, finding a business model, and hiring people when you are a startup with no perks,” he says.
Benchmark is extremely selective about its investments because the partners are so hands on with the entrepreneurs they back. It’s just not scalable to be so hands-on with startups at that stage. “We want to be the first phone call, the first text message, the first email for any founder,” says Cohler. That sort of engagement is difficult to do at a larger scale, he says, with a large number of investments across stages. Tolia’s experience with the firm is that it feels like less of an outside investor and more like a member of the team. He says Gurley, who is on the board of Nextdoor, has spent as many late nights working on products, hiring and other issues as Tolia has. Gurley not only closes hires, but sources them for the startups he works with, says Tolia. “He is a true member of the team,” he adds.
Another area where Benchmark has differed from many of its peers in the VC world is its internal partnership structure. The firm was founded in 1995 with a flat non-hierarchical organizational structure, meaning each partner has equal equity as well as an equal voice on all business decisions. There are no junior partners, and no startup is going to have an out-sourced board seat given to a junior partner or other firm employee. As explained by Kevin Harvey in this Quora (a Benchmark-backed company) post, the decision to create this was to avoid the politics and internal competition that comes with the hierarchical model. For example, there could be negative results when the VC partner working on a startup is not the final decision maker.
The other benefit of this equal partnership means that each partner feels a stake in helping out the portfolio’s startups. And that synergy is really where the founders and companies benefit. Cohler says that this structure means that the entrepreneurs the firm works with and the companies the firm engages with have access to everything on the team.
For example, when the firm was courting Snapchat, Cohler actually flew down a number of times to meet with the founders, although Lasky is the board member. In 2011, Fenton was instrumental in recruiting Kenny Van Zant as Asana’s product lead, although Cohler is on Asana’s board. Fenton also started the first Nextdoor neighborhood in Russian Hill, and gave Tolia invaluable feedback on how to approach public vs. private feeds, and the asynchronous vs. synchronous follow model, which Fenton had intimate experience with in advising Twitter.
Tolia believes that this approach, pioneered by the firms founder, to have incentives in place to make sure that every partner wants every portfolio company to succeed is key to what differentiates Benchmark from every other firm in the Valley. And Tolia’s perspective isn’t just anecdotal–I talked to several other founders in Benchmark;s portfolio who had similar experiences as Tolia had with the Benchmark partnership.
It’s clear that with the ongoing trends in the venture capital industry, Benchmark has doubled down on what they do best — being company builders.
Disrupt Europe will take place from October 26-29 (Hackathon on 26-27; Main Event on 28-29) and lots more info can be found here. And read more about why Cohler thinks Berlin will be the next big startup ecosystem here.
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Eniac Ventures Debuts Second, $12.9M Fund To Back Mobile-First Startups
Eniac Ventures is announcing its second fund to invest in mobile startups. The new fund is $12.9 million, significantly larger than the first $1.6 million fund. The company plans to use the new fund to continue to back mobile-first ideas in the adtech, consumer, enterprise and commerce industries.
Eniac, which was founded by Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh and Tim Young, is focused solely on making small seed stage investments in mobile startups. Previously the the average size of the investment was around $25,000 to $100,000, but the new fund will allow for bigger checks, in the $200,000 to $300,000 range with money for follow-on rounds.
Mehta, the founder of ad-tech startup Local Response, originally sold his first company ipsh! to Omnicom in 2005 and was an angel investor in AdMob (which was sold to Google for $750 million). Harris was the Head of Business Strategy and Vice President of Marketing at Vlingo which was acquired by Nuance for $225 million, as well as the CMO of Thumb, which was acquired by Ypulse in mid-2013.
Since 2010, Eniac has backed 42 early stage mobile investments with six exits. Investments include LocalResponse, OnSwipe, Localytics, Tempo AI, MindSnacks, Fondu (acquired by Airbnb), Instinctive (acquired by Soundcloud) and MetaResolver (acquired by Millennial Media). which almost tripled Eniac’s investment in less than a year. We’re told that the total value of first fund has increased 2x from the initial investment.
Eniac is also announcing some of the investments it has already made out of the fund, including BioBeats, Boxed, Glide, Just Sing It, Reactor, RapCommerce, and Vistar Media.
JumpCam, Backed With $2.7M, Debuts Its Snappy Mobile App For Making Collaborative Videos
If you’ve been to a nice wedding, anniversary, or milestone birthday party lately, you’ve probably seen this kind of video: A montage of friends and family from all over the world giving their congratulations and well-wishes. The thing is, as simple as they look, those types of videos can actually be a real pain to make. You have to have each contributor shoot his or her part, collect the various individual videos through a file sharing service such as Dropbox, then have someone who really knows their way around iMovie or Final Cut Pro stitch it all together in a way that keeps in the best bits, edits out the rest, and makes it all look cohesive.
A new startup debuting today called JumpCam wants to replace that whole process with one simple mobile app. JumpCam, which is launching today on iOS but will be available on Google Play soon, lets groups of friends easily shoot and edit together collaborative videos comprised of up to thirty 10-second clips.
It’s a really simple and snappy process, so JumpCam’s co-founder and CEO David Stewart stopped by TechCrunch HQ this week to give us a hands-on look. You can check that out in the video embedded above.
JumpCam is of course not the first startup aimed at letting people create collaborative videos — Switchcam is just one that’s launched in recent years that comes to mind — but as with all apps, the details and experience are really what sets JumpCam apart. Many of the existing apps in the space are focused around having people film the same thing, at the same time, from different vantage points — like a concert. JumpCam allows you to do that, but it’s more about bringing together videos from different places and different times. “We’re more about things that are thematically linked, not linked by location or timestamp,” Stewart says.
Stewart came up with the idea for JumpCam when he was helping to make a video for a friend’s destination wedding filled with messages from people who couldn’t be in attendance. In beta testing, he says he’s seen people use the app for similar projects — but there have been some surprises too. “People were excited about using it for things we hadn’t anticipated. We’ve had a band that allowed its fans to create a music video, and comedians all riffing around the same idea, like ‘world’s worst date lines,’” Stewart said.
There is certainly a graveyard in startup land for video apps, which just haven’t quite caught on with the mainstream in the same way that photo apps have. But the recent successes of Vine and video on Instagram have shown that user-generated mobile videos can actually be something that people want to both produce and consume. The key seems to be keeping the content good-looking, compelling, and short — not an easy feat. For now, though, it looks like JumpCam could be hitting all the right notes.
JumpCam, which is headquartered in San Francisco and has a staff of 9, has raised $2.7 million in a Series A round led by Trinity Ventures and Google Ventures.
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