Extra Crunch Tuesday: 12 top cybersecurity VCs discuss investing, valuations and no-go zones

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

Keeping our distance from each another made us even more dependent on technology, but scattering millions of workers far and wide also increased the surface area for attacks.

Investors are sharply focused on security these days: ransomware, data breaches and other disruptions are bad for business, so VCs are on the hunt for startups that have developed robust security solutions. To learn more about security trends and opportunities that are top of mind with investors, we reached out to a dozen active investors:

• Shardul Shah, Index Ventures
• Theresia Gouw and Mark Kraynak, Acrew Capital
• Niloofar Razi Howe, Energy Impact Partners
• Matt Bigge, Crosslink Capital
• Sarah Guo, Greylock Partners
• Deepak Jeevankumar, Dell Technology Capital
• Ariel Tseitlin, Scale Venture Partners
• Umesh Padval, Thomvest Ventures
• Saam Motamedi, Greylock Partners
• Alex Doll, Ten Eleven Ventures
• Dharmesh Thakker, Battery Ventures

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; be well.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Vroom targets nearly $2B valuation in impending IPO

Used-car marketplace Vroom filed an S-1/A yesterday that suggests it will price its IPO around $15-17 per share, which would value the company between $1.69 billion and $1.91 billion.

“So on one hand, Vroom can appear cheap if you view the numbers from a particular perspective,” writes Senior Editor Alex Wilhelm. “But with a second glance, things seem a bit worse, or more expensive.”

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4 views on the future of retail and the shopping experience

Walking into a store to browse or chat with workers about the products they carry is a quaint memory. Online shopping, delivery and curbside pickup are now the norm, but there are massive opportunities for innovation in retail.

Four TechCrunch writers looked ahead to what the future might hold when it comes to product discovery, empowering small businesses and “shopping-by-proxy.”

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The best investment every digital brand can make during the COVID-19 pandemic

Consumers have shifted much of their activity to e-commerce, but smaller stores that lack Amazon’s ability to manage logistics can be easily overwhelmed by requests for refunds, returns, or delayed deliveries.

One serial entrepreneur made a simple change he says decreased refund requests and boosted revenue more than 200% since the pandemic began — he rolled out 24-hour live chat in all of his stores.

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Dear Sophie: Can I create a startup on a dependent visa from Australia?

Dear Sophie:

I live in Sydney and an American company is offering my husband a professional job and a work visa. I’m eligible to receive a visa and a work permit under my husband’s visa.

Can I form my own startup with that dependent visa and work permit or do I need to find a job with an American company? How long would we be able to stay in the U.S.?

— Aspiring in Australia

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Aaron Levie: 'We have way too many manual processes in businesses'

Box CEO Aaron Levie says the COVID-19 pandemic is forcing a “digital transformation” on many businesses that have been slow when it comes to moving to cloud services.

“Overall, what we’re going to see is that anything that can become digital probably will be in a much more accelerated way than we’ve ever seen before,” said Levie in an Extra Crunch Live interview last week.

Read highlights from our conversation, or watch the entire chat on YouTube.

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This Week in Apps: Facebook launches trio of app experiments, TikTok gets spammed, plus coronavirus impacts on app economy

The global health emergency continues to influence how we’re using mobile devices: a new Snapchat lens lets you feel like you’re dining out, and meditation and mindfulness apps continue to surge in popularity.

Plus: HBO Max’s app sees 87,000 installations on its first day of release, Android Studio 4.0 launches with improved tools for coding and design, and a major Android bug is letting malware pose as apps to steal user data.

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6 VCs share their bets on the future of work

Once-thriving offices are gathering dust as millions shifted to remote work to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, and investors have taken notice.

A distributed society needs technology and services to facilitate hiring and managing, but these workers must also be able to communicate and collaborate in a frictionless environment. To learn more about the investor landscape when it comes to the future of work, we spoke to these VCs:

• Saar Gur, general partner at CRV
• Roy Bahat, head of Bloomberg Beta
• James Cham, partner at Bloomberg Beta
• Karin Klein, partner at Bloomberg Beta
• Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner at Floodgate
• Quentin Clark, managing director at General Catalyst

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Zoom's earnings to test hot tech valuations

Share prices for Zoom and CrowdStrike have surged since the beginning of 2020 as the massive shift to working from home fuels demand for video chat and improved cybersecurity.

Both firms are reporting their earnings this week, so Alex Wilhelm took a closer look at investor expectations.

“If Zoom and CrowdStrike report results that disappoint investors, they could do more than just deflate their own shares,” he wrote. “Missed earnings reports from either could puncture SaaS valuations more broadly.”

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India’s richest man built a telecom operator everyone wants a piece of

In the last several weeks, Reliance Jio Platforms secured $10.3 billion in recent weeks from Facebook and four private equity firms based in the U.S.

The deals pushed the companies valuation to $65 billion, which led TechCrunch reporter Manish Singh to ask (and answer) a number of important questions:

“How did an Indian firm become so valuable? What exactly does it do? Is it just as unprofitable as Uber? What does its future look like? Why is it raising so much money?”

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Partners at B2B European VC henQ discuss remote work’s biggest advantages

Amsterdam-based VC firm henQ recently announced the close of its fourth fund, which is expected to top out at between €75 and €85 million later this year.

Steve O’Hear interviewed founding partners Jan Andriessen, Mick Mackaay and Jelmer de Jong to learn more about their fully-remote VC shop and their focus on B2B software startups.

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Should SaaS founders be raising capital now?

Roger Hurwitz, a founding partner at Volition Capital, advises SaaS founders “to play offense” when it comes to valuation expectations and fundraising plans.

In this climate, founders should either “push forward with their financing plans as price setters” or “take a wait and see approach until the picture becomes clearer,” but “in no event should a company put itself in a position where it becomes a price taker.”

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Is Zoom the next Android, or the next BlackBerry?

Just because Zoom is the company of the moment, that doesn’t mean its future is secure, says Gaurav Jain, a VC who worked on product teams at BlackBerry and Android.

“Product experience trumps everything else,” says Jain. “It’s more important than security (an issue Zoom is getting blasted about right now), what CIOs want, your user install base and the larger brand identity.”

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Decrypted: iOS 13.5 jailbreak, FBI slams Apple, VCs talk cybersecurity

In his weekly cybersecurity column, Zack Whittaker recaps his scoop regarding U.S. immigration authorities’ use of cell phone snooping technology to track and arrest people and reports on a recent LiveJournal breach that affected 26 million users.

Also this week: an iOS vulnerability gave every iPhone a working jailbreak, the ACLU is suing surveillance startup Clearview AI, and Cisco acquired network monitor ThousandEyes for a reported $1 billion.

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