Extra Crunch Tuesday: Investors based in San Francisco? That's so 2019

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

The cost of renting a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco has fallen 9% from this point last year. As a longtime resident, I can’t help but notice the number of FOR RENT signs and moving vans that have cropped up in recent weeks.

Remote work has become the default for so many startups, but a lot of the investors who make these companies possible are also decamping for greener pastures — literally, in some cases. Small wonder: the monthly cost of a Napa farmhouse, a ranch outside Austin or a Tahoe vacation home could be cheaper than a home in San Francisco.

“If the wealthy are no longer a quick drive from San Francisco, are they more open to doing remote investments?” asks Natasha Mascarenhas. And are these new escapees from NYC and SF prepared to compete with established regional investors? She interviewed several VCs from different regional startup hubs to get their opinions:

• Natty Zola, Matchstick Ventures
• Collin Gutman, SaaS Ventures
• Richard Kerby, Equal Ventures
• Deena Shakir, Lux Capital
• Alex Rosen, Ridge Ventures

Have a great week; thank you for reading.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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3 perspectives on the future of SF and NYC as startup hubs

In a related conversation, three TechCrunch staffers discuss whether the pandemic will create a decentralized tech ecosystem.

Click through to find out why a new Napa Valley café shows why in-person networks matter, how the shift could improve diversity and why Alex says “Danny is an ignoramus.”

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Extra Crunch Live: Join Superhuman’s Rahul Vohra for a live discussion of email, SaaS and buzzy businesses

Sponsored by TechCrunch

Buy an Extra Crunch membership today so you can join our live Q&A with CEO/founder Rahul Vohra!

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Bearish VCs, bullish founders and changing investing trends

In today’s edition of The Exchange, Alex Wilhelm ponders why more startups than expected have been seeing up rounds in recent weeks.

In the early days of the pandemic, “it wasn’t hard to find wags on Twitter declaring that the world had changed and startup valuations were now off 40% — if you could put a round together.”

Founders are less worried than VCs about the pandemic, but “investors are picking up the pace of their dealmaking,” and “valuation declines appear to exist at the early stages of the market,” he found.

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What's next for space tech? 9 VCs look to the future

As a follow-up to last week’s survey, Darrell Etherington interviewed nine VCs who actively invest in space-related startups to find out what they’re looking for and where they think the industry is headed:

Chad Anderson, Managing Partner, Space Capital
Ethan Batraski, Partner, Venrock
Will Porteous, General Partner and COO, RRE Ventures
Shahin Farshchi, Partner, Lux Capital
Tess Hatch, Vice President, Bessemer Venture Partners
Matt Kozlov, Managing Director, Techstars Starburst
Rayfe Gaspar-Asaoka, Principal, Canaan Partners
Rob Coneybeer, Managing Director and Co-Founder, Shasta Ventures
Dylan Taylor, Chairman and CEO, Voyager Space Holdings

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Snapchat looks to maintain its own friendships -- with devs

TechCrunch reporter Lucas Matney sat down with Snap’s VP of Partnerships Ben Schwerin to better understand how the platform’s developer relationships are paying dividends.

According to Snap, 800 developers have integrated with Snap Kit APIs. As a result, about 150 million people use these integrations each month, which brings Snap a trove of data Lucas describes as “the real treasure.”

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This Week in Apps: Android 11 beta, Snapchat’s makeover, Apple’s WWDC20 plans

In last week’s roundup of all things mobile, Android 11 beta launched despite the cancellation of Google I/O and a series of delays, Apple released its schedule for its virtual WWDC20 developer conference and HBO MAX hit almost two million downloads in its first two weeks of release.

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How Liberty Mutual moved 44,000 employees from office to home when the pandemic hit

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller interviewed Liberty Mutual CIO James McGlennon about how he managed the insurance company’s shift to remote work.

“We certainly hadn’t contemplated needing to get 44,000 people working from home or working remotely so quickly, but there have been a few things that have happened over the last few years that made me think,” he said.

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Marietje Schaake is ‘very concerned about the future of democracy’

If you do a search for “Europe’s most wired politician,” Marietje Schaake is the top result.

After a decade as a member of the European Parliament, she’s now at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, a think tank that studies the convergence of public policy, governance and tech.

“I’m very concerned about the future of democracy in the broadest sense of the word,” she told TechCrunch.

“I feel like we need to understand better how the architecture of information flows and how it impacts our offline democratic world. The more people get steered in a certain direction, the more the foundations of actual liberalism and liberal democracy are challenged. And I feel like we just don’t look at that enough.”

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IoT solutions are enabling physical distancing

As the world adjusts to new ways of living and working in the shadow of the novel coronavirus, some businesses are turning to IoT devices as a solution for physical distancing.

Trends like distance learning and telehealth have been getting a lot of attention, but UV disinfection hardware, expanded COVID-19 testing and AI also have major roles to play.

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In uncertain times, jump start your SEO

Implementing basic SEO best practices should be one of the first tasks on a startup’s whiteboard, but in many cases, it’s a one-off project that gets little attention after a site launch.

Many anxious growth managers are sitting around right now and wondering what they can do to help themselves; this seven-step checklist is a good place to start.

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Dear Sophie: How can I bring my brilliant friends from Guatemala to work at my startup?

Dear Sophie:

I have some amazing former colleagues (who are also my friends) back home in Guatemala. I have a green card now, was recently laid off from my job, and am founding a startup through an accelerator program.

I know all of these amazing people in Guatemala with whom I would love to work. How can I set things up so that some of them could join me in the U.S. one day? If they are my friends, is that even allowed? I don’t want to cross any lines!

— Go-Getter from Guatemala

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How COVID-19 transformed the way Americans spend online

Ethan Smith, founder and CEO of growth marketing agency Graphite, has shared a guest post packed with data that examines shifts in consumer behavior since the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.

Sheltering in place altered behavior across the board — this deep dive looks at e-commerce, home maintenance, online groceries and several other sectors that paint a detailed picture of the times we’re living through.

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