Extra Crunch Tuesday: The essential revenue software stack

Welcome to Extra Crunch Tuesday

In just a few months, the COVID-19 pandemic forced marketing, sales and growth managers to identify and adopt best practices and tools that could bridge the gaps created by working remotely.

To create this essential revenue software stack, startups require four interconnected core capabilities:

• Revenue enablement
• Sales engagement
• Revenue operations
• Conversational intelligence

Revenue teams are under tremendous pressure to perform, which means there’s real urgency around boosting productivity and efficiency. If you’re looking for a better way to manage through the uncertainty, start here.

Thanks for reading — I hope you have a great week.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

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Is the 2020 SPAC boom an echo of the 2017 ICO craze?

Electric truck company Lordstown Motors and Paya, a fintech startup, are two of the latest private firms to merge with a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company).

The move will allow Lordstown to list on the Nasdaq after it joins hands with DiamondPeak Holdings. Paya, which hasn’t taken any venture funding, plans to merge with FinTech III.

Data suggest that firms following this path don’t fare well over the long term, “but that historical stigma isn’t stopping a flow of SPACs taking private companies public this year,” wrote Alex Wilhelm in yesterday’s edition of The Exchange.

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Annual Extra Crunch members save 20% on Disrupt passes — September 14 - 18, 2020

Sponsored by TechCrunch

Claim your discount now to get one free day at our virtual conference next month!

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SaaS securitization will disrupt VC’s biggest returns this coming decade

Although SaaS investors have done very well over the last decade, “the gargantuan returns we are seeing today… are unlikely to repeat themselves,” suggests Managing Editor Danny Crichton.

“High valuations are hitting the SaaS investment market hard right now,” but what if a cash-strapped enterprise company could take on debt that’s tied to its recurring revenues?

Suddenly, a fast-growing company with a low churn rate and reliable customers “could have access to even more debt capital than with traditional loans,” Danny concludes.

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Amid pandemic, returning to offices remains an open question for tech leaders

Enterprise reporter Ron Miller spoke to an infectious disease expert, a government official and several tech executives to get their thoughts about what the world needs to look like before we can go back to our desks.

“Most couldn’t see returning to the office beyond a small percentage of employees this year,” he found.

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Extra Crunch Live: Join fintech legend Max Levchin for a live Q&A on August 6 at 4pm ET/1pm PT

If you’re busy on Thursday and can’t join our live Q&A with entrepreneur and investor Max Levchin, don’t worry — you can watch or listen to the entire conversation afterwards on Extra Crunch.

But if you tune in live, you’ll have a chance to ask a direct question.

Host Ingrid Lunden will moderate our hour-long conversation, which is open to Extra Crunch subscribers. To get the Zoom link and add the chat to your calendar, click through or join today.

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How one moonshot VC approaches investing in the COVID-19 era

When Playground Global CTO and co-founder Peter Barrett joined us last week on Extra Crunch Live, the novel coronavirus was (naturally) a recurring theme.

“One thing that underscores this pandemic is a realization that we need to be doing other things if we want to avoid being stuck inside for six months to a year,” Barrett said.

Founders and investors are reconsidering their priorities, he said, adding that he’s now looking more closely at long-term plays like life sciences and quantum computing, as well as nearer-term companies in logistics, automation and delivery.

“If you’re an entrepreneur, I think a dating app looks less appealing than contributing in some way.”

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Even as cloud infrastructure growth slows, revenue rises over $30B for quarter

Spending on cloud infrastructure slowed in Q2 2020, but it still topped $30 billion for the first time.

Ron Miller dug into the numbers for the big three vendors — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — and found that the COVID-19-fueled digital transformation “has caused the dollars spent to increase in a fairly dramatic fashion, and the numbers keep going up.”

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Tech at Work: Amazon caravan protest, Genderify's algorithmic bias and using 'BIPOC'

In her latest Tech at Work column, Megan Rose Dickey covered a recent work action taken by Amazon employees in the Bay Area who pressured the company to close their warehouse “for a thorough cleaning.”

According to Amazon worker Adrienne Williams, “they are having COVID cases reported and they’re not being truthful about how many, and they’re not being reported right away.”

Amazon told TechCrunch that it’s doing everything in its power to make workers are “as safe as possible,” but the protest spotlights how workplace safety is reshaping e-commerce.

Also: why algorithmic bias got an app yanked, and a better understanding of the term “BIPOC.”

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