Extra Crunch Friday: 10 Poland-based investors discuss trends, opportunities and the road ahead

Welcome to Extra Crunch Friday

As we’ve covered previously, the COVID-19 pandemic is making the world a lot smaller.

Investors who focus on their own backyards still have an advantage, but the ability to set up a quick coffee meeting with a promising investor is no longer one of them.

Even though some VCs are cutting first checks after Zoom calls, regional investors’ personal networks are still a trump card. Tourists will always rely on guide books, however, which is why we continue to survey investors around the world.

A Dealroom report issued this summer determined that 97 VC funds backed more than 1,600 funding rounds in Poland last year. With over 2,400 early- and late-stage startups and 400,000 engineers in the country, it’s easy to see why foreign investors are taking notice.

Editor-at-large Mike Butcher reached out to several investors who focus on Warsaw and Poland in general to learn more about the startups fueling their interest across fintech, gaming, security and other sectors:

• Bryony Cooper, managing partner, Arkley Brinc VC
• Anna Wnuk-Błażejczyk, investor relations manager, Experior.vc
• Rafał Roszak, investment director, YouNick Mint
• Michal Mroczkowski, partner, Market One Capital
• Marcus Erken, partner, Sunfish Partners
• Borys Musielak, partner, SMOK Ventures
• Mathias Åsberg, partner, Nextgrid
• Kuba Dudek, SpeedUp Venture Capital Group
• Marcin Laczynski, partner, Next Road Ventures
• Michał Rokosz, partner, Inovo Venture Partners

We’ll run the conclusion of his survey next Tuesday.

Thanks very much for reading Extra Crunch; I hope you have a relaxing and safe weekend.

Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch
@yourprotagonist

Read more

Brands that hyper-personalize will win the next decade

Even for fledgling startups, creating a robust customer service channel — or at least one that doesn’t annoy people — is a reliable way to keep users in the sales funnel.

Using AI and automation is fine, but now that consumers have grown used to asking phones and smartspeakers to predict the weather and read recipe instructions, their expectations are higher than ever.

If you’re trying to figure out what people what from hyper-personalized customer experiences and how you can operationalize AI to give them what they’re after, start here.

Read more

Reminder: $1,000 in AWS Activate credits available for Extra Crunch members

Sponsored by TechCrunch

Are you eligible to receive $1,000 in AWS Activate credits as a part of an annual Extra Crunch membership plan?

Read more

VCs pour funding into edtech startups as COVID-19 shakes up the market

For today’s edition of The Exchange, Natasha Mascarenhas joined Alex Wilhelm to examine how the pandemic-fueled surge of interest in edtech is manifesting on the funding front.

The numbers suggest that funding will far surpass the sector’s high water mark set in 2018, so the duo studied the numbers through August 31, which included a number of mega-rounds that exceeded $100 million.

“Now the challenge for the sector will be keeping its growth alive in 2021, showing investors that their 2020 bets were not merely wagers made during a single, overheated year,” they conclude.

Read more

How to respond to a data breach

The odds are low that someone’s going to enter my home and steal my belongings. I still lock my door when I leave the house, however, and my valuables are insured. I’m an optimist, not a fool.

Similarly: is your startup’s cybersecurity strategy based on optimism, or do you have an actual response plan in case of a data breach?

Security reporter Zack Whittaker has seen some shambolic reactions to security lapses, which is why he turned in a post-mortem about a corporation that got it right.

“Once in a while, a company’s response almost makes up for the daily deluge of hypocrisy, obfuscation and downright lies,” says Zack.

Read more

Shift's George Arinson shares 6 tips for taking your company public via a SPAC

There’s a lot of buzz about Special Purpose Acquisition Companies these days.

Used-car marketplace Shift announced its SPAC in June 2020 and is on track to complete the process in the next few months, so co-founder/co-CEO George Arinson wrote an Extra Crunch guest post to share what he’s learned.

Step one: “If you go the SPAC route, you’ll need to become an expert at financial engineering.”

Read more

Dear Sophie: What is a J-1 visa and how can we use it?

Dear Sophie:

I am a software engineer and have been looking at job postings in the U.S. I’ve heard from my friends about J-1 Visa Training or J-1 Research.

What is a J-1 status? What are the requirements to qualify? Do I need to find a U.S. employer willing to sponsor me before I apply for one? Can I get a visa? How long could I stay?

—Determined in Delhi

Read more

As direct listing looms, Palantir insiders are accelerating stock sales

While we count down to the September 23 premiere of NYSE: PLTR, Danny Crichton looked at the “robust secondary market” that has allowed some investors to acquire shares early.

“Given the number of people involved and the number of shares bought and sold over the past 18 months, we can get some insight regarding how insiders perceive Palantir’s value,” he writes.

Read more

Use ‘productive paranoia’ to build cybersecurity culture at your startup

Zack Whittaker interviewed Bugcrowd CTO, founder and chairman Casey Ellis about the best practices he recommends for creating a startup culture takes security seriously.

“It’s an everyone problem,” said Ellis, who encouraged founders to promote the notion of “productive paranoia.”

Now that the threat envelope includes everyone from marketing to engineering, employees need to “internalize the fact that bad stuff can and does happen if you do it wrong,” Ellis said.

Read more

Bear and bull cases for Unity's IPO

In a two-part series that ran on TechCrunch and Extra Crunch, former media columnist Eric Peckhman returned to share his analysis of Unity Software Inc.’s S-1 filing.

Part one is a deep dive that explains how the company has grown beyond gaming to develop revenue multiple streams and where it’s headed.

For Extra Crunch, he studied the company’s numbers to offer some context for its approximately $11 billion valuation.

Read more