Hi .
“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation
While life returns to normal in many parts of the world, U.S. cities are in the midst of more substantial changes. First, about 12m people are soon to be at risk of eviction. Additional unemployment benefits may help, but missed rent payments will still need to be made up.
Additionally, about one-third of U.S. workers are able to do so remotely, and many are reconsidering where they live. While remote work and a return to remote school likely influenced Google’s extension of work from home until summer 2021, Google is not alone. Siemens is allowing its 140,000-strong workforce to work remotely two or three days per week.
In NYC, comparisons are made with 9/11 or 2008. People left around these times but returned within a few years. How does remote work change people’s thoughts about living in or near the city?
Bloomberg Beta’s recent survey data suggests that 72% of people expect to return to their offices just a few times a week. If these people don’t need to commute two hours a day, it seems likely they will be more open to living outside the city.
Dror Poleg offers an interesting perspective from the movie and music industries. With more options to consume content, consumption has gone up. Similarly, it may be that demand for office space in Manhattan will not recover because the office won't budge. However, demand in areas surrounding the city may increase as people choose to spend their few days a week in new spaces.
The WSJ offers another perspective on some firms’ struggles with remote work and their expansion of office space to safely bring people back together. While this no doubt will occur, the perspective of Dror and Bloomberg Beta fits better with what we’re seeing from startups that can work remotely.
Finally, Sascha Haselmeyer offers an important perspective on the sharp decline in local government revenues of U.S. cities and the significant expected impact on services. A stimulus package from the Federal Government seems unlikely when U.S. cities are mostly Democratic and at odds with the Trump administration on many fronts. Declining services in major U.S. cities could further add to remote worker flight. The presidential election could decide the fate of U.S. city budgets.
#goodreading
We’re rewriting our seed stage fundraising playbook. In the meantime, this is a good overview of current seed round dynamics in the U.S. It’s never been more important to show that customers love what you are building and that each business type has a growing set of metrics to show off this love.
As we’ve moved URBAN-X completely online, we’ve been working hard to move more reference content online. We’re not alone. This High Output Library is especially good on topics like hiring, culture and self-management, leading us to discover this comprehensive guide to approaching diversity and inclusion.
About half of Urban Us portfolio companies work with hardware and physical assets. Rentals and leases for larger assets, like cars, make sense because of the legal and operational costs to repurpose assets (if payments aren’t received, for example). But now that so much hardware is connected and remotely operable by owners, more startups are considering hardware as a service business models (HaaS). As Perl Street has been discovering, HaaS enables new startup financing, while lowering upfront costs for new customers. However, some potential downsides exist, as explored in this near future tale.
#opportunities
More startup founders are open to new types of funding. And we’re noticing more options. There is always policy-aligned funding from various government agencies. For example, non-dilutive capital from NYSERDA and New Energy Nexus exists for companies with ~$1M in revenue focused on building energy efficiency in New York State. Or if moving from full-scale prototype to production in clean energy, California has funding to receive the first production line.
About a year ago, Urban Us portfolio company, Sapient raised over $1m with Republic. At the time, most founders weren’t sure what to make of equity crowdfunding. But we’ve seen much more interest from founders during C19. Upshift has run a successful campaign over the last few months, and Borrow and Kiwibot recently launched RegCF campaigns. We’re urging more founders to evaluate equity crowdfunding as part of their fundraising efforts.
#jobs and talent
Resonant Link is working with us at URBAN-X to build low-cost wireless charging as they’re expanding from lower power applications to all kinds of electric vehicles. They’re looking for a senior electrical engineer and an embedded software engineer.
Cove Tool is looking for a parametrics designer, as well as roles in engineering and sales. Recurve has product and engineering remote roles open. CoInspect is looking for a marketing manager. Numina is looking for a backend engineer. Treau is looking for a thermal research engineer. Hades is looking for business development and sales support.
Some later stage startups are growing rapidly across marketing, sales, mechanical engineering, data science, electrical engineering and even farming. Here are open opportunities from Miles, EVA, BRCK, Urbint, Onewheel, One Concern and Bowery Farming.
Beyond startups, there are great opportunities in the urbantech ecosystem with organizations like Elemental Excelerator, New Lab and Schmidt Futures.
#urban us
Two of our startups came out of stealth in the last few weeks. Social Construct’s launch is featured in TechCrunch for their computer-optimized buildings that could shake the construction industry's foundations. And Kibbo wants to remake the RV park so #vanlife can be a life and not a lifestyle.
Small, cheap robots are coming. Near Space Labs expands high-altitude Earth imagery to Texas and ramps up remote deployment. Kiwibots are featured in this piece from “The Economist” - The pandemic is giving unmanned deliveries a fillip.
As we reopen, Miles is seeing rapid growth and they’re expanding into multiple new geographies. Miles, the app that offers rewards for traveling, expands to Latin America and Europe. City curb space used to be the domain of parking. No more. Govtech talks about Coord in Curb Management Pilots to Launch in Several US Cities.
Finally, thanks to the many founders who nominated Urban Us to the TechCrunch List. As Stonly put it “...as a fund founder, it can take many years of anxiety before you know if you're really doing a good job. Thanks to this list...I had like 5 seconds of less anxiety.” The VCs who founders love the most.
Best -
Zeev, Liz, Mark, Shilpi, Stonly, Anthony and Shaun
What’s up with the #hashtags? This content comes from our slack channels where we review contributions from people like you. So you can wait for this newsletter or join us on Slack.