January at Betaworks
By: Sarah Mcbride
Tags: Startup, Betaworks, VC, Technology, NYC

Hey there, 2019.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already 1 month + 7 days into another year of building. The snow hasn’t yet hit the streets of NYC, but the air certainly has a cold enough bite to it to make you want to sit inside a little longer and read satirical tweets about Peleton bikes. Meanwhile, Betaworks has been humming with activity as we ease ourselves into the new year, from continuing to grow our community of builders at Studios, to actively searching for companies building the future of Synthetic Reality for Camp, and supporting our companies that make up the Ventures portfolio family. Every day seems to bring new conversations, perspectives and people into our circle, so we decided that in 2019 we’d sit down at the end of each month and try to capture all the good stuff.

The Frontier

People often ask what our investment thesis is. And in the simplest sense, our philosophy is to invest in frontier technology — that is, technology that signals a fundamental shift in engineering or design, coupled with changing user behavior. We continually think about and look for the next interface for creation and interaction and the result of that is often a new category of consumer good or service.

The next frontier we’re investing in is that of Synthetic Media — a term we coined to describe the outputs generated by advancements in generative adversarial networks, a form of deep learning. Specifically, we’re interested in deep tech and tools for creating synthetic media, detection systems for artificially created or modified media and consumer applications that enable new modes of entertainment or connection. We’ve already started to invest in companies building in this space (Morphin, Superplastic, Hugging Face) and applications are open for our upcoming early-stage program organized around this theme–Synthetic Camp. This article by Julia Alexander at The Verge sums up the opportunity for applications of this technology, particularly in the digital celebrity space.

Continuing the theme of Betaworks Camp, we were stoked to welcome back Livecamp company Culture Genesis as they hosted a press event at Studios to announce a new funding partnership with Tech Cypha. Tech Cypha is an investment syndicate focused on early, growth and late-stage startups started by founders of color, with Culture Genesis being their first investment. The syndicate was created by Jason Geter (Grand Hustle Records) and Clifford Joseph ‘T.I’ Harris Jr. (rapper and actor). This is an important new frontier in investment and we look forward to supporting their mission.

Finally, our portfolio co Superplastic continued to push the frontier in collectable art. Superplastic makes a range of limited edition “Janky” figurines, designed by famous street artists from all over the world. This month, they launched their 8-inch Lotus SuperJanky and it sold out in minutes. We got our hands on another SuperJanky, designed by Pete Fowler, which you can watch us unbox here.

Humans are weird, let’s build for that

We started Studios with a mission to bring people together IRL to have important conversations that would ultimately help them to build better. We wanted to start the year by breaking down exactly what our vision for building better means, so John wrote a compact and shared it with our members. The 5 tenets of our compact are:

I. Products are born from human needs. II. Build for people. Build from trust. III. That’s a tree! Remember the forest. IV. Have a purpose. Mean it. Measure it. V. Bias our species.

These tenets are infused into our conversations at Betaworks and we hope that by adopting them, our members can build products that better serve humankind and society.

And while we’re on the topic of better serving humankind, we’re still mulling over our thoughts from our event with Douglas Rushkoff and Seth Godin for the launch of Rushkoff’s book ‘Team Human’. Addressing a packed clubhouse, Rushkoff implored us to:

“embed the digital future with our human values before we surrender to algorithmic logic”.

This theme resurfaced during our inaugural AMA Live of 2019 with Betaworks CEO John Borthwick. John echoed Doug’s point, emphasising the need to be more purposeful in what we build:

It probably doesn’t get any more humane than an initiative that works to save human lives. We were honored to host Life Camp for their Peace Week townhall, bringing together a diverse group of peacebuilders to find solutions against gun violence. We built Studios with the belief that bringing a diverse group of people together face-to-face to have a conversation is how real-world problems are solved, with solutions catering for the many and not the few. We’re thrilled that Erica and the Life Camp team chose Betaworks Studios as the place to bring their community together.

Peace Week Townhall at Betaworks Studios. Photos by Bridget Badore 📸

The month in betas

Betaworking is a way of thinking about turning ideas into businesses. It is focusing on building betas and then refining them. Although a physical space, Betaworks Studios is a product that is in constant beta. We started the year with a refresh of our entrance hall and added a colorful mural designed by our artist-in-residence, Christian. We also opened up our podcasting room to the public, in partnership with our friends at Anchor. The Anchor Podcast Lab at Betaworks Studios comes complete with recording equipment and is available to book here.

Our new mural coming to life.

Betaworking also means building with intent, purposeful experimentation. Having a goal but knowing that there may be many twists and turns before that goal is reached. In January, Squad App released their latest beta into the wild. Esther and the team originally joined the Betaworks family in 2016 as part of Botcamp. Since then, they have felt the twists and turns of experimenting with their product and released Squad App to offer a better way to connect with people digitally. Read the story behind the product for yourself here.

Matt Hartman talks me through top products of the day on Product Hunt using the Squad app.

Meanwhile, Studios member Paul Mikhaylenko has been using his time in our clubhouse to ready his podcast app for launch. Paul launched Listen as the first design-focused and gesture-based podcast app, featuring a UI which allows the user to perform all the essential functions with one hand. With a little help from the Studios community, it reached no.1 on Product Hunt on launch day. You can try it for yourself here.

The Listen app in action.

But with betaworking, you won’t always get it right. In our monthly ‘Inside The Investment Committee’ breakfast, we were joined by fellow VCs from Lerer Hippeau to find out how to nail your pitch. Their advice:

(more where that came from here)

But VCs get it wrong too. For his AMA, John recounted missing SNAP when they were raising a seed round. He declined to meet Evan Spiegel, but felt that if he had he would have felt differently about the product and likely invested! The portfolio co that could have been, ey?

John later sent the email below to the betaworks ventures team with the comment:

“Remember, to keep an open mind. Judgement and assumptions was my mistake here.”

When John got introduced to Evan Spiegel.

What we’re reading

Upcoming conversations

BTS

02/04 — Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs — Partners or Adversaries?

02/07 — Ask Me Anything Live: Elizabeth Cutler

02/21 — The Messy Middle: A Discussion with Scott Belsky

02/21 — Ask Me Anything Live: Scott Heiferman

02/28 — Ask Me Anything Live: Neil Blumenthal

Workshops

02/04 — Workshop: Snap Kit for Developers with Snapchat

02/05 — Let go of perfectionism: a workshop with Ladies Get Paid

02/11 — How to foster a culture of belonging at work

Something to think about

What will it be like to live in a world where the boundaries between real and synthetic are blurred?

Gif of the month