If you’ve read Shoshana Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism, you likely agree that the most important asset for a data-driven advertising platform is consumer engagement. That engagement throws off data, that data drives prediction models, those models inform algorithms, those algorithms drive advertising engines, and those engines drive revenue, which drives profit. And profit, of course, drives ...

The first quarter of 2020 ended with a whimper  — with the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500 and NASDAQ posting their worst quarter in decades — as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause uncertainty and volatility across all major stock market indices. At the beginning of the quarter, we were still basking in a ...

Zoom, a video chat service then popular with corporations, filed to go public on March 22, 2019. Best known in venture and corporate circles, Zoom was far from a household name at the time. However, the groundwork for its 2020-era consumer breakthrough during the novel coronavirus epidemic was detailed during its IPO march in the ...

After yesterday’s news that the U.S. automakers would temporarily close their doors and the US President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to shift manufacturing capacity to meet equipment shortages, trading on the major markets was mixed investors adjust to a global slowdown in trade. Warnings regarding the current economic situation are coming fast, ...

Chargify, the subscription billing platform, announced today that it has acquired event streaming company, Keen for an undisclosed amount. One interesting aspect of this deal is that both companies are part of the Scaleworks private equity firm’s stable of companies. Keen gives Chargify an event streaming business, and it has taken advantage of that by ...

Podium, a Utah-based SaaS company focused on small business customer interactions, added payments technology to its product suite today. The move accretes a new income stream to the company’s quickly growing annual recurring revenue (ARR). While I tend to stay away from product news, Podium’s decision to add payment technology to its service hit a ...

Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between. Today we’re in for a treat, as we get to dig into Procore’s S-1 filing. In case you aren’t familiar, Procore sells software that helps manage construction projects, but it offers more than a single ...

Coding and other computer science expertise remain some of the more important skills that a person can have in the working world today, but in the last few years, we have also seen a big rise in a new generation of tools providing an alternative way of reaping the fruits of technology: “no-code” software, which ...

In the old days of enterprise software, when companies like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft ruled the roost, there was a tendency to shop from a single vendor. You bought the whole stack, which made life easier for IT — even if it didn’t always work out so well for end users, who were stuck using ...

In part two of a survey that asks top VCs about exciting opportunities in open source and dev tools, we dig into responses from 10 leading open-source-focused investors at firms that span early to growth stage across software-specific firms, corporate venture arms and prominent generalist firms. Where top VCs are investing in open source and ...