Technology

Founders face many trials and tribulations when building their companies, from fundraising woes to visa challenges to product failures to company failures.

And according to Kari Sulenes, &almost everybody who has built a company has a burnout story.& Her startup, Atlas, connects venture firms and startup founders to specialized therapy sessions. Plus, it views the silver linings of burnout stories: &Therealso a large number of people who have a burnout story who have an impact story that comes out of it.&

More recently, as a response to the coronavirus outbreak, the company was hired by a number of venture capital firms to provide mental health services to portfolio companies. The uptick in business — that is, clients looking to provide founder-specialized therapy during uncertain times — makes Atlas projected to double its estimated revenue this year.

We&ve interviewed VCs that, in the wake of the novel coronavirus disease, have told their startups to hold off putting excessive capital to work. Others said to keep your head down and work on the product. And some that say it is business as usual until the dry powder dries up.

Beyond business economics, mental health remains largely unaddressed from the slew of issues that founders struggle with, oftentimes alone and in private. Atlas& utilization sheds light on how the tech industryfinancial arm is prioritizing health.

Itjust one data point, but itan important one, nonetheless.

Starting this week, Atlas is launching a small group founder program with the following firms: Primary VC, Corigin Ventures, SoGal Ventures, Spero Ventures, Lerer Hippeau and Crosscut Ventures.

Atlas is also working with the venture capital firm it spun out from in the first place: AlphaBridge VC. Sulenes, the founder and executive director, noted that while these firms were in prior communication with Atlas, the outbreak helped increase their business with the company (in other words, the world ending inspired the firms to bring its mental health resources out to its portfolio founders).

Atlas in action

Herehow small group sessions for founders will shape up: Atlas will hold a virtual group program that connects six to eight founders, mixed between all the portfolios of client venture firms with a minimum commitment of six months. Each small group will meet twice a month for one and a half hours, and it will be facilitated by a trained life coach. From there, Sulenes says, there is not much structure.

&Founders can&t bring [anxiety] to their company, they have to hold steady and strong,& she said. &We are the place they can have their freak out that they can&t have every other place.&

The small groups will be created by a three-interview process led by Atlas. Sulenes noted that she matches groups based on stage of company, plus goals and personality structure &so the people who want to go deep and talk about existential problems& can. Others, she said, might want to keep it to business impact.

Atlas &anti-matches& on sectors so there aren&t competitors in the same group. The company also has an offering in which it embeds a coach in a company to work with employees, executives and managers for mindfulness and development.

Before the outbreak, Atlas relied simply on word of mouth.

&We are different from coaching firms who are charging a lot of money and looking to be seen as experts — we are who we serve,& Sulenes said. There are no clinical psychologists within Atlas, but there are individuals who are trained to be life coaches.

Sulenes says that the team was thankfully &at scale& for massive interest with a group of trained coaches on deck. Right now, due to the pandemic, the startup is offering any founder a preliminary conversation, free of charge.

Of course, the startup has had to respond to the novel coronavirus outbreak in-house as well. While the meetup is usually done in person, Sulenes said that the small groups will be done virtually. Next week, they&re having a free event for group coaching — it is titled Homeostasis Happy Hour.

Amid post-YC Demo Day discussions and online &coffee& catchups, there is a lingering sense of dread among VCs — particularly junior VCs — about their own job security.

Over the past few days, I have heard rumors — and they are just rumors, for now — about three recognizable venture firms and how they are beginning to rethink staffing in the year ahead amidst the novel coronavirus pandemic. Two of those firms are in active discussion about potential exits with specific individuals, while another is nearing a decision to eliminate seven investors at the associate, principal and venture partner levels due to massive declines in their own predicted returns.

We are actively reporting this; feel free to reach out to me or other staffers at TechCrunch if you have tips here.

Nonetheless, it seems almost inevitable that an industry that has massively expanded its partnerships and junior staffs in the bull market of the past few years would suddenly need to rethink the exorbitant costs of all that salary overhead.

There are a couple of considerations here based on what I have been told by VCs. The first is that the pace of investing will slow down, allowing investors more time to do due diligence, plan and use their staffs more effectively, thus requiring fewer folks to do sourcing, analysis and customer calls.

Let me give three examples of the kind of speed we saw before and how that is changing today.

Take the news that Sequoia let go of its investment in Finix a little while back. We had heard that one of the causes for why the firm seemed to accidentally invest in a direct competitor to one of its most valuable portfolio companies, Stripe, is that the deal got done so quickly (I heard 48-72 hours from someone in a position to know, but letsay a week or two) that there was limited time for diligence or even I guess competitive mapping in the process.

Or take the news that Kleiner Perkins raised a new fund two weeks ago, just a year after raising its last early-stage fund, having spent the entire investible capital in all of 12 months. Investing an entire fund like this in one year requires a huge and energetic staff to pull off.

Or finally, take a seed-stage company I was talking to a few weeks ago that closed its seed round and then met a top investor just a few days later — and that investor actually wrote another, richer-valued seed check almost immediately after the meeting. Why? So that the second seed investor didn&t have to compete for the inevitable Series A bake-off.

That speed required VCs to have the staff to be able to process deals and diligence in real time since another firm could lock in a round in a matter of hours. But with what looks like an almost certain slowdown in investing in the coming months, how many staffers will VC firms need, particularly if they have weeks to make investment decisions instead of mere hours?

Another consideration on staffing from what I have gathered — and one that almost no VC is willing to talk about on or even off the record — is that GPs have to immediately start husbanding their management fees for what might be a tricky few years of cash flow.

That might sound surprising, given that VC firms would seem to be among the most stable employers; after all, management fees built into fund docs are guaranteed by a formula for typically 10 years. However, there are a couple of nuances that make these funds more complicated than they might appear.

First, itgenerally reported that management fees are 2% of assets per year. That means that a $100 million fund has access to $2 million to pay overhead expenses every year. That general rule is both true and not true. Those fees are generally front-weighted to the early side of a fundlife cycle. A fund may pay out 2% fees in years one-five, but then decline to less than 1% by year 10.

Thatwhy maintaining a firmlevel of management fees generally requires them to consistently raise VC dollars in order to maintain their cash flow. That could be challenging with a looming economic depression and a tougher LP fundraising environment. If the time between funds lengthens from one year to two or even three years, plus if fund sizes get smaller to boot, the amount of management fees will decline accordingly.

Third, and this is rarer, some funds have made loans or real estate investments using their management fee income as a way to boost the salary returns of the general partners. Those financial arrangements drastically limit the flexibility around management fees in an economic downturn, and that can cause more acute pain than might otherwise be publicly visible.

The thinking goes then that carefully managing expenses today can protect those fee streams further in the coming years, providing more stability for the firm at the cost of some early unhappy news today.

There are a couple of other reasons beyond those two, and from what I can tell from my talks with VC sources, most VCs seem to be in a wait-and-see mode. But the discussions are starting to happen at least, even if no decisions have seemingly been made, at least to my knowledge. Which means that it is important to have open lines of conversation and start to understand a firmfinancial context and what the next few months might look like as everyone processes the new economic reality.

Detroitbig three automakers are to shut down all factories due to fears over the coronavirus. Details are still in the works and will be announced shortly.

Over the last few days, United Auto Workers has been pushing the automakers to shut down their factories over concerns of worker safety. UAW President Rory Gamble sent a letter calling on the automakers to shut down for two weeks. Itunclear if this pressure had any effects on the automakers& thought process.

Ford and FCA said they intended to only suspend operations at several Michigan-based plants. Early today, Honda announced it was pausing all operations at its 12 North American factories, including transmission and engine plants in Ohio, Indiana, Alabama, Canada and Mexico. Ford and GM followed several hours later. Now, in the afternoon, FCA also decided to close its factories.

At this time it seems the automakers are focusing on manufacturing and assembly plants. Most automakers had already instituted a work-at-home plan for office workers.

Along with these factories owned by major automakers, third-party suppliers will be affected, as their parts will no longer be needed. Itunclear how many workers will ultimately be affected by these closures.

Tesla is reportedly working through shelter-in-place mandates. Early today, TechCrunch published an internal Tesla memo detailing employee instructions for its Fremont-based factory.

It read, in part, &There are no changes in your normal assignment and you should continue to report to work if you are in an essential function: production, service, deliveries, testing and supporting groups as discussed with your manager.& Teslamanufacturing employees, unlike the big three Detroit automakers, are not represented by the United Auto Workers.

Itbeen a bonkers week in the world, with markets gyrating, companies fretting, investors tweeting and founders re-cutting their 2020 forecasts. But for one collection of startups, the past few days weren&t about work crises or the latest Slack share price. Instead, for Y Combinator Winter batch, it was Demo Day week.

TechCrunch has covered Y Combinator companies since time immemorial. And we&ve been present throughout a number of format changes over the years. We&ve been around for things like the old single-day events in the South Bay computer history museum, and we&ve been around for the SF era. Hell, we were there for the two-stage concept.

But this yearDemo Day brought with it something altogether new: No in-person pitches and demos. Yep, in response to COVID-19, Y Combinator made its demo day virtual, even scooting up its presentations by a full week. Obviously we tuned in en masse, writing a host of posts about the presenting companies (read them here, here, here and here). We also caught up with CEO of Y Combinator, Michael Seibel, to here his take on whatahead for the accelerator.

Given the scale of change, however, we weren&t content with just those entries. So, we gathered the TechCrunch crew, hopped on a Zoom, invited in our friends until our Zoom account maxed out (we didn&t know that that was a thing; more capacity coming) to chat over observations and the most interesting startups. We didn&t even miss the usual slew of Y Combinator live tweets — for the most part.

Hit the jump and we&ve got the recording for you. And see which companies the TechCrunch staff liked the most.

The Chat

Bill Gates, newly free from his role on the Microsoft board, has taken to Reddit to answer the communityquestions about the pandemic, the government response, and what the world can do to be better prepared. Always candid but never cynical, Gates gives some heartening but realistic advice.

Worth noting at the outset is that Gates and the Foundation have been warning about and preparing for an epidemic of this type for years. His 2015 TED talk in particular is extremely prescient, and he wrote a detailed article (PDF) around then for the New England Journal of Medicine detailing the lessons we should learn from the Ebola outbreak. The Foundation also participated in the creation of the Center for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations in 2017. (A recent simulation with Johns Hopkins that has been getting attention for its eerie parallels to the present situation is not in fact a prediction or good comparison.)

You can read all his responses (and the thousands of questions and comments) at the AMA, of course, but the most interesting ones have been lightly edited and condensed below.

Q: What do you think about the current state of testing nationwide?

Gates: The testing in the US is not organized yet. In the next few weeks I hope the government fixes this by having a website you can go to to find out about home testing and kiosks. Things are a bit confused on this right now. In Seattle the U of W is providing thousands of tests per day but no one is connected to a national tracking system.

Q: Can the 18 month estimate for a vaccine be shortened?

Gates: This is a great question. There are over 6 different efforts going on to make a vaccine. Some use a new approach called RNA which is unproven. We will have to build lots of manufacturing for the different approaches knowing that some of them will not work. We will need literally billions of vaccines to protect the world. Vaccines require testing to make sure they are safe and effective. Some vaccines like the flu don&t for the elderly.

Kimberly Shenk has been focused for a while now on &clean& products that are made without harmful chemicals. In 2017, Shenk and friend Jaleh Bisharat launched NakedPoppy, a site that curates and sells cosmetics that have been vetted by chemists (including some of its own products).

Interestingly, as the young startup was announcing $4 million in seed funding last summer from Cowboy Ventures, among others, Shenk — who remains on the board of Naked Poppy — was splitting off to launch a second company. Called Novi, it hopes to address the same need that Shenk and Bisharat discovered, but it plans to go much broader.

Specifically, Novi is developing a platform that it hopes will eventually become a go-to service for beauty brands, as well as a lot of other businesses that sell to the growing number of consumers concerned about what, exactly, is in their homes. Think carpet sellers, medical device makers, developers of house cleaning products like detergents. If it needs to be formulated, Novi wants to assess it and give it its stamp of approval.

Itnot an easy thing to pull together, concedes Shenk, a graduate of the United States Air Force Academy and MIT who spent several years as the head of Eventbritedata science operation. Just one of the many steps involved is building connections to far-flung and disparate raw suppliers, like makers of the surfactants used for cleansing, foaming, thickening and other special effects in cosmetics. The reason: Novi will need to learn about and certify as safe their manufacturing processes.

Ita major piece of the overall puzzle, and itharder than it might sound to nail down, as many manufacturers are hesitant to share information that they view as proprietary.

Still, Novi thinks it can persuade them to be more forthcoming by touting an AI-driven platform that it says can ingest and manage manufacturers& proprietary data at scale — and make it easier, in turn, for consumer companies that are focused on using vetted ingredients and chemicals to find them. Indeed, where Novi will really shine, suggests Shenk, is in data management.

Investors who know her seem to think she has what it takes. Brian Rothenberg, a partner at Defy Partners who helped scale Eventbrite across six years before he joined the world of venture capital, just led a $1.5 million seed round for Novi. (&We see a groundswell of consumer consciousness in this area,& Rothenberg said in an emailed statement to us.)

The startup further has the backing of Eventbrite co-founders Kevin and Julia Hartz.

Also working in its favor: Novi says italready working with a large beauty retailer that likes the results it has seen as a customer of Novisoftware-as-a-service. (Shenk declines to name the outfit, but she says another reason she had to split off from NakedPoppy was the high likelihood that Novi would be working with competitors to the company.)

Itcertainly progress, considering that Novi is still fairly nascent, with a team of just four people as it ramps up.

In addition to Shenk, itrun by Bisharat, who remains CEO of NakedPoppy but is also a co-founder of Novi and a board member; an engineer; and a chemist who previously worked for another &clean& beauty company, called Beautycounter.