Technology

What do you do when you&ve raised nearly $100 million and you want to grow as quickly as possible In Doctolibcase, the startup is acquiring its main competitor MonDocteur. Together, the two companies work with tens of thousands of doctors and get tens of millions of unique visitors every month.

Doctolib has developed an online scheduling platform for all sorts of doctors, from your physician next door to the hospital in the big city.

Instead of creating integrations with existing calendars and software solutions, Doctolib is replacing your doctorscheduling system altogether. After signing up, you can create your profile and manage your calendar from Doctolib directly.

This way, patients can look at their doctorcalendar on Doctolibwebsite and find a time slot that works for everyone. But doctors even use Doctolib for patients who call them directly as it replaces the entire calendar system.

MonDocteur started five years ago with the exact same idea in mind. Over time, the two companies have significantly grown and convinced more and more doctors. You can&t use both solutions, so each doctor had to decide between Doctolib and MonDocteur.

Here are some numbers:

• MonDocteur has 150 employees, while Doctolib has 450 employees.
• MonDocteur works with 10,000 health professionals and Doctolib has signed up 45,000 health professionals.
• MonDocteur costs €106.80 per month, Doctolib costs €109 per month in France.
• MonDocteur gets 4 million visitors per month on its website. Doctolib now attracts 16 million visitors.

So itclear that MonDocteur was smaller than Doctolib, but not really an order of magnitude smaller. These two startups will form a big company after the acquisition with 600 employees. It will also lead to a huge jump in monthly recurring revenue.

Itclear that Doctolib now has nothing to worry about in France. The startup also recently launched its service in Germany. Now, itall about convincing new doctors in France and Germany to join the platform. The company could also expand to new services to create new revenue streams.

For now, both MonDocteur and Doctolib will stick around. If you&ve been using one of those two sites, nothing will change. Doctors will also remain segmented between the two sites. Eventually, there will be just one service.

A couple of weeks ago, Airbnb announced some major changes to the ways it compensates employees before it goes public.

At least two former Airbnb employees and a longtime VC will be ready to fund those who leave when it does. They&ve been waiting on this moment since last summer, in fact. Thatwhen former Airbnb data scientist Riley Newman left the firm to start work on a venture firm,quickly enlisting the help of his colleague of several years, Sara Adler (Airbnbformer head of corporate development) and former Madrona Venture Group principalDavid Rosenthal. What they set out to do with that fund, Wave Capital, is invest in marketplace startups, including — especially, even — those founded by other former employees of the home-rental giant.

Itan idea that has resonated with investors. Wave just closed its debut fund with $55 million in capital commitments, slightly more than the three were targeting. They&ve already begun putting it to work, too. To find out more about those bets, and where the three expect to shop next, we asked them for a few more details in a chat that has been edited for length.

TC: How exactly did this firm come to pass

DR: Riley is really the hub for all of us; his wife and mine grew up together in Marin and have remained best friends since early childhood. As Rileycareer at Airbnb progressed and my career in VC progressed, we talked about doing something together at some point in time.

RN: Meanwhile, Sara and I sat beside each other and together reported to the person who was effectively AirbnbCTO and we were part of a number of working groups together. David and I started talking about doing something together and we quickly drew Sara into our plans.

TC: &Marketplaces& is both a huge mission for a venture fund and a narrow one. Why pursue it

DR: For me, when I was at Madrona, we incubated the [dog services company]Rover.comand I saw the power of marketplaces and the importance of helping them get off the ground. And Riley and I talked a lot over the years about how he watched Greg McAdoo [formerly of Sequoia Capital and now of the venture firm Bolt] work with Airbnb in the early days, and the importance of a true lead board member. And we thought that between our three collective experiences, we could play that role.

SA: As a member of the corp dev team at Airbnb and at Dropbox and Facebook before that, I could also see the impact of investors even on the final stages of companies& journeys.

TC: You&ve now fully closed the fund from institutional investors, including the fund-of-funds Cendana Capital. How many companies do you expect to support with it

DR: We think roughly 18 to 20 companies. We intend to lead every round and to take board seats. We want to play the same role as Greg did at Airbnb.

SA: We expect for each partner to do one to two deals per year.

TC: You haven&t invested together in the past, and establishing an investing history together is usually really important to institutions that invest in venture funds. How did you persuade them that this wasn&t an issue

RN: It was definitely a process. [Laughs.] We were told no multiple times. We had not invested together and it did come up quite a bit and was a disqualifying thing for people who care a lot about that. We underwent a monster due diligence process with [the investment consulting company] Cambridge Associates that thankfully put us on [institutional investors&] buy list. But we dealt with every flavor of [no] before that. I think what won everybody over were the skill sets that each of us have, and how well-rounded they are in combination with one other.

SA: I think our approach [appealed to investors], too. Itkind of like what venture used to be 20 years ago, both in terms of the size of the investments we plan to make and the time and energy we intend to spend with the companies we fund.

TC: How many investments have you made so far, and how dependent on Airbnb are you for your deal flow I know Nate Blecharczyk, Airbnbco-founder and chief strategy officer, is an advisor to Wave.

RN: Alma was our first investment. We spent months with [co-founder] Dan Hill [who was formerly a director of product and performance marketing at Airbnb and whose startupconnects prospective donors with local philanthropies]. We helped them firm up their marketplace design and design a long-term strategy and our [check] was built around a financial model that we built for them to get them from seed to a Series A round. We&ll have to go out and execute on that, but that process determined what they needed.

We have another investment at the finish line.

SA: Airbnb will be a big part of our network, especially with our first fund, because we know exactly who the great people are at the company, which you only know by working with them. But across my time at Airbnb and Dropbox and Facebook, I&ve been a part of acquiring 30 companies and I&ve interacted with thousands more during the evaluation process, so therea deep network of founders for us to draw from.

TC: Thereso much late-stage capital sloshing around. Do you think about how it will impact what you&re doing at the earliest stages of these companies& lives

DR: The tail is really wagging the dog in a lot of cases right now. I don&t necessarily see so much capital as good or bad; whatimportant to us is that founders use their capital as a tool to accomplish their aims. When you let capital start driving your decisions, there are very real unforeseen consequences.

TC: Are there any sectors about which you&re particularly excited

DR: We&re sector agnostic. We believe in the business model, whether itconsumer or b2b or healthcare. Crypto, we&re a little scared by, but I suppose those are marketplaces, too.

If you&re sick of hearing about esports, you need to get over it. The space continues to grow, inching its way into the traditional media landscape. Today, in fact, Activision Blizzard announced that the Overwatch League playoffs will be aired on ESPN and Disney XD.

The Overwatch League in itself is a huge step for esports, as itthe first true city-based league for a competitive video game. While most esports leaguesconsist of privately owned teams with little or nothing to do with geography, Overwatch League is a pro league made up of city-based teams such as the Dallas Fuel or the San Francisco Shock. Many of these teams are owned by big names in the traditional sports world, such as Robert Kraft (CEO and owner of New England Patriots, who owns the Boston Uprising) and Jeff Wilpon (COO of the New York Mets, who owns the New York Excelsior).

The agreement, which also includes a recap/highlights package from 2018 Grand Finals coverage on ABC on July 29, marks the first time that live competitive gaming has aired on ESPN in prime time, and will be the first broadcast of an esports championship on ABC. Activision Blizzard said in the announcement that this is just the start of a multi-year agreement.

That said, EAMadden NFL 18 did broadcast an esports tournament on ESPN2 and Disney XD earlier this year.

Overwatch League playoffs begin tonight at 8pm ET, and will culminate in the Grand Finals, taking place in the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, on July 27 and July 28.

Herewhat Justin Connolly, EVP of Affiliate Sales and Marketing at Disney and ESPN, had to say in a prepared statement:

The Overwatch League Grand Finals is by far our most comprehensive television distribution for an esports event over a single weekend: 10 total hours over four networks and three days. This overall collaboration with Disney/ABC, ESPN and Blizzard represents our continued commitment to esports, and we look forward to providing marquee Overwatch League coverage across our television platforms for fans.

The rise of Twitch stars, like Ninja, and the growth of the competitive gaming scene have paved the way not only for a new type of sports media, but for a growing new economy. While challenges remain around monetizing the content, the pieces of the puzzle are slowing coming together to create an audience large enough to incentivize advertisers to spend big money.

In fact, sponsorship revenue and ad spending revenue are expected to hit $655 million and $224 million, respectively, by 2020, according to Newzoo. That doesn&t sound like much when you think about the NFL, which raked in $1.3 billion in revenue in 2017 alone. But, like this deal proves, the esports space is growing and working its way into the mainstream, hoping to get the attention of young men between 18 and 34 who have become increasingly difficult to reach via traditional advertising.

Alongside the live TV broadcast of the Overwatch League playoffs on ESPN and Disney XD, the playoffs will also be live-streamed via Twitch, MLG.com and on the ESPN app and DisneyNOW.