Technology

StrattyX is a trading interface that lets you set up sophisticated &if-this-then-that& rules and execute orders on the stock market. The startup is participating in the Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt SF.

There are plenty of brokers that let you buy and sell shares using a mobile app and a web interface. But if you want to access more sophisticated tools and automate strategies, therenot much you can do.

StrattyX wants to open up automated trading software to anyone, from non-professional traders who have some savings to professional day traders. The startup focuses on this specific part of the process.

It doesn&t try to reinvent the wheel and it doesn&t want to become an online stock broker. Instead, the company integrates with existing brokers, such as Robinhood, TD Ameritrade and many others as long as they support trading via an API. It acts as an interface and executes orders on your behalf.

You can create rules based on multiple different factors. In addition to traditional stop-loss and stop-limit orders, you can say that you want to buy or sell shares if something happens on Twitter, in the news or on the stock market.

Here are a few examples of rules you can create:

• If @realdonaldtrump tweets something that contains &China& or &tariff,& sell Apple shares.
• If the value of EUR drops by 2% against USD, buy LVMH shares.
• If news headline contains &Tesla delays deliveries,& sell Tesla shares.

Interestingly, StrattyX will provide a marketplace of strategies. If a star investor starts using StrattyX to define a set of automated rules, other users could follow the same strategy.

StrattyX then wants to go one step further by giving you the tools to train a model using machine learning and user-generated data sets. You could imagine a feature that lets you upload a .csv file with price history and different types of data points, such as SEC filings, earnings, etc.

The company is also working on a feature that would show you news headlines that you&d rate with a Tinder-style swipe gesture — swipe right if you think itgood news, swipe left if you think itbad news.

StrattyX is launching its mobile app today. Ita sort of minimum viable product for now — some features are still in beta. The company is also working on a desktop version that would be useful for professional traders in particular.

StrattyX initially costs $5 per month per user, with more expensive plans for bigger teams and whether you execute a lot of orders through the product. The startup is looking to raise a seed round in the coming months.

&What public markets do is indeed the great reckoning. But it cleanses [a] company of all of the bad stuff that they have.&

ThatSalesforce founder and chief executive officer Marc Benioff talking about the benefits of public markets.

Itsomething that private companies seem to be ignoring in the go-go days of the current venture capital boom cycle and something thatled to a lot of the erosion in investor value, says Benioff.

&I think in a lot of private companies these days, we&re seeing governance issues all over the place,& says Benioff.

The multi-billionaire founder of one of the most successful enterprise software companies of the past 20 years pointed to both WeWork and Uber as companies that could have benefitted from the oversight that public investors provide sooner in their lifecycle.

&I can&t believe this is the way they were running internally in all of these cases,& says Benioff. &They are staying private way too long.&

Benioff pointed to Salesforce as an example. &We went public, were $100 million in revenue [and] that was about the right time. We were small enough that we could make those changes and adjustments,& Benioff said. &And therea lot of those that have to continually happen, and that includes the people on your team… who are really keeping you on the straight and narrow.&

Benioffadvocacy for public markets was just one facet of a wide-ranging interview onstage at our Disrupt SF event.

In addition to his old refrain that &Facebook should be regulated like cigarettes,& Benioff called for the creation of a national privacy policy to ensure that companies and consumers can be on the same page.

&We need a national privacy law,& he said. &Otherwise you&re going to get a patchwork of privacy laws. We have to get our privacy and data locked down so we know where we&re going. [Regulators] need to be stepping in now and they should be working hard to make those changes.&

Benioff also pointed to the need for a reinvention of modern capitalism and a rethinking of how executives build their startups if they want to be successful in the new business landscape of the early 21st century.

&I really strongly believe that capitalism as we know it is dead… that we&re going to see a new kind of capitalism and that new kind of capitalism thatgoing to emerge is not the Milton Friedman capitalism thatjust about making money,& said Benioff. &And if your orientation is just about making money, I don&t think you&re going to hang out very long as a CEO or a founder of a company.&

Good relationships require ongoing commitment and work. LifeCouple, launching today in public beta at TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, wants to help make that work a bit easier for you and your partner.

Through its app, LifeCouple enables couples to address and monitor any challenges in their relationship. The startup does this by serving up content designed to encourage people to look more closely at their relationship across four key areas: trust, communication, conflict and intimacy. The content includes daily relationship challenges, ice breakers to help approach tricky conversations, digital gifts and more.

LifeCouple is designed to supplement couples therapy, its founder Sean Ronestold TechCrunch.

&Itnot a replacement to therapy but ita complement to it,& he said. &I don&t think this can 100% solve your problem but it can give you the tools to solve your problems.&

Additionally, Rones envisions couples therapists using this tool to further assist their clients.

Just how startups use technology to track fitness and health, LifeCouple aims to help people create relationship goals, address those goals and track them over time. The ideal is for people to spend about 15 minutes per day to get the most out of it, Rones said.

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&What motivated me is after many different startups, I&ve learned that in order to be somewhat successful, you have to be tackling a really big problem,& he said.

LifeCouple is currently free, but is working to determine the cost moving forward.In the first two months of its soft launch, LifeCouple amassed 2,500 users in the U.S.

&What we&re trying to do is create something that can help — even if itjust 10 couples that stay together,& Rones said.

This year, LifeCouple raised a $575,000 seed round. The plan is to do a full launch in January.