Technology

Startup founders are hard-pressed to find the right investors — not only to fund their businesses but to help their businesses grow. These days, investors represent a variety of backgrounds and industries — traditional venture capital, Hollywood, even the NBA.

When Golden State Warriors point guard and two-time MVP Stephen Curry isn&t playing basketball, heworking with his business partner and former college basketball teammate Bryant Barr. Together, Barr and Curry run SC30 Inc., which manages Curryinvestment, media, philanthropy and brand partnership interests.

SC30 Inc.third investment came in December 2018,when the fund participatedin hotel-booking platform SnapTravel$21.2 million Series A round.

Curryforay into the tech ecosystem started when he co-founded marketing automation platform Slyce. Since then, Curry has taken a more structured approach to investing through SC30 Inc., where the portfolio has grown to eight investments in companies such as TSM and Palm.

Itworth noting Curry is not the only baller in the tech investment game. There are his former teammates Andre Igoudala, an investor in Lime and board member of Jumia, and Kevin Durant, an investor in a number of startups through his fund Thirty Five Ventures.

At Disrupt SF 2019, listen as the three-time NBA champion Stephen Curry and SC30 Inc. President Bryant Barr discuss SC30 Inc. investments, featuring SnapTravel CEO Hussein Fazal as he shares how he determined SC30 Inc. would make a good strategic investor. We&ll also talk to Curry about his general investment strategy and overall ambitions in tech.

Disrupt SF runs October 2 & 4 at the Moscone Center in the heart of San Francisco. Passes are available here.

Googleparental control software, Family Link, is getting a noteworthy update today with the addition of new features that will allow parents to limit screen time per app, instead of the device as a whole, as well as let them more easily extend screen time as needed. The features were first announced at GoogleI/O developer conference this spring, and help to make Family Link a more complete parental control and screen-time solution.

While the simplest way to manage screen time is to just not give kids a device in the first place, itnot the most realistic. As parents, we need to teach our kids to navigate the world — and that means we have to show them how to establish a healthy, non-addictive relationship with technology, too. Certain apps make that more difficult, as they&ve been intentionally designed to steal our focus for long periods of time. Even as adults, many of us struggle with this same problem.

For years, platform makers like Apple and Google were complicit with regard to users& app addictions. They were thrilled about the success of the third-party developers and the money they brought in. Only more recently have these companies realized that their popular devices are starting to be seen as the digital equivalent of junk food — sure, it fuels you. But itbad for your health and should be limited. And that, of course, is bad for business. Hence, the arrival of screen-time and digital well-being features.

Family Link is not a perfect system, but it now comes built-in to Android devices with Android 10 and up, and can be downloaded as a standalone app from Google Play if you don&t have it available. Itto Googlecredit that it has integrated it now into the core mobile OS, where iteasier to find and use.

Already, itable to do things like set device &bedtimes,& track activity per app, set daily limits, view the devicelocation on the map and ring it (you&ll need Family Link for this feature alone) and more.

But what was sorely lacking was the ability to more narrowly define how a childscreen time should be used.

Today, there are plenty of educational apps — from flashcards to study guides to Kindle books — that kids don&t deserve to be locked out from just because they&ve used their phone over a certain number of hours per day. And as a parent myself, I was hesitant to enforce daily limits in Family Link because it locked my child out of her phone entirely, except for the ability to make calls. She just as often uses texting to reach me, so I didn&t want to cut her off from that ability.

With the new per-app limits, you&ll be able to limit how long each individual app on the device can be used.

That means I can drastically trim the number of hours per week she spends on TikTok and YouTube (sorry, not sorry, Google!), or in mobile games. It also now means that chores around the house aren&t tied to &screen time& as a whole, but time in a favorite app, like Roblox. (Oh, the motivation!)

However, per-app limits will require a lot of manual labor on parents& part. I don&t mind the extra work, because I appreciate the granular control, but a lot of parents would be better-served by category-based limits. (e.g. &mobile gaming.&) This could be something Google addresses in a future update.

The other update rolling out today is Bonus Time, which lets you up the amount of screen time in sort of a one-off situation.

For example, if the child is in the middle of something and just needs a few more minutes, you can now grant this extra time without having to disable the screen-time setting. You&ll know screen time is running out because the child gets warnings at 15 minutes, 5 minutes and 1 minute. And they&ll be sure to tell you about this.

These updates are rolling out today to the cross-platform Family Link service.Parents can control Family Link settings from their Android or iOS device, and the child can use an Android or Chrome device.

As Greta Thunberg heads back to Europe from the U.S. after radicalizing a generation, entrepreneurs are quickly realizing there is a zeitgeist to be gotten hold of here. With food production a major contributor to climate change, itno surprise then that on-demand food startups are appearing to cater to this new audience.

Simple Feast launched its plant-based food product in early 2017 and since then has developed a fast-food range that is catching the climate and taste fashion wave.

The company has now raised a total of $33 million in a Series B round led by U.S.-based venture capital firm 14W, with a number of other existing investors participating, including EuropeBalderton Capital, which is increasing their investment in the business.

The company was partly self-funded in the beginning, then added Sweet Capital (London/Stockholm) and byFounders (CPH/SF) as the first VCs. Later, Balderton Capital (London) and 14W (NYC) joined in the Series A and B. The total funding to date is now north of $50 million.

The founders are Jakob Jønck and Thomas Ambus; Jønck was co-founder of Endomondo, acquired by MyFitnessPal.

Jønck says: &The future of food does not just belong to plants, but will be both plant-based and unprocessed. This movement is pivotal to save not only our planet, but also human health. With this investment, we can continue our journey and bring our products to more people, in existing as well as new markets, while also strengthening our R-D efforts in new food innovation.&

Simple Feast is ticking the climate agenda boxes, with packaging made solely by FSC-approved cardboard boxes, to the cooling element they use to keep the food fresh (frozen tap water in drinkable cartons) and their use of all-organic produce.

Alex Zubillaga from 14W commented: &Over the past year since first investing in Simple Feast, we have continued to be impressed by the caliber and deep operational experience of the management team that Jakob Jønck has built around him… We believe Simple Feast has the opportunity to become a global, category-defining brand as they expand to the U.S. early next year.&

Typical customers are meat-eating families in their 30s and 40s who are trying to cut down on their meat consumption. They are well-educated, have a middle or high income and demand high quality and transparency in the food they consume. Their main competitors are restaurants, meal-kits and take-away. The idea is not to compromise on taste or quality, nor convenience or packaging.