Technology

Hungry, a catering marketplace that connects businesses with independent chefs, announced this week that it has raised $20 million in Series B funding. Hungrytells me that the funding valued the company at more than $100 million (pre-money).

The investors were also pretty impressive: The round was led by Evolution VC Partners and former Whole Foods co-CEO Walter Robb, whojoining the startupboard. Kevin Hart, Jay-Z, Los Angeles Rams running back Todd Gurley, former Obama aide Reggie Love and Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner also participated.

CEO Jeff Grass said that he and his co-founders Eman Pahlavani (COO) and Shy Pahlevani (president) got the idea for the company while working at their previous startup LiveSafe.

&LiveSafe was in a food desert, where the best options were Subway and Ruby Tuesday,& Grass said. &We wanted more authentic food and we started thinking about, ‘Is there a better way that taps into local chefs?& &

That eventually led to Hungry, which has built up a network of independent chefs in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, New York and Atlanta, providing catering to companies including Amazon, E-Trade, Microsoft and BCG. The chefs are all screened by Hungry, they cook out of &ghost kitchens& (commercial kitchens that aren&t attached to a restaurant) and then the food is delivered by the Hungry team.

&The food is produced at a much lower cost structure than at a restaurant with a retail location,& Grass said. &And yet you&re not sacrificing on quality. These are top chefs cooking their best dishes — you get higher than restaurant-quality food, but produced at a much lower cost.&

He added that this lower cost also allows the startup to be generous. Specifically, for every two meals sold, Hungry is supposed to donate one meal to end hunger in the U.S., and it has donated nearly 500,000 meals already.

As for the funding, Grass and his team will use it to expand into new markets — he hopes to be in 23 cities by the end of 2021.

Is it good news to say that stocks fell less sharply than they had on previous days?

Thatthe bright side of another turbulent trading day across the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange. The major indices were down again — although their declines were less severe than they had been during the week.

Investors appeared to shake off positive labor statistics (the U.S. added 273,000 jobs, ahead of expectations), as the expanding number of coronavirus cases in the U.S. and lack of a coordinated response from the Trump administration took their toll on investor confidence that the impact on the economy would be minimal.

With that said, things could have been worse.

The Dow fell 256.50 points, or just under 1%, to close at 25,864.78, while the S-P stumbled 51.57 points, or 1.7%, to close at 2,972.37 while the Nasdaq slid 1.8%, or 162.98 to close at 8,575.62. The benchmark indices are in the territory of a market correction — hovering at around a 10% loss already on the year.

For startups, itimportant to note that these market pressures can have implications for their businesses. Jittery buyers may be inclined to curb spending and save to conserve cash on their own balance sheets; consumers may rethink priorities and focus on essential purchases as they tighten their own belts.

Sequoia Capital warned in a blog post yesterday that things may change as time rolls along and the global economy stutters.

Heretheir take:

• Drop in business activity.Some companies have seen their growth rates drop sharply between December and February. Several companies that were on track are now at risk of missing their Q1 2020 plans as the effects of the virus ripple wider.
• Supply chain disruptions. The unprecedented lockdown in China is directly impacting global supply chains. Hardware, direct-to-consumer and retailing companies may need to find alternative suppliers. Pure software companies are less exposed to supply chain disruptions, but remain at risk due to cascading economic effects.
• Curtailment of travel and canceled meetings. Many companies have banned all &non-essential& travel and some have banned all international travel. While travel companies are directly impacted, all companies that depend on in-person meetings to conduct sales, business development or partnership discussions are being affected.

The COVID-19 crisis is touching all aspects of society, including how we work. In response, many companies are considering asking some percentage of their workforce to work remotely until the crisis abates.

If your organization doesn&t have a great deal of experience with remote work, there are a number of key things to think about as you set up a program. You are going to be under time constraints when it comes to enacting an action plan, so think about ways to leverage the tools, procedures and technologies you already have in place. You won&t have the luxury of conducting a six-month study.

We spoke to a few people who have been looking at the remote working space for more than a decade and asked about the issues companies should bear in mind when a large number of employees suddenly need to work from home.

The lay of the land

Alan Lepofsky, currently VP of Salesforce Quip, has studied the remote work market for more than a decade. He says there are three main pieces to building a remote working strategy. First, managers need to evaluate which tools they&ll be using to allow employees to continue collaborating when they aren&t together.

Oribi, an Israeli startup promising to democratize web analytics, is now launching in the United States.

While we&ve written about a wide range of new or new-ish analytics companies, founder and CEO Iris Shoor said that most of them aren&t built for Oribicustomers.

&A lot of companies are more focused on the high end,& Shoor told me. &Usually these solutions are very much based on a lot of technical resources and integrations — these are the Mixpanels and Heap Analytics and Adobe Marketing Clouds.&

She said that Oribi, on the other hand, is designed for small and medium businesses that don&t have large technical teams: &They have digital marketing strategies that are worth a few hundred thousand dollars a month, they have very large activity, but they don&t have a team for it. And I would say that all of them are using Google Analytics.&

Shoor described Oribi as designed specifically &to compete with Google Analytics& by allowing everyone on the team to get the data they need without requiring developers to write new code for every event they want to track.

In fact, if you use Oribiplugins for platforms like WordPress and Shopify, thereno coding at all involved in the process. Apparently, thatbecause Oribi is already tracking every major event in the customer journey. It also allows the team to define the conversion goals that they want to focus on — again, with no coding required.

Shoor contrasted Oribi with analytics platforms that simply provide &more and more data& but don&t help customers understand what to do with that data.

&We&ve created something that is much more clean,& she said. &We give them insights of whatworking; in the background, we create all these different queries and correlations about which part of the funnels are broken and where they can optimize.&

There are big businesses using Oribi already — including Audi, Sony and Crowne Plaza — but the company is now turning its attention to U.S. customers. Shoor said Oribi isn&t opening an office in the United States right away, but there are plans to do so in the next year.

Following Microsoft lead from late last night, some the biggest technology companies in the U.S. have agreed to pay wages for hourly employees impacted by the ongoing corporate response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Itthe right thing for companies to do, from both a health and safety perspective, and to ensure that the hourly workers who are most impacted by work stoppages and shortages are not adversely affected by events that are beyond their control.

As we reported earlier today, Facebook committed to pay its &contingent& workers. And according to a report in Axios, Amazon, Google and Twitter are joining them. We&ve reached out to Apple but have yet to receive a comment.

In a statement to Axios, Amazon made the same commitment for its employees.

&We will continue to pay all hourly employees that support our campus in Seattle and Bellevue & from food service, to security guards to janitorial staff & during the time our employees are asked to work from home,& the company said in a statement. &In addition, we will subsidize one month of rent for the local small businesses that operate inside our owned buildings to help support them during this period.&

Google and Twitter have reportedly made the same commitments.

Tech companies have taken a lead on the issue and received praise from labor organizations for the stance. But organizers in the Bay Area and beyond are encouraging companies to cushion the blow hourly workers will face from lost wages due to office closures.

The issue has even caught the attention of the Democratic Senator Mark Warner from Virginia, who is pressuring gig economy companies Uber, Lyft, Postmates and DoorDash to provide compensation for workers impacted by the coronavirus.

&I strongly urge that you attempt to address the potential financial hardship for your workers if they are sick or have to self-quarantine during this time,& Warner wrote. &In order to limit the spread of COVID-19, it is critical that platform companies lead by example by committing that economic uncertainty will not be deterrents to their workers following public health guidance during the response.&

SXSW has officially announced it will cancel its tech and music conference slated for March 13th to 22nd in Austin, Texas due to concerns around coronavirus, though itexploring rescheduling. &Based on the recommendation of our public health officer and our director of public health . . . I&ve gone ahead and declared a local disaster in the city and associated with that, have issued an order that effectively cancels SXSW,& said Austin Mayor Steve Adler at a press conference today.

SXSW writes that it will follow the mayororder and cancel its conference. &We are exploring options to reschedule the event and are working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience as soon as possible for 2020 participants, starting with SXSW EDU. For our registrants, clients, and participants we will be in touch as soon as possible and will publish an FAQ.& Itunclear if attendees or sponsors will receive refunds.

Interim health authority for Austin Dr. Mark Escott said that there are no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Travis County, but called the cancellation a &proactive step in preparing this community for this storm.& He said that because people would be spending long periods of time near each other at panels and concerts, and because some registered attendees hail from international and domestic areas with COVID-19 exposure, cancelling SXSW was the right move. Not all future events will need to be cancelled, though, Escott explained.

US President Barack Obama speaks during a South by Southwest Interactive with Texas Tribune editor Evan Smith (L) at the Long Center for Performing Arts in Austin, Texas on March 11, 2016. / AFP / MANDEL NGAN

The news comes just three days after Adler held a press conference to announce that, &At this point, thereno evidence that cancelling SXSW makes us safer.& As of Tuesday, AustinTravis County said Thursday that it had zero confirmed cases of COVID-19.

SXSW is known as a central gathering point for the tech, music and media industries that gather to learn from each other while enjoying the Texas weather, beer and barbecue. A decade ago it was the hot place to launch new social apps. Though over the years as the event grew less nerdy and more mainstream, SXSW became more of an exhibition space for well-funded companies to prove that they&re cool.

A petition to cancel the 2020 conference had reached 54,000 signatures. Entrepreneurship influencer Tim Ferris had called on Adler to cancel the event. SXSW had been refusing to offer refunds to trade show booth-buyers and attendees. A full-access platinum badge for the conference currently costs $1,550.

AUSTIN, TX & MARCH 11: Josh Constine, Mike Krieger and Kevin Systrom speak onstage at Interactive Keynote: Instagram founders Kevin Systrom - Mike Krieger with Josh Constine during the 2019 SXSW Conference and Festivals at Austin Convention Center on March 11, 2019 in Austin, Texas. (Photo by Chris Saucedo/Getty Images for SXSW)

The conference was put in a tough position by the pull-out of many of its highest-profile sponsors, speakers and party organizers. Netflix, Apple, Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, Vevo, TikTok, Warner/HBO and CNN had all cancelled events, product announcements, film premieres and speaking appearances by their employees.

Many other major tech conferences had already cancelled or moved online, including Google I/O, Facebook F8, GDC, Collision Toronto and Mobile World Congress. Music festivals like Ultra in Miami and Tomorrowland in Belgium had cancelled too. Lime president Joe Kraus was slated to hold a fireside chat with me at SXSW but had already cancelled this morning.

But the impact on Austin could be especially pronounced. SXSW isn&t a traditional festival held at one massive site. Itspread across hundreds of venues across the city that all run panels, parties and concerts simultaneously. For musicians in particular, expensive travel rearrangements and tight touring schedules could make cancellation of SXSW a serious burden on their businesses and something thattough to reschedule. The citybars, restaurants, venues and hotels that benefit from the hundreds of thousands of attendees could take a significant revenue hit, as well.