Office Hours Podcast: ChowNow’s Software Empowers Restaurants To Save Money on Deliveries
Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 75 companies and is incubating several more.
College was not Chris Webb's thing, so at 18 he took an internship at Oppenheimer and launched his career in finance.
While working Wall Street at investment bank Bear Stearns and then Lehman Brothers, he continually found himself drawn to the tech sector.
Eventually, the New York high life was getting him down, and Chris returned home to Los Angeles where his mom had invested in a restaurant that's now a successful chain, Tender Greens.
Chris learned about the pain points the restaurant was experiencing. Inspired, he combined his knowledge of tech to help restaurants avoid the onerous fees required of services offered by the likes of GrubHub.
Chris and his co-founder, Eric Jaffe, built ChowNow, an app and online ordering system for restaurants, in 2011.
Now, the L.A.-based company has 450 employees with investments from Upfront and 3L. Incidentally, I'm a limited partner in both those funds, so that makes me an investor in ChowNow.
Chris Webb is the co-founder and CEO of ChowNow. Previously, he had a career on Wall Street at investment bank Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.
dot.LA Sr. Podcast Producer & Editor Laurel Moglen contributed to this post.
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Spencer Rascoff serves as executive chairman of dot.LA. He is an entrepreneur and company leader who co-founded Zillow, Hotwire, dot.LA, Pacaso and Supernova, and who served as Zillow's CEO for a decade. Through his startup studio and venture capital firm, 75 & Sunny, Spencer is an active angel investor in over 75 companies and is incubating several more.
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Spinn Raises $20M For a More Sustainable Home-Brewed Coffee
One Los Angeles-based coffee startup is hoping to put a new spin on at-home coffee making.
Spinn makes a coffee brewing machine that uses a unique "centrifuge process" and offers coffees from a variety of vendors — without relying on wasteful packaging that its competitors use.
Spinn was able to capitalize on lockdowns that closed grocery stores and coffee shops. Small coffee vendors looked to Spinn's online marketplace to sell their coffee and consumers looked to Spinn's machines to brew coffee at home, said CEO Roderick de Rode.
The company has raised $20 million in a round of funding led by Spark Capital, Amazon's Alexa Fund and Bar 9 Ventures, it said Monday. The money will go toward fulfilling pre-orders the company has for its coffee machines and for hiring additional workers.
Founded in 2015, Spinn hopes to tap into a growing market for at-home coffee machines. Its machine is an all-in-one brewer that make a variety of coffee types — including espresso, americano, cold brew and drip coffee — through a unique "centrifuge" process. It can process around 1,500 types of coffee from around 500 vendors.
Competitors, including Nespresso and Keurig, also offer brewing machines and coffee marketplaces. But de Rode said Spinn's focus on sustainability sets it apart. Their machines don't require filters, reducing the amount of waste produced when brewing coffee.
As working conditions fluctuate between in-person and remote, Spinn is hoping to tailor both to consumers who continue to work remotely and to offices looking to buy coffee machines for returning workers, said de Rode.
To de Rode, consumer interest in coffee is moving in the same direction as wine — People are becoming more aware of the different types and origins of coffees, much like how people have become aware of the nuances in the types of wines, he said, giving Spinn more space to operate.
"Nowadays people know that there's a difference between a Cherot and a Pinot Noir," he said. "You see the same thing happening in coffee."
Spinn's machines are also connected to the internet, and can be controlled through Spinn's app or through Amazon's Alexa.
Peacock Gets a Bump in Users, Even as Olympics Viewership Declines
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
Cynics are having a field day with the tepid audience that watched Friday's Olympics opening ceremony on NBC.
The data show a 36% decline from the 2016 Games across all NBC's platforms, which include its linear TV channel, Peacock and NBC Sports digital.
On the other hand, the network said Saturday brought Peacock record viewership.
NBCUniversal and its parent company Comcast own the Games' U.S. media rights through 2032. They expected the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics to provide a lift to Peacock, their recent entrant into the streaming wars.
The pandemic scuppered that plan, and Peacock has struggled to achieve traction. But the rescheduled Games provided the network a new opportunity to try to make up some ground in the streaming wars. Is it too late?
Actually, some analysts say, it's too early to tell.
"Some people are jumping to conclusions a little too quick here," said media analyst Dan Rayburn.
Peacock is showcasing a few hours of live Olympics content per day, in addition to a curated mix of highlights, recaps and analysis.
"We're gonna see a huge flurry of usage and signups, absolutely," Rayburn said. "But the more important question to ask is, 'What is the engagement going to be once the Olympics are gone?"
The longer-term impact of the Olympics on Peacock's competitiveness, in other words, is less about how many people watch the event, and more about how many of them stick around.
Beginning to answer that question will require waiting for Comcast's future earnings calls. Its third-quarter results will likely come in September and its fourth-quarter results will follow in early 2022.
Streaming companies have been reluctant to share much coveted performance data. The information they do share should be taken with a grain of salt, analysts say, as the companies can cherry-pick from their oceans of data to spin up a story that makes them look good.
NBC has been quick to report Peacock's record-breaking Saturday, but hasn't shared any specific numbers on Peacock.
One metric streamers will be unlikely to avoid sharing, eventually, is whether they achieve profitability on the timelines they've publicized. Peacock head Matthew Strauss told investors in January last year he expects the service to break even by the end of 2024.
In April, Comcast reported Peacock has had about 42 million sign-ups, one-third of whom use the service monthly. For comparison, Netflix reported 209 million paying subscribers in its most recent earnings call, and Disney reported over 103 million for Disney Plus.
A limited version of Peacock is available for free with ads. The full, ad-supported version costs $5 per month and the ad-free version is $10 per month. Comcast has not provided a breakdown of its users across those tiers.
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Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
'It's So Prevalent': A Labor Rep on Gaming's Culture of Harassment and Discrimination
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake
When labor organizer Emma Kinema saw a tweet pop up on her feed saying that California is suing Activision Blizzard for workplace harassment, she said she felt heartened.
To her recollection, it's the first time such a large state agency has targeted a big player in gaming to try to fix a toxic culture problem that has plagued the industry for years. But it wasn't surprising to Kinema. For over five years, she's been working with the Communications Workers of America to organize gaming workers and calls this type of discriminatory culture "pervasive."
"There will always be a thousand more stories than the ones we're seeing on Twitter now, in this case now, in the press now," she said. "It's so prevalent, this just broad culture of sexism and discrimination and racism."
"I don't think I've ever interacted with any organizing committee or group of workers who were interested in making change that this wasn't like in the top three issues they wanted to address," she added.
The California Department of Fair Employment and Housing sued the Santa Monica-based company this week after a two-year investigation that found male workers and bosses tormented women and executives didn't seriously deal with complaints.
The lawsuit alleges women were subjected to "cube crawls" where male employees drink "copious" amounts of alcohol and crawl to various cubicles in the office and "often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees," including groping them.
For its part, Activision Blizzard released a statement in response accusing the agency of using distorted and false descriptions.
The CWA is behind the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees, which is aimed at unionizing tech and gaming companies and helping workers push back on issues like poor workplace culture. The campaign has been piling up wins of late, including helping to form the Alphabet Workers Union, which Kinema said has won disputes on issues around pay discrimination at the Google parent company; unionizing location software company Mapbox and helping app development company Glitch ratify the first ever collective bargaining agreement in the U.S. tech industry.
Gaming specifically, however, has proven a tougher nut for CODE's unionization efforts to crack. Kinema said that is due in part to the industry's sometimes brutal working conditions that contribute to frequent employee turnover, which in turn makes sustained labor organizing difficult.
Only 20% of Activision employees are women, representative of a lopsided reality across the industry.
Kinema said the Activision Blizzard lawsuit is "a big step forward and very valuable" in getting people to pay attention to what has become a rampant issue in gaming.
"The thing I really want to see," she said, "is actual systemic change within workplaces," including practices like prioritizing diversity in hiring, retention and promotion and lower tolerance for overt racism and misogyny.
Sam primarily covers entertainment and media for dot.LA. Previously he was Marjorie Deane Fellow at The Economist, where he wrote for the business and finance sections of the print edition. He has also worked at the XPRIZE Foundation, U.S. Government Accountability Office, KCRW, and MLB Advanced Media (now Disney Streaming Services). He holds an MBA from UCLA Anderson, an MPP from UCLA Luskin and a BA in History from University of Michigan. Email him at samblake@dot.LA and find him on Twitter @hisamblake