LA Venture: How Science Inc. CEO Mike Jones Stays Ahead of the Trends
This week on the L.A. Venture podcast, hear from Mike Jones, the founder and CEO of studio and venture firm Science Inc. Jones is considered an expert on scaling and robust business strategy. He runs Science Inc. with Peter Pham, Greg Gilman and Tom Dare.
Starting in the late 90s, Jones began creating and managing his own businesses. He created UserPlane, an instant messaging service that was acquired by AOL early in his career. Following that, he was the turnaround CEO of MySpace— helping the company navigate losing its legacy status — and has invested in a number of notable brands, including GoodReads, Maker Studios Inc., HelloSociety and DogVacay.
Science is often considered an incubator. It was also the first investor in Dollar Shave Club and has also helped scale Mammoth Media, Arrive Outdoors, pray.com, Liquid Death and PlayVS. Jones has also been named one of the most influential people in Los Angeles.
Science has a venture funding studio, a blockchain fund and a late-stage SPAC. The company is best known for its venture arm, which is investing out of its $100 million Fund III.
Jones also works with these companies as an advisor. He says it's important to him that the founders he invests in are willing to learn and be highly adaptable to new strategies.
His background at MySpace, he says, gives him a unique perspective on the future of social media. He says he has respect for Snap founder Evan Spiegel, but adds he thinks social media needs to be more empathetic.
"in a world where when you and I meet up in person, we have millions of micro expressions on how we're communicating with each other," he says, "like pheromones, and all the other components that go into two people standing next to each other and actually having a conversation. We have to rebuild that digitally."
This is why he argues that founders' intent and message are so important.
"The thesis of an authentic brand is 'I make this product because I believe it's the right thing to do. And it has a purpose'," he says, beyond profit.
Mike offers his insights on investing, the 2020 ecommerce boom, the future of NFTs and his passion for cyrptocurrency.
"One thing that's 100% true is I've never seen retention correct itself. If you need to change retention substantially, you need to make substantial changes to the business." — Mike Jones
dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.
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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