Hello and welcome back to Startups Weekly, a weekend newsletter that dives into the weeks noteworthy startups and venture capital news.
Before I jump into todays topic, lets catch up a bit.
Last week, I wrote about a new e-commerce startup, Pietra.
Before that, I wrote about the flurry of IPO filings.Remember, you can send me tips, suggestions and feedback to kate.clark@techcrunch.com or on Twitter@KateClarkTweets.
If you dont subscribe to Startups Weekly yet, you can do thathere.Whats new?Peloton revealed its S-1 this week, taking a big step toward an IPO expected later this year.
The filing was packed with interesting tidbits, including that the company, which manufacturers internet-connected stationary bikes and sells an affiliated subscription to its growing library of on-demand fitness content, is raking in more than $900 million in annual revenue.
Sure, its not profitable, and its losing an increasing amount of money to sales and marketing efforts, but for a company that many people wrote off from the very beginning, its an impressive feat.Despite being a hardware, media, interactive software, product design, social connection, apparel and logistics company, according to its S-1, the future of Peloton relies on its talent.
Not the employees developing the bikes and software but the 29 instructors teaching its digital fitness courses.
Ally Love, Alex Toussaint and the 27 other teachers have developed cult followings, fans who will happily pay Pelotons steep $39 per month content subscription to get their daily dose of Ben or Christine.To create Peloton, we needed to build what we believed to be the best indoor bike on the market, recruit the best instructors in the world, and engineer a state-of-the-art software platform to tie it all together, founder and CEO John Foley writes in the IPO prospectus.
Against prevailing conventional wisdom, and despite countless investor conference rooms full of very smart skeptics, we were determined for Peloton to build a vertically integrated platform to deliver a seamless end-to-endexperience as physically rewarding and addictive as attending a live,in-studio class.Peloton succeeded in poaching the best of the best.
The question is, can they keep them? Will competition in the fast-growing fitness technology sector swoop in and scoop Pelotons stars?In other newsLast week I published a long feature on the state of seed investing in the Bay Area.
The TL;DR? Mega-funds are increasingly battling seed-stage investors for access to the hottest companies.
As a result, seed investors are getting a little more creative about how they source deals.
Its a dog-eat-dog world out there, and everyone wants a stake in The Next Big Thing.
Read the story here.Rounds of the weekTime to DisruptDont miss out on our flagship Disrupt, which takes place October 2-4.
Its the quintessential tech conference for anyone focused on early-stage startups.
Join more than 10,000 attendees including over 1,200 exhibiting startups for three jam-packed days of programming.
Were talking four different stages with interactive workshops, Q-A sessions and interviews with some of the industrys top tech titans, founders, investors, movers and shakers.
Check out ourlist of speakers and theDisrupt agenda.
I will be there interviewing a bunch of tech leaders, including Bastian Lehmann and Charles Hudson.
Buy tickets here.ListenThis week on Equity, TechCrunchs venture capital-focused podcast, we had Floodgates Iris Choi on to discuss Pelotons upcoming IPO.
You can listen to it here.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,OvercastandSpotify.LearnWe published a number of new deep dives on Extra Crunch, our paid subscription product, this week.
Heres a quick look at the top stories: