Chief community officer is the new CMO

Community isn’t a single Slack group or event or newsletter. It’s an aggregation of all of these touch points, and includes both customers, eventual customers and one-time users. Despite this nebulous, disconnected reality, companies are paying more attention to various channels as remote work and digital communication powers our days. My recent tweet underscored the chord community strikes even in sectors such as edtech, which often have to sell to fragmented customer bases.

In the rest of this newsletter, we’ll get into early-stage startup competition, the pipeline problem and Bitcoin breaking barriers. As always, you can find me on Twitter @nmasc_ or e-mail me. Want Startups Weekly in your inbox every Saturday. Sign up here.

Will your investor put money into a competitor?

When an investor backs a startup, they ideally think that the company will be the winner in said category, whether it’s CBD gummies, financial plumbing or peer-to-peer car sharing. So, if they place a bet in a competing startup the investment could serve as both a negative signal and a reputation hit.

Here’s what to know, via Alex Wilhelm: As software markets mature, maybe the investing playing field is opening up to investing in competitors? Call it conveniently complementary investments.

Etc:In this week’s Equity episode, we talked about the complexity of competition within startups, and how one firm’s investments seem to all perfectly and conveniently fit into each other. I’ll make you listen to the episode to figure out who, but here’s a hint: Is there a world where Dispo creators track monetization from Clubhouse through Stir?

An Olive startup competes with Amazon

Ambitious early-stage founders often have to answer a common question from investors and journalists: What if Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix or Google built your startup? The idea behind the question is figuring out why a founder is specifically and uniquely qualified to solve a problem, even if a behemoth business throws millions of dollars and a team of engineers at it.

Here’s what to know via Jet co-founder Nate Faust: He sold his business to Walmart for $3 billion in 2016, and now he’s back to compete with Amazon with a sustainable e-commerce play. Olive consolidates a shopper’s purchases into a single weekly delivery in a reusable package.

Faust acknowledged that Olive runs counter to the “arms race” between Amazon and other e-commerce services working to deliver purchases as quickly as possible. But he said that the startup’s consumer surveys found that shoppers were willing to wait a little longer in order to get the other benefits.

Etc: If you were wondering when it makes sense to compete with Zoom, these four edtech startups and Google might have some information for you.

Bust the myth of the pipeline problem

The lack of diversity in Silicon Valley, from the check writers to the employees, has often been chalked up to the pipeline problem: The idea that there isn’t enough diverse, qualified talent to fill roles. But recent research underscores how aged, and flawed, this mindset might be. Reporter Megan Rose Dickey interviewed Dr. Joy Lisi Rankin, a research lead for gender, race and power in artificial intelligence at the AI Now Institute.

Here’s what to know, according to Rankin:

The pipeline is a way to silo all of that out and say, ‘We just need to get more Black women in tech,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Actually, these companies are and have been racist and white supremacist and misogynist, and it’s those institutions and larger societal and global capitalist structures that need to change.

Rankin adds that transparency around hiring and corporate recruiting could help combat biases and signal important information to talent.