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Building a startup is never easy, especially when you’re in the early innings and navigating a huge learning curve. Education, support and sage advice are arguably as essential to startup success as fundraising. Find all that — and connect with your early-founder community — at TC Early Stage 2021. We’re hosting two of these virtual bootcamps designed for early-stage startup founders and open to investors, later-stage founders and other startup enthusiasts.

One big theme in tech right now is the rise of services to help us keep working through lockdowns, office closures, and other Covid-19 restrictions. The “future of work” — cloud services, communications, productivity apps — has become “the way we work now.” And companies that have identified ways to help with this are seeing a boom. Today comes news from a startup that has been a part of that trend: Calendly, a popular cloud-based service that people use to set up and confirm meeting times with others, has closed an investment of $350 million from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq. The funding round includes both primary and secondary money (slightly more of the latter than the former, from what I understand) and values the Atlanta-based startup at over $3 billion. Not bad for a company that before now had raised just $550,000, including the life savings of the founder and CEO, Tope Awotona, to initially get off the ground. Calendly is a freemium software-as-a-service, built around what is essentially a very simple piece of functionality. It’s a platform that provides a quick way to manage open spaces in your calendar for people to book appointments with you in those spaces, which then also books out the time in calendars like Google’s or Microsoft Outlook — with a growing number of tools to enhance that experience, including the ability to pay for a service in the event that your appointment is not a business meeting but, say, a yoga class.

GitLab, the increasingly popular DevOps platform, today announced a major update to its subscription model. The company is doing away with its $4/month Bronze/Starter package. Current users will be able to renew one more time at the existing price or move to a higher tier (and receive a significant discount for the first three years after they do so). The company’s free tier, it is worth noting, is not going away and GitLab argues that it includes “89% of the features in Bronze/Starter.” As GitLab founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij told me, this was a difficult decision for the team.

TikTok has a vaping problem. Although a 2019 U. S. law made it illegal to sell or market e-cigarettes to anyone under the age of 21, TikTok videos featuring top brands of disposable e-cigarettes and vapes for sale have been relatively easy to find on the app. These videos, set to popular and upbeat music, clearly target a teenage customer base with offers of now-unauthorized cartridge flavors like fruit and mint in the form of a disposable vape.

SetSail wants to upend the way sales people get compensated by paying them throughout the sales cycle, rather than a single commission after the sale closes. Today, the startup announced a $26 million Series A. Insight Partners led the round with participation from existing investors Wing Venture Capital, Team8 and Operator Collective.

Late last week, independent journalist Eric Newcomer reported that Databricks is raising new capital at a valuation of “about $27 billion.” A few days later, another publication chimed in, saying that they had heard the round could be worth $29 billion at a slightly higher valuation. Well, well! Last year, The Exchange covered Databricks’ financial progress as a private company.