Jyoti started as a first-time entrepreneur trying to do a fat startup. Read how he managed to navigate the chicken and egg, and build a Unicorn-level success. Superb story! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start...
___
According to RedSeer Consulting, India as a market holds tremendous potential for food delivery apps with the sector recording a 125% increase in order volumes. A huge beneficiary of this trend is...
___
Tesla CEO Elon Musk must pay a $20 million fine and step down as chairman of Tesla. Max Whittaker/Getty Images
Good morning! This is the tech news you need to know this Monday.
Elon Musk must step down as chairman of Tesla and pay a $20 million fine after reaching a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC had on Thursday charged Musk with "false and misleading statements" about taking Tesla private. California signed through a net neutrality law which is being contested by the US government. Department of Justice officials plan to sue California to block the bill, which would restore net neutrality protections. Facebook announced on Friday was hacked, with over 50 million users affected. The attack appears to be the most significant breach in Facebook's history, and sent shares down by 3% in midday trading on Friday. Facebook could be fined up to $1.63 billion for Friday's massive breach which may have violated EU privacy laws. The hack may have violated the EU's new privacy law called the General Data Protection Regulation, which would result in a hefty fine if EU citizens were affected. FBI agents forced a suspect in an investigation to unlock their iPhone using Apple's Face ID. The investigation, first reported by Forbes, is the first known case where a suspect has been compelled to use Apple facial recognition feature to open a phone. Google CEO Sundar Pichai agreed to give testimony at Capitol Hill after Google failed to send anyone to the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing early in September. Pichai will be invited to testify at a House Judiciary Committee, and he is reportedly keen to attend. Slack is planning to go public in 2019 at a reported $7 billion valuation. Slack is planning an initial public offering in 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported and a person familiar with the matter confirmed to Business Insider. Elon Musk told Tesla employees the company is "very close to achieving profitability" after agreeing to pay the SEC a $20 million fine. Musk gave the update to staff in a company-wide email on Sunday. For the first time since the original, a new "Minecraft" game is in the works, and it's arriving in 2019. The game is named "Minecraft: Dungeons," and it's a dungeon crawler along the lines of "Diablo." Business Insider investigated "BeautyGate," the claims that the iPhone XS selfie camera makes faces look too smooth. The smoothing effect on selfies taken with iPhone XS phones is reminiscent of the "beauty modes" from phones like Samsung's line of Galaxy phones.Have an Amazon Alexa device? Now you can hear 10 Things in Tech each morning. Just search for "Business Insider" in your Alexa's flash briefing settings.
LONDON â A successful British "venture-builder" business is expanding to New York, hoping to show off Britain's expertise in financial technology in America.
Blenheim Chalcot, which was founded 20 years ago in London, is opening its first US office in New York. The office will act as a "beachhead" for Blenheim Chalcot-backed businesses looking to expand to the states.
Blenheim Chalcot sets up startups and then provides support services to them such as legal, recruiting, IT, and other admin-type tasks, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on building their businesses. Blenheim Chalcot currently supports around 20 companies across fintech, education services, and media. It has assets of over $600 million under management and reinvests money from successes into its other businesses.
"One of the real strengths of the Blenheim Chalcot model is that we have a team of some 200 people that work across London, India, and now the US to create an ecosystem that helps our businesses to win," Dan Cobley, the managing partner of fintech at Blenheim Chalcot, told Business Insider.
A recent success is ClearScore, a free credit checking service that Experian is in the process of buying for $383 million, although UK competition regulators are probing the deal.
"We decided we wanted to go into the US and formerly put that capability on the ground so that as our businesses in London and Nottingham want to go to the US, they've got a beachhead, a landing pad, that gives them a lot of support," Cobley said. "We think that's really powerful."
Cobley was previously the managing director of Google in the UK, and cut his teeth at Capital One before that. He joined Blenheim Chalcot in 2014.
The US is already well served for tech startups, but Cobley believes Blenheim Chalcot's businesses still have something to offer.
"While there are some areas in which the US is well served, there are some areas in which the UK is leading," he said.
"In fintech, London does have incredible strength. London's the only place where you've got the tech, the regulator, and the banks all in the same geography all supporting each other and you've got a big unified UK market, which helps them get to a reasonable scale, versus the US situation where you've got Silicon Valley, New York, and Washington as three important geographies all quite well separated. And you've got different regulation in the different states which makes it harder for fintechs to get to national strength as quickly."
Blenheim Chalcot's new office will help launch two of its fintech businesses in the US initially: SalaryFinance, which lets staff borrow against future paychecks; and small business lender Liberis.
SalaryFinance is already working with Legal & General in the US, and Cobley said part of the rationale for expanding to New York was client demand.
"We've got a number of clients who are international and they're asking if we can serve them in the US. That gives us an obvious bridge," he said.
Blenheim Chaclot is helping to bring over seven of its 20 UK businesses to the US initially. Others include training platform Avado Learning and publishing business Contentive.
Engineers and manufacturers have been working to automate the homebuilding process for years, and some startups have already released prototypes of their designs. Until this year, however, nobody has lived in any of these prototypes.
This summer, a five-person family in France became the first to permanently live in a 3D-printed home. The 1,022-square-foot home, part of the "Yhnova" project, is located in Nantes.
Below, take a look at the building's construction process and photos of other startups' designs for 3D-printed homes.
This feature from TechCrunch covers the recent Facebook security breach that is expected to have affected 50 million users. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links. Tech Posts Quikr...
___
Not too long ago, if your friend had a smart speaker like Amazon's Alexa or Google's Assistant in their living room, it seemed like a rare novelty. Within a matter of months, however, smart speakers have started becoming household staples â and they're still only at a fraction of their growth potential.
One of the biggest drivers of adoption has been increased functionality. Smart speakers aren't just changing the music and turning on the lights; they're helping consumers find new products and make purchases â and they're quickly becoming a preferred method of shopping.
In fact, nearly a quarter of consumers globally already prefer using a voice assistant over going to a company website or mobile app to shop. This share will jump to 40% by 2021, according to Capgemini.
Consumers are on board with the prompt, convenient nature of shopping with smart speakers â and brands who join them stand to reap massive rewards. The Voice in Retail Report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, highlights the value voice brings to the shopping funnel and how retailers can implement it throughout the customer journey.
Here are three ways brands can capture consumers with voice technology:
Driving product purchases: Voice assistants make spending faster and easier when consumers are unable to use their hands. The ability to make a purchase on any channel and the addition of personalized, intelligent elements to the shopping experience are simplifying the transition from product discovery to product purchase. Heightening customer loyalty: Brands can leverage voice assistants in the post-purchase phase to track delivery status, automate part of the return process, interact with customer service, offer feedback, and collect consumer behavioral and transactional data. Shifting consumers' spending behaviors: Smart device ownership has a snowball effect, so as the smart device ecosystem reaches the mainstream, consumers will flock to connected cars, smart home devices and appliances, and connected virtual reality and augmented reality (VR/AR) headsets.Want to Learn More?
Shoppers are interested in using voice assistants for every stage of the customer journey, from initial product search and discovery to post-purchase customer service and delivery status. And retailers that take advantage of consumers' desire to leverage voice will be in a stronger position to heighten customer engagement, increase conversion times, drive sales, and boost operational efficiency.
The Voice in Retail Report from Business Insider Intelligence examines the trends driving the adoption of voice commerce, details the role of voice throughout the customer shopping journey, outlines how brands can benefit from implementing voice in their strategies, and explores what's ahead for the technology in retail.
When it comes to how artificial-intelligence technology might affect society, there are a host of things to worry about, including the massive loss of jobs and killer robots.
But the best way to avoid such negative outcomes may be to ignore them, more or less.
That's the advice of Phil Libin, CEO of All Turtles, a startup that focuses on turning AI-related ideas into commercial products and companies. In a recent conversation with Business Insider, Libin likened the situation to some advice he received when he was learning to ride a motorcycle.
His instructor taught him that if an accident happened in front of him while he was riding on the highway, such as a semi truck flipping over, the worst thing to do would be to stare at the truck. Instead, his instructor said, he should focus on the point he needed to get to to avoid colliding with the truck.
"If you look at what you're trying to avoid, then you're going to run into it," said Libin, who previously founded Evernote. "You've got to look at where you want to be."
The tech industry would do well to follow that admonition when it comes to developing artificial intelligence, he said.
Years in the making, AI is starting to progress rapidly. It's being used by consumers in the form of intelligent assistants such as Amazon's Alexa to answer trivia questions and make purchases. And it's being used by corporations to help them make business decisions.
Many observers think the technology could transform society in profound ways, and not necessarily for the better.
Indeed, there are some potentially dangerous and dystopian outcomes and uses of AI. It's already starting to be used in China as part of a mass surveillance scheme. It could be used to track people basically from their birth on, collecting intimate insights into their every thought and desire. It could be used to perpetuate or worsen discrimination against particular people or groups. And it could be used to power terrifying new weapons.
Technologists and policy makers ought not ignore such potential uses of the technology, Libin said. They should be aware of them. But the best way to avoid them would be to concentrate on developing ways to use AI in socially beneficial ways, he said.
"There really is a flipped-over truck, and there's all sorts of bad things that can happen. And we definitely need to work towards not hitting it," Libin said. "But the best way to do that is to [say] ⦠this is where we want to go. Here's a vision of certain products that are like obviously good, and virtuous, and the world needs them, and they solve real problems, and let's make those products."
Indeed, that's what he sees as a big part of All Turtles' mission. One of the first projects the company helped incubate is a chatbot called Spot that is designed to make it easier for employees to document and report incidents of sexual harassment and discrimination. Another is Disco, a plug-in for collaboration software Slack that helps employers give timely positive feedback to workers.
The projects All Turtles works on "is all stuff that we should be able to, right from beginning, right by design, feel good about," he said.
This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here. Current subscribers can read the report here.
Voice assistants, including Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, Apple's Siri, and Microsoft's Cortana, are pegged to trigger widespread transformation across the retail industry in the years to come.
Voice assistants offer an additional level of convenience and speed over other shopping channels, and these advantages are driving consumers to embrace the technology for their shopping needs. Today, 6% of US adults have engaged in some sort of voice shopping, according to Business Insider Intelligence estimates. By 2023, voice commerce adoption is expected to reach 49% of US adults.
As consumer interest for voice technology in retail mounts, brands that embrace voice throughout the entire customer journey stand to pull ahead of competition. Shoppers are interested in using voice assistants for everything from the original product search and discovery, to the purchasing phase, to the post-purchase stage, which includes customer service and checking delivery status. Retailers that take advantage of consumers' desire to leverage voice will be in a stronger position to heighten customer engagement, increase conversion times, drive sales, and boost operational efficiency.
In this report, Business Insider Intelligence examines the trends driving the adoption of voice commerce, details the role of voice throughout the customer shopping journey, outlines how brands can benefit from implementing voice in their strategies, and explores what's ahead for the tech in retail.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
The prompt, expedient nature of voice assistants is what makes them the prominent channel for product discovery. Seventy-one percent of consumers would rather use their voice assistant to search for something than physically type when searching online. And among consumers who've used their voice assistant, nearly half are leveraging their voice to search for products every day, with 17% of them using voice search multiple times a day.In full, the report:
Explores what's driving adoption of voice commerce. Discusses the various ways voice is being implemented throughout the customer shopping journey. Highlights the value voice brings to the shopping funnel. Discusses the new mediums consumers will eventually flock to for voice commerce.
In an email, Elon Musk told Tesla employees on Sunday they have "one more day of going super hardcore" to close the quarter and the company is "very close to achieving profitability and proving the naysayers wrong."
Musk assured investors that Tesla would turn a profit in the third quarter in a conference call in August. The company has never turned an annual profit, and has had only two profitable quarters in its history.
We are very close to achieving profitability and proving the naysayers wrong, but, to be certain, we must execute really well tomorrow (Sunday). If we go all out tomorrow, we will achieve an epic victory beyond all expectations. Go Tesla!!! Thanks for all your hard work,
Elon
This comes just after Musk came to a $20 million settlement with the SEC, which filed a lawsuit against him on Thursday that alleged he tweeted false and misleading statements about Tesla.
The SEC accused Musk of knowingly spreading false information about Tesla to manipulate its stock price. In August Musk tweeted that he was taking Tesla private for $420 a share with "funding secured." He did not have funding secured, and Tesla announced there would be no deal a few weeks later.
As part of the settlement, Musk will have to step downs as Chairman of Tesla's board for at least three years, and there will be more oversight of his communication with investors, including how he uses Twitter.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the email.
French startup Klaxit connects drivers with riders so that you don’t have to take your car to work every day. And the company recently announced a new feature with the help of Uber. If your driver cancels your ride home, Klaxit will book an Uber for you.
Klaxit is a ride-sharing startup that focuses on one thing — commuting to work. And this problem is more complicated than you might think. You can’t just go to work with the same person every day because you don’t always go to work at the same time. Similarly, sometimes your driver has to leave work early, leaving you at the office with no alternative.
As a driver, you want to take the quickest route to work. So you want to be matched with riders who are exactly on the way to work.
Klaxit currently handles 300,000 rides per day. In particular, the company has partnered with 150 companies, including big French companies such as BNP Paribas, Veolia, Vinci and Sodexo.
Klaxit can be particularly useful for companies with large office buildings outside of big cities. Promoting Klaxit instantly fosters supply and demand from and to this office. But you don’t have to work for one of those companies to use Klaxit.
Local governments can also financially support Klaxit to improve traffic conditions and mobility for users who don’t have a car or a driver’s license. “Subsidizing rides on Klaxit is 8 to 10 times cheaper than building a bus line,” co-founder and CEO Julien Honnart told me.
One of the biggest concerns as a rider is that you’re going to be stuck at work in the evening. Klaxit is now asking its users to request a ride with two other drivers. If they both decline your request, Klaxit will book you an Uber ride to go back home.
You don’t have to pay the Uber ride and then get reimbursed, Klaxit pays Uber directly. You don’t need an Uber account either as Klaxit is using Uber for Business. MAIF is the insurance company behind this insurance feature, and also one of Klaxit’s investors. This is a neat feature to convince new users that they can trust Klaxit.
Klaxit competes with other French startups on this market, such as Karos and BlaBlaCar’s BlaBlaLines.
Apple's all-glass iPhone designs are beautiful, but they can be very expensive to repair if you don't have AppleCare+.
Any new iPhone you buy, whether it's the new iPhone XS Max or the 2-year-old iPhone 7, comes with AppleCare, which includes complimentary phone support from Apple for the first 90 days, and a one-year limited warranty â but specifically against defects.
Notably, normal AppleCare doesn't cover accidental damage. This is only covered by Apple's premium insurance plan, AppleCare+, which anyone should purchase if they're buying the new iPhone XS or XS Max.
AppleCare+ costs $300 to cover a new iPhone XS or XS Max, or $15 per month for 24 months. It's not cheap!
But, if you're already spending at least $1,000 on an iPhone XS, it's absolutely worth the purchase.
AppleCare+ basically extends AppleCare's warranty from one to two years, including the complimentary phone support from Apple. But it also adds coverage for accidental damage, either from drops or water. AppleCare+ will cover up to two "incidents," but if you have two incidents where part of your phone breaks, AppleCare+ pretty much pays for itself. AppleCare+ for the new iPhone XS models also covers theft and loss, something AppleCare+ didn't previously cover.
Check out this chart from Apple:
Apple
To break it down:
If you have AppleCare+, and you break your screen, you'll only be paying $29 to repair it.
If you don't have AppleCare+, and you break your screen, you'll be paying $279 if you have an iPhone XS, and $329 if you have the iPhone XS Max.
But that's just repairs for the screen! Check out this second chart from Apple, which shows the costs of "other repairs," including if you break the glass back of the phone:
Apple
To break it down:
If you have AppleCare+, and you break the back of your phone, you'll only be paying $99 to repair it.
If you don't have AppleCare+, and you break the back of your phone, you'll be paying $549 if you have an iPhone XS, and $599 if you have the iPhone XS Max.
So, let's say you buy an iPhone XS Max, and choose not to buy AppleCare+. If you have two incidents, where you break the front and back of your phone, you're paying $928 just to repair your phone! If you bought AppleCare+, the most you would have paid, in total, would be $527, which includes the $300 price of AppleCare+.
In other words, it pays to have insurance â even if you're extremely careful, you can't foresee certain circumstances, and you'll be glad you paid more money up front so you could save more money later on.
AppleCare+ is costly, but it's much more costly to deal with repairs, whether you have Apple's insurance plan or not.
AppleCare+ should be considered your last line of defense, so get some extra protection to ensure you don't have to pay for repairs at all. In other words, buy a phone case. Cases provide some protection for your screen, but more importantly, they protect the most fragile and most expensive parts of the iPhone XS and XS Max: their large glass backs.
My colleague Avery Hartmans rounded up the best iPhone X cases you can buy last year, and most of those should fit the new iPhone XS, but I would personally recommend you get a case from Apple (they make some very nice silicone and leather cases) or Society6, which has hundreds of thousands of different fun designs to choose from.
Job-hunting site Comparably, which allows employees to anonymously review and rate their employers, has sifted through its 5 million+ employee reviews to create its annual list of the best paying small companies.
Comparably currently tracks about 10,000 companies, it says.
In order to qualify for this list, Comparably limited the list to companies that had fewer than 500 employees and had at least 15 ratings from employees between September 12, 2017 and September 12, 2018. Please note that the pay data listed below came from information that employees reported to Comparably themselves. And it centered mostly on salaried roles in engineering, product, marketing, design, sales and finance, as opposed to hourly-wage type roles.
In order to rank these companies, Comparably considered both pay and at how satisfied employees said they were with their pay.
The result is this list of the best paying small companies, according to employees.
Did you spend over $1000 on a new iPhone XS or iPhone XS Max this weekend?
You might want to be careful, because despite Apple saying they use the "most durable glass ever in a smartphone," the new iPhones tend to break when dropped, according to new drop tests by SquareTrade, a device insurer.
The new iPhones, like last year's models, have a glass design â there's glass on the front, and a glass shell on the back to enable wireless charging. The glass is made by Corning, which Apple has invested in.
Turns out, in the four tests SquareTrade performed, including a test where the new phones took a spin in a tumbler, Apple's phones broke nearly every time they were subjected to stress.
Both the iPhone XS and the iPhone XS Max broke when dropped on their backs from 6 feet, and both phones failed when they were bent by a machine.
But when dropped face down, the iPhone XS Max proved to be more durable than its smaller sibling. While the screen shattered, the iPhone XS Max touchscreen was still usable. The smaller phone's screen did not work.
That's why SquareTrade gave the iPhone XS Max a better durability score of 70, or "medium risk," compared to the iPhone XS's score of 86, which the insurer considers "high risk."
Both improve on the now-discontinued iPhone X, which scored a 90 in last year's SquareTrade test and was called the "most breakable iPhone ever."
SquareTrade, owned by Allstate, uses these tests as a way to sell insurance plans for the new iPhone. If you don't have insurance or AppleCare, repairing the iPhone XS screen is $279, and any other damage â like a cracked back â costs $549.
A new screen for the iPhone XS Max is $329 and nearly $600 for other repairs.
But if you are more likely to drop your phone in your beer or other bodies of water than on concrete, you can rest easy. SquareTrade and repair advocate iFixit have both submerged the new phones in beer for hours â and they've survived.
It looks like the four-figure price tag is here to stay when it comes to new iPhones from Apple.
Indeed, the $1,000 iPhone XS and $1,100 iPhone XS Max may very well be out of reach for some who want the iPhone experience, and even for those who don't want to spend that much on principle.
The $750 iPhone XR may seem like the iPhone to get if you don't want to be a part of the $1,000 club, but there are actually a few things about the iPhone 7 that some might prefer over the XR.
Thankfully, Apple is keeping around its older iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus just in case you want the Apple experience for under $600. Surprisingly, you're not sacrificing that much by going with Apple's iPhone 7, which is now two generations old. The iPhone 7 is still a fantastic smartphone that stands strong in the face of its younger, shinier siblings, and it's still a great option for anyone who's clung onto an iPhone 4, iPhone 5, and even iPhone 6.
Check out eight great reasons why you should check out the iPhone 7 instead of Apple's latest iPhones:
Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft, married Melinda French in 1994.They met at Microsoft when Melinda was brought on a product manager. She initially turned down Bill's request for a date at a company picnic.Today, they run the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has an endowment of $40.3 billion.
Melinda French was less than impressed when her boss asked her out on a date.
It was 1987, and the recent Duke graduate had just joined Microsoft as a product manager. CEO Bill Gates approached her at a company picnic and asked if she'd be interested in grabbing dinner in two weeks. She responded, "That's not spontaneous enough for me," Fortune reported in 2015.
Fast-forward three decades, and Bill and Melinda Gates are married with three kids, worth $98.1 billion, and run a namesake philanthropic enterprise boasting a $50.7 billion endowment.
Here's a look at their marriage.
The Airbus A320 is one of the most popular airliners in the world.
It's also Europe's answer to Boeing's stalwart 737, still the best selling airliner of all time. However, the A320 is quickly catching up.
Through the end of August, Boeing has sold a whopping 14,956 737s. The A320 and its derivatives are close behind with 14,281 orders. However, it should be noted that Boeing began selling the 737 nearly two decades before the A320's launch in 1984.
Since then, the European jetliner has actually outpaced the venerable Boeing in sales. From 1984 to the present, the A320 has outsold the 737 by 438 planes.
The A320's sales prowess is not the aircraft's only claim to fame. At the time of its debut, the narrow-body Airbus was also one of the most complex and innovative airliners ever attempted.
In an interview with Business Insider, Teal Group aviation industry analyst Richard Aboulafia called the A320 and its many technological innovations "Airbus's greatest contribution to commercial aviation."
The A320 helped push forward the adoption of fly-by-wire technology, side-stick controls, and cockpit commonality in commercial airliners.
Since its first flight in 1987, the A320 family has become a short and medium-haul workhorse for airlines around the world. With the introduction of the next generation A320neo and A321neo, the aircraft can now add trans-Atlantic long-haul to its long repertoire of capabilities.
The list prices for the A320 family of jets range from $77.4 million for the A318ceo to $129.5 million for the A321neo. The A320 lists for $101 million while the A320neo has a $110.6 million entry price.
Here's a look back at how the Airbus A320 came to become to the Boeing 737's greatest foe.
Sramana Mitra: I understand that in 2007, it was betting on Vijay as the entrepreneur. How long did you stay in that company? Did you seek an exit somewhere along the way? What has been your...
___
French startup Ownpage has recently released a new product called Relike. Relike is one of the easiest ways to get started with email newsletters. You enter the web address of your Facebook page and that’s about it.
The company automatically pulls your most recent posts from your Facebook page and lets you set up an emailing campaign in a few clicks. You can either automatically pick your most popular Facebook posts or manually select a few posts.
Just like any emailing service, you can choose between multiple templates, decide the day of the week and time of the day, import a database of email addresses and more. If you’ve used Mailchimp in the past, you’ll feel right at home.
But the idea isn’t to compete directly with newsletter services. Many social media managers, media organizations, small companies, nonprofits and sports teams already have a Facebook page but aren’t doing anything on the email front.
Relike is free if you send less than 2,000 emails per month and don’t need advanced features. If you want to get open rates, click-through rates and other features, you’ll need to pay €5 per month and €0.50 every time you send 1,000 emails.
The company’s other product Ownpage is a bit different. Ownpage has been working with media organizations to optimize their email newsletters. The company is tracking reading habits on a news site and sending personalized email newsletters.
This way, readers will get tailored news and will more likely come back to your site. Many big French news sites use Ownpage for their newsletters, such as Les Echos, L’Express, 20 Minutes, BFM TV, Le Parisien, etc.
Ownpage founder and CEO Stéphane Cambon told me that Relike was the obvious second act. Using browsing data for customized newsletters is one thing, but many talented social media managers know how to contextualize stories and maximize clicks (even if it means clickbait, sure).
The startup was looking at a way to get this data, and ended up creating Relike, which could appeal to customers beyond news organizations. For now, both products will stick around. In the future, the company plans to add Twitter and Instagram integrations as well as better signup flows for newsletter subscribers.
Dressed in a Naruto t-shirt and a hat emblazoned with the phrase “lone wolf,” Ne-Yo slouches over in a chair inside a Holberton School classroom. The Grammy-winning recording artist is struggling to remember the name of “that actor,” the one who’s had a successful career in both the entertainment industry and tech investing.
“I learned about all the things he was doing and I thought it was great for him,” Ne-Yo told TechCrunch. “But I didn’t really know what my place in tech would be.”
It turns out “that actor” is Ashton Kutcher, widely known in Hollywood and beyond for his role in several blockbusters and the TV sitcom That ’70s Show, and respected in Silicon Valley for his investments via Sound Ventures and A-Grade in Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, Bird and several others.
Ne-Yo, for his part, is known for a string of R&B hits including So Sick, One in a Million and Because of You. His latest album, Good Man, came out in June.
Ne-Yo, like Kutcher, is interested in pursuing a side gig in investing but he doesn’t want to waste time chasing down the next big thing. His goal, he explained, is to use his wealth to encourage people like him to view software engineering and other technical careers as viable options.
“Little black kids growing up don’t say things like ‘I want to be a coder when I grow up,’ because it’s not real to them, they don’t see people that look like me doing it,” Ne-Yo said. “But tech is changing the world, like literally by the day, by the second, so I feel like it just makes the most sense to have it accessible to everyone.”
Last year, Ne-Yo finally made the leap into venture capital investing: his first deal, an investment in Holberton School, a two-year coding academy founded by Julien Barbier and Sylvain Kalache that trains full-stack engineers. The singer returned to San Francisco earlier this month for the grand opening of Holberton’s remodeled headquarters on Mission Street in the city’s SoMa neighborhood.
[gallery ids="1722954,1722952,1722953,1722955"]Holberton, a proposed alternative to a computer science degree, is free to students until they graduate and land a job, at which point they are asked to pay 17 percent of their salaries during their first three years in the workforce.
It has a different teaching philosophy than your average coding academy or four-year university. It relies on project-based and peer learning, i.e. students helping and teaching each other; there are no formal teachers or lecturers. The concept appears to be working. Holberton says their former students are now employed at Apple, NASA, LinkedIn, Facebook, Dropbox and Tesla.
Ne-Yo participated in Holberton’s $2.3 million round in February 2017 alongside Reach Capital and Insight Venture Partners, as well as Trinity Ventures, the VC firm that introduced Ne-Yo to the edtech startup. Holberton has since raised an additional $8 million from existing and new investors like daphni, Omidyar Network, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang and Slideshare co-founder Jonathan Boutelle.
Holberton has used that capital to expand beyond the Bay Area. A school in New Haven, Conn., where the company hopes to reach students who can’t afford to live in tech’s hubs, is in development.
The startup’s emphasis on diversity is what attracted Ne-Yo to the project and why he signed on as a member of the board of trustees. More than half of Holberton’s students are people of color and 35 percent are women. Since Ne-Yo got involved, the number of African American applicants has doubled from roughly 5 percent to 11.5 percent.
Before Ne-Yo’s preliminary meetings with Holberton’s founders, he says he wasn’t aware of the racial and gender diversity problem in tech.
“When it was brought to my attention, I was like ‘ok, this is definitely a problem that needs to be addressed,'” he said. “It makes no sense that this thing that affects us all isn’t available to us all. If you don’t have the money or you don’t have the schooling, it’s not available to you, however, it’s affecting their lives the same way it’s affecting the rich guys’ lives.”
Holberton’s founders joked with TechCrunch that Ne-Yo has actually been more supportive and helpful in the last year than many of the venture capitalists who back Holberton. He’s very “hands-on,” they said. Despite the fact that he’s balancing a successful music career and doesn’t exactly have a lot of free time, he’s made sure to attend events at Holberton, like the recent grand opening, and will Skype with students occasionally.
Ne-Yo was very careful to explain that he didn’t put money in Holberton for the good optics.
“This isn’t something I just wanted to put my name on,” he said. “I wanted to make sure [the founders] knew this was something I was going to be serious about and not just do the celebrity thing. I wanted it to be grassroots and authentic so we dropped whatever we were doing and came down, met these guys, hung out with the students and hung out at the school to see what it’s really about.”
What’s next for Ne-Yo? A career in venture capital, perhaps? He’s definitely interested and will be making more investments soon, but a full pivot into VC is unlikely.
At the end of the day, Silicon Valley doesn’t need more people with fat wallets and a hankering for the billionaire lifestyle. What it needs are people who have the money and resources necessary to bolster the right businesses and who care enough to prioritize diversity and inclusivity over yet another payday.
“Not to toot the horn or brag, but I’m not missing any meals,” Ne-Yo said. “So, if I’m going to do it, let it mean something.”
Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
