Sramana Mitra: What did BevyUp do? Dennis Joyce: It allowed the sales representative from a place like Nordstrom to work with their customers in a shared shopping cart capacity. It was a co-shopping...
___
September 5, 2018
One of my favorite public events is the CU Boulder Silicon Flatirons Entrepreneurs Unplugged series. I was the co-host for the first couple of years, sharing the interview job with another Brad (Bernthal) who now is generally on his own.
On Thursday, 9/13/18 at 5:30pm, Bernthal will be interview David Cohen and David Brown, the co-CEOs of Techstars (who we often fondly refer at Foundry Group as the âthe David(s).â The event will be held at the CU Boulder Law School.
If you know the David(s), I expect this will be a treat as I know Bernthal will start with their early entrepreneurial career (Pinpoint) and stick with it for a while. While many people know the Techstars story, the PinPoint story is much less well known but equally fascinating. And, if you need any hints on Q&A (which Bernthal always leaves time for), just drop me a note.
Also published on Medium.
The proliferation of devices in organization these days driven by cloud, mobility, Internet of Things (IoT), and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trends has exponentially increased the...
___
Sramana Mitra: If you look at your last 15 months deal flow, what do you see? What are the highlights of the trends you see in your deal flow? Jeremy Schneider: One thing that has been exciting for...
___
Sramana Mitra: Do you lead deals? Anshu Sharma: In Silicon Valley, even $100,000 doesn’t really make you a lead in any meaningful sense. Sramana Mitra: Depends on what stage. Maybe we should visit...
___
On the afternoon of 8/21, I had a Foley Catheter put in. I didnât think I was going to die (that was the afternoon of 8/22), but I did think I was going to explode.
I feel better today. Not 100%. But on the mend. But two weeks ago I was in the midst of a blooming E. Coli infection that started Sunday 8/19 and probably came from some fruit and vegetables I bought at the Aspen Farmers Market on Saturday. Note to self â always, always, always wash your fruits and vegetables carefully.
By Thursday, 8/23 I was very sick. So I canceled everything on my calendar through yesterday. I addition to my dance with E. Coli, I am healing from a bone bruise I have on my left tibia and something miserably wrong with my right shoulder â both which came from a tumble down the stairs on July 16th.
Yeah â itâs been a physically shitty summer. Not just for me, but for lots of people in my world. A friend with liver cancer. Another friend in the ICU for a few days. Another friend with a messed up knee from a fall. Several big marital struggles. Lots of âwe are 45 â 55 and stuff is starting to breakâ going on. No one close to us died this summer, but we had a few days of real uncertainty in the mix.
My worst day was the one where I had borderline sepsis. I always thought the acronym for sepsis was telling, but itâs not until you are on the edge of it that it really hits home.
SÂ â Shivering, feeling very cold or having a fever
EÂ â Extreme pain or discomfort
PÂ â Pale or discolored skin
SÂ â Sleepiness, difficulty rousing
IÂ â âI feel like I may die,â a feeling like youâve never felt before
SÂ â Short of breath
Fortunately, all of that passed within a few days after they bombed me with IV antibiotics, but then I was completely exhausted for a week. For whatever reason, my shoulder pain intensified during this time period and between my new friend Foley and the pain, I couldnât sleep. Within a few days, it was pretty easy to see the struggle one goes through with chronic pain or illness, something Iâve been spared my whole life.
Yup â it was a miserable two weeks.
Amy was incredible. I playfully tease her about her school motto, Non Ministrari sed Ministrare (Not to be ministered unto, but to minister), but it is remarkably accurate. Sheâs always been amazing in a crisis â any crisis â and shows up fully for whomever is in need. For two weeks, I got her continual, endless, and wonderful attention. Iâm not sure how I would have handled the two weeks if I was alone.
A friend recently said, âYour real friends are the ones who show up in a crisis.â I count myself lucky â a lot of people showed up the past two weeks. While Foley is gone, I have plenty of healing to do in front of me. We are heading back to Boulder for the rest of September and Iâm just planting myself in one place, doing only what I have to do, and getting healthy.
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: Going back to my question, in terms of stage validation, what is the sweet spot? Are you looking to see customers already in place? Are you looking to see revenue in place before you...
___
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 413th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, September 6, 2018, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
___
Salesforce.com (NYSE: CRM) delivered another stellar performance in the last quarter. But the company couldn’t deliver a promising outlook for the coming quarter. Despite that, the market is pleased...
___
Sramana Mitra: Let’s now talk about stage and how big is the fund that you’re investing from. What sized investments do you like to make? Jonathan Pines: In terms of stage, we tend to focus on the...
___
French startup Shine is raising a $9.3 million (€8 million) Series A round. The company is building an alternative to traditional bank accounts for freelancers working in France.
XAnge is leading today’s round with existing investor Daphni also participating, as well as business angels Gilles Samoun and Ed Zimmerman. The company previously raised $3.3 million (€2.8 million) from Daphni, Kima Ventures and various business angels.
While it’s pretty easy to get started as a freelancer in many countries, France is not one of them. You need to register a “micro-company”, report your earnings for corporate taxes, report sales tax collection in some cases and more.
Arguably, it has gotten much easier recently with a ton of resources to get started. But Shine wants to go one step further and package everything you need in an app.
Shine starts by helping you register your company. After downloading the app, the company will guide you through the process — you need to take a photo of your ID and fill out a form. It feels like signing up to a social network. Compared to the official process, Shine’s process is less intimidating and easier to understand.
You can send and receive money from your Shine account just like in any banking app. Shine gives you your own banking information (IBAN) to receive payments and pay using direct debit. A few days later, you receive a debit card. You can temporarily lock the card or disable some features in the app, such as ATM withdrawals and online payments.
Shine doesn’t handle IBAN and cards directly. The company partners with Treezor for those banking features.
If you’re a rider on Deliveroo and UberEats, or if you work with a freelancer marketplace, such as Malt, Side, Upwork and Brigad, all you need to do is enter your Shine IBAN on those platforms. If you work with clients directly, Shine has an integrated invoicing system. It generates a web page and a PDF that you can send to your clients. When a client opens the page, you get a notification. They can pay with a card.
Finally, Shine reminds you when you have to pay your taxes and has a customer support team that can help you figure out what you need to do. They’re slowly building a comprehensive knowledge base on being a freelancer in France.
Shine is free for everything I just described except if you choose to accept card payments on your invoices. But even for that feature, it remains quite cheap.
The company plans to launch a premium plan in the coming months with advanced accounting features. So far, 25,000 freelancers are using Shine in France. And 10 percent of new freelancers (“micro-entrepreneurs”) register their company through Shine.
While challenger banks, such as N26 and Revolut are widely successful, it’s great to see some companies focus on niche markets with the same approach. Shine is a breath of fresh air for freelancers in France. The company is making the process so much easier for newcomers.
As cryptocurrencies emerge from the speculative bloodletting of the past months, believers in the promise of distributed ledger technologies for business and consumer applications are casting about for what comes next.
On our stage at Disrupt San Francisco we’ll be welcoming some of the leading thinkers in how distributed ledgers can create an entirely new architecture for computing and new processes for almost every conceivable transaction framework.
For Brian Behlendorf, the executive director of Hyperledger, distributed ledger technologies represent a powerful path for the future of networked computing — no matter the underlying technology. That’s why Behlendorf –through the Linux Foundation — is investing resources in ensuring that viable open source distributed ledger projects are supported and coming to market for any number of applications for businesses and consumers.
One of the leading lights of the internet revolution, Behlendorf’s career shaping the future of the networked world began in 1993 when he co-founded Organic Inc. — the first business dedicated to building commercial websites. Going on to become one of the foundational architects of the Apache http protocol, Behlendorf has served as the chief technology officer of the World Economic Forum and as an executive director for the technology investment fund, Mithril Capital.
Meanwhile, Parity Technologies is attempting to ensure that businesses don’t need to worry about the underlying technologies at all. Selling a suite of services that are all enabled by distributed ledger technologies and cryptographic computing, Jutta Steiner is giving businesses a way through the maze of competing protocols with a service that can enable the creation and adoption of distributed apps for businesses.
“We see it as a way for people to build blockchains that fulfill their particular needs,” Steiner told our own Samantha Stein at our Blockchain event earlier this year in Zug. “One of the challenges we’re addressing in this is to come up with a scalable framework.”
Before Parity, Steiner was responsible for security and partner integration within the Ethereum Foundation when the public blockchain first launched in 2015. Steiner also co-founded Project Provenance — a London based start-up that employs blockchain technology to make supply chains more transparent.
Supply chains are at the heart of Tradeshift’s offerings — and the company is hoping that distributed ledgers will be too. That’s why the company created Tradeshift Frontiers, an innovation lab and incubator that will focus on transforming supply chains through emerging technologies, such as distributed ledgers, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things.
“The use cases we’re working through Frontiers cover a very wide variety of themes, including supply chain financing, asset liquidity, and supply chain transparency,” said Gert Sylvest, co-founder and GM of Tradeshift Frontiers, at the time. “There is so much more potential than just cryptocurrencies.”
That potential will be one of the things that Sylvest, Steiner, and Behlendorf discuss. We’ll hope you’ll be in the audience to listen.
Disrupt SF will take place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center West from September 5 to 7. The full agenda is here, and you can still buy tickets right here.
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Anshu Sharma was recorded in March 2018. Anshu...
___
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Dennis Joyce of Alliance of Angels was recorded in...
___
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jeremy Schneider and Jonathan Pines of Webb...
___
People at Burning Man festival in Nevada, which finishes on Monday, are transfixed by this 100-foot high orb on a mast.
It has an 84-foot diameter and stands an impressive 100 feet tall, towering above the dusty venue:
Some people at the festival, running from 25 August to September 1, think the shiny sphere is a mini-planet, and creators Bjarke Ingels and Jakob Lange from Denmark wrote that it's actually a 1/500,000 scale model of earth.
Before the festival the designers shared this virtual rendering of the orb on their indiegogo page:
They wanted to raise $50,000 to get the orb to Burning Man. In the end they got $34,300, which was enough.
This is what the finished product looked like:
Designer Lange posted the erected artwork on his Instagram:
But some are content with it being a huge disco-ball for party goers:
"The ORB is a tribute to mother earth & human expression - designed to easily inflate and deflate," said Lange.
This year's theme was I-Robot.
Jeremy Darroch, Chief Executive of Sky, signed the letter. Elisabetta Villa/Getty Images for National Geographic
A group of top British broadcasters have signed a letter calling for more regulation of tech giants like Twitter, Google and Facebook.
The letter was published in the Sunday Telegraph and signed by the heads of the BBC, Sky, ITV, Channel 4, BT, and Talk Talk. They called for "independent oversight" of tech companies that publish news, in the form of a watchdog.
"We do not think it is realistic or appropriate to expect internet and social media companies to make all the judgment calls about what content is and is not acceptable, without any independent oversight," said the letter.
"There is an urgent need for independent scrutiny of the decisions taken, and greater transparency. This is not about censoring the internet, it is about making the most popular internet platforms safer, by ensuring there is accountability and transparency over the decisions these private companies are already taking."
The signees said they see upcoming government proposals on internet safety as a "golden opportunity" to address their concerns.
Big tech companies have come under heavy fire recently for misfires in the way they filter content. In July an undercover investigation by Channel 4 revealed that Facebook moderators in Dublin were being trained to leave images of child abuse and racist memes on the platform. Last week, the social network was criticised for deleting a post showing nude, emaciated Holocaust victims.
At the same time, traditional TV is under considerable threat from tech firms. A 2017 Ofcom report found that YouTube was the most recognised content brand for viewers aged between 12 and 15 years old. And only last week, Facebook released its video-on-demand service, Watch, globally.
Business Insider has contacted Facebook, Google, and Twitter to ask for their response to the letter.
The mugshot of Liu Qiangdong, the founder and CEO of JD.com, who was arrested in Minneapolis on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct. Hennepin County Sheriffâs Office via AP
Liu Qiangdong, one of the richest men in China, was briefly arrested during a trip to the US on sexual misconduct allegations.
Liu, the founder and CEO of the e-commerce company JD.com, was arrested around 11:30 p.m. on Friday and released shortly after 4 p.m. the following day, according to Hennepin County Sheriff's Jail records.
Minneapolis police arrested the 44-year-old on suspicion of criminal sexual conduct charges, the jail records said. There are no further details of the alleged incident.
John Elder, a police spokesman, declined to provide any further details of the case or circumstances of the arrest because the investigation is still considered active, according to the Associated Press.
Liu is the 16th richest person in China. AP
JD.com on Sunday said the accusations were false and unsubstantiated. The company didn't name the charges.
It said in a statement on Chinese microblogging platform Weibo: "Mr Liu Qiangdong encountered a false accusation while on business in the US. An investigation by local police did not find any evidence of misconduct, and he will continue his trip as planned. We will take the necessary legal action against false reporting or rumors."
Elder also told the BBC: "There is absolutely no restriction on his travel. The understanding is that if we need to get in touch with him, we will be able to do so."
Liu's arrest came shortly after he tried to distance himself from another sexual misconduct scandal. In late July he said he didn't know anything about a sexual assault that was alleged to have taken place at a party he was hosting in Sydney in 2015. He was not accused of any wrongdoing.
Liu, also known as Richard, has a net worth of $10.8 billion (£8.4 billion), according to Forbes. He was named by the Forbes billionaire list as the 16th richest person in China and the 140th richest person in the world.
JD.com is the second largest Chinese e-commerce company after Alibaba. The company had 292.5 million active customer accounts in 2017, and reaped a net profit of 50.8 billion yuan ($7.8 billion) in FY17, the company said in its annual statement.
He is the husband of Zhang Zetian, who at 24 is China's youngest female billionaire.
Countingup, the U.K. fintech that provides a business bank account that combines bookkeeping, has raised £2.3 million in seed funding. Leading the round is Forward Partners, with participation from previous backer Frontline Ventures, and JamJar Investments.
Founded last year by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, Countingup wants to simplify the life of sole traders and other small businesses by reinventing the business current account. Fouracre’s vision is that for small enterprises, business banking and accounting software should be merged so that bookkeeping and filing accounts can be a lot more automated.
“If you are running a business then bookkeeping is a chore, wastes your time and is boring,” the Countingup up founder told me last year. “Your bank surprises you with hidden fees and you’ve probably lost faith in their customer service. Countingup is making starting and running a business really simple… We’re doing that by combining accounting and banking into one simple smartphone app”.
After downloading the Countingup for iOS or Andriod, you are able to open a current account on your smartphone in a claimed 5 minutes. The account comes with a U.K. sort code/account number and a contactless Mastercard. The accounting functionality currently includes a profit and loss report, bookkeeping categorisation and the ability to attach receipts to transactions.
However, the big feature that will be launched later this year is invoicing, while things like “automated receipt scanning,” and tax calculations and filing are also in the 2018 roadmap.
Fouracre says Countingup wants to be the financial platform for 1 million U.K. small businesses. It already has four thousand customers and I’m told is signing up new users at a rate of 1,500 businesses per month.
Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
