Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You said 19 of the top 20 technology companies are your clients. Do you have metrics of having impacted their sales at a certain level using these kinds of technologies?...
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Let’s say you want to build a great tech company. Should you start by moving to Silicon Valley? Or, can you do it from right where you are, right from your own hometown? I suggest start validating...
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September 22, 2017
Kauffman Fellows and Techstars are running another cycle of the Venture Deals course with me and Jason Mendelson. Signups close tomorrow as the course runs from 9/24/17 â 11/13/17. The course is free to everyone.
The seven-week course, which is about five hours of work each week, has the following agenda.
Week 1 â Introduction of key players/Form or join a team
Week 2 â Fundraising/Finding the Right VC
Week 3 â Capitalization Tables/Convertible Debt
Week 4 â Term Sheets: Economics & Control
Week 5 â Term Sheets Part Two
Week 6 â Negotiations
Week 7 â Letter of Intent/Getting Acquired
Over 10,000 people have taken the course at this point. Weâve gotten universally strong positive reviews and have made plenty of new friends from people who have gone through the course and connected with us.
If you are interested in raising venture capital, I encourage you to sign up and take the course. I hope to see you online.
Also published on Medium.
According to a Business Insider report, the automation of B2B payments and accounts payable is continuing to grow. Many businesses still make more than half of their B2B payments by check and are now...
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Sramana Mitra: What did you tell Emergence Capital about what is going to be your monetization strategy? What were you going to charge and how were you going to go move your free users to paying...
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During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Cindy Padnos, Founder and Managing Partner at Illuminate Ventures. Cindy spoke on a topic that we’ve been highlighting recently: the need for...
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ipsy, a subscription service that delivers a collection of products to its users every month, has spent the last six years building up a community with millions of people obsessed with beauty products. And now that the company has more than 3 million subscribers — with a $10 per month subscription cost — it’s ready to get a little bit more aggressive by getting directly… Read More
Flexport handles the boring logistics of a trillion-dollar business: the transport of shipping containers around the world. Because the work of freight forwarding seemed so bland, it was long ignored by the tech world. But digitizing the paperwork let Flexport speed up shipping so clients keep less inventory on hand while never running out. Read More
September 21, 2017
Amy and I have been big supporters of a movie about immigration called For Here or To Go?
With our friends at Boundless, we are sponsoring a week of screenings in Seattle. We are supplying a bunch of free tickets and â when they are used up â will still have a set of paid tickets available.
Itâs playing at the Landmark Theaters Crest Cinema Center from Friday 9/22 to Wednesday 9/27. If the topic of immigration is important to you, this is a great, powerful, thought-provoking movie.
If you want to bring a big group or spend some time with Rishi, the creator of the movie, just
Also published on Medium.
There’s a new CEO at TodayTix, though he’s definitely not new to the company — Chairman Brian Fenty is becoming chief executive, while his co-founder (and the previous CEO) Merritt Baer is becoming the Head of Europe. TodayTix sells theater tickets in cities across the United States (including New York, Chicago and San Francisco), but its European presence is currently limited… Read More
Sramana Mitra: That’s what then drives all the actions on the site of the technology company who’s your client in terms of who’s looking at their stuff. You’re basically having them market further to...
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London and Antwerp-based Hummingbird Ventures, which counts Deliveroo and Showpad in its portfolio, has closed a new $95 million fund to invest in tech startups at the “late Seed and Series A” stage. Read More
Today’s 368th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 21, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are...
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Today’s 368th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting in 30 minutes, on Thursday, September 21, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All...
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Pinterest builds itself around visual discovery — the idea that you can come to the site or app, see something you like, and immediately dive down a rabbit hole. The company has built an extensive suite of tools internally to figure out which rabbit hole to divert users to, and now it’s opening up some of that knowledge to advertisers. Pinterest said today that it’s… Read More
Zenefits co-founder Parker Conrad was shown the door in February last year, paving the way for then-COO David Sacks to take over the company and try to turn it around. After about a year of working on that, Sacks stepped back and brought in Jay Fulcher as its new CEO, the former CEO of Ooyala and Agile Software. Since then, Fulcher has been taking a heat test on the company and the brand,… Read More
BI IntelligenceThis is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting businesses, governments, and consumers and transforming how they interact with the world. Companies are going to spend almost $5 trillion on the IoT in the next five years â and the proliferation of connected devices and massive increase in data has started an analytical revolution.
To gain insight into this emerging trend, BI Intelligence conducted an exclusive Global IoT Executive Survey on the impact of the IoT on companies around the world. The study included over 500 respondents from a wide array of industries, including manufacturing, technology, and finance, with significant numbers of C-suite and director-level respondents.Â
Through this exclusive study and in-depth research into the field, BI Intelligence details the components that make up IoT ecosystem. We size the IoT market in terms of device installations and investment through 2021. And we examine the importance of IoT providers, the challenges they face, and what they do with the data they collect. Finally, we take a look at the opportunities, challenges, and barriers related to mass adoption of IoT devices among consumers, governments, and enterprises.
Here are some key takeaways from the report:
We project that there will be a total of 22.5 billion IoT devices in 2021, up from 6.6 billion in 2016.We forecast there will be $4.8 trillion in aggregate IoT investment between 2016 and 2021.It highlights the opinions and experiences of IoT decision-makers on topics that include: drivers for adoption; major challenges and pain points; stages of adoption, deployment, and maturity of IoT implementations; investment in and utilization of devices, platforms, and services; the decision-making process; and forward- looking plans.In full, the report:
Provides a primer on the basics of the IoT ecosystemOffers forecasts for the IoT moving forward and highlights areas of interest in the coming yearsLooks at who is and is not adopting the IoT, and whyHighlights drivers and challenges facing companies implementing IoT solutionsTo get your copy of this invaluable guide to the IoT, choose one of these options:
Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIPPurchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORTThe choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, youâve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the IoT.
Publishers like Tastemade built big Facebook audiences by churning out lots of short content. But now many need to shift gears. That's because Facebook has begun inserting ads into video clips, but only if they run 90 seconds or more. For Tastemade, that's meant shooting videos using more TV-like conventions, like cliffhangers before ad breaks.
Over the past few years, Tastemade got really, really good at making very short recipe videos on Facebook (aka food porn).
Think a 30-second clip of an unseen chef making delectable-looking fried shrimp tacos â one of which has generated over 26 million views since last June.
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Then Facebook decided it wanted media companies to make longer videos, so it could insert more video ads.Â
When Facebook decides it wants something, publishers usually get on board â especially when the promise of ad revenue is involved.
"We kinda had to rethink everything," Larry Fitzgibbon,Tastemade co-founder and CEO, told Business Insider.
That's likely the state of affairs for many content companies that spent a great deal of energy perfecting eye-catching, decidedly short videos on Facebook. Many publishers built large Facebook audiences by honing the art of producing quick-hit clips built for a sound-off, thumb-scrolling world. The hope was eventually Facebook would help them make money on these videos
But now, they've got to rethink their production operations to make longer videos, and the videos need to be shot and edited accommodate ads seamlessly, without turning people away. It's hard not to feel a bit of algorithm and business-model whiplash.
So earlier this year Tastemade shook up its production process over a two-month period, and re-oriented it around longer content. The hope was that Facebook would keep putting Tastemade clips in people's feeds, and that the content would be good enough to keep people's attention for more than a few seconds â and thus good enough to feature 'mid-roll ads'.
When videos from partners run 90 seconds or more, Facebook now inserts ads during video breaks, similar to TV ads. This is especially top of mind now that Facebook is pushing original series via its new longer-video-centric Facebook Watch platform.
"We were optimized for the Facebook news feed," added Jay Holzer, Tastemade head of production. "That meant grabbing people thumbing through Facebook on their phones with arresting images, hoping they stick around for a few seconds. We had developed a good set of best practices around that."
"You can't just make 45-second videos 90 seconds," said Oren Katzeff, Tastemade's head of programming. "That would be a terrible experience. "
Luckily, Tastemade started out as a food-centric network built primarily on YouTube. So it had been producing content with the help of influencers that was longer than the early Facebook video fare.
Plus, Tastemade was an early Snapchat partner, where it's been experimenting with longer (in relative terms) original series, such as "Frankie's World," a show featuring the digital influencer Frankie Celenza digging into the science of cooking.
"This is all more about changing our process around watch time," said Fitzgibbon. This has been in the works for a while, he added. "You may be able to generate views or clicks. But watch time is the ultimate measure of whether you are entertaining people. So we've thought about, how do we tell stories and create a monetization opportunity. It was evolutionary."
For Facebook specifically, Tastemade has started not only going longer with its instructional, recipe clips, but also breaking them into acts â much like a TV show. Videos now have to deliver something interesting right away, but leave people hanging a bit so they'll hang around after a mid-roll break.
"You need a set up and a tease," Holzer said. "It's very similar to TV. You need a payoff after the ad."
That's even more true for Facebook Watch shows, some of which run a whopping five, 10, or 15 minutes.
It's very early, but Tastemade is seeing some solid traction with Watch. For example, the show "Struggle Meals" which features Celenza prepping quick meals for under $2, has seen several of its early episodes generate over one million views each.
Now Tastemade just needs to start generating some more checks from Facebook.
This hydraulic bender makes metal look like playdough.
It's called the Mobi-Bieger 100 and it's manufactured by Gelber-Bieger in Germany.
It can exert a force of up to 10 tonnes in order to shape metal rods. The machine itself only weighs 80 kg and it is 1.2 metres in length.
Produced by Jasper Pickering. Special thanks to Joe Daunt.
Deliveroo's expansion in 2016 helped drive the company's revenue for the year up 611% to £129 million, from £18 million the prior year.
Losses for the food delivery startup were up 300% year on year to £129 million, from £30.1 million in 2015.
According to the filing there was one exceptional cost of £5.3 million, which is how much it cost Deliveroo to rebrand last year.Â
Most of the growth came from Deliveroo's international markets, with revenue from countries outside the UK "increasing substantially." In 2016, the London-headquartered startup had expanded to 84 cities in 12 countries. It now operates in 120 markets across 12 countries, and has 120,000 restaurant partners.
The company is still sitting on considerable amounts of investor cash, having raised $275 million (£210 million) in a Series E funding round in August last year. Deliveroo said its net assets stood at £169 million as a result.
Rapid growth means London-headquartered Deliveroo is considered a major startup success story. It was founded in 2012 to allow people to order food for delivery from their favourite high street restaurants, not just those which do takeaway. The company charges £2.50 for delivery â more if your order is under £10 â and takes a commission fee from the restaurant.
But there are some risks. According to Deliveroo's filings, its gross margin percentage stands at just 0.7%. That figure shows the proportion of each pound of revenue the firm keeps as gross profit, before it pays cost of goods. The higher the margin, the more efficient the company. Deliveroo's low figure suggests it has more work to do to cut costs â but 0.7% is an improvement on 2015, when the firm reported a negative gross profit margin.
A higher gross profit margin may depend on whether Deliveroo is forced to pay its drivers more. There is an ongoing battle over how companies like Deliveroo and Uber pay their workers â who work flexibly but are not guaranteed the minimum wage. Deliveroo itself acknowledged the risk of greater regulation in its filings.
Another risk to the business is that more rivals are popping up in the food delivery space. UberEats is a significant rival in the UK, while Amazon has also launched a food delivery service.