Sramana Mitra: Same thing about MVPs. Are you looking for early customers that are international customers that they have built an MVP around? Sandeep Singhal: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You...
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Christina Brodbeck, Founding Partner at Rivet Ventures, talks about the firm’s investment thesis of funding companies that target the female demographic in its purchase decision cycle. Very...
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Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Nathan Lustig was recorded in October 2017. Nathan...
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The FCC has denied a space startup permission to launch a collection of communications satellites after discovering that it had already launched some — after being told not to. Swarm Technologies, still in stealth mode, appears to have gone ahead with the deployment of four satellites deemed too small to be tracked and therefore unsafe to put into orbit. Read More
Snapchat has temporarily removed its Giphy GIF sticker feature after a user saw an extremely racist GIF as an option. Snapchat confirms to TechCrunch “As soon as we were made aware, we removed the GIF and have disabled Giphy until we can be sure that this won’t happen again. Read More
Urban Airship recently announced new capabilities designed to allow app developers to deliver the right message to their users at exactly the right time.Senior Vice President of Product and Engineering Mike Herrick explained that the company (which started out as a platform for push notifications) has supported in-app messaging for years.However, those messages have been sent from Urban… Read More
We’re hearing from a number of sources that Giphy, the big platform for hosting GIFs that also runs a GIF keyboard, held talks to raise a huge new financing round — though it’s not clear if it ever crossed the finish line. Read More
The high-end audio technology company Bose is getting into the augmented reality game with a new product and a $50 million fund devoted to startups that will develop services for its new platform. Read More
There’s nothing we spend more money on for a worse experience than housing. Keyo wants to fix all of it. The audacious startup envisions a world where a building’s other tenants get $20 to show you an available apartment on your schedule. Where you auto-pay your rent online. Where you get local business perks and can communicate maintenance requests through an app. And where… Read More
Tiago Maximo’s grandparents were shepherds. They word solid, handmade boots into the fields, trudging through dry grass and mud, over rutted country roads and through barnyards. He brought that tradition – handmade boots for people who appreciate quality – to his business, Urban Shepherd – where sources boots from Portugal to sell to customers in Barcelona and all over… Read More
Social planning apps have yet to take the world by storm. A handful of these apps tried and failed years ago, and even Swarm decided to ditch that methodology and focus on location logging. But a new Y Combinator-backed company seems to be picking up traction. And shockingly enough, the winning ingredient seems to be location! Location! Location! The startup is called Playbook, and its main… Read More
While some don’t care for the hit novel Ready Player One, it’s hard to deny that the book captured the hearts and minds of millions as it climbed the NYT Bestseller’s list in 2011. At the end of this month, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Stephen Spielberg, will be released in theaters. And given the book’s heavy focus on VR, it makes sense that HTC wants to… Read More
A PhD candidate in Computer Science at Columbia Engineering, Brian A. Smith, created a new system for blind gamers who want to get a little racing in. The system, called racing auditory display or RAD, is truly amazing. It lets the visually impaired play racing games without “seeing” the screen. Instead, the audio output tells the player when they’re getting closer to an edge… Read More
Trina Chiasson says a lot of cricket farmers will talk about how figuring out when they are laying their eggs is an art — and she hopes to turn it into a science. She and her co-founder James Ricci started Ovipost, a new startup looking to optimize the right conditions for a cricket grower to get the most yield from a generation of eggs without having to lose a bunch of crickets in… Read More
Most of you, I suspect, haven’t read a short story in a long time. Well, there’s a Y Combinator-backed startup called Curious Fictions looking to change that — and to turn those stories into a regular source of income for their writers. The company was founded by Tanya Breshears, a designer who previously worked for Airbnb. (I’ve known Breshears for more than a… Read More
As ecommerce grows here in the United States, there are still some significant hurdles for the Latin American market. Credit card penetration is lower than the U.S. and there isn’t the same infrastructure for shipping, meaning that returns are far more tedious. That’s where Ropeo comes in. Ropeo was founded by Alejandro Casas, Santiago Gomez, and Luis Huertas, who saw that the… Read More
Today is International Womenâs Day (âIWDâ) which dates back to 1909, although the UN did not start celebrating IWD annually until March 8, 1975.
With the current global movement for womenâs rights and equality, IWD 2018 has spawned numerous initiatives including #PressForProgress and #TimeIsNow. While the hashtags vary, the common theme of 2018 is action. For many organizations, the goal is for these initiatives to launch on March 8th but continue throughout the year and beyond. At a minimum, IWD and the organizations and individuals celebrating it will spark action, continue existing conversations, and force new ones.
At Foundry Group, as part of our efforts to help build a more inclusive tech industry, weâve joined two initiatives as part of IWD 2018: #StartWithEight and Project #MovingForward.
#StartWithEight addresses the gender disparity in venture capital funding by asking participants to commit to taking eight meetings with women from outside their existing networks during the month of March. The idea there is that âthe dynamics will change when capital flows equally to any talented founder, no matter his or her gender, race, sexual orientation, or any other characteristic.â For many VCs, deal flow is extremely network driven and often our networks look a lot like us. At Foundry Group, weâll do at least eight new meetings with women looking for funding who weâve never met with before in the month of March.
Project #MovingForward is building an open-source directory that pools diversity, inclusion, and anti-harassment commitments from VCs. We (along with 35 other VC firms) shared information (now public on the site) on how weâre #MovingForward. At Foundry Group, in addition to adopting new policies, weâve created a portal for internal and external stakeholders to report sexual harassment.
Thereâs a ton of work to be done to achieve gender equality and inclusivity in tech, but these action-oriented initiatives are a good start. I hope the momentum continues to build and we start to see some real change. K9âs Project #MovingForward submission really sums it up: âActions speak louder than words.â
Also published on Medium.
San Francisco-based autonomous trucking company Starsky Robotics announced this morning that it’s closed a $16.5 million Series A, led by Shasta Ventures. The news comes as the company also announced that it recently completed a seven-minute drive on a closed course without a single human in the truck. Read More
Gary Little, Co-founder at Canvas Ventures, discusses the various types of venture capital and the evolution of the industry into a rather segmented current eco-system. For an entrepreneur trying to...
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Atom Tickets, an app that combines online movie ticket booking with social features, said today that it has raised a $60 million Series C led by Fidelity Investments, with participation from returning investors Lionsgate, Disney and Twentieth Century Fox Film. All three studios contributed to Atom Tickets’ $50 million Series B, which was announced two years ago. Read More
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