For entrepreneurs interested to meet and chat with Sramana Mitra in person, please join us for our weekly informal group meetup. If you are living in the San Francisco Bay Area or are just in town...
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Mohit Gulati, Founder and CIO of Altius Ventures, which recently changed their name to ITI Growth Ventures, discusses the Indian startup eco-system.
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We saw recently on Netflix Ken Burns’ documentary, The West. Between the Spanish conquistadors and the Jeffersonian Americans, with some contribution from the British and the French, the American...
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Alastair Mitchell, Partner at EQT Ventures, talks about the European Startup Funding trends.
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HQ Trivia is letting Android users pre-register for the live-streamed trivia game built by the makers of Vine, Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. Pre-registering means you’ll get notified the moment HQ Trivia is available for download. HQ, which opened up pre-registration on December 24, had previously marketed its Android app as being available “this Christmas.” Read More
December 26, 2017
Iâm on day 8 of a cold, which in retrospect has been possibly the harshest cold Iâve ever had. I felt worse when I had salmonella poisoning in Adelaide in 2016Â and I remember a childhood flu over the holidays that had me throwing up for days. But, on Friday, when I had some existential dread, I realized I was really sick and crawled back in bed for the rest of the day.
I woke up this morning still sick but feeling on the mend. Iâve been at home for a week and havenât been doing much other than sleeping, reading, responding to email, eating mac and cheese, and sleeping some more. Iâve been a sub-optimal companion for Amy, but Brooks and Cooper have filled in pretty well for me.
Iâm glad the world is taking a break for the holidays. 2017 was an intense year in many dimensions. Our society changed in ways that feel extremely uncomfortable to me, but Iâve tried to process it with a long view. Long-simmering conflicts that were just under the surface explosively broke through and forced us to confront them and our collective behavior, and reactions, to them. Iâve continued to do what felt important and right to me while listening and learning. I worked hard to eliminate the noise and concentrate on the signal. To do this, I withdrew on several dimensions, especially via social media and online channels, which diminished my experience, but allowed me time and space to think.
Iâve been metabolizing my emotions at a new level. Iâve always been able to handle a huge amount of stress and anxiety, and part of my role has been to absorb the stress in the system, stay calm, and help the people around me work through whatever we are confronting. Iâve learned that when this gets to a certain level in me, it can trigger a depressive episode, so Iâve been working on understanding my limits better and how to address them more effectively. The broader cultural challenges of 2017 have just piled onto this, so I had to learn a new set of skills around this. If anyone is curious, the magic gateways for me have been meditation and therapy.
This cold forced some downtime on me. As Iâm recovering, Iâm going to savor the rest of the week and prepare for 2018. It feels like a cold reboot is in order.
Also published on Medium.
In case you missed it, you can listen here:
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Eva Ho, General Partner at Fika Ventures, discusses their investment thesis.
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Wish you all a very happy Christmas. Christmas is the time for lots of music, dance, food, travel, and shopping. This Gift Guide from Washington Post provides great gift ideas for home décor, food...
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he trip began just before the end of school. From the wood-shaving smell of third grade out into the clean winter air, sprung free by my mother who appeared at the little window in the classroom door like a treat. You were the one who got out early. You were the one walking down an empty hall toward the big triple doors of the school. We were leaving school to drive to my… Read More
All eyes may have been on Nvidia this year as its stock exploded higher thanks to an enormous amount of demand across all fronts: gaming, an increased interest in data centers, and its major potential applications in AI.But while Nvidia’s stock price and that chart may have been one of the more eye-popping parts of 2017, a year when AI continued its march toward being omnipresent in… Read More
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 380th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, January 4, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...
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Scaleworks, a private equity firm based in San Antonio, Texas, apparently couldn’t wait until after the holidays to share the news of its latest purchase. The firm announced it was acquiring Keen IO in a Medium blog post yesterday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, and neither company was available for comment beyond the blog post, but Keen has raised close to $30 million since it… Read More
Sramana Mitra: What else is tricky that is worth discussing that people can learn from? Jason VandeBoom: I think it’s really trying to find that optimal speed of growing. Just in the last 12 months...
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Molekule, a San Francisco-based startup with a sleekly designed molecular air purifier started as an immigrant dream twenty years ago and ended up being named one of Time’s top 25 inventions of 2017. The inventor Yogi Goswami came up with the idea when his baby son Dilip started having a hard time breathing the air around him. Dilip suffered from severe asthma but no air purifier at… Read More
December 22, 2017
As we start spinning up Defy Ventures in Colorado, we are doing a Business Coaching Day at the Arkansas Valley Correctional Facility in Ordway, Colorado. Itâs one of our first Defy Colorado events and Governor Hickenlooper will be joining us for the day.
There will be around 80 Entrepreneurs-in-Training. While we were planning on having spaces for 50 volunteers, weâve already filled over 40 of them before even talking about the program so there are only a few spaces left.
If you are interested, the event is happening on February 8th, 2018 from 9:00 am â 4:30 pm.
For a taste of what the experience is like, watch the video above or go to my post Understanding Privilege â My Experience in Prison.
Also published on Medium.
“I have FOMO for the future”, says Sam Lessin. That’s why his startup Fin is working backwards from a far-off tech utopia. One day, computers with some human help will answer our every beck and call. Today, Lessin is teaming them up. Every day, Fin gets smarter. For $1 a minute, 24/7, Fin gets your digital chores done. Message, email, or speak a request and a real person… Read More
What a challenging, exhilarating year it has been for women everywhere, starting from the women’s March on Washington to former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s eye-opening and now famous blog post to the #metoo movement that has swept the country, washing dozens of sexual predators out of their powerful roles in the process. All the while, women in tech have been driving their… Read More
I started a literary group about a year ago focused on serious literary works. We call it Caravanserai Literati. I have always been passionate about literature. This endeavor, however, is a return to...
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Mattermark, the site for startup and company data, is shutting down its own business after selling in a disappointing outcome to FullContact.In a document obtained by TechCrunch, co-founder and CEO Danielle Morrill wrote that “common stockholders will not be receiving anything in this deal.” In other words, Mattermark employee shares are worthless.It was just last year that… Read More
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