eBay is not having a great afternoon after posting a pretty ho-hum third quarter that fit roughly in line with analyst estimates, but perhaps not seeing the kinds of leaps that Wall Street is looking for heading into the fourth quarter. The company said it added an additional 2 million active buyers and now says it has 168 million global active buyers. But even with buyer numbers as large as… Read More
There’s no doubt that our collective mobile device addictions are hurting real-world engagement for advertisers. This is especially true in professional sports stadiums, where looking down at your phone means you’re not paying attention to announcements, advertisements, and sometimes even the live game. One New Zealand-based startup think they have an answer to this problem. Dropit… Read More
AdHawk is announcing that it has acquired one of its competitors, Y Combinator-backed Automate Ads. Even if you weren’t a customer, Automate Ads may sound familiar because it was previously known as Kuhcoon, a social advertising startup co-founded by Andrew Torba, who has since been in the news for getting banned from the YC alumni network and for his social network Gab.ai, which has… Read More
Sramana Mitra: What are the use cases? Where are you applying those capabilities to? Doug Randall: There’re a couple of use cases. The big one that I like to think of is changing a narrative. Let me...
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Thanks to the Internet, you can order regular deliveries of everything from clothing to razors to geeky memorabilia. With Bespoke Post, you’re not just limited to one type of products — it ships its customer “box of awesome” that could be focused on style, travel, alcohol or something else entirely.Co-founder and CEO Rishi Prabhu explained that the goal is to curate… Read More
Last night Amy and I hosted an event at our house for the ACLU and Earthjustice, two organizations we are significant supporters of. If you told me 20 years ago that Iâd be spending a lot of my philanthropic energy supporting lawyers, I would have aggressively rejected the notion. But if you had described what is going on in the US right now, I would have also aggressively rejected the notion.
Since the election, Amy has had a great tagline for me.
Action is the antidote.
Sheâs amazing and the energy she puts behind this is unwavering. Iâm extremely fortunate to have her as my life partner â it buoys me up regularly, especially around things that I might otherwise just ignore.
Last nightâs event was great. We heard from David Cole (the ACLU Legal Director) and Patrice Simms (the Earthjustice VP of Litigation). Like me, they are each long-term optimists so their perspective is not just about tomorrow (although much of their focus is on today and tomorrow).
In the middle of the discussion. David mentioned a quote that he attributed to Cornel West and Roberto Unger from their 1998 book titled The Future of American Progressivism. The quote, which is the title of this post, is âHope is the consequence of action.â I believe, but am not certain, that it comes from this passage:
âChange requires neither saintliness nor genius. What it does require is the conviction of the incomparable value of life. Nothing should matter more to us than the attempt to grasp our life while we have it, and to awaken from the slumber of routine, of compromise and prostration, so that we may die only once. Hope is not the condition or cause of action. Hope is the consequence of action. And those who fail in hope should act, practically or conceptually, so that they may hope.â
David deconstructed this to explain that action doesnât come from hope, but hope comes from action. Chew on that for a bit â itâs important in every context, not just politics. Apply it to any situation â work or personal; exogenous or endogenous; positive or negative. Take action, which will generate hope, rather than use your hope to generate action.
When I think about my life and my work, it applies. I take action all the time, and thatâs what creates hope and makes me optimistic.
If you are inspired by this, Iâll leave you with a recent Cornel West talk at the most recent Harvard Divinity Schoolâs Convocation address.
Also published on Medium.
InVision, the collaborative prototyping tool used by more 3 million people, has been around since 2011. But today, InVision is taking on the full stack with the announcement of its own Photoshop competitor. Meet Studio. InVision’s new Studio design tool goes toe-to-toe with Adobe Photoshop and Sketch, offering designers a way to both create and edit their work and then seamlessly send… Read More
According to a MarketandMarkets report, the global video streaming market is expected to grow from $30.29 billion in 2016 to $70.05 billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 18.3% during the forecast period....
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Pinterest began rolling out targeted ads based on searches for its partners earlier this year, giving it another moment in time to catch potential customers as they try to sniff out new things they might buy — and now everyone else will get a piece of that. The company said it is adding search ads to its Ads manager today, letting businesses target customers searching for potential… Read More
The only thing I hate more than schlepping around electronics is schlepping around accessories and dongles for those electronics. And even when I’m not traveling it’s still hard to organize everything in one place and resist the temptation to just throw all my cables into a drawer. Which is exactly why my interest was piqued when I saw Bento Stack. It’s a stacking case… Read More
Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a few questions to understand how you’re going to market with this kind of technology. Is this like a central hub where banks are all signing up for access or is it an...
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A cyber security accelerator with links to the UK’s GCHQ intelligence agency is doubling down for a second program that’s larger and longer than the inaugural bootcamp which kicked off in January. Read More
BuddyGuard, the Berlin startup behind the Flare AI-powered home security camera, has raised €3.4 million in new funding, money it plans to use to ramp up marketing of the newly-launched device. Leading the round is German electrical specialist Bachmann Group, with participation from over 20 unnamed angel investors across Europe. Read More
Prenetics, a genetic testing startup, plans to expand into more Asian countries after raising a $40 million Series B led by Beyond Ventures and Alibaba Hong Kong Entrepreneurs Fund. Read More
“It’s a way to give people a chance to have fun, maybe win, maybe learn something new.” That’s how former Vine co-founder Rus Yusupov describes his new trivia game show app HQ, which feels like Who Wants to Be a Millionaire meets Facebook Live. Read More
SelfMade brings professional photo editing to your phone — yes, literally. The startup, which is announcing that it has raised $11 million in funding, was founded by CEO Brian Schechter and CTO Zach Lloyd. Schechter was previously co-founder at IAC-acquired dating startup HowAboutWe, and he points to HowAboutWe as the starting point for his interest in photo editing. After all, he… Read More
An engineer for BitGo, Jameson Lopp, faced down a horde of police officers with rifles at his home in Durham, North Carolina after someone sent an anonymous tip regarding a hostage situation at his home. The engineer has been vocal on Twitter about upcoming changes in the protocol. “They shut down most of my neighborhood,” he said. “There were dozens of patrol units, a SWAT… Read More
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 372nd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 19, 2017, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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Doug Randall: The first thing we do is we look for narrative richness. This is text that has high levels of emotion and that is not simply mundane and descriptive. Mundane and descriptive is, “I went...
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Allset has raised $5 million in Series A funding led by Greycroft. The startup’s goal is to eliminate most of the wait time that comes with eating out. You make a reservation through the Allset smartphone app, and when you do, you also order your food and pay for the meal. Ideally, that means you should get your food within five minutes of arriving at the restaurant, and you should be… Read More