While many folks think of Yelp as a place to find a great place to eat, the company has been quietly infiltrating other categories. Home Services — stuff like plumbing, movers, mechanics, etc. — seem to be a booming business for Yelp, now representing 20 percent of the company’s overall revenue. So it only makes sense that Yelp has been tailoring features specifically for the… Read More
Plume Labs wants to be the definitive startup when it comes to air pollution. The company has built an app, an API and now an air quality tracker. The Flow is a tiny Bluetooth device you pair with your smartphone to learn more about the air you’re currently breathing. It works both inside and outside and could be particularly useful if you live in a polluted city. It tracks… Read More
September 26, 2017
In response to my post Book: Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape several people asked me for the feminist literature reading list that Amy had put together for me.
Following are the other ten books that Iâm working my way through this fall.
Sexual Politics by Kate Millet
Sisterhood is Forever by Robin Morgan
The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Ainât I a Woman by bell hooks
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer
In Search of Our Motherâs Gardens by Alice Walker
A Room of Oneâs Own by Virginia Woolf
Beyond God the Father by Mary Daly
If there are any that youâd like to add to my reading list, please leave them in the comments.
Also published on Medium.
French startup Eligo Bioscience just raised $20 million to develop next-gen biotherapeutics. Khosla Ventures is leading the round. This is also Khosla Ventures’ first investment in a French startup. Existing investor Seventure Partners is also participating, and the startup received a $2 million grant from the Worldwide Innovation Challenge. Eligo Bioscience has been working on a new way… Read More
ProsperWorks, a service that offers a set of Google-centric CRM tools, today announced that it has raised a $53 million Series C round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from GV (the fund you probably still remember as Google Ventures). This new round brings the company’s total funding to $87 million, which, in ProsperWorks’ own words, makes t the “#1 funded… Read More
This feature from TechCrunch covers the winners of the Startup Battlefield at the Disrupt SF 2017 event held in San Francisco held last week. Wireless charging startup Pi was the winner of the...
___
Deliveroo, the London headquartered restaurant food delivery startup, has raised $385 million in new funding, giving it a valuation of “over $2 billion,” according to the company. Read More
âMen are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.â â Margaret Atwood
A few weeks ago, after reading the New York Times Sunday Review article The Book That Made Us Feminists, I asked Amy for several recommendations for books that were foundational to the feminist movement. I purchased all that she suggested and added them to my infinite list of books to read.
The past few days I read Susan Brownmillerâs book Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape. Written in 1975, itâs 480 pages of intense and powerful writing. After about a third of it, I turned to Amy and said, âThat Margaret Atwood quote has a clear basis in history.â
Today, again in the New York Times (this time online), I read the article Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say Itâs Gone Too Far. I was almost finished with Against Our Will so it didnât take much to infuriate me about the article. There are several men quoted in the article and others referenced. The only one whose perspective makes any sense to me is Dick Costoloâs quote.
âIn just the last 48 hours, Iâve spoken to a female tech executive who was grabbed by a male C.E.O. at a large event and another female executive who was asked to interview at a venture fund because they âfeel like they need to hire a woman,ââ said Dick Costolo, the former chief of Twitter, who now runs the fitness start-up Chorus. âWe should worry about whether the women-in-tech movement has gone too far sometime after a couple of these arenât regularly happening anymore.â
In many of the conversations Iâve had around sexual harassment and sexual assault, Iâve been discussing something Iâve been referring to as the âperpetrator / victim paradox.â In this situation, the perpetrator âassaults / harassesâ the victim. When the perpetrator is discovered (or almost discovered), he becomes the victim and tries to manipulate the victim into ânot destroying my life.â It alternates between threats (continued perpetrator behavior aimed at the victim) and pleas (where the perpetrator takes the role of the victim, often using guilt to try and keep the victim quiet.)
Now, this doesnât only apply to sexual harassment and sexual assault, but to any power dynamic. Which leads to the well-discussed idea that rape is much more about power than about sex. Brownmillerâs book does an incredible job of linking power to sex, especially in the context of men using sex to assert their power over women. But there was another level that jumped out at me, which was the notion of women as property, where a first man asserts their power over second man by having unwanted sex (rape) with the woman who was âaffiliatedâ (wife, child, sister) with the second man. While Brownmiller has an incredibly long and distressing chapter on rape as part of the spoils of war, this idea infiltrates much of the book.
When I read articles like Push for Gender Equality in Tech? Some Men Say Itâs Gone Too Far all I can think of is âthese men are afraid of losing power to women.â
As a man, I wish other men would get over this. As our current president assembles the most male-dominated government in decades itâs clear that there is still a lot of work to do here.
Also published on Medium.
It’s no secret that automakers have shown more interest in startups lately. Nor is it any secret what’s driving that surge, given the massive shifts the industry faces from the rise of electric cars, autonomous vehicles, ride-hailing services and other emerging technologies and transportation business models. We set out to quantify combined investment by automakers in startups… Read More
Jim Regan: You have these companies doing a great job aggregating behavior that’s online but there are all these other inputs that provide a lot of context for the machine and bring us a level of...
___
Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money? Anthony Smith: CRM, as you well know, is a very popular field with a lot of competition. Insightly was just one of many CRMs that had...
___
The innovation of tbh, teen-speak for To Be Honest, was getting rid of the typing. Whether asking or answering questions, open text fields invite abuse when combined with anonymity. Even an innocuous question like “What do you think of me?” can lead to mean-spirited comments if responders don’t have their names, and therefore any accountability, attached. Read More
Seed funding is drying up. Accelerators are scrambling for revenue. Things are changing drastically in the startup ecosystem. So how do you raise money when your product needs more than some Django code and an AWS instance? You run an ICO, right? Read More
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 369th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, September 28, 2017, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
___
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?...
___
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...
___
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...
___
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...
___
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...
___
Copyright © 2020 iStart Valley.
