According to a report by Transparency Market Research published last year, the global licensed sports merchandise market is estimated to grow 6.4% annually from $27.63 billion in 2015 to $48.17...
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Sramana Mitra: I’ve thought about this quite a lot. My observation is that you have to have private-labeled brands to compete with Amazon at this point. In whatever category that you’re working in,...
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Teralytics’s big data analytics platform is targeting government agencies and transport companies wanting to understand complex problems relating to human mobility — from how to relieve transport pressure points to monitoring urban air quality without the need for CO2 sensors. Just plug in telecos’ data to play… Read More
What could you do in the next three days to change your startup’s trajectory? Apply to Startup Battlefield Australia! Taking an hour today to apply could result in $25K AUD, an all-expense paid trip to TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2018, pitch training that will leave investors asking for more, global media exposure and a warm welcome into the Startup Battlefield Alumni Community. Read More
Today’s Stories Disney’s streaming service will exclusively get Marvel and Star Wars movies Amazon is looking for a 2nd headquarter city, a ‘full equal to Seattle’ Spotify and Hulu partner on a discounted entertainment bundle, first aimed at students HotelTonight to expand booking window to 100 days Credits Written and Hosted by: Anthony Ha Filmed by: Matthew… Read More
GrubHub was back in court today in San Francisco over its use of 1099 independent contractors for food delivery. Tj O’Shae, a former GrubHub W-2 employee, echoed much of what plaintiff Raef Lawson testified. She spoke about preferred drivers getting access to priority scheduling, acceptance rates, bonuses, a system that allowed GrubHub to see where their drivers were and “ghost… Read More
During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Stefania Mallett, CEO at ezCater, who raised multiple seed rounds, and then, over a period of a decade, $70 million. Stefania described her journey...
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We stopped by Andy Rubin’s Playground in Palo Alto to check out a new autonomous cart from Canvas Technologies. The startup aims to replace existing fixed and expensive factory infrastructure, like conveyor belts, with its lightweight and adaptable computer-vision-powered cart. Read More
French startup Streamroot just raised $3.2 million from Partech Ventures, Techstars Venture Capital Fund, Verizon Ventures* and R/GA. The company is taking advantage of WebRTC to make video streaming much cheaper. When you’re watching a video on YouTube or Netflix, those companies send a video file to your device from their servers. It’s a straightforward, one-way transaction between… Read More
Caleb Sima, a world-class security expert and serial entrepreneur, was working on his security startup, BlueBox Security (acquired by Lookout in 2016), at the time of this discussion. If security is...
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HotelTonight, the platform that lets you make last-minute bookings at hotels, is today announcing that they’re expanding their reservation to up to 100 days out. The change doesn’t take effect immediately, but HotelTonight says that the expanded booking window will go live “in the fall.” As it stands now, HotelTonight only lets users book hotels within seven days of… Read More
StatMuse, the sports statistics database that can be queried using natural language inquiries, just announced that it’s become the second startup accepted into the NFL Players Association’s accelerator. As a refresher the accelerator, called The One Team Collective, was built to help smaller startups get access to player licensing rights in return for equity. We first wrote… Read More
Daniel Gulati: What’s changed with Amazon is, historically, you used to be able to red-line categories as Amazon-proof. Amazon is an intent-based environment and doesn’t really do well on discovery....
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Today’s 366th FREE online 1Mby1M roundtable for entrepreneurs is starting NOW, on Thursday, September 7, at 8:00 a.m. PDT/11:00 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. Click here to join. All are welcome!
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Pendo helps businesses understand and assist their customers with tools like analytics, polls and walkthroughs. Until now, however, CEO Todd Olson said the company has been focused on the web (both desktop and mobile), with just a single mobile developer on the team. “We as a team constantly had a lot of internal debates about how much to invest in [mobile],” he said. “If… Read More
The on-demand economy is great for consumers but hard for the companies that provide on-demand services. While many are still struggling to stabilize their business model and optimize their work force, Favor has seemed to find a bit of success by focusing in on a specific region. Favor is an on-demand delivery service that operates in Texas. Much like Postmates, the service lets users order… Read More
VizEat, the European “social eating platform” that connects travellers and local hosts around authentic food experiences — such as dining in a local’s home, cooking classes, and food tours — has acquired EatWith, a similar startup headquartered in San Francisco. Read More
Five months after abandoning its proposed purchase of Monsanto’s precision planting subsidiary due to anti-trust concerns, agricultural equipment giant Deere and Company announced that it will spend $305 million to acquire ag-tech startup Blue River Technology. Founded in 2011 and based in Sunnyvale, Blue River develops machine learning technology for precision farming and counts… Read More
Upload, formerly UploadVR, the virtual reality startup at the center of a sexual harassment and wrongful termination lawsuit filed earlier this year, has settled the case with its former employee and is aiming to put the ensuing damage behind it. The lawsuit, filed against the startup and its co-founders by former director of digital and social media Elizabeth Scott, alleged that the company… Read More
September 6, 2017
I woke up from a dream about being in my early 20âs. It was a complicated one that included struggling to finish my graduate degree (yup â thatâs clearly an anxiety dream) along with meeting with Bill Gates and trying to sell him my company (something that never happened but clearly has some fantasy element to it.)
As I was brushing my teeth, parts of the dream stuck with me, as some do. In my waking haze, I inhabited some of my memories from my early 20âs. The fantasy meeting with Bill Gates led to the Microsoft / Lotus battle for #1, which reminded me of several Lotus meetings I attended with my Uncle Charlie when I was in college and he was CIO for Frito-Lay (I canât remember his exact title â I think it was something like VP MIS, but he was what we would call a CIO today). Mitch Kapor loomed large there and at MIT, even after he left Lotus and started On Technology.
I flashed to a meeting in my late 20âs with Dan Bricklin at a restaurant in the Boston suburbs where I met with him and the founding team of Trellis when I was considering joining them as president or CEO (I canât remember what the title was going to be â but Dan and I were going to be partners.) This was during a phase after Feld Technologies when I was making lots of angel investments and considering being founding-CEO of a company for a year at a time and then hiring a CEO and becoming chairman. This led to a memory of meeting Lisa Underkoffler, the aunt of John Underkoffler (close friend and CEO of Oblong) in the kitchen of my fraternity. I think Lisa ran product for TK Solver, the product from Software Arts (Danâs company) product that came out after VisiCalc was a monster hit (the first killer app for the Apple II.)
Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer app for the IBM PC, so thereâs Mitch again. By this point, the dream was merely wisps as I thought about the early entrepreneurial heroes of mine. Steve Case then popped into my mind, and I remembered how central AOL was to my life at the time. The âbfeldâ moniker that I use came from my AOL address, long before I was using it anywhere else.
Robert Mertonâs On the Shoulders of Giants was a powerfully important book that I read in graduate school. As we fetishize todayâs entrepreneurial heroes in the software industry, let us not forget that we are standing on the shoulders of many giants. Mine include Bill Gates, Mitch Kapor, Dan Bricklin, and Steve Case. There are many more, but these four shaped my entrepreneurial path and shone a bright light of inspiration that lit the way.
Also published on Medium.