The FDA approval process can be like navigating a minefield for health startups hoping to get through regulations and begin selling to the American public. YC company Enzyme.io hopes to help these small businesses by automating the process for them. Biomedical engineer Jared Seehafer came up with the idea through his own experience consulting with health companies. Read More
Fortnite, which has topped 50 million players, has released an update to the game in the form of version V.2.2.0. The patch is significant in that it brings a long-awaited update to the Battle Royale map. Fortnite Battle Royale quite literally takes a page out of the PUBG playbook. In it, 100 players are dropped into a map, where they loot for gear and try to take down the competition. But… Read More
Group Nine Media has hired Stacy Green to lead its human resources team. The company was created at the end of 2016 by the merger of Thrillist, The Dodo, NowThis and Seeker. CEO Ben Lerer said that at the time, he assumed there would be a “Lego-like” process of combining the best teams from each organization — and since Thrillist had the largest HR staff, it seemed natural… Read More
Eyeota is looking to sell audience data to advertisers around the world, and it’s announcing that it’s raised $12.5 million in Series B funding for further growth.The company was actually founded back in 2010, but it didn’t raise its Series A until two years ago. CEO Kevin Tan admitted that the company had been “difficult for early-stage investors to wrap their head… Read More
Birch Finance, a TechCrunch Disrupt 2016 Battlefield alum, has raised a $1 million seed round from AGP Miami, Kevin Johnson, the former CEO of Ebates and Frank Azor, founder of Alienware. The plan is to grow Birch Finance’s user base and increase its opportunities for monetization. Birch Finance aims to help people make the most of the credit cards in their wallets by telling them… Read More
Ledger just raised an impressive Series B round of $75 million (€61 million), led by Draper Esprit. The startup already raised a $7 million round last year. But the cryptocurrency mania probably made it easy to raise more money. If you have more than a bit of money in cryptocurrencies, chances are you’ve heard about Ledger wallets. The French startup has been designing some of the… Read More
Entrepreneur First (EF), the London-headquartered company builder that invests in individuals “pre-team, pre-idea” to help create new technology startups, is continuing to expand internationally. Following adding an outpost and program in Singapore, in addition to London, the so-called talent-first investor is setting up shop in Berlin, kicking off its first German program this April. Read More
Who needs Amazon when you can make your own online distribution channel? At least, that’s the idea behind Grove Collaborative, a natural home care products company that ships natural cleaning brands like Method and Mrs. Meyer’s. Co-founder Stuart Landesberg started the company in 2014 after working with retail brands during his time as an investor at TPG. He noticed how limited… Read More
You can’t swing a cat in the Bay Area without hitting some startup accelerator or another, but it can be hard to find one with a mission. That’s the easy part with the Ocean Solutions Accelerator, a new program that aims to help advance startups in tech and conservation relating to… you guessed it, the big blue. They’re now accepting applications for their first wave… Read More
Sketchfab just launched a store so that you can buy and sell 3D models and reuse them in commercial projects. This is a major new feature for Sketchfab, which has become one of the biggest repositories of 3D models on the web. It feels like Sketchfab is becoming a sort of stock photography site, except that it’s all about 3D models. While Sketchfab already has 2 million 3D models on… Read More
The Associated Press is partnering with Arkadium to use InHabit, an interactive content tool launched last year. Arkadium’s goal for InHabit is to automatically add interactive polls, quizzes and games into relevant stories, hopefully making those stories more engaging in the process. The technology was initially designed for sports content, so the AP is starting its integration on its… Read More
January 17, 2018
Over the past 25 years, Iâve attended approximately 14,387 board meetings. My partners and I talk a lot about how to improve them and today released The Foundry Group Manifesto on Board Meetings. It follows:
In 2013, I wrote a book with Mahendra Ramsinghani about board meetings titled Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors. It was a tough book to write because every time I dug into it, I got bored, but I think it ended up being a contribution to the corpus of entrepreneurial knowledge. However, I anticipate Bored Meetings will be an even more significant contribution.
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Ken Elefant: We’re focused on the United States since we are doing so much in security. We do spend a lot of time in Israel as well. In the past, I have done...
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Perspective can be a useful thing. Cryptocurrencies have had a bad 24 hours.
Last night Amy and I watched The Big Short for the second time. If youâve never seen it, itâs a must watch movie. If you havenât seen it in at least a year, watch it again. While the events are from 2005 â 2008, they feel like they happened yesterday. And, the cast, including Brad Pitt (my favorite character), Steve Carell (my second favorite), Christian Bale, and Ryan Gosling play their parts spectacularly well.
There are hundreds of lessons in the movie. But, like most things human, we quickly forget them. Or we pretend like they couldnât happen again. Or we justify whatâs going on today as âbut itâs different this time.â
In 2000 I was co-chairman of a public company called Interliant. The company had gone public in 1999 and the market cap rose to just under $3 billion ($55 / share, up from $10 / share at the IPO). By the end of 2000, the stock price was at $13. I was on a walk at my house in Eldorado Springs with one of the VPs who asked me how low the stock could go. I canât remember the exact phrasing, but I remember it being something like âThereâs no way the stock will go below $10 / share, right?â
My response was simple. âIt could go to $0. I hope it doesnât, but it could.â
In 2002 Interliant went bankrupt and the stock went to $0.
Now, I donât have schadenfreude about cryptocurrencies going down. Like many, Iâm fascinated by them and the potential implications of both cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. I hold plenty of cryptocurrencies â either directly or indirectly in funds Iâm an investor in. So I benefit financially from them going up.
But Iâm not a trader. I never have been. I never will be. Itâs not my temperament. I donât enjoy it. I donât want to spend mental energy thinking about the gyrations of the market â any market. I donât want to make money on short-term financial trades, but rather by helping create new things over the long-term.
We all eventually die, at least for now. Some people learn from history. Some people suppress or deny it. Many people ignore it. I prefer to reflect on it and make sure the big lessons are inputs into my thinking. If you want a quick, 128-page frame of reference on this, read The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant. The cliche âthe more things change, the more they stay the sameâ is a cliche because it applies to a lot of things.
My scan of my morning news feeds included Researchers find that one person likely drove Bitcoin from $150 to $1,000, BlackRockâs Message: Contribute to Society, or Risk Losing Our Support, GE Shares Dive on $6.2 Billion Charge for Problems in Its Finance Unit, and a very interesting post titled Impatience: The Pitfall Of Every Ambitious Person.
Iâll leave you with this.
Â
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: I’m going to probe deeper. You’re saying that all the touch points are being captured. Are you recording the phone calls and doing speech-to-text? What is the level of capturing of the...
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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 382nd FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, January 18, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur,...
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According to a report published by SNS Research late last year, the global Big Data hardware, software, and professional services markets were estimated to grow to $57 billion last year. The...
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Sramana Mitra: How did you get the company off the ground? How were you acquiring customers? What was the genesis of the story? Marius Hanganu: For years, it was a Sequoia-based startup. Before it...
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William Hsu, Co-founder and Partner at Mucker Capital, a Los Angeles based fund that invests largely outside Silicon Valley and follows a more fundamentals oriented approach.
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Indian B-to-C startups started off with huge promise and were constantly compared with China’s Alibaba. But the reality has been consistently sobering. The Economist offers some excellent...
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