Late last month, Spanish media got wind that the Barcelona-based on-demand delivery app Glovo had closed Series B funding, but now the company is making the news official. The startup, which offers a service similar to Postmates in the U.S., has raised a €30 million round led by Rakuten Capital, and Cathay Innovation. Existing investors Seaya Ventures, Entreé Capital, Caixa Capital Risk,… Read More
As tech giants like Apple and Facebook prepare to spend billions of dollars on movies and TV, longtime Hollywood executive Jeffrey Katzenberg is looking to write some big checks for original content, too. Katzenberg began his career at Paramount Pictures (where he worked on Star Trek: The Motion Picture), but is best known for running Disney’s motion picture division during the period… Read More
Amy and I have always believed in this value and importance of voting. If there was any doubt about how this can impact our society, that doubt was obliterated in the 2016 election.
Boulder has an odd-year election cycle so our local elections are happening between October 16, 2017 (ballots get mailed) and November 7, 2017 (the last day to vote). Historically, less than half of the registered voters in town have voted in our local elections. A group of us, led by Engage Boulder hope that meaningfully increases (both the registered voters and the ones who choose to vote) this year.
Having lived and worked here for almost 22 years (longer than Iâve lived anywhere else by a wide margin), I now feel like I understand the strengths and weaknesses of Boulder. I get the difference of opinions about the long-term view of the city. I think we are living in an amazing place, but we have a lot of work to do to both keep it amazing and have it continue to evolve in a healthy, productive, and successful way.
As a result, I believe that our city council election is critically important. In the past, Iâve voted but I have not been public about my endorsements, nor have I put much energy into helping the candidates I endorse get elected. This election feels different for me, partly because Iâm now thinking a lot about the long-term health of Boulder, but also because I feel like the low voter turnout in past elections shows that the broader population is not necessarily being represented.
Iâve decided to endorse Jan Burton, Eric Budd, Jill Grano, Mark McIntyre, and Bill Rigler.
These are the same endorsements being made by Open Boulder, Better Boulder, and Engage Boulder, three organizations that I support along with a number of other community leaders.
We have chosen to endorse these five candidates because of their commitments to bring visionary and practical strategies to:
Create more housing and transportation for all Boulder residents;Make our streets and paths safer;Meet Boulderâs carbon reduction goals;Keep Boulder open for entrepreneurs and the ecosystem that encourages them;Make Boulder attractive for creative people, in the arts, research, and elsewhere;Maintain a balance of conservation and recreation access on our open space.While I donât necessarily agree with every position of each of these candidates, I strongly believe they are all smart, thoughtful, willing to engage, and capable of thinking long-term about what is good for our city and community.
Voting in Boulder is easy. If you havenât registered to vote, please register now. And, Engage Boulder is having voter-oriented events several times a week between now and the election â get involved!
Also published on Medium.
Sramana Mitra: The reason why professors want to see how you are proceeding is because they can’t partially mark you. If you’re going in the right direction and somehow made a mistake and got the...
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Recursion, a drug discovery startup out of Salt Lake City, Utah has announced a $60 million Series B round, led by Data Collective (DCVC). Recursion started out in 2014 on a mission to identify 100 new treatments in 10 years. That’s a lofty goal, considering the discovery for just one drug can traditionally take decades and tens of millions of dollars, with a high rate of failure… Read More
MessageBird, a cloud communications platform that counts publicly listed Twilio as a competitor, has raised a hefty $60 million in Series A funding. The round is being led by Accel in the U.S., with Atomico, the VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, leading in Europe. Read More
Entrepreneurs are invited to the 370th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Thursday, October 5, 2017, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register...
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According to a recent Gartner report, global enterprises are transforming their security spending strategy by moving away from prevention-only approaches to more detection and response-related ones....
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Frame.io, the collaboration platform for the video industry, has today announced the close of a $20 million Series B funding round led by FirstMark Capital, with participation from existing investors including Accel Partners, SignalFire and Shasta Ventures. Frame.io launched on to the scene back in March of 2015. The company solved a growing problem with a seemingly obvious solution. People… Read More
The recent Equifax hack is yet another reminder that major corporations are still leaving themselves susceptible to attacks. There are countless cybersecurity startups looking to fix this problem, but HYPR believes its decentralization approach is key. Its authentication technology secures traditional passwords and also biometrics like fingerprints, faces and voices. Read More
AtScale, a four-year old startup that helps companies get a big-picture view of their big data inside their BI tools, announced a $25 million Series C investment today. The round was led by Atlantic Bridge with participation from new investors Wells Fargo and Industry Ventures along with returning investors Storm Ventures, UMC, Comcast and XSeed Capital. With today’s investment, the… Read More
Jared Shusterman: Quite frankly, a lot of these guys don’t trust the bigger brands that they sell. The number one game changer here in helping these guys was to be cooperative and, in effect, reap...
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What do N26, Revolut and Monzo have in common? The three founders of those three startups are all coming to TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin to discuss all things fintech. If you want to see Valentin Stalf, Nikolay Storonsky and Tom Blomfield share the same stage, come to Disrupt in December. N26 also happens to be a Startup Battlefield success story. The company participated in our startup… Read More
Curiscope, a U.K. augmented and virtual reality content startup, has raised a $1 million seed round led by LocalGlobe, the seed VC firm founded by Saul and Robin Klein. Ascension Ventures, Force over Mass, ustwo Adventure, and Richard Fearn also participated. Read More
Topology Eyewear is an augmented reality app providing custom-fit glasses from a 3D scan of your face. Most glasses are mass manufactured to fit a supposedly symmetric head. The problem is, most of us are not that symmetrical. The Topology app, available on iOS, uses face-scanning technology to take into account facial factors that can make most glasses not fit as well as they should. Read More
Ex-500 Startups partners Elizabeth Yin and Eric Bahn want to focus on potential impact, not on whether or not founders have a degree from Stanford or some Ivy League school. Their goal with Hustle Fund, according to sources, is to level the playing the field for entrepreneurs in an industry where pedigree is not a good proxy for success. Read More
About a year ago we reported that Bumble would soon launch BumbleBizz – a swipe-based networking tool that is designed to help people make professional connections. And now the feature is finally rolling out today to users in the US, UK, Germany, France and Canada. Essentially BumbleBizz will use the same types of parameters that regular Bumble does – your location, network,… Read More
Recently, my friend Ross Baird came out with a new book, The Innovation Blind Spot. In the book, Ross outlines and diagnoses a problem that Iâve been exploring for over a decade: our innovation economy neglects many people and ideas.
Ross kicks off the book with some pretty stark statistics: despite the fact that promising startup communities (such as my hometown of Boulder) are thriving, in most communities in America, firm creation is the lowest itâs been in a generation. With women making up less than 10% of new startups that are funded and African-Americans and Latinos making up less than 1%, itâs obvious weâre not seeing the best ideas in our innovation ecosystem.
Rossâ book is important because he focuses on solving this problem through HOW we invest, not just WHAT we invest in. Itâs not enough for tech firms to say âwe need more diversity â letâs go find different founders!â The design in how we find companies, perform diligence and make investments have unintentional side effects that cut many people out. One example highlighted in the book is that the very act of âpitchingâ a business tends to favor men (a Wharton study showed that men were 60% more likely to raise money pitching the exact same business as women.)
Iâve been thinking about ways to design startup communities to be more inclusive. A classic investor problem is a tension between wanting to be accessible to new founders while at the same time giving existing portfolio companies the time they deserve. When youâre getting a thousand pitches a year, you often tend to gravitate towards the people you already know and ideas that are familiar. Techstars has been a key part of addressing this issue for us as weâve met thousands of companies we wouldnât have otherwise and have invested â both directly and through our investment in Techstars â in a wide variety of founders all over the world.
Rossâs book also explores ways to build a stronger pipeline of different types people. As Iâve dug further into the problem, Iâve seen consistent ways that many people are excluded. For example, entrepreneurs go to conferences and network in order to find customers and investors. If you donât have personal savings or family members who can help support you, you canât afford that plane ticket. Organizations like the Techstars Foundation are working on addressing problems like this.
My favorite part of the book is when Ross talks about how places and communities can support their own founders. Rossâ final section is titled with one of my favorite words: âTopophiliaâ, or âlove of placeâ. Itâs a phrase Iâve embraced as weâve built our startup community in Colorado and have tried to share with other communities around the world, both in my travels and through my book, Startup Communities. Whether you live in Cincinnati or Jakarta, you are far better able to help the entrepreneurs in your hometown than I am. I think that in order for us to ensure that entrepreneurs flourish everywhere, communities need to embrace them, and Iâve enjoyed being part of a community of folks like Ross who are trying to help communities do this worldwide.
Rossâs book is a quick, entertaining, informative read that diagnoses how we can do better as a startup community, and more importantly, focuses on the HOW. I encourage everyone in the innovation economy to read it.
Also published on Medium.
Going against the grain of Venture Capital mania, in 1999, Aviram started his second bootstrapped venture. 18 years later, he is still running it. Happily! Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very...
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French startup OpenClassrooms is partnering with IT service company Capgemini to find and hire new people off the beaten path. This is something new for OpenClassrooms and could turn into a lucrative opportunity.Starting today, 16 people have been recruited by Capgemini to become Java J2EE experts. They’ll first start by studying full time for three months. They’ll then work at… Read More
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