Slack Gets Slice of SoftBank’s $100 Billion Tech Bounty. Workplace messaging startup is now valued at more than $5 billion.Slack Technologies Inc. closed a $250 million funding round led by SoftBank Group Corp.’s Vision Fund, the company said Sunday. The financing round values the workplace chat service operator at $5.1 billion, up from $3.8 billion the last time. The Vision Fund is joined by Accel and other investors, Slack said. Bloomberg reported on the latest funding in July. The San Francisco-based startup said the money is for “operational flexibility,” not for a particular use, and added that it still has much of the $591 million it already raised. At its first user conference on Tuesday, the company announced an expansion of its service to work in German, French, Spanish and Japanese. It also said that it had reached $200 million in revenue from subscriptions. [ Bloomberg ] These VCs Are Bringing ‘Hard Science’ to Fortune 500 CompaniesIn 2010, as the dust from the financial crisis settled, three women working in disparate parts of the economy noticed that startups in “hard science” (think biology or chemistry rather than tech) weren’t getting the attention they deserved from big investors. They joined forces with the foundation of Peter Thiel, the well-known contrarian investor, to launch Breakout Labs, an incubator program to help such companies turn their ideas into viable businesses. Seven years later, those same three women want to be the big investors whom they used to court. In July they officially launched Breakout Ventures with a $46.5 million fund, to help those startups take the next step. “Most of our companies are atoms leveraging bits”—lab science aided by computing power—“and they generally take more capital and a longer time horizon to hit those key milestones,” says Lindy Fishburne, executive director at Breakout Labs and managing director at Breakout Ventures. Now a science startup can grow from entrepreneurial infancy to adolescence while staying in the Breakout family. [ Fortune ] WHY VC IS A LIFESTYLE NOT A JOB, WHY YOU MUST DO POST-MORTEMS ON GOOD AND BAD DEALS & WHY SOCIETY IS ON A DOWNGRADE WITH KATHLEEN UTECHT, MANAGING PARTNER @ CORE INNOVATION CAPITALKathleen Utecht is a General Partner @ Core Innovation Capital, I would say one of the most under the radar but immensely exciting funds in market and they are looking to revolutionize financial services with their portfolio. With their portfolio are the likes of NerdWallet, PayJoy, fundera and Mayvenn just to name a few. Prior to Core, Kat was an investor at Comcast Ventures and WVP Ventures. Prior to her venture roles, Kath invested in and led Green Rock Entertainment, an online/offline commerce startup. Before that, Kat cut her teeth in the world of finance working as an investment banker at Raymond James. [ 20 VC ] Blue Bottle's investment success owes much to the personal taste of Silicon Valley investorsBlue Bottle's fancy coffee shops have long been a favorite haunt of Silicon Valley's movers and shakers. So at some point, a who's who of prominent venture capitalists decided that since they were pouring money into everything else, they might as well fund their preferred baristas too. Never mind that they had little experience in the coffee business. That act of "entrepreneurial camaraderie," as one investor described it to TechCrunch, set Blue Bottle on the cash-paved path that ultimately led to its reported $500 million sale to Nestle this week. [ Mashable ] Google Allowed Advertisers To Target People Searching Racist Phrases - BuzzFeedGoogle, the world's biggest advertising platform, allows advertisers to specifically target ads to people typing racist and bigoted terms into its search bar, BuzzFeed News has discovered. Not only that, Google will suggest additional racist and bigoted terms once you type some into its ad-buying tool. Type "White people ruin," as a potential advertising keyword into Google's ad platform, and Google will suggest you run ads next to searches including "black people ruin neighborhoods." Type "Why do Jews ruin everything," and Google will suggest you run ads next to searches including "the evil jew" and "jewish control of banks." BuzzFeed News ran an ad campaign targeted to all these keywords and others this week. The ads went live and were visible when we searched for the keywords we'd selected. Google's ad buying platform tracked the ad views. The issue is not unique to Google. On Thursday, ProPublica reported a similar issue with Facebook's ad targeting system. VC-in-Residence program aims to help underrepresented minorities break into venture capitalThere’s a shortage of women, non-binary people and men of color in the venture capital world. That’s why Pipeline Angels, an angel investing bootcamp for underrepresented people in tech, has launched a VC-in-Residence program to help people from diverse backgrounds become managing or general partners at VC firms. While there are some people of color in the VC world, it can be hard for associates to climb the ladder to become managing or general partners or for underrepresented people in tech to start their own funds, Pipeline Angels founder Natalia Oberti Noguera told me. “Something I found, in terms of who is getting the funding to launch their own VC firms, it’s straight, cis white guys with friends and family,” Oberti Noguera said. “It’s that early network.” [ Tech Crunch ] Reid Hoffman: LinkedIn’s Freelancers Aren’t Worried About Automation (Yet)Last year, LinkedIn added a freelance marketplace called ProFinder, where businesses and individuals can seek out services ranging from web design to public speaking. And while there are currently 70,000 freelancers on the new network, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman sees it getting much bigger–eventually. In an exclusive interview with Fast Company, Hoffman explains why he’s expecting it to take a while to scale up the freelance platform, and shares his take on why the freelancers who use ProFinder don’t seem to be worried about the threat of automation in the near-term. [ FastCompany ] Some Thoughts On Burn RatesThe startup and venture capital businesses are based on a general idea that you can and should invest heavily into your business in order to increase value creation, amplify it, and accelerate it. These investments mostly take the form of operating losses, driven by headcount, where the monthly expenses are larger, often much larger, than revenues. These losses are known in the industry vernacular as “burn rates” – how much cash you burn on a monthly basis. [ AVC ] Startup complacency is the other side of success that nobody talks aboutThe Technical Challenges of Measuring Gravitational Waves - Rana Adhikari of LIGORedmart’s new head of tech spent nights stamping envelopes for his first startupFacebook to German automakers: 'We’re the only company in Silicon Valley that’s not building a car'With New Fundraising, 9-Month-Old Bike-Sharing Startup Is Said To Be Worth $200 MillionAn eggless mayo startup is out to beat Hampton Creek — here's the verdictHow startups can avoid Bodega’s PR disasterUber is pushing hard to hire a CFO and top legal execs — even as others will be pushed out |