In 2015, social payments company Tilt was worth $375 million. Less than two years later, it had lost over 95% of its value and was sold for a pittance. What happened? Slack, an Upstart in Messaging, Now Faces Giant Tech RivalsSlack is the classic Silicon Valley accidental success. Born three years ago, with roots in a failed video game, the messaging software is now used by five million people. The company behind it, Slack Technologies, found success by combining something that Silicon Valley fetishizes — rich data on how people use a product — with something it often overlooks: How do people actually feel while using it? This combination produced an unlikely hit that, when it became available in 2014, grew mostly by word of mouth, which is unusual for corporate software. Last year, the privately held company was valued at nearly $4 billion. [ NY Times ] Houzz Raises $165M Series D Funding Round Led By Sequoia To Fuel International ExpansionHouzz, the fast-growing home-remodeling site, today announced that it has raised a $165 million Series D round led by Sequoia Capital, one of its early backers. Existing investors Oren Zeev, New Enterprise Associates, GGV Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers also participated in this massive round, as well as new investors DST Global and T. Rowe Price. [ TC ] Meet The Top Women Investors In VC In 2017Just six female investors have claimed spots on this year’s Midas List, up from five women a year ago. The list also has two female newcomers, Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, and Ann Miura-Ko, cofounder and partner at Floodgate Fund. The Midas List, coproduced by Forbes with TrueBridge Capital Partners, ranks VCs on the number and size of exits over the past five years, with a premium on bolder early-stage deals. VCs in the top 10 averaged 10 deals involving companies with at least a $200 million acquisition or IPO, or a private valuation of more than $400 million. All 100 VCs averaged no less than nine of these deals. [ Forbes ] Midas 2017: Meet The 100 Best Venture Capitalists In The WorldTo break into the top echelon of the world's best tech investors requires the kind of special return that most venture capitalists spend a career chasing. For Founders Fund's Brian Singerman, Stemcentrx has proven just such a golden outcome. [ Forbes ]Climbing the wrong hillI know a brilliant young kid who graduated from college a year ago and now works at a large investment bank. He has decided he hates Wall Street and wants to work at a tech startup (good!). He recently gave notice to his bosses, who responded by putting on a dog and pony show to convince him to stay. If he stays at the bank, the bosses tell him, he’ll get a raise and greater responsibility. Joining the technology industry, he’d be starting from scratch. He is now thinking that he’ll stay, despite his convincing declaration that he has no long term ambitions in finance. Pivot Survival Tactics from Kabam's 3 Near-Death TriumphsKabam's story is pretty well known. In a Cinderella story twist, the social network-turned-sports-turned-gaming company weathered three major pivots in 10 years to ultimately sell for $800 million. This is pretty much unheard of. But there's a big chunk of this unlikely tale that hasn't been told — how they managed to pull it off. In this exclusive interview, Co-founder and CEO Kevin Chou shares the most important hypotheses and actions that made their survival possible. This film about Facebook porn and violence moderators is darkThese are the real people keeping the internet nice and clean for you. VoiceOps founder Daria Evdokimova: “Our mission is to be moneyball for sales”VoiceOps (formerly Clover Intelligence) is an AI startup for voice enterprise optimization that just presented at Y Combinator’s Demo Day and raised seed funding from Accel, Founders Fund, Lowercase capital, Y Combinator, and AngelList, through Edelweiss’ syndicate. In this interview with VoiceOps co-founder and CEO Daria Evdokimova, we learn:
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