Exclusive: Dave McClure resigns as general partner of 500 Startups fundsDave McClure has resigned as a general partner of all funds and entities managed by 500 Startups, the seed investment group he founded in 2010, Axios has learned. The move comes after several women accused McClure of inappropriate behavior.
500 Startups partner Elizabeth Yin resigns over McClure situationElizabeth Yin has resigned as a partner with 500 Startups, where she also led the venture firm's Mountain View accelerator program, Axios has learned. Her departure follows the resignation of 500 Startups founder Dave McClure, who has been accused of sexual harassment.
Designer Fund's Ben Blumenfeld on how designers can become successful foundersBen Blumenfeld is a co-director at Designer Fund. In our 21st episode, he explains how designers can become successful founders, how to best develop a learning mindset, and what makes for an effective pitch to the investors at Designer Fund. Designers don’t have to be stuck using only pixels and pencils. Blumenfeld explains how, with the right skillset and curiosity, any designer can become a founder. That said, if you’re expecting to become a design founder, Blumenfeld says to remember that there’s a lot of non-design work to be done. [ Tech Crunch ] My experience with Dave McClure as a woman CEOTo begin, I am not condoning Dave’s behavior towards the women who have spoken up (or who have not yet spoken up). Hearing about this was a shock to me. His behavior was inappropriate to say the least and took advantage of his power. I am glad they spoke up and that Dave has to face the consequences. I simply want to share my own experience with Dave and his role in my getting funding as a woman CEO. [ Rashni Sinha - SlideShare Cofounder ] Startup Funding In Austin, TX Finds Its Way To Minority EntrepreneursAustin is known for a lot of things including a booming tech scene and sharp increases in population. But one thing the Texas capital is not receiving (positive) recognition for? Being diverse. A number of organizations and entrepreneurs are hoping to change that. This story is the first of a three-part Crunchbase News series looking at diversity in tech in Austin and the Lone Star State as a whole. Let’s be clear that this problem is not exclusive to Austin. Just three percent of America’s venture capital-backed startups are led by women, and only around one percent are led by African-Americans, according to a 2015 White House press release. Additionally, only 17 percent of startups, venture-funded or not, are founded by women. [ Crunchbase ] Mammoth task: billionaire Peter Thiel funded effort to resurrect woolly beastThe Silicon Valley titan, who has openly challenged death as an inevitability, invested $100,000 in a project to bring the extinct mammoth back to life. PayPal billionaire and Gawker war-wager Peter Thiel has invested $100,000 in a research effort to resurrect the woolly mammoth. Thiel, who believes that viewing death as inevitable is a sign of “complacency of the western world”, gave the money to Harvard University genomics professor George Church, whose laboratory is attempting to revive the extinct pachyderm. [ The Guardian ] Trucking Is About to be Disrupted as More Truckers Get a Common DeviceThe trucking industry is still very old-school — paper schedules on cork boards, if you listen to tech investor Reid Hoffman — but everybody needs trucks, which makes it a very attractive industry for technologists and investors. The thing that’s going to revolutionize trucking though, is something most people already have: an iPhone or Android or other smartphone. “The smartphone revolution is beginning to hit truckers,” Hoffman told Kara Swisher on the excellent Recode Decode podcast released on Monday. “They all have … a general-purpose computer that can help match and route and deal with things like taking pictures of incomplete loads and other things. You have this whole place where the experience can be transformed. It makes a very big difference in the world.” That’s why Hoffman invested in — insert “Uber but for” here — Convoy, a trucking start-up based in Seattle that aims to put trucking logistics onto the cloud to make the trucking business more efficient. KLEINER PERKINS GP, ERIC FENG ON HOW THE BEST FUNDS USE TECH AND DATA TO FIND COMPANIES, WHY ENTREPRENEURS START THE FIRE AND VCS ADD THE ROCKET FUEL & WHY CONSUMER IS HARDER THAN EVER TODAYEric Feng is a Partner @ Kleiner Perkins, one of the world’s leading venture capital firms with prior investments in the likes of Google, Amazon, Snapchat, Uber, Twitter and more. At Kleiner Eric focuses on consumer and incubation with his current being his co-founding role with Packagd, the startup building a family of apps offering a new mobile shopping experience. Packagd recently raised a $6m Series A led by Forerunner and GV. Prior to KPCB, Eric held the role of CTO at both Flipboard and Hulu. [ 20 VC ] VC Aileen Lee just offered some very specific advice to female founders looking for fundingIn May, at TechCrunch’s Disrupt event in New York, researchers from Harvard Business Review were in the audience, and they were taking notes. Using their findings, along with the help of a linguistic software program that scanned video transcriptions of Q&A sessions between on-stage venture capitalists and startup founders, they came to an interesting — and disturbing — conclusion. They discovered the investors (and 40 percent of them were women) tended to ask men questions about the potential for gains at their startups, while they asked women about the potential for losses. [ Tech Crunch ] An Open Letter to Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Travis Kalanick, and All of Silicon ValleyThis is an open letter, after two weeks of reading about sexual harassment scandals. Dear Silicon Valley We know you're very sorry about creating a culture that for decades has demeaned and excluded both women and people of color. Thanks so much for your multiple apologies. The question is, are you satisfied with your own apologies, or do you want to change things? If you do, I have a few suggestions. It certainly has been a fascinating couple of weeks. It began with Travis Kalanick's departure as Uber CEO, in the wake of a blog post detailing the company's routine practice of protecting and concealing sexual harassment. [ Inc. ] Mark Pincus and Reid Hoffman are launching a new group to rethink the Democratic PartyMark Pincus and Reid Hoffman want to hack the Democratic Party. Not literally. Not the likes of what befell the team behind Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, resulting in scores of private emails being published online — and countless news stories that helped seal her defeat. No, Pincus, the co-founder of Zynga, and Hoffman, the brains behind LinkedIn, want to force Democrats to rewire their philosophical core, from their agenda to the way they choose candidates in elections — the stuff of politics, they said, that had been out of reach for most voters long before Donald Trump became president. [ Recode ] Invest early, go global and aim for exits: VC firm Accel explains its investment strategy"Venture capital is a boutique business - it's about relationships, emotion and instinct. It's hard to institutionalise," Sonali De Rycker, general partner at Accel, says. "But we asked ourselves: how can you help your founders go global if you haven't done it yourself?" In Paris, They Do Start-Ups With StyleIn Silicon Valley, people famously work long hours. Do what it takes. Perfect that gadget or widget. Help your wealthy venture capital backer raise the money necessary to buy that sweet summer villa on Capri. But in recent years, work-life balance has become a cause célèbre among tech workers, who are questioning whether a shot at the brass ring is really worth it if you don’t get to see your children grow up. The recent exaltation of parenthood by star executives like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has amplified suspicions that you can work hard while living well. [ NY Times ] |