Sophia Amoruso: Why I Raised Venture Capital AgainToday marks the announcement of the close of Girlboss’ $3.1 million round of seed funding, led by one of the best investors in the valley and (thank the lord) a woman—Nicole Quinn of top-tier Silicon Valley venture firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners. Joining her, alongside our existing investors Slow, BAM, Human Ventures, and others, are Gary Vaynerchuk and Troy Carter, two entrepreneurs I admire and respect so much. I couldn’t be more thrilled and honored to have their support in what we’re building, and am equally thrilled and honored to have been given this second chance by our community of incredible women, many of whom have followed my own ups and downs, choosing to continue rallying together for Girlboss. And me, surprisingly, despite it all. [ Girlboss ] Squarespace reportedly raises about $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuationSquarespace, the 14-year-old platform that makes it easy for essentially anyone to build their own website, is raising about $200 million from General Atlantic, valuing the company at a $1.7 billion valuation, Bloomberg reports. The plan with the funding is to buy stock from early employees and investors, giving them a way to cash out if they’re not trying to wait around for an IPO. Squarespace is a profitable company, with revenues increasing 50 percent in the last year to about $300 million. A big Squarespace competitor, public company Wix, is expected to generate about $424 million in revenue this year. [ Tech Crunch ] Women in Blockchain and CryptocurrenyMeltem Demirors, director of development at Digital Currency Group, and Maxine Ryan, co-founder and chief operating officer at Bitspark, discuss women in blockchain and cryptocurrency, the trends they're seeing and investing in blockchain technology. They speak on "Bloomberg Daybreak: Asia." [ Bloomberg ] Spotify's valuation tops $19 billion in the private markets as it prepares for a public listing
The value of music streaming service Spotify, which is planning a stock market listing, has grown around 20% to at least $19 billion in the past few months, outperforming US and European tech indexes, sources familiar with the matter said. [ Business Insider ] Masterclass: My new favourite fucked companyThey were glory days. A micro era – spanning a year, maybe two – when capital outpaced rationality, but did so in a way that benefit users just as much as entrepreneurs. Often more than entrepreneurs. I’m talking about the days of the first dot com bubble. Days of pet food shipped below cost, and free grocery deliveries, and fifty bucks just for signing up to PayPal, and every newspaper on earth suddenly giving its content away. And of rivers of money pouring into naturally niche publications like Slate and Salon and Plastic and a flurry of other media companies which seemed to exist to serve the needs of a tiny handful of very specific users. Remember Pseudo.com? [ Pando ] Uber is Going to 0, and Benchmark Knows It!On the surface this seems contrarian. When is being last better than being first? Steve Jobs understood this. Apple didn’t make the 1st MP3 player or the 1st smartphone. Yet in consumer tech, Apple is synonymous with both. [ Think growth ] Lawyer Culture: The Boundary To VC Funding For Legal Startups?powered by automation and artificial intelligence, the dissolution of major industries is a well-worn arc. The legal sector and its practitioners are not excluded from the narrative. In fact, a number of startups have crowded around lawyers in an effort to bring their offices from pen-and-paper to the cloud. [ CrunchBase ] Shervin Pishevar leaves his venture capital firmVenture capitalist Shervin Pishevar has left Sherpa Ventures, the San Francisco-based firm he co-founded in 2013, following multiple allegations of sexual harassment. He has denied all of the claims, including one made on-the-record to Axios. Sherpa's statement: We thank Shervin for his contributions and service in co-founding Sherpa Capital. The Sherpa team remains focused on supporting our founders and portfolio companies, serving the interests of our Limited Partners across all of our funds. We are deeply committed to our culture of integrity, inclusion, and respect and will continue to put these values into action through all of Sherpa Capital's activities, including the founders and companies we support. [ Axios ] Women in STEM 2017 session video - Women in InnovationHow A Female Engineer Built A Public Case Against A Sexual Harasser In Silicon ValleyA lot of women have come forward in the past few months with stories of being sexually harassed, and often the perpetrators have lost their jobs. But in other cases, women have shared their experiences and there has been no change. Silicon Valley engineer Niniane Wang wanted to be certain that when she came forward the man responsible paid a price. Wang has the kind of pedigree that should equal dollar signs for any investor: a master's in computer science, founder of Google Desktop and lead engineering positions at Microsoft. But for women in Silicon Valley, all those credentials might not add up to much. Over the past decade, the share of women getting venture funding has hovered around 2 percent. Wang is among the few who did manage to get some of that money. [ NPR ] Ford Chooses a Detroit Base to Take On Silicon ValleyIn a bid to link its historic past with its future products, Ford Motor said on Thursday that it had chosen a site near downtown Detroit as the base for a high-level team working on self-driving and electric cars. By relocating the group from its corporate campus in nearby Dearborn, Ford is embracing its Motor City roots and creating an urban work environment similar to a Silicon Valley start-up. It is the latest in a series of strategic moves by Ford, the nation’s second-biggest automaker after General Motors, to accelerate its development of battery-powered vehicles and driverless technology. Ford has long been a major presence in southeastern Michigan with its headquarters and factories, but the company has had minimal operations in Detroit — where its founder, Henry Ford, built a Model T assembly plant more than a century ago. “Returning to Detroit is particularly meaningful because it is where my great-grandfather originally set out to pursue his passion and where we always have called our home,” William C. Ford Jr., the company’s chairman, said at a media event announcing the plans. [ NY Times ] Two Kolkatans Meet At Indiana's Purdue University; Launch Y Media Labs In Silicon Valley, Part I11-08-17 Venture Capital Panel: Funding for IoT StartupsY Combinator announces growth program for later stage startupsSilicon Valley is flipping elections in its spare timeHow to put together an information memorandum to attract early-stage fundingStartup Spotlight: Unearth Technologies rethinks construction with a bird’s eye view of project managementFCC kills net neutrality rulesAnother startup is attempting to make all-in-one credit cards a thing3 ways local governments can make their state or city more startup-friendly in 2018 |