Blue Apron Put IPO Plans on Hold to Focus on FinancialsMeal-kit delivery company Blue Apron Inc. has put preparations for an initial public offering on hold, people familiar with the matter said, delaying selecting bankers while it focuses on improving its financial metrics. After starting to interview banks in September to advise on the IPO, Blue Apron has pushed back formally hiring underwriters until some time next year, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details aren’t public. Even with more than $800 million in annual revenue this year, the company has struggled to improve profit margins as much as management wanted in the face of more competition, the people said. A stronger performance is needed to support the $3 billion valuation that the company was targeting in an IPO. [ Bloomberg ] Leaked documents from startup Maple show the brutal economics of food deliveryIt has been a challenging year for food-delivery startups. SpoonRocket went out of business. Munchery is struggling. DoorDash and Postmates secured new investments at a lower and flat valuation, respectively. Maple, the restaurant-in-an-app backed by celebrity chef David Chang, is facing an uphill battle, too. The New York City-based delivery startup appears to have lost money on average on every meal in 2015, resulting in an operating loss of $9 million for the year on $2.7 million in gross revenue, according to an investor presentation reviewed by Recode. By March of 2016, Maple began squeaking out a tiny profit of 30 cents per meal — or a gross margin of 2 percent — driven in part by reduced food costs. [ Re/code ] TaskRabbit’s Stalled RevolutionThe company hasn’t succeeded in its big claims to change the nature of work and is talking increasingly about a more mundane goal: turning a profit. TaskRabbit was founded in 2008 with a big idea. On the company's website and app, people make money by assembling strangers’ Ikea furniture or cleaning their bathrooms. There’s nothing particularly exciting about other people’s chores, but Leah Busque, a former IBM engineer who started the company, had grand ambitions. “Our mission is to revolutionize how people work,” she told Bloomberg TV last year. [ Bloomberg ] Stripe is now worth $9 billion — its CFO explains why there are 'no plans' for an IPO anytime soonIn late November, the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Stripe, a San Francisco payments processing startup, had raised $150 million in a deal co-led by General Catalyst Partners and CapitalG (formerly Google Capital), that valued the startup at $9.2 billion. That's just shy of double the $5 billion valuation it had achieved in 2015, when a group of institutional investors including Visa handed over $80 million. Stripe was, and remains, the most valuable financial technology startup. The Road to Pokemon Go - and BeyondBackchannel’s Big Idea of 2016 is a breakout game that thrust us into the future. Here’s how it happened. How Airbnb Found a Mission—and a Brand. This excerpt from Leigh Gallagher’s upcoming The Airbnb Story reveals how the company searched for its soul—with sometimes painful results—and deepened its connection to customers.Airbnb has been one of the signature successes of the “sharing economy.” Along with Uber, it’s a young brand that has penetrated consumers’ consciousness—and rung up a $30 billion valuation—so quickly that many people already use it as a verb. (As in, “Let’s go to Miami for the weekend. We’ll Airbnb a place by the beach!”) In her upcoming book, The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry,
Made Billions … and Created Plenty of Controversy, Leigh Gallagher takes readers inside the company’s rise. Gallagher, an assistant managing editor at Fortune, identifies how Airbnb astutely expanded its brand from one known for putting budget travelers in people’s living rooms to endless exotic options (tree houses, anyone?) to renting ultra-high-end gems to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow. The book explores Airbnb’s significant challenges along the way, from battles with regulators to racial discrimination and other unwelcome behavior on its platform, but also how, with 140 million “guest arrivals” since its launch in 2008, it has clearly struck a chord with consumers. In the following excerpt, Gallagher examines how cofounder and CEO
Brian Chesky’s search for a mission for employees turned into a rebranding for the whole company, a revealing process that spotlights the interplay between what can be seen as a company’s soul and the way it engages with the outside world. How This Millennial Turned a Side Gig Into a $1 Million BusinessAfter a few years of working as a consultant at Bain and Co., Diana Goodwin noticed she was bored with her job. “When I started working there in 2007, I thought I’d be at Bain forever,” Goodwin says. “But I wasn’t as happy as I was when I first started working.” Goodwin and a friend who was also unhappy at work would spend hours brainstorming about businesses they could start. Then one day it struck Goodwin. Rather than look for new business idea, why not further develop the swimming school she started in 2003 when she was 19 and a student at the University of Toronto Rotman School of Management. [ Forbes ] The 38 most valuable enterprise startups of 2016Achal Bakeri could have taken an easier way out if he wanted. After all, he is the heir to one of 2016 was an odd year when it came to venture funding. While there was still plenty of money available, investors weren't as generous with their terms as they were during their check-writing frenzy of 2014-2015. They wanted to nab a bigger piece of equity for the money they put in. So, if the previous period was all about "unicorns" – startups that raised so much money at such great terms that their investors valued them at over $1 billion – 2016 was the year of the "down round." That's when cash-burning startups had to sell shares for a lower price than they previously commanded. Paytm is paying a price for its sudden stardomOn Nov. 08, Vijay Shekar Sharma found himself intensely in demand. The founder and CEO of Paytm, India’s largest mobile payments startup, was attending an industry event in Mumbai when prime minister Narendra Modi announced the move to demonetise Rs500 and Rs1,000 notes. As soon as Sharma’s session was over, his phone began ringing non-stop: almost every newsroom in the country wanted to know what the 38-year-old entrepreneur thought of the decision, which would suck out 86% of India’s cash in circulation. [ QZ ] Curated by Venture Pulse Team. Find us on : [ Venturepulse.org, CrunchBase,
AngelList ] |