SoftBank's Masayoshi Son on the Hunt for More DealsTECHnalysis Research President Robert O'Donnell and Bloomberg’s Cory Johnson discuss tech giant SoftBank’s search for deals and investments. They speak with Emily Chang on “Bloomberg Technology.” [ Bloomberg ] UK startup Huddle is being sold to a private equity firm for an estimated $89 millionEnterprise software startup Huddle is selling to San Francisco-based private equity firm Turn/River, after months of financial struggles left the firm urgently seeking a buyer or a new round of funding. The company offers collaboration software and competes with Silicon Valley rivals like Box and Dropbox. It's headquartered in San Francisco and London. [ Business Insider ] The 17-Year Slow Burn: A Dotcom-Era Dorm Room Startup Finally Gets Its Exit The business world's obsession with tales of tech startups and entrepreneurship is typically focused on very specific kind of success story: The kind where startup founders raise giant piles of venture capital to fuel hypergrowth, and then ride said hypergrowth to an IPO or sale. But there are plenty of other paths to success. Not all of them involve venture capital, and some end up earning more money for their founders in the end. Blaine Vess is one example. He founded Student Brands in 1999 out of his dorm room at North Central College in Illinois as a way to allow students to help each other study. At the height of the dotcom boom, he asked a family friend to invest in the company so he could hire a developer. The friend instead gave Vess an important piece of advice: Learn to program and build out the site yourself. Soon his site, Oppapers.com, was earning around $400 a month on ads, which felt like a small fortune for a college student in the 90’s. [ Fortune ] Online Lender Earnest Seeks to Raise $50 Million or Find BuyerEarnest, the online lending startup, is seeking to raise $50 million in new equity as it simultaneously looks for a buyer, according to people familiar with the situation. The San Francisco-based company hired Barclays as an adviser to pursue the so-called “dual-track” process, the people said. One of the people confirmed a Bloomberg reporton Monday that Earnest hired Barclays to sell the company for about $200 million, which the person said was lower than its previous, undisclosed, valuation. Earnest has previously raised $100 million in equity as well as $200 million in debt, according to Crunchbase. [ The Information ] Uber is the most valuable U.S. startup, with Airbnb and WeWork following far behind itBenchmark and SoftBank have been publicly negotiating an Uber deal that could let Benchmark pocket some of the cash it has made from Uber, and allow SoftBank to invest in the ride-hailing giant. The conversation has led to a discussion of Uber’s valuation. Uber investor Benchmark foresees it going as high as $100 billion, though, of course, it would have incentive to say that. For context, here’s a look at the 10 most valuable venture-backed U.S. startups — Uber sits squarely on top, according to the most recent PitchBook data. [ Recode ] Birchbox has held acquisition talks with several retailers, including WalmartBirchbox has recently been discussing a potential sale with several retailers, multiple sources told Recode. One potential acquirer who has spoken with the beauty subscription startup is Walmart, these people said, with conversations taking place between Walmart’s U.S. e-commerce chief Marc Lore and Birchbox co-founder and CEO Katia Beauchamp. It’s not clear how far along any of the talks are or whether they will result in a deal. Walmart has been on an acquisition tear under Lore, snatching up digital-first retailers like Bonobos and ModCloth, and continues to meet with other startups in the space. Birchbox and Walmart declined to comment. [ Recode ] Roivant, which creates companies around abandoned drugs, just raised $1.1 billion from SoftbankRoivant Sciences, a three-year-old, Basel, Switzerland-based company aiming to one day be a giant holding company for dozens of independent biopharmaceutical companies, has raised $1.1 billion in equity led by the Softbank Vision Fund — making it the latest in a string of enormous bets by Softbank, and putting the young outfit more squarely on the radar of the tech world. These 2 teens cold-called Sam Altman and became the youngest founders ever accepted to Y CombinatorWhen 14-year-old app developer Saroush Ghodsi cold-called famed Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sam Altman on a Friday night in January, he had no idea that he and his friend Stefan Stokic, then 16, would go on to become the youngest founders in Y Combinator history. At the time, Ghodsi and Stokic were just high school sophomores in Waterloo, Canada, and Jackson, Mississippi, respectively. They had become friends online and in 2016 decided to partner up on building a startup called Slik. Slik is an enterprise software system that allows salespeople to more effectively generate leads. The product began as a simple browser extension to collect email addresses, but when Ghodsi and Stokic realized how valuable their tool was to salespeople, they decided to build the product into what they hope will become a full-fledged Salesforce competitor. [ Mic ] Can the pioneering DNA-testing company satisfy the FDA while also staying true to its founding mission: putting people in control of their healthcare? Wojcicki, sitting in a glass conference room at the Mountain View, California, office of 23andMe, the company she cofounded in 2006, seems not to appreciate the irony of her story. Just four years earlier she paid a heavy price for trying to bulldoze her way through obstacles: In November 2013, the FDA gave 23andMe a forceful slap-down, barring the company from selling its revolutionary DNA spit test, which had stirred passionate interest and generated headlines for promising to democratize genetic testing and yield data-driven cures for disease. (Fast Company had even run a cover story calling her “The Most Daring CEO in America.”) The FDA declared her company’s service an “unapproved medical device,” a crippling blow. [ Fast Company ] A couple bought one of the most exclusive streets in San Francisco for $90,000 — take a look insideTina Lam and Michael Cheng are living their version of the American dream. The couple made headlines this week when a San Francisco Chronicle story outed their 2015 purchase of Presidio Terrace — a private cul-de-sac lined by $35 million mega-mansions. An unpaid tax bill caused the City of San Francisco to put it up for sale, without the knowledge of the street's wealthy residents. Lam, an engineer in Silicon Valley, and Cheng, a real-estate agent, scooped up the street, its sidewalks, and other "common ground" for $90,000. [ Business Insider ] ANDREW NG SPREADS THE GOSPEL OF AI WITH A NEW ONLINE SCHOOLANDREW NG IS a soft-spoken AI researcher whose online postings talk loudly. A March blog post in which the Stanford professor announced he was leaving Chinese search engine Baidu temporarily wiped more than a billion dollars off the company’s value. A June tweet about a new Ng website, Deeplearning.ai, triggered a wave of industry and media speculation about his next project. Today that speculation is over. Deeplearning.ai is home to a series of online courses Ng says will help spread the benefits of recent advances in machine learning far beyond big tech companies such as Google and Baidu. The courses offer coders without an AI background training in how to use deep learning, the technique behind the current frenzy of investment in AI. [ Wired ] |