Brad Svrluga - GP at Primary Venture Partners What these guys have pulled off is a rare, difficult, and incredibly admirable thing in my mind. Generally, private-private mergers of companies relatively equal in stature present a world of risk and uncertainty for both parties. I’ve seen many that would make tremendous strategic sense, but for a variety of reasons they hardly ever get pulled off. The risks of such an undertaking are many - from questions over company leadership, board seats, complicated logistics of combining two teams, uncertainty over job security and lack of control over the overarching business strategy of the resulting entity. Add that to the reality that neither group of shareholders walks away with any immediate liquidity and the risk-reward is often hard to square. Billion-dollar startups were chock-full of kindness and controversy this year. These are our picks for the best deeds and worst offenses. Every year, we cook up a list of who's been naughty and who's been nice among the billion-dollar startups known as unicorns. This year was a relatively quiet one, but it wasn't without its fair share of goodwill toward consumers, in addition to the usual malfeasance and misconduct. Fast Company looked at the latest ranking of 183 unicorn startups provided by CB Insights and cross-referenced it against some of the year's biggest startup news. [ Fast Company ] 33 startups to watch in 2017, according to VC investors2017 is almost here and it's once again time to predict which startups will take the tech industry by storm. Who better to ask than the startup experts, the VCs that watch the industry, guide the startups, hear their pitches, and invest in them? So we reached out to a handful of top VCs and asked them which young or growth-stage startups will boom in 2017. [ Business Insider ] WHAT WE WOULD MISS IN AN ALL-AMAZON-SHOPPING WORLDWhat happens when the human element is removed from the retail experience? [ The New Yorker ] Bothsides TV Episode 13 with John Shahidi, CEO of ShotsMark Suster sits down with John Shahidi, CEO and co-founder of Shots. They discuss how he thinks about building products for younger audiences and how he worked with celebrities at the startups he has built. Three Business Lessons You Can Learn From AirbnbFortune's Leigh Gallagher explains. Salesforce asserted itself in 2016Salesforce has always liked to think of itself as an industry irritant, the company that was bucking the status quo and making the established players feel uncomfortable. But this year as the cloud mainstreamed and Salesforce took off on a $10 billion run rate, you couldn’t help but feel that after 17 years in business, that Salesforce’s time had finally come. [ Tech Crunch ] VENTURE CAPITAL JOBSVentures Principal at BP - San Francisco, CA Director or VP at Zanbato - Mountain View, CA Senior Analyst - Corporate Development Capital One - McLean, VA Director, Corporate Development VMware - Palo Alto, CA Citi Ventures Senior Vice President, Program Senior Lead Citi - San Francisco, CA Corporate Development Mergers & Acquisition Associate AT&T - Dallas, TX Corporate Development Mergers & Acquisition Associate at AT&T - Dallas, TX Outfitter - New York at Trumaker, NY, US Venture Investment Analyst at BUNGE - White Plains, NY Investment Associate at The McClatchy Company, Washington, DC Business Development Analyst/Associate for Services at Siemens, Mountain View, CA Venturing & Edge Technology Lead Booz Allen Hamilton - Washington, DC Director of People at Womply Lehi, Utah |