Exclusive : Airbnb Looks To Add To Executive RanksAirbnb’s on-again, off-again search for another senior executive to help CEO Brian Chesky manage the rapidly growing company is active again, said three people briefed on the matter. Among the people approached recently was Brent Bellm, former chief operating officer of vacation-rentals rival HomeAway and current CEO of ecommerce platform BigCommerce. He said he’s not looking to leave BigCommerce. [ The Information ] Shutting Down Your Startup: The Exit No One Talks AboutPhil Nadel, Syndicate Lead, Co-Founder, Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners Creating A Digital You That Never DiesIf you could create a digital version of yourself to stick around long after you've died, would you want to? The digital version could comfort your mother, joke with your friends -- it would have your sense of humor. But it would also have your other traits, perhaps the ones you're not proud of -- your stubbornness, your tendency to get angry, your fear of being alone. Would you want this digital version chatting with your loved ones if you were unable to control what it said? One entrepreneur has started asking these questions. In November 2015, Eugenia Kuyda's best friend Roman unexpectedly passed away. She created an experiment to bring parts of him back to life. [ CNN Money ] The inventor of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, outlines its three biggest threatsThe World Wide Web turned 28 today. But rather than celebrate, its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee, used the occasion to lay out what he sees as its greatest challenges. Specifically, Berners-Lee points to three threats: the loss of
control of personal data, the spread of misinformation, and lack of transparency in political advertising. He describes them as “three new trends” though they’ve each been around in some form for some time. Clearly, though, they’ve taken on a greater urgency for Berners-Lee and many others in the wake of the US presidential election that was an exhausting swirl of fake news, and ended in a result few saw coming. Why 2017 Should be a Great Year to Raise Venture CapitalRecently Upfront Ventures published its outlook for the technology startup world and venture capital overall titled it “WTF Happened to Winter?” The conclusion of our report was that winter did come, but it was mild and short. This was driven by the influx of corporate VCs, foreign VC money, sovereign wealth funds and the new war chests of VCs who raised new funds in the past 18 months. We are now publishing some of the VC survey data the report used and the results are clear — it’s a great time to be a startup raising venture capital. The results are in (full deck is published here) but a summary would be:
EXCLUSIVE: EARLY UBER INVESTORS SLAM TRAVIS KALANICKIt’s exceedingly rare for an investor in a private tech company to publicly criticize a portfolio company. Even Theranos hasn’t received so much as a public smack on the wrist from its biggest institutional tech investor, Draper Fisher Jurvetson. So it was somewhat shocking, within Silicon Valley, when Mitch and Freada Kapor, who in 2010 were among the earliest investors in Uber, penned a scathing open letter to the company’s board and fellow investors, calling out the company for a “toxic” pattern of bad behavior. After working for years “behind the scenes to exert a constructive influence on company culture,” the Kapors said they had given up on reforming Uber from the inside. “If we believed it was too late for Uber to change, we would not be writing this.” [ Vanity Fair ] Early Uber investor Chris Sacca hopes lessons from company spread before it's too lateProminent venture capitalist Chris Sacca says he hopes recent allegations of sexual harassment and discrimination at Uber will be a lesson for other tech companies. Sacca, a billionaire who has appeared on ABC’s "Shark Tank," runs venture capital fund Lowercase Capital and was an early investor in Uber, Twitter and Instagram. Intel to Buy Mobileye for About $15 Billion in Car Tech PushIntel Corp. plans to buy Israel’s Mobileye NV for about $15 billion, its second-biggest acquisition and a bold attempt to dominate technology for self-driving cars. The U.S. chipmaker will pay $63.54 per share in cash for Jerusalem-based Mobileye, according to a statement Monday from both companies. Mobileye shares closed at $47.27 on Friday in New York. [ Bloomberg ] Dating-app Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe shares her advice for entrepreneursAfter Whitney Wolfe's high-profile departure from Tinder, the recent inductee to the Forbes 30 under 30 list decided she would undertake a pretty lofty endeavor: she would try to make the internet more accountable. "For the first time I was able to truly appreciate the degree to which people can hide behind a screen," Wolfe said. Ultimately the desire to change the internet translated into a desire to change the way dating took place on the internet. Wolfe's firm, Bumble, turns the dating world on its head. On Bumble, girls make the first move. Unlike other dating apps, guys can't send the first message after a match. Once a match is made, the girl must message the guy within 24 hours otherwise the match disappears forever. 33 photos of the rise and fall of Apple in its earliest daysEverybody remembers when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and set the company on the incredible turnaround that's led to it becoming the world's most valuable company. But before its legendary rise, Apple was just three guys in a garage in Los Altos, California. Back then, it was a company struggling with IBM and Microsoft's meteoric success, and it would eventually face rough times where everything seemed like a lost cause. [ Business Insider ] |