1 New York Investor Did More For Startups in 1 Tweet Than Most of Silicon Valley This YearJosh Kopelman, one of the general partners at New York early stage venture capital firm First Round, is looking for talent. News is, he knows how to not stop looking when he's exhausted his immediate network. Mr. Kopelman's surprising tweet pinged into my feed retweeted from another investor, Kirsten Green at Forerunner. When I saw what he was up to, I retweeted it to my follower base, which has a lot of power women: Startups are cheaper to build, but more expensive to grow – here’s why Andrew Chen
Not only do a number of these trends make building new products cheap, in many cases it’s about driving the costs down to zero. If we zoom just into AWS / cloud computing, you see how a massive amount of competition is leading to significantly lower costs – even some vendors giving away their services pro bono: SoftBank Vision Fund Leads $200 Million Bet on Indoor Farms
Masayoshi Son has discovered a green thumb. The SoftBank Group Corp. chief’s Vision Fund is leading a $200 million investment in Silicon Valley startup Plenty, which says it has cracked the code on growing crops indoors super efficiently. Other participants in the round include Moore Capital Management founder Louis Bacon as well as existing backers such as DCM Ventures and funds that invest on behalf of Alphabet’s Eric Schmidt and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. [ Bloomberg ] Why Should I Start a Startup?Michael Seibel Y Combinator A lot of people ask themselves this question. They often mull over one or more of the following facts: My answer to why you should start a startup is simple: there is a certain type of person who only works at their peak capacity when there is no predictable path to follow, the odds of success are low, and they have to take personal responsibility for failure (the opposite of most jobs at a large company). Here is how I learned this about myself. Clara Labs nabs $7M Series A as it positions its AI assistant to meet the needs of enterprise teamsClara Labs, creator of the Clara AI assistant, is announcing a $7 million Series A this morning led by Basis Set Ventures. Slack Fund also joined in the round, alongside existing investors Sequoia and First Round. The startup will be looking to further differentiate within the crowded field of email-centric personal assistants by building in features and integrations to address the needs of enterprise teams. Founded in 2014, Clara Labs has spent much of the last three years trying to fix email. When CC-ed on emails, the Clara assistant can automatically schedule meetings — reasoning around preferences like location and time. [ Tech Crunch ] Investing In Women: Venture Capitalist Jesse Draper's Best Bet YetJesse Draper is betting big on female founded and led companies through her new venture capital fund Halogen Ventures. She saw the big white space in investing in women and realized that there is no lack of pipeline, only lack of dollars being allocated to this under looked at class of investments, women led and founded companies. [ Forbes ]Un-break my heart. Our investment in MendNicole Quinn of Lightspeed Venture Partners Have you ever had your heart broken? A relationship ending can be devastating. It can also be a catalyst for change. A gluttonous holiday season is often the catalyst to get a fitness coach. A new job in management is often the catalyst to get an executive coach. These are tried and tested methods of self-improvement. We have a coach for other areas of our life, so why don’t we have one for relationships? Now, you can. Ellen (“Elle”) Huerta, the founder of Mend, brought her unique insight into heartbreak to the screen on Planet Of The Apps. Elle’s passion stems from her own experience with heartbreak. Her own personal breakup made her take the leap to find help, and with Mend, she is now making a relationship coach available to all. Like so many of the founders we meet at Lightspeed, this company started with finding a solution to an authentic problem Elle faced. How we work at HomebrewSatya Patel of Homebrew In many of our first meetings with startups during the fundraising process, founders ask us exactly how we work with companies. So I thought it would be helpful to answer that question in public, both because it’s asked frequently and because it’s critical to the relationships that we build with founders who choose to partner with us. We have a few formal ways in which we work with founders (the informal being text, Slack, email and calls all day, every day!) during the seed stage. Women Are Better at Crowdfunding Than MenWhen it comes to raising funds from large groups of anonymous donors over the internet, women come out tops. That could be a boon for job creation and economic growth. A new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and The Crowdfunding Center shows that women across the world consistently outperformed men on funding campaigns: Globally, females were 32 percent more successful than males in reaching their funding targets; in Asia, women achieved twice as much success as men. [ Bloomberg ] Presence Capital has made 33 VR and AR investments in less than 2 yearsPresence Capital — one of the earliest venture capital firms to focus on virtual reality and augmented reality startups — is today announcing that it has made 33 investments. That’s a lot of investments for a fund that was announced in December 2015. Presence Capital has invested in Baobab Studios, Bigscreen, Harmonix, Nomadic, Meta, Resolution Games, Scope AR, Strivr, TheWaveVR, and Visbit. While Facebook bought Oculus in 2014, Presence Capital contends that its was the first VC fund to focus on VR/AR. Six of its investments are in game companies. “A little under two years ago, Paul Bragiel, Phil Chen, and I started Presence Capital so we could be at the forefront of the platform shift to VR and AR, while helping entrepreneurs who are just as passionate as us about this space,” said Amitt Mahajan, managing partner at Presence Capital, in a statement. “This
milestone is a huge reward in our journey that is really just taking off.” |