Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer faced a lot of sexism and condescension when they launched their e-commerce marketplace for weird art–that is until they introduced an imaginary cofounder named Keith.
When Penelope Gazin and Kate Dwyer decided to start their own online marketplace for weird art, they didn’t expect it to be easy. After all, the L.A.-based duo of artists were bootstrapping the project with a few thousand dollars of their own money and minimal tech skills. But it wasn’t just a tight budget that added friction to the slow crawl toward launching; the pair also faced their share of doubt from outsiders, spanning from the condescending to the outright sexist.
“When we were getting started, we were immediately faced with ‘Are you sure? Does this sound like a good idea?’,” says Dwyer. “I think because we’re young women, a
lot of people looked at what we were doing like, ‘What a cute hobby!’ or ‘That’s a cute idea.'” [ Fast Company ]
Venture capital is headed for a ‘huge, rude awakening’
Investment firm Social Capital has filed with the SEC to create an alternative to banks for companies that want to go public. And according to its CEO, Chamath Palihapitiya, the future will mean doing a lot of other things that venture capitalists don’t usually do.
“We do seed, venture, growth, equity, debt, private, public,” Palihapitiya said on the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher. “Once we’ve made a decision to be beside you, we will never go away. We will deploy code, we will deploy people, we will help you every day understand your business better.” [ Recode ]
Who is new Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi?
So who is Dara Khosrowshahi?
Khosrowshahi was born in Iran in 1969, but he emigrated to the U.S. as a child in 1978 following the Iranian Revolution. His father was detained by Iranian authorities for six years after he returned to the country to look after his father when Khosrowshahi was aged 13. Khosrowshahi grew up in the New York State area with his mother and two brothers.
After graduating with an electrical engineering degree from Brown University, Khosrowshahi joined Allen and Co as an analyst in 1991. His move into travel came when he joined USA Networks (now IAC) in 1998 and the company went on to acquire a majority stake in Expedia, then a subsidiary of Microsoft, in 2001 at a valuation of around $2 billion. [ Tech Crunch ]
How To Value Crypto Assets
Given the explosive increase in the prices of crypto assets this year, there is a growing discussion on how to value them. This is a very good thing. Andy Kessler weighs in on the topic in this WSJ piece which was published over the weekend. You should go read the piece as it does a good job of dissecting the economics of the transaction processing system that underlies Bitcoin (aka the Bitcoin Mining Network). [ AVC ]
Stanford Dropout Says Blood Startup Won't Be Another Theranos
A Stanford University dropout wants to change blood testing with a machine that promises precise results from a fingerprick.
This is not the story of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos Inc. -- which soared to fame and then just as
spectacularly crashed to Earth two years ago. With this new startup, some investors believe, things will be different.
Tanay Tandon and co-founder Deepika Bodapati, who dropped out of the University of Southern California, have raised $3.7 million from investors led by venture-capital firm Sequoia Capital to kickstart their company, Athelas, named for the healing plantin “The Lord of the Rings.” The founders, who are 20 and 22, respectively, say that their portable blood analyzer, a black cylinder that looks a lot like Amazon Inc.’s Echo device, can run a complete blood-cell count from a fingerprick test done at home. [ Bloomberg ]
These are the unicorns pulling in the most cash
In light of WeWork's monstrous $4.4 billion funding round and the release of our annual Unicorn Report,
we've put together a ranking of current US-based VC-backed unicorns by capital raised in the last 18 months. In that time frame, the top three companies, Uber, WeWork and Airbnb—which are, unsurprisingly, the three most valuable startups in the US—have procured the lion's share of VC dollars, a total of nearly $14 billion.
So far this year, US companies with a $1 billion or greater valuation have been responsible for more than 20% of deal value but only 1% of the total number of completed financings, according to the PitchBook Platform. It's a staggering statistic, but given some of the recent deals among tech's heavy hitters—Airbnb's $1 billion round in March or Lyft's $600 million financing in May—it makes sense. [ PitchBook ]
New Data: Selling Your Company Might Get Easier Than Raising Money
Raising money has always been hard, but today's fundraising environment has some new edges for entrepreneurs, according to the latest venture capital and private equity fundraising report from Pitchbook. For the newest entrepreneurs and the youngest companies, the first financing check is becoming harder than ever.
It's not just a matter of venture capital investors like me being pickier, which perhaps they are, but it's also a matter of less capital being available at the early stage than ever before. First, there's geography. Over 50% of all the funds raised in the last year are from just one state. You guessed it--California. Are 50% of the entrepreneurs in California? Of course not, but some of you move there every day. [ Inc. ]
US-Educated Founders, Born In Asia, Find It Advantageous For Their Startups To Grow At Home
Last weekend, Crunchbase News explored which U.S.-based schools minted the most unicorns. While digging through the alma maters of VC-backed entrepreneurs, we found another interesting phenomenon: some of the most-heavily-funded companies in Asiahappen to have founders who went to schools in the U.S. These founders have built companies in every industry you can think of, from ridesharing, fintech, and agtech. [ CrunchBase ]
Sequoia Capital's Head Of Corporate On The Future Of Technology
Jeff Pashalides is the Head of Corporate at Sequoia Capital, one of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the world. As such, he operates at the intersection between those who are shaping the technology landscape (investors and entrepreneurs) and the CEOs, COOs, and CIOs who would invest in those companies or who would articulate needs unmet by current technologies. As such, he has an unusually strong network and an unusually deep reservoir of insights into the future of technology. [ Forbes ]
Late last year, before the November election, John Borthwick warned me that, if Trump won, the mechanics of the entire start-up investment ecosystem would grind to a shuddering halt. “I was wrong,” the New York-based chief executive of Betaworks now recognizes. Today, Borthwick admits that he’s “surprised” about how little has actually changed under President Trump. Indeed, in many ways, he acknowledges, things have never been better for early stage investors and incubators of tech talent like Betaworks – particularly in AI which, he says, now offers “extraordinary potential”. So, I ask, are we in a Trump bubble?
Is it 1995 all over again? [ TechCrunch ]
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