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End-to-end operators are the next generation of consumer business

TechCrunch

How to communicate with your board in tough times. The key purpose of being end-to-end is to deliver an even better value proposition to consumers relative to incumbent alternatives. Back in 2014, Chris Dixon wrote a bit about this phenomenon in his post on “ Full stack startups.” More posts by this contributor.

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Sequoia Heritage, Stripe and others invest $200M in African fintech Wave at $1.7B valuation

TechCrunch

And this has investors, especially foreign ones, excited and looking to get on board. Drew Durbin and Lincoln Quirk founded Sendwave in 2014 to offer little or no fee remittances from North America and Europe to select African and Asian countries. ” Going up against incumbents. From Sendwave to Wave.

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Polly snags $37M in Menlo-led Series B to automate workflows for mortgage lenders

TechCrunch

Carmel previously founded Ethos Lending (which sold to Fenway Summers in 2014 ) and it was that experience that helped him conclude there were serious gaps in the market for automating workflows for lenders. The need certainly seems to be there. For example, o ne company in the space, Optimal Blue, was purchased by Black Knight for $1.8

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CommerceIQ gets its horn as capital continues to flow into e-commerce infrastructure startups

TechCrunch

The CEO is Guru Hariharan, who you might remember from retail analytics company Boomerang Commerce , a Startup Battlefield finalist in 2014. As part of the investment, Priya Saiprasad, partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, is joining CommerceIQ’s board of directors. “E-commerce He exited the company to Lowe’s in 2019.

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How W4 plans to monetize the Godot game engine using Red Hat’s open-source playbook

TechCrunch

Godot, for the uninitiated, is a cross-platform game engine first released under an open source license back in 2014, though its initial development pre-dates that by several years. But Linietsky was keen to highlight one core difference between W4 and these incumbents: it’s expertise. ” Support and services.

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In its first funding in 7 years, profitable fintech Lower raises $100M Series A led by Accel

TechCrunch

“We were immediately intrigued because Ohio-based Lower echoes both of these themes,” said Accel partner John Locke, who led the firm’s investment in Lower and is taking a seat on the company’s board as part of the investment. Snyder co-founded Lower in 2014 with the goal of making the homebuying process simpler for consumers.

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The Uber that Never Was

This is going to be BIG.

Using the proliferation of newly GPS-enabled mobile devices to enable taxi hailing and beat out stagnant incumbent providers was always going to be a big win for consumers. How many LPs are asking the top tier funds what they’re doing to enforce and oversee values and culture from a board perspective?

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