A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

MAY 19, 2021

As USV is now about six months into investing our first climate fund, I am starting to see more clearly what climate investing is all about and my partner Albert said something in a team meeting earlier this week that really stuck with me. I did not write it down but it was something like, “we’ve spent two hundred years taking carbon out of the ground, burning it, and putting it into the atmosphere and what we now need to do is get it from the atmosphere and put it back into the grou

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

The real estate sales market has been in an upswing this year, and today a startup that’s addressing one of homeowners’ biggest needs — repair and maintenance services, and specifically the stress of sorting these out when things break down — is announcing some funding on the heels of strong growth. Super — which has built a business providing repair and maintenance for electrical and mechanical systems, appliances and plumbing by way of a monthly subscription ̵

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OnStartups

MAY 19, 2021

I’ve been thinking about, talking about and working on culture for at least a decade. (Not counting the 15 years I spent being mostly clueless about culture in my first startup). I've spent hundreds of hours working with the HubSPot team to create the HubSpot Culture Code deck. It has been invaluable for us as we've scaled from a 2 founder startup to a 4,000+ person scale-up with a market cap in excess of $22 billion.

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StartupNation

MAY 19, 2021

The creator economy is made up of 50 million creators , who are all living out their dream jobs thanks to platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. This new economy is all about aligning your business with your creative calling, and for many, that means creating an online course or program to monetize their zone of genius and help others level up in theirs.

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Lack of digitalization decreases business competitiveness. To thrive, embracing modern solutions becomes essential. The approach to digitalization often aligns with a company's business model. This shift not only boosts productivity but also automates processes and improves security. The tech market offers a wealth of technologies tailored for management, planning, and forecasting, replacing outdated pen-and-paper methods.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

European startup studio eFounders has now been around for 10 years. And because a birthday sounds like a good opportunity to share some metrics, the portfolio companies have reached a valuation of $2 billion together — only 18 months after reaching $1 billion. eFounders says it is focused on building the future of work. In practical terms, it means the company is building B2B SaaS startups with a focus on productivity and workflows.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

A.I.-powered voice transcription service Otter.ai wants to make it even easier for its business users to record their meetings. The company is today introducing a new feature, Otter Assistant, which can automatically join the Zoom meetings on your calendar, transcribe the conversations, and share the notes with other participants. Though Otter.ai is already integrated with Zoom, the assistant is designed to make using transcription something you don’t have to constantly remember to enable

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

MAY 19, 2021

The lessons I learned in my 20-year journey Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

The podcasting world remains one of the most vibrant formats in media (and I am not just saying that since the Equity crew won a Webby yesterday for our not-that-humble podcast ). Its openness, diversity, freedom and ease-of-authoring has broadened the medium to all sorts of hosts on every subject imaginable. We experience that dynamism and verve in our own audio listening, but then we start to tune into our company’s internal communications, and, well, you certainly don’t need sleeping pills to

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

MAY 19, 2021

3 Seemingly A$$-Backwards Strategies I Use To Grow My Dream Online Business ?—? Nick Wolny I Finally Quit My Job Today: Here’s What I Learned ?—? Tim Denning Why Warren Buffett Called Berkshire Hathaway A $200bn Mistake ?—? Amardeep Parmar 9 Confessions From a Failed Startup CEO ?—? Rachel Greenberg One Year at Hopin, the Fastest Growing Startup in Europe?

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Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

The real estate market in South Korea is very fragmented, which means people often have to work with dozens of brokers before they find a new home. Founded in 2020 by a former WeWork executive, Dongnae wants to create a centralized base for brokers, serving as a multiple listing system (MLS). Since its first seed round last year, Dongnae has increased its brokerage partners to more than 70.

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

MAY 19, 2021

#1: Losing thousands of readers right from the start Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

Steve Sy, CEO of Great Deals, and William Chiongbian II, CEO of Fast Group, sign the contract for the companies’ strategic partnership. Image Credits: Great Deals. Founded in 2014, Great Deals is an e-commerce enabler that helps brands like Abbot, L’Oréal and Unilever build their online retail operations in the Philippines. The startup announced today that it has raised $30 million in Series B funding led by Fast Group , one of the Philippines’ biggest logistics firms, with support from CV

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Entrepreneur's Handbook

MAY 19, 2021

6 concepts I wish I’d thought differently about Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

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CAPTARGET presents a masterclass in M&A deal sourcing. Learn to cast a wide net, embracing seller self-identification. Consistency is the linchpin: keep the origination process steady for a reliable flow of opportunities. Diversify your tactics, employing various tools and vendors. Tech matters! Understand DNS settings, domain authority, and brand presence for optimal outreach.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

How are mom-and-pop self-storage facilities meant to keep up with the tech offered by the massive, ever-growing chains? That’s a key part of the idea behind OpenUnit , a team I first wrote about in August of last year. You bring the storage units, they bring the website, payment processing and backend tools you need to manage them. They don’t charge facility owners a monthly subscription fee, instead taking a cut of each payment as the payments processor.

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Entrepreneurs' Organization

MAY 19, 2021

Contributed by Annabel Maw , the director of communications at JotForm , a full-featured online forms platform for easy data collection and management. Why would a small business want to survey its customers? Because surveys reveal what customers are really thinking and what they really want. The simplest way to learn about someone’s shopping preferences?

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

Tess Hatch, vice president and partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, will join us at TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 as a judge for our Startup Battlefield competition. By the way startups, you can still apply now until May 27 to take part in the competition here ! At Bessemer, Tess spearheads frontier tech investments, including the scaling and commercialization of revolutionary technologies, including drones, space-based observation and launch, agritech and much more.

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OurCrowd

MAY 19, 2021

Kryon®, international innovators in user-friendly enterprise automation, robotic process automation (RPA) and process discovery, announced it has earned the ISO 27701 certification, a data privacy extension that offers a framework for compliance with the EU’s GDPR, California’s CCPA, and other global data privacy standards. Achieving certification for this stringent framework ensures that automation projects created through Kryon Full-Cycle Automation are following best security practices each t

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Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago, they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Turning analytics into a source of revenue means integrating advanced features in unique, hard-to-steal ways. Download this white paper to discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your analytics.

TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

At the end of March, TechCrunch reported that buzzy startup Pipe — which aims to be the “Nasdaq for revenue” — had raised $150 million in a round of funding that values the fintech at $2 billion. Well, that deal has closed and in the end, Miami-based Pipe confirms that it has actually raised $250 million at a $2 billion valuation in a round that was “massively oversubscribed,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Harry Hurst.

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OurCrowd

MAY 19, 2021

NEW YORK, May 19, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Ro, the healthcare technology company, today announced the acquisition of Modern Fertility, a high-growth reproductive health company focused on addressing gaps in women’s healthcare through fertility testing, research, education, and community. Since 2017, Modern Fertility has empowered people with ovaries nationwide to play a more active role in their health and build the lives they want on their own terms.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

Unbounce , a Vancouver startup best known for helping marketers create automated landing pages, added a new wrinkle this morning when it announced it has acquired Snazzy.ai , an early stage automated copywriting startup. The two companies did not share the terms. Unbounce Chief Strategy Officer Tamara Grominsky says that her company focuses on helping customers convert their customers into sales, and with Snazzy, it gets some pretty nifty technology based on GPT-3 artificial intelligence technol

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The Seraf Compass

MAY 19, 2021

How many times have you heard an entrepreneur say they have no competition? After hearing thousands of investor pitches over the years, my rough estimate is that I hear it about 25% of the time. When I hear a CEO blurt this out, I chuckle to myself and think, well, maybe there isn’t a need for their product. Or, maybe the CEO is just clueless about their target market.

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Advertiser: ZoomInfo

Marketing technology is essential for B2B marketers to stay competitive in a rapidly changing digital landscape — and with 53% of marketers experiencing legacy technology issues and limitations, they’re researching innovations to expand and refine their technology stacks. To help practitioners keep up with the rapidly evolving martech landscape, this special report will discuss: How practitioners are integrating technologies and systems to encourage information-sharing between departments and pr

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

Part of learning to be an engineer is understanding the tools you’ll have to work with — voltmeters, spectrum analyzers, things like that. But why use two, or eight for that matter, where one will do? The Moku:Go combines several commonly used tools into one compact package, saving room on your workbench or classroom while also providing a modern, software-configurable interface.

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Dream It

MAY 19, 2021

The ‘How much are you raising?’ question is a common and important component of investor Q&A. Seasoned founders have a particular way of answering this question. In this Dreamit Dose, Managing Director Adam Dakin presents his view on the right way to answer it after hearing hundreds, if not thousands, of founder pitches. Make the specific amount you are raising and corresponding milestones clear at the beginning of the pitch, and do not give a range.

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TechCrunch

MAY 19, 2021

Netlify , the startup that’s bringing a micro services approach to building websites, announced today that it has acquired YC alum FeaturePeek. The two companies did not share the purchase price. With FeaturePeek, the company gets a major upgrade in its design review capability. While Netlify has had a previewing capability called Deploy Previews in the platform since 2016, it lacked a good way for reviewers to discuss and comment on the design.

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Smart Hustle Magazine

MAY 19, 2021

While 2020 was challenging for most of the general population, it was a particularly turbulent year for small business owners who learned to quickly adapt to a struggling economic landscape. The UPS Store, Inc. recently released findings from their 2021 Inside Small Business Survey which revealed the strength of small business owners who demonstrated an inspiring sense of resiliency.

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Just by embedding analytics, app owners can charge 24% more for their product. How much value could you add? This framework from Software Pricing Partners explains how application enhancements can extend your product offerings. You’ll learn: How to take a disciplined approach to pricing The three elements of the Packaging Decision Framework Ways to structure your new embedded analytics offering Download the White Paper to learn about How To Package & Price Embedded Analytics.

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