February, 2023

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Grow Fast, Breakeven, or Die: How Moderate Cuts Will Kill Startups in 2023

This is going to be BIG.

“Extend your runway.” That’s what every VC is telling their portfolio companies these days. The very important part they’re leaving out, however, is, “But keep growing at the same pace before the cuts.” In other words, they’re telling companies that, in order to get next round funding, they’re somehow supposed to stay the same fast growers they were before the tech downturn, but just do that longer and get to higher aggregate revenue and performance numbers.

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3 Types of Questions Investors Ask When They’re NOT Interested In Investing in Your Startup

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Learning how to tell when investors aren’t interested will save you tons of time and frustration.

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Anthropic begins supplying its text-generating AI models to select startups

TechCrunch

Anthropic , a buzzy AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI employees, has begun offering partners access to its AI text-generating models. The first commercial venture to announce that it’s integrating Anthropic models is Robin AI , a legal tech startup that’s raised over $13 million from investors including Plural, Episode 1 and the Google Black Founders Fund.

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Ukraine One Year Later: Insights and Entrepreneurship in Action

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Since February 2022, the UN High Commission on Refugees reports that nearly 14 million people have been displaced from their homes in Ukraine—most of them seeking safety and shelter in other countries. More than 9 million of them crossed the border into Poland alone. Dawid Adach, a co-founder of technology company MDBootstrap and former EO Poland president from 2021-22, partnered with fellow EO members Szymon Boniecki, Jakub Szalaty and many others across Europe and North America to fundraise, c

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How to Stay Competitive in the Evolving State of Martech

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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Investing in a More Inclusive Innovation Economy

Revolution

Since the beginning of modern venture capital investing — a relatively nascent asset class — the industry has been biased toward funding what it knows best: founders with familiar demographics (white, male) in familiar geographies (Silicon Valley). Despite the recognition of bias and calls for change, systemic inequities unfortunately persist. Case in point: only 1% of 2022 VC dollars went to Black founders, a marked decrease year over year.

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More Trending

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5 Proven Tips for Accelerating Your Sales Process In 2023 (and Beyond)

StartupNation

Whether you’re managing an early-stage startup or running a sales department for a larger company, a strong sales… The post 5 Proven Tips for Accelerating Your Sales Process In 2023 (and Beyond) appeared first on StartupNation.

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Be Present

Entrepreneur's Handbook

(Any views expressed in the below are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions.) There are many activities we modern humans engage in so that we can be more present. Mental clarity and internal peace takes on extreme importance in a global society addicted to their endlessly pinging, internet-connected devices.

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AI’s hype isn’t going to be simply star-studded 

TechCrunch

Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. First off, hello to all the new Startups Weekly subscribers who joined us after last week’s newsletter. I’m glad we all still resonate with a comeback story. Second, here are some basics on what to expect.

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Why there are so few women in tech (and what you can do about it!)

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Contributed to EO by Natalie Kaminski, an EO New York member and co-founder and CEO of JetRockets. In observance of the United Nations’ International Day of Women and Girls in Science on 11 February, we asked Natalie to share her view on women in STEM careers, and specifically in her field of computer science. Here’s what she shared: I immigrated to the US from Israel at the age of 18 with US$500 in my pocket.

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Statement of Cash Flows vs. Cash Flow Statement

Speaker: Wayne Spivak - President and Chief Financial Officer of SBA * Consulting LTD, Industry Writer, and Public Speaker

The old adages that "cash is king" and "you can’t spend profits" still hold true today. But however well-known these sayings might be, it requires a change in mindset to properly implement a cash flow management system that predicts your business's runaway as accurately as possible. Key to this new mindset is understanding the difference between the Statement of Cash Flows, a historical look at the source and uses of cash, and the Cash Flow Statement, which uses transaction history and forward-l

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Magical Metrics with Omni

Tomasz Tunguz

In August, I wrote about why Omni’s technology reinvents BI once more. The Omni founding team hails from Looker & Stitch. They’ve set out to solve the problems customers faced with the previous generation of BI. Today, I can show you what this means in practice because Omni is commercially available. Anyone who has managed a larger BI deployment has faced the challenge of managing hundreds, perhaps thousands of metrics.

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Investing in Svix

Andreessen Horowitz

Every so often, we meet founders with unusually strong conviction about solving systems problems. They’ve often lived through the pain of bad software, diagnosed the cause of their suffering, and made it their mission to convince the world they have … The post Investing in Svix appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Smart Money: A Glossary of Directors and Officers Insurance

The Seraf Compass

In CYA: Liability Insurance for Directors we talked about some high-level concepts relating to Directors & Officers insurance. Here we are going to go into a bit more detail. This will get you well-grounded, but as we noted previously, there is no substitute for a good D&O broker to help you wade through your options. Without the help of a broker, it is very easy to pay more money for a lesser policy, when, with some help, you could have purchased better coverage for your needs for less money.

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The Paradox of Being Scrappy: Why First-Gen Founders Need to Learn to Spend

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Putting on your mask first: knowing when to spend as a first-time founder. “Be scrappy” is great advice for most founders, but for first-generation and minority founders, it’s often the wrong advice — and one of the most challenging things I had to unlearn when I built my first company. Of the many lessons that come with entrepreneurship, learning how to spend as a first-time founder was brutal.

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How to Avoid the Pain and Cost of PCI Compliance While Optimizing Payments

Speaker: P. Andrew Sjogren, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Very Good Security, Matt Doka, Co-Founder and CTO of Fivestars, and Steve Andrews, President & CEO of the Western Bankers Association 

PCI compliance can feel challenging and sometimes the result feels like you are optimizing more for security and compliance than you are for business outcomes. The key is to take the right strategy to PCI compliance that gets you both. In this webinar, we have a great set of panelists who will take you through how Zero Data strategies can be used as part of a well-rounded compliance and security approach, and get you to market much sooner by also allowing for payment optimization.

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SunFi aims to be the fastest way for Nigerians to find, finance and manage solar

TechCrunch

SunFi , the Nigerian clean tech startup that connects people and businesses who want solar energy access to payment plans that match their needs, has raised $2.325 million in seed funding. The self-described energy financial tech platform received backing from lead investors Nairobi-based Factor[e] and SCM Capital Asset Management and participating investors such as Voltron Capital, Norrsken Impact Accelerator, Ventures Platform and Sovereign Capital.

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Connecting Dots for Greater Good

INBIA

The post Connecting Dots for Greater Good appeared first on InBIA.

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Explorers are bad leaders

Derek Sivers

Explorers poke through the unknown, experimenting, trying many little dead-ends. Explorers meander, constantly changing directions based on hunch, mood, and curiosity. Explorers are hard to follow. It’s better to let them wander alone, then hear their tales. Explorers occasionally find a great place that would make a better home for many people. So that makes a job for a leader.

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Investing in Replicate

Andreessen Horowitz

It’s very rare to see a new building block emerge in computing. If aliens landed on earth and decompiled our software, every app would look roughly the same: some combination of networking, storage, and compute. The way developers consume these … The post Investing in Replicate appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Building Healthy Innovation Ecosystems for Your Projects

Speaker: Nick Noreña, Innovation Coach and Advisor, Kromatic

Every startup and innovation project exists within an ecosystem that either helps or hurts that project. As innovation managers, we need to keep a pulse of that ecosystem and make sure we're helping those innovation projects we're managing every step of the way. In this webinar, Nick Noreña will walk through an Innovation Ecosystem Model that he and his team at Kromatic have developed to help investors, heads of product, teachers, and executives understand how they can best support innovation in

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How AI and Machine Learning Can Boost Business Efficiency

StartupNation

Efficiency. It’s the goal of every modern business from the newly minted startup to the legacy enterprise. Yet… The post How AI and Machine Learning Can Boost Business Efficiency appeared first on StartupNation.

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Sam Parr’s Playbook for Building 7-Figure Communities

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Sam Parr’s Playbook for Building 7-Figure Online Communities An inside look at the keys and takeaways he uses to launch successful community businesses. Plus, a checklist worksheet to launch your own community because—well—we’re a handbook. Sam Parr Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur, known best for founding The Hustle newsletter, which was acquired by Hubspot in 2021 and cohosting the My First Million podcast.

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Boston offers a world of advantages for startup founders

TechCrunch

City Spotlight: Boston Register for the free event here! 5 investors discuss Boston’s resilient tech ecosystem Boston’s university-to-startup pipeline defies downturn to grow and diversify In order to build a startup culture, a city or region needs some key elements in place – like an innovation engine to drive startup ideas. It needs a couple of successful exits, which in turn drives angel investing as entrepreneurs growing increasingly wealthy look to help new founders building companies reach

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How to get your business funded. Start with a solid cofounding team

Founder Bounty

Every top tier of any company looks for a solid team more then anything else. Having interviewed at YC and talking to alumni everyone talks about the same thing. A solid team with a natural fit that can get through any hard times is essential to build a scalable business.  I have also been through techstars. Working with someone you just met is simply not good enough to get your business funded Its best to work with someone you know from before.

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The Startup Funding Gap

This resource discusses the gap between early funding from friends/family and the more substantial rounds from angel groups and VCs. Why does this gap exist and what can be done about it?

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Predicting Cloud Growth Rates for 2023

Tomasz Tunguz

I’m watching public company earnings to identify early weaknesses in the software market. Yesterday, Google & Amazon announced earnings which completes the picture. Growth will continue to slow this year. A year ago, AWS, GCP, & Azure averaged 44% annual growth. Today, that figure has dropped to 27%. Amazon also guided to lower growth rates in the future.

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Investing in Snapser

Andreessen Horowitz

We are thrilled to announce that a16z Games has led the Series Seed investment in Snapser , a games backend technology company poised to become the de facto platform for games studios. Twenty years ago, game studios had to develop … The post Investing in Snapser appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Why are you here?

Mark MacLeod

Why are you here? This simple question is perhaps the most important question of our lives. First, consider it in the existential sense: Why are we here? Why are humans on this planet?

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The Business Advice ChatGPT Would Never Give You

Entrepreneur's Handbook

And why ChatGPT — and other AI tools — are rapidly breeding millions of destined-to-fail entrepreneurs who haven’t a clue.

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ABM Evolution: How Top Marketers Are Using Account-Based Strategies

In times of economic uncertainty, account-based strategies are essential. According to several business analysts and practitioners, ABM is a necessity for creating more predictable revenue. Research shows that nearly three-quarters of marketers (74%) already have the resources needed to build successful ABM programs.