November, 2021

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Betting Beyond the Bowl: Investing in Sweetgreen Was Always About More Than Salad

Revolution

In 2013, Sweetgreen had 22 locations in D.C., Maryland, Virginia, Boston, and New York?—?the first a 560-square-foot shack in our backyard. Fast forward to today, the tech-forward company spans more than 140 stores nationwide; partners regularly with chefs , artists , and cultural icons ; caters to millions of app users; and has officially debuted as a public company on the NYSE.

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Tough hiring market? Make it easier to be a parent at your company.

This is going to be BIG.

After 80 long days in the NICU, my 10 week early daughter Mirren has finally come home. We’re overjoyed and we’ve begun the task of learning how to manage all the logistics of her care—while somehow doing the bare minimum of that for ourselves. We both showered in the last 24 hours, which is a major moral victory for the team. TFW you’re small and slippery and you realize your parents have no idea how to give you a bath.

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Founder Led Companies

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

I remember about fifteen years ago, a well-known VC said to me “you need to sell a company within a few years of the founder leaving. Companies can’t sustain their innovation after a founder leaves.” I told that VC that my experience has been different on that measure and that I did not agree. I have seen leadership teams take over great businesses from founders and get them to the next level.

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Building sustainable marketing skills with a Colombian YLAI Fellow

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

Building sustainable marketing skills with a Colombian YLAI Fellow. By Shannon Courtney. As an entrepreneur who aims to build sustainable success, you must always be ready to shift focus and be flexible — flexible not only in your professional career but also with the direction of your company branding, team and digital marketing strategies, which is something that 2017 Colombian YLAI Fellow Katherine Villa has recently come to understand.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business.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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pitch competitions: tips for success from winning teams

Venture Well

Pitch competitions offer early-stage startups the opportunity to share their innovations, network with potential mentors and funders, and possibly gain access to funding and expert. The post pitch competitions: tips for success from winning teams appeared first on VentureWell.

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More Trending

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How to Amplify Your Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Message

Source Link

Creating strong inclusive ecosystems of support for entrepreneurs is key to a community’s economic success, however sharing collective impact can be challenging. In celebration of Global Entrepreneurship Week , SourceLink’s Dara Macan and Rob Williams recruited a panel of local ecosystem builders in Fort Worth, Texas, northern Louisiana, Iowa, and Puerto Rico to share valuable communication tips and strategies in this interactive webinar.

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Helion raises $2.2B to commercialize fusion energy

TechCrunch

Helion Energy , a clean energy company committed to creating a new era of plentiful, zero-carbon electricity from fusion, today announced the close of its $0.5 billion Series E, with an additional $1.7 billion of commitments tied to specific milestones. The round was led by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator. Existing investors, including co-founder of Facebook Dustin Moskovitz, Peter Thiel’s Mithril Capital and notable sustainable tech investor Capricorn Invest

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Seed Rounds At $100mm Post Money

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons: Seed stage is when a company has a good team, a good idea, but has not yet proven product market fit and a go to market model, and has not yet demonstrated a sustainable business model. These investments have a high failure rate.

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6 Strategies for Local Startups to Scale Up Nationally

StartupNation

If you’re thinking about launching a business or have started one recently, there’s no need to restrict your goals to the local area. Here are six ways to compete on a national level. 1. Create products that address common pain points. One way to increase your chances of becoming nationally relevant is to ensure your products meet nearly universal needs.

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PE Mastery: CAPTARGET's Playbook for Quality Lead Flow

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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ten years of I-Corps: the program that changed innovation

Venture Well

In the last 10 years, the National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps Program has spearheaded transformational program innovation. The post ten years of I-Corps: the program that changed innovation appeared first on VentureWell.

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The Need for Two Types of Payback Period Calculations

Tomasz Tunguz

Imagine an AE closes two contracts for $100k ARR. The contracts are identical twelve month contracts except for the payment terms. Contract A requires annual prepayment - all the cash will be paid tomorrow. Contract B relaxes payment terms to monthly payment, 12 monthly installments for the next year. Is the payback period for each contract the same?

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What is the Best CRM and Marketing Tech Platform for a New Private Equity/Venture Capital Fund?

David Teten VC

One of the first decisions we had to make in setting up our new VC fund, Versatile Venture Capital , was our CRM and marketing technology infrastructure. . I’m very interested in the tech stack of private equity/VC firms , both to improve the efficiency of Versatile VC and also as a focus area for our investing. I run PEVCTech , a community focused on this area.

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The industrial data revolution: What founders got wrong

TechCrunch

Joe Hellerstein. Contributor. Share on Twitter. Joe Hellerstein is co-founder and chief strategy officer of Trifacta and the Jim Gray Chair of Computer Science at UC Berkeley. In February 2010, The Economist published a report called “ Data, data everywhere.” Little did we know then just how simple the data landscape actually was. That is, comparatively speaking, when you consider the data realities we’re facing as we look to 2022.

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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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Buying Crypto Assets

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

A number of friends have been asking us how to buy crypto assets. This is not the first time we’ve gotten this question and it won’t be the last. When I first started getting this question, my answer was “open a Coinbase account and buy Bitcoin.” Then there was a period when my answer was “open a Coinbase account and buy Bitcoin and Ethereum.” Today, my answer is “open a Coinbase account and buy a diverse set of crypto assets.” A diverse set of cry

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The Benefits of Encouraging Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace

StartupNation

Creativity is essential for any organization if you want to keep your business moving forward. There are numerous organizations that have designed a cool, funky, creative environment for their employees to help them relax and spark creative thinking to get their projects moving forward. Some organizations go as far as having regular brainstorming sessions when working on a project to allow employees to contribute and build on a project.

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infrastructure support services: the behind-the-scenes secret to RADx

Venture Well

Infrastructure support services may not get the attention of a game-changing technology, but, as the RADx program demonstrates, it can be a deciding factor in whether an innovation fulfills its commercial promise. The post infrastructure support services: the behind-the-scenes secret to RADx appeared first on VentureWell.

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Want to Partner with Amazon? Here’s One Way.

Smart Hustle Magazine

Did you know you can grow your small business, if you’re into trucking, by becoming an Amazon freight partner ? During an interview with April Taylor of Opulent Transport, Ramon Ray, founder of SmartHustle.com learned how Taylor’s partnership with Amazon has helped her trucking business grow. Smart Hustle Small Business Podcast · Want to partner with Amazon?

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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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The 100x ARR Multiple

Tomasz Tunguz

The 100x ARR multiple might be the fundraising meme of 2021. Before, most investors used forward ARR multiples to value companies, but recently, the 100x multiple seems to be a benchmark for SaaS companies raising rounds. Where did this figure originate? How does it compare to the public markets' valuation of companies? Let’s look at the data.

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Kenya’s Twiga raises $50M to scale food solutions across Africa

TechCrunch

Years ago, Americans spent most of their disposable income on food but consistent investment in retail infrastructure has changed that. Now, they only spend 6% of their household income on food and beverages. Africa still battles with this and it is not hard to see why. The continent’s retail markets are highly fragmented and mostly made up of small and informal retailers and intermediaries, which is why a ton of tomatoes that costs around $100 in the U.S., for instance, costs about $400 in Ken

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10 Reasons Why I Use Bubble.IO to Iterate on Startup Ideas

Entrepreneur's Handbook

??You shouldn’t have to onboard a technical co-founder just to test a business idea. Bubble is a no-code platform that enables you to build web apps. Here’s my simple definition of a no-code platform: A platform that allows you to build an interactive web app through a “drag and drop” user interface and easy-to-implement logic. Working on a no-code platform is almost like writing in plain English.

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Simple Hacks to Enhance the SEO of Your Website

StartupNation

SEO can be a revenue goldmine, but as fruitful as it can be, it is not an easy undertaking. SEO requires consistency and a multidirectional approach. While most companies are investing the time and effort to get their SEO game right, most of them are not yielding the desired results. As per an Ahrefs study, just 5.7% of all studied pages ranked in the Top 10 search results within one year.

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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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THE TECHCELERATOR@STATE COLLEGE IS HOSTING A VIRTUAL PITCH EVENT!    

Ben Franklin Technology Partners

S even local entrepreneurial teams are in the process of completing a ten-week, virtual, business startup boot camp. This exciting program has been offered by Ben Franklin’s Tech Celerator @State College, in partnership with the Invent Penn State initiative, for nine years. On Tuesday, November 30, 2021 beginning at 2:00 PM, the teams will pitch their business concepts to a panel of independent judges for a cash prize of up to $10,000!

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How to Advertise Your Business on TikTok

Smart Hustle Magazine

By Francisco Schmidberger, Co-founder at LINK Agency. Brands are always looking to leverage the latest social media trends to help the success of their marketing and advertising campaigns. Interestingly, compared to Instagram , advertising on TikTok is an even better place to start for every small business, not just those targeting a Generation Z audience.

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Justifying Token Equity Multiples using GDP Data

Tomasz Tunguz

When investing in a crypto startup that will issue a token, an investor considers two prices - the price of the equity and the price of the token. There’s a rule of thumb used today that states the token should be worth 3-5x the equity. A founder informed me the rationale is that a share in a company has a lien on the future dividend streams, but a token has a lien on profit share of the GDP around an economy and that economies tend to be 3-5x larger.

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Chipper Cash gets $2B valuation with $150M extension round led by FTX

TechCrunch

Chipper Cash , an African cross-border payments company, has raised $150 million in a Series C extension round led by Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange platform FTX. The investment comes barely six months after Chipper Cash closed its first Series C round of $100 million, led by SVB Capital , the corporate venture capital arm of SVB Financial Group.

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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