August, 2023

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The BS List - We Don't Like This Space (No. 52)

This is going to be BIG.

One of my favorite startups to have backed was a travel company called Noken. You answered a few basic questions about travel preferences, like pace, the fanciness of the hotel, etc., and then BOOM they sent you a link to an app with your whole trip, completely booked, with a map driven itinerary and a text concierge available to make last minute changes, etc.

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Centering accessibility and belonging for a more inclusive and profitable business 

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

Centering accessibility and belonging for a more inclusive and profitable business By Jewelle Saunders Knowing all of the benefits of prioritizing diversity, equity and inclusion in your business, you must continually consider the sustainability of these initiatives. In 2021, President Biden signed an executive order directing federal agencies to take action to advance diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) within their organizations.

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Three Places At Once: Challenges VCs Face In Managing Their Time [Part II]

The Seraf Compass

In Part I of this article we talked about the challenges and responsibilities General Partners face managing a fund. Now let's take a closer look at the time commitment involved when you're ready to invest in a company, what's required when serving as a board director, and how GPs should handle communications with their LPs.

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Sarah Says: How To Leverage School Breaks To Advance Your Innovation

Venture Well

Welcome to Sarah Says, a series by VentureWell Program Officer Sarah Wharmby. Sarah will address commonly asked questions raised in our E-Team Program workshops, Pioneer. The post Sarah Says: How To Leverage School Breaks To Advance Your Innovation appeared first on VentureWell.

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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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Need money? Read this!

Berkonomics

How important is this issue for your business? The subject of raising money is critical to many businesses and a passing option to others, depending upon the capital efficiency of the enterprise. Some businesses require very little capital and the founder can self-finance the enterprise and retain 100% of its ownership and control from ignition through liquidity event (startup through sale).

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The BSList: You Need a Co-Founder (No. 93)

This is going to be BIG.

A recurring theme in a lot of my BSList posts is that, if an investor thinks they can make a boatload of money with you, they’ll go to all sorts of lengths to invest. That includes investing way earlier than they would normally, investing outside of scope, investing with their personal capital outside of the fund, etc. So when someone gives you a single, declarative reason for a pass, they’re either saying one of two things: In my experience, companies that have this particular attribute have an

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GEN New Zealand releases manifesto to encourage greater entrepreneurship

NZ Entrepreneur

Watch the video interview now A network of more than 140 entrepreneurial businesses and organisations warns New Zealand is in danger of being left behind due to a lack of resources and insufficient policies to progress entrepreneurship. The New Zealand chapter of the Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN) wants to see local and central government politicians initiate policies to make entrepreneurship easier and more effective.

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How Azibo’s Vikas Gupta is on a Mission to Streamline Property Management for Independent Real…

Jason Malki

How Azibo’s Vikas Gupta is on a Mission to Streamline Property Management for Independent Real Estate Investors I had the pleasure of interviewing Vikas Gupta the CEO of Azibo , a unified financial and property management platform for independent real investors. Prior to Azibo, he was the founder at Nodabl, an HR-tech SaaS startup. Before that, Vikas ran product and strategy for The Baby Box Co, a Series A digital education platform for expecting parents.

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Superbank and Genesis Join Forces to Inject $40 Million into Indonesian Startups

AsiaTechDaily

Bookmark ( 0 ) Please login to bookmark Username or Email Address Password Remember Me No account yet? Register Indonesian digital bank Superbank , supported by Grab, Singtel, and Emtek Group, is collaborating with Singapore’s Genesis Alternative Ventures to offer a financing package of $40 million for startups in Indonesia. Through a joint announcement, the entities unveiled their intention to combine conventional bank credit with venture capital investment, all while ensuring minimal eq

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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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Founder Rewind

Entrepreneur's Handbook

What advice would you give your past self? I recently caught up with a friend who’d founded a company. He was at a low point: overwhelmed, sleep deprived, stressed… I listened, nodded, and said, “I remember those days.” And I do remember them. It took years before my startup Anchor began to gain real traction. There were sleepless nights and drastic pivots, crashed servers and bad bugs.

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Modular secures $100M to build tools to optimize and create AI models

TechCrunch

Modular , a startup creating a platform for developing and optimizing AI systems, has raised $100 million in a funding round led by General Catalyst with participation from GV (Google Ventures), SV Angel, Greylock and Factory. Bringing Modular’s total raised to $130 million, the proceeds will be put toward product expansion, hardware support and the expansion of Modular’s programming language, Mojo, CEO Chris Lattner says. “Because we operate in a deeply technical space that re

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Supporting the Open Source AI Community

Andreessen Horowitz

We believe artificial intelligence has the power to save the world —and that a thriving open source ecosystem is essential to building this future. Thankfully, the open source ecosystem is starting to develop, and we are now seeing open source models that rival closed-source alternatives. Hundreds of small teams and individuals are also working to make these models more useful, accessible, and performant.

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How to Lead Through Uncertainty and Change

Startup Blogpost

How to Lead Through Uncertainty and Change Navigating uncertainty and change is a common challenge for startup leaders. To shed light on this, we’ve gathered ten insightful strategies from CEOs and Founders. From embracing agility amidst market shifts to planning for the long game, these leaders share their experiences and lessons learned in successfully steering their startups through uncertain times.

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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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Take only “smart money” investments

Berkonomics

This statement could be considered controversial. We have previously made the case that professional investors demand more in the form of restrictive covenants and lower valuations. Now we explore the other side of that coin. Professional investors usually bring “smart money” to the table, defined as money that comes along with good advice and great relationships for corporate growth.

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And let’s be clear: The term “culture and employee engagement” doesn’t mean “Happy Hours” and “Pizza Parties:” Navigating Market Downturns and Other Startup Advice with Melanie Naranjo, Head of People at SaaS Startup Ethena

Hunter Walk

“You both have context for this introduction, so I’ll let you two take it from here! I know you’ll really enjoy chatting.” That was the email one of Ethena’s founders sent to me and Melanie Naranjo on 8/21/21, a bit over two years ago. At the time Melania was in discussions with Ethena about joining the startup as VP People, happily employed at a larger company but knowing she wanted new challenges.

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How Three Friends Built an Award-Winning Space for Indie Winemakers to Thrive on the Vine

Entrepreneur - Entrepreneurs Category

Patt Eagan discusses the launch and growth of Virginia's innovative Common Wealth Crush.

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Dipp uses AI to fix bottlenecks between marketing and design teams

TechCrunch

Before founding dipp , Jennifer Chen and Mikhail Abramov spent 15 years working as art directors in New York City. During that time, Chen says they realized that the marketing, sales and design process have stayed the same, despite new technology and tools being introduced to the market, and is often riddled with bottlenecks. “Salespeople have sales needs, they communicate with the marketing team and then once the marketing team has a direction they brief a designer, then the designer goes back

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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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Announcing SPEEDRUN 2024: Accelerating Games x Tech

Andreessen Horowitz

SPEEDRUN began with a simple question: how can we support the best gaming founders at the earliest stages of their journey? Our answer was to craft a bespoke accelerator for the gaming industry. We invested in all 32 companies from … The post Announcing SPEEDRUN 2024: Accelerating Games x Tech appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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The BSList: You're Raising the Wrong Amount (No. 93)

This is going to be BIG.

“How much should I ask for?” Almost every single time I talk to a founder as they’re prepping their raise, this comes up—and it’s absolutely the wrong way to think about a round. The right question is, “How much do you need?” When you raise money, the way you should build up your ask—ideally—is the following: “We need X amount to get to Y milestone, which we can do based on Z assumption in the model—which we’ve already proven.

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Need investment capital?

Berkonomics

Preparing for the game… If you have been following our recent insights, you’ll be up to speed knowing that professional investors negotiate tough terms, from provisions of control over asset acquisition, eventual sale of the company, future investments, forced co-sale when others attempt to sell their shares and more. And yet, in an earlier post, we spoke of the problems that come when taking unstructured investments from friends and family.

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From Ironman Training and Coworking: Harnessing the Power of Laser-Like Focus

GCUC

From Ironman Training and Coworking: Harnessing the Power of Laser-Like Focus Guest post by Kane Willmott of IQOffices.com One late evening in May of 2021, I left my desk, where I had been sitting for.

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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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Networking for Angel Investors; The Three Magic Questions

The Seraf Compass

Networking is often cited as a core skill for entrepreneurs. But it is just as important for angel investors, whose job it is to help connect their companies to the people, resources and customers they need to succeed. Most investors have some or all of their professional career behind them and assume they know how to network. But it never hurts to review the fundamentals, right?

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This week in AI: Amazon ‘enhances’ reviews with AI while Snap’s goes rogue

TechCrunch

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of the last week’s stories in the world of machine learning, along with notable research and experiments we didn’t cover on their own. This week in AI, Amazon announced that it’ll begin tapping generative AI to “enhance” product reviews.

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Investing in Socket

Andreessen Horowitz

Open source is the bedrock upon which all modern applications are built. But here’s the elephant in the room: There is a huge attack surface hidden within this seemingly solid foundation, and the proliferation of open source usage has opened … The post Investing in Socket appeared first on Andreessen Horowitz.

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Why intersectionality matters for entrepreneurs and how it benefits your business

Young Leaders of the Americas Initiative

Why intersectionality matters for entrepreneurs and how it benefits your business By Mary Tiffin One’s life experience cannot be summed up with one identifying factor. Someone is not just their gender, race, color, sex, ethnicity, class, ability or sexuality; people are a combination of these and other identities. The same can be said for businesses.

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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.