2021

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4 outrageous ideas to reinvigorate company culture

Entrepreneurs' Organization

Contributed by Chris Kirksey, an EO member in Washington, DC, and the CEO of Direction Inc. , a Washington, DC-based SEO and SEO software agency. Chris is a US Army Veteran and mentor for US military service members transitioning into the civilian world. As entrepreneurs transition and adjust to changes the pandemic caused in their companies, how can they build—or rebuild—not only a business but also a team of like-minded individuals with a common purpose or goal?

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How Not To Regulate Innovation

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

The Secretary Of Treasury, in his last month in office, is giving us a textbook case of how not to regulate important technology innovation. The issue is “unhosted wallets” and how regulated exchanges and other “hosted wallets” interact with them. Let’s start with why this is important. Our current financial systems are old, creaky, expensive, and do not serve enough people.

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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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Seraf Toolbox: Exit Planning for CEOs and the Board of Directors

The Seraf Compass

As a director on an early stage company board, how do you deliver on your main responsibility as a board member - maximizing shareholder value? And, what do you do to make sure the CEO is doing her job in increasing the value of your investment in the company? And what good is the increase in value if it is not accompanied by sufficient liquidity to realize it?

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Digitalization: 5 Tech Updates That Will Help You Survive The Recession & Thrive

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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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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More Trending

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21 Ways to Grow Your New Business Online in 2021

StartupNation

If you’re not growing your business online in the current climate, you will likely leave a lot of money on the table. As 2021 begins, we’re witnessing a fast-changing landscape. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, everything from working to socializing to ordering and shopping online has become the norm. In fact, according to emarketer.com ; “U.S. e-commerce sales will reach $794.50 billion (in 2020), up 32.4% year-over-year.

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How to find a Technical Co-Founder for your Startup

Entrepreneur's Handbook

Advice for non-technical founders for finding a serious CTO for your startup Finding a co-founder is hard work. Finding a technical co-founder is even harder. Yet, the benefits of having a technical co-founder make it all worthwhile. A good co-founder will serve as a powerful force multiplier. Think how much faster you will be able to go, and therefore have more runway to iterate to product-market fit.

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Passive Investing in Venture Capital and the Parallels to Public Equities

Tomasz Tunguz

Passive venture capital investing is a relatively new idea. But it’s transforming the industry. As later stage investors permeate venture capital, they are amassing index funds of startups. If the public equities market is any indication, passive investing is here to stay. In public equities, passive investment funds constitute 54% of total dollars in the market, according to Bloomberg Reseearch.

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Come Work at YC – July 2021

Y Combinator

YC’s Admissions, Continuity and Software teams are hiring. Find out more about the open roles here. ADMISSIONS. Admissions Associate : Twice a year, Y Combinator receives tens of thousands of applications from promising startups all around the world. Reviewing these applications is fundamental to our core business and we’re looking for an Admissions Associate to review those applications and help manage the overall admissions process.

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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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Step-by-Step Guide to Develop a Strategy to Scale Your Business in 2021 

Smart Hustle Magazine

No matter what stage your business is at, it’s never too soon to have a scaling-up strategy in place. It can always be amended as you go, but being mindful of where your business can use an efficiency boost will always be a winning strategy. Keep in mind, however, that this is not a guide to grow your business. This is a guide to increase the efficiency of your business as you grow.

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Culture Is A Product You Build For Your People

OnStartups

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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NYC’s Tech Resurgence (continued)

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC’s Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world’s leading centers of tech innovation. And then yesterday, I saw this tweet : NYC startups are getting funded at 2/3 the rate of Silicon Valley startups. That’s a huge change from where NYC was even two or three years ago.

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How I Gamified My Own Brain to Lose Weight & Improve Fitness

Both Sides of the Table

Socially distant hiking in Sedona (we drove there) I recently wrote about my weight-loss journey over the past 18 months where I lost 65 pounds without a fad diet and returned to my college weight. If you want to get in better shape and haven’t read that you might start there. I separately wrote about some food plans I use. I started advice with the premise that no amount of exercise or food eating plan would help with long-term fitness or weight goals unless you first had a mental plan and a se

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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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Will Anyone Care? Building an Exit Strategy

The Seraf Compass

Early stage investors might not view it this way, but… until a company has some form of financial exit (e.g. acquisition or IPO), you are really more like a donor than an investor! Think of it this way: since there is no liquidity in early stage company stock, you can’t sell the stock and recoup any of your original investment. You’re stuck with stock that, for all intents and purposes, has no financial value that you can monetize.

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Google’s Africa Investment Fund makes first investment in Uganda’s SafeBoda

TechCrunch

Internet giant Google announced today that it has made the first investment from its Africa Investment Fund in Ugandan super app SafeBoda. The undisclosed investment comes two months after Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced the tech giant’s intentions to commit $1 billion over the next five years in “tech-led initiatives”, which includes a $50 million Africa Investment Fund targeted at early- and growth-stage startups on the continent.

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5 Innovative Fundraising Methods for Emerging Venture Capital and Private Equity Funds

David Teten VC

How do you raise money for your venture capital or private equity fund from family offices and high net worths? . I see five innovative new methods for raising capital which emerging managers such as Versatile VC are using, which I’ve ranked in roughly descending order of popularity: . Join the online communities and virtual conferences where investors participate. .

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5 Actionable Goals for Your Startup to Set and Achieve in 2021

StartupNation

While the pandemic has created numerous obstacles for entrepreneurs, some of the best and most inventive ideas have been born out of adverse circumstances. January is the perfect time to re-evaluate what worked and what didn’t work over the course of the past 12 months in order to set new intentions for your business. Whether you’d like to focus more on marketing, sales, training or profitability, there’s always room for improvement in your business.

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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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How First Principles Thinking Took Naval Ravikant From Zero To Millionaire Silicon Valley Icon

Entrepreneur's Handbook

The entrepreneur behind AngelList who also funded Twitter started with nothing. Continue reading on Entrepreneur's Handbook ».

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The Fastest Growing Sectors of Startup Fundraising in 2020

Tomasz Tunguz

From time to time, I chart the fastest growing categories of startup investment in the US for seed through Series C. Here are 2015 , 2017 , This year, I was certain the categories would have been influenced by COVID19. I analyzed Crunchbase data and looked for the startup categories that grew fastest in terms of funding rounds year-over-year, provided there were at least 10 rounds in that category.

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Y Combinator Top Companies — 2021

Y Combinator

We’re excited to share the newest YC Top Companies list. We put this list together to help potential employees, partners, and late stage investors get to know a wider set of YC companies. If you’re looking for a job at one of our top companies, you can hit the Jobs button to be taken to their careers page. The companies in this list are sorted by valuation as of January 2021, including YC companies that have been acquired or gone public. 1 Why do we use valuation?

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Happy International Coworking Day

GCUC

Happy International Coworking Day y’all. Is it just us or does the celebration of community feel a little more special this year? Almost magical. The post Happy International Coworking Day appeared first on GCUC Community.

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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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Why Colleges and Universities Should be Scared of the On Deck Fellowship

This is going to be BIG.

There’s been an emergence of “pre-accelorator” or “people accelorator” programs—experiences that you can buy your way into with cash, as opposed to potentially valuable future equity, that replicate the education and network provided by the likes of YCombinator. They’re popping up in a variety of different verticals, led by one called On Deck and they’re causing a lot of people to ask the question if a very specific and highly relevant continuing professional education and network is buyable in

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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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Saas Survey 2021

For Entrepreneurs

2021 SAAS SURVEY – Part 1 For the eighth year in a row, we’re proud to work with KBCM Technology Group (formerly Pacific Crest Securities) Thank you to the readers of forEntrepreneurs who participated in taking the survey! Thank you also to Adam Noily and the team at KBCM Technology Group for their work on.

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Penalty Box - Legal Issues For Startups

The Seraf Compass

It might be hard to believe, but it’s not very difficult for an early stage company to run into all sorts of legal issues before they even start to ship product. The good news is that most legal issues at this stage are confined to just a few areas. With just a little research, you can ascertain whether the company has any legal cleanup needed before you are ready to sign the check and close the deal.

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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.