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Parafin Transforming Delivery of Small Business Financial Services Closes $100M Series C

American Entrepreneurship

Poddar previously was Head of Machine Learning Engineering at investment platform Robinhood following his position as Data Scientist at Meta. This funding is not just a milestone for Parafin but an investment in the future of small businesses. Incumbent methods systematically bias against women- and minority-owned businesses.

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Headwinds, Tailwinds, and Crosswinds Ahead for Rising Startup Ecosystems

Revolution

The optionality to lock in gains amid prolonged investment cycles through secondary sales and continuation funds are disproportionately available to larger, multi-stage, incumbent funds. With lower interest rates comes greater access to capital and lower theoretical investment hurdle rates, which benefits startups and investors.

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After Investing $100 Million Into New VC Firms, Here’s What I Look For: Traditional But Better, or Different & Excellent.

Hunter Walk

In these cases we’re asking ourselves, can this individual/partnership execute a ‘known’ playbook better than incumbents, because it’s not very interesting to put people in business who are going to be Traditional But Average.

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What To Do When Your Competitor Gets Funded?

Both Sides of the Table

Conventional wisdom says I shouldn’t tell you this because I invested in their main competitor, MakeSpace. Clutter is LA based and many of my friends invested. And our competitors are not really each other but the incumbent businesses that have 99.9% ” In summary: The competitors are the incumbents.

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The next wave of supply-chain innovation will be driven by startups that help incumbents win

TechCrunch

Steve Sloane is a partner at Menlo Ventures where he invests in inflection-stage companies. For years, the prevailing narrative for innovation in supply chain has focused on the disruptors: Upstarts that enter the industry with new technologies and business models to displace incumbents. Steve Sloane. Contributor. Share on Twitter.

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The Future of Corporate Venture Capital

500

Conventional wisdom dictated that incumbents should focus their innovation efforts on R&D and growing their cash cows while investing in a few startups. But the rate of change has accelerated and with it, the balance of internal versus external investment. We believe the new corporate landscape calls for new strategies.

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Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You

Both Sides of the Table

The framework of his book has profoundly altered how I think about the technology market and affects how I thought about building my businesses and how I think about investing in venture capital. It should affect how you think if you are an incumbent but also if you’re a startup. Incumbents feel threatened.