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The case for tenured voting
It’s hard to get too worked up about unequal voting rights, which are seen by public market investors as giving founders too much control, while viewed by founders as necessary to protect their companies from short-term shareholders. The reality is that only a minority of companies can command these terms, most famously Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and now Snap. The majority of… Read More
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Houston, Kalanick and Zuck walk into a headline
And a bar called SPiN, where photos of them playing ping-pong have the tech media in a great mood this Friday morning. The reason? At the same time as Houston’s ping pong birthday fun, SPiN was also holding a (wait for it… it’s totally worth it:) “Babes & Balls” party with “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” as the theme. Read More
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Verizon Ventures and R/GA partner to launch a digital media ‘venture studio’
Verizon Ventures and R/GA are announcing a new program called the Verizon Media Tech Venture Studio. Stephen Plumlee, R/GA’s global COO and managing partner of R/GA Ventures, explained that the interactive agency’s “venture studios” started out similar to other startup accelerator programs, but they’ve expanded to provide access to “financial capital… Read More
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Crunch Network
How The Last Mile helped Kenyatta Leal walk from prison in San Quentin to a job in tech
Prison spending is 5x more than higher education, and ~10 percent of the U.S. prison population is in California. Part of the reason why people return to prison after they are released is because they have no access to education while they’re incarcerated. On today’s Breaking Into Startups episode, we talk about an educational program that is paving the road to success… Read More
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Google partners with VCs to host its own machine learning startup competition
On the heels of acquiring data science community Kaggle, Google is launching a machine learning competition of its own for startups. Google is targeting early-stage companies taking an innovative approach to machine learning. The competition is being run in partnership with seven venture capital firms. Read More
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NFL’s Drew Brees backs Waitr to make takeout easy in anytown USA
Food delivery startups abound in the U.S., but few of them deliver to customers in “second cities” and smaller towns. From early pioneers like Grubhub to newer services like DoorDash, food delivery businesses have tended to focus on urban areas with a high concentration of restaurants and people who frequently order takeout. Now, New Orleans Saints Quarterback, philanthropist… Read More
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PassivDom is a Zombie-proof “autonomous 3D-printed mobile house”
It’s rare that I quote a company’s marketing tagline outright, but PassivDom, makers of an “autonomous 3D-printed mobile house,” sounds pretty darn rad. The Ukrainian company wants to create mobile homes that can be made anywhere and are completely self-powered. Max Gerbut, a Ph.D. of Engineering Sciences of physics of the solid state, built the houses in the Ukraine and… Read More
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The New York Micro-Meetup is Monday
In preparation for Disrupt New York in May I’m going to hold a few pitching workshops in New York for you all. We’ll listen to and critique 8 pitches on March 13th at 7pm at the Knotel space at 22 West 38th Street, 4th Floor. This is an informal pitch-off, but the two best teams will get two tickets to Disrupt New York and the undying admiration of millions of people (actually… Read More
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Bolt Threads debuts its first product, a $314 tie made from spiderwebs
It may not look like a bunch of cobwebs, but the tie you see above was spun from the same material spiders spin out from their behinds. The difference is this thread was mass produced from fermented microbial poop instead, and it’s the first product out from materials science startup Bolt Threads. Read More
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Chowbotics raises $5 million for salad-making robots named Sally, of course
Chowbotics Inc. has landed $5 million in a Series A round of venture funding to develop what it’s calling food service robots. These are machines designed to prepare food in restaurants, cafeterias and hotels, as well as food courts in airports, malls and hospitals. The company’s flagship product, Sally, is a salad-making robot that uses 20 different food canisters to prepare… Read More
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Crunch Network
Watch ‘High Resolution,’ a video series about design
Ever wonder how design has helped drive success for businesses like Airbnb, Facebook, Slack and IBM? How about how their teams are structured? How they operate? What their processes look like? High Resolution is bringing clarity to these questions, and we’re doing it 25 times. We’re sitting down with 25 masters of the digital design industry to learn how they approach… Read More
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Astro raises an $8 million Series A for its AI-powered email solution for teams
On the surface, Astro, launching its public beta today, is a nifty but not completely necessary email client that combines machine intelligence and a bot interface to improve workflows and increase the signal to noise ratio of mail for power users. But the real story is that the startup, backed with a new $8 million Series A led by Redpoint, is gearing up to pitch enterprises on… Read More
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The Kairos Society, an organization for young entrepreneurs, has raised its own venture fund
The Kairos Society isn’t just trying to bring the next generation of entrepreneurs together — it’s investing in their companies, too. The organization today announced a seed fund called Kairos Society Ventures, and the portfolio already includes Abaris (which offers a private-sector alternative to social security), Brazilian education startup Me Salva, Colombian… Read More
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Kidizen raises $3.2M for a kids’ clothes resale app with a social twist
Kidizen, a marketplace for secondhand children’s apparel, has raised $3.2 million in Series A funding, the company announced today. The funding was led by Chicago-based Origin Ventures, which backed the startup following its more than 100 percent year-over-year growth in 2016 — which has allowed the business to reach more than a quarter million registered users across the… Read More
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Hugging Face wants to become your artificial BFF
Meet Hugging Face, a new chatbot app for bored teenagers. The New York-based startup is creating a fun and emotional bot. Hugging Face will generate a digital friend so you can text back and forth and trade selfies. Playing with Hugging Face was a lot more engaging than talking with a customer support bot. Like other companies, Hugging Face doesn’t want to be useful. It wants to create a… Read More
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Index-backed Pariti is an app to help you get out of debt
Founded by Matthew Ford, who was previously head of acquisitions for OnTrees, a personal finance app that exited to MoneySuperMarket in 2014, Pariti is a mobile app that helps you keep an eye on your spending and, crucially, tracks how much you are paying out servicing existing debt, such as overdrafts or credit cards. It then suggest changes you can make to pay off that debt more quickly. Read More
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Scoot wants to expand its electric scooter operations globally with a white-label service
San Francisco-based electric scooter sharing network Scoot tells TechCrunch it plans to share its back-end software with third-party scooter operators in congested cities around the world. The idea is to allow those in other cities who have vehicles to hook into Scoot’s back-end operation system, allowing them to also run a scooter sharing network in their area. Read More
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