Startups

Financial institutions and entrepreneurs have a historically complicated relationship. Entrepreneurs need ways to fund their companies and keep business moving, meaning they lean on banks for everything from business loans to checking accounts. And banks need entrepreneurs, too — without small businesses fueling the economy, there isn’t much banks can do. This (sometimes reluctant) co-dependent […]

Much has been written about the tech industry’s sexist undertones. In 2017, Silicon Valley faced a “reckoning” for its gender-driven decision-making and tolerance of sexual harassment. From marginalizing women’s ability to contribute to the field because of their biological makeup to holding them to higher standards in order to earn leadership roles, the business world […]

To expand your wealth and achieve specific financial goals, you’re going to have to make some investments. However, those investments come with the significant risk of potential loss. Fortunately, the investment world has grown to offer more investment options and ways to assess those options. This includes more opportunities for individuals and companies to get […]

Bevy, an enterprise community event platform, announced today it has raised $6.4 Million Dollars from investors: Upfront Ventures, renowned author and Stanford Professor Steve Blank, Ryan Smith and Jared Smith, co-founders of Qualtrics, and Aaron Skonnard, SEO of Pluralsight. Bevy raised funds to increase their growth rate and expand the team. The Bevy Platform was […]

“I didn’t even know who Mark Zuckerberg was back in October 2015. Eighteen months later, I’m keynoting at conferences and serving clients in London, Sydney, Singapore, Los Angeles, Lisbon, Vancouver, and 50 other cities,” says Logan Young, the co-founder of BlitzMetrics, a Facebook dashboard and advertising company. Learn, Do, Teach: Build Your Expertise First New […]

If you’ve ever toured the offices of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S., you might notice a few commonalities. There’s the ubiquitous ping pong table, productivity-enhancing tunes wafting through the air, and an open, flexible workspace designed to support collaboration across teams. But the biggest commonality of them all? Their cupboards are almost invariably stocked […]

Let’s talk about values. Not family values or stock values, but company values: the bedrock of an organization. A company’s core values define it in a way nothing else can. They support the vision and shape the culture. They are the principles and beliefs that define the work. They are what drive the company. Some […]

Economic bubbles aren’t new. From the tulip bubble of the 1630s, to the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, to the big-tech mania we’re seeing today, overvaluations happen — but not all bubbles pose the same risks or offer the same rewards. Every few years, it seems we’re warned of another looming “bubble” about to burst. Most […]

Artificial Intelligence is a hot topic across the board. Everyone from developers, to data scientists, journalists, and general user-bases of all profiles are talking about it on a global scale. Entrepreneurs have taken notice of the benefits of AI in most areas of everyday life, whether assistants, mobile, entertainment and even healthcare or insurance. In […]

Savvy business owners understand the importance of intellectual property (IP) to their business’ success and most can name patents, trademarks, and copyrights as some of the various forms that IP can take. But the distinctions between copyrights, patents, and trademarks is often confusing and misunderstood, even by business people that regularly deal with IP. But not […]

Every time you’ve installed a piece of commercial software, you’ve invariably been presented with what must have appeared to be legal gibberish- a seeming difficult to read, needlessly long, solid block of text that was almost impossible to understand. Most people never bother to read the information presented- quickly scrolling to the bottom of the […]

“Make a spinner and spin the wheel”. – Seth Godin That’s what influencers always mean, start what you like doing and stick to it. Don’t give up in the middle. However, you can only continue doing something when you start something in the first place. Most of us today are tired of living a 9-to-5 […]

What do Pied Piper and blockchain tools have in common? Both are always “coming soon.” By now most of us are familiar with blockchain, the technology underpinning cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Outside of cryptocurrency, blockchain has many purported use cases in scenarios that require an immutable ledger. Rhetoric has elevated blockchain to godly status, […]

Meural, the digital art platform we love and have in our office displaying beautiful art was just acquired by NETGEAR. This was just announced at NETGEAR’s Analyst Day. Meural started in 2014 by Jerry Hu and Vladimir Vukicevic. They has since raised $9.4 million over four rounds of funding from NETGEAR, Corigin Ventures, Bolt, Bryan […]

At first all I wanted was to be able to purchase something wonderful and uplifting for my bedroom wall. Then the goal was — if we could just find a piece that was inspirational above the desk in the den — that would be enough. Soon, we realized that we spent much more time in […]

Over the past couple years, the machine learning niche has exploded into the mainstream. Startups have popped up left and right to show off their innovative new tools, and Google — the tech giant above all tech giants — now claims to be a machine learning company. This sudden spike in AI interest is not as […]

As a startup one of your most important assets is your brand and that brand is usually embodied in your company name and logo. The valuable time that you invested in coming up with just the right creative name and developing the branding and marketing around that company name is impossible to measure. After creating […]

Freelancing has been dubbed the on-demand economy, where businesses hire independent contractors to perform tasks for the company instead of regular employees. Contractors are generally less expensive to hire because you only pay for what you need. This can make them more appealing for smaller or shorter term projects, but some Silicon Valley startups are […]

The Start-Up Chile accelerator was arguably the spark that ignited Chile’s entrepreneurial ecosystem. The Chilean government, through the development agency CORFO, founded Start-Up Chile in 2010 as a way to bring in foreign entrepreneurs who would galvanize Chile’s transition into an economy built on technology and innovation. Since then, Start-Up Chile has accelerated over 1,500 […]

OK. That’s an exaggeration. Odds are you can’t win every startup competition you enter. But you could win 92.59%. Candace Klein did. Klein is the founder and CEO of a new peer-to-peer lending platform called SoMoLend and she’s won 25 of the 27 startup competitions she’s (That’s a winning percentage of 92.59% – do the math). We asked her…

A lot of people in Silicon Valley are down on job-hoppers these days. They’re flaky, they’re bad employees, they steal all the Sharpies when they leave, blah, blah, blah. But it turns out that all that job-hopping is an important part of what makes the Valley so special. 

From the art of the pitch to a smooth sale and everything in between, these seven tenets come straight from the annals of successful startups. 

Combine their penchant for creating social change with their innate entrepreneurial inclinations, and it you might expect a wave of Gen Y-owned non-profits to launch in the next few years. That might still happen, but the latest research suggests that non-profits may not actually be the best way to drive social change.

Think an elevator pitch is hard? Try selling your vision with a beer in each hand, balancing in the aisle of a train barreling north at 80 mph. That’s exactly the challenge posed by Geeks on a Train, a veritable Nerd Express from Portland, Ore., to Vancouver, where passengers will “rethink business” among like-minded entrepreneurs and…

Intellectual Property (IP) is vitally important to start-ups. The Start-Up Genome Project, which aims to map, model and analyze what makes start-ups tick, identified IP as a top source of competitive advantage for start-ups. But start-ups face significant challenges in acquiring, maintaining and enforcing their intellectual property.

Silicon Forest, Silicon Prairie, Silicon Beach, Silicon Hills, Silicon Sandbar. Nice ideas, all of them. But let’s get real. Startups anywhere outside the two major tech hubs of Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley have even more trouble attracting serious venture capital than they do finding a food truck with a decent bulgogi burrito.

A new study shows that startups do better when they’re launched in the place where their founders were born or have lived for a long time. Makes sense, but the reasons why are surprisingly complex and modern.

Staying on top of trends is key to any startup’s success. Spotting trends early makes it possible tocome up with smart startup ideas – or modify your startup plans to jump on a new trend just as it takes off. Just as most important, you can avoid the risk of starting a business based on a trend that’s just about to fizzle out. Fortunately…

Mitt Romney is growing his own. Well, sort of. His old firm, Bain Capital, is taking on the problem of hiring talented tech workers by training them itself. Bain’s StartUp Academy, launched by the company’s VC arm Bain Capital Ventures, recruits students from top universities and plants them in positions at the tech companies it funds.

These days everyone has their favorite mobile apps, ones that make both their personal and business lives run smoother. But are there any apps that are must haves for entrepreneurs and startup founders?

Every online startup has a global presence, whether that’s its goal or not. For e-commerce startups the question then becomes, “Do you really want to turn down a sale just because the order comes from overseas?”

Africa has most of the elements required for technology innovation. What it doesn’t have is a startup culture where smart young entrepreneurs can grow their ideas into companies. So Mbwana Alliy is creating the Savannah Fund fund to help them.

It’s every startup’s dream – to get the attention of the people who matter. You might think that refers to customers or clients, or even venture capitalists or angel investors. Nope. We’re talking about bloggers.

Blame Mark Zuckerberg. Since he invented Facebook in the third grade (or so it seems) high-tech investors have been throwing more and more money at younger and younger whiz kids. Older entrepreneurs may not like the trend – but it shows no sign of slowing anytime soon.

Being innovative is part of the DNA of a tech startup – or at least it should be. But when your employees are working 18-hour days, unleashing their inner innovators can be a challenge. These 7 tips can help get the ball rolling:

Prison inmates have all day, every day, to sit around and think. It could be the world’s largest pool of untapped brain time. Chris Redlitz decided to put it to productive use. He founded the Last Mile startup accelerator program at San Quentin State Prison in California.