Prismatic founder Bradford Cross doesn’t come from a traditional media background — he is a data scientist who specializes in machine learning — but what he is doing with content recommendations says a lot about how the media business is evolving and what the future might look like. Read more »
But hidden in the headlines about the JOBS Act is the creation of an entirely new class of capital that could be far more valuable to startups: customer capital. Instead of raising capital from VCs, entrepreneurs can reach out to customers directly. Read more »
Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech VC has closed investment on its third fund at $55 million, making Fund III its biggest fund yet.
Clavier talked to GigaOM about why SoftTech decided to go so big, how the new cash will be invested, and the larger tech industry landscape. Read more »
Thanks to an almost unprecedented grass-roots awareness campaign conducted by his friends through Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter and other social media over the past three months, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Amit Gupta was able to find a compatible bone-marrow donor whose cells could help him conquer acute leukemia. Read more »
I sat down with Case on Friday at the TiE Silicon Valley conference to discuss how he’s advocating for entrepreneur-friendly policies at a governmental level. Entrepreneurs, meanwhile, should focus on building companies they’re passionate about, rather than looking for a money-making “quick flip,” he said. Read more »
Though associates at VC firms can always find mentors, there are a few things that the Kauffman Fellows might not tell you. Remmy Oxley gives his five unexpected tips for upping your venture capital game. Read more »
After closely controlling burn rate through the first two phases of a startup’s life cycle, the third phase is the time CEOs are waiting for — though they may not yet be ready for it. VC David Skok explains how CEOs can spend to grab market share. Read more »
As a company grows from a “seat of the pants” entrepreneurial company to a process-driven, mechanized one, the sales process has to change, too. Mark Suster lists the most important things sales teams need to standardize, based on the lessons he learned from his own startups. Read more »
Salespeople who have been with a startup since the beginning intuitively know how to overcome the hurdles that potential customers put up to avoid making a purchase. Mark Suster shows how a growing company can codify this knowledge to more effectively arm its sales team. Read more »
There are plenty of apps that make collaboration easier — at least once you’ve figured out what your actual project is going to be. But if you’re still in the kicking-around-ideas stage of planning your organization you could probably do with a specialized tool. Read more »
