Tag Archives: startup

WhatsApp becomes most popular messaging app with 600 million users

WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum tweeted that the popular messaging app user-base has now been increased to 600 million. Earlier in April, it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users. 

Surprisingly, the instant messaging space has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is worth noting that WhatsApp had 200 million users in August 2013. By January 2014, the number surged to 430 million in January 2014. Apart from WhatsApp, WeChat, Facebook Messenger, Line, and Hike are o .. 

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Klarna is like an iceberg because consumers only see about a tenth of what it does

Ready to check out online? Just enter your email address and a postal code to complete the purchase. The bill will be in the mail.

That is the simple option offered to shoppers on 45,000 e-commerce sites using Klarna, a fast-growing online payments service start-up run from a newly refurbished downtown office here.

Enter a few bits of information and your online shopping generates a flurry of activity at the company. In seconds, Klarna analyzes reams of credit sources and online purchasing data to determine whether it will assume the liability for your purchase.

If you are a returning Klarna user, buying during regular working hours or shipping to your usual address, an email and postal code are probably enough. Klarna may even let you pay for the goods up to two weeks after they have arrived in the mail.

But if you are buying at odd hours or sending goods to a previously unused location, expect greater scrutiny. That includes Klarna asking you to pay upfront with a credit card.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/technology/klarna-an-online-payment-system-popular-in-europe-eyes-global-expansion.html

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    What do OpenTable, Yelp, GrubHub, Twitter, Zillow, and Uber have in common? Bill Gurley, and of course his firm Benchmark. In my opinion, Bill’s at the top of the top venture capitalists today. With a deep background in engineering, capital markets, and venture (not to mention basketball), he’s got all the…
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  • 74
    WhatsApp CEO and founder Jan Koum tweeted that the popular messaging app user-base has now been increased to 600 million. Earlier in April, it was announced that WhatsApp had 500 million active users. Surprisingly, the instant messaging space has been growing by leaps and bounds. It is worth noting that WhatsApp…
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Who bought, funded or exited the most Bay Area startups?

Orginal post here  : http://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2014/08/15/who-bought-or-funded-the-most-bay-rea-startups.html?page=all

The venture investor that has backed the most startups in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco area in the past five years is 500 Startups.

But the one with the most exits of companies it has backed is Sequoia Capital, and the company that has bought the most local startups isn’t Yahoo or Facebook — both of whom have been on an acqui-hiring tear recently. It’s Google.

That is according to a report from investment database research firm CB Insights, whose rundown we posted yesterday on the 20 local startups that have raised the most cash without exiting yet.

The ranking of top investors didn’t include Y Combinator and other accelerators that don’t have a separate venture investing wing.

The top two on the list — 500 Startups and SV Angel — get in at the earliest stage of the companies they back. But most of the top investors there blend early and later stage funding. SV Angel, in fact, is a frequent co-investor in 500 Startups and backer of many Y Combinator companies, as well.

The top 10 (in the number of unique companies they have backed since 2009) are:

1. 500 Startups — 222.

2. SV Angel — 197.

3. Andreessen Horowitz — 157.

4. New Enterprise Associates — 123.

5. Google Ventures — 118.

6. Sequoia Capital — 111.

7. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — 102.

8. Greylock Partners — 102.

9. Intel Capital — 92.

10. Accel Partners — 90.

When it comes to middle and later rounds, Intel Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Sequoia Capital were the most active.

In terms of the investors with the most exits, CB Insights ranks Sequoia on top with 54 of its local portfolio companies bought or doing an IPO in the past five years. Big names on that list include WhatsApp, Palo Alto Networks and Instagram.

Here is the top 10 ranking of investors with the most exits:

1. Sequoia Capital — 54.

2. Intel Capital — 49.

3. Accel Partners — 47.

4. Felicis Ventures — 42.

5. Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers — 37.

6. New Enterprise Associates — 37.

7. SV Angel — 36.

8. Lightspeed Venture Partners — 35.

9. Foundation Capital — 35.

10. Benchmark Capital — 35.

As noted earlier, Yahoo and Facebook have done the most acquisitions in the past year or so. But CB Insights reports that Google has been the big buyer over the past five years with Waze and AdMob being two of the most prominent deals.

Here is that top 10 ranking, with the number of deals done by each.

1. Google — 37.

2. Facebook — 30.

3. Yahoo — 28.

4. Twitter — 18.

5. Oracle — 15.

6. Apple — 15.

7. Cisco Systems — 14.

8. IBM — 13.

9. VMware — 11.

10. Salesforce — 11.

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Uber’s Brilliant Strategy to Make Itself Too Big to Ban

The question of how Uber would spend its billion-dollar investment was never really much of a riddle. More rides in more places has always been the plan.

But with its ten-figure cushion, the San Francisco-based ride-hailing startup can be more cunning about how it tries to get huge. Uber wants to grow as quickly it can, and right now, it’s chasing that goal by undercutting the competition on price—even if it loses money in the process. This isn’t a novel approach among tech startups, for which profits aren’t valued nearly as much as popularity. But for Uber, playing in the new realm of the so-called sharing economy, the stakes are higher, since so many entrenched interests are trying to regulate it out of existence. With not just success but survival on the line, Uber has even more incentive to expand as rapidly as possible. If it gets big enough quickly enough, the political price could become too high for any elected official who tries to pull Uber to the curb.

Yesterday, Uber announced it was lowering UberX fares by 20 percent in New York City, claiming the cuts would make its cheapest service cheaper than a regular yellow taxi. That follows a 25 percent decrease in the San Francisco Bay Areaannounced last week, and a similar drop in Los Angeles UberX prices revealed earlier last month. The company says UberX drivers in California (though apparently not in New York) will still get paid their standard 80 percent portion of what the fare would have been before the discount. As Forbes‘ Ellen Huet points out, the arrangement means a San Francisco ride that once cost $15 will now cost passengers $11.25, but the driver still gets paid $12.

http://www.wired.com/2014/07/ubers-brilliant-strategy-to-make-itself-too-big-to-ban

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  • 84
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The Inside Story of How PayPal Ousted an Early Rival

In the early days of PayPal, its most important rival was Billpoint, a rival payment system that was a joint venture between eBay–PayPal’s most important partner–and Wells Fargo Bank. Consider the situation PayPal faced: the vast majority of its business at the time consisted of handling payments for eBay auctions, yet eBay itself owned a competitive payments business (Billpoint) that it was promoting to every single eBay user. To outside observers, the circumstances must have looked grim.

Yet as we know, PayPal triumphed over Billpoint, leading eBay to purchase PayPal for over $1.5 billion. One of the key factors was PayPal’s superior use of network intelligence. Reid led this intelligence-gathering effort for PayPal (he was executive vice president at the time) and asked all the members of the team, from executives to individual engineers, to use their network intelligence to learn about Billpoint’s strategy. Billpoint’s team, on the other hand, completely ignored the potential for network intelligence to provide insights into PayPal’s strategy.

From conversations with other companies that were building on the eBay platform such as Honesty.com and AuctionWatch (now Vendio), PayPal employees learned two key facts. First, the Billpoint team was convinced that the key success factor for an internet payments system was a deep banking relationship to combat fraud. Billpoint’s leadership felt that the Wells Fargo relationship represented an overwhelming advantage over PayPal.

Second, contrary to Billpoint’s belief, the companies on the eBay platform (and their customers) didn’t consider a deep banking relationship that relevant. They placed a far greater value on ease of use, especially in e-mail communications. Fraud prevention was a hygiene factor, not a driving force. None of this information was public, but none of it was secret either.

http://www.inc.com/ilan-mochari/reid-hoffman-excerpt.html

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  • 77
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Mobile-Only Bank Osper Raises $10M To Aim At UK Youth Market

Osper, a new UK startup, has come up with an innovative way to create a banking service than can be used by children, combining prepaid debit cards and smartphone apps controlled by both them and their parents. The approach could potentially reach a market underserved by most banks, but which may also be embraced by parents keen to educate their children early on about how to manage money.

The startup has also announced it’s closed a $10m (£6m) funding round, led by London’sIndex Ventures (which has backed SoundCloud and Etsy among others). Previously Osper had raised a seed round of £800,000 in June last year as an alumni of the Techstars Londonaccelerator. The cash will be used by founder Alick Varma to launch the service out of beta, roll out in the UK and eventually expand abroad. It’s also enrolled the backing of major UK TV celebrity, Davina Mccall.

Other investors include Horizons Ventures (Li Ka-Shing’s venture capital arm – investor in Spotify, Facebook and Skype); Peter Jackson (CEO of Travelex), and Darren Shapland (ex-Chairman of Sainsbury’s Bank); as well as the entrepreneurs behind businesses including Streetcar, Lastminute.com, Jawbone, SoundCloud, Skyscanner and Funding Circle.

http://techcrunch.com/

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Taxi medallions have been the best investment in America for years. Now Uber may be changing that.

CHICAGO — A taxicab is a car remade by government, modified dozens of ways by edicts within subsections of articles of the city’s taxi code.

“Everywhere on this car has been regulated,” John Henry Assabil says. “Look at it!”

He throws up his arms in the direction of his gold-colored 2012 Ford Transit Connect. The car’s medallion number — 813 — is painted in black plain gothic figures (must be black plain gothic figures) on the driver’s-side hood, on both passenger doors and, for good measure, on the rear. Inside, there is a camera mounted over the rear-view mirror, a dispatch radio bolted to the console, a credit-card reader snapped to the passenger headrest.

From the back of Assabil’s seat hangs a sign — lamination required — spelling out the city’s fare structure: $3.25 for the base rate, $2 for the airport departure/arrival tax, $50 vomit cleanup fee. Everywhere, there are mandatory stickers. “That one costs a dollar,” Assabil says of a window decal reminding passengers to LOOK! before opening the door into the possible path of cyclists and pedestrians. “The fine for not having it is $100.”

Then there are the holes. Several have been drilled into the roof to mount the top light that distinguishes cabs from other cars at a distance. Another has been punched right into the hood, bolting down the palm-size metal plate — the “medallion” itself — that gives Assabil the right to operate this cab, one of 6,904 in Chicago.

Every one of these requirements is a point of contention in the escalating battle between the cab industry and tech start-ups such as Uber and Lyft, which threaten to upend a pact that has long existed in Chicago and other cities: In exchange for all of this regulation, taxis have for decades held a government-backed monopoly. At the center of that bargain — and the debate over what form of transportation best serves the public — is the medallion.

Assabil, a 62-year-old immigrant from Ghana, and his wife own four. Each one grants him a license, which he’s free to sell, to operate a single cab among the limited supply in the city. As of last summer, a medallion in Chicago fetched around $350,000, a sum that would buy a comfortable condo overlooking Lake Michigan — and one that buyers often finance as they would a mortgage.

In New York, taxi medallions have topped $1 million. In Boston, $700,000. In Philadelphia, $400,000. In Miami, $300,000. Where medallions exist, they have outperformed even the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. In Chicago, their value has doubled since 2009.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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Klarna is the next big thing in Internet payments

PayPal revolutionized the way we buy things online, but Klarna is the next big thing in Internet payments, according to famed venture capitalist Michael Moritz.

Moritz made early investments in Google (GOOGL, Tech30), LinkedIn (LNKD, Tech30),Yahoo (YHOO, Tech30) and eBay’s (EBAY, Tech30) PayPal. His firm, Sequoia Capital, has been investing millions in Klarna over the past few years. He is impressed with how the Swedish company’s technology makes online transactions easier, cutting out passwords and the traditionally slow registration process.

“We’ve invested in payments for a good long time and had started doing that in the 1990s,” Moritz told CNNMoney. “We had been an early investor in PayPal. But that was a long time ago. That was almost 15 years ago now. And the world moves on and changes, particularly with the advent of mobile computing … there’s a vast new landscape to conquer.”

http://money.cnn.com/

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10 Movies Every Entrepreneur Needs to Watch

No one ever said being an entrepreneur would be easy. A million obstacles seem to stand in the way each and every day. The naysayers and budget woes can be enough for the average person to start waving the white flag.

But you are not an average person: You’re an entrepreneur. That means that even when times are tough, you’re still going to march forward.

Yet when this whole entrepreneur thing becomes overwhelming, take a break and look for some much needed motivation. And what better way to find inspiration than watching movies?

Whether it’s a heartwarming adventure, irreverent comedy or thought-provoking documentary, a film can inspire and motivate a weary business owner.

With that in mind, here are 10 movies that every entrepreneur needs to watch:  http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234538

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9 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

Some of the best content to be found about startups is locked in books. Thomas Kjemperud asked me yesterday for a 140 character recommendation of one book for founders. Reducing my list to just one and condensing an argument for why founders ought to read it in just 117 characters was just too great a challenge for me. Instead I’ve written a blog post about the nine favorite books I’ve read over the last five years have helped me understand startups and the processes that make them successful.

They range from written 70 years ago to written in the past 3 years. They have been written by salespeople, CTOs, speechwriters, consultants and magnates. These are the books I go back to, time and again, when I have a question or I’m looking for an insight. If they weren’t all e-books, they would be dog-eared and foxed. Here they are:

List 1

http://www.tomtunguz.com/books-about-entrepreneurship/

List 2

http://smallbusiness.foxbusiness.com/entrepreneurs/2014/05/09/books-every-entrepreneur-should-read/

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