FundersClub Weekly Newsletter - January 28, 2016
FundersClub Portfolio News
Aircall, the startup that lets you deploy a business phone system in just a few minutes without installing anything on your servers or switching to new desk phones, just raised a $2.75 million round in "Aircall Grabs $2.75 Million For Its Powerful Phone Customer Support Service For Teams".
Zoomcar, the self-drive car rental company, is on an expansion drive and now the company will provide its service to the customers in 11 cities across India in "Zoomcar's expansion drive, now available in 11 cities".
Instacart has partnered with Binny's Beverage Depot to put 12,000 items, including beers, wines, spirits and mixers, up for home delivery in much of Chicago in "Binny's and Instacart team up on alcohol delivery".
Virool, a programmatic video marketing platform, said that its DMP has the ability to reach more than 450 million unique profiles globally after conducting more than 75,000 video ad campaigns in "Virool Says Its DMP Can Reach 450M Unique Profiles Globally".
Online translation startup Unbabel – which uses a blend of machine translation, AI, and crowd-sourced post-editing – recently named Paulo Dimas as Head of Product in "Unbabel Names Paulo Dimas Head of Product".
FundersClub, the world's premier online VC and platform, is hiring for a Venture Associate.
Investor Thoughts
Mahesh Vellanki of Redpoint Ventures discusses the recent stock performance and enterprise value of companies in the social, marketplace, ecommerce, gaming, and travel industries, and what those numbers mean for the future in "How Much Further Will Internet Stocks Fall?".
Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners says one of the keys to crafting a successful go-to market strategy is picking a pricing and packaging that is scalable, and expands on the Unit of Value framework in "Unit of Value: A Framework for Scaling".
Alex Danco of Social Capital establishes three conditions under which he guesses the next $100B company (the mythical Indicorn) will be created, including path dependence, participation and reach in "Seeking the Indicorn".
Ben Nasarin of Canvas Ventures and Jeremy Abelson of Irving Investors take a close look at the last 20 years of IPO data, finding that the percentage of profitable tech IPOs has been declining since 2009 in "IPO Slowdown: A Look At Company Profitability".
Jason Calacanis (Angel Investor) believes that the decision for founders to go to more than one incubator depends on "how strong a reputation you have as founder, the overall strength of the business and how competitive a market there is for your equity" in "Incubator hopping: Should you go to more than one incubator?".
CB Insights finds that seed investors poured over $120M into healthcare startups in 2015, a five-year high, with most of it going to biotech and medical devices in "Seed Funding To US Healthcare Startups Breaks $100M Mark For Second Year In A Row".
Founder and Operator Thoughts
Ricky Yean of PRX relates mindset inequality to why poor founders tend not to be successful, but believes it is something that can be overcome in "Privilege and inequality in Silicon Valley".
Biz Stone of Jelly, Twitter, and Medium offers 5 pieces of advice he would say to someone who is just starting out as a CEO in "CEO Advice from a New CEO".
Ben Thompson of Stratechery argues that development of the feed – or lack thereof – is the core reason why Facebook has soared over the last ten years, while Twitter has slumped in "How Facebook Squashed Twitter".
Christa Quarles of OpenTable reveals the three pillars of her philosophy to leading a company during dynamic and uncertain times in "OpenTable's CEO on How to Dodge Company Breakdown as You Scale".
Troy Sultan of Resource releases the first post in a weekly series documenting his company’s journey through 500 Startups Batch 16 in San Francisco, and discusses their plan to accelerate growth in "[500] Week 0: An Open Letter To Our Team".
Patrick Park of Krown.io advises founders who are building their startup while working at another job to break their startup into micro-startups that they can work on in the half-awake hours of the morning, make their work public, and be obsessed with productivity in "How to Wake up at 5AM and Build Your Startup".
In Other News
Apple's first-quarter results showed that growth slowed to a halt, with its first quarterly revenue decline in more than a decade in "Apple’s First-Quarter Earnings in Charts".
Uber announced that it has been running a pilot program that uses drivers’ smartphone gyrometer data to see if the driver is checking his phone too much during the ride or is driving too fast, to help them assess which of their drivers are being rated fairly in "Uber Using Smartphone Gyrometer Data To Monitor Speeding Drivers".
Did You Know?
Did you know that every so often Google brings about 200 goats to their headquarters for a week to eat the bush and weeds as an alternative to mowing the lawn?