FundersClub Weekly Newsletter - December 23, 2016
FundersClub Portfolio News
Slack is adding video calling to their audio chat services, following the acquisition of FC portfolio company ScreenHero, with group video chat having the ability to handle up to 15 people currently in "Slack swipes at Skype with video calls and reaction emoji."
Unocoin provides a systematic investment plan (SIP) to buy bitcoins as a conservative way to make any investment, compared to investing in one go, and can be used to average out the price volatility of bitcoin in "Afraid to invest in bitcoin? Unocoin's SIP plan might help."
Abacus helps mid-sized firms with expense management by offering insight into corporate spend, both for budgeting purposes and for legal and compliance purposes, by arming these businesses with real-time data visibility in "Cash Management, Compliance Intersect For Mid-Market Expense Management."
AppZen, who uses artificial intelligence to automate expense report audit, is hiring for a Customer Success Specialist, a patient, caring, and highly organized person who's driven to help their customers get the most out of AppZen’s audit solution, and a Front-End Engineer with exceptional skills in Javascript to work on the Front-end of their AI-powered solution.
Investor Thoughts
Christopher Steiner of FundersClub summarizes a recent FundersClub Live interview with Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures and shares some of his invaluable insights in how founders should approach their companies, their markets and investors in "To Get Funded, Have Vision And Understand Your Market."
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures analyzes global data for the SaaS market and breaks it down by dollars invested, median software series A, and number of software financings in "Just How Global Is The SaaS Startup Phenomenon?"
Samuel Gil of JME Ventures uses some venture math and frequently made assumptions to derive the size in terms of revenues that a company has to achieve in a 5–7 years time window to be regarded as attractive for VC investment in "Meaningful VC Exits."
Kyle Lacy of OpenView Partners interviews Christoph Janz of Point Nine Capital and receives actionable advice to help early-stage founders create a pitch deck that will help them get to their Series A or B round in "How To Create The Perfect Pitch Deck."
CB Insights visualizes the locations of the 98 US-based unicorns in a map, and highlights that collectively, US unicorns are worth approximately $372B in "The United States Of Unicorns: Every US Company Worth $1B+ In One Map."
Ash Rust of Trinity Ventures lists basic startup metrics you must know about your company before meeting with a VC in "Know these Numbers for your VC Meeting."
Ross Baird and Victoria Fram of Village Capital explain three lessons they learned from peer selection that can help investors be more successful in "Why Entrepreneurs Are Better Judges of New Ideas than Expert Investors."
Founder and Operator Thoughts
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook shares what he learned while building an AI to run his home in "Building Jarvis."
West Stringfellow of Target Corporation offers some lessons he learned about building an accelerator that is attached to a company of scale in "How to Build a Startup Accelerator at a Large Company: Lessons from Target."
Mitchell Lee of Penny shares the step by step story of how he raised his seed round as a first time founder in "Raising your first $1,000,000."
Alex Wilhelm of Mattermark summarizes recent news regarding Uber's financials and their plan to IPO in "The Recent Uber Revenue/Profit Debate Explained, Part II."
Brian Lenney points out the dangers of relying on one big client, and advises to be ready for the relationship to end in "Stop Relying on Your “One Big Client” (Because One Day — You’ll Lose Them)."
Jonathan Clark of Diginovas highlights that successful people treat failures as data points on the road to success in "The Beauty of Success."
Ryan Robinson uses his experience of going from first-time founder of a failed business, to freelancer, to building 4 successful businesses  to create 10 steps to starting a side business while keeping your full-time job in "We are living at a time of unlimited potential."
In Other News
Twitter CTO Adam Messinger is leaving the company to take some time off, and VP of Product Josh McFarland is leaving to join venture firm Greylock Partners in "Twitter’s Chief Technology Officer to Leave Company."
Apple Inc. looks to Canon Tokki Corp. in their quest to adopt advanced displays for its next-generation iPhone, but their growing output backlog raises questions over Apple's ability to feature OLED displays in next year's iPhones in "Apple's Search for Better iPhone Screens Leads to Japan's Rice Fields."
Tesla Motors Inc. increases its borrowing capacity under two credit agreements by about $500 million, after saying in October that Tesla didn’t need to raise equity or borrow money this quarter in "Tesla Boosts Credit Lines Again to Aid Elon Musk Expansion."
Did You Know?
Did you know that South Korea is currently number one in the world for fastest internet, with an average connection speed of 26.3 Mbps, while the U.S. lags in 12th place? Source