Tag: startups

Venture capitalists are helping launch a number of direct to consumer startups, or DTCs. But do sofas, toothbrushes, and suitcases need the Warby Parker business model?

High-stakes time travel adventure from sci-fi writer Jo Lindsay Walton.

Why is a vegan-food startup avoiding the term “vegan”?

The internet is not pleased with start-up bros who want to “disrupt” bodegas.

When your Ubud neighborhood becomes a luxury tech bubble.

Tilt was once a start-up with extravagant soirées, hazy business plans, and a $375 million valuation. Then it came to the end.

Ben Popper takes a look at Koko, a startup with an app that helps people connect and provide emotional support to peers and, in the process, allows them to recognize and “rethink” their own problems.

Andy Samberg and Colonel Sanders aren’t the only people to put memorable things in boxes. Corby Kummer wrote about his trials and issues with the booming meal kit delivery industry in The New Republic last October, weighing the benefits of convenience and culinary experimentation with the reality of waste: I won’t be marketing my services as an investment adviser, at least […]

One challenge for Andreessen is whether venture itself has a skills problem. If software is truly eating the world, wouldn’t venture capital be on the menu? The AngelList platform now allows investors to fund startups online. Its co-founder Naval Ravikant said that “future companies will require more two-hundred-thousand-dollar checks and way fewer guys on Sand […]

My boss when I worked in London—someone who’d published Booker Prize winners, remember—used to say that two-thirds of publishing is about failure. I agree with that: it’s the nature of the business. And yet publishing is an industry that keeps attracting to it, in various ways, people who want it to be two-thirds about success. […]

Uber’s aggressive tactics reflect the fact that ridesharing is largely a zero-sum game: a driver picking up an Uber customer can’t simultaneously pick up a Lyft customer. (Drivers are allowed to drive for both services, though the companies discourage the practice.) Having more active drivers on the road creates a virtuous circle that improves geographical […]

Stewart readily admits he sold Flickr too early. “If we had waited six months we would have made much more money. If we had waited a year we would have made 10 times more money,” he says. He regrets it now. But at the time, after the dotcom crash, the Nasdaq plummet, and September 11, […]

It’s not just the workers who get a lousy deal. Over the years, Bob Baber, the Quiznos franchisee, became increasingly frustrated by the terms of his contract. One of the issues that galled him the most was that Quiznos was allowed to (and did) place additional sub shops in his franchise area, creating what he […]

Clinkle’s growth team proved effective at signing up more than 100,000 would-be users — this, despite being a little hazy about precisely what they were selling. Says one former growth team member, “I never saw a direct demonstration of the product.” The growth teams met ambitious goals by targeting the most influential students on campus, […]

Yiren Lu, a recent Harvard grad who now studies computer science at Columbia, takes a step back from the startup world to wonder what it means for our tech infrastructure when all the bright young things want to make apps but aren’t skilled in networks and hardware — the stuff that makes the Internet go. […]

“The Story of a Failed Startup and a Founder Driven to Suicide.” Alyson Shontell, Business Insider.

What does it take to get a tech startup funded? Inside the competitive selection process for one incubator in New York City: The date is January 24, one day after applications were due for TechStars, a three-month mentorship program that is part boot camp, part investment fund. Some 1,480 young companies have filled out a […]