Why Sexual Harassment Continues to Be A Problem in Silicon Valley and the Startup World
Why Sexual Harassment Continues to Be A Problem in Silicon Valley and the Startup World.
Silicon Valley has had a problem with sexual harassment in the workplace for a long time, but only now does it seem that the tech industry is coming to terms with the issue.
That’s on top of the string of controversies at Uber Technologies Inc., which involved two investigations into the ride-hailing startup’s company culture, including sexual harassment claims from a former engineer, Susan Fowler.
The controversies ensnared Uber for several months, ultimately leading to the resignation of CEO Travis Kalanick and the departures of numerous high-profile executives, including business chief Emil Michael and senior vice president of engineering Amit Singhal.
Prominent VCs such as Bain Capital Ventures have since signed on.
But in order for real change to take place, Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks, a software company that creates niche social networks, said high-profile VCs need to come out in support of the issue.
Female entrepreneurs are placed into an especially vulnerable position when they seek funding from venture capitalists. “It’s those things that made me realize how difficult it is for female founders,” Wang explained.
Wang is trying to make it easier for female founders to report harassment, which SheWorx describes as anything from “egregious stories to the small paper cuts experienced every day,” through an anonymous form on the company’s website.
Investors, too, need to stop perpetuating the culture that involves inappropriate behavior, like asking female founders “signaling questions” about their marriage status and other details, said Drew Koven, managing director of investment firm LDR Ventures.
New Mexico Health tech startups invited to new virtual accelerator at Arrowhead Center
New ideas for devices, products and services are always emerging, but it can be difficult to access the potential customer base that’s needed to test the feasibility of these innovations in a timely manner.
That’s where Arrowhead Center at New Mexico State University can help, with a new accelerator program targeting health tech startups across the state in need of customer discovery research opportunities and a network of regional industry contacts to draw from.
Offering participants $2,000 to accelerate their business, HealthSprint is the latest in a series of Arrowhead Accelerator programs being provided by Arrowhead Center, NMSU’s entrepreneurship and innovation hub, through funding from New Mexico Gas Company, an Emera Company.
HealthSprint is a four-week program designed to launch successful health technology startups in the state of New Mexico.
Teams do not need any prior NMSU affiliation to be considered, and selected businesses can participate in the program’s curriculum and its weekly workshops virtually or in-person, making HealthSprint accessible for health technology entrepreneurs all across New Mexico.
Previous Arrowhead Accelerator cohorts have included TechSprint, which focused on tech startups in New Mexico, and AgSprint, which attracted agricultural technology businesses from across the Southwest.
“Within the first week,” he said, “I found that what the experience was offering was the opportunity for us to develop and grow our idea in a very short time period in a very safe space.” Each HealthSprint team has a required structure, including an entrepreneurial lead based in New Mexico, a technical lead and a business mentor, and Arrowhead Center can help connect applicants to potential team members who could fill any roles that are missing.
Each team will also receive access to additional follow-on funding through Arrowhead Innovation Fund and mentorship through Arrowhead Innovation Network Ventures.
“HealthSprint is a great opportunity for health tech startups in New Mexico to test the viability of their business, win $2,000 and gain access to some substantial follow-on funding opportunities,” said Kramer Winingham, director of Aggie I-Corps, NMSU’s National Science Foundation Innovation Corps Site at Arrowhead Center.
Information from NMSU
Anne Arundel County opens ‘toolbox’ as incubator closes
Anne Arundel County opens ‘toolbox’ as incubator closes.
With its startup incubator closing, Anne Arundel County Economic Development Corp. announced a new initiative to provide resources for cybersecurity startups last week.
In a March 1 letter announcing the closure, Schuch wrote that the incubator was “not sustainable,” having received $130,000 equity in return after $11 million in public and private funds invested.
The CIC opened in 2003, and moved to Odenton in 2014 to be closer to Fort Meade.
The incubator had nearly 20 member companies when the announcement was made.
AAEDC has a new program targeting to help cybersecurity companies growing around Fort Meade.
The program includes a fund that will offer loans of $50,000-$250,000 to companies with less than 100 employees.
Cruz said the program is designed for companies who are gaining initial traction after bootstrapping or getting friends and family investment, and seeking funding to keep growing.
“In talking to a lot of people and having focus groups and having individual discussions….we felt that this toolbox and the components in it best speaks to the needs that we heard over and over again.” AAEDC hired Sarah Purdum, who previously worked with cyber companies at bwtech@UMBC, as Business Development Associate to coordinate the program.
A graduate of Northeastern University, he moved to Baltimore following stints in New Orleans and Rio Arriba County, New Mexico.
If you can focus on building a sustainable business, there is no need to chase funding
In answer to the oft-asked question “How much have you raised?” As a founder and someone who has been involved with the Indian and South East Asian startup ecosystem for a sometime now, I get invited to a quite a few speaking engagements, investor/founder meets and college events.
On telling people that I have not raised any funding for my current venture, the next question that follows is this: But you know so many investors.
A venture can get funded at any stage.
Many an entrepreneur start their ventures with hopes of getting funded as per these models.
I have seen entrepreneurs quit and wind up their business just because they could not raising funding.
These myths have propagated because we have conveniently excluded a large number (read majority) of new businesses started every year from the definition of startups.
All these business started without any plans of raising funding.
Do these businesses raise funding?
Many of these businesses become profitable over time and then raise funding to expand.
Blame it on the investors or the entrepreneurs, there have been precedents (and many of them) where ventures which did not have any clue of how to become sustainable got heavily funded, became unicorns or aimed to become one and then burnt to the ground.
Side raises $5.7 million to match students with companies for short-term jobs
Side raises $5.7 million to match students with companies for short-term jobs.
It’s a marketplace that helps you scale your workforce for a product launch, peak season and more.
Aglaé Ventures, Jacques-Antoine Granjon, Antoine Martin are also participating in today’s funding roun, as well as existing investors Connect Ventures, Fly Ventures and TheFamily.
Think about Side as a sort of “staffing-as-a-service” startup.
It isn’t a typical job board or temp agency.
It’s a marketplace of freelancers that you can hire for a specific task.
Side handles all the administrative tasks — billing clients, collecting payments and paying you.
It then takes a 20 percent cut.
As many companies rely on Side for the same kind of tasks, the startup now has templates to help you post an offer.
Students get notified on their phone that there’s a new task.
I’m a startup founder and I had sex with an investor — and I am sorry
Looking back, I am kind of embarrassed I even had those meetings, but what I learned over the next few years was that those meetings are incredibly hard to get.
You rely on founder friends and parties, which can be equally elusive, mostly to get access to investors and helpful people.
It’s so hard to get meetings and raise money that you are willing to meet wherever and whenever to get some air time.
I was the one who decided this was a business meeting.
At this point, I still hadn’t raised any money, but I had a prototype, and I felt more confident pitching.
Because in an ecosystem where socializing and happy hours are a big way to meet or get to know investors, there are no real clear lines about what is personal and what is professional.
And men wouldn’t keep behaving this way if it didn’t work.
Radical personal responsibility I’ve done a lot of personal work to heal my own trauma, and when I talk about this topic, I rarely talk about men needing to change.
It’s finding the places where you have control and taking it back.
If any women want to talk about anything I have shared, or if you want resources to help heal your own trauma, please feel free to reach out to me at perribchase@gmail.com.
Cross-border payment startup InstaRem eyes IPO in 2020 after closing $13M Series B
Cross-border payment startup InstaRem eyes IPO in 2020 after closing $13M Series B. Cross-border payment startup InstaRem has raised $13 million in new financing as it looks to expand its business, which is rooted in Asia, into Europe and North America ahead of an eventual public listing as soon as 2020.
InstaRem operates a cross-border payment service that is targeted at business users, including banks and retailers, although it does operate a consumer service.
By working with banks and using wholesale rates, the firm is able to get good cross-border rates for its retail customers, too, InstaRem CEO and co-founder Prajit Nanu told TechCrunch.
Now, with this funding, it is working to get necessary licenses to expand to all markets in Europe and the U.S. before the end of the year as it aims to take a larger bite out of an industry that processes over $500 billion in transactions per year.
(Its headquarters are in Singapore with most of its development team currently situated in India.)
Already it is net profitable in some markets, he added.
“We should have enough capital to run the business — we didn’t want to raise too much,” Nanu explained.
“If we hit profitability, we could be looking at an IPO for 2020 [which] would give enough time to build our business.” Hong Kong is attracting tech IPOs, with gaming firm Razer following the lead of selfie app company Meitu, and Singapore is also vying for public listings.
However, the InstaRem CEO said it would most likely aim for a U.S.-based IPO.
“In three years time I think we’ll have a great story,” he added.
An ‘Uber for garbage’ picks up steam, and $11.7 million in Series A funding
Instead of purchasing its own trucks, RTS is partnering with a growing number of mid-size, independent haulers that it provides with feature-rich tablets to make their work more efficient — even when they aren’t being used in service to RTS.
What changed: the 17-person company raised $11.7 million in Series A funding from the Boston-based growth equity firm Volition Capital to hit the gas.
TC: Whose trucks are you using?
GL: Trucks that we don’t own.
We work with 10 operators in New York, and we might add another one to two operators, but that’s sufficient enough to have operators to service the entire city.
TC: Where else are you operating?
TC: What does your business look like in those other markets?
Our other customer is the companies that own the garbage trucks.
You need customers, because the more customers you have, the more hauler relationships you have; it’s additional revenue for them.
GL: Because we’re able to separate out and track what’s on these trucks, we can turn that material into additional revenue.
Tonsser, the social app for youth soccer players, partners with Nike and raises new funding
Tonsser, the social app for youth soccer players, partners with Nike and raises new funding.
Tonsser, the Copenhagen-based startup that offers a vertical social network aimed at youth soccer players who want to build their own online profile and potentially get discovered by a bigger club, continues to grow at a clip, both in terms of signups but also the influence it wants to have on the beautiful game.
The Danish startup has also raised a new round of funding as it gears up for a 2018 expansion to the U.K., home to the English Premier League and a huge potential youth football market for the startup.
In a call with co-founder and CEO Peter Holm (and after we spent the first ten minutes catching up with the latest Tottenham Hotspur news, as we are inclined to do), he told me that Tonsser is evolving from a social app that was mainly about youth players making a profile of themselves and tracking scores and stats in order to get noticed by scouts — a bit like a real life Football Manager video game — to offer even more user-generated content where players can learn skills from each other and in turn become influencers on the platform.
We believe it should be the same in football where you don’t need to be at the best or most expensive academy to learn and be inspired by the best players and coaches,” he says.
This is seeing top youth players, including from PSG, Lyon, and Dortmund, and “freestylers and local heroes” create video content, such as how to take a free kick, to inspire other young soccer players in Europe.
Related to this, Tonsser has signed on Nike to be the first brand to get access to the platform with its own channel, where the company is posting what Holm calls “edutainment,” including drills with from players in Barcelona’s La Masia academy.
“Next is opening [the platform up] to top clubs to show drills and practice from their academies.
[We are] currently in talks with international top clubs from England, Germany, Holland and Denmark,” adds Holm.
He also tells me Tonsser is working on integrations with wearable devices to “empower players to become more data-driven and compare physical data including pace, acceleration, distance covered, form, etc”.
Amazon puts an additional $260M into its Indian business
Amazon puts an additional $260M into its Indian business.
The infusion of capital comes in time to prepare Amazon India (officially named Amazon Seller Services Pvt Ltd) for the holiday shopping season, which centers around the Dussehra and Diwali festivals in the fall.
Amazon India’s chief rival for the attention of online shoppers will be Flipkart, which raised $1.5 billion at a valuation of $11.6 billion three months ago from a noteworthy roster of investors including Amazon rival eBay, Microsoft, and Tencent.
Another important competitor is Alibaba-backed Paytm.
Amazon pumped $2 billion into its Indian marketplace in summer 2014 and launched Amazon Prime there last year, with annual memberships costing 999 rupees (about $15, though discounts are available for new members).
Amazon India will run its first Prime Day on July 10, to coincide with the online shopping/promotional event’s timing in the U.S. and other markets.
The e-commerce behemoth is likely to continue pumping money into its India unit.
China and the U.S. are still the world’s largest e-commerce markets, but India is the fastest-growing one, with online retail sales expected to reach $64 billion by 2021, at a five-year compound annual growth rate of 31.2 percent.
But that doesn’t mean its smooth sailing for India’s biggest e-commerce players as they struggle with high operating costs.
Featured Image: David Ryder/Stringer/Getty Images
This NYC Startup Just Raised $5M to Make Manufacturing in America Viable Again
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Voodoo Manufacturing is a software-enabled 3D printing factory that works with major brands to produce high-quality products, prototypes and parts at scale.
At Voodoo, we minimize the cost and lead-time for mass production and customization, making it possible for consumers to have a completed customized product overnight.
The idea for Voodoo started while our team was at Makerbot.
At Voodoo, we use commoditized 3D printing technology to manufacture plastic parts and products.
The fact that we are able to cost-compete with injection molding is what makes us a viable alternative for producing many different types of parts.
We produce parts and products for our customers across two main services – Direct Print, a quick turn around low-volume service and Volume Printing, high volume orders (up to 10,000 units in 2 weeks) that may include 3D design and project management components.
Beyond 3D printing specifically, we believe in a digital future for manufacturing where lead times are short, iteration cycles are fast, products can be customized, and runs can start small and scale instantly.
Not many investors fully understand what’s happening in the manufacturing industry today.
Further expand into new verticals like marketing and promotional products.
Sexism and Startups
Sexism and Startups.
The guys with funds and foresight?
A lot of venture capitalists come with biases against women and can go at lengths to justify sexism.
Angel investors, seed funders are in the news too often for making sexual advances.
In case you missed it, Dave McClure, co-founder of early-stage venture capital fund 500 Startups, resigned after several women said he harassed them.
First The Bias, Then The Harassment This entrepreneur was asked several times to bring her chief product officer along.
It’s The Conversation We Need To Be Having Are investors having this conversation with startup owners?
The last few months we have had founders of many hip startups being accused of harassment.
For too long VCs have claimed it’s the business of VCs to focus on the business.
India ranks second (after Japan) when it comes to gender pay gap with men earning 67% more than women.
Sexism and Startups
Sexism and Startups.
The guys with funds and foresight?
A lot of venture capitalists come with biases against women and can go at lengths to justify sexism.
Angel investors, seed funders are in the news too often for making sexual advances.
In case you missed it, Dave McClure, co-founder of early-stage venture capital fund 500 Startups, resigned after several women said he harassed them.
First The Bias, Then The Harassment This entrepreneur was asked several times to bring her chief product officer along.
It’s The Conversation We Need To Be Having Are investors having this conversation with startup owners?
The last few months we have had founders of many hip startups being accused of harassment.
For too long VCs have claimed it’s the business of VCs to focus on the business.
India ranks second (after Japan) when it comes to gender pay gap with men earning 67% more than women.
Women grapple with Silicon Valley’s bro culture
Abuse towards women is rife in Silicon Valley’s macho culture.
So, why aren’t women a larger driving force in Tech?
Among the companies recently under fire are Uber, Twitter, Apple, Oracle, Google and Tesla.
As if that isn’t evidence enough, surveys conducted with women working in Silicon Valley startups report that 60 percent of women experience harassment in the workplace, highlighting the need for a dramatic cultural makeover.
Read more: Uber boss Travis Kalanick resigns under investor pressure Uber launches probe into harassment, sexism claims Many attribute this to Silicon Valley’s dominance by the white male and their perpetuation of “bro culture,” where founders put their friends and family in top positions, investments in HR are small to nonexistent, and acceptance from the tight-knit group of founders is maintained through male bonding as opposed to actual professionalism. “You have this insular group of like-minded and similar-looking people who are suddenly given immense privilege and opportunity and wealth,” said Jahan Sagafi, a lawyer from Outten and Golden representing workers claims, “and before long, they can feel like they are above the law.” Tackling the bro culture Lakshmi Balachandra, who was both an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist has ample experience on this topic from when she was the only woman working for a venture capitalist startup.
This is how men interact with each other,” said Balachandra, “if you don’t participate and go along with it, you miss out; you’re not part of that network again and you’re not given the same opportunities.
This lack of diversity is directly related to the continuation of bro culture in the workplace.
This means male-founded companies get 16 times more funding than women’s.
At the same time, the surveys taken found that 84 percent of women working in Silicon Valley were told they are “too aggressive,” indicating women are judged through a more paradoxical lens than men.
Baidu acquires natural language startup Kitt.ai, maker of chatbot engine ChatFlow
Baidu acquires natural language startup Kitt.ai, maker of chatbot engine ChatFlow.
China’s search giant Baidu has made another acquisition to continue its push into artificial intelligence, and specifically carving out a place for itself as a platform for developers who want to create chatbots and other services based on natural language technology.
It has acquired Kitt.ai, a profitable startup based out of Seattle that has developed a framework to build and power chatbots and voice-based applications across multiple platforms and devices.
Kitt.ai has been around since 2014, but it appears that it had only disclosed a seed round of funding of an unspecified size as a startup.
Its backers were Amazon’s Alexa Fund and the Founders Co-op.
Importantly, the company was growing and thriving.
It has paying customer across four continents “and we are profitable,” co-founder Xuchen Yao notes in the blog post.
Kitt.ai’s tech powers apps for smart phones, speakers, appliances, web chat, cars, homes, conference rooms, offices, hospitals, “and even telephone lines.” Yao and his two other co-founders Kenji Sagae and Guoguo Chen come from academic backgrounds, variously at Johns Hopkins and Carnegie Mellon.
The company had released three products, all of which will remain operational as before: Snowboy (“a customizable hotword detection engine”), NLU (“a multilingual natural language understanding engine”), and ChatFlow (a multi-turn conversation engine that we covered here), and appeared to be built as a cross-platform service, improving its ubiquity.
Baidu — like its U.S. counterpart Google — has been investing over many years in building AI expertise and technology, not only to power its own services and whatever moves it plans to make next in search on existing platforms like mobile and computers, but also completely new areas like automotive as a new endpoint for its search technology.
Will Blue Apron’s rebound continue?
Will Blue Apron’s rebound continue?.
Cooking kit delivery company Blue Apron traded up 3.5% on the stock market Monday, erasing some of the losses from its first two days as a public company.
Shares closed at $9.67, which was still beneath last week’s $10 IPO price.
This is in contrast to a lot of public debuts, where companies are typically in the green for the first day “pop.” It’s the subsequent days or weeks where things can get tougher.
But perhaps a stronger close on Monday was a sign that investors think the market was too tough on Blue Apron.
Or perhaps it was just a fluke.
On the plus side, Blue Apron popularized a category with enormous market opportunity.
Everybody eats, after all.
There have also been reports that Blue Apron has significant churn.
Redfin, which unveiled its IPO filing on Friday, is likely to debut towards the end of the month.
Chinese co-working unicorn URWork raises $30M from healthcare firm Aikang
Chinese co-working unicorn URWork raises $30M from healthcare firm Aikang.
Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on TechNode, an editorial partner of TechCrunch based in China.
URWork, a billion-dollar-valued co-working in China, announced today that it has closed a RMB 200 million ($30 million) investment from Beijing’s Aikang Group.
The deal is a strategic one that both sides said will grow the selection of services for URWork customers and help unlock additional revenue.
The new investment adds to URWork’s six rounds of funding, which total RMB 1.2 billion ($175 million) and one merger since its launch in April 2015.
“These are just the revenues that are tangible, but there is a lot of hidden money,” says Mao in an interview with local media [link in Chinese].
He is referring to the 25 percent of its revenue which is generated from its so-called value-added offerings, such as financial services, human resources, and healthcare.
Its new strategic investment partnership from Aikang is design to boost those services and growth bottom line revenue.
It started its overseas expansion efforts in the second half of 2016, which to date includes the opening of locations in Singapore, London, Taiwan and New York City — the latter being an already crowded market that dominated by U.S. competitor WeWork.
Shortly after, URWork confirmed its merger with New Space, a rumor that had circulated for over a year ago.
Cross-border payment startup InstaRem eyes IPO in 2020 after closing $13M Series B
Cross-border payment startup InstaRem eyes IPO in 2020 after closing $13M Series B. Cross-border payment startup InstaRem has raised $13 million in new financing as it looks to expand its business, which is rooted in Asia, into Europe and North America ahead of an eventual public listing as soon as 2020.
InstaRem operates a cross-border payment service that is targeted at business users, including banks and retailers, although it does operate a consumer service.
By working with banks and using wholesale rates, the firm is able to get good cross-border rates for its retail customers, too, InstaRem CEO and co-founder Prajit Nanu told TechCrunch.
Now, with this funding, it is working to get necessary licenses to expand to all markets in Europe and the U.S. before the end of the year as it aims to take a larger bite out of an industry that processes over $500 billion in transactions per year.
(Its headquarters are in Singapore with most of its development team currently situated in India.)
Already it is net profitable in some markets, he added.
“We should have enough capital to run the business — we didn’t want to raise too much,” Nanu explained.
“If we hit profitability, we could be looking at an IPO for 2020 [which] would give enough time to build our business.” Hong Kong is attracting tech IPOs, with gaming firm Razer following the lead of selfie app company Meitu, and Singapore is also vying for public listings.
However, the InstaRem CEO said it would most likely aim for a U.S.-based IPO.
“In three years time I think we’ll have a great story,” he added.