Most founders don’t realize that startup success takes a lot of work –– and a whole lot of crazy. You’ve got to find your path to revenue: provide what customers want, make it convenient, keep them coming back. To grow, you sell your business to investors, but you have to prove you’re making money for…
Tech startups are increasingly cloud-native. Companies of every kind are migrating their data and ops to maximize efficiency, security and agility with cloud-based services. But what about businesses that have been around for 50, or even 150, years? There are banks, insurers and government agencies whose legacy technology is older than most of…
One of the main takeaways from the book I’m listening to right now, Jim Collins’ Good to Great, is that the vast majority of innovative companies –– the ones that are exponentially outperforming the market –– have leadership born from within the company. They haven’t brought in a hired gun, a superhero solver of problems,…
When BenchPrep co-founders Ashish Rangnekar and Ujjwal Gupta uploaded their first app, a GMAT test-prep product, to the then-new App Store in 2009, they never imagined it would become a multi-million-dollar business. In fact, they didn’t think of it as a business at all, evidenced by what they filled in under “Company Name” on…
Millennials are accused of “killing” a lot of stuff –– home ownership, diamonds, cereal. Dressing up for work is another casualty. Most workplace dress codes are some version of casual, if they exist at all. But there are still plenty of people who can’t wear hoodies to work. And lots of guys up…
A home is probably the biggest thing you’ll ever buy –– or sell. Unfortunately, the process of doing either is notoriously stressful, fragmented, and clunky. So we rely on brokers to navigate it –– for a hefty commission. Is this industry ripe for disruption? Kyle Stoner thinks so. With a background in investment…
Fresh from a Series A raise of $8 million and barely a year into a partnership with Microsoft, Lightstream is ready to scale in a massive way. “We’re a small team with enterprise-class problems,” says Stu Grubbs, its co-founder and CEO. The company’s browser-based, cloud-enabled streaming studio interface seamlessly integrates with Twitch,…
Tap that. Nick Anastasiades, Jonathan Elron, and Arik Gaisler’s company 2ndKitchen is also the second business they’ve started together. Their previous venture, SF-based “quintessential startup” RedPie, billed itself as the “Uber for pizza,” using a supply optimization model called “spread sourcing” to deliver pies in record time. It was a “quintessential startup,”…
In the early days, famous founders like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak worked for the individuals who would become their future mentors: They hunted the mentors down, pushed their way in and worked beside them while taking meticulous notes on how to build something better. And, sometimes, the would-be mentor would take notice and provide…
“Work-life balance” is a buzz phrase we’ve heard for years, but how many of us actually achieve it? Ishan Daya, co-founder of Crafty, says that the next generation of office dwellers want something else: work-life integration. The smartest employers emphasize “the fluidity between life and work,” he says. “They want to create an…