Buzz Room
A compendium of what our partners read each week, highlighting macro industry trends, our investment focus areas, and general personal and business strategies.
News About Our Portfolio Companies
- Hustle’s 2017 HustleCon speaker list
- Werk on how female entrepreneurs are fundraising today
- Astronomer.io on how to lead
- Greenhouse named to Glassdoor’s best places to work
- Epic! on promoting literacy for children
- Unaliwear on 6 types of upcoming technology for seniors
- How Newswhip is tackling fake news
- Stratifyd on how GM uses data analytics to retain employees
Industry Trends
- Floodgate 6
- Desktops die on weekends + 10 startling mobile app usage trends
- The top 9 VCs backing IPOs…most involved with healthcare startups
- WPP CEO most concerned about Amazon
- Clips by Apple + driving further into Facebook & Snap territory
- The future of family office investing + why to invest + 20 US cities beyond the Valley that attract the most Bay Area investment
- Google to revamp ad policies + improving brand safety controls + more control for brands over online ads + more trouble
- Up to 20% of digital ad spend could be fraud
- Demographic differences between the top 7 social media networks + social media’s effect on democracy is Alexander Hamilton’s nightmare
- Education change is here but we aren’t ready for it – 65% of primary school children will work in jobs not yet existent
- SpaceX is working with NASA on finding a Mars landing spot
- LinkedIn revamps timeline with trending storylines
- Is Facebook a structural threat to a free society? Why Snapchat can’t copy Facebook + Instagram hits 1M advertisers
- TechCrunch launches ‘Equity,’ a VC podcast
- Everything to know about AV
- Apple iPhone hacker ransom + protecting yourself from the Turkish crime family +
- Is the information age weaponized? The future of the open internet is in your hands
- Goldman Sachs’ bankers say deal-making is at dot com levels
- Big tobacco has caught startup fever
Artificial Intelligences
- Taking AI to mythical proportions + the future of work – 3 mega trends
- The future of AI in fashion + AI is the new electricity
- From automation to empathy, AI dominated SXSW
- Elon is starting another company
- The product edge in ML startups + Prof X: the AI AV genius
- YC to dedicate vertical group to AI in next batch
Commerce
- Amazon sold 43% of online sales in 2016
- Introduction to AI-powered ecommerce merchandising
IoT Software Stack
- Retail IoT
- Microsoft’s plan to dominate connected cars
Content and Experiences
- Alexa to be a $10B business by 2020
- Snapchat launches Bitmoji widget + launches MGM partnership
- Search in VR + watching March Madness in VR
- Easing dental worries in VR and social justice activism and incarceration reform in VR
- The end of smartphone innovation + Apple’s next big thing: AR
Health
- Telemedicine is additive; it could be great if people stopped using it so frequently
- Big data to optimize health and disease + healthcare and AI
- How digital health can help end opioid addition
- Zocdoc’s new machine learning search engine
Business and Personal Strategy
- Why facts alone can’t fight false beliefs
- 25 considerations for preparing an IPO
- Investing and building marketplaces
- Startup fundraising dictionary + how accelerators help startups + why accelerators should mimic Moneyball + how to get a meeting
- Psychological price of entrepreneurship
- Taking feedback impersonally
- Learn to lead, before you learn to manage
- A 2000+ word Guide on Change Management
- Why innovators should study the rise and fall of the Venetian Empire
- Creative destruction lab startup
- Why humble people make better decisions + happiness and life satisfaction
- When should you sell your business? And the state of the seed market in 2017
- Capital efficiency and valuations matter
- Peer pressure helps change people, not incentives
- Relationships are 100/100, not 50/50
- The productivity paradox