Economic Times Startup Awards 2015: Indian startups will transform world, say ... - Economic Times

BENGALURU: The sum total of sentiment at India's most prestigious startup event was akin to the mood in India at the moment — the promise and excitement of endless possibility, mingled with reminders that the road to enduring success is a long, hard slog.

At the Jio Economic Times Startup Awards on Monday night, toasts were raised to celebrate the finest achievement by a new generation of Indian entrepreneurs, and hopes expressed that from among the ranks of the middle class will spring forth startup founders whose companies can transform India and the world.

"We are a country where the demographics are right," said Nikesh Arora, the president of Japan's SoftBank, which has invested about $1 billion in Indian startups in less than a year. "And we are at a point where technology is going to allow us to leapfrog tremendous amounts of developments that have happened in the West."

Also Read:

ET Startup Awards celebrates heroes of emerging economy: Vineet Jain

Policy-makers need to act responsibly, says Softbank President Nikesh Arora

Entrepreneurs, investors celebrate success, failure and everything in between

The Winners

From startup founders and investors to business leaders and politicians, more than 400 guests thronged the venue in a five-star hotel in India's technology capital for the ceremony in which awards were given away in eight categories. Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel, Pete Lau of smartphone maker OnePlus and Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal were among those joining in the celebrations. Reliance Jio Infocomm directors and heirs to India's richest man Mukesh Ambani, Akash and Isha Ambani, brought in the power quotient, while Wipro's Rishad Premji brought in his dignified gravitas to the event that saw business leaders, bankers and several Bengaluru notables in attendance. Spiegel's girlfriend, Victoria's Secret Angel and paparazzi magnet Miranda Kerr, brought in the glamour quotient.

India's biggest startup ceremony was the culmination of months of effort, involving an open and transparent process of applications, shortlisting of candidates by a team of ET editors and the selection of winners by a high-powered jury.

Vani Kola, the founder of Kalaari Capital and the winner of the Midas Touch Award for best investor, said the accolade is not only an acknowledgement of individual su ccess but also the struggle of many

"This is like the Oscars of our industry," she remarked.

Ankit Bhati, the cofounder of taxi app Ola which won the Startup of the Year award, joked that had the concept of "Oscar for startups" existed earlier, convincing his mother about starting up would have been a walk in the park.

It is springtime for entrepreneurship in India, as young people with ideas build technology-led ventures that are changing the way Indians live, work and play.

Investors with deep pockets are rushing in to back such ventures — just this year, about $4 billion (Rs 25,000 crore) is estimated to have been invested in Indian startups.

Arora, who is the heir-apparent to SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, reminded entrepreneurs that they are "pioneers in the Indian startup ecosystem" and must set an example to those who follow by behaving responsibly. And an important element of such behaviour, he said, is utter and complete devotion to the product they are building.

"A bad product is not going to be successful with great marketing," he said.

"If you give money away, Indian consumers are very good at finding out you are giving money away and they will flock to collect the money."

Spiegel, the world's youngest billionaire whose company is reportedly valued at $16 billion, concurred with this view during a 'fireside chat' with Arora.

"Customer acquisition costs have really increased online ... I mean globally that is one of (the) big things we pay attention to," he said.

For the valuations-crazed startup ecosystem, he had words of sobering advice that appeared to turn conventional wisdom on its head.

"My job is to make sure we are always undervalued," he said.

Spiegel also pointed to something that most startups do not pay attention to while they chase growth: "Do not forget to have fun and play, (this is) why we do this stuff."

Predictive sales software startup EverString raises another $65 million - Fortune

EverString, another marketing startup that sells software for personalizing business-to-business sales outreach, has closed a $65 million Series B round.

The funding was led by LightSpeed Venture Partners, along with Sequoia Capital, IDG Ventures, and Lakestar. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company previously raised around $13.7 million in seed and Series A funding.

EverString uses analytics and artificial intelligence technologies to sort through a company's prospects and qualify the leads that are most promising based on historical encounters. It can filter far more information than typical inside sales teams, helping an organization build sales pipelines far more quickly.

Its account list currently includes more than 50 customers, said President and co-founder J.J. Kardwell. The ones willing to be named publicly are mainly from the tech sector: IBM, Microsoft, VMware, and Zenefits. "We don't sell analytics. We help companies increase their conversion rates," Kardwell said.

EverString's co-founders were previously with Summit Partners, where they became intimately familiar with the challenges of selling to business-to-business prospects. The three-year-old company is led by CEO Vincent Yang, who has a background in mathematics and data science. EverString now employs slightly more than 100 people. The new money will go toward sales team research and development, and sales team expansion, Kardwell said.

One of EverString's rivals is Demandbase, which cites customer reference accounts including as Dell, General Electric, and Kelly Services. That company raised $30 million in June, bringing its total to around $90 million.

Other companies to watch closely include Lattice Engines (backed by $75 million) and Leadspace (which has attracted a more modest $35 million.)

EverString's healthy Series B round underscores the demand for better customer data to inform both consumer and business-to-business campaigns. San Francisco-based Segment, another startup seeking to automate the collection and analysis of customer data, raised $27 million in its Series B round last week.

The funding was led by Thrive Capital, with participation from Accel Partners, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and Jon Winkelried, the former president of Goldman Sachs.

"Segment provides the infrastructure that makes centralizing and syndicating this data a seamless process," said Thrive Capital partner Will Gaybrick, in a statement. "At the same time, it increases the fidelity and flexibility of your customer data no matter what tools you're using to analyze, visualize or take actions with it."

Segment's customers include Bonobos, Conde Nast, and HotelTonight.

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5 Reasons Your Startup Should Add a 'Shark' to the Dream Team - Entrepreneur

Ever hear the following? "For your tech startup dream team, all you need is a hustler (your salesperson), a hipster (your designer), and a hacker (your coder)." You likely have heard this, because it's repeated so often that it's now practically industry dogma.

Related: These 3 Legal Traps Can Stop a New Business in its Tracks

But startups are never quite so secure; the waters surrounding them are fraught with risk -- in the form of legal liability. That's why you need one additional player on that dream team: competent legal counsel (a.k.a your "Shark"). And if you're still skeptical, consider the following five reasons why:

1. Founder conflicts 

In a perfect world, a startup business would roll out following a well-structured plan. In reality, startups are multiple acts of improvisation and agile adjustment; and in a multi-founder company, people's commitment and input to the enterprise may change over time as economic, personal and market realities unfold. Your Shark can help your team create written operating agreements so that roles and expectations are established from the outset and ownership is apportioned fairly and in accordance with the value that's been created.

2. Employee matters 

In addition to other founders, employees provide critical input for your business. At a minimum, you'll need employment and confidentiality agreements to protect the interests of your company. But employment agreements and incentive plans can't be done willly nilly, and a shark can keep you in compliance with state and federal tax regulations. If your startup is cash-constrained and you contemplate offering "deferred compensation" (don't!), your Shark can help you structure agreements to prevent employees or founders from falling prey to any unintended tax traps. 

Related: The Legal Advice Mark Cuban Didn't Take

 3. Patents and trademark issues 

Intellectual property (IP) is foundational to your company's value. Whether it's in the form of software code, trade secrets, trademarks or patents, IP is vulnerable. And the least you need to do is work to avoid infringement of others and, even better, stake out some beach-front intellectual property so that you can defend and build your enterprise value.

You also need to ensure that employees and contractors assign works to your company to make your company the sole owner of your IP. Procedurally, the steps needed to protect your IP aren't complex, but some deadlines are inflexible, so your Shark can keep you on track to protect or build your IP portfolio.

4. Form contracts and agreements

You won't be taken seriously -- especially in the B2B world -- if you don't have professional legal contracts and agreements. And to avoid the downside risk of seeing the value you've created collapse from haphazard legal underpinnings, you'll need boilerplate-form agreements for your terms of service, your privacy policies, non-disclosure agreements and other agreements that can all be easily prepared by a competent Shark but are required to run your business.

5: Compliance with securities law

Many startup entrepreneurs take pride in being nimble and innovative, but when it comes to compliance with state and federal securities laws, there is little room for experimentation. If you expect to issue options or sell equity to employees, friends, family or investors, the involvement of a Shark is required. At best, without one, you'll be in danger of expensive legal "cleanup" down the road. At worst, you could find your company regarded as unfundable by investors, and you could be liable for civil or even criminal charges.

Regardless of whether your Shark is a founding partner, hired counsel, individual or a composite of these types, his or her addition to your dream team will help you avoid some of the fatal flaws that afflict many startups. So, recruit a Shark at your company's inception and feed him/her well.

Related: 3 Key Legal Issues Online Marketers Need to Know About

Book of the Week: Prepare for the startup plunge with advice from investors ... - GeekWire

You may think you have a great idea for a startup. Maybe it's a way to revolutionize dating or a method of moving huge chunks of data between cloud platforms, but no matter how good it is, you're doomed to fail if you don't consider some vital startup components before you embark on your endeavor.

Sean Wise and Brad Feld detail what you need to know before jumping into startup life in their book Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job.

Both Wise and Feld know startups. Wise has a storied background in venture capital, which led him to a five-year consulting role on the CBC's Dragon's Den, the Canadian version of Shark Tank. Feld founded Interliant before the dot-com bust, followed by a string of venture capital firms, most recently co-founding Techstars.

Brad Feld

Combined, the two provide an overview of what VCs are looking for in startups before they even start up, and what an entrepreneur should think about before attempting to execute their big idea. Coming up with a good idea is only a small part of the creation of a successful business.

"The cost of what could have been created is small when compared to the resources squandered on bad ideas," they write.

The book includes viewpoints from other investors and founders as well, detailing anecdotes of early startup mistakes and successes from Circa, Twilio and Disqus. Sections include how to evaluate ideas, how to find the right people and products for your idea, and how to pitch it and raise money.

Wise and Feld's advice on hiring the right people is especially important. They push the idea of building a diverse team to fully prepare your idea for the real world and push entrepreneurs to find a co-founder before diving into the startup world.

Sean Wise

"Without people to create the business all you have is a good idea," the write. "While most of the elements around a business are continuously changing, people are the hardest elements to change and are often the slowest to evolve. Never forget that people are complicated."

The advice ranges from practical (be ready to live at least 6 months without an income; if you can't fully execute a your solution, don't be afraid to find a co-founder) to more theoretical ideas (make sure your solution is 10 times better than any others; make sure you're solving a need, not a want) that you just need to have in mind before quitting your day job.

Startup Opportunities isn't meant to be the only book you read on your journey to bring an idea to the world. Instead, Feld and Wise are augmenting the methods outlined in classic startup books like The Lean Startup and The Startup Owner's Manual.

The startup is this generation's embodiment of the American Dream, letting people with great ideas rise up in the world. But before quit your job and dive into the world of entrepreneurship, be sure to think about the ideas discussed in Wise and Feld's book.

GeekWire Picks is a regular feature linking to our favorite products and deals. GeekWire may receive a share of the revenue from your purchase through affiliate partnerships.

The Evolution Of Japanese Startups: Innovation From The Ground Up - Forbes

[unable to retrieve full-text content]ForbesThe Evolution Of Japanese Startups: Innovation From The Ground UpForbesJapan is an extremely entrepreneurial society, with a long history of individuals creating businesses and striking out on their own. Despite this history, the phenomenon of 'Startup entrepreneurship' is not yet the engine of economic growth and ...

Tech Talk: GIA plans 'Startup Import Welcome' party - DesMoinesRegister.com

Tech(Photo: The Register)

The Global Insurance Accelerator plans to host a set of insurance startups from outside of Iowa for a few weeks this month.

The accelerator will welcome the companies with a "Startup Import Welcome Party" this week, opening its doors for members of Iowa's startup and financial community to come by and introduce them to the city.

Startups coming by the accelerator include San Francisco-based Parachute, Philadelphia's Livegenic and London-based Tractable, among others.

The party is scheduled from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday at the accelerator, 321 E. Walnut St., Suite 130, Des Moines. Attendees can RSVP via https://tikly.co/events/930.

It will have some dashes of classic Des Moines fare, including beer from Confluence Brewing Co. and food from Tacopocalypse and Fong's Pizza.

Marlowe buys back his company

Iowa City-based investor and entrepreneur Anthony Marlowe recently bought back his company TMone, renaming it Mass Markets.

During an interview, Marlowe said he has big plans for the company, including quickly hiring another 100 people Iowa City and Spearfish, S.D.

While he focuses on the company, Marlowe said he may slow down on investments he makes through Iowa City Capital Partners, the investment company he runs by himself.

"I think I'm going to put a slow down on the Iowa City Capital Partners thing," Marlowe said. "I'm all in and 120 percent focused on Mass Markets."

Iowa City Capital Partners took part in Clusterflunk's seed round and provided convertible debt to Pear Deck, among other investments listed on its website.

Marlowe also said he won't exit Mass Markets until it can go public or he can sell it for nine figures.

For more on Marlowe's reacquiring the company, check out this Iowa City Press-Citizen story: http://icp-c.com/1jez9yz.

Matthew Patane covers technology, innovation and startups for The Des Moines Register. Contact him at 515-284-8211 or mpatane@dmreg.com. Follow him on Twitter via @mattpatane.

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Misery Loves Company: FuckUp Nights at Austin Startup Week - Silicon Hills News

By SUSAN LAHEY Reporter with Silicon Hills News

Elijah May, Managing Partner at The Experience Firm, photos by Susan Lahey

There was the story about a really fun, crazy marketing plan with no ROI, the entrepreneur who thought she could let her bills and health slide while she built her business, the visionary pivoter who didn't bother to do any market validation before buying $100,000 worth of inventory, and the startup techie who didn't get things in writing because her co-founder seemed like someone she could trust. It was Austin FuckUp Night, Startup Week Edition.

FuckUp Night is a global phenomenon that began in Mexico in 2012 where entrepreneurs can share their failure stories and lessons learned. Austin's first FuckUp Night was in August. Thursday night Elijah May, Managing Partner at The Experience Firm, Frances Smith, formerly of Diesel Foods, Laura Beck, founder of Striped Shirt, and Nicole Forbes of Violet Crown Consulting bore their entrepreneurial wounds before a group of about 100 people at Mutual Mobile.

Marketing for Fun, Not Profit

May, chagrined to be sharing that brand strategist screwed up someone's brand, told a sad tale that had the audience laughing the entire time. The idea started—like many startup brands do—with a crazy idea that had no real tie to the business plan. His favorite part of what he does is to create amazing experiences. And he was hired by a sign company that gave him carte blanche to create such an experience for customers.

"After a lot of conversations, I found this cool idea: Signs and Bacon…," May said. People loved it, but it didn't make people buy signs. "We didn't do any homework," he said. "We didn't figure out what this thing was or understand the company's culture. We had a cool logo and some fun stickers and we ended up getting a pig and naming him Kevin Bacon."

At Christmas time, they tried to tie the campaign to selling yard signs by decorating the old-fashioned pig logo with a Santa cap and writing "Pork Your Neighbor," on the signs. This didn't go over as well as Kevin Bacon.

"No one wanted to pork their neighbor at Christmas," May said.

At one point they had Kevin Bacon, the pig, make a star appearance, pulling up in Whurley's (founder of Chaotic Moon Studios and Honest Dollar) car to a red carpet. The pig relieved himself in the car. That, May said, was kind of the moment he knew.

His biggest takeaway, May said, was: Don't forgo the branding process. "Is the culture clear? Is the brand clear? We jumped right to the fun reputation stuff but you have to be sure why you're doing it and provide people with a solution they want in their lives."

When Your Business is Everything

Frances Smith, founder of Diesel Foods

Frances Smith spoke next. Hers was the freshest failure, since she closed her business, Diesel Foods, only six months prior. Smith said she'd had one talk prepared but switched it the night before to an admonition that entrepreneurs have to take care of themselves. Entrepreneurs, she said, sometimes pride themselves on the insane hours they work and how long they go without sleep. They shouldn't. But they also shouldn't neglect the other parts of being a person, like working out, getting a haircut, and possibly getting a counselor.

"All I ever talked about was my business so my friends never wanted to talk to me again," she said.

Plus, friends who weren't entrepreneurs didn't understand that $50,000 in revenue didn't mean she was getting paid. And that was one of the biggest issues: Not paying her bills. Tanking her personal credit score made it nearly impossible to get money for her business.

When an audience member asked her if she would have heeded her own advice had she heard it at the start of her business, she acknowledged "Probably not. But I'll do it next time."

Well I Love the Idea….

Laura Beck, founder of stripedshirt

Laura Beck zipped the audience through a tragically hilarious dip into fashion entrepreneurship that she described as "One and done."

Beck had been in PR for years and her agency was "killing it" with $3 million in revenue. But she was working constantly and didn't have the time she wanted for her two young daughters. So, without the benefit of any market research beyond consulting her own opinions, she dumped it all and spent $100,000 on boxes and boxes of striped shirts that would let people show their support for a school or a team or a city, without having to wear some ugly logo. She imagined whole families going to games dressed in the shirts, which were priced at around $20.00—again, according to her opinion of what they should be priced.

She built a $10,000 website that was way more than she needed. "I did it thinking 'I can scale this baby! I can have striped bathing suits and water bottles….' I over architected the smack out of this thing. It was like I was building The Gap." But she never took time to implement a lot of the other marketing tools she actually knew—on some level—that she needed.

She'd thought, being a PR expert, she could push her business without sales. But PR, she realized, is "air cover" for sales. The only time sales rose was in September. She thought it was tied to people going back to school and sports teams getting revved up, but in fact people were buying them for Halloween costumes, Where's Waldo in particular.

In May she threw what became a viral "Kickstopper" or and "Indienogo." "I wanted to bookend this fucker," she said. She did a tongue-in-cheek Facebook video that got 138,000 views and sold 1,000 t-shirts. Then she took her family to China. (She still has a lot of shirts for sale).

Trust But Verify

Forbes told the tale many entrepreneurs struggle with about going into business with someone she trusted without pinning her co-founder to nitty gritty details like vesting schedules and control.

Ultimately, she said, the business, SMRT Mouth, a biometric mouth guard that collected data from players on the field and sent it to coaches with tablets on the sidelines, succeeded, but she was out. Forbes' co-founder started by wanting 51 percent of ownership, promising her full control as to how to run a business.

Once they got their patents on a smart mouth guard, she was off like a bullet from a gun. "I was really eager, versus excited," Forbes said. "It's okay to be excited, but when you're over eager, you start to overlook red flags." For example, there was no proof of concept. "You couldn't even put the thing in your mouth," she said. She had no equity, there was no vesting schedule, she wound up working for a year for free, and every time she was on the verge of getting investment that might cut into the co-founder's 51 percent, he put the kibosh on it. What finally convinced her to leave, she said, was learning that the co-founder had given someone else equity in the company.

The co-founder wanted to split the company into a hardware company, a mobile app company and a data company, giving her the hardware piece. "Everybody knows the money's in the data," she said.

Her biggest mistake, she said, was avoiding offending her co-founder. That and "Never go into business with someone who knows shit about business."

FuckUp Night happens monthly in Austin.

More Funding Won't Magically Fix Your Startup - TechCrunch

Some entrepreneurs think that (more) money will solve all their company's problems. It won't. Like a teenager with a million dollar allowance and an identity crisis, a startup with too much capital and no product-market fit will become capable of making larger mistakes.

Biggie Smalls said it best: "Mo Money, Mo Problems."

As an investor, I root for startups. It pains me to see great teams and ideas collapse under the pressure that sometimes follows fundraising. If you've raised money and you're not sure what comes next, that's fine – I don't always know either. However, I do know four things you absolutely should not do:

This startup could change the game for same-day shipping - Fortune

A lean operation with a brilliant idea—caffeinated club soda—wants to crack the L.A. market during the spring. Sounds like a slam dunk, but they don't want to commit to a long warehouse lease while they're still getting a foothold. Meanwhile, a Christmas-decoration warehouse sits largely empty.

It's a classic missed connection—and it's common.

"At any given moment," says Karl Siebrecht, "There are many, many businesses out there who have too much space, while other businesses don't have enough."

Siebrecht is trying to solve that problem with Flexe, a warehousing marketplace he helped found in Seattle in 2013. Just as Airbnb turns unused guest rooms into a commodity, and eBay EBAY lets you sell grandma's dusty porcelain, Flexe's mission is to connect partially or temporarily empty warehouse space with companies that need short-term inventory storage. (And yes, the caffeinated club soda company is an actual customer).

The biggest obvious fluctuation in warehouse needs comes during the holiday shopping season, when plenty of retailers need all the space they can get. But other cycles are more complementary—you're not going to sell much garden equipment in the Northeast in January, so you might as well let someone store scarves in your space. In sectors like toys, hit-driven boom and bust cycles create unpredictable peaks and valleys in warehouse demand.

Then there are the deeper trends making flexibility more important. As e-commerce continues to expand, warehouses and distribution nodes are moving ever closer to the center of the retail equation. Meanwhile, product life cycles are shrinking, and long global supply chains continue to make true just-in-time planning tough.

With an eye on those changes, Siebrecht is thinking bigger than temporary storage for Halloween costumes. He wants Flexe to transform how companies think about warehousing as fundamentally as Amazon Web Services changed thinking about data, shifting the model from one of big fixed costs to services that can be quickly turned on and scaled as needed.

MORE: Why food delivery is an uphill battle for Amazon, Google, and Uber

Flexe, whose revenue is based on transaction fees, may have its work cut out for it in changing minds and habits. In September, the supply chain researcher SCM World found that only 20% of respondents in consumer products and retail felt that on-demand "Uberization" was important for the future of their operations. That's double the positive response from last year, but numbers were even lower in other sectors.

And while Flexe seems to be the only company building a peer-to-peer commercial warehousing marketplace, it has fairly direct competition from companies like Cubesmart, which offers short-term leases on warehouse spaces it owns and manages. That model, though, isn't as cost-efficient as reselling excess capacity, or as granular—Flexe lets customers lease space by the pallet. It also integrates their goods into a warehouse's existing labor flow, meaning they don't have to provide their own workers or forklifts.

But the fundamental logic of the marketplace model may be its most powerful edge. Consider that while still-tiny Flexe has over 200 U.S. partner warehouses after only two years, Amazon AMZN , which has thrown its massive weight behind building a shipping network, has only around 96.

"It allows you to potentially have this virtual network of facilities," says Siebrecht, "To push your inventory further out into the marketplace, without investing tons and tons of capital."

Shared space wouldn't allow for the elaborate automation needed to fulfill Amazon's breadth of products, but Siebrecht envisions something almost as effective—companies offering same-day shipping on a few top sellers during peak season, all from temporary micro-distribution centers. That could have a big impact in the heated same-day shipping market, where Google's Express service is now going head to head with Amazon.

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For more Fortune coverage of Amazon shipping, watch this video:

Please Educate Your Startup Team About Equity - ReadWrite

Guest author Rob Leathern was the founder of Optimal.

Please Educate Your Startup Team About Equity

I believe that the uncertainty around stock options and equity at startups often works unfairly—to the company's benefit. 

As founders and CEOs, we don't create a safe environment for very smart, technical people to not get embarrassed asking what seem like elementary questions about equity. We startup founders worry—wrongly—about being overly transparent. That makes us get defensive. I've made mistakes and done it too. 

But transparency on company valuations and financing terms also needs to not be reactionary, and to be paired with proactive employee education.

Companies like eShares now providing a better solution for startup employees to see how much equity they have than getting a cut-and-paste email from founders culled from an unwieldy lawyer-provided spreadsheet of stock grants and shares outstanding. 

But many startups still play "hide the ball" on valuation and equity terms during the recruiting process, and most companies still do little or nothing to make equity a better-understood trade for employees.

I wrote "10 Startup HR Ideas for Founders" late last year with some thoughts from my first 5½ year stint as a startup CEO. One of the most important points I made there was that startups owe it to their teams to educate them about equity, both in general and for their company specifically.

One issue too is the short timeframe given to employees to exercise when they leave—often just 90 days. Pinterest announced it would give employees seven years to do so, and I've since encouraged companies I've been involved with to extend exercise windows to a minimum of 2 years, especially if they are not issuing incentive stock options. (Incentive stock options, or ISOs, have different tax treatment than nonqualified stock options, or NQSOs—but that's a topic for another post.)

At Optimal, one of our earliest engineers decided to leave the company in February 2011 to join a bigger company with a better base salary, and didn't exercise their vested shares, which would have cost about $2,760. Because they were ISOs, they wouldn't have had any immediate tax consequence to exercising, and in 2013, when we sold the business, those shares would have been worth about $83,000. (I consider our outcome quite modest by comparison to what some startups have achieved.)

 My cofounder and I tried to encourage the engineer in question to figure out some way to come up with the money to exercise, and we offered to extend the window three more months, but the engineer still chose not to exercise the options.

Most equity grants have a 12-month cliff—meaning you don't get any credit for staying less than a year. My position is that if a resource-and-cash-strapped startup lets someone they consider "undeserving" of equity stay that long, the issue is with their management, not the employee. Don't try to claw these shares back, in other words.

Finally, remember that the company's current valuation and the percentage of the company an options package represents if exercised don't give a complete picture. Liquidity preferences, particularly for early investors, can dramatically alter how much employees end up making. To help employees understand this, I recommend Dan Lopuch's Venture Dealr, a visualization of what can happen as a company raises money.

Photo courtesy of MyFitnessPal

A big day for startups in Cincy - Cincinnati.com

Cintrifuse's annual meeting took place Wednesday at at 1311 Vine St..(Photo: The Enquirer/Fatima Hussein)Buy Photo

OVER-THE-RHINE - Assembled in front of some of the country's top venture capitalists, the startup community in Cincinnati showcased its best and brightest, in hopes of garnering more outside investment into the area.

Both the Brandery and Cintrifuse held annual events, outlining what they have achieved over the past year.

Cintrifuse held its annual meeting Wednesday at its new space at 1311 Vine St., in front of a group of roughly 200 people, including investors in the accelerator, area business leaders and potential angel investors.

The organization connects the region's high-potential, venture-backable startups to advice, talent, funding, and customers.

"We want to get people, especially our big companies, invested in what we are doing here," said Wendy Lea, CEO of Cintrifuse, who will have completed one full year on the job next month.

Lea said as of current, Cintrifuse has a $58 million dollar fund, backed by 11 venture capital funds and other private organizations. Now, 71 percent of the fund is currently in use to help back a portion of the 155 startups that are clients to the organization.

"What we need right now are more investors, and part of this event has to do with inviting people to put money in the companies we have here."

"We have so many wealthy people in this community who are open to giving to the museum or the symphony – we want to figure out ways to get them to invest," she continued.

Attendees focused on the profitability of startups here.

Blair Garrou, managing director of Mercury Fund, a Houston-based startup venture capital fund, said his group has invested $75 million in total in Cincinnati startups for the past 11 years.

"We're feeling excited about Cincinnati and the startups we're seeing here today," Garrou said. "I see more investment in the future."

Earlier in the day, the Brandery held its sixth annual Demo Day, presenting the latest startup class' work to investors and area business leaders.

The 10 startup companies, including Oros, which developed hyper-insulated outerwear, and Wyzerr, which uses neuroscience to learn from mobile game usage for consumer brands.

Tony Alexander, general manager of the Brandery, said he thought the event was a success.

"I am confident each of the startups will find funding," he said, adding that the average investment in a startup that comes out of the Brandery runs from $500,000 to $1 million.

The Brandery, which operates at 1411 Vine St., works with select startup companies each year and provides them with mentoring, business development assistance, co-working space, access to potential business opportunities and in-kind services.

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Brickell startup stalls on road to disrupt car rental business - South Florida Business Journal

[unable to retrieve full-text content]South Florida Business JournalBrickell startup stalls on road to disrupt car rental businessSouth Florida Business JournalCarHopper has hit a sp eed bump on the road to disrupt Miami's car rental business. The Brickell startup has been trying to raise $500,000. It has been sponsoring tech community events. And it has been garnering media attention, including stories in the ...

New Orleans startup scene believes in angels - NOLA.com

New Orleans is making its mark as an entrepreneurial hotbed, with multiple incubators fostering business ideas into fledgling companies. Success stories have emerged from the likes of Idea Village, 4.0 Schools and the BioInnovation Center.

A steadily growing list of locally spawned startups -- Kickboard, Dinner Lab and Lucid (formerly Federated Sample) to name a few -- is bolstering the city's reputation.

But in order for more emerging companies to stand on their own – and develop into sizeable employers down the road -- boosters in the local entrepreneurial community say New Orleans needs to attract investors with the means to keep cash flowing into new businesses. It requires someone with a stomach for risk, and the willingness and resources to eat a loss on occasion.

Friends and family can chip in enough money for a single business, and crowdsourcing can expand that reach. But it typically takes deeper pockets to take a startup from an idea with potential to a tangible product or service.

That is the angel investor, who typically provides the money needed to take a company from its nascent stage to a point where it can generate inventory or hire employees. Until recently, New Orleans has struggled to build a solid base of these front-end investors.

Enter Mike Eckert, former CEO of the Weather Channel, who arrived in the city in 2013 and helped pull together a group of independent investors to form the NO/LA Angel Network. His vision included those already financially engaged in the New Orleans startup scene and angel investors around the state.

"There was no one market in Louisiana generating enough deals for those local angel investors," Eckert said. So he set about building the network to identify and finance businesses around the state. A key qualifier for companies seeking the network's support is that they maintain their base and concentrate their growth in Louisiana.

NO/LA Angel Network's membership has been on a rapid ascent, growing to 114 within a year and a half -- well above the average size of 68 among its peers in the national Angel Capital Association. Since making its first investment in October 2014, NO/LA Angel Network has put more than $2 million into local early stage companies, including Servato, MicroBiome, SmartPak and MobileQubes.

While their names have yet to reach household status, these companies and others are part of the buzz New Orleans is generating on the national startup scene. Even this brief history is enough to raise awareness of the city among outside angel investors.

"Angels are always looking for good deals, and there's interest in Louisiana," said Marianne Hudson, executive director of the Angel Capital Association. "There's a curiosity about New Orleans."

Tim Williamson, co-founder and CEO of Idea Village, said this growing attention from angel investors is part of the anticipated evolution of New Orleans as an entrepreneurial center. As new companies scale upward, he said, they lean on the professional community for guidance. Incubators offer access to lawyers, accountants, and bankers, and angel investors are typically part of this supporting cadre.

Williamson expects more angel groups to form locally, with breakout entrepreneurs "making exits" and seeking to put money back into the organizations and programs that fostered their growth.

"I think they care about paying it forward," he said.

It's that community spirit that helped Eckert persuade the Angel Capital Association to hold one of its annual Angel Insights Exchange in New Orleans, marking the first time the group will meet in the city. On Nov. 9-10, hundreds of investors will meet for idea-sharing and networking sessions in a members-only event at the Pan-American Life Conference Center. They represent 240 angel networks in an organization with more than 13,000 individual accredited investors.

That accreditation is important, Eckert said, because it means the investor can afford to lose his or her entire investment in a startup. According to the Securities and Exchange Commission, an accredited investor has a net worth of $1 million and makes at least $200,000 a year.

In addition to forging potential "syndicate" opportunities to pool local money with contributions from outside angel networks, Eckert said the exchange event raises New Orleans' profile among business investors.

"The idea is to showcase that New Orleans is back in a big way, particularly with the capital structure" needed to make deals, he said.

Servato, which creates backup power supplies and monitoring for computer infrastructure and is based at the BioInnovation Center, was the first company to tap into the resources of the NO/LA Angel Network. Co-founder and CEO Chris Mangum said the original plan was to seek $500,000 in "first round" financing from West Coast investors, but a meeting with Eckert convinced him to seek the backing of local angels.

The decision proved fruitful, with Mangum raising $750,000 quickly and linking him to potential syndicates for a larger Series A round of investment reaching $2 million to $3 million.

He and others point to Eckert as being instrumental in linking Louisiana startups with the right investors, which is critical when these backers join the management or boards of the new companies. Personalities and preferences come into play, and a complementary partnership is often the difference between failure and success.

Eckert has an ability to "match the hatch," said Mangum, using a fly fishing term describing a lure that closely resembles the insect that fish are most likely to eat.

Williamson expects more angel syndicates to forge financial ties to New Orleans companies as the city develops a talent pool of managers who specialize in leading early growth stage companies. With those people in place, he said investors will take a closer look.

"The only way syndicates can work is to have good people on the ground," he said.

With a critical mass of angels in place, the next phase would be attracting venture capital to New Orleans, Williamson said. At this stage, investment banks, specialized financial institutions and wealthy backers provide "Series A" money, the millions that allow a company to expand rapidly.

Williamson notes 75 percent of U.S. venture capitalists are based in New York, California, and Massachusetts. But in the South, he said there is no solid concentration of VC wealth.

With its star quickly rising in the entrepreneurial world, "maybe New Orleans is a hub in the South," he said.

With Startup Sols' New App, 3D Printed Custom Insoles Are One Quick Phone ... - Forbes

[unable to retrieve full-text content]ForbesWith Startup Sols' New App, 3D Printed Custom Insoles Are One Quick Phone ...ForbesBut until this week, would-be shoppers who wanted SOLS had to go to a podiatrist that worked with the startup. SOLS hopes its printers are going to get a lot busier now that it's launched its first consumer app. Take three photos of your feet with the ...and more »

ET Startup Awards 2015: Hear it from the unicorns- Snapdeal, Ola, Paytm, Quikr ... - Economic Times

BENGALURU: The country's biggest startup awards will be presented at a glittering ceremony in Bengaluru next week, and the event will play host to the founders of India's 'unicorns' — or companies with over billion-dollar valuations — who will discuss the tips and tricks of scaling up a venture.

On the evening of October 12, ET is bringing together a never-before assembled panel to celebrate the spirit of entrepreneurship at the maiden Jio Economic Startup Awards. Seen together on the stage will be Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal, Bhavish Aggarwal of Ola, Vijay Shekhar Sharma of Paytm, Pranay Chulet of Quikr and Naveen Tewari of InMobi.

The awards, which will be presented in eight categories, represent the finest achievement in India n entrepreneurship. From the startup of the year award which recognises size and scale to the Bootstrap Champ award for building a business without outside funding, the accolades cover a wide range of achievement. We are honouring women achievers, investors with the Midas Touch, startups born on campus, smart innovators, those who combine profits and social good, and the ones with gumption to fail and make a comeback.

The lesson, from the founders of 'unicorns', will be an important guide for hordes of young Indians who decide every day to pursue their entrepreneurial dreams. Scaling a venture in India continues to be a very different proposition compared to more mature, largely Western, markets.

The lack of infrastructure — physical and regulatory, internet penetration and limited reach of financial institutions — have often forced the country's startup founders to innovate, while building their own ecosystems, in order to reach out to the mass of consumers.

T hese entrepreneurs have founded and built companies that have successfully created large revenue-generating ventures, from being just those with user growth. They are offering services that are, more often than not, seen as essential for the price-conscious, still-maturing Indian consumer class.

In the process, some of them have gone on to provide platforms for millions of small businesses to come online and be part of the ongoing entrepreneurial revolution that is taking place. This, in turn, has forced investors — venture as well as strategic — to sit up, take notice, and then pump in billions of dollars.

Cash-on-delivery, for example, is an innovation born out of necessity in India, where credit card penetration continues to be low. The example set by Indian startups has also been copied by global peers. Stay tuned to ET for more details in the run up to the awards.

Oscar, a health care startup, brings insurance coverage to Dallas - Dallas Morning News (blog)

Employees at work inside the office of Oscar, a startup health insurance company, at the Puck Building in New York, March 28, 2014. Oscar is only one of two for-profit companies that were not already health insurers to enter the state markets since the passing of the Affordable Care Act. (Joshua Bright/The New York Times)

Oscar, a health insurance startup that offers fitness incentives and unlimited telemedicine visits, is entering the Dallas market, the company announced.

Related

Coverage will be available for open enrollment next month, both on and off the federal exchange. Premiums have not been released yet.

Oscar launched health coverage in New York in 2014 and added New Jersey this year. It advertises prominently in New York subway stations and often appeals to younger tech-savvy customers. It has over 40,000 customers.

Mario Schlosser, CEO and co-founder of Oscar.

For 2016, Oscar is expanding to the Dallas area and San Antonio, along with Los Angeles and Orange County, Calif.

In Dallas, Oscar will offer individual and family health insurance, and partner with Tenet Healthcare and Baylor Scott & White Health, the company said.

CEO Mario Schlosser, a former consultant at McKinsey & Co., said Texas has long been a focus for Oscar, whose approach stands apart from traditional insurers. The company said its services include unlimited free telemedicine, free physician visits, no-cost generic prescriptions and wellness benefits, such as free wearable fitness devices.

Customers can receive up to $100 a year in gift cards for reaching specific daily walking goals.

Oscar has raised $350 million from venture funds and other investors, including $32.5 million from Google Capital. The startup is valued at over $1 billion, according to news reports.

Five startup sectors that performed the best in 2015 - Economic Times

By Ashish Mittal

With the year, almost drawing to a close, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on how the startup ecosystem has performed in the country. It has been a fascinating year and some of the early presumptions about starting up have begun to unravel. Beginning early this year, we saw a great rush of venture money and a significant uptick in valuations. As a seed round of a million dollars became the new norm, startups started mushrooming throughout the country. The sectors that saw significant interest include:

IoT and Wearables: The entire Internet of Things (IoT) has been literally forced down our throat by big tech companies, which has meant over a billion dollars have been invested in startups in the IoT space globally over the past few months. Technology companies and their investment arms like Intel, Cisc o, Microsoft, Qualcomm and big VC firms like Sequoia Capital, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz and others have made a sizeable investment in the space. While I am a great believer of IoT and its potential, there seems to have been more hype than substance till now. However, that has not stopped a number of startups trying to do some interesting stuff around IoT. Probably it will take us some more time before we can start seeing the full benefits of IoT.

On the other hand the entire Wearables segment has seen a number of significant products taking over our life. This segment is largely propelled by fitness products that look to help us maintain a healthy l ifestyle. Fitness bands are the most popular Wearables today, followed by Smartwatches. While top tech companies like Samsung and Apple have thrown everything behind their Smartwatches, even Google has tried its hand in it. It is not surprising that many startups now consider Wearables he next big thing.

Food Tech: This is perhaps that segment that has taken everyone by surprise. While the segment has been simmering for some time now with the likes of Zomato doing a good job, the amount of startup interest in the segment has been a revelation. This has been mainly because the food and restaurant industry till now has been largely fragmented with little or no tech adoption. Startups have figured out a lot can be done in the aggregation business and in delivery. The sub segments that have done well in the space include both eat at home ordering and delivery, restaurant discovery and booking (table reservation), in restaurant payments, office food delivery and recipe aggregators.

Hyperlocal: At any point of the day, my local market today has more delivery boys compared to actual shoppers. With the likes of Grofers, BigBasket and Pickingo vying for your attention as your on demand delivery partner, there is an explosion of hyperlocal services. From delivering fruits, vegetable, pulses, to transportation services, hyperlocal startups have managed to grab their fair share of eyeballs and investor money. However, this sector has become very competitive and it is will be interesting to see how these startups scale and evolve in the future.

Logistics Management: According to global startup analyst firm Tracxn about 90 startups and 50 plus startups have been founded in 2014 and 2015 respectively. Top funded startups inc lude the likes of Delhivery, TinyOwl, Ecom Express and Gofers. The sector has seen a lot of interest primarily because of the growth of ecommerce in India. The startups in the segment have now started finding niches and diving deeper. This has led to the emergence of local delivery startups, food delivery startups, intra-city, inter city, overseas, courier aggregators, ecommerce shippers and local transport and freight aggregators. Of the many sub segments, local delivery, intercity transport and local transport and fright aggregators have seen considerable attention.

Local Services Marketplace: In a world where we are increasingly busy, availing services may not be easy. Whether you need a plumber, electrician, a dance teacher or someone to teach you yoga, a plethora of startups now help you zero in on the desired service provider. Other services include caterers, photographers, drivers among others that make up the otherwise fragmented market. Startups like UrbanClap, Taskbo b, LocalOye and Qyk have raised funding and managed to grab a part of the lucrative market. Investors active in this field are SAIF Partners, Accel Partners, Orios Venture Partners, Mayfield, Tiger Global, Lightspeed and even Snapdeal cofounders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. While the primary way to avail local services have been through online search or through classified platforms, local services marketplace and aggregators make it seamless, allows greater price discovery and also greater choice. This has led to increasing popularity of such startups.

(Ashish Mittal in Angel Investor and Chief Mentor at TurningIdeas Solutions, a startup incubation platform based in Noida. Ashish can be followed at @ashishmitt)

How one Paris startup is becoming an Uber for people with disabilities - Mashable

When visiting Florida earlier this year, Parisian Charlotte de Vilmorin — who has been in a wheelchair her entire life — was desperately searching for a car adapted for people with disabilities.

She finally found one, but soon discovered how expensive it was to rent — for 10 days, it cost her approximately $1,000.

"It's very difficult to get around when you are in a wheelchair, because public transportation is not accessible," de Vilmorin tells Mashable. "You can't just grab a cab or rent a regular car."

The constant lack of options inspired her to take matters into her own hands. She cofounded Wheeliz, a French car-sharing service that easily connects people with disabilities to owners of adapted cars.

There are approximately 100,000 privately owned adapted cars in France, de Vilmorin says, but they may not necessarily be in use every day. Wheeliz offers the opportunity for adapted car owners to earn extra money by renting out their vehicles, helping out someone who needs assistance with transportation.

Car owners can list their vehicles on Wheeliz at a recommended daily fee of €50 to €60 ($55 to $65 USD). The startup takes a 30% commission and provides insurance. In contrast, traditional car rental service Hertz tells Mashable its adapted cars go from €80 to €180 ($90 to $200) per day, depending on the type of car and number days you want to rent. One local French service charges €79 to €199 ($87-$220).

Inclusive and competitively priced, Wheeliz has now spread across many French cities, including Paris, Nantes and Bordeaux, with plans to expand internationally.

"I really believe there is an opportunity there for the collaborative economy and sharing economy to make mobility more accessible for wheelchair users," de Vilmorin says.

De Vilmorin knows about obstructions to mobility firsthand, and has even blogged about her experiences living in Paris and the difficulties getting around, calling out everything from businesses with step-only entrances to inaccessible taxis.

She feels wheelchair users will understand the challenges people with disabilities face in finding a car, and will be eager to share their adapted cars in order to help the larger community.

"When you know how hard it is to move when you are in a wheelchair, I really believe you are ready to help and do your best to let the user use your own car so [they] can be free to travel," she says.

Wheeliz currently has 120 cars listed with 900 registered users — including people from other countries who are using the site to plan trips to France.

As CEO of Wheeliz, currently working with a small team of a CTO and a business developer, de Vilmorin wants to create a global network of adapted cars for people who need them — and that means expanding.

The company is considering hiring its own drivers and may also launch a smartphone app, though de Vilmorin says these plans aren't priorities at the moment. Trips in adapted cars, after all, are usually planned in advance, she explains, unlike the on-demand nature of ridesharing apps — but she hasn't ruled it out.

Wheeliz CEO Charlotte de Vilmorin poses next to an accessible vehicle in Paris on April 28, 2015.

Image: TEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP

The sharing economy is very active in France, with car-sharing and peer-to-peer (P2P) services like BlaBlaCar and Drivy. But U.S. giant Uber has faced some challenges in France in recent years, with opposition from the taxi sector over unfair competition, leading to violent protests in Paris. Authorities are now trying to level the playing field between old and new services.

Uber itself has been criticized for not being accessible to people with disabilities, and has even been questioned by the Massachusetts attorney-general over accessibility. However, it recently launched UberASSIST, a service with drivers specially trained in both sensitivity and handling mobility aids, and has introduced visual features in its app for deaf drivers.

Il se trame quelque chose chez Wheeliz... J-5 !

Posted by Wheeliz on Tuesday, September 22, 2015

At the moment, de Vilmorin doesn't believe Wheeliz will encounter any of its own legal challenges.

"When you want to drive a person in a wheelchair in France, you have to pass a test or [get] certification. It's the only regulatory thing we have to deal with," she says.

Philippe Portier, a partner at French law firm JeantetAssociés, confirms that Wheeliz is unlikely to face "any particular stringent legal issues." Beyond providing insurance, which Wheeliz and many other P2P companies do, the business is unregulated, he says.

Still, de Vilmorin says legal hurdles shouldn't be a deterrent in tackling disability problems.

"I believe the world of startups and innovation is still disconnected from the needs of disabled people," she says. "To me, it is essential to create and build a sustainable sharing community dedicated to the mobility problem."

Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.

I tried an unlimited-blowout startup called Vive, and it's completely worth ... - Business Insider

ViveAlanna Gregory and Cristin Armstrong cofounded Vive. See Also New startup Vive offers unlimited monthly blowouts for $99, and women are going nuts BATTLE OF THE BLOWOUTS: We tried 2 new 'ClassPass for hair' services — here's what we thought ClassPass is raising its monthly prices in New York City by more than 25%, and users are flipping out

A new startup, Vive, gives women exactly what they want: unlimited blowouts — basically a super-thorough blow-dry for your hair — on demand.

Vive, which is currently in private beta in New York City, offers a subscription-based service centered on unlimited blowouts. That includes a wash and dry, but no haircuts or coloring.

Professional blowouts are intended to make your hair look as sleek and smooth as possible. You might get one before, say, your sorority's formal or your friend's wedding.

You can do it yourself at home, but it probably won't look as good and will take forever to do. Places like blowout startup Drybar charge $45 per blowout, though you can find salons in New York City that do it for closer to $25 a pop.

Which makes it all the more incredible that Vive offers its services for only $99 per month. It pays for itself after about 3 appointments, though you're encouraged to include an $8 to $10 tip as well — so what you're really getting for $99 a month is $10 blowouts.

Think of Vive like the ClassPass for blowouts: An all-you-can-eat service that lets you get your hair done as often as you want. (Of course, "as often as you want" comes with limits — it's probably not great for your hair to be blow-dried at high temperatures every day).

ClassPass is a breakout, $400 million New York startup that's earned a reported $60 million run rate by bundling up small-business fitness services. ClassPass works with a number of fitness classes to create a $125-per-month gym-membership-like deals, allowing customers to studio hop.

Vive is a first of many likely ClassPass spinoffs, which will try to benefit from bundling tons of local offerings together.

Vive went through Y Combinator this year, presenting at Demo Day in August. "Y Cominator really helped us make a lot of operational updates to our model," founder and CEO Alanna Gregory told Business Insider. "Most of the audience [at Demo Day] came away knowing what a blowout is. I feel like I run a blowout-awareness campaign."

Gregory says that since its launch in April, Vive has completed 10,000 blowout appointments. 50% of appointments on Vive are booked in 12 hours prior to the time of the appointment, so it's good for times when you want to get an appointment last minute.

What it's like to use

I've been using Vive for the past five weeks. I have unruly, curly hair, and it's too much work to blow it out myself or straighten it five days a week. So I signed up for Vive's wait list this summer, and, about a month later, I got an email letting me know I was accepted into Vive's beta program.

My biggest complaint about Vive is that it's only available via browser or mobile browser. There's no app yet, though the company says it's launching one soon.

Screenshot

That said, the website is easy to navigate, and the startup makes it easy to set up an appointment.

Here's what it looks like when you book your appointment.

Screenshot

You get a confirmation email and a text message when you book your appointment, and then once more when your appointment is confirmed. (I've had appointments booked within two minutes, and others booked as long as 15 minutes after making my appointment. Either way, it's pretty much on demand.) You can book an appointment for that day, or a week in advance.

The service itself is no different than going to a salon and having an appointment if you weren't signed up with Vive. You go, tell them your name, get your blowout, and leave a tip at the end. You don't pay because the cost of the service is included in your monthly $99.

Maya KosoffThe author, post-blowout

Having to leave a tip is the only annoying part of the Vive experience.

One of the best things about Uber is that you don't have to leave a tip — it makes your black-car ride experience seamless and eliminates a huge pain point. When you're paying $10 for each blowout on top of the monthly $99 cost, it can add up, especially if you're trying to get your money's worth out of the monthly cost. I don't typically carry cash on me either, so having to stop by an ATM in the morning on my way to my blowout is kind of a pain.

I've been averaging one to two blowouts a week, and, in total, I've had roughly 10 blowouts through Vive (Anything more than that would probably not be good for my hair). But blowouts last for several days, so if you get a blowout on a Tuesday and again on Friday, you're pretty much set for the week, and don't have to worry too much about doing your own hair.

In this way, my behavior has completely shifted. Instead of waking up an hour early to wash, dry, and straighten my hair, I can head to the salon and check a bunch of my emails and actually get some work done, and get my hair done at the same time.

Vive is great for salon discovery — I've found a couple great salons a block away from Business Insider's office that I never would have visited without Vive.

That said, there's no way to request a salon. You're at the mercy of Vive's algorithms, which place you at a salon that has open availability at the time you've requested your appointment.

Is Vive worth it? If you can shell out $99 a month, along with the cost of tips for each blowout, then yes — it's a service well worth the money. I don't plan on canceling my membership anytime soon.

SEE ALSO: New startup Vive offers unlimited monthly blowouts for $99, and women are going nuts NOW WATCH: Here's how often you should wash your hair Please enable Javascript to watch this video

5 things to look for in your startup team - The Next Web

Once you determine if you have a good business idea or not, the first step in building your business is putting the right team in place.  There are five key drivers to consider when setting up your management team:

(1) the required skill sets for the job

(2) prior experience with startups

(3) a personality fit with the rest of the team

(4) shared vision with the rest of the team

(5) fire in the belly

The Right Skillsets; and 2. Prior Startup ExperienceLet's talk about the first two together, as they go hand in hand.  You'd think it would be pretty self-explanatory that for a Chief Marketing Officer hire, as an example, you should find a candidate with strong marketing skills. 

But, the tactics differ for different types of marketing vehicles (e.g., digital, print, TV, direct mail), different industries require different expertise (e.g., e-commerce business vs. catalog business) and B2C companies require different skillsets vs. B2B companies (e.g., marketing vs. sales skills). 

So, it is important prior to hiring, to make sure you find someone that has deep knowledge of your specific industry and has successfully scaled up businesses within your desired budget range.  For example, don't put a $1BN budget Proctor & Gamble CMO, in charge of your $1MM start-up budget. The P&G guy most likely only knows how to build brands with big teams and big budgets, not how to organically and virally grow your business on the cheap in new kinds of ways (e.g., social media, mobile, SEO), rolling up his sleeves and doing it himself on a shoestring.  So, past start-up experience is a definite plus.

2. The Right Personality FitAs we all know, startups are a 24/7 type of job. So, you are going to be spending a lot of time with your co-workers.  It is critical there is a good personality fit between the team, as in those late night hours, the last thing you need is someone getting on your nerves. 

Or, having one member of your inner circle the pariah within the company that nobody wants to work with.  You don't have time for these types of issues while you are trying to win the start-up race.

4.  Shared VisionEqually important, it is critical that each member of your team share a consistent vision on exactly what you are building.  As an example, let's say we want to build a car, which seems clear enough at the 30,000 foot view. 

But, when you drill down to the specifics, it is important the team know we are all specifically building a mini-van for families, not an SUV, or a pickup truck or a luxury sedan, which appeal to different user markets, have different costs to build and require different marketing tactics.

5. Fire in the BellyAnd, most importantly, it is critical that all involved have a deep passion for the product and fire in the belly in order to move at light speed and quickly own your market.  This is not a 9 to 5 job. This is a passion you are living and breathing in real time. 

Going back to our Chief Marketing Officer example, somebody that has come from a cushy role, managing a big team of employees with private secretaries and big budgets, most likely is going to have a really tough time going back into the trenches, rolling up their sleeves, and putting in the required long hours.So, in the words of Bo Schembechler, the former Michigan football coach at my alma mater: it is all about "The Team! The Team! The Team!" that will ultimately win you your championship.

Read Next: 14 ways to bootstrap finance your startup

Image credit: Shutterstock

3D Modeling Startup BioDigital Launches An API For The Human Body - TechCrunch

Imagine a reality where surgeons practice difficult procedures on virtual renditions of their patients before walking into the operating room, and professional athletes review their exact muscle movements on a 3D game tape after they walk off the field.

Now that BioDigital, a 3D human body modeling startup, is releasing its API to the public, this is possible.

Over the past two years, the New York-based startup has worked closely with more than 100 organizations spanning all sectors of healthcare to tailor its virtual human body, comprising 7,000 objects modeled by hand, to specific use cases.

The National Institutes of Health, for instance, is using BioDigital to map bacteria in the body. For MyFace, a nonprofit that provides treatment to patients with craniofacial conditions, the virtual human enables doctors worldwide to learn how to perform cleft palate operations from afar.

"We've seen the profound impact that 3D tech has had on video games for the last 15 years, and more recently on geo-browsers and how we navigate planet earth," says BioDigital founder Frank Sculli. "Nowhere does this make more sense than representing the human body."

It may not be as thrilling as a video game, but it's pretty fascinating to mess around with:

You can think of BioDigital as the Google Maps for the human body. In the same way that Starbucks integrates Google Maps into its apps and website to direct you to the nearest retail store, developers can now leverage the BioDigital API to visualize their health data.

Already, Mount Sinai and other teaching hospitals are using the BioDigital human to train their surgical fellows, who now practice on 3D humans as well as cadavers.

"You can literally go in and see the virtual heart pumping as you change the heart rate, or watch the dilation of a pupil as you change the light on your screen," Sculli explains.

While this education is essential for doctors, the majority of patients want to understand what's going on as well.

According to the latest PEW report, 72 percent of Internet users searched for health information online in the past 12 months. And 77 percent of that group, not surprisingly, most often consulted Google (or another search engine) as their online MD of choice.

"When people go to WebMD and Wikipedia and read about what heart failure is, it's very passive, you're either reading or you're watching," says Sculli. "Now you can interact with it, engage with it, and there's deep analytics behind it."

Earlier this year, BioDigital partnered with About.com to provide interactive visualizations for common health conditions. Patients searching for information about Type 2 diabetes, for instance, are presented with a 3D model of a cell's response to insulin, in which they can explore the process from different angles while toggling between diabetic and normal cell function.

What's revolutionary about the API launch, though, is that now developers can personalize the BioDigital human by integrating their own imaging data, movement data collected by wearables, and health record data, among other sources.

So essentially, instead of clicking around the standard human model on About.com, we could soon be exploring 3D models of our own bodies, constructed with our unique health data.

For athletes especially, the immediate advantages of virtually replicating a moving body are obvious. If you can see exactly which movements inflict pain or stress on your body, it's much easier to understand how to avoid them.

For medical professionals, though, the ability to visualize vast amounts of health data in real time via the BioDigital human has the potential to change the way new information is analyzed and consumed.

"The human body is this incredible system of systems, and there's an infinite amount of detail," says Sculli. "So we can start mapping cellular mechanisms, and genomic and brain activity, and all of this information that's being collected in masses from research and wearables, and make it consumable for people."

The other billion dollar startup club - Fortune

We at Fortune have written a lot about unicorns, which we define as privately-held startups that are valued at $1 billion or more by their investors. So much, in fact, that we did a cover story about them and Hasbro sent a toy unicorn for my amusement (disclaimer: "Ella" was intercepted by my 5 year-old daughter, and now lives on her bed).

But there also is a smaller, more exclusive group of billion-dollar companies within the unicorn herd: The companies that have actually raised $1 billion or more in equity funding. You know, the ones that would be considered unicorns even if their pre-funding valuations were zero dollars and zero cents. Let's call them honey badgers.

The latest member of this clan is SoFi, which yesterday announced $1 billion in new equity funding led by SoftBank. That brings its overall total to $1.42 billion, not including another $400 million or so in debt financing. For context, that's about 57x the amount of funding Google GOOG raised before going public.

According to data provided by research firm Mattermark, SoFi is the 26th startup to ever raise $1 billion or more in venture capital (including corporate venture), of which 21 remain privately-held.

Of the five 'exited' companies, the results are a decidedly mixed-bag. On the upside are Facebook FB and Alibaba BABA — yes, we're counting the Yahoo YHOO investment. Somewhere in between is Groupon GRPN , which has worked out great for its early investors but been a slog for those who came in pre-IPO. And then there was the partial flameout Clearwire (acquired by existing shareholder Sprint for just a fraction of its earlier valuation) and the total flameout Fisker Automotive (Chapter 11).

Of the still-private group, Uber has raised by far the most money — seemingly adding new cash on a weekly basis. Mattermark puts the current equity total at around $6.4 billion, although it may already be higher by the time you read this.

The next couple names on the list are foreign — Didi Kuaidi (Chinese rival to Uber) and Flipkart (Indian e-commerce) — followed by Airbnb. The "smallest" honey badger is WeWork, which has raised just a hair over $1 billion. Thirteen of the 21 are based in the U.S.

This is the part where I should draw conclusions, like how the middling batting average for the exited companies should cause concern for those invested in the larger, still-private group. Particularly given the VC-backed IPO drought. But I honestly have no clue how this plays out, given that those earlier companies were exceedingly rare — and the newer, larger group has plenty of company and operates in a different financing/tech environment.

But given the SoFi news, I felt it was worth beginning to break out these companies and begin to track them a bit differently. Particularly because a company that raised $1 billion or more in equity can no longer be satisfied becoming a $3 billion or $5 billion public company. At least not if their investors have anything to say about it…

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Can Y Combinator find its next 'unicorn' in a hardware startup? - Fortune

In less than a minute, a robot resembling a printing press made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then neatly dropped it into a cardboard take out box. Nearby, a smartphone laying next to a white gadget the size of a dictionary charged up without being plugged into a wall socket.

No, this isn't Maker Faire for do-it-yourselfers, or an unusual section of a Bed Bath & Beyond store. It's a sampling of the computer hardware shown off at Demo Day, the semi-annual coming out party for startups coached by Silicon Valley accelerator Y Combinator.

Y Combinator, founded in 2005, has yielded some of the best-known Internet startups in recent years. Home rental company Airbnb is now valued at more than $25 billion, file-sharing service Dropbox is valued at $10 billion, and gaming video network Twitch sold to Amazon for roughly $1 billion last year, to name a few.

But as the who's who of tech investors crowded into the Museum of Computer History in Mountain View, Calif. in mid-August, one question became clear: What if Y Combinator's next "unicorn" — a startup valued at $1 billion or more — were a hardware company?

The right time

"We've seen entrepreneurs really start to build amazing companies in hardware," Luke Iseman, who leads Y Combinator's hardware push, told Fortune before presentations kicked off at the two-day demo marathon.

Sitting at a table outside the museum, Iseman is dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, taking advantage of the California sunshine. A Y Combinator alum, he joined the program's staff in March. He participated in the accelerator's summer 2014 program as the co-founder of Edyn, a device that lets people monitor their garden's soil's moisture and temperature from a mobile app. At that point, hardware companies were a distinct minority.

That's partly because most of Y Combinator's co-founders and partners hailed from the Internet and software companies, and gravitated to what they knew. Another reason was simplicity and money.

More affordable programming tools arrived in the mid-to-late 2000s that made building Internet and software companies easier. Y Combinator quickly mastered the category.

But over the past year, under the leadership of current president Sam Altman, who took over in the spring of 2014, Y Combinator has expanded its horizons, notably in hardware. The reason is that hardware has gone from a complicated, capital-intensive, and risky business, to a hot sector in which entrepreneurs can produce a small batch of gadgets without having to spend millions of dollars.

The rise of 3D printers and cheap computer chips are partly responsible for the boom. So is software that makes developing hardware faster and a new willingness among suppliers to sell parts in smaller quantities.

For their part, crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and Indiegogo showed that the public will fork over money in exchange for the promise they'll receive new electronics in the mail several months later. In short, hardware entered a renaissance, and everyone from entrepreneurs to investors warmed up to it.

"The manufacturing process has become more friendly to startups," Michael Siebel, a Y Combinator partner and unofficial hardware advocate, told Fortune.

To be sure, Y Combinator has had some occasional successes with hardware in the past. Smartwatch pioneer Pebble is the best known.

Still, the difference with today is stark. Y Combinator has gone from having one or a few hardware startups in each session to 20 of them in its latest class.

And some are already having some success. Nebia, a water-efficient showerhead, raised $1.3 million through Kickstarter shortly before finishing the program as well as an undisclosed amount from Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt's family foundation, among others. Auro Robotics, a company building self-driving shuttles that resemble golf carts, is already testing its prototypes on Santa Clara University's campus. Meanwhile, drone company Flirtey became the first to complete a government-approved commercial delivery in July (much to Amazon's chagrin).

A homegrown approach

Iseman said that the trick was to figure out how to help entrepreneurs in Y Combinator's program speed up creating prototypes of their hardware. He gathered an initial pool of information about vendors, resources, processes that startup founders can tap for guidance.

"By far, the smartest thing I did was interview all of our hardware alumni," Iseman said. "We asked alumni how to make hardware move faster."

As it pushes more into hardware, Y Combinator is increasingly partnering with outsiders to get its startups extra help. In February, it allied with Bolt, a venture capital fund that also provides mentorship and resources to hardware startups.

The deal also included Y Combinator entrepreneurs getting access to 3D printers and laser cutters in a San Francisco workshop owned by design software company Autodesk. However, Iseman says most companies haven't preferred to stick with whatever tools they were already using or third-party vendors that can quickly ship them prototype parts.

Y Combinator has also partnered with Amazon's LaunchPad, a new program that will showcase startup hardware products in an online store and help founders with marketing and distribution. "We like amplifiers," Iseman said of the program's promise to help startups reach Amazon's millions of customers.

Alexandre Wayenberg and Martin Kessler, founders of ShapeScale, a startup making a connected weight scale that was in Y Combinator's latest graduating class, said they considered the program's most valuable asset to be its network of alumni and investors. As experienced hardware entrepreneurs who have spent time in China's manufacturing hubs, they said they didn't need Y Combinator to have deep technical expertise in hardware.

Instead, they found value in the program's weekly meetings with fellow entrepreneurs in the program to discuss their respective questions and problems, often bonding over common challenges. "That was particularly helpful," Kessler said.

As it continues to learn about hardware, Y Combinator isn't focusing on is large-scale manufacturing. "I worry about the people who worry about making 100 units before they can sell 10,000," Iseman said.

This is in sharp contrast with Hax, a rival startup accelerator program exclusively focused on hardware startups that sends its participants to Shenzhen for the duration of the program. Its idea is to immerse companies in a manufacturing center so they are ready to start fundraising after graduating from the program. Forcing the founders to network their way through Shenzhen as they build their product prototypes can help them be as financially and time efficient as possible, the accelerator believes.

Another respected program, PCH International's Highway1 accelerator, is somewhere in the middle with its four-month program in San Francisco. It does conclude, however, with a two-week trip to Shenzhen, and Liam Casey, the CEO of parent company PCH International, is known in hardware circles as the man who knows everything about manufacturing — and more importantly, doing it China.

But perhaps the main reason Y Combinator advocates a domestic approach to hardware development instead of jetting off to Shenzhen is that it doesn't see its hardware companies as being inherently different from other startups. Put aside from needing 3D printers and soldering equipment, the theory is that these companies face many of the same challenges as those building apps, enterprise software, and consumer services.

"The YC philosophy is that it's not a software strategy, it's a startup strategy," Siebel said.

For more about Highway1, PCH International's accelerator for hardware startups, watch this Fortune video: