David Lidsky's Blog, page 2969
June 11, 2015
A VC's Formula For Picking Winners Like Birchbox, Warby Parker, And Other Brands You Love
With Forerunner Ventures, her all-women VC firm, Kirsten Green has helped build stellar consumer brands in a digital world.
Five years ago, Kirsten Green had a feeling that change was afoot in the world of digital commerce. At the time, the Internet was rapidly transforming shopping: Amazon and eBay made millions of products available at rock-bottom prices, while beloved brick and mortar stores like Gap and Pottery Barn were swiftly creating an online presence. Yet, Green felt that brands still hadn't figured out how to surprise and delight customers in the crowded, noisy online marketplace. And she was fixated with trying to find a solution to this problem.
Even before the dotcom boom, Green—who spent the early part of her career analyzing retail stocks at Montgomery Securities, an investment bank in San Francisco, eventually working her way up to vice president—had closely observed the way that brands manufactured magical experiences for consumers, wooing them with a charming ambience, atmospheric music, and products that seemed tailor-made for them. One advantage of being a woman in that male-dominated field, she says, was her insight as a female consumer herself. Women drive the vast majority of household purchasing decisions in the U.S., controlling two-thirds of consumer wealth, yet men tend to make the big investment decisions about consumer brands. "Thriving in this industry has to do with appreciating what you bring to the table," Green tells Fast Company.
How We Created Intel's Capital Diversity Fund
A VP at Intel Capital explains how they created their $125 million fund for companies run by women and minorities, and why we need it.
Shortly after he announced a $300 million initiative earlier this year to increase workforce diversity at Intel, I approached Intel CEO Brian Krzanich with an idea.
What if we applied the same intent and effort to our investment portfolios? What if we took stakes in high-growth companies run by women and underrepresented minorities, whose biggest hurdle wasn't the quality of their ideas, but the funding to make them scale?
June 10, 2015
Today in Tabs: The Apple That Ate Everything
If you had to choose between reading Tabs today and reading Tabs tomorrow, you should probably wait 'til tomorrow.
Apple did that thing on Monday where it absorbs a couple industries and makes them features of the iPhone but no one cared that much because what's the alternative? Facebook? This time it was music and news, which will now be known as Apple Music and Apple News. Apple News murdered the old Newsstand, and probably also Flipboard, but the Wall St. Journal is jumping right in with a new app called What's News. Rumor has it that VICE is developing its own news app, called "Fuck News!" But don't worry! Whatever platform / mega-corporation / sentient algorithm selects our news for us in the future, we will still only want the garbage we have always wanted.
Spotify Raises $526 Million For Showdown With Apple
It's on: Spotify just sold 1.4% of the company for $115 million as part of its latest fundraising round.
Spotify just raised a cool $115 million for its upcoming war with Apple for the future of streaming music. The money comes from TeliaSonera, a Swedish telephone company with a large market share in Scandinavia. TeliaSonera purchased a 1.4% share in Spotify with the $115 million, and the company says it will collaborate with Spotify on media distribution, customer insights, advertising, and analytics projects among other things.
Good For Luggage Manufacturers, Bad For Travelers: Carry-On Bag Size To Shrink By 21%
An influential air travel trade association wants to shrink carry-on bag size by 21%, and some airlines have already agreed.
If an influential airline trade association gets their way, flying coach could soon become an even more miserable experience. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) wants to shrink the size of carry-on bags by 21%, which would require hundreds of millions of travelers worldwide to purchase new luggage, slow down boarding time on airplanes, and make paying luggage fees almost mandatory for anything longer than a day trip. According to the trade association, shrinking the bags "will make the best use of cabin storage space."
Spotify Shows Off Latest User Numbers In Response To Apple Music
In the wake of the Apple Music reveal, Spotify touts its continued growth.
In a blog post on Wednesday, Spotify revealed its latest user figures: 20 million paying subscribers out of 75 million active users, an increase from the 15 million paying customers and 60 million users reported in January. The streaming music service, which has been criticized by some musicians (including Taylor Swift) for allegedly paying artists too little, also boasted that it has paid more than $300 million in royalties in the first quarter of 2015.
Can Wearable Tech Combat Sexual Assault?
ROAR is a startup that's building a wearable device designed to deter attackers and notify loved ones.
Yasmine Mustafa knew things were out of control when somebody was abducted outside her Philadelphia apartment and raped. This wasn't a bad part of town, either: The self-described serial entrepreneur lived in a pricey, well-lit part of downtown Philly. At the time, her nerves were raw. She had just returned from a months-long, solo trip across South America, during which she was repeatedly warned of the risks of a thirtysomething woman traveling alone—and there were plenty of disturbing stories to illustrate the point.
Instagram's New Design Has Bigger Images (And Room For Ads)
Instagram's new design will streamline user experience while introducing the possibility to produce some cash on the side.
Instagram redesigned its webpage.
The Untold Story of Microsoft's Surface Hub
A man with a dream. A company in flux. A secret factory outside Portland. And a hyper-ambitious gambit to reimagine how meetings happen.
[image error]Jeff Han touches the world on an 84-inch Surface HubJeff Han's fingers are dancing across an expansive, wall-mounted touch screen. Planet Earth spins in front of him in computer-generated form; he grabs it with both hands and starts to zoom in. He keeps going—Western Hemisphere, North America, United States, Pacific Northwest—until we're finally staring at a prosaic industrial area alongside a highway.
A Wearable System That Could Track You Until You Die
The first biometric device to include fertility information, Bellabeat's Leaf aims to contextualize women's health from birth to death.
When it comes to the human body, the sexes are not equal. Sure, men and women share a lot of parts, such as hearts and legs and lungs and breasts. But physiologically, their bodies respond differently to the same stimuli.
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