Berkonomics
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
Close. This statement could be considered controversial. We have previously made the case that professional investors demand more in the form of restrictive covenants and lower valuations. Now we explore the other side of that coin. Professional investors usually bring “smart money” to the table, defined as money that comes along with good advice and great relationships for corporate growth.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Los Angeles-based Beauty By Design , a startup offering up "hyper-personalized" beauty products based on a customer's skin, has raised $2.2M in a seed funding round. The funding was led by Resolute Ventures, and also included Ludlow Ventures, TenoneTen Ventures, Troy Capital Partners and angels Spencer Rascoff (Zillow), Terry Boyle (NordstromRack.com, HauteLook), and Rob Chesney (former COO, Trunk Club).
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L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Fair raises $50 million and acquires rental car delivery service Skurt; Global Eagle submits overdue SEC filings; and Hulu says Super Bowl live-streaming outage was caused by program-extension glitch.
Tech.Co
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
One thing is for certain, entrepreneurship can start at anytime, even as a child. In Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book Crushing It , he begins by talking about his eight-year-old daughter wanting to be a YouTube star. Whether she becomes a celebrity or not remains to be seen. More importantly, even at such a young age, she recognizes the value of online platforms when it comes to building a personal brand and ultimately getting paid for doing something you love.
Advertiser: Aggregage
Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
[ Updated 2/8/18, 1:39 pm.] The race is on to sign up consumers seeking same-day delivery of groceries, household items, and personal goods. Late on Wednesday, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN ) announced it has started free two-hour delivery of products from Whole Foods Market, the most significant example of the e-commerce giant using technology at the Austin, TX-based grocery chain since it purchased Whole Foods last year for $13.7 billion.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Toba Capital , the venture fund run by former Quest Software founder Vinny Smith, has backed reporting and analytics dashboard software developer Grow.com in a $16M Series B funding round. The funding also included Peterson Ventures, Pelion Venture Partners, Kickstart Seed Fund, and HubSpot. Toba Capital also led Grow.com's SEries A funding. According to the company, it has now raised $26M in total.
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Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
You don’t have to be a new venture advisor like me to hear all the excuses for not starting your own business. I’m sure all of you have friends who are not happy in their employee roles, and are not shy about complaining, but never seem to get around to doing anything about it. They can cite all the myths about being too old to change, not having the money, or no business degree.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Dozens of medical organizations and patient advocacy groups are pushing back against so-called “right-to-try” legislation that passed the Senate in August and is now under consideration in the House. An open letter sent today to House leaders is the latest opposition to the Republican-led push to give desperate patients access to experimental drugs without FDA oversight.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
In the biggest rocket to leave the planet since 1973, Hawthorne, California-based SpaceX has successfully sent its Falcon Heavy on its way to space, lifting off the new rocket off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 3:45PM ET. SpaceX is sending a red, Tesla Roadster--complete with a dummy spaceman in the drier's seat--to orbit around Mars.
L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
Snap is trying to lure Instagram advertisers by offering them free ads on Snapchat; Elon Musk explains why SpaceX prefers clusters of small engines for the Falcon Heavy; and digital media drives entertainment employment growth in Los Angeles
SoCal Tech Calendar
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Tuesday, February 13, 2018 --.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Houston —Knowledge is power, but too much of a good thing can render data meaningless. That’s the struggle many retailers have in an age of data analytics. Think about the retailer e-mails we receive daily or the ads that appear on Google or our social media sites. Though based on our Web searches, those ads don’t necessarily represent what we would like to buy.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
Los Angeles- and Austin-based Moonshots Capital , the venture capital fund led by serial entrepreneur Kelly Perdew, is ramping its investment pace, with the first two formal investments out of its new fund. The two investments, both announced in January, were cyber-defense firm Threatcare , and bot detection developer New Knowledge. Threatcare says it provides breach and attack simulation, antivirus assessment, credit card exfiltration, and many other simulations to help organizations evaluate c
L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Middle-market private equity firm Brentwood Associates in Sawtelle announced on Feb. 6 an investment in Credentials Solutions, a technology company that provides business services to the higher education sector. The amount invested was not disclosed.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
As an active angel investor, I’m accustomed to hearing entrepreneurs pitch their expectation to quickly create a new dominant brand, based on their disruptive technology. In the past, such statements have been credibility red flags, since “everyone” knows that a dominant brand takes decades to establish and scale. Only recently, I realized that times are rapidly changing.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
You don’t need me to tell you it’s a rough world out there for startups. Venture capitalists have been unusually stingy lately, hanging on to billions of dollars they’d typically be channeling into promising young companies. When those investors do open their wallets, they’re shunning risky investments in favor of what the Wall Street Journal called “the upper echelon of highly valued startups” such as Airbnb and WeWork.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
The former deputy administrator of NASA, Lori Garver, said in an opinion piece in The Hill that NASA turned down an offer to place a payload, for free, on the Falcon Heavy. According to Garver, Musk's launch of his cherry red Tesla Roadster (and spaceman) was the "backup plan" after NASA declined a payload spot. Garver argues that the Falcon Heavy is "just what the space agency needs to escape from the governmental bureaucracy" which has kept the US in low earth orbit for the last 45 years.
L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Snap Inc.’s share price soared more than 26 percent to as high as $17.80 a share in after-hours trading Tues., Feb. 6 after the Snapchat developer posted revenue for the quarter ended Dec. 31 that beat stock analysts’ expectations.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 3, 2018
As an angel investor to startups, I’m still surprised to find entrepreneurs who expect investors to give them money, and assume no strings attached. Would you do that if it was your money? If the entrepreneur wants total control of their own venture, with no one looking over their shoulder, they should work within the limits of their own resources, a process called bootstrapping.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
As Andreessen Horowitz begins to invest the $450 million the bellwether venture firm recently raised for its second bio fund , general partner Vijay Pande has been talking increasingly about the use of artificial intelligence in the life sciences. In a presentation a few months ago at the firm’s annual a16z Summit , Pande argued that many aspects of biology (biochemical pathways, for example) have become so big, complicated, and messy that understanding the system is beyond what a human being ca
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Santa Monica-based online employment marketplace ZipRecruiter has reportedly raised $50M in a Series B funding round, which values the company just shy of $1 billion, according to reports this morning. The investment round--not yet confirmed by ZipRecruiter--was reportedly led by current investor IVP. ZipRecruiter is led by Ian Siegel, and previously raised $63M in its Series A funding back in 2014; the company's investors include Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), Basepoint and Industry Vent
L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Snapchat to broadcast live NBC’s Olympics Coverage; ZipRecruiter fundraising at nearly $1 billion valuation; and Tesla semi-truck rival Thor demonstrates vehicle.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 4, 2018
Most entrepreneurs assume that success is dependent on their product expertise, coupled with some knowledge of how to run a business. In fact, I have found from personal experience and mentoring that both of these are necessary, but not sufficient, for building a business. Successful entrepreneurs today must practice human-centered leadership to compete and win.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Walmart’s tech incubator in Silicon Valley, Store No 8, has acquired Spatialand , a virtual reality software firm, as its third portfolio company. While much of the focus in using VR has been on gaming and entertainment, “virtual reality has the potential to reinvent the consumer experience—with an experience we call contextual commerce,” according to a Store No 8 blog post Monday by Katie Finnegan, Walmart’s vice president of incubation and principal and founder of Store No 8.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 6, 2018
Biotech mogul and billionaire Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong has agreed to acquire the Los Angeles Times from current owner Tronc , according to a report from the Washington Post on Tuesday afternoon. Financial details of the deal were not disclosed, and neither Tronc nor the LA Times had confirmed the deal yet. The Washington Post quoted "people involved in the deal" for the news.
L.A. Business Journal
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
Online sneaker sellers GOAT and Flight Club merge; Hulu lost $920 million in 2017; and U.S. military certification the next big test for Falcon Heavy.
Startup Professionals Musings
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Entrepreneurs and business executives seem to be even more focused on their technology than the rest of us, and less inclined to listen to the voice of the customer, even if they remember to ask. Real two-way conversations with real customers, including the all-important body language, are unheard-of these days. Being connected to the Internet many hours a day is not enough.
Xconomy
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
The top biopharma story of the week involves the fast-moving field of lung cancer, which, as we’ve written previously, has several key trials reading out in 2018. A big domino fell this week: data from a two-drug immunotherapy combination developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb. But the results, touted as positive, left more questions than answers. First, Bristol changed the trial’s structure midstream.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
Two, Los Angeles-area venture capital investors--the new Akatsuki Entertainment Fund (AET Fund), and Upfront Ventures , have backed a developer of virtual reality livestreaming and broadcast software. According to Vreal , it raised $11.7M in a funding round which was led by Axioma Ventures, and also included Intel Capital, AET Fund, Upfront Ventures, Vulcan Capital and CRCM Ventures.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
Los Angeles-based hybrid cloud operator Unitas Global said Thursday morning that it has acquired Solinea , which helps enterprises with cloud adoption. Financial details of the acquisition were not announced by the companies. According to Unitas Global, the addition of the Solinea team will help its position as a trusted advisor and partner to its clients.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 8, 2018
Irvine-based mobile car financing startup AutoGravity said this morning that it has appointed Meesh Pierce as the company's new Vice President of Product Management. Pierce was most recently VP of Product Management at Fandango, and also served as a consultant to Epson America, Energy & Power Solutions, and other companies. AutoGravity offers up a mobile app which lets consumers apply for an auto loan, all using their smartphone.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 7, 2018
Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong has acquired both the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union Tribune , in a deal worth $500M in cash, from current owner Tronc. According to the LA Times, the deal--put together in only five days--is being made through Soon-Shiong's company Nant Capital, and also includes assumption of $90M in pension liabilities.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Los Angeles-based car leasing startup Fair , led by technology veteran Scott Painter, has acquired Los Angeles-based on-demand car rental service Skurt , according to reports this morning. Financial details of the acquisition were not announced. Skurt was venture backed by Upfront Ventures, BMW, Cross Culture Ventures, Expansion VC, Greycroft Partners, and Magic Johnson.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 5, 2018
Hawthorne-based SpaceX has released an animated video of what it hopes to demonstrate with its Falcon Heavy launch, scheduled now for tomorrow, Tuesday. In the video, SpaceX zooms in on the Florida launch pad, shows separation and landing of all three rocket boosters, and delivery of Elon Musk's shiny red Tesla--complete with astronaut dummy--into orbit around Mars.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
San Diego-based Qualcomm has rejected the new takeover proposal from Broadcom , saying Thursday that the proposal "materially undervalues Qualcomm" and "falls well short" of regulatory commitments, and has a "significant downside risk of a failed transaction." However, Qualcomm did say that it would be willing to meet with Broadcom to see if it can address those issues.
socalTECH
FEBRUARY 9, 2018
Carlsbad-based NextWave Ventures , a venture capital investor which focuses on commercializing early stage technology, said it has launched a new artificial intelligence start, Apical Technology. Size of the investment in Apical Technology was not announced. According to NextWave, Apical Technology is developing a software platform which uses AI for equities trading.
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