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Category: Advice

Buh-Bye Safe Spaces: On Sheltering in the Connected Home

Buh-Bye Safe Spaces: On Sheltering in the Connected Home

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Image by jeferrb from Pixabay

Since we’re all spending so much time at home as a result of offices having been slow to re-open in many places, or people have opted not to return, we felt that it’s a good time to check in on the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT). Good place to start: this TED 2018 presentation on What your smart devices know (and share) about you. We’ve come a long way since then, baby – or at least technology has. Many of us are more or less stuck in our homes – and time to look at the data they’re collecting.

“There are smart lights, smart locks, smart toilets, smart toys, smart sex toys. Being smart means the device can connect to the internet, it can gather data, and it can talk to its owner.

“But once your appliances can talk to you, who else are they going to be talking to? I wanted to find out, so I went all-in and turned my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a smart home. I even connected our bed to the internet. As far as I know, it was just measuring our sleeping habits. I can now tell you that the only thing worse than getting a terrible night’s sleep is to have your smart bed tell you the next day that you “missed your goal and got a low sleep score,” said Kashmir Hill, one of the two presenters, and a journalist who covers privacy and security for Gizmodo. Read More...

Everything You Need to Know About the Investor Dog Whistle

Everything You Need to Know About the Investor Dog Whistle

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Basic to every startup/newco is having a pitch deck. An executive summaries as well, and while you know this, we wonder if we have pitch decks all wrong. Or if you believe that there’s a set order of slides to which you must strictly adhere.

Wrong.

Charlie O’Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures’ somewhat unofficial mantra is ‘Always Be Selling’ and truth be told, no matter what your official title is in your startup/newco, you’re doing sales. Especially in a lean company: unless you’re in a completely non-public facing role, you’re a salesperson for your company, which brings us to your investor presentation, your deck and everything in between. Read More...

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

Don’t Look Now, But the Tech Surveillance State Just Upped the Ante

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We know that the lockdowns with the Covid flu went far in enriching the coffers of the tech cartel at an (even more) accelerated rate than usual (World’s Richest People Smashed Wealth Records This Week). At some point, it’s no longer about money: it’s about what that largesse can bring and in case you missed it, NSA Chief Who Oversaw Sweeping Domestic Phone Surveillance Joins Amazon Board As Director. “This is the very NSA chief (Keith B. Alexander) who was the face of the agency’s mass sweeping up of Americans’ communications exposed by Edward Snowden’s leaks. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit earlier this month ruled the invasive NSA program was “illegal” and that US officials lied about it… For those keeping score, not only does Amazon own the The Washington Post and oversees the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Enterprise, it now has on its powerful board of directors the most visible figure from the NSA who illegally spied on Americans for the better part of a decade.” ZeroHedge reported, and it’s a must-read, and note to self: “Crucially his tenure as Director of the National Security Agency went for nearly a decade, from August 2005 to March 2014. From there he founded a cybersecurity technology company in 2014, of which he’s still leads as Co-CEO and president, called IronNet Cybersecurity, Inc.”

The hire came “Just days after Amazon published a scathing letter (in the Washington Post, which, like Amazon, is also owned by Jeff Bezos) slamming President Trump for not allowing the American multinational tech company to get the $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which instead was awarded to Microsoft.”

Never mind that Amazon Web Services is now authorized to host the US Department of Defense’s most sensitive data, including top secret Pentagon and NSA information (as of 2017) and also has “a monopoly on many services on the internet,” as Esha (@eshaLegal) noted, and “Even without an ex-spy chief with a less-than-stellar reputation in terms of privacy protection on its board, Amazon has faced growing pushback over its intrusive high-tech devices. Its virtual assistant Alexa was caught red-handed passively recording intimate conversations of unsuspecting family members, while its new fitness tracker ‘Halo’ promises to scan users’ bodies and track emotions in their voice,” RT reported, Read More...

Is It Time to Shoot the Messenger?

Is It Time to Shoot the Messenger?

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Image by Jan Alexander from Pixabay

Calm down, we’re talking about delivering your message via online video. It seems that everyone is doing a videocast these days and given that one has one’s choice of either Facebook Live, LinkedInLive, YouTube, Periscope, DLive, Twitch, et al and out in beta, mmhmm, there is certainly no shortage of platforms. Or people who feel that they need to say something, whether or not they necessarily have something to say.

Careers have been launched via these platforms: look at PewDie Pie, the gamer/comedian who started out by playing videos of games, threw in some comedy and became one of the most viewed channels on YouTube. Or Harry Stebbings, who was a mere 20 years old when he launched his Twenty Minute VC, featuring, yes 20-minute interviews with investors, keeping them short, snappy and getting right to the point. Twenty minutes. That’s all it took. In fact, the now 24-year-old Stebbings recently launched his own micro VC fund (20VC).

“Podcasts are becoming big business — in part because of how well they can attract and keep audiences at a time when so many other media formats are finding it hard to pin down that elusive metric of engagement,” says Techcrunch. Read More...

Inside Investor Baseball: Here’s the Pitch

Inside Investor Baseball: Here’s the Pitch

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Image by Сергей Ремизов from Pixabay

Ok, so you’ve done your pitch deck – revised it ad infinitum, based on the feedback you’ve gotten from everyone you know and his or her fourth cousin twice removed. Now you’ve secured a few investor meetings, via Zoom. Where’s that investor pitch meeting template when you need one?

Brian Cohen spoke at our virtual investor breakfast recently and imparted some pearls of advice to help you with that one, some of which we’ll share with you today, with a few additions of our own, along with points other investor friends and previous Investor breakfast speakers of ours have made in the pas.

First, meetings these days are done via Zoom. Show your face. At least at the outset of the meeting. Not a photo, nyour initials, not your LinkedIn photo, which is no doubt a selfie and doesn’t look all that great anyway – the real you – and the other team members who may also be on the call. Why? Investor(s) want to get to know you and yours, and much is conveyed via your visage and facial expressions. Do you smile? At least occasionally? Investors – and Brian referred primarily to angels – after all, he was Chairman of the New York Angels for a decade before co-founding New York Venture Partner – and has invested in literally hundreds of companies over the years – have to like you. This is a partnership and a potentially a long one, so they want to see you – if only on a video call. For now, at least. Read More...

The Investment Landscape in the New For-Now

The Investment Landscape in the New For-Now

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Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

It’s an odd time in the industry, to put it mildly. World economies have certainly been challenged (again, to put it mildly). Still, Crunchbase reported that “Despite the turmoil of an ongoing pandemic, global venture funding for the second quarter of 2020 was not as dire as we expected, but it was down from previous years.” Specifically, it was down 7% from the first half of 2019.

According to CNBC the First half of 2020 sees 30% drop in startup deals; seed funding falls 40%. The big winners in overall funding: fintech, health tech and long-time also-ran edtech.

We live in strange times, again to put it very mildly. After all, Meditation app Meditopia raised $15m funding round. “Mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower reckons that the top 10 meditation apps generated $195m of user spending in 2019 – and that was before a global pandemic created a new spike in their popularity.” Read More...