Launching at DEMO (video)

All About DEMO -

• Learn how entrepreneurs from around the world prepare to launch at DEMO.
• What New Tech Can you Expect to see at DEMO? Video
• DEMO Executive Director Erick Schonfeld discusses new tech products that will launch at DEMO Fall in San Jose, CA. He speaks on “Bloomberg West.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Printable agenda

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Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups (video)

Lecture 18 - Legal and Accounting Basics for Startups -
Published on Nov 20, 2014

There's a lot that goes behind the scenes in running a startup. Getting the legal, finance (equity allocation, vesting), accounting, and other overhead right will save you a lot of pain in the long run. Kirsty Nathoo, CFO at Y Combinator, and Carolynn Levy, General Counsel at Y Combinator, cover these very important topics, in Lecture 18 of How to Start a Startup.

See the slides, readings, and more, at http://startupclass.samaltman.com/cou...

View the annotated transcript, and add annotations of your own, on Genius: http://genius.com/Kirsty-nathoo-lectu...

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Kevin Rose, New Startup North, New Model of Incubation

Kevin Rose Steps Into Part-Time Role At Google Ventures To Build A New Startup Called North | TechCrunch: "... His newest venture will be called North, and will be focused on building a series of mobile and social products. In an interview with Rose, he told me the plan is to start with a small team of about three and to create a new product each quarter. And if one of those products becomes a hit, Rose says he’ll recruit a team and try to build a company around it. If the model sounds familiar, that’s because it was kind of the idea behind Milk. But the world has changed since then, according to Rose. “The biggest thing that’s changed in the last three years is that back then we spent a lot of time spent building out the back end… But the scaling piece is a solved problem,” Rose told me. Nowadays he says, a lean startup can work specifically on product and design, and leave the infrastructure side of things to someone else. He envisions North as a team that has one product person, one design person, and a full-stack engineer to get products going, while outsourcing much of the actual development work to trusted friends and colleagues. Rose isn’t the only entrepreneur operating under that type of model: Uber and StumbleUpon co-founder Garrett Camp has Expa, Twitter founders Ev Williams and Biz Stone have Obvious Corp., and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin has HVF. In each case, those founders are operating on a model of incubating a portfolio of interesting products and then building teams around them...."

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Early-Stage Tech Companies, Investment Bankers

In Silicon Valley, Mergers Must Meet the Toothbrush Test - NYTimes.com: "“Bankers do two things well: financial evaluation and negotiation,” said Richard E. Climan, a partner at the law firm Weil, Gotshal & Manges who often works with companies to complete deals where no banks are involved. “But there’s a feeling that investment bankers might not be so important on the evaluation of early-stage tech companies.”"

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For Venture Capital, Time Can Be The Most Important Currency

Bay Partners proves that, in venture capital, the most important currency can be time.

The best VC firm you thought was dead and buried: "Bay Partners actually had a lot of future winners in that legacy portfolio. Examples include Dropcam (bought by Nest Labs for $555 million), Zenprise (bought by Citrix for $327 million), Buddy Media (bought by Salesforce for $745 million), Eloqua (went public, then bought by Oracle for $957 million), Oncomed (went public, current $530 million market cap) and Guidewire (went public, $3 billion market cap). Plus more than two dozen still-private companies, including 2015 IPO candidates like LendingCub, Apigee and Xactly."


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US Regulatory Burden, Innovation Breakdown by Joseph Gulfo

Book Review: 'Innovation Breakdown' by Joseph V. Gulfo - WSJ: ".... Compare MelaFind's experience in the U.S. with its reception in Europe: MelaFind was submitted for marketing approval in Europe in May 2011. It was approved just five months later. One key reason for Europe's efficient approval process is that European governments don't review medical devices directly. Instead they certify independent "notified bodies" that specialize and compete to review new products. The European system works more quickly than the U.S. system, and there is no evidence that it results in reduced patient safety. Rather than tweak the current system, why doesn't the U.S. just adopt the European model and call it a day? Our health and our economy would be better off for it. Google's Sergey Brin recently said that he didn't want to be a health entrepreneur because "It's just a painful business to be in . . . the regulatory burden in the U.S. is so high that I think it would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs." Mr. Brin won't find anything in Dr. Gulfo's book to persuade him otherwise. Until we get our regulatory system in order, expect a lot more Yo's and not enough life-saving innovations."


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LinkedIn, Off-the-clock Work, Overtime

"This was a function of not having the right tools in place for a small subset of our sales force to track hours properly," said Shannon Stubo, vice president of corporate commmunications.(source infra)

LinkedIn to pay nearly $6 million in U.S. Labor Dept settlement | Reuters: "... The Labor Department said LinkedIn failed to record and compensate workers for all hours worked, violating provisions of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). In addition to the settlement payment, LinkedIn will train all employees that "off-the-clock work" is prohibited for all non-exempt workers, the Labor Department said. The FLSA requires that non-exempt workers, who are not salaried managers, be paid the federal minimum hourly wage of $7.25 plus overtime pay for hours worked past 40 in a given work week...."


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America Less Entrepreneurial, Employment Impacts

America Is Getting Less Entrepreneurial -- NYMag: Robert A. Litan of the Brookings Institution and Ian Hathaway of Ennsyte Economics provide some scary data points in two research papers they have released in the last few months.

• The share of all companies comprised by start-ups under a year old fell by half between 1978 and 2011
• The proportion of private-sector workers employed at older firms has increased from 60 percent to 72 percent since 1992
• The proportion of workers employed at young firms has declined over the same period
• Companies under a year old are failing more often, with the “failure rate” for start-ups climbing to 27 percent from 16 percent in the early 1990s
• The “failure rate” has increased for all but the longest-established businesses

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Google Taking Away Future Corporate Customers From Microsoft

Google is stealing away Microsoft’s future corporate customers - Quartz: "Among the Fortune 50, only one company—Google—had its mail records pointed at Google’s servers. Among the mid-size companies, almost 60% host their email with Google, including corporations like Twitter, Dropbox, Box, Airbnb, Square, Uber, and Etsy. And among the Y Combinator startups—mostly very small companies with some funding, but often tight budgets—92% host their email with Google."


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