FundersClub Weekly Newsletter - January 7, 2016
FundersClub Portfolio News
Coinbase reports that a majority of its users now reside outside of the US, with Brazil, Philippines, and Indonesia being the fastest-growing markets in "2015 Bitcoin Year in Review".
inDinero is continuing to expand operations in Portland, and intends to keep a 50:50 ratio of men and women in "inDinero Targets Diversity as it Continues to Add Portland Jobs".
Eden co-founder, Joe Du Bey, discusses Reflexivity Theory, San Francisco as a startup center, and their core company values in "Office Management Startup Eden Is Growing at Warp Speed".
Move Loot, a San Francisco-based company where shoppers can buy and sell used furniture online, has expanded its shipping route into Orange County in "Have a Couch You Want to Get Rid Of?".
Investor Thoughts
First Round Capital compiles a list of the '30 most impactful, change-making pieces of advice' drawn from everything they published in 2015 in "The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2015".
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures advises founders to develop their startup's compensation philosophy based on a normal distribution or power law distribution in "When Startup Compensation Isn't About The Money".
Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures believes that the future of online video is bright and that the best, new online video companies will be 'technical in nature and content at their core' in "There’s No Such Thing as an MCN. It’s a Figment of Your Imagination".
Boris Wertz of Version One Ventures advises startups to make building proprietary data sets their top priority if they want to succeed in machine learning in "Data, Not Algorithms, is Key to Machine Learning Success".
PitchBook releases a datagraphic about global venture capital fundraising, deal making and exit trends from 2015 in "A Visual Summary of VC Activity in 2015".
Josh Nussbaum of Metamorphic Ventures notes the difficulty of investing and building great companies because of the crowdsourcing of information that surfaces great ideas, therefore increasing competition before a sustainable competitive advantage can be built in "Efficient Startup Hypothesis".
Founder and Operator Thoughts
Brian Chesky of Airbnb notes the connection between imagining and creating something, advising entrepreneurs to polish and refine ideas rather than start by editing them in "Don't Edit Your Imagination".
Henry Ward of eShares offers a set of hiring principles and a heuristics guide to help founders make decisions in their hiring process in "How to Hire".
Frank Rapacciuolo of Musixmatch says that teamwork between designers and developers is the result of continuous negotiation and respect of small basic rules to avoid wasting time in "How Do You Ensure That The Dev Team Understands The Design?".
Brandon Redlinger of PersistIQ provides a step-by-step methodology for founders to affordably source high-quality leads in "Outsourcing: Generating Thousands of Sales Leads at a Fraction of the Price".
Mitchell Harper of PeopleSpark believes that good CEOs are busy working “in” the business for the first few years, but then transition to surrounding themselves with people who can do their jobs better than they could in "Good CEOs Aren't Busy".
In Other News
Twitter is building a new feature that will allow users to tweet things longer than the traditional 140-character limit in "Twitter Considering 10,000-Character Limit for Tweets".
With Chinese shares and the yuan posting their worst starts to a year in at least two decades, the ruling Communist Party is being forced to scale back efforts to let markets have more sway in the world’s second-largest economy in "China's Terrible Start to 2016 Has Beijing Fighting Market Fires".
Did You Know?
Did you know that worldwide, hackers have stolen an estimated 1 trillion dollars in intellectual property costing U.S.-based companies 100 billion dollars a year in lost profits?