FundersClub Weekly Newsletter - December 8, 2016
FundersClub Portfolio News
LeadGenius raises $4m in debt and equity Series B funding, and intends to use the funds to add multi-channel capabilities for outbound marketing and sales in "LeadGenius Raises $4M in Series B Funding."
Slack announces a strategic partnership with Google Cloud, which will bring a number of new features, including deeper integrations with Google services, new bots for notifications, support for Google’s recently launched Team Drives, and document previews to its collaboration platform for teams in "Slack and Google announce partnership focused on better integrating their services."
VetPronto, the nation's largest veterinary house call service, recently launched in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Washington DC, Baltimore and Tampa Bay. More at "VetPronto wants to make it easier to care for your pets by sending vets to you."
Thalmic Labs is using its pioneering work in gesture control - used to manipulate things ranging from computers and phones to drones, video games, touch screens, surgical robots, power-point presentations and much more – to create a new undisclosed product by the end of the year in "Thalmic Labs is on verge of introducing a revolutionary new gesture control​ wearable tech product."
ClearTax founder & CEO, Archit Gupta, recalls his journey from creating ClearTax in 2011 to having over 1 Million customers today in "From 1K Customers In First 11 Days To 1 Mn Today: ClearTax's Journey Post The YCombinator Stamp Of Approval."
Tamatem CEO, Hussam Hammo, chats about what it is like creating games for the Middle East & North Africa region in "Exclusive Interview With Tamatem CEO Hussam Hammo – A Leading Mobile Games Publisher In Middle East & North Africa (MENA)."
Investor Thoughts
Christopher Steiner and Boris Silver of FundersClub offer a Series A checklist that can help a startup ready itself for the rigors and scrutiny that come with trying to raise this major investment, using their dual perspective from operating as founders and investors at FundersClub to inform the guide in "FundersClub Series A Checklist."
Ali Rowghani of Y Combinator Continuity describes how a CEO can build a company to maximize the opportunity that the product has surfaced by focusing on the highest leverage tasks that only the CEO can accomplish in "What’s the Second Job of a Startup CEO?"
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures analyzes a data set of all software companies acquired over the last six years and benchmarks them by enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to asses how much a SaaS startup would be worth in an acquisition in "What Is Your SaaS Startup Worth In An Acquisition?"
Devon McDonald of OpenView Partners shares collective thoughts from the firm on the evolving sales and marketing technology landscape in "VCs Weigh In: An Inside Look At What's Fueling The Sales & Marketing Technology Market."
David Brown of Techstars discusses their recent change to becoming a Certified B Corporation, a new type of company that uses the power of business to solve social and environmental problems, and how it impacts their business in "Business as a Force for Good: Becoming a B Corp."
Jason M. Lemkin of SaaStr offers advice to founders to make sure that the VPs they hire also know how to hire effectively in "VPs That Can’t Hire."
CB Insights updates their timeline of AI acquisitions by corporations such as Google, IBM, Yahoo, Intel, Apple, Salesforce, and GE, as over 40 of the nearly 140 acquisitions of private companies working to advance artificial intelligence technologies have taken place in 2016 alone in "The Race For AI: Google, Twitter, Intel, Apple In A Rush To Grab Artificial Intelligence Startups."
Founder and Operator Thoughts
Yvonne Wassenaar of New Relic, and previously of VMware, outlines why simulations within a company are invaluable, when they’re most effective and how to use them to help startups maneuver through difficult junctures in "Less Work, More Play: Change the Game With Simulations."
Jason Fried of Basecamp shares how they make sure their employees can still benefit from a sale or liquidity event without offering equity or options in "The liquidity what if? Our alternative to employee options/equity grants."
Scott Belsky of Behance shares how although often overlooked, the outcome of your work is determined by timing just as much as other variables in "The Criticality Of Timing."
Jonathan Van of Technium describes how deep technologies, which are unique, differentiated, often protected or hard to reproduce, technological or scientific advances, are changing the world of entrepreneurship in "The Next Era of Deep Tech Entrepreneurship."
Susan Su of 500 Startups chats with Spencer McClung of Ipsy about how they have scaled their influencer-driven content marketing, while keeping it affordable and defensible in "How an $800M Company Grows through Influencers and Content."
Greg Gascon discusses how ubiquitous computing will impact us in the future by examining the way we engineer and interact with the apps that exist today in "How Invisible Interfaces are going to transform the way we interact with computers."
In Other News
Microsoft and LinkedIn today announce that Microsoft’s $26.2 billion acquisition of LinkedIn, the social networking site, has officially closed, six months after news first broke of the deal in "Microsoft officially closes its $26.2B acquisition of LinkedIn."
Spotify announces that they have halted all efforts to buy SoundCloud following months of talks between the two, because it feared that an acquisition could negatively impact its IPO preparation in "Spotify has backed out of talks to acquire SoundCloud."
Did You Know?
Did you know that four new elements, Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennessine and Oganesson, have just been added to the period table? Source