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As the cool night air settled over Utah’s Lake Powell, Elizabeth Moore feigned sleep. Eyes closed, she listened as the Mercato Partners cofounder Greg Warnock stepped into the living room of his houseboat.She felt Warnock’s hand squeeze her arm as he whispered her name over and over, softening his voice so as not to wake the only other employee on the boat, who was sleeping on a nearby couch.Moore pretended to wake. Her boss, a well-connected Utah venture capitalist with a mop of gray hair and r…
10 days ago
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From the outside, things are looking rosy at Index Ventures.This week, the 28-year-old venture capital firm debuted a new pair of funds totaling $2.3 billion, a substantial sum during an abysmal time for the industry’s fundraising efforts.However, a series of departures at the firm paints a darker picture of Index’s state.Last week, the firm parted ways with five investors in its San Francisco office, including mid-level dealmakers and a senior dealmaker, according to four people familiar with t…
16 days ago
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Last year’s dearth of capital for startups forced many founders to stretch their cash runways. Heeding the advice of their investors, they closed offices, laid off workers, and slashed software costs.Efficiency is a hallmark of any good business, but Tom Loverro, a partner at the 44-year-old Bay Area venture-capital firm Institutional Venture Partners, thinks startup founders should step off the brake pedal.The venture capitalist who correctly predicted a “mass-extinction event for startups” las…
24 days ago
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Di-Ann Eisnor, founder of Crews by Core, which makes software used by construction foremen to set schedules and tasks and track progress, is on a mission to build the Trello for the $12 trillion global construction industry.“I want to build a company that matters, and I want to do it fast. I’m impatient,” Eisnor said. “I don’t mind saying, all right, I’m not going to do it alone.“And she won’t be. She’s now selling her startup to WakeCap, a Saudi Arabia-based company that has contracts with many…
25 days ago
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Two months ago, when my startup founder-husband Kyle decided to exit his startup, he started job hunting for a product manager role. Fearing the dreaded technical interview, Kyle hit the books harder than a high school junior studying for the SAT.In the world of recruiting software engineers, product managers, and other tech talent, the technical interview is a candidate’s first step. It’s a coding test done in person or at home using a shared screen designed to test a candidate’s grasp of the f…
30 days ago
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When he was a college student in Kansas, Nikhil Teja Kolli worked a night shift at a convenience store on the edge of the Ozarks. One night, a man lingered inside the store until the other customers cleared out, then approached the counter with a gun stretched in Kolli’s direction. The gunman swiped the cash in the drawer and left Kolli frozen. He felt helpless to stop it.Eight months later, he would be held at gunpoint again.He couldn’t have known it then, but Kolli would go on to start a busin…
3 months ago
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On a tour of Y Combinator’s new offices, Jared Friedman walks me through a tall, one-room building with a hipped ceramic roof. Steel columns frame the space, and sunlight streams in through arch windows. In the center, an air compressor like a wheel the size of a Volkswagen bug juts from the floor. This is the place where migrant workers built steel parts for mining and ships as far back as the Gold Rush. And it’s where a new gold rush is underway.The full-blown mania in artificial intelligence…
4 months ago
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Mathilde Collin realized she needed help.Things had been changing quickly at her startup Front. After years of trying to build a shared email app for businesses, the company had sharpened its focus on the customers that got the most use out of its product: customer support. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence were changing how these teams assign tickets and respond to customers, and Front needed to transform, again.And so last fall, Collin kicked off a search for a new board director, to fi…
4 months ago
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Last fall, Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, was at a cloud conference in Chicago and grabbing a bite to eat with Rob Slaughter, founder of a promising young startup. They got to talking about how Slaughter’s company, the cheerfully named Defense Unicorns, had bootstrapped its way to nearly $30 million in annual revenue and secured a large portfolio of work across the military and prime contractors.Das flew home that night but didn’t stop thinking about their chat. Three days later, he se…
5 months ago
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Lily Lyman, a partner at the early-stage firm Underscore, has been known to lace up her cleats to chase a deal.In her second year as a principal, she spent months courting founder Mike Greene to invest in a round of funding. His startup, Hi Marley, allows insurance providers to text with customers, and it had several name-brand firms circling. In her final attempt to win the deal, Lyman offered to coach his 10-year-old daughter’s lacrosse team. She played midfield for Harvard University.“As part…
5 months ago
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Sam Blond, the Founders Fund partner who brought sales expertise from his years at Brex and Zenefits, has left the firm, he announced on X. He’s the second partner to depart Founders Fund this year after Keith Rabois made a return to Khosla Ventures in January.“Full time investing / being a VC isn’t the right fit for me and I’ve decided to go back to operating. More on what’s next for me later,” Blond wrote on X.Blond was chief revenue officer and an early employee at Brex, the fintech that’s ra…
5 months ago
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The venture capital industry has mostly been a tale of woe in the past year, with thousands of startups struggling to raise money and many shutting down.For some lucky founders, though, the market is as frothy as it’s ever been, and edging into the realm of insanity again.A couple of days ago, startup founder Dan Siroker set his sights on meeting new investors. He anticipated so many VCs clamoring to meet that the entrepreneur decided to whittle down the field and make some money (for charity) w…
5 months ago
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Dick Costolo enters our Zoom meeting two minutes early. On a gray day in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, the 60-year-old investor at 01 Advisors, a boutique venture capital fund, looks après-ski chic in a cable-knit zip-up and black frame glasses. Costolo grew up in a Detroit area household where he says his parents taught him five minutes early is on time, and has been known to chastise executives under his former command at Twitter for being late to meetings.Costolo isn’t just early to meetings but als…
5 months ago
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It was a Friday morning when a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank rippled through startup land, and Parker Conrad, the 44-year-old chief executive of Rippling, was frantically texting and calling his board members. Customers of Rippling rely on its workforce management software to run payroll, but their and Rippling’s funds were tied up at the bank, sending Conrad into a mad dash to fundraise.Less than 12 hours later, Conrad signed a term sheet for $500 million from Greenoaks, an early investor tha…
5 months ago
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A new reform to the US H-1B visa program aims to ring out some of the uncertainty for migrant workers and employers.The US Citizenship and Immigration Services recently said it finalized measures to make sure each applicant has the same chance of being selected for the H1-B visa program, the nation’s largest temporary work visa program with over 600,000 workers across 50,000 employers.Each year, tens of thousands of foreign nationals wind up at venture-backed companies through the employment-bas…
6 months ago
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On a stretch of the Massachusetts Turnpike, where it exits the suburbs west of Boston and the skyline comes into view, a pair of bright orange billboards greets commuters.“Have a therapeutic idea worthy of funding?” asks a billboard for Curie.Bio, a year-old venture capital firm and incubator started by Zach Weinberg, a repeat founder and a general partner at early-stage firm Operator Partners, who sold a previous company to Roche for $2 billion.These days, in Boston, more ideas are getting fund…
6 months ago
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The H-1B visa has served as a prominent pathway for skilled foreign labor into the American job market. This includes many startups, such as Stripe, Plaid, X, and Carta, that have relied on the program to secure unique talents from a global pool.The H-1B visa program is the nation’s largest temporary work visa program, with over 600,000 workers across 50,000 employers. However, obtaining an H-1B visa remains challenging due to high demand. The program gets more interest than it has the capacity…
6 months ago
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Sam Altman and Oliver Mulherin, a software engineer, got married, Business Insider has learned.Photos of the nuptials between the OpenAI CEO and Mulherin, who lives with Altman in California, circulated on social media on Thursday, with some asking if they were real.A source who attended the wedding told BI the photos were “not AI generated images! 😂” The person spoke on condition of anonymity, but their identity is known to BI.The photos appear to be screenshots from Altman’s private Instagram…
7 months ago
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In the clubby world of venture capital, layoffs were once a rarity. But as the industry reels from one of its worst years for fundraising in a decade, it’s starting to feel like open season on venture jobs.Firms that had to scale back the size of funds they planned have made cuts. Others are staffing up less quickly and scuttling junior staffers to work at portfolio companies. More still are going out of business. According to about a dozen investors who spoke to Business Insider on the topic of…
7 months ago
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A funding logjam at the early stages. A shut window for IPOs. Clients ghosting businesses. If the investor warnings are to be believed, struggling startups will face a bloodbath this year as cash runs low and wary investors encourage founders to return the capital.Now, investors are predicting an epidemic of founder mental illness in Silicon Valley and beyond, the likes of which tech has never seen.“Sadly, but not terribly surprisingly, it feels as though we are in the early stages of an unprece…
7 months ago
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Generative AI and machine-learning have been a bright spot in an otherwise doom-and-gloom year for startups and venture capitalists.Despite an overall slump in startup funding this year, 2023 saw a scramble among investors to pour money into AI and machine-learning startups.Generative artificial intelligence startups exploded onto the scene in 2022 with tech advancements that amazed those both within and outside the tech community. OpenAI became a household name with the launch of ChatGPT, and l…
7 months ago
