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Melia Russell

Melia Russell

Senior Tech Reporter at Business Insider

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United States
Covering topics
  • Computers & Technology
  • Finance & Banking Services
  • Business
Languages
  • English
Influence score
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Melia Russell
businessinsider.com

Wall Street and Harvard Face Generational Rift Over Israel-Gaza ... - Business Insider

There’s an old joke that goes: The hardest thing about Harvard is getting in. But simply being on campus this week has put that idea to the test. It started when dozens of student groups issued a statement holding Israel’s government “entirely responsible” for the violence that Hamas unleashed in Gaza. That, in turn, prompted billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman to demand that his alma mater disclose the names of students who are members of the signatory groups — even those who didn’t kno…
businessinsider.com

Marc Andreessen is facing backlash for calling ESG the 'enemy' - Bu...

It wouldn’t be a Marc Andreessen essay if the internet didn’t lose its mind over it.That’s what happened Monday when the billionaire venture capitalist dropped a lengthy manifesto that decries efforts to regulate technology and the full-blown moral panic around artificial intelligence. Rather, technology, he wrote, can solve for “any material problem” under the sun and herald a new era of “abundance for everyone.”“Typical boneheaded straw man setup that EVERYONE but the fine minds of tech elite…
businessinsider.com

Founders Fund hires Coinbase's Jennifer Campbell as its newest part...

Founders Fund’s newest partner Jennifer Campbell isn’t hunting unicorns, or startups worth more than $1 billion. She’s looking to “harpoon a whale,” she told Insider in her first interview since she joined the legendary venture capital firm this month. And she has a strategy to do so.“Everyone’s really investing in incremental businesses, but Founders Fund is one of the few that’s still looking for super audacious ideas,” Campbell said in a video call from an office in San Francisco’s Presidio n…
businessinsider.com

Seed-Stage VC Firm Founder Collective Unveils New $95 Million Fund ...

It’s no secret that startups are taking longer to fundraise. What’s less obvious is that the same can be said for many venture capital firms.While many firms sit out this fundraising season, Founder Collective is taking the wraps off a new fund. The firm has raised $95 million for its fifth and largest fund, Founder Collective tells Insider exclusively. The fund’s size represents a modest 12% increase from the last vehicle it closed in 2020, though a spokesperson for the firm said that with infl…
businessinsider.com

My Husband Launched a Tech Startup and It Changed Our Marriage - Bu...

One morning this past spring, I was working at my desk when Biz, a fellow tech reporter with a bloodhound’s nose for news, texted me a screenshot of my husband’s Twitter bio.Something was missing. Kyle had deleted the name of his startup.“What happened to Playbyte????” Biz wrote.Confused, I wrote back, “Wait that’s so weird. I’ll talk to him.“Kyle and I both work from home, and I wanted to confront him then and there. But talking about my husband’s battle-scarred startup always had the potential…
businessinsider.com

Allbirds cofounder says startups need to be profitable before going...

Blink and you might have missed it, but the window for privately held companies to go public briefly reopened this year after a nearly two-year hiatus. In September, Instacart, Arm, and Klaviyo went out in quick succession, and other candidates like Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein, Skims, and Reddit have readied their papers in order to follow suit.The companies that floated initial public offerings this year had something in common: They’re actually profitable.Going public before turning profi…
businessinsider.com

Venture capital's steep decline is leaving female founders in the c...

In the midst of a sharp pullback in venture capital investment, women founders are feeling the chill more than men.The latest data report from Carta uses anonymized data from tens of thousands of startups on its platform to take the pulse of the funding market. This year was challenging for startups of all stripes, as third-quarter funding fell to $11.9 billion, the lowest quarterly tally in years, but Carta’s data shows the scarcity of capital has had an outsized impact on startups with women f…

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businessinsider.com

The Deck Doctors Make Pitch Decks That Get Startups Funded - Busine...

Mark Golub was working as a brand consultant when a friend with a startup asked for feedback on his pitch deck. Before he could think it through, Golub said that he and Alex Flynn, a buddy from high school who was working at a crypto company, had actually started a business making pitch decks for startups.Only, they hadn’t. Both 26 years old, Golub and Flynn had spent years working at consultancies like Accenture and R/GA, where they created and scrutinized thousands of slideshows for clients, a…
businessinsider.com

2024 Tech Trends Predictions From Top VCs - Business Insider

They say good startups emerge in bad times. The way things are going, next year will produce the best class of companies ever.Founders are hustling harder than ever to bag funding. With all the financial ups and downs of the past couple of years, less cash is making its way into venture funds, which are in turn slowing the pace of investments. Meanwhile, customers are more challenging to close as they pare down expenses to ensure they survive the storm.To help startup founders, employees, and in…
businessinsider.com

Jack Altman talks stepping down as CEO of Lattice - Business Insider

Jack Altman is the second Altman brother to drop the CEO title in the last month — but this time, it’s of his own accord. Earlier this week, Lattice announced it was bringing on a new CEO — former Salesforce executive Sarah Joyce Franklin — and that Altman would step down from his role and become executive chairman, eight years after founding the human-resources software startup.These past few years, Jack Altman, who is Sam Altman’s brother, led the enterprise unicorn through a period of rapid e…
businessinsider.com

2024 AI Tech Trends Predictions From Top VCs - Business Insider

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…
businessinsider.com

Startup founder mental health will crumble in 2024, VCs predict - B...

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…
businessinsider.com

Amid VC Layoffs and Restructuring, Some Investors Seek Fresh Starts...

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…
businessinsider.com

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman gets married to coder - Business Insider

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…
businessinsider.com

25 US Startups That Sponsor H-1B Work Visas - Business Insider

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…
businessinsider.com

H-1B visa lottery changes benefit startups, immigration lawyers say...

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…
businessinsider.com

Boston Startups Funding Outpace New York in 2023, New Data Shows - ...

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…
businessinsider.com

01 Advisors Investor Dick Costolo Talks the New Startup Funding Fre...

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…
businessinsider.com

AI startup founder asks VCs to pay $100 to meet him - Business Insider

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…
businessinsider.com

Lily Lyman is the next leader of Boston's Underscore VC - Business ...

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…
businessinsider.com

Defense Unicorns Lands $35 Million in Funding From Sapphire Venture...

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…