startupanz.com

Author: Alina Siegfried Last night in Wellington, the BizDojo played host to one of the most exciting and innovative players in the blockchain space — Vitalik Buterin, the 23-year old founder of Ethereum. Ethereum is the world’s leading and fastest growing blockchain-based distributed computing platform. Proposed in 2013, the project sold more than US$18 million in “ether” tokens, the cryptocurrency which runs on the platform,...

Author: Social Good Stuff Although the social enterprise sector is still young in Australia, social entrepreneurs are on the rise in response to the social and environmental challenges that we are currently facing. In the recent Finding Australia’s Social Enterprise Sector (FASES) 2016 report, social entrepreneurs face major external constraints in growing both their businesses and impacts. Constraints include: – a patchy...

Author: Claire Lew “It’s not what you say that matters — it’s what you do.” I observed the truth of this old adage, firsthand, about six years ago. At the time, I wasn’t CEO of Know Your Company. I was an employee at another company. As an employee, I remember making a suggestion to our CEO about how we should market a new program… I’ll never forget how...

Author: Robin Tolochko On December 31, 2013, I was in an Uber in Bogota, Colombia, 6 cm dilated and in active labor. As we drove towards the hospital on traffic-free New Year’s Eve roads, the driver asked if I wanted him to go faster. Sitting on the floor of his car, I said in between contractions, “No, despacio. No hay afán.”...

Author: Nir Eyal “I’m endlessly loyal,” my wife said, staring straight into my eyes. But she wasn’t talking about our marriage — she was pledging her allegiance to a piece of software. “I’ll never quit Microsoft Office,” she told me. “It does too much for me to leave it.” For a moment I wondered if her husband had engendered the same reverence, but then...

Author: Coin and Crypt Over the past year, a growing number of people have leapt to take part in bitcoin’s meteoric rise. Teenagers have invested their college funds. Some families have mortgaged their homes and placed everything on the table. Even billionaires have suggested putting 10% of all assets into the digital currency. There is a lot of money in play and...

Author: Neeraj Joshi Whenever we talk about a million dollar tech startup, the first question that comes to our mind is: How much money it has raised till now? So is it even possible to build a million dollar tech startup staying bootstrapped? History says, Yes of course! SurveyMonkey raised 11 years after getting started, Shopify after 6 years, lynda.com ran bootstrapped for 17 years, and MailChimp hasn’t raised a single dime till now. But...

Author: HubSpot In one year, HubSpot doubled the number of certified partners in its platform ecosystem and increased the number of apps installed by customers by 142% — here’s why that matters. We’re living in the golden age of marketing and sales technology. There are more than 5,000 marketing and sales technology vendors globally, all striving to help businesses to better find and delight customers in...

Author: Spearhead 11 Angel Investing Lessons In the words of Charlie Munger, investing requires a latticework of mental models. Here are 11 lessons to begin filling out your angel investing lattice: If you can’t decide, the answer is no Proprietary dealflow means ‘they want you’ Investing takes years to learn, and longer to see returns Valuation matters Back $0B companies Judgment is...

Author: John Battelle Technology’s march is taken as gospel. But if we’ve learned anything from the past year, it’s that Valley giants often miss key human externalities. Case in point: Amazon Go. So Amazon Go launched this week, and the rush to praise the “store without cashiers” as the future of retail was immediate and sustained. I found Ben Thompson’s considered take representative of the bunch: For decades...

Author: Steve Yegge After nearly 13 years at Google, I have finally left the nest! Never thought it would happen. I always thought I would die at Google — maybe choking to death on one of their free chocolate brownies, or maybe finally having a heart attack over YouTube’s increasingly bizarre policy enforcement. But regardless of how I envisioned the Grim Reaper catching...

Author: Enrique Dans A little more than a year after its launch, during which it has carried out tests open only to company employees, Amazon has opened its first Amazon Go convenience store in Seattle. Covering some180 square meters, about the size of a gas station store, the outlet sells freshly prepared food and snacks, local products such as cheeses and chocolates,...

Author: David Schmidt The times of pure Design Thinking are over: Certainly, the last years have seen the rise of Design Thinking and similar processes (most lately design sprints) that help entrepreneurs and managers to create more user-centered products and services. They are great tools to spawn desirability in customers. Nevertheless, they often fall short in creating a sustainable business model. Business Design is...

Author: Nick Maggiulli How to Use Brute Force to Improve Your Finances It was January 1969 when the Department of Justice filed antitrust charges against IBM for monopolizing the computer market. Little did they know, the case would drag on for 13 years, cost the Department of Justice $15 million, and result in 2,500 depositions and over 60 million pages of documents. The...

Author: Richard Edelman As we begin 2018, we find the world in a new phase in the loss of trust: the unwillingness to believe information, even from those closest to us. The loss of confidence in information channels and sources is the fourth wave of the trust tsunami. The moorings of institutions have already been dangerously undermined by the three previous...

Author: Andrew Beebe Milton Friedman would agree: give the people what they want. Much has been written about the lofty goal of creating profits while somehow also delivering on the goal of providing a social good. “Profits with Purpose” has become something of a romantic rallying cry for those seeking to make a difference. Yet so many great thinkers, most famously Milton Friedman, describe...