‘My $60m weight-loss app cured my personal pain’
Image caption Victoria Repa avidly read business books as a child The BBC’s weekly The Boss series profiles different business leaders from around the world. This week we speak to Ukrainian entrepreneur Victoria Repa, founder of weight-loss and fitness app BetterMe.Victoria Repa had an unlikely start in life for a successful tech entrepreneur – she…
Canceled conferences will force startups to focus on scalable lead generation
Founders should use this pause to re-assess processes and strategies Dan Wheatley is CEO/co-founder of StraightTalk Consulting, a SaaS operations and growth consultancy that works with B2B founders to implement long-term, data-driven growth strategies. Described by Sequoia Capital as the black swan event of 2020, the long-term economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic on startups…
Coronavirus: ‘Caremongers’ who are helping vulnerable Indians
Image copyright Caremongers India With India under lockdown and social distancing being advised to deal with the threat of the coronavirus, an online collective of “Caremongers” is reaching out to help the elderly and other vulnerable groups. It started last week when Mahita Nagaraj, a digital marketing professional and single mum, received a call from…
Apply to be a TC Top Pick at Disrupt SF 2020
If you’re an early-stage startup founder with a big vision and even bigger dreams, join us and more than 10,000 other like-minded startuppers at TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2020 on September 14-16. Silicon Valley’s premier early-stage startup extravaganza focuses on founders, investors and startup experts determined to disrupt and reshape technology. Attending is awesome, but…
All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part I: B2B Companies
Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around. As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website…
Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian on how to survive these crazy days (and what to learn from them)
Garry Tan and Alexis Ohanian founded Initialized Capital roughly nine years ago and they’ve closed four funds since, including most recently in late 2018. That $225 million vehicle is roughly twice the size of their previous fund, but because of the coronavirus, the firm, and its portfolio companies — some of which include Opendoor, Instacart…
How American Elections Got So Vulnerable—and What We All Can Do Now
America’s democracy is at risk from more than Russian Twitter trolls. Our voting systems, the information technology that undergirds our elections, are dangerously outdated and vulnerable to attack. And for Finnish data security expert Harri Hursti, the best defense we have might be counting paper ballots. We don’t have to count every vote by hand,…
Greece’s Convert Group raises €1.2M to bring e-commerce visibility to FMCG
Convert Group, a startup based in Athens that offers a SaaS to help FMCG (fast-moving consumer goods) brands understand how they are performing across e-commerce, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. The investment comes from Uni.fund, which is backed by the EquiFund investment platform (an initiative created by cooperation between the Hellenic Republic and…
Coronavirus: ‘If you can’t work, what do you do?’
Image copyright Cathy Wassell Image caption Digital marketing agency owner Cathy Wassell has been self-employed for 17 years Many self-employed people are struggling because work is being cancelled during the coronavirus outbreak, but are excluded from financial measures announced by the UK government.”It made me feel as if I wasn’t of any importance,” says Cathy…