We live in a world where complex predictions can often be expressed with a single number. Banks use FICO scores as being predictive of whether you will repay a loan on time. Universities use SAT scores as (supposedly) being predictive of how you will do in college. Nightclub owners use a band’s social media numbers as indicative of whether they should book the band (seriously).
Peter Lufkin, a data scientist in Santa Barbara, has developed a system to predict the condition of real estate property without a physical inspection. If you’re looking at buying a house somewhere you can look up its predicted selling price using a site such a Zillow, but there’s no way to know its condition and potential deferred maintenance without sending a contractor out for a physical inspection. …
This startup is bringing wealth creation to all.
Gold has been used as a store of value for all of recorded history. It holds its value forever, and isn’t subject to the fluctuations and political risk associated with fiat currency.
Most of us know that a good balanced investment portfolio includes some gold (it has often outperformed the stock market), but the average person doesn’t have an easy, efficient, and legal way to buy and store physical gold.
So Ashraf Rizvi and his team decided to tackle this problem, and democratize physical gold ownership. Riz (as everyone calls him) is a Wharton grad who went on to be Global Head of Commodities Trading at UBS Investment Bank. He knows that wealthy people can easily buy and store gold as part of their diversified investment portfolio — one day he thought to himself, “Why not bring that bring that access to all?” …
Like many in my generation, as a teenager I read The Teachings of Don Juan, the Carlos Castaneda book that ended up being a NY Times best-seller, with over 10 million copies sold. An entire generation was fascinated by his stories of how he took mystical excursions into the desert, ate magic mushrooms, and discovered “springboards into new horizons of cognition”.
Back then pretty much all recreational drugs were illegal, but the illicit nature of the topic just made Castaneda’s writings seem all the more seductive.
Since then there’s been a slow (sometimes glacially-slow) but significant trend in the US toward decriminalizing recreational drugs. Today 1 in 3 Americans live in a state where marijuana is legal, and it now seems likely that it will be legalized at the Federal level in the not-too-distant future. …
Voice assistants are being used for a wide range of applications today. Consumers are using them to shop and and play music, while professionals across many sectors are using them to become more efficient and effective.
Shubu.ai, is a new venture working on transforming medicine in India with a new voice assistant platform for physicians. Doctors using the platform can use voice to reschedule appointments, write prescriptions, look up information, and update Electronic Medical Records. Physicians in hospitals are using the Shubu.ai …
In the past twenty years, many business sectors have been transformed, but veterinary services are pretty much the same as they’ve always been. Some big consolidators like VCA have bought-up a bunch of local veterinarians, but the way services are delivered hasn’t changed much. Your dog gets a foxtail in their nose, you call the vet to make an appointment, you get put on hold. Finally you get an appointment, hustle the dog into the car, drive to the vet, sit in the waiting room, and finally get shown into the examination room where the vet removes the foxtail.
You’re a hundred dollars poorer, and the dog is now traumatized. …
The “sharing economy” is one of the most fundamental economic shifts of the 21st century. Anybody with a new car today can drive for Uber or Lyft, getting more economic value out of that capital investment. Anybody with an extra bedroom can list it on Airbnb, extracting more economic value from their home. Anybody with extra money in the bank can loan it out on Prosper or Lending Club, getting a better return on capital. Need a fancy designer dress for a special evening? Getting one from Rent the Runway probably makes far more economic sense than buying one.
It’s a huge trend, all over the world. By some estimates, the sharing economy is expected to grow to $335 Billion by 2025. …
This new startup uses AI and ML to gather customer feedback from disparate sources and provide actionable insights.
Lots of startups have failed because the engineering team built the product they thought the world wanted, and they were wrong. Other startups have failed because the sales team said yes to every customer request and the engineering team quit in disgust.
So the typical Silicon Valley organizational structure today is to have a Product Manager (or product management team), who owns the product and makes the decisions about which features to add, which to remove, etc. …
How a new fintech startup in Mexico is knocking-down socioeconomic barriers.
Fintech (financial technology) startups are disrupting traditional financial services all over the world. From N26 (mobile banking) to Transferwise (bank wires), from Stripe (payments) to Robin Hood (stock trading), fintech companies are raising large piles of venture capital and completely changing the way that financial transactions are conducted.
But what I’m really excited about is that fintech is also creating opportunity in poorer communities and knocking-down socioeconomic barriers. Traditional banks have never cared much about people in the bottom third of the economy — they just can’t make money serving those people. But fintech companies — because of the lower costs of a pure-digital transaction — actually can serve populations in lower economic classes. …
This startup makes it easy and affordable to get relevant peer-to-peer guidance on college admissions.
Great startups often begin with entrepreneurs who fall in love with a problem worth solving. In the case of Klustur, the co-founders fell in love with a problem they had experienced themselves first-hand: the college admissions process is daunting!
The co-founders of Klustur, Rajesh Bhusa and Thaw Zin Aung Gyi, were childhood friends who went through the college admissions process just a few years ago. Rajesh ended up going to the University of Chicago, ThawZin went to Brown (and then Oxford for grad school). …
And how you might represent it in your pitch deck.
All startups operate within a landscape of competitors and alternatives. One of the worst things an entrepreneur can say to a venture investor is “And best of all, we have no competition!”.
There is competition for everything. If you claim you have no competition then that either means there is zero demand for what your startup does, or it means you don’t know how to use Google search. Either way, you look like a fool.
In fact, competition is usually a good thing. If there are other companies successfully selling something like what you’re selling then that means there is established demand what what you offer. Now you just have to be better/different in some way. …
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