WHY IT MATTERS: Digital Transformation

Prioritizing innovation today is the key to unlocking postcrisis growth.

If you take nothing else away from this post, it should be that retention matters. A lot. No other metric is as singularly telling of whether your business will thrive or die. And so, the better you understand what good retention looks like for your business, the better shot you have at the former. We hope this research proves useful to you whether you’re building, investing, or just curious.

CB Insights and Fast Company team up to analyze high-momentum startups. Key highlight: Enterprise/big data tools dominate: 30% of companies on this year’s list work on enterprise or big data tools.

With recent uncertain times across the world, 2020 is shaping up to be both exciting and frightening. Many startups have experienced cutbacks, including many needing to initiate layoffs while others…

These tech “laws” describe why a given network’s value rises exponentially with the volume of participants (Metcalfe’s Law), why most marketing channels eventually produce diminishing returns (Law of Shitty Clickthroughs), or why starting with simple iterations leads to better long-term products (Gall’s Law). Some, like Moore’s Law, have been extremely prescient. Others, like Conway’s Law, provide counterintuitive insights — such as why Apple’s corporate structure is key to its user experience
The report look at 8 of the most famous tech laws, where they come from, why they matter, and how they help describe some of tech’s biggest successes.

Here is a note that we sent to Sequoia founders and CEOs today to provide guidance on how to ensure the health of their business while dealing with potential business consequences of the spreading effects of the coronavirus.

Analyze why startups fail and problems startups face. Avoid making similar mistakes and learn from them. Download our in-depth report of startup failure.

A business moat is a key competitive advantage setting a company apart from its competitors. See how Amazon, Uber, Starbucks and 16 others built and defend their moats.

We are in the midst of an open source renaissance. But how do you turn an open source project into a business? a16z's Peter Levine and Jennifer Li cover the complete go-to-market from community management to enterprise sales.

Must-do's in order for your hires to reach their full potential you need to put a structure in place that encourages and nurtures their growth, both technically and as managers and leaders.

When it comes to specific start-up sub-sector leadership, we see Montreal emerge as one of the global hotspots for artificial intelligence (AI) start-ups. Since 2016, more than $1 billion has been invested in AI companies located there (including notable startup Element AI), and it has the largest concentration of AI academic researchers in the world. Montreal also hosts the NeurIPS conference, the largest AI event held annually in the world.

Is this 1999?  It sure feels like it...

It seems to us that profitless companies seem to be back in vogue. Recently, companies like Uber and Lyft have gone public with very disruptive business models but no profit in sight. At best, profit might come a long way down the road. Yet they are given market valuations at levels that suggest a wildly profitable business model.

Have you ever wished you could be in the room when founders present to the a16z investing team? Even better, do you wish you could stay to hear the discussion after the pitch? We hear you and are thrilled to launch our latest series of videos called "The a16z Pitch Room". This inaugural episode features the Sandbox VR team Steve Zhao and Siqi Chen pitching to General Partner Andrew Chen. Steve and Siqi present a lightly edited version of their pitch deck. Then Andrew will join them on screen and provide the “director’s commentary”: a slide-by-slide walkthrough of the presentation, describing what resonated, what didn’t, and how he thought about the investment opportunity.

From 2013 to 2017, AI VC funding increased 4.5x while all VC funding increased 2.08x. The 1997 — 2000 boom in all VC funding can be explained by the dot-com bubble. The smaller booms in 2014 and 2015 reflect a period of relatively large economic growth.

When you experiment with work culture as much as we do at Buffer, you tend to receive a lot of questions about it.

What is it like to work remotely? How do you collaborate across time zones? Do people really feel okay making their salaries public? Can you become friends with teammates when you’re not in an office? Do you miss working in an office? Do you basically live in pajamas? (Quick answer to that one: not usually, though I definitely have spent a work day or two in pajamas!)

The research tackles three key areas: economic strength for startups and established businesses, standard of living including disposable income and healthcare benefits, and the inclusion of youth, women and expats in the workforce. The final index ranks the top 100 cities by the total job opportunity score, from highest to lowest, revealing the score for each factor. The data can also be sorted by each individual category.

Après plus de deux ans d’accompagnement de nos startups chez la plupart des grands groupes français, j’ai souhaité dresser un premier bilan.

Once prospective partners in the ecosystem have been identified, there are a variety of ways to work with them, ranging from collaborations that involve a limited financial commitment to outright acquisitions.

We've compiled a collection of the best startups committed to revolutionizing finance, help anybody build a nest egg, get better student loans or rental insurance, invest in non-traditional products like startups or classic cars, or just save some money.

Silicon Valley may favor the young, but technology's romantic idea of the youthful, enterprising entrepreneur may be off by about 20 years, according to a new study.

Investors are pouring record-setting levels of capital into bike and scooter technology. We map out 30+ startups innovating in the bike and scooter space through shared networks, vehicle design, and charging infrastructure.

Additional economic growth, including from business dynamism and rising productivity growth, will also continue to create jobs. Many other new occupations that we cannot currently imagine will also emerge and may account for as much as 10 percent of jobs created by 2030, if history is a guide. Moreover, technology itself has historically been a net job creator. For example, the introduction of the personal computer in the 1970s and 1980s created millions of jobs not just for semiconductor makers, but also for software and app developers of all types, customer-service representatives, and information analysts.

The Warehouse est le premier entrepôt destiné aux startups pour créer la supply chain du futur. Créé par Cdiscount, ce lieu d’innovation propose un programme d’accompagnement de 6 mois, alliant à la fois du mentoring pour challenger la stratégie des startups, mais également des ateliers de codesign avec les utilisateurs experts de leur métier, afin de contextualiser les solutions logistiques des startups sélectionnées.