Startup

Laura Modi was sitting in a meeting when Sarah Hardy, her co-founder at the infant formula startup Bobbie , arrived with alarming news. "Very shocked, she says to me, 'The FDA is at the warehouse!'" recalls Modi. It was May 2019: T wo weeks after the launch of Bobbie's pilot . A team of nurses, lactation specialists, and doulas were traversing San Francisco, hand-delivering product to the company's earliest adopters. Bobbie's advisers had warned Modi that at some point they'd be inspected. But she never thought it would come so soon, before the fledgling business had even cracked its shell. At the warehouse, Modi and Hardy encountered two uniformed U.S. Food and Drug Administration agents, armed with clipboards, who had been alerted to Bobbie's launch by early press. The agents reviewed the contents of a box. The labeling, they informed the founders, did not comply with FDA requirements. "Talk about my heart dropping in my stomach," says Modi. To keep Bobbie … [Read more...] about How Infant Formula Startup Bobbie Survived an FDA Crackdown and Recall at Launch

Customers will have to enter the details afresh for each transaction from July 1 Starting July 1, payment aggregators and gateways and merchants onboarded by them will not be allowed to store credit and debit card data of customers on their platforms, as directed by the Reserve Bank of India. With a little over a month left, merchants are worried that an alternative system may not be ready in time. Payment aggregators, payment gateways and merchants can store card credentials of customers in their databases only until June 30, a deadline that has already been extended twice, most recently by six months on December 23. In the absence of an alternative mechanism, customers using their credit or debit cards from July 1 will have to enter the details afresh for each transaction, including the 16-digit card number, expiry date and card verification value (CVV). Payment companies and card networks Visa, Mastercard and RuPay are working to implement the alternative – Card on File … [Read more...] about Payment disruption fears linger as deadline nears for merchants to delete customer card data

One of the questions I'm most often asked by CEOs is how to hire sales people. I've written a lot about recruiting and hiring at startups including my controversial post on whom not to hire and my rapid response to the flame war . I've also written extensively on sales and on which sales execs to hire and how to think about the different kinds of sales leaders . One of the questions I used to ask in any recruiting meeting for a senior hire or even a junior sales rep is as follows: "When you run sales campaigns do you prefer to A. Call high, and get passed down or; Of course there's no "right" answer but I'd like to persuade you that "calling high" will help you greatly shorten sales cycles and help you avoid wasting a lot of time on sales efforts that are not likely to close in the first place. If you don't have a good sales methodology already in place in your organization you might try reading that last link. … [Read more...] about How to Shorten Your Sales Cycle and Avoid Wasting Time

As the cost of cybercrime balloons in the U.S., a number of startups have emerged to help small businesses detect fraud before it happens. Stripe , the San Francisco payments processor recently valued at $5 billion, is now offering its own cybersecurity program to small-business customers. On Wednesday, the company announced a suite of new tools to help startups detect and prevent fraudulent transactions. Dubbed "Radar," the new offering uses machine learning to examine the hundreds of thousands of businesses processing transactions on Stripe every second. By looking at purchasing patterns--and better spotting irregularities--the new tools will help bolster defenses and curb fraud, the company claims. Stripe also says it receives signals from its financial partners, including credit card companies, to determine when a transaction seems suspect. "We've been thinking about this problem for a long time," says John Collison, Stripe's co-founder and president. "We have this … [Read more...] about How Stripe Aims to Help Small Businesses Combat Cybercrime

You probably already know that in terms of available venture capital , one city leads all the rest, and it's not even close. San Francisco , predictably, has the largest VC ecosystem of any metropolitan area in America, according to a report released this week from VC funding data firm Pitchbook. What perhaps is surprising, given the progress and growth of other startup ecosystems, is the size of the gap: San Francisco startups have raised $117.6 billion since 2006--around three times as much as those in New York ($43.6 billion) and Silicon Valley's own San Jose ($35.5 billion). That's not to say things are trending in the right direction for the city. San Francisco was home to an increasing number of VC deals each year from 2010 to 2014. That number dropped from around 1,900 deals in 2014 to 1,700 last year--and only 656 in the first six months of 2016. Also noteworthy is the trend in San Francisco's notoriously high rent rates. From July 2015 through July of … [Read more...] about San Francisco Secures More VC Funding Than Any Other U.S. City, and It Isn’t Even Close

Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Differentiation is one of the most powerful marketing concepts you need in your arsenal in order to successfully take a startup project from idea to exit. Competing with big, established brands directly is not a smart strategic move. Obviously, large corporations have more resources at their disposal than early-stage startups. Moreover, they benefit from economies of scale - thanks to mass production and division of labor they are (usually) highly cost-effective in their production process, which means as a startup you would have a hard time competing on the basis of price alone. This is where differentiation comes in - you can win market share not by directly out-competing the established brands, but by innovation that allows you to disrupt the market. This is why innovation is one of the key variables determining the value of a startup project. Your value offering needs to be sufficiently different than the … [Read more...] about Beat Your Competitors By Turning Their Offering Into A Relativity Trap

Sebastian Partogi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta   ● Thu, December 3, 2020 2020-12-03 17:41 533 d66dcbf21949a93b498053ceec3c4812 1 Science & Tech Tokopedia,Indonesian-economy,foreign-direct-investment,e-commerce Free You might have heard the bad news already: Indonesia’s economy has just entered its first recession since the 1998 Asian financial crisis, bringing two decades of economic expansion to an end as the coronavirus pandemic has caused a sharp economic slowdown, throwing millions into poverty and out of jobs. Economically speaking, a recession is defined as contractions in two consecutive quarters, causing a significant decline in economic activity to spread across the economy, resulting in fewer jobs, people earning and spending less, as well as businesses grinding their expansions to a halt or even ceasing their operations altogether. As a result of the pandemic, the Indonesian economy shrank 3.49 percent in the third quarter after contracting … [Read more...] about Global firms remain upbeat about Indonesia’s digital economy