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Yellow , the accelerator program launched by Snap in 2018, has selected ten companies to join its latest cohort. The new batch of startups coming from across the U.S. and international cities like London, Mexico City, Seoul and Vilnius are building professional social networks for black professionals and blue collar workers, fashion labels, educational tools in augmented reality, kids entertainment, and an interactive entertainment production company.
BYD Motors Inc., a downtown-based electric vehicle maker, delivered to Anaheim the first two electric buses of a previously announced 40-bus order, BYD announced Feb. 24.
Every year, a personal Upfront Summit highlight is getting to sit down with experts in a field I care about. Sometimes that’s venture capital generally (like last year’s conversation with Reid Hoffman ) and sometimes it’s in a space where I’ve invested (like mobility and city innovation with Bird’s Travis VanderZanden , one of our portfolio founders.
Our challenge is getting more difficult. How many of us have “hired” independent contractors over the years, a bit worried over the gray area between employee and contractor as defined by the IRS? Or separately the State of California? I’ve experienced the results of a wrong decision, and the IRS and state agencies are not forgiving in their pursuit of penalties, interest and most damaging, assessing a company with the on both employer and employee taxes when reclassifying the person as an emp
Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.
San Diego-based Seqster , which develops software used f[link] health data management, said today that it has received an investment from Takeda Pharmaceuticals. Size of the investment was not announced. According to Seqster, it will use the new funding to accelerate adoption of its technology, which is used for managing clinical trials and patient engagement.
As a mentor to entrepreneurs, I tend to see many of the same obstacles appearing in every new startup, and since I don’t want to appear to be a downer , I’m not sure how to properly warn people ahead of time to be on the alert for these challenges. In fact, since most entrepreneurs are eternal optimists anyway, they would never believe any negative scenarios could happen to them.
Hyundai Motor Group said it will jointly develop an electric vehicle platform with Los Angeles-based startup Canoo, the latest startup tapped by the automaker as part of an $87 billion push to invest in electrification and other future technologies. The electric vehicle platform will be based on Canoo’s proprietary skateboard design, according to the agreement that was announced Tuesday.
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Hyundai Motor Group said it will jointly develop an electric vehicle platform with Los Angeles-based startup Canoo, the latest startup tapped by the automaker as part of an $87 billion push to invest in electrification and other future technologies. The electric vehicle platform will be based on Canoo’s proprietary skateboard design, according to the agreement that was announced Tuesday.
Steve Isakowitz is president and chief executive of Aerospace Corp., the nation’s only federally funded research and development center focused on aerospace.
Scripps Research is charting new territory with its Calibr division, a drug discovery and drug development group within the research institute that is advancing its own experimental treatments. This week Calibr announced it had received the agency’s go-ahead to move a CAR-T cell therapy it has been evaluating for the treatment of certain blood cancers, including relapsed/refractory B-cell malignancies such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma and chronic lymphocytic leukemia, into human testing.
How it happens. When you seek professional investors, whether organized angels or venture capitalists, one of the early questions you are asked is “How have you financed the business so far?” Investors love to see entrepreneurs who have used their own money to ignite their businesses. But often, entrepreneurs turn to others for initial capital. Describing that capital using the phrase “friends, family and fools,” or “FFF,” has become as common as to be trite.
Amazon is in a major expansion in Santa Barbara, with plans to hire as many as 300 people in a new, three story downtown location, all working as part of the Amazon Alexa team. Amazon's new space, at 1001 State Street, is expected to draw workers from UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and other local universities, as well as from the region's existing supply of technology companies.
There is an old saying that good lawyers run away from risk, while good businessmen run towards risk. Entrepreneurs see “no risk” as meaning “no reward.” In reality, all risks are not the same. Many risks can be managed or calculated to improve growth or provide a competitive edge, while others, like skipping quality checks to save money, are recipes for failure.
During the days when Snapchat’s popularity was booming, investors thought the company would become the anchor for a new Los Angeles technology scene. Snapchat, they hoped, would spin-off entrepreneurs and angel investors who would reinvest in the local ecosystem and create new companies that would in turn foster more wealth, establishing LA as a hub for tech talent and venture dollars on par with New York and Boston.
Pfizer and Merck are each cutting ties with a smaller clinical-stage biotech after experimental drugs being developed under separate alliances fell short in human testing. Pfizer (NYSE: PFE ) is walking away from a partnership with GlycoMimetics (NASDAQ: GLYC ) a Rockville, MD-based company developing drugs for diseases where carbohydrates play a role.
By Harley Kaufman, guest author. Note from Dave: Harley is an old friend and avid reader of BERKONOMICS. With a background in management and technology, he gives us something to think about regarding today’s top-of-news subject. Addressing the issue to small and medium businesses. The CoronaVirus (Covid19) could potentially cause some real disruptions in the US generally and, specifically, to the small and medium sized businesses that probably make up the bulk of your readership.
Irvine-based Ingram Micro , the big computer and technology distributor and provider of technology and supply chain services, said that its strategic business unit, Ingram micro Commerce & Lifecycle Services , is seeing record growth of its Canadian e-commerce business. The company said it saw an 87 percent increase in apparel/footwear orders and a 25 percent increase in consumer electronics in Canada in 2019.
Selling services has always been about relationships, but the challenges of building relationships with services clients have exploded. Customers today extrapolate their relationships not only from personal contact, but from every aspect of their interface with your company, including web site and social media interactions, access to peer reviews, as well as the actual services experience.
Another on-demand transport app is making a move into payments to expand the existing relationship with its customers (and subsequent margins that it makes from serving them). Bird today announced the launch of Bird Pay, a service that will let people use its app to purchase items from local participating businesses alongside renting scooters. The service is being tested first in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, the company said.
As digital media continues to evolve, and as entertainment plays an increasingly crucial role in the category, Silicon Beach has developed into an essential location for big and ambitious companies.
A migraine drug that Lundbeck added to its pipeline via its nearly $2 billion acquisition of Alder BioPharmaceuticals won FDA approval on Friday. The drug, eptinezumab (Vyepti), is part of a new class of antibody therapies developed to prevent migraine attacks before they start. These drugs block calcitonin gene-relate peptide (CGRP), a protein associated with the onset of migraine pain.
Is the guarantee still required today? More than ever, the banks and lenders today require personal guarantees from entrepreneurs, and even from CEO’s of angel or some VC funded businesses. Starting and running a small or growing business can be a challenge to the most confident and optimistic entrepreneur. And the process of borrowing money or financing asset purchases can be an eye-opener for those who are not used to today’s lender and seller aversion to grant easy credit.
Santa Monica-based GumGum , which develops artificial intelligence software for the advertising and media market, has raised $22M more in a funding round, the company said on Thursday. According to the firm, the new $22M funding came from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital, NewView Capital, and Upfront Ventures. All three of those investors are existing investors in the company.
Every new venture that survives the first five years starts to drift away from their entrepreneurial thinking, and assumes they have achieved the path to longevity. In fact, even within Fortune 100 companies, almost 90 percent have encountered growth stalls or flirted with failure, or worse, in the last 50 years. No company can afford to lose the agility, flexibility, and innovation of a startup.
Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox. Busy week for SpaceX – across funding, space tourism, and next-gen spacecraft. There’s also a space station resupply mission coming up that it’s getting ready for, and signs ( this time literally ) continue to suggest that its first human spaceflight mission is imminent.
While Silicon Valley remains home for many technology industry heavyweights, Los Angeles is rapidly gaining ground as a hub for both startups and established firms.
Where’s the threat? It is hard to separate this kind of advice from economic lessons in running a business, when office politics can threaten a business in ways that are subtle, but sometimes just as devastating as economic shocks or continuing poor management. Examining the petri dish. Most any office with more than one level of management (more than ten employees) can become a Petri dish for office politics.
Los Angeles-based ringDNA , the venture-backed startup which is developing artificial intelligence tools to help sales teams, says it has acquired a popular podcast focused on sales. According to the company, it has acquired the sales podcast "Accelerate!", which is run by Andy Paul, and will appoint Paul as its new Head of Revenue Performance Evangelism.
Many of the entrepreneurs I advise or invest with spend considerable time on the Internet, keeping up with technology, customers, and competitors, but very few feel the need for an early personal presence. In fact, some totally avoid it, assuming their product or solution will speak for itself later. They don’t realize that you need to build positives early, to offset any negatives later.
Riot Ventures , the Los Angeles-based, early-stage and deep technology investment firm is going out to market to raise a $75 million second fund to finance the development of startups in LA and beyond, according to fundraising documents viewed by TechCrunch. The firm has largely flown under the radar, but it has been investing in startups applying innovations in automation, artificial intelligence, computer vision, computational biology, material sciences and robotics to industrial products and
Parsons Corp., the multibillion-dollar engineering and infrastructure firm, is opening a new facility in L.A. County to pursue the rapidly expanding space satellite business.
Thursday, March 5, 2020 -- SCALE is North America's leading open source community conference. Held annually in the greater Los Angeles area the conference draws over 3500 attendees from around the globe.
It is human nature to start in a new position with enthusiasm, lofty goals, new ideas, and a heightened awareness of those around us and their ideas for the business. After time in our job positions. And it is an unfortunate truism that most of us become a bit stale in our jobs after some time, even if we are most successful at it and appreciated by all who work for or with us.
In the latest move by a tech billionaire into the neighborhood, Jeff Bezos , the founder of Amazon , has paid a record $165M for a mansion in Beverly Hills. The mansion had previously been owned by David Geffen, who had owned the property since 1990. It's unclear how much the move will benefit Southern California's technology industry, as many other tech moguls with property in Beverly Hills have not necessarily gotten involved with the growing technology industry here despite having residences
In this world of constant change, new technologies, and a thousand cultures, it’s evident and somehow comforting to me that the basic rules for business prosperity really haven’t changed in the last hundred years. Business success is still more about the people than the technology or idea involved. As an angel investor and a mentor to entrepreneurs I still see this every day.
David Renteln, the Los Angeles-based co-founder of Soylent and the co-founder and chief executive of new nicotine gum manufacturer Lucy Goods , thinks there should be a better-tasting, less-medicinal offering for people looking to quit smoking. That’s why he founded Lucy Goods, and that’s why investors, including RRE Ventures, Vice Ventures and FundRX joined previous investors YCombinator and Greycroft in backing the company with $10 million in new funding. “We reformulated nic
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