Instacart App Instacart founder Apoorva Mehta believes he can build an empire of Amazon-scale by helping people shop for groceries from their homes. While this may sound like a stretch, it mirrors Amazon in the 90s; books were Amazon’s starting point, on which a behemoth was built. Likewise, Instacart has big plans. Yes, countless companies have tried to […]

Recently, Paul Graham came out with a great (and comprehensive) post on how to raise money. Of the many great “rules,” the ones I find most important (and surprisingly often neglected) are: Get warm intros to investors; do not cold email them. Worse is the cold LinkedIn message Talk to your investors in parallel for […]

It wasn’t Nasty Gal CEO Sophia Amoruso’s fancy degree, tailored business suit, or five years of investment banking background that grew her e-commerce venture into a $128 million company, which has been courted by major potential buyers as of late. In fact, she had none of those things at first. She launched her business as […]

Recently while attending a session at Lowenstein LLP for the inauguration of the 2013 First Growth Venture Network, I had the pleasure to speak with and listen to some of NY and the Valley’s top investors.  Some of this advice comes from them, and some from personal experience. You quit your job, labored months building a […]

While this list is definitely not exhaustive, I wanted to briefly shed some light on a couple of the reasons why startups should be thinking about insurance, regardless of where they are in their life cycle. 1. To strike a balance “Risk-averse” is probably the last phrase anyone would use to describe the startup community. […]

Despite the Ticketmasters and Eventbrites of the world, YPlan has emerged over the past nine months as an important player in the events industry. The startup, which offers users an easy way to buy tickets last-minute, seems to have done quite well for itself; it claims to run on 15% of all iPhones in London […]