From a new profile in Fast Company, penned, with much courage, by "veteran biz journo" Lydia Dishman: "As a former high school class president, captain of the soccer team, camp counselor, and consistent holder of the Girl Scout’s coveted best cookie seller designation, Morin’s a natural born leader."
Lucas Duplan dropped out of Stanford, brought a bunch of his buddies with him, and got to work on something daunting: creating an app that lets you pay for things with your phone. This is daunting because so many other things let you do it. Despite this, and the fact that his app is a total mystery, powerful VCs just handed him $25 million.
Step 1: hand out these free t-shirts on behalf of your enterprise software company.
"The first time I had sex I was seventeen" is not the way you'd expect a blog post titled "Growing Up As a Startup Founder" to begin, and yet, here we are. Let this analogy flow over you like a large, warm wave.
OK, we've got a problem: we need to figure out what "young people" think is "cool" so that we can "be like Snapchat." But we're not Snapchat yet, so we can't afford to organize an actual focus group. Solution: get high school kids to work for free and call it a "teen advisory board." By God, we've done it again.
Brit Morin profits, literally, from the Donald Rumsfeld school of reality: repeat something often enough and it will be so. Someone once called her the "Martha Stewart of Silicon Valley," and the label's been repeated in almost every article ever written about her, iota of talent not withstanding. Today, it pays off.
A source familiar with Snapchat's recent round of funding said that the teen sensation's two twenty-something cofounders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, each received $10 million in secondary funding as individual shareholders. According to the source, that combined $20 million was on top of the $60 million Series B the company raised at an $800 million pre-money valuation.
Greek tech investor and self-described filthy senior citizen George Polis is angry about dividends! But first, he'd like to tell you, and all Yahoo present shareholders, that he's attracted to the company's CEO. Yep, this was just as gross to listen to as we thought it'd be.
Earlier today an anonymous founder created a Tumblr called My Startup Has 30 Days to Live, chronicling the advice from investors that left him unable to make payroll. How does a once profitable and bootstrapped company morph into the startup walking dead? By following the contemporary formula for startup riches: boosterish article in the tech press, join a top accelerator, give good deck on Demo Day, cash the VCs checks, crush it . . . you're the next Dropbox.
Yesterday, Bloomberg provided the world with one of the first peeks behind design bauble repository Fab's billion dollar curtains. It looked like, for the people quoted, an occasionally miserable place to work? Now Fab's co-founder has taken to his blog to set things right: he's not a scary boss, just a joker!
Let's disrupt modesty: Drew Houston, who created the widely popular cloud-syncing service Dropbox, just shared a little gem from his past. Do you remember the day you became a tech millionaire? He sure does—and here's the unimpeachable proof!
