In 2011, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharcyzk faced a difficult decision. The founders of AirBnB had spent the last four years building their business. After bootstrapping by selling election-themed breakfast cereal, they had won a place in Silicon Valley’s prestigious Y Combinator and had gradually settled on the company’s product, its service, and its standard. AirBnB had recently...
Hahna Alexander found an opportunity. She discovered it while she was at college and wanted to make walking on campus at night safer. By embedding a set of gears in the sole of a shoe, she was able to turn a downward step into rotational movement. That movement powered a small generator in the heel and made the shoes light up. It didn’t take long before Alexander realized that the potential of...
When a “Seattle-based Internet bookseller” had its IPO on May 15, 1997, the New York Times described Amazon’s $18 share price, above the expected range of $14 to $16, as a “sign of healthy demand.” The share price valued the company at $429 million. The next day, as trading began on Nasdaq, the demand was more than healthy. It looked positively fighting fit. The share price reached as high as $30...
There used to be a time when entrepreneurs would dream of building million-dollar businesses. They’d wire together some gear that they picked up in Radio Shack and hope that one day it would all work well enough to give them seven figures and a large house. For techpreneurs today, that amount is barely worth getting out of bed for, and in Silicon Valley a million bucks won’t even pay for a...
Call it courage. Or call it blind obstinacy. But in June 2017, Google surprised the technology world by releasing an update to Google Glass. It was the first upgrade since 2014, and the addition of Bluetooth now allows the device’s users to operate their tiny wearable computers with a mouse and a keyboard. That broadening of Glass’s features is likely to have surprised people less than the news...
For many entrepreneurs, a new business starts with a trip to the bank. They either present their business plan to the loan manager at their local branch and hope for a line of credit or they head to the Bank of Mom and Dad to ask for an advance on their inheritance. But banks these days are holding onto their cash and not all parents are able to write a check to finance all of their children’s...
When Facebook offered Jan Koum $19 billion for WhatsApp, including $3 billion for the company’s founders and staff, observers might have wondered what Mark Zuckerberg was thinking. The rival messaging app was lean and simple where Facebook was large and complex. Facebook at the time was a social media application but it was also a photo-sharing application, an advertising channel, a data...
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