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Startups

  • Travis Kalanick Sells Remaining Uber Shares, Leaving Board

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    1 min read

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    After selling more than $2B of his shares, Travis Kalanick has severed his final ties to Uber. The New York Times reports:

    Travis Kalanick, the founder and former chief executive of Uber, has stepped down from the company’s board of directors, severing his last tie with the company. 

    Mr. Kalanick, 43, started the Uber in 2009 with co-founder Garrett Camp, and grew it from a small start-up to a behemoth that defined the ride hailing industry. The company went public in May, and has since struggled on the public market. The board forced Mr. Kalanick to resign as chief executive in 2017 after a series of sexual harassment and privacy incidents.

    Talk about selling out. Kalanick’s reign of burning a seemingly endless supply of cash may have finally come to an end, but Uber continues to hemorrhage cash. Travis has been riding the IPO pony to cash out slowly (which, I should add, many others were not so lucky). A majority of his shares have been locked-up since the IPO, which is why he didn’t sell them en masse. There’s no ambiguity about this $2B conclusion, he’s done with Uber.

  • Duolingo Earns $100M in Annual Bookings, Raises $30M from Alphabet

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    1 min read

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    Duolingo’s Premium subscription offering, which launched in 2017, has contributed to a meteoric increase in annual bookings. It continues to invest more and more R&D into AI and machine learning to power its tutoring software and growth. Duolingo raised some serious money from Alphabet bringing the total valuation of the charming Pittsburgh startup, to roughly $9 billion:

    Popular language learning app Duolingo has raised $30 million in a series F round of funding from Alphabet’s investment arm CapitalG. […]

    Duolingo claims 30 million users are actively learning languages on its platform, and it has emerged as one of the most downloaded educational apps globally. Since its last funding round more than two years ago, it has more than doubled its employees from 95 to 200 and has opened additional offices in Seattle, New York, and Beijing. It also now claims annual bookings of $100 million after it launched its premium plan in 2017, a significant increase from the $33 million it drew in last year.

    (via VentureBeat)

  • Poolside.fm

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    2 min read

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    It’s pretty rare these sorts of websites exist anymore, but here we are in 2019 and poolside.fm has me completely captivated. In my opinion, the same advice given to athletes, goes for websites, apps and startups too:

    Do one thing, really well.

    Poolside.fm does one thing very well indeed. Emulating a very specific aesthetic. Observe:

    Player detail. I just love this. Reminds me of System 8.

    It just so happens to play the most wonderfully curated playlists this side of the internet. Come for the aesthetic, stay for the jams. Right? Poolside is a labor of love from Marty Bell (@marty). Marty also admins a VIP entrepreneurs chat room called Jacuzzi Club.

    Poolside consists of the classic trappings of a decent music site: a delicious summery mix of jams, dancey tunes, indie tracks, seasonal goodies, lo-fi mixes and rarities that your neighboring college radio station envies — I could easily spend days here myself. It has a fantastic nostalgia too (Majestic Casual anyone?). It’s a good place. In an age where algorithmically generated playlists tend to breed boring, repetitive (and all too frequently predictable) Spotify playlists and Twitter trends, Poolside fills the void with serendipitous sounds that I seemingly never grow tired of.

    I feel like this exactly what the music community needs right now. According to The Verge:

    That’s intentional. Poolside.FM has about 32,000 followers on Instagram, and Bell says that the site has 4,000 monthly listeners. He wants to grow that number this year and continue building up the community. Part of that is welcoming new listeners, but he also wants to encourage other artists and musicians to submit their tracks. It’s a collaborative process.

    Spectacular. Very encouraging.

    Visit Poolside.fm

  • Heuristics to Generate Startup Ideas

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    1 min read

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    Initially came across this fun list via Twitter:

    His actual post, is embedded in his Tweet, but you can visit the list here. But in particular I enjoyed #8:

    Turn open source projects in to SAAS businesses — Find open source projects that are very popular and turn these in to out of the box services for enterprises, e.g. PagerDuty is like Nagios.

    Great entrepreneurial advice, and easily serves as a fun jumping-off point for any viable hack-a-thon. Any hacker or eager founder can find some amazing open-source projects and inspiration on Github.

    My personal favorite startup adage, for any would-be-founder is, be the arms dealer.

  • Thoughts on Microsoft Acquiring Github

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    4 min read

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    So, this just happened. It’s official. Microsoft will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. Quite the price tag.

    I’ve used Github for years. I’m sure many of you have too. It’s really a remarkable place. Millions of users, all humming at their own pace, piecing code together. Hundreds of millions of unique repositories of codebases, open-source projects, communities, and amazing software.

    I’m a little concerned and sidewinded by the sheer magnitude of this story. Github has largely been hailed as the neutral library of the world’s code. Communities and enemies alike have been forged in fiery maelstroms of pull requests and pithy “+1” comments on issues. But, for the most part, Github has been a great product. Apart from the occasional server downtime or DDoS attack from China, it’s been great. And personally, the community has largely been life-changing for me. If it weren’t for the community, I probably wouldn’t be where am now.

    I can say with certainty, I’m a better developer because of Github.

    It’s important to note that Github has been the center of decentralized projects such as Bitcoin Core, or IPFS. Which may be problematic for many organizations realizing that their codebase is hosted online by none other than Microsoft now. I’m sure the irony is not lost on them either. The Hacker News discussion is pretty temperate so far. Very few are conflicted, and even fewer hate it. But, going forward, I believe Github will have an uphill battle regarding trust.

    So, what are we to make of the new proprietor? Will Microsoft make sweeping changes to how the product operates? How will repos change? Will repos become a signal for Microsoft to source talent on LinkedIn? I’m so curious to understand Satya Nadella’s motive for acquisition. Microsoft is so huge, and we’ve all seen the negative side of acquisitions before. You know, like LinkedIn.

    https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/1002879517751414784

    Ugh. Damnit. That’s the stuff of nightmares right there.

    From The Verge:

    Microsoft is the top contributor to the site, and has more than 1,000 employees actively pushing code to repositories on GitHub. Microsoft even hosts its own original Windows File Manager source code on GitHub. The service was last valued at $2 billion back in 2015, but it’s not clear exactly how much Microsoft has paid to acquire GitHub.

    So that makes sense. I had no idea Microsoft was such a huge contributor. At any rate, Microsoft has never been great at shipping their own creations. Hell, Microsoft never even developed DOS. They bought it. From that perspective, I’m less worried than say if Google or Facebook had acquired Github.

    What feels like eons ago in 2014 when Nadella joined Microsoft, John Gruber wrote:

    Satya Nadella needs to find Microsoft’s new “a computer on every desk and in every home running Microsoft software”. Here’s my stab at it: Microsoft services, sending data to and from every networked device in the world. The next ubiquity isn’t running on every device, it’s talking to every device.

    I thought this was noteworthy to dig up from the Daring Fireball archive. Namely because of the (very) timely news that Microsoft is now more valuable than Google. Sure, market cap fluctuates — regardless, Nadella is penning Microsoft’s new message, and it’s in permanent marker. It’s true that Microsoft in recent years has taken a backseat in services, but only because they’ve gobbled up the best talent in the world. Microsoft is and will continue to, play the long-game. This was a bold and genius move.

    I’m apprehensively optimistic about this. Like I said, trust is an uphill battle. Don’t disappoint us Microsoft.

    Further Reading:

  • Lobe

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    2 min read

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    Lobe, is a visual composer of sorts — for building, training, and exporting custom deep learning models. The interface is very Quartz Composer-esque. Check it out:

    If you’re in a hurry, watch from 6:12 for a walkthrough on how to create a project from scratch.

    Lobe is a start-up from Mike Matas, Markus Beissinger and Adam Menges. Matas, an ex-Apple and ex-Facebook Silicon Valley designer veteran — previously released published this demo called The Brain (see below), which was entirely built in Quartz Composer. A fucking awesome demo.

    No wonder Lobe looks like a Quartz composition. Keep in mind, this was published about one year ago:

    This is really really exciting stuff. Building and training deep learning models are simple in concept, but complex in reality. Lobe, may just be the first visual tool to bridge that divide.

    To quote John Gruber:

    Lobe is to CoreML what Illustrator was to PostScript — a profoundly powerful tool that exposes the underlying technology to non-experts through an intuitive visual interface.

    Gruber’s analogy is probably the best, and he’s right. When Desktop Publishing Software exploded in popularity the late 80’s and late 90’s, everything changed. Productivity skyrocketed, and progress in tooling, production and creative software just took of and to be honest, it never really cooled down. We’re still in living in that same epoch, but having different conversations about the same problems.

    Lobe truly exposes a whole new world of problem-solving to non-experts and that will lead to some really exciting tools. Hats off to everyone at Lobe. Remarkable work.