Prominent tech investor Bill Gurley captured headlines coming out of SXSW last week with his rather grim predictions of things to come for the startup economy – and unusual addition to what is generally a celebration of all the potential of what’s new and now...
When Sophia Amoruso’s first version of Nasty Gal launched in 2006, it was as her personal store on the eBay marketplace. That small, original venture developed a reputation for eclectic and edgy fashions combined with a young, visible and fashion-forward following. Fast forward nine years,...
“Uh-uh. No way. Cold cucumber mush for thirty-something bucks?” –Phoebe Buffay, “Friends,” The One With Five Steaks And An Eggplant Every year, hundreds of perfectly nice meals are ruined when it comes time to pay the bill. As it turns out, nothing alienates lifelong friends, convivial...
When Credit Karma came on the scene in 2007, it entered the startup marketplace with a fairly simply goal: help consumers better manage their financial lives by giving them truly free access to their credit reports. “We’ve been handing out free credit reports since 2008,”...
Slacktivism: The act of participating in obviously pointless activities as an expedient alternative to actually expending effort to fix a problem. Everyone with a Facebook page or a Twitter feed knows at least one “slacktivist” – that probably well intentioned soul who seems to have...
What do professional baseball, Google, political forecasting and retail all have in common? A love of big data. Whether that comes in the form of Billy Beane harnessing its power to build a better baseball team, Nate Silver taking all the fun out of the...
“What should I make for dinner?” It is a deceptively simple question. One that has a variety of answers – all of which are now much easier today, thanks to mobile devices, apps, data and the cloud. For instance, on one end of the spectrum,...
2014 will go down as the most lucrative year for venture capital since 2000, largely because of a greater emphasis on late-stage funding of tech firms that choose to stay private longer than their predecessors did during the dot-com bubble at the beginning of the last...
The problem with a financial crisis is that the climb out has been particularly arduous for consumers and retailers. Even though spending and wages have recovered (albeit slowly and at a lesser rate than many would like) spending continues to frustrate. Consumers may be returning...