Crossbar Incorporated is a Bay-area consumer electronics company working to usher in a new generation of non-volatile memory through "Resistive RAM" (RRAM) tech. They'll get some help in their goals through $25M in Series C funding, joined by SAIF Partners, Artiman Ventures, KPCB, Northern Light Venture Capital as well as my alma mater, the University of Michigan. Founder Wei Lu previously worked in the Electrical Engineering department at the University of Michigan.
ClearStory Data, another Bay-area startup, wants to make it simple for business users to gather data from dispersed data sets across internal sources, corporate sources, Hadoop, and the Web. They have received $21M in Series B funding, in a round led by DAG Ventures and heavyweights Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and KPCB.
Kitchensurfing, a startup based in Brooklyn, is seeking to make finding a private chef as easy as booking a hotel room online. They received $15M in Series B funding, in a round led by Tiger Global Management and joined by Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital, and may raise their valuation to approximately $40M.
Personal Blogs
Joel Gascoigne, founder of Buffer, a San Francisco startup that helps you share across all social media, explains how his co-founder and himself structured themselves when the time came to use labels such as CEO and COO.
In the first week of December we were in Thailand for our second company retreat. It was during our time there that Leo and I had a lot of lengthy walking meetings around Pattaya about the structure of our roles. We talked a lot. I couldn’t think of a more perfect setting for us to figure these things out. We’re both optimistic people and despite the tough conversations we knew we’d come to a conclusion about how things should work. We had gratitude for how lucky we were to be in Thailand and had built a company to a stage where this problem had arisen.
Customer acquisition was hard. Lyft and Uber are viral online-to-offline businesses, because many of the times you call a ride you take it with others (who subsequently think it’s an incredible experience and download the app). Exec Errands was a not nearly as viral (and cleaning not at all), because you could use those services without ever telling anyone.
In an old post, but one that bears mentioning, Ben Milne, founder of payment network Dwolla, advises to “solve problems that piss you off.”
Q. “How much does this really piss me off?”
A. Tons. Shit, I hate this. I see it everywhere. I sign up for new services hoping it does it differently, and it never does.
Something I hope you can take away from this:
YOU CAN’T SOLVE THE PROBLEM WHILE YOU ARE CONTRIBUTING TO IT.
So, I know it bugs me to no end, and I know I can’t let it go. It’s not a personal issue, and the more I think about the time we all lose to this junk, the more it bothers me. This may not be true for others, but for me, if a problem:
1. Doesn’t get me out of bed
2. Make me lose sleep
3. Drive me to the point of getting angry when I see strangers doing it
4. Make me swear constantly about how obnoxious it is that I’m doing it
5. Isn’t systemic in society (a lot of people deal with it)
Then I shouldn’t solve it!
