Bird is the fastest startup ever to reach a $1 billion valuation

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Electric scooter startup Bird is the fastest company to reach a valuation of $1 billion.

Bird, one of many scooter startups currently sweeping the US, was last valued at $400 million after closing $100 million in series B funding in early March. In late May, Bird was reported to be raising $150 million in series C funding led by Sequoia Capital, at a $1 billion valuation.

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Steve Blank: The unexpected reason why people start their own companies

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A controversial study suggests that people become entrepreneurs because they realize they’re worth more than their resumes.

If you asked me why I gravitated to startups rather than work in a large company I would have answered at various times: “I want to be my own boss,” “I love risk,” “I want flexible work hours,” “I want to work on tough problems that matter,” “I have a vision and want to see it through,” “I saw a better opportunity and grabbed it. …”

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Here’s how old you should be when you start a company, according to science. (It’s not what you think)

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The National Bureau of Economic Research used Census data to find the average age of super-successful founders.

Company founders can be as young as in their teens or as old as in their 80s. But is there an ideal age you should be when you start a company? It turns out there is, and it’s older than you may think.

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Over half of millennials say they’d love to start their own company

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Around 49% of millennials said they plan to start their own company within the next three years, while 62% of them reported having their ideal company “that they would love to start,” found America’s SBDC Network and the Center for Generational Kinetics in a study. The researchers considered a small business “an independently owned and operated company that employs fewer than 500 people.”

Those were just two findings, but there were many others across generations.

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The Swasthya Slate – an affordable diagnostic machine that could disrupt health care

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Kahol built a prototype of a device called the Swasthya Slate (which translates to “Health Tablet”).

Kanav Kahol was a member of Arizona State University’s department of biomedical informatics. He became frustrated at the lack of interest by the medical establishment in reducing the costs of diagnostic testing, and seeing almost no chance of getting the necessary research grants he returned home to New Delhi in 2011Kahol had noted that, despite the similarities between most medical devices in their computer displays and circuits, their packaging made them unduly complex and difficult for anyone but highly skilled practitioners to use. And they were incredibly expensive — costing tens of thousands of dollars each.

 

 

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Why managing cashflow is critical for the survival of your startup

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Managing cashflow and burn rate is more critical to your business success than having the right idea and the right product.

A basic survival metric for every startup is cashflow. Investors check your burn rate to assess your efficiency, and project your remaining runway before you run out of money and into a brick wall. Don’t wait until you are almost out of cash before managing every dollar spent, or looking for the next refueling from investors. Desperate entrepreneurs lose their leverage and die young.

 

 

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Why startups fail

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Many startups build things people don’t want with the irrational hope that they’ll convince them otherwise.

When a startup shuts its doors, it is customary to write an essay that tells the rest of the community what went wrong, called a failure post-mortem. It’s estimated that nine out of 10 startups fail, which is why the technique has become so common as to be a Silicon Valley cliché.

 

 

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Why is lab-grown beef better than ranchers raising cows?

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If they can grow muscle, can they make meat?

Modern Meadow is a startup based in Brooklyn, New York. They are aiming to commercialize leather and meat products that are not made from slaughtered animals but brewed in cell-culture vats. If it works, and if the market embraces the resulting products, it would lead to vast savings in water, land, and energy use associated with livestock production.

 

 

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