According to data from our friends at Crunchbase, there were 354 acquisitions of New York companies in 2017, up from 238 in 2016. Today, I shine a spotlight on 13 of these notable transactions involving NYC startups that were acquired in during 2017. I have included the acquiree, the acquirer, transaction amount (when available), as […]
Tony Hsieh
Meetup Acquired by WeWork
According to a recent Crunchbase post, Meetup, the NYC-based events platform, founded in 2002 by Brendan McGovern, Matt Meeker, Peter Kamali, and Scott Heiferman has been acquired by coworking behemoth WeWork. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. This marks a continuation of WeWork’s acquisition spree. Last month, the company announced its acquisition of coding academy, Flatiron School. Prior to […]
Why All Entrepreneurs Can Benefit From Learning Code
“Pre-dodgeball I went through 3-4 years thinking I was going to meet some magical engineer who would build all the stuff I was thinking about. I’m still a really sh***y programmer…but I know enough to hack a prototype together.” –Dennis Crowley, Foursquare In a world where people spend more than 20 hours per week on […]
Great Startups Practice Persuasion without Pushing
Successful entrepreneurs like Tony Hsieh of Zappos and Casey Sheahan of Patagonia, have long since realized that influence is no longer something that you do to someone to get what you want, but requires listening and relationship building to do what they want, with a win-win outcome. We now live in a world where even […]
The Unspoken Heroes of Startups: Brand Personality
Recently, I wrote an article about why branding is one of the underrated heroes of startups. This week’s article is about the importance of having a personality behind that brand. I view brand personality the same way I view human personality. If your startup is devoid of any human emotion or lacks a sense of […]
How Startup Founders Set the Right Company Culture
Many investors will assert that company culture trumps strategy every time in predicting the long-term success of a new startup. Obviously both are important, so it behooves every entrepreneur to start early in setting the right tone for his own company, and every new team member should be gauging both of these relative to their […]
Branding: The Unspoken Hero of Startups
Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures is probably the only VC in the Valley who understands the importance of branding.. As a long-time marketing and branding consultant for startups, I am continually shocked at the reckless disregard that tech startups have for these 2 important principles. Unless you have a truly defensible product, all startups have competitors who […]
Meetup Surpasses 100,000,000 RSVPs…and Climbing Fast
They boast over 13 million members in 196 countries. There are 126,000+ meetup groups, well over a quarter of a million monthly meetups and last week Meetup announced that they had surpassed over 100 million RSVPs. Scott Heiferman started Meetup in the aftermath of 9/11. He observed random people coming together as a result […]