Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Switching a bit, there’s a tremendous amount of innovation that you have to probably keep your eye on. The pace of startups has picked up tremendously. The number of companies that got seed-funded in 2013 was about 70,000. Since then, now there are 700,000 seed funds. These vary. Some are pre-seed, seed, post-seed,

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12 Investors Discuss Unicorn Mania via the Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum

Right now there is a lot of capital in the startup investment system. Investors managing a good amount of money have to think of an investment thesis where they can really get returns. One of the observations I’ve had is that if everybody is chasing Unicorns, it’s not going to work, because there aren’t that

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Catching Up On Readings: African Tech Startup Hubs

This report from GSM Associates looks at the growth in tech startup hubs in Africa. In the last five years, increased smartphone adoption, lower internet costs, and the immense size of the African market has drawn several high-profile investors and tech giants into Africa. In 2017, venture capital funding reached $560 million, a 53% year-on-year growth. For this

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is your investment thesis around online education right now? Jason Stoffer: I don’t really do education either online or offline. The biggest area of opportunity in education is post-college. What you see is an environment where when I graduated college in 1999, it was very easy to get a job. You had

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There’s an interesting question that comes up in that context. About a couple of years ago, Xerox PARC did several days of brainstorming with about 44 Fortune 500 Chief Innovation Officers. This point of hackathons versus business cases of innovative ideas came up. I did a half-day session with this group. One of

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Thought Leaders in Big Data: Periscope CEO, Harry Glaser (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What do you see around your space that are open problems? Harry Glaser: One of the fun things about our space is that every problem is an open problem. One of the biggest open problems that we see that we are working hard to solve is, there is so much going on and

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jason Stoffer of Maveron (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s switch topics a little bit to look at some other categories that you tend to invest in. You like to invest in education it seems – online education. I saw that you’ve invested in Course Hero. We’ve done a big story on Andrew. I love what Course Hero is doing. Huge numbers

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Steven Aldrich, Chief Product Officer of GoDaddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: This workflow that you described are ideas that are coming from customers and have been picked up and identified by the product organization. Do you have any kind of internal innovation or intrapreneurship program that nurtures grassroots intrapreneurship within the organization? Steven Aldrich: We don’t have a separate team. We have a framework

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