A famous investor published notes today concerning its startup investments, detailing where they excelled and where they struggled. To understand why we care about this particular investor’s results, a little context helps.The investor in question is Japanese telecom giant and startup benefactor SoftBank, which reported its fiscal year results this More

Ashwin Ramasamy Contributor Ashwin Ramasamy is the co-founder of PipeCandy, an online merchant graph company that discovers and analyzes business and consumer perception metrics about D2C brands and e-commerce companies. More posts by this contributor D2C companies deliver customer delight and simplicity The different playbooks of D2C brands E-commerce is taking off faster than ever. In More

By March 16, founder Janine Yancey was tired of playing the waiting game. After watching the stock market take yet another unprecedented nosedive due to coronavirus, she called up a potential investor.“If this isn’t going to happen, let’s call it now,” Yancey said, referring to the close of her Series More

“In general, the consumer has proven to be more resilient than I would have thought,” said Kirsten Green, founder of Forerunner Ventures, which has investments in breakout D2C stars like Glossier, Hims and Bonobos.She joined us for an Extra Crunch Live conversation to help us better understand buying habits in More

When you think of voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri, the words “emotional” and “expressive” probably don’t come to mind. Instead, there’s that recognizably flat and polite voice, devoid of all affect — which is fine for an assistant, but isn’t going to work if you want to More

When Zach Sims first started pitching his coding startup, Codecademy, he framed it to investors as a corporate tutoring company. That was intentional, despite the fact that edtech is a $5 trillion business.“It was much easier for investors to understand instead of an education company,” he said, noting that the More