Author: Michael V. Copeland

You know the story. Plucky band of adventurers make off with the dragon’s loot, only to suffer some tragic ending because they neglected to take seriously some key bit of information. Usually it falls along the lines of said-dragon treasure being cursed, or so heavy it sinks the boat, or originally belonged to a foul-tempered Orc king now out for blood. The point is, things end badly. There was no way Pouch cofounder Vikram Simha was letting any of that happen.

Andiamo aims to bring 3-D scanned and printed orthotics to families and children in the UK—and soon, the world. What the London-based startup, through 3-D scanning and printing, has the potential to solve for is what every great new technology brings to the party: a better, faster, and cheaper approach.

How open source can be a resource for startups.

First Round Capital’s Hayley Barna and Boldstart’s Ed Sim look back on the startup landscape in 2017, and toward the trends powering the year ahead.

During a recent fireside chat at the AWS Loft in San Francisco, Greylock Partners’ Josh Elman Elman shared with the crowd of founders and entrepreneurs that he had just wrapped up a recent investment in a startup. While he declined to name the company just yet, he did stress that the dynamics of that deal applied equally to all of his investments. One aspect in particular that Elman stressed is how he and the founders built a relationship over time. Elman didn’t invest the first time he met these folks, but he kept tracking the team, and just as importantly they kept Elman in the loop.

Josh Elman, a consumer specialist at venture capital firm Greylock Partners, couldn’t have been blunter about “acquihiring,” the practice of big companies paying big bucks for startups to hire teams for their expertise. “There was this funny little period time where that seemed like it was a thing,” Elman recently told a crowd of startup entrepreneurs at the AWS Loft in San Francisco. “I think that’s gone.”

That doesn’t mean big companies aren’t buying startups, Elman continued. In fact, it turns out that acquihiring didn’t translate to getting better talent than just hiring—it’s just more expensive.

Not every startup program is a fit for every startup (or every funding round). Instead, think about what you really need—maybe it’s customers, mentors, or funding—and what you don’t.

Before pitching yourself as a machine learning startup, you better be one, says Matt Hartman of Betaworks.

At Startup Day in New York City, COO—and former head of engineering—Dustin Lucien looked back on the initial years of Betterment and the startup’s technical, operational, and cultural hits and misses.