Category: Startup

Joshua Builder, Rent the Runway CTO, shares insights into the technology system and tools that organizes and dispatches more than 100k items every day.

Learn how Houtan Fanisalek, Chief Technology Officer of Felix Gray, an e-commerce startup, scaled their infrastructure and planned for massive traffic spikes using Amazon Aurora and Elasticache. He discusses best practices on how to scale your database with minimal downtime, find performance bottlenecks in your database driven application, and how to handle service failures gracefully. Houtan also provides real world examples of the challenges his team faced while scaling Felix Gray, and speaks to the common growing pains any tech startup will face as they scale in the cloud.

“Public transit is not reliable enough,” says Eitan Yanovsky, CTO of Optibus, an Israeli software startup. “People are suffering from delays and a lot of these are happening because of improper planning.” To help cities run their bus fleets more efficiently, flexibly, and economically, Optibus offers proprietary cloud-based software driven by AI machine learning that analyzes historical and real-time passenger data to optimize service. The ultimate goal is to cut cost and improve service, making happier municipalities and happier riders.

“Death by PowerPoint, yeah? A phenomenon known to all of us,” jokes Sven Hoffmann, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Powtoon, a cloud-based service that allows users to create their own professional-looking videos. But what other option do you have, if you want to present information in a visual way? According to Hoffmann, video is the way to go. Specifically, animated video. “[It’s] better to grab people’s attention and get your point across than a long, boring presentation.”

Janine Teo, CEO of Solve Education!, talks to us about what inspired her startup, how they use technology, who their customers are, and their roadmap for 2019.

Benn Stancil, Chief Analyst and co-founder of Mode, gives a crash course in the practical analysis startups need to raise money.

Cash flow problems are among the most common that small and midsize businesses deal with. Regardless of industry or location, guaranteed access to funding is a primary concern. And according to Daniel Goldberg, CEO of Bridgement, the complications facing these businesses in South Africa can be especially high.

Simplaex uses AI and machine learning to power Rivr, which provides full transparency on where and when ads are being served so that advertisers and publishers know the right customers are seeing the ads.

No matter the industry or stage of a startup, there are common challenges and goals. While speaking with founders and technology leaders every day, I noticed common topics such as fundraising, profitability, hiring, regional expansion, and cloud architecture. In this post I’d like to share three technology-driven trends I’m seeing in consumer startups, which address new types of challenges.

Shawn Carolan, Partner at Menlo Ventures Just call Shawn Carolan Menlo Ventures’ “mobility man.” Not only did the general partner champion the venture capital firm’s investments in Jump Bikes and electric scooter startup Skip, but Carolan was also among the earliest to understand how the transportation sector would unfold, backing connected-car and location-based services company […]