Month: October 2018

Finding a job can be tricky. And once you find that job, it can be difficult to succeed and excel in it. HireClub wants to help with all of that.

HireClub started as a job-posting group on Facebook back in 2011 and has since expanded to a full-fledged business that helps people find jobs, prepare for interviews, negotiate salaries and generally navigate the workplace.

Today, HireClub has about 20,000 members in that Facebook group and offers coaching subscriptions across three tiers: standard, pro and executive. The pro plan, for example, costs $149 a month and gets you one hour’s worth of phone-based coaching and unlimited texting with your coach.

Compared to some other career-coaching services, HireClub is a steal. One career-coaching service I came across costs $2,900 for 10, one-hour sessions. That comes out to $290 a session. Another one costs $50 for 30 minutes, which is cheaper than HireClub’s $89 per month service that gets you one 30-minute call.

HireClub, which counts $6,500 in monthly revenues, currently has 60 clients on board who are supported by 40 coaches. The company says 90 percent of its clients find a job within 60 days.

HireClub’s marketplace of coaches range from professional, certified coaches looking to expand their client base to human resources professionals who have been doing work on the side. With HireClub, you also can book single sessions for a resume review, job interview prep and salary negotiation. For $39, you can book a resume review and for $99, you can book a mock interview.

People rarely get to practice interviewing, and most companies don’t give feedback after an interview, HireClub founder Ketan Anjaria told me. That’s what makes it hard to improve.

“I want to make coaching more accessible,” Anjaria said.

HireClub’s target customers are people changing careers, college graduates and women. The latter is because of a lack of support in the workplace and issues of discrimination, Anjaria said. Today, 60 percent of HireClub’s customers are women.

The small startup has raised just $50,000 from its members. HireClub is currently looking to raise a seed round from traditional investors, but Anjaria said it’s been a tough journey. With funding, Anjaria says HireClub would be able to employ its staffers full-time, and launch an iPhone and Android app.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a trio of researchers whose work in lasers enabled all kinds of new experiments and treatments. Arthur Ashkin is the primary recipient, sharing the prize with Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland; notably, the latter is the first woman to receive the prize (in physics, to be clear) since 1963, and only the third in history.

“This year’s prize is about tools made from light,” the Swedish foundation said in its announcement of the prize. ”

The work that won the award stretches over decades. Ashkin’s began during his tenure at Bell Labs in the ’60s and ’70s,  where he discovered that tiny particles and in fact cells and monocellular creatures could be trapped and manipulated using microscopic lasers.

In 1987 he used his “optical tweezers” to capture a bacterium without harming it, opening the possibility of the tool being used for all kinds of biological applications.

Mourou and Strickland, meanwhile, were also making strides in laser technology. They approached the open question of how to compress a powerful laser into a brief but equally powerful pulse, publishing a breakthrough paper in 1985.

The CPA technique described by Mourou and Strickland’s landmark research.

By “stretching” the beam out, then amplifying it, then compressing it again (as you see in the diagram above), they created the first “chirped pulse amplification,” which would become a standard tool. If you’ve gotten laser eye surgery, for instance, you’ve enjoyed the benefit of their research.

“The innumerable areas of application have not yet been completely explored,” the Nobel press release reads. “However, even now these celebrated inventions allow us to rummage around in the microworld in the best spirit of Alfred Nobel – for the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Strickland joins the very small club of women who have received the prestigious prize (again, in Physics; many women have won it in the other categories). It was given in 1963 to Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who created the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, and before that in 1903 to Marie Curie for, of course, her work on radium. (She won the Nobel for Chemistry 8 years later, making her the only woman to win two Nobels and the only person to win one in two different fields.)

Speaking to NPR, Strickland expressed surprise that so few women had been honored. “Really? I thought there might’ve been more,” she said. “Obviously, we need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there … I don’t know what to say, I’m honored to be one of these women.”

If you’re curious about the specifics of the research honored today, feel free to check out this writeup by the Nobel Foundation.

The 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to a trio of researchers whose work in lasers enabled all kinds of new experiments and treatments. Arthur Ashkin is the primary recipient, sharing the prize with Gérard Mourou and Donna Strickland; notably, the latter is the first woman to receive the prize (in physics, to be clear) since 1963, and only the third in history.

“This year’s prize is about tools made from light,” the Swedish foundation said in its announcement of the prize. ”

The work that won the award stretches over decades. Ashkin’s began during his tenure at Bell Labs in the ’60s and ’70s,  where he discovered that tiny particles and in fact cells and monocellular creatures could be trapped and manipulated using microscopic lasers.

In 1987 he used his “optical tweezers” to capture a bacterium without harming it, opening the possibility of the tool being used for all kinds of biological applications.

Mourou and Strickland, meanwhile, were also making strides in laser technology. They approached the open question of how to compress a powerful laser into a brief but equally powerful pulse, publishing a breakthrough paper in 1985.

The CPA technique described by Mourou and Strickland’s landmark research.

By “stretching” the beam out, then amplifying it, then compressing it again (as you see in the diagram above), they created the first “chirped pulse amplification,” which would become a standard tool. If you’ve gotten laser eye surgery, for instance, you’ve enjoyed the benefit of their research.

“The innumerable areas of application have not yet been completely explored,” the Nobel press release reads. “However, even now these celebrated inventions allow us to rummage around in the microworld in the best spirit of Alfred Nobel – for the greatest benefit to humankind.”

Strickland joins the very small club of women who have received the prestigious prize (again, in Physics; many women have won it in the other categories). It was given in 1963 to Maria Goeppert-Mayer, who created the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, and before that in 1903 to Marie Curie for, of course, her work on radium. (She won the Nobel for Chemistry 8 years later, making her the only woman to win two Nobels and the only person to win one in two different fields.)

Speaking to NPR, Strickland expressed surprise that so few women had been honored. “Really? I thought there might’ve been more,” she said. “Obviously, we need to celebrate women physicists, because we’re out there … I don’t know what to say, I’m honored to be one of these women.”

If you’re curious about the specifics of the research honored today, feel free to check out this writeup by the Nobel Foundation.

Tesla plans to speed up construction of a factory in Shanghai as tariffs, shipping costs and missed incentives continue to drive up the price of the company’s electric vehicles and dampen demand.

Trade tensions between the U.S. and China have led to 40 percent tariffs on Tesla vehicles compared to 15 percent duties placed on imported autos from other countries, the company said in its production and delivery report issued Tuesday. The tariffs, combined with the cost of shipping its vehicles via ocean carrier and the lack of access to cash incentives that are available to locally produced electric vehicles, has put the company at a disadvantage, the company warned.

As a result, Tesla said it’s now operating at a 55 percent to 60 percent cost disadvantage compared to the exact same car locally produced in China.

“This makes for a challenging competitive environment, given that China is by far the largest market for electric vehicles,” the company said. “To address this issue, we are accelerating construction of our Shanghai factory, which we expect to be a capital efficient and rapid buildout, using many lessons learned from the Model 3 ramp in North America.”

Even with an accelerated timeline it will be months, if not years before Tesla will be able to mass-produce vehicles in China.

Tesla hasn’t responded to questions about the factory, including the construction timeline and when it might come online.

Tesla doesn’t break out delivery numbers by country, making it difficult to accurately assess how tariffs and other costs have impacted sales in China even as total deliveries grew.

The company reported Tuesday that it delivered 83,500 electric vehicles in the third quarter, more than double from the previous period. The delivery numbers initially boosted Tesla shares until concerns about the company’s warnings on China began to sink in. Tesla shares were $306.36, down 1.4 percent in afternoon trading in New York. 

It also isn’t clear what “lessons” Tesla might apply in China. It’s possible the company might turn to unconventional production tactics it used in the U.S., notably the giant tent it erected to produce the Model 3.

Tesla has been eyeing the Chinese market for years, and has some operations there. But Tesla can’t fully realize the opportunity to sell electric cars in the world’s largest EV market until it can produce its vehicles in China.

Tesla reached a deal in July with the Shanghai government to build a factory capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles a year. Once construction begins, it will take about two years until Tesla can produce vehicles. It will be another “two to three years before the factory is fully ramped up to produce around 500,000 vehicles per year for Chinese customers,” a Tesla spokesman said at the time.

The Shanghai factory deal marks a shift within the Chinese government to allow foreign companies to build and operate wholly owned facilities there. Foreign companies have historically had to form a 50-50 joint venture with a local partner to build a factory in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pushed forward plans to phase out by 2022 joint-venture rules for foreign automakers. Tesla is one of the first beneficiaries of this rule change.

Tesla plans to speed up construction of a factory in Shanghai as tariffs, shipping costs and missed incentives continue to drive up the price of the company’s electric vehicles and dampen demand.

Trade tensions between the U.S. and China have led to 40 percent tariffs on Tesla vehicles compared to 15 percent duties placed on imported autos from other countries, the company said in its production and delivery report issued Tuesday. The tariffs, combined with the cost of shipping its vehicles via ocean carrier and the lack of access to cash incentives that are available to locally produced electric vehicles, has put the company at a disadvantage, the company warned.

As a result, Tesla said it’s now operating at a 55 percent to 60 percent cost disadvantage compared to the exact same car locally produced in China.

“This makes for a challenging competitive environment, given that China is by far the largest market for electric vehicles,” the company said. “To address this issue, we are accelerating construction of our Shanghai factory, which we expect to be a capital efficient and rapid buildout, using many lessons learned from the Model 3 ramp in North America.”

Even with an accelerated timeline it will be months, if not years before Tesla will be able to mass-produce vehicles in China.

Tesla hasn’t responded to questions about the factory, including the construction timeline and when it might come online.

Tesla doesn’t break out delivery numbers by country, making it difficult to accurately assess how tariffs and other costs have impacted sales in China even as total deliveries grew.

The company reported Tuesday that it delivered 83,500 electric vehicles in the third quarter, more than double from the previous period. The delivery numbers initially boosted Tesla shares until concerns about the company’s warnings on China began to sink in. Tesla shares were $306.36, down 1.4 percent in afternoon trading in New York. 

It also isn’t clear what “lessons” Tesla might apply in China. It’s possible the company might turn to unconventional production tactics it used in the U.S., notably the giant tent it erected to produce the Model 3.

Tesla has been eyeing the Chinese market for years, and has some operations there. But Tesla can’t fully realize the opportunity to sell electric cars in the world’s largest EV market until it can produce its vehicles in China.

Tesla reached a deal in July with the Shanghai government to build a factory capable of producing 500,000 electric vehicles a year. Once construction begins, it will take about two years until Tesla can produce vehicles. It will be another “two to three years before the factory is fully ramped up to produce around 500,000 vehicles per year for Chinese customers,” a Tesla spokesman said at the time.

The Shanghai factory deal marks a shift within the Chinese government to allow foreign companies to build and operate wholly owned facilities there. Foreign companies have historically had to form a 50-50 joint venture with a local partner to build a factory in China.

Chinese President Xi Jinping has pushed forward plans to phase out by 2022 joint-venture rules for foreign automakers. Tesla is one of the first beneficiaries of this rule change.

Google has acquired a small startup building tools for businesses looking to automate their customer service or sales workflows. Onward and some of its key employees including co-founders Rémi Cossart and Pramod Thammaiah as well as CTO Aaron Podolny will be joining Google. Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

The startup gives businesses an AI-powered chat solution to get customers what they want while making the most efficient use of their resources through automation.

Cossart and Thammaiah pivoted the startup from a more consumer-facing product called Agent Q which was a sort of shopping virtual assistant that people could text and quickly ask for product recommendations. The team billed it as a product marriage of Magic and Consumer Reports.

The co-founders eventually determined that there was more worth in bringing this kind of functionality to businesses who could use it as a way to automate interactions with customers in a tailored manner.

The bot service basically sought to make it easy to answer the simplest questions with answers pulled from a database while building flows that could help more detailed questions get addressed with just a few follow-ups.

For these more complex customer queries, Onward created a visual bot builder to allow users to quickly build chat decision trees that could help address their customers requests while also knowing when it was time to hand things off to a human.

The service could be easily integrated with products like Salesforce, Zendesk, Shopify and HubSpot.

“Throughout this journey, we’ve remained focused on unlocking the magical experiences that are possible when computers understand the subtleties hidden in a user’s actions and messages.” a blog post on the Onward site reads. “With Google, we’ll be able to expand the reach of the technologies that power Onward.”

Not even Techstars NYC can avoid the end of summer, where 10 startups are wrapping up their participation in the accelerator’s summer program.

This also marks the end of Alex Iskold’s tenure as managing director of the program. He’s certainly going out with a varied groups of startups — these entrepreneurs are working on everything from tampons to spices to skin care, plus more traditional tech categories like finance and security.

Here’s a quick rundown of each company.

• • Aunt Flow helps businesses and schools stock free tampons. Founder and CEO Claire Coder argues that if businesses are providing toilet paper for free, they should do the same with menstrual products. Current customers include Viacom, Twitter, and Brown University. (And it’s also selling products directly to customers.)

• • Burlap and Barrel finds spices from farmers all over the world, selling them to consumers and restaurants (including Dig Inn). The startup emphasizes the stories behind the spices, and it says it currently offers organic black peppercorns from Zanzibar, wild mountain cumin from Afghanistan, smoked pimenton paprika from Spain, plus 40 other spices.
  • Clever Girl Finance offers financial education content and tools for women of color. Founder and CEO Bola Sokunbi is an immigrant, computer science major and a certified financial educator. The startup currently offers more than 20 different courses, covering topics like getting out of debt and managing your wedding on the budget, all accessible for $10 per month.
  • Concert Finance automates financial reporting, starting with sales commissions. This allows sales reps to get real-time updates on the commissions that they’re earning. It works on top of Salesforce with no developer integration work required.
  • FlyThere connects customers with drone operators, allowing those customers to fly drones remotely. The company is pitching this as a way for people to experience locations around the world without actually traveling there. It’s available for visits to eight locations already, including the Big Buddha temple in Thailand and the pirate ship in Cancun.
  • With Le CultureClub, customers can test the “microbiome” of their skin by swabbing their skin and sending a sample to the startup. Le CultureClub can then give them access to a dashboard with personalized skincard recommendations.
  • Pandium aims to make it easier for B2B software companies to support integrations. The platform handles authentication, scheduling and other basic issues. That doesn’t eliminate the work for developers, but it’s supposed to allow them on the core integration logic, and supposedly reduces engineering time by 80 percent.
  • Perch aims to improve physical training and coaching by installing a camera and tablet, which is mounted on gym equipment to track and display data like number of reps and velocity. It’s currently targeting college and professional teams, and plans to expand to commercial and home gyms.

• SeekWell co-founder Mike Ritchie spent 15 years leading analytics teams at Bank of America and at startups. His goal is to change the way analytics teams share code by offering them an analytics platform and common code repository, allowing them to share and reuse SQL queries.
• SIEmonster is focused on security information and event management, using deep learning to detect and defend against attacks. Its partners include HP, which is distributing the platform to financial institutions like Bank of America.

Apple is about to release the public beta version of iOS 12.1. And before everybody freaks out, the company announced that this update will feature new emojis — best feature update ever.

In other words, Apple is releasing its own take on Unicode 11.0 emojis. Other devices and major services will soon all support the same emojis, but with a different design.

Apple already previewed some of these new emoji designs back in July for World Emoji Day. So here’s what you should expect.

Curly hair, grey hair, bald people, red hair…

As always, you’ll be able to find five skin colors in addition to yellow, and all characters come in male and female variants. The Unicode 11.0 specs said that vendors should add "curly hair" emojis. But it looks like Apple concluded "alright let's put a ’stache on that face!"

As for everything else, you’ll find a new emojis for outdoor accessories, such as luggage, compass and hiking shoes. On the food front, you’ll find bagels, salt, cupcakes, leafy greens, mango, moon cake, etc.

And when it comes to animals, there’s finally a mosquito emoji as well as new llama, swan, raccoon, kangaroo, lobster, parrot and peacock emojis.

Animals

Faces

Food

Everything else

Every time I’ve written about emojis, the number one comment has always been about red hair. It took a few years but red hair people, the Unicode consortium has finally heard you!

People procrastinate about buying insurance because it’s such a boring and complicated chore to compare policies. But Cover combines plans from 45 insurance companies into a single marketplace so it’s easy to find the best one for your car, home, rental, business, personal property, pets, jewelry and more. Now Cover is building powerful onboarding tricks like a driving school that earns you lower car insurance rates, and a way for Shopify merchants to sell warranties for their items.

The potential to use tech to run circles around the old insurance brokers has attracted a new $16 million Series B for Cover led by Tribe Capital’s Arjun Sethi, who led the Series A and sits on the startup’s board. The round was joined by Y Combinator, Social Capital, Exor and Samsung, and brings the company to a total of $27.1 million in funding.

“Insurance isn’t very different from being a white-collar bookie, where the house’s rake is too high and the dollars at stake are in the hundreds of billions in the U.S. alone,” says co-founder and CEO Karn Saroya. “This, all to the detriment of regular people, who view insurance as a tax. We’re here to change that perception.”

Saroya and his co-founders have deep ties. He went to high school with Anand Dhillon, is engaged to Natalie Gray and hired Ben Aneesh at the team’s previous startup, a high-end fashion marketplace called StyleKick that was eventually acqui-hired by Shopify. “We were tossing around ideas for what we wanted to do after StyleKick/Shopify, running hackathons on weekends. We built a couple different apps, but Cover — the MVP, where we just asked potential customers to take pictures of things they wanted to insure, surprised us” says Saroya. “Our customers sent us walkthroughs of their homes, pictures of their dogs and videos of themselves washing their cars. When you come across behavior that violates your expectations in consumers, that’s usually when you double-down.”

Cover co-founder and CEO Karn Saroya

So they built Cover, where you don’t have to cobble together an endless set of insurance websites or wait on hold. You download the app, pick your item, list how much you paid and where, provide some photos or video of its condition using its TensorFlow-equipped camera and Cover will check across its insurance partners and find you the best quote instantly. You can easily see what is and isn’t covered, learn how to make claims, and text with an agent if you have questions. For example, I was quickly quoted $5 per month to insure my new iPhone against damage but not loss or theft.

Cover earns between 10 to 35 percent per dollar of premium you pay. Its annualized premium already exceeds $8.5 million and is growing 30 percent per month. Thanks to its low-churn business model, easy cross-promotion of products, low training requirements for customers and no need to constantly update its existing subscriptions, Cover starts to look like a very efficient software-as-a-service business.

The big question remains whether Cover can consistently find the best rates for customers so they don’t second guess its quotes and search somewhere else. It will have to outcompete multi-insurance providers, like State Farm and Geico, as well as startups like MetroMile tackling specific insurance verticals with mobile apps. To really earn the big profits, Cover is building out its own in-house insurance plans. But that will put it under constant threat of insuring the wrong risks and ending up paying out too much.

“We built Cover because we saw an opportunity to build elegant products that could deliver on pricing and customer experience in a way that no incumbent insurance entity can,” Saroya concludes. By bringing the service to mobile and making it a seamless part of owning something, Cover could ensure you’re insured, even if insurance is the last thing you want to think about.

We’ve finalized the Vancouver micro meetup for this Thursday. We’ll be holding it at Hoot Suite HQ on 5, East 8th Ave at 7pm on October 4. Extra special thanks to the folks at Hoot Suite for helping out.

You must RSVP here so we know how many are attending. If you’d like to pitch please fill out this form and I will contact you ONLY IF YOU ARE CHOSEN. The best pitch will win a table at Disrupt Berlin.

Since there will be no booze at the event we’ll have an extra special drinkathon at 9pm at a bar of your choosing. I’m open to suggestions.

I love doing these little meetups because it gives me a good view on the startup scene in a city so I hope you’ll join us. See you all soon!