Category: Pay

Humans before hype: This investing method would make VC more inclusive

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The question I find myself asking founders the most often is a simple one: “Why are you the right person to solve this problem?” One of the least inspiring (but increasingly common) responses I hear is “I’m really excited for the entrepreneurial journey and I see an opportunity here.” That’s valid. Some incredibly talented people are motivated more by the thrill of the build than by solving a specific problem. And there are plenty of investors who, inspired by their momentum, are eager to get on board. Sometimes I’m one of them. But I also know firsthand that one shouldn’t always trust and follow the hype. There was a time in the early days of TaskRabbit, the company I founded, when we were doing fewer than a hundred tasks a day, yet getting heaps of national press. Even as Diane Sawyer ran a feature on us, we were assigning jobs to our staff members because we hadn’t yet automated our Tasker onboarding processes. It’s not at all uncommon for a company that’s generating lots of press and social mentions to not yet have the numbers to back up the buzz—and that’s a necessary part of building momentum. But with overhyped companies, it’s often the case that this momentum-building isn’t meaningful to the long-term success of the company. A huge press hit, big name investor, or vanity metric milestone can belie what’s really going on at a startup. To me, what’s much more interesting than following the hype is discovering the founder who becomes obsessed with solving a specific problem because she has a personal connection to it. Caribu founder Maxeme “Max” Tuchman is a great example of this (full disclosure: Fuel Capital invested in the company’s most recent round). This Miami-based Latina founder, who has a background in education, became obsessed with finding a solution to help traveling parents read bedtime stories with their kids back home. That idea grew into a dedicated video calling app that hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents now use to engage and connect with their kids and grandkids—a bright spot during a global pandemic Read More …

Apple Watch and AirPods data shows that we’re exposed to too much noise

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In 2019, Apple announced a series of studies to be conducted with academic partners. Among them was the University of Michigan, which Apple teamed up with for research focused on hearing loss. The results of their study are in, and as it turns out, we are all probably exposed to too much noise. An estimated one in 10 of the study’s participants have hearing loss due to noise. The study took place between November 2019 and February 2021 and analyzed data from approximately 70,000 participants. Each participant was involved in the study for at least 60 days. In addition to noise levels, which the study captured through the Apple Watch and through Apple headphones, the study also looked at heart rate and exercise data for Watch wearers. Researchers also gathered demographic data, gave participants surveys, and used the iPhone to give participants a virtual hearing test. The main purpose of the study was to get a better understanding of what kinds of noise people are exposed to on a daily basis. “Until a couple years ago, we had 40-year-old estimates on national noise exposure,” Rick Neitzel, the associate chair of environmental health sciences at the University of Michigan and the leading researcher on the Apple hearing health study, told Fast Company in 2019 when the study was first announced. The World Health Organization estimates there are 466 million people with “disabling hearing loss,” or hearing loss at 40 decibels. The goal of the study is to help researchers at the University of Michigan gather broad data about hearing loss and specifically about noise-induced hearing loss. Read More …

How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era

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The rise of cord cutting and streaming video was supposed to render the digital video recorder (DVR) irrelevant. In theory, you shouldn’t need to record anything when services like Netflix and Amazon Prime make everything available on demand. But now that every big media company has its own streaming service, all that instant gratification has come at a cost. Watching TV now means bouncing between a dozen different apps, each with its own separate menu system, catalog, and watch list. Read More …

COVID-19 was a disaster for organ transplants. Here’s how they’re recovering

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Organ transplants in the United States have been increasing over the last several years. In 2019, transplants from deceased donors rose by 10% while living donors increased by 7%. The growing system combines education, technological advances, various research, and public policy work to save lives off the 100,000-person waitlist. While kidneys are the top organ in transplant numbers, other key organs transplanted in America include the liver, heart, and lungs. The transplant community has been working together for years to increase organ donations for those in need. Experts say that deceased donors alone will not resolve the waitlist. Organizations like the American Kidney Fund (AKF), among other things, work to get rid of kidney disease in the first place. They provide education and access to resources to help make it easier, and encourage living donors to save a life. As a kidney donor myself, I can confirm that multiple organizations work hard to make organ donation a safe and rewarding experience. Despite the progress in recent years, more living donors are necessary. Especially now. Beginning in late March of last year as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the U.S., the country’s transplant system came to a screeching halt. Deceased donor donations dropped by 50% and living donor donations dropped by 90%. “The pandemic caught everybody off guard,” says Dr. David Klassen, chief medical officer at United Networks for Organ Sharing (UNOS). “Nobody really saw it coming. Transplant is really a collaborative process by nature.” In order for a surgery to be successful it requires both the transplant center and the donor hospital to be fully operational and functional, along with the organ procurement team for deceased donor organs; potential recipients and donors also have to have access to healthcare. Not only did COVID-19 affect all these groups individually, but it only takes one of them with a problem to disrupt the entire system. Waves of impact Once the pandemic hit, healthcare resources had to pivot Read More …

How Disney Plus is winning by ripping up the streaming playbook

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Earlier this month, Netflix sent out an email announcing titles on its service for that week. The flurry of personalized (for the subscriber) titles included its teen romance hit To All the Boys: Always and Forever ; the Nickelodeon series iCarly ; and War Dogs , a Netflix original movie starring Bradley Cooper. There were also promos for recent Netflix originals: Bridgerton , Shonda Rhimes’ buzzy period drama; the teen film We Can Be Heroes ; and George Clooney’s sci-fi film The Midnight Sky . Disney also sent out an email that week announcing what it was touting on its streaming service, DisneyPlus. Most prominently featured was Cinderella , the 1997 TV adaptation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical starring Brandy. Less space was given to a single episode—number six—of the Marvel series WandaVision , a DisneyPlus exclusive, and High School Musical: The Musical: Series , another Disney Plus show that debuted in 2019. As streaming services duke it out and woo subscribers—the latest, Paramount Plus , debuts on March 4—Disney is snubbing its nose at the streaming playbook pioneered most meaningfully (and aggressively) by Netflix. It is not promising a brand-new TV show or movie every single day of the year. It is not churning out splashy press releases announcing lavish deals with TV and filmmakers like Rhimes and Ryan Murphy. It isn’t catering to consumers by allowing them to binge an entire season of a show in one sitting. Want to watch WandaVision ? Read More …