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Investing Like a Fox: An Interview With Legendary Angel Investor John Ason

John Ason has invested in over 80 early stage companies across a 20 year career, often as the lead angel and chalking up impressive exits such as xlibris.com, diapers.com and centrak.com. This longevity is remarkable not only considering that angel investing is a notoriously high-risk field, but also that New York City’s tech scene is much younger than Silicon Valley and itself is only a few decades old. John spoke about what mental models he brings to investing, how to make an investment decision in one minute and why we need more women entrepreneurs. READ MORE

The Box: How A Forgotten TV Network Changed Music & Predicted The Future

Source: Thrillist

BACK IN OLDEN TIMES, THERE WAS A THING CALLED THE BOX, and it offered a simple proposition: you called up a 900 number on your landline, punched in a four-digit code corresponding to a music video you wanted to see (ideally something banned from mainstream media for obscenity), and incurred a charge of between $0.99 and $2.99. When your selection aired on your TV about 20 minutes later, you sat there, or danced, or sang along, or quite possibly masturbated to it. Maybe all four at once if you were talented and your parents weren’t home.

While every single thing about The Box (1985-2000) seems hilariously dated now (landlines! taboos! paying for content! not enough porn!), it once represented the cutting edge of media and technology. “The Box doesn’t have its proper place in the history of music, if not television, because it was so ahead of its time,” says its former executive vice president, Les Garland, who, prior to joining The Box, was a hugely influential executive at MTV.

Obviously, he’s biased. But that doesn’t make him wrong. The Box was an unprecedented entertainment delivery system, a proto-YouTube showing the pre-internet world what a democratized mass media looked like (for good or ill). It opened up floodgates for audiences aching for music they weren’t seeing or hearing elsewhere — especially hip-hop, which The Box helped vault from subcultural curiosity to global pop juggernaut. And it was just about only way to see 2 Live Crew’s “Pop That Pussy” in broad daylight without having to buy a bootlegged VHS copy off some kid at school. “We pushed the envelope more than anybody in history,” Garland recalls, “and I say that with a lot of pride.” Read more

$1 Billion for Dollar Shave Club: Why Every Company Should Worry

Unilever is paying $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club, a five-year-old start-up that sells razors and other personal products for men. Every other company should be afraid, very afraid.

The deal anecdotally shows that no company is safe from the creative destruction brought by technological change. The very nature of a company is fundamentally changing, becoming smaller and leaner with far fewer employees.

Read more: http://nyti.ms/2ar77iq

Top Tech Trends In 2016 Will Take Aim At The Heart Of The Economy

Technology has put powerful new tools in the hands of individuals looking to exert more control over their lives and to collaborate with others who have shared affinities. It has been an evolutionary process as young tech companies work to discover the most effective models to channel that power and for users to adopt them, but several trends are really beginning to resonate. As a result, 2016 is shaping up to be an inflection point for personal and community empowerment in areas at the very core of the U.S. economy.

Earlier this year I wrote about how the Millennial generation, frustrated by an unresponsive political class, is applying technology to address the issues that are important to them (Eschewing Politics Millenials View Technology As The Agent Of Change). 2016 is an election year and it remains to be seen whether there will be an issue or candidate to rally around that turns young voters into active participants. The smart money says that the majority of Millennials will sit on the sidelines and leave the voting to the over 65 crowd. But that doesn’t mean they won’t actively address the issues that are important to them. They’ll just do it on their own terms, using apps on their phone instead of letters to their congressman.

The On-Demand Economy There is no better example of this phenomenon than the On-Demand Economy. It is a rapidly growing movement that both tech start-ups and workers are seizing with gusto and it is poised to fundamentally alter how people work and services are provided. Most everyone has heard of Uber but there are hundreds of companies that have come on the scene; Lyft, Saucy, Instacart, Doggybnb, Dolly, Washio, TaskRabbit. Well, you get the picture.

16.6 million workers say they now earn 10 percent or more of their income through the collaborative economy. That’s up from 9 million people who said the same last year. What’s interesting is their reasons. Yes, it is hard to find jobs, especially for young graduates, and most people need to earn money. But the most important reason cited by on-demand workers is exerting control over their lives. They say they want to determine their own schedule, be their own boss and do things they love. There are now so many service providers seeking workers and workers looking for gigs that a colleague of mine started what is essentially a matching service called Crowded. The company recruits independent workers at scale and aggregates gigs from hundreds of on-demand platforms.

The on-demand economy is no longer just a U.S. phenomenon. Earlier this year I advised a Korean company called Globee. In Asia, over $102 billion is spent annually on private education and one of the most sought after services is English instruction by a native speaker. Globee matches English speaking foreigners looking for a job with locals seeking a language tutor.

Crowd Finance The music industry was among the first to experience systemic disruption due to the shift from analog to digital. And while the impact was profound, worldwide sales for music were less than $30 billion at their peak. The financial industry, in contrast, is measured in the trillions of dollars. According to The Economist, “…a new generation of startups is taking aim at the heart of the [financial] industry – and a pot of revenues that Goldman Sachs estimates is worth $4.7 trillion.”

In the last five years we have seen emergence of crowd finance in a variety of forms. Many people are familiar with the pioneer, Kickstarter, which offers individuals the ability to donate to the development of interesting inventions or projects in exchange for receiving a finished product when it is completed. Lending Club was formed to match investors with individuals seeking loans and has grown into a public company on the NYSE with a multibillion dollar transaction volume.

Just as specialization has occurred in the on-demand economy, crowd finance is developing in dozens of verticals from community fundraising to business lending. I am a director and investor in two such companies. Schools are often budget constrained which means that youth sports teams end up running car washes and bake sales to cover their costs. Piggbackr is an online fundraising platform that enables communities to rally around a fundraising goal for a team or project. Small to medium businesses borrow 600 billion dollars annually but have had trouble getting access to capital since the downturn of 2008. Funding Wonder matches small businesses seeking loans with investors who want to support the growth of neighborhood businesses.

Recently the SEC gave Crowd Finance a shot in the arm. First it passed Regulation A which provides an exemption to the registration requirements mandated by the Securities Act for small public offerings. Recently Title III of the JOBS Act became the law of the land and it is expected to be in full force by May 2016. These new rules allow public solicitation of private investment offerings to non-accredited investors; essentially the general public.

Personal and community empowerment will drive the top tech trends in 2016 and they aren’t just nibbling around the edges. The on-demand economy and crowd finance are big ideas that take aim at the heart of the economy.

Written by Alan McGlade, Managing Director DEV

DEV Discovery Korea Accelerator Program Kicks off the Fall 2015 Global AIM Program

October 8, 2015 – Digital Entertainment Ventures (DEV) launched the Fall 2015 Global AIM Program with a kickoff event attended by program speakers, mentors, and participating companies. Also in attendance was Michelle Kim, Team Leader of the Global Cooperation Team at Innopolis, South Korea’s largest research institution and DEV’s key partner for the program.

Ten companies have been selected for the Fall 2015 Global AIM program and over the next month they will gain the necessary skills, knowledge, and experience to pitch in front of a diverse audience at Demo Day on November 4. The current program’s participating companies are Globee, ForceEdu, Fluttr, Coolio, Twinkle:Mi, Botem, RNSLab, Brew Glass, Firstar, and Standard Energy.

Orientation and kickoff event for the current program began with a welcome message from Alan McGlade, managing director and Co-Founder of DEV: “Each of these companies has a strong team, a working product, and a desire to expand globally, and this program will help them form the connections they need to do exactly that.” Those at the kickoff event were treated with an excellent lecture on The Art of Storytelling by Neal Shenoy, a founding partner of 212 Media, CEO and Co-Founder of Speakaboos. Neal Shenoy advised that “investors want to hear your story, so make sure it counts.”

Take a look at the startups:

Twinkle:Mi is developing an e-commerce platform for brand name shoes in the tradition of Zappos, which does not exist in South Korea or China.

Globee is a mobile platform that matches students with foreign language tutors. Students use an app to search for appropriate tutors and initiate sessions.

Fluttr is a mobile app for sharing travel experiences with fellow travelers. Users can create a photo diary and a bucket list of places to visit.

Coolio was founded by a team of big data scientists to develop a media content recommendation platform covering articles, audio clips, images, and videos.

Standard Energy makes large capacity redox flow batteries. Their batteries range from 5KWh-1MWh and are used for energy storage and backup in industrial applications.

RNSLab has developed low-power, chip-based carbon dioxide sensors. Their chips have built-in wireless connectivity, which makes retrofitting existing appliances easy.

Botem creates sensor devices that collect data on people’s movements for building management and security.

Brew Glass is developing an advanced recommendation engine. Their first application was for beer and champagne recommendations.

DEV Discovery Korea Accelerator Program Kicks off the Fall 2015 Global AIM Program

(October 8, 2015) Digital Entertainment Ventures (DEV) launched the Fall 2015 Global AIM Program with a kickoff event attended by program speakers, mentors, and participating companies. Also in attendance was Michelle Kim, Team Leader of the Global Cooperation Team at Innopolis, South Korea’s largest research institution and DEV’s key partner for the program.