Rebecca McDougal, VP Client Success at Synapse, has been passionate about customer service and support since the day she entered the workforce. Today, she uses that enthusiasm to help Synapse clients automate and streamline their instructional design process ensuring they have the support they need to implement and leverage their solution!

Ok, I’m not advocating for you to spend the next 24 months taking the CPA exam and then punch the clock for 90 hours a week at PWC for another 3-5 years to become good at sales. However, I am suggesting that you should be able to hold your own in the conference room when the accounting lingo starts getting thrown around.

There exists a vibrant ecosystem of specialized security tools. The sad truth is that it is almost impossible to reach 100% invulnerability.

DevOps continues to get a lot of attention as a wave of companies develop more sophisticated tools to help developers manage increasingly complex architectures and workloads. In the latest development, Databand — an AI-based observability platform for data pipelines, specifically to detect when something is going wrong with a datasource when an engineer is using a disparate set of data management tools — has closed a round of $14.5 million.

Consumer intelligence startup Konnecto is putting $3.5 million of seed funding to work to provide brands with data and insights on their customers.

When done properly, channel sales can be a very valuable asset for your company. It can afford you instant credibility with customers and leverage for your sales, implementation, and customer support teams with minimal increases to headcount. Just be sure you are acutely aware of the risks and over-prepare for the inevitable challenges that will arise.

Figuring out how to sell your product in the earliest days of a startup is one of the biggest challenges founders face. While it sounds appealing, the strategy to sell through partners and relying on product-led sales at the Seed stage of a company always make me highly uncomfortable. Increasingly it seems many founders casually toss around the statement “we are going to take a bottoms-up strategy, like Slack, to bring our product to market” or “we have a partnership with [insert giant tech/consulting firm] that is going to sell our product to their [insert absurd number of customers].” This is fine as a vision but, in the beginning, the only way to get your product into the hands of customers is through founder sales.

The following dichotomy complicates the decision on whether or not to invest in quantum computing: quantum computing will revolutionize the landscape of high-powered computing in every industry that depends on number-crunching; quantum computing hardware is years away from being broadly available and affordable. Quantum computers are inevitable, and their game-changing nature makes it imperative that businesses invest in developing in-house expertise. When quantum computers become as ubiquitous as classical computers* are today, any company that doesn’t have a grasp on how quantum computing will revolutionize their industry’s use of software will be left in the dust by those that do.

Knockri, a leading developer of artificial intelligence video-based soft-skill assessment and talent mobility solutions, today announced it has closed an oversubscribed seed round of $3 Million led by Differential Ventures with participation from Grand Ventures, MaRS IAF, BDMI – Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Amplify Capital and others to transform talent acquisition and increase diverse hiring.

Good research requires well-tested software that validates the accuracy of the research results. Good products require a much higher level of testing, that not only ensures the accuracy of software, but also ensures maximum uptime, eliminates failures, maintains efficiency and performance, and protects customers from experiencing any negative impact from software changes

Our data is everywhere. We can’t stop companies from having it. But we have a right to know how it is used. By encrypting all human behavioral data and creating an audit trail when it is decrypted and used, we can achieve enforceable data privacy policies.

Nick Adams is a co-founder and managing partner of Differential Ventures and an investor on ZeeTV's startup fundraising show 'Break Through the Crowd.'

Previously, Nick was a Venture Partner at Supernode.vc, f.k.a. Flatiron Investors, in New York City where he evaluated seed- stage SaaS companies and led the due diligence for multiple investments. Before moving into Venture Capital, Nick held senior sales, marketing and product management roles for software companies that have realized over $1.3 billion in exit value, including: Opower (IPO), RAGE Frameworks (acquired by Genpact), Basware (Publicly-traded on OMX), and Comverge (acquired by Itron).

He mentors startups, helps with non-profit ventures and is a former baseball player who always keeps his eye on the ball. Listen in as Nick connects with Lou Diamond on Thrive LOUD

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 shuttered the US economy in March the investor community has been spewing advice to startups at a rapid pace. One of the refrains sung most frequently is ‘cut your burn rate to extend runway as long as possible.’ While this advice certainly seems to have merit, we set out to evaluate the available data from 2008 to better understand why.

'Leadership Series' Part 3 - ZOOM Fatigue is Real

Like many of us, I have been spending weeks on end in my home office in front of my computer screen. And at the end of each week, I have been bleary eyed and utterly exhausted. Wanting to better understand why I was so tired, I logged onto my Zoom account to see how much time I had spent ‘connecting’ to clients and colleagues during the week. Whether conducting group sessions, working one-on-one, facilitating a large group presentation or participating in a virtual happy hour, I spent over 45 HOURS IN ZOOM MEETINGS in one week alone. I’m ‘ZOOMED OUT’.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Differential Ventures decided to give away up to $500,000 in $25,000 grants to early-stage data science-oriented startups pivoting to adapt their technology to help cure the disease or help society recover from it. One of the most common questions we received was: Why? The answer has to do with our understanding of the value of data science, the nature of early-stage investing, and the desire to help lead our industry, early-stage investing, through this crisis intact.

The COVID-19 health and economic crisis is in Month Two for most of North America and if one thing remains certain it’s that everything remains quite uncertain. Hopefully, by now you have gone through a couple of iterations of scenario planning for your business and have identified various approaches to keeping the lights on. The next question to ask yourself each morning, after ‘how do we keep the lights on?,’ should be ‘what do I want my company to be after we get through this crisis?’

On March 29th, our team announced a $500,000 pool of funds to be awarded in $10,000 - $25,000 grants to startups that are using data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to find solutions for the myriad challenges created by COVID-19. Today we are thrilled to announce the second batch of awards to seven companies that have taken a leadership role in this fight.

Similar to the recent years leading up to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, VC investment increased rapidly from the Dotcom crash of the early 2000’s to the GFC. Between 2003 to 2008, total VC investment increased from $8.3 billion to $21 billion only to be cut in half to $10.3 billion just two years later. As you can see in the chart below, VC investment came roaring back hitting 2x its pre-GFC peak and 4x the trough by 2018.

Just about a week ago we announced that over 50 countries are coming together to support inventors, innovators, developers and anyone with a passion to tackle COVID-19 in their country. Today, we are proud to announce that our commitment to those innovators will live beyond Startup Weekend. The top teams will go on to receive training and financial support.

I have spent most of my career running trading, capital markets, and investment businesses. I was a trader during the Asian Financial Crisis, Russian Financial Crisis, the Dot-Com blow up, ran a credit derivative business during the Financial Crisis, and am currently a director of a public company that is managing through the current COVID crisis. So I have learned much from managing risk during turbulent times (having paid a reasonable tuition to acquire such knowledge!). Rather than relay personal anecdotes, I thought I’d summarize some key takeaways.