So the Wall Street Journal just published an interesting article about TJX aptly titled: How to Survive the Retail Crisis: A Master Class from T.J. Maxx . Haven’t read it yet? Do so. If you’re a millennial, I don’t need to convince you to borrow someone else’s password to get past the paywall — you’re already doing it :)
Anyways, I figured I’d take this opportunity to provide a hot take (fairly uninformed and took no more than 5 minutes to write), and I’d love to hear any differing thoughts on it:
In short: everything and nothing.
To back things up for a minute, for those who don’t know what the blockchain is: it’s a “data structure that makes it possible to create a digital ledger of transactions and share it among a distributed network of computers” (via the Wall Street Journal).
Many people have already heard of the blockchain through a product that utilizes the technology on the back-end: Bitcoin (yes, Bitcoin is the currency of choice for the “dark web,” but it’s used for a lot of other purposes now too) — but the blockchain has an opportunity to encourage…
Thoughts on a New Startup in a “Boring” Space…
So over the weekend I read an article via Inc. Magazine on a new startup idea in a very, very boring, archaic, traditional space: notarization of documents. The company is called Notarize.com, and it just got $2.2M* in seed funding via Polaris Partners (not surprising, given the founder, Pat Kinsel, is a venture partner at Polaris) and a few other angels.
*QUICK UPDATE: This article was originally published on my personal blog back in February — back in June, Notarize closed an $8M Series A funding.
Bottom line: I absolutely love…
So last Friday I had the opportunity to stay in and watch a documentary which I’d been waiting over a year to see: Meru. It won the “Audience Award” at the Sundance Film Festival, and is available for viewing either on iTunes ($14.99 pricepoint is tough to swallow) or Amazon ($4.99 rental is more manageable). Why did I “need” to wait an entire year, you ask? Because I’m “frugal” (read: cheap), and was perpetually waiting for it to come out on Netflix for streaming, to no avail.
What is Meru, you ask? I’ll let the official website explain:
In the…
“First there were websites, then there were apps…now there are bots.”
There’s been a lot of buzz lately around the rise of chat bots in the market:
- Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is talking about it here, as Kik Bot (a portfolio member) just created a white label solution
- Forbes had an article about it back in February
- There were at least 3 different chatbot-related startups that were in this year’s Y Combinator class alone: Chatfuel, Prompt, and Assist
- Sephora already has a bought, Slack has had one for a while…even Staples is creating one (shameless plug)
- Not a…
Have you noticed that just about every other time someone wins the state lottery nowadays, you hear the same message about what they are going to do with their winnings first: “I’m paying off my student loans!” Thrilling, right? That’s what our world has come to…
Listen — if you tried to find someone more passionate and informed about the student loan situation in the US (and these are not mutually exclusive, sadly), you would be hard pressed to find someone other than me. After paying off quite a lump sum in 2015, I’m still sitting on over $100K in…
