A 2 Apple

Rising Rent

Renting is the new owning… especially for the younger demographic who is battling with high unemployment and student loan repayments. The 2008 financial crisis opened a wide path for some of the most disruptive and innovative businesses in the New Rent Economy.

Pay on the Go

Mobile payment solutions continue to see strong momentum, and even more so now as some of the larger tech leaders are pushing into that space. A few weeks ago, Twitter announced it is starting to test a “buy” button powered by Stripe, that is embedded in tweets and that allows users to directly buy…

Swipe to Date

Swipe left or swipe right? — that is the question…increasingly so for many young adults. Ever since the rise of the Internet, online dating has been a hot area, but it has also been considered a grey area by many. People still back up and feel weird from the idea of searching for a match online. But…

From Tel Aviv to Lisboa

Bubblin, #A2Apple

Over the last ten days, I traveled coast to coast on the European continent to see some of the emerging startup ecosystems. First I was in Tel Aviv, just before the Israel-Palestine conflict began to escalate again. Israel has…

Taylor’s Back to 1989…

Taylor Swift playing hard-to-get with Spotify is frustrating for many music fans around the World and for the Swedish streaming leader, but ironically, the entire drama around this break-up has created a huge, free marketing wave for the Viking growth company. (Disclosure: GSV owns shares…

Food, Water and ChatApps

A 2 Apple

In the pre-smartphone era — which is as little as 10 years ago, you woke up in the morning and turned on your PC to check if you had a new email… Today, you wake up to tens or hundreds of emails (majority of which are irrelevant), tens of new…

Sharing Economy Adds Sharing Dinner

It’s always interesting to observe how a disruptive new startup emerges as a trend, quickly gains critical mass, becomes very popular, and then we start to see new ideas and startups developing from that initial trend…

Ridin’ in India

The ride sharing space continues to boom, and specifically the Indian marketplace seems to be “on fire.” Two significant financings fueled that trend last week.

The smaller one was Zoomcar, a car rental service that raised $8 million from Sequoia. Zoomcar users get a variety…

Hollywood Meets Silicon Valley

Hollywood and Silicon Valley have always had a very special relationship. Steve Jobs’ admiration for Hollywood, and especially for Pixar and Disney, helped him enhance his creativity, which ultimately resulted in Apple creating some of the best designed tech devices ever…