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"SAFE FINANCING DOCUMENTS The safe (simple agreement for future equity) is intended to replace convertible notes in most cases, and we think it addresses many of the problems with convertible notes while preserving their flexibility. In addition to being simpler and clearer, we intend the safe to remain fair to both investors and founders.During its development the safe was positively reviewed by many of the top startup investors. We believe it's a positive evolution of the convertible note and hope the startup community finds it an easier way to accomplish the same goals. Features of a safe: Unlike a convertible note, a safe is not a debt instrument. Debt instruments have maturity dates, are typically subject to certain regulations, create the threat of insolvency, and can include security interests and sometimes subordination agreements, all of which can have unintended negative consequences for startups. Because the money invested in a startup via a safe is not a loan, it will not accrue interest. This is particularly beneficial for startups, but also better embodies the intention of investors, who never meant to be lenders in the first place. As a flexible, one-document security without numerous terms to negotiate, a safe should save startups and investors money in legal fees and reduce the time spent negotiating the terms of the investment. Startups and investors will usually only have to negotiate one item: the valuation cap. Because a safe has no expiration or maturity date, there should be no time or money spent dealing with extending maturity dates, revising interest rates or the like. A safe still allows for high resolution fundraising. Startups can close with investors as soon as both parties are ready, instead of trying to coordinate a single close with all investors simultaneously. There are four versions of safe, corresponding to the four types of convertible note: Safe Primer Safe: Cap, no Discount Safe: Discount, no Cap Safe: Cap

"There's a new coalition in D.C., and big players like Apple, DuPont, Ford, GE, IBM, Microsoft, and Pfizer have all signed up. Unfortunately, launched on the day the Senate was supposed to take up the latest effort to reform the patent system, the coalition's sole purpose appears to be an effort to derail the important strides we've made toward fixing the patent troll problem via the proposed Innovation Act legislation. So what is it about the Innovation Act (and other legislative proposals being discussed in the Senate) that this coalition thinks will harm both their businesses and ability to build innovative products? These companies were all startups themselves once, and protecting startups that cannot afford to protect themselves from patent trolls is at the heart of the Innovation Act. The startups being targeted by patent trolls have less than $10 million in revenues. They are in no position to hire a patent lawyer to understand the scope of the threat they face - let alone pay the millions of dollars it would cost to take case to court. Even worse, startups are too often short on talent, so they do not have the luxury of using their current employees to read and understand vague patents with "fuzzy boundaries". Today's trolls send out scores of demand letters that make vague assertions of patent infringement while requesting "licensing fees" of $100,000 or more. The cost of trolling, on the other hand, is minimal. Trolls also typically render themselves litigation-proof by creating shell companies with no assets, should they fall into legal trouble from a wrongful suit. We need real reform that will stem the tide of the troll epidemic, while maintaining protection for patent holders to enforce their legal rights. This is precisely what the current proposals would do."

""You'll notice we have many more startups that aren't in the traditional software category," said Y Combinator President Sam Altman at the start of its Winter 2016 Demo Day 1. While once upon a time YC was known for legions of social and marketplace apps no one needed, it's branched out. Now Silicon Valley's top accelerator features tons of hardware, engineering, alternative energy and enterprise startups, too. [Update: Check our our list of the "Top 7 startups from YC W'16 Demo Day 1" according to investors and TechCrunch's writers. You can also see all the startups that pitched on day 2 of YC W'16 Demo Day here.] The afternoon began with a moment of silence for Andy Grove, former Intel CEO and beloved business mentor, as well as the victims of this morning's terrorist attacks in Brussels. Y Combinator President Sam Altman The house at YC's Demo Day was packed - more than anyone expected, it would seem. A few chairs short, millionaires from around the world could be seen sitting on the floor to watch startup after startup strut their stuff - many of them for the first time. The big theme of the day was profitability. In the past, YC startups have highlighted their growth, downplaying profitability as some saw it as a sign that they were shooting too small or not reinvesting enough. But due to the market correction, VCs are more keen on startups that can become sustainable faster and won't need endless funding to succeed. Today, many startups mentioned that they were already profitable, would be in several months, or were in specific markets where you don't account for money spent trying to expand. Yet Altman told us that investment was "hotter" today than he's ever seen it, with VCs aggressively pushing to invest on the spot. For the last year, he says YC has been telling startups to raise less and get to profitability faster in anticipation of a frosty fundraising climate. Yet now he believes the correction "hasn

"A new player has entered the enterprise productivity race. For decades, Microsoft reigned as the market leader in enterprise productivity - until Google pushed into the space with Google Apps. Now, with the acquisition of Quip, Salesforce is joining Microsoft and Google in the race. The implications, however, extend far beyond productivity and CRM. Recent developments in enterprise software - including Oracle's acquisition of NetSuite, Microsoft's purchase of LinkedIn and Salesforce's acquisition of Demandware and Quip - point to a shift in the market. Enterprise software (not just productivity apps) can no longer be siloed applications bolted together with varying degrees of integration. Today's tools are expected to be cross-functional, with native integration, real-time collaboration and smart communication at their very core. Enterprise software giants across different verticals are moving in the direction of end-to-end solutions in an attempt to own more of the workflow - Salesforce's acquisition of Quip will only intensify the competition. For enterprise software startups, it's indicative of more mergers and acquisitions to come."

"Pilarinos is one of dozens of startup founders who have graduated from a two-year-old boot camp run by First Round, a venture-capital firm that focuses on early-stage tech startups. The two- to six-week program drills its cadets in important lessons that are part Sales 101, part human psychology seminar, and part tutorials on practical tasks like creating slide decks. The goal is to help startup founders, who may have spent months or years engrossed in arcane product details, sell their vision to the people with the money. And in a funding environment in which the easy money has dried up, the CEO boot camp, known as Pitch Assist, could become increasingly critical as startups fight to secure more financing. Going straight for the jugular The coaches at the boot camp, who are basically First Round partners, don't pull any punches. On the first day, CEOs are put on the spot and made to answer the burning questions investors will have - especially the tough questions for which the CEOs might not yet have answers. "Some of the questions are the sort of holes in the business," First Round partner Bill Trenchard said. "No company is perfect. There's always a weak point in the architecture." First Round First Round normally does only seed rounds of fund-raising. Pitch Assist helps those companies go on to raise their next round. Young CEOs aren't used to talking about those holes. No one starts a sales call by going over their weaknesses. When pitching investors, however, those weak points have to be addressed head-on in the presentation. "If you try to play games or try to hide things, any reasonable investor will notice," Brett Berson, First Round's vice president of platform, said. "And once you've lost that credibility, there's no coming back from that." Berson estimates that it takes about two hours of work to go through each question, but after that startup founders can step back and see the overall picture. The questions become the plot points - the m

"Samsung on Wednesday announced its intentions to support early-stage startups focused on emerging technologies. The company, through its global innovation group, has established a $150 million fund targeting businesses specializing in virtual reality, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and "other new frontier technologies." So far, Samsung has made investments in 10 startups: Converge Industries, Dashbot, Entry Point VR, Filament, Intezer, LiquidSky, Otto Radio, 2Sens, SafeDK, and Virtru. The fund is aimed at making pre-seed to series B investments. "Our investments bring the power of the Samsung platform to startups to accelerate their growth and ultimately their success," said Brendon Kim, vice president and the managing director of Samsung's Next Ventures. "The Samsung NEXT Fund expands our global reach and capabilities, while increasing Samsung's access to more great ideas, products and talent." Samsung declined to specify how much each startup receives. In addition, it appears that the company could be targeting those in Israel next, with the opening of a new office in Tel Aviv, Israel in September. There are now five offices worldwide dedicated to innovation, including San Francisco, Mountain View, Korea, and New York. More locations are planned later this year. Samsung Next formerly was known as the Global Innovation Center. The name change was done because "our new name reflects our passion for partnering with tech innovators to take them to the NEXT level - build great ideas into products, grow products into thriving businesses and scale businesses that leverage and transform the Samsung ecosystem.""

"August 2007 (This is a talk I gave at the last Y Combinator dinner of the summer. Usually we don't have a speaker at the last dinner; it's more of a party. But it seemed worth spoiling the atmosphere if I could save some of the startups from preventable deaths. So at the last minute I cooked up this rather grim talk. I didn't mean this as an essay; I wrote it down because I only had two hours before dinner and think fastest while writing.) A couple days ago I told a reporter that we expected about a third of the companies we funded to succeed. Actually I was being conservative. I'm hoping it might be as much as a half. Wouldn't it be amazing if we could achieve a 50% success rate? Another way of saying that is that half of you are going to die. Phrased that way, it doesn't sound good at all. In fact, it's kind of weird when you think about it, because our definition of success is that the founders get rich. If half the startups we fund succeed, then half of you are going to get rich and the other half are going to get nothing."

An amazing article about Marc Andressen and his a16z VC firm on Sand Hill Road. Covers the entire story and provides a great insight into how Silicon Valley and VC industry work. It's long, but nevertheless a must read. Very enjoyable! " At his firm, Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capitalist routinely lays out "what will happen in the next ten, twenty, thirty years." CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOE PUGLIESE On a bright October morning, Suhail Doshi drove to Silicon Valley in his parents' Honda Civic, carrying a laptop with a twelve-slide presentation that was surely worth at least fifty million dollars. Doshi, the twenty-six-year-old C.E.O. of a data-analytics startup called Mixpanel, had come from San Francisco to Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, where many of the world's most prestigious venture-capital firms cluster, to pitch Andreessen Horowitz, the road's newest and most unusual firm. Inside the offices, he stood at the head of a massive beechwood conference table to address the firm's deal team and its seven general partners-the men who venture the money, take a seat on the board, and fire the entrepreneur if things go wrong. Marc Andreessen, the firm's co-founder, fixed his gaze on Doshi as he disinfected his germless hands with a sanitizing wipe. Andreessen is forty-three years old and six feet five inches tall, with a cranium so large, bald, and oblong that you can't help but think of words like "jumbo" and "Grade A." Two decades ago, he was the animating spirit of Netscape, the Web browser that launched the Internet boom. In many respects, he is the quintessential Silicon Valley venture capitalist: an imposing, fortyish, long-celebrated white man. (Forbes's Midas List of the top hundred V.C.s includes just five women.) But, whereas most V.C.s maintain a casual-Friday vibe, Andreessen seethes with beliefs. He's an evangelist for the church of technology, afire to reorder life as we know it. He believes that tech products will soon

"The 2015 holiday season is upon us and the year is drawing to a close. Soon our thoughts will drift to our hopes and goals for 2016. For those who are dreaming of a new job at an up-and-coming young company, we've compiled this list to help. All of these companies specialize in making tech for work and business use, a $3.5 trillion worldwide market. All of them had spectacular years in 2015, by launching great new technology or getting a boatload of funding or landing big partnerships and generally setting themselves up for a successful 2016 and beyond."

"SAN FRANCISCO - The number of worldwide email users will reach 2.9 billion by the end of 2019, according to predictions from The Radicati Group. But has anyone really learned to use it effectively and efficiently in the workplace? Two-year-old San Francisco startup Emmerge claims it has: It's marketing an inbox with collaboration features, which is designed to streamline team projects. Project Management and Collaboration The project management and collaboration platform in one allows users to assign action items in the body of emails and build on ongoing tasks and projects. Emmerge organizes information by hashtags and also offers a way for employees to track billable hours if they need to do that, too. Emmerge CEO and founder Marc Blinder said his company isn't trying to replace email. Rather, it is trying to enhance it with a little "social DNA" and other features. "We know everyone in the business world is going check emails," he said. Emmerge offers a new way to look at it, he continued. Blinder said the Emmerge solution is more collaborative than the way Google looks at email, with a "consumer-first lens … We do it on a team basis. The fundamental philosophical difference is that team aspect that gets better and better as more people use it.""

"There's no question Amazon is turning the screws on the $140 billion data-center-tech industry. Amazon has grown to become the largest player in the rapidly growing cloud industry as its cloud platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS), celebrates its 10-year anniversary.  And in the process, AWS has sent shockwaves through the traditional enterprise sector. In an interview with Business Insider, Werner Vogels - the CTO of Amazon in charge of AWS - explained why hardware companies aren't going to get any respite any time soon. Hardware builders are getting squeezed out the game Right now, instead of buying all of their own computers, networks, and software, businesses large and small are opting to rent it all from cloud-computing vendors. That spells bad news for companies like IBM, HP, Dell, EMC, Cisco, the hardware makers selling companies the servers, storage, and management software."

"Startup Quip is taking on big boys Microsoft, Apple and Google with a revamped Web and mobile word processing app called Quip 2.0 that provides users with new publishing and search capabilities. Quip 1.0 launched last July and is now used by over 5,000 companies, including Path, Taser, Zomato and Facebook, for whom Quip leader Bret Taylor used to serve as chief technology officer. Quip 1.0 includes a word processor and built-in messaging capability."

"April 21, 2016: In February of last year, Fortune magazine writers Erin Griffith and Dan Primack declared 2015 "The Age of the Unicorns" noting - "Fortune counts more than 80 startups that have been valued at $1 billion or more by venture capitalists." By January of 2016, that number had ballooned to 229. One key to this population growth has been the remarkable ease of the Unicorn fundraising process: Pick a new valuation well above your last one, put together a presentation deck, solicit offers, and watch the hundreds of million of dollars flow into your bank account. Twelve to eighteen months later, you hit the road and do it again - super simple. While not obvious on the surface, there has been a fundamental sea-change in the investment community that has made the incremental Unicorn investment a substantially more dangerous and complicated practice. All Unicorn participants - founders, company employees, venture investors and their limited partners (LPs) - are seeing their fortunes put at risk from the very nature of the Unicorn phenomenon itself. The pressures of lofty paper valuations, massive burn rates (and the subsequent need for more cash), and unprecedented low levels of IPOs and M&A, have created a complex and unique circumstance that many Unicorn CEOs and investors are ill-prepared to navigate."

"Enterprise communications is not a sector that typically generates palpable excitement. In the enterprise, the plumbing is never as exciting as the fixtures, and people spend more time noticing what communications enables than how it's delivered. It doesn't help that enterprise communications is often dismissed as slow to innovate, given its high capital costs to deploy new infrastructure and natural monopolies. But this bias is now outdated, largely because software has taken the lead in an industry that was previously hardware-centric. And communications is one of very few markets where startups can claim their share of a trillion-dollar market. Companies like Slack, Fuze (formerly ThinkingPhones) and Twilio have carved out large and growing businesses in new categories to improve the way enterprises communicate. One of the main drivers for this shift is because communications is moving from one of the most closed tech ecosystems to one of the most open. In the era of telecom monopolies and copper wires, only a few trusted wizards actually knew how to build and maintain complicated systems that needed to deliver 99.999 percent uptime. As infrastructure has moved to data, faster networks and the cloud, it has become much easier not only to provide basic connectivity, but also to layer on additional services."

"In the engineer-glorifying culture of Silicon Valley, salespeople are often an overlooked breed. But there's a man who's quietly built his legacy by mastering the art of selling business software. Meet Dave Rudnitsky, senior VP of enterprise sales at Insidesales.com, a software startup that was last valued at roughly $1.5 billion. Although he started in finance, Rudnitsky soon made the jump to sales and carved out an incredible 30-year career, helping grow some of the most groundbreaking tech companies, including Oracle, Netscape, and Salesforce early on - even earning a separate chapter about his prolific sales skills in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's 2009 book, "Behind the Cloud." "If you're going to build the greatest product in the world, you're going to need the greatest engineers in the world. But if you can't execute on it, you're going to fail," Rudnitsky tells Business Insider. "And executing means selling." Finance to sales Rudnitsky first got into sales for a simple reason: money. In his first job out of college, with payroll software company ADP's finance team, Rudnitsky realized his peers in sales were getting paid a lot more than he was.  "At a minimum 3 times more," he recalls."

"Either way, customers win. In early November Microsoft announced a new product called Microsoft Teams. It's a way for groups of people, typically colleagues inside a company, to communicate with each other over multiple, simultaneous conversations. It will be part of the software giant's online Office 365 product, the "productivity" subscription program used by 85 million "knowledge workers" around the world. More than a billion additional customers use the offline version of Office. A relatively small group of people-4 million, to be precise-will recognize something familiar about the new Microsoft offering. That's because it's more or less what a San Francisco startup called Slack does. Microsoft is adding a few bells and whistles, including easier-to-follow threaded conversations and video conferencing. Slack, which took the charmingly old-fashioned step of buying a newspaper ad to "welcome" Microsoft to its game, has said it will match those features. (Fortune, like many journalism organizations, uses Slack; after a year of steadily increasing usage, I've grown to like it.) This isn't the first time Microsoft has unveiled a "Slack killer." In fact, it is becoming something of an annual event. What's more, Slack is growing fast. It has 4 million users, up from 1.25 million a year ago. About 30% of those customers pay either $6.67 or $12.50 per month for the product, depending on which features they use. My back-of-the-envelope calculation of Slack's annual revenue, assuming all customers pay the average of the two price points, is around $140 million. "You're pretty close," Slack founder and CEO Stewart Butterfield told me just before Thanksgiving. "

"Amazon's purchases of Twitch and Elemental Technologies appear to be only two parts of a bigger strategy at the company to move deeper into video services through acquisition. Last year, the marketplace and cloud computing giant also quietly acquired a startup out of San Francisco called Biba Systems, which develops and operates video messaging apps aimed at business users. Sources say that Amazon has been working on its own video messaging service, which it plans to unveil during its re:Invent AWS conference later this month. News of Amazon's possible purchase of Biba Systems first surfaced last week, when GeekWire found some Delaware filings that spoke of a merger with an entity called "Justin Acquisition" in September 2015. There was no direct mention of Amazon in the Justin Acquisition document, but the filing included the name of a paralegal employed at the time by Amazon. Amazon never responded to our request (or GeekWire's, it seems) for comment on the story. So we decided to do some digging of our own. We discovered some direct links between Biba and Amazon that point to both Biba's technology and employees now being part of Amazon. We found that Biba had filed and received two patents, one related to video conferencing, and another related to audio streaming. Both of these patents transferred their ownership to Amazon Technologies in the last two months. Furthermore, we've been able to trace active Amazon work email addresses to current Biba employees. (We are not publishing those here.) "

"A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION, A LITTLE MORE ACTION I don't know about you, but here's what I want to see happen. I want the first tab of my OS's home screen to be a central inbox half as good as my chat app's inbox. It want it to incorporate all my messengers, emails, news subscriptions, and notifications and give me as great a degree of control in managing it. No more red dots spattered everywhere, no swiping up to see missed notifications. Make them a bit richer and better-integrated with their originating apps. Make them expire and sync between my devices as appropriate. Just fan it all out in front of me and give me a few simple ways to tame them. I'll spend most of my day on that page, and when I need to go launch Calculator or Infinity Blade, I'll swipe over. Serve me a tasty info burrito as my main course instead of a series of nachos. The next time I'm back stateside, I want my phone to support something like Chrome Apps, but retaining a few useful properties of apps instead of being big, weird icons that just link to websites. I want to sit down at T.G.I Friday's4 and scan a QR code at my restaurant table and be able to connect to their WiFi, order, and pay. Without having to download a big app over my data plan, set up an account, and link a card when it is installed. Imagine if I could also register at the hospital or DMV in this fashion. Or buy a movie ticket. Or check in for a flight. As a user, I want my apps - whether they're native or web-based pseudo-apps - to have some consistent concept of identity, payments, offline storage, and data sharing. I want to be able to quickly add someone in person or from their website to my contacts. The next time I do a startup, I want to spend my time specializing in solving a specific problem for my users, not getting them over the above general hurdles. I don't actually care how it happens. Maybe the OS makers will up their game. Maybe Facebook, Telegram, or Snapchat can solve these pr

"One of the oldest business models in the world is using new technology to trample traditional businesses, drive innovation, and create new and immense sources of value. Matchmakers, the subject of our new book, make it easy for two or more groups of customers, like drivers and riders in the case of Uber, to get together and do business. They operate platforms that make it easy and efficient for participants to connect and exchange value. Unlike traditional businesses, they don't buy inputs, make stuff, and sell it. Instead, they recruit participants, and then sell each group of participants access to the other group of participants. The "participants" are the "inputs" that they use to produce the intermediation service they provide. Today, we're living in the matchmaker economy. It is a bigger and more pervasive part of our lives than many imagine. Three of the five most highly valued companies in the world - Apple, Google, and Microsoft - make much of their profits from connecting different groups, like developers and users in the case of Apple. So do seven of the most valuable unicorns - startups worth more than $1 billion in their latest funding round - such as Uber, Airbnb, and Flipkart. And then many other companies that have IPO'd in the last decade, like Visa, which connects cardholders and merchants, and Facebook, which connects friends, advertisers, and developers. And it's not just these humongous companies. Westfield Malls operates shopping malls that help retailers and shoppers to get together. Then there are all the ad-supported media that troll for eyeballs so they can sell them to marketers. In fact, if you think about, as a consumer and a worker, you probably use multiple matchmakers throughout your day, from the operating system on your phone, to an exchange for trading stock, to a dating app for finding a mate. The firms that make up the gig economy and the sharing economy - the new darlings - are matchmakers t

"Recently, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said at Forbes CIO Summit that there is a major shift taking place in the global business software space - toward smarter and more predictive software. According to Benioff, analyzing data and suggesting the future course of action are the next wave of business opportunity. With that growth potential in mind, Salesforce has been acquiring a number of machine learning and data analysis startups, including PredictionIO, MinHash, Tempo IO and RelatelQ. Benioff said "This will be the huge shift going forward, which is that everybody wants systems that are smarter. Everybody wants systems that are more predictive, everybody wants everything scored, everybody wants to understand what's the next best offer, next best opportunity, how to make things a little bit more efficient." More smarter, more predictive enterprise software. That's exactly what we're seeing in the marketplace as well - and it's an enormous trend. The demand today for intelligent automation and cognitive analytics is unprecedented. We hear it from system integrators who are moving with us into these solution areas, and we see it from our end customers. Big data has unlocked enormous volumes of information, in-memory databases have made it instantly accessible, and today's cloud environments deliver virtually unlimited computational horsepower.  With all that, what's a business to do? This has now become the key question."