• Starsky Robotics, a San Francisco startup that makes self-driving semi-trailer trucks, wants to put driverless big-rigs on the road in 2018.
• That would put the startup well ahead of Tesla's timeline. The electric-car juggernaut predicts its hauler, the Semi, will go into production in 2019.
• Starsky Robotics' CEO says: "I don't think Tesla's in the race."

You've probably never heard of Starsky Robotics, the San Francisco startup that wants to put driverless semi-trailer trucks on the road later this year.

The company faces significant competition from transportation juggernauts such as Waymo, Uber, and Tesla, who are also working on big-rigs that drive themselves.

But Stefan Seltz-Axmacher, the 28-year-old cofounder and CEO of Starsky Robotics, says he isn't worried, simply because he doesn't think trucking is a priority for his rivals.

"I don't think Tesla's in the race. Honestly, I think Waymo, Tesla, and Uber all have their leftover people working on trucks, or maybe their up-and-comers who are trying to make a name for themselves on a less important team," Seltz-Axmacher said.

Founded in 2015, Starsky Robotics — named for the trucking slang term for when drivers work in teams, like the title characters of the 1970s TV series "Starsky & Hutch"— aims to have driverless semi-trailer trucks on the road before the end of 2018, Seltz-Axmacher said.

It could be a first, beating all of those rivals.

The system they're building has big-rigs drive themselves in simple highway conditions, and has human drivers take remote control from miles away when the trucks encounter anything weird or complicated. The plan is to eventually hire dozens of drivers, who will each monitor several trucks at once from the safety of a computer screen.

Before the year's end, Seltz-Axmacher says Starsky Robotics will beat Tesla to putting self-driving semi-trucks on the road — without a human in the driver seat.

The company may already be halfway there. Starsky Robotics has been hauling freight for other companies and making money since April 2017, with a small number of self-driving, but manned vehicles operating in southeastern parts of the US.

Starsky Robotics employs seven drivers and its trucks cover about 150 miles every day, according to Seltz-Axmacher.

And while its competitors are focused on ride-hailing, electric vehicles, and self-driving cars, Seltz-Axmacher says Starsky Robotics has eyes on long-haul trucking only.

"Saying that we're better than Tesla is like an average baseball player saying that they're better at baseball than Michael Jordan," Seltz-Axmacher said. "I don't know if we're going to be better at basketball, but I don't really care about basketball in this case."

'Least qualified person in this entire industry'

The entrepreneur describes himself as the "least qualified person in this entire industry" to disrupt long-haul trucking. He became interested in trucking as a college student and intern at a manufacturing company based outside Philadelphia.

One day on the job, he learned that buying a new, diesel semi-trailer Class 8 truck  will set you back around $150,000, and that most drivers buy their own vehicles. By comparison, some Lamborghinis start at $200,000.

The cost of getting into the business, combined with poor working conditions, solitude, and life-threatening job hazards, makes long-haul trucking one of the least desirable jobs in America. For these reasons and more, there's a dire shortage of truckers nationwide, pushing up freight costs and, in turn, raising retail prices.

Seltz-Axmacher thinks self-driving semi-trucks can help.

Starsky Robotics employs regular truck drivers, who are familiar with operating these vehicles, to drive using a remote-control steering wheel and pedals from inside a Starsky Robotics office. For now, the company also puts a human in the driver seat.

The goal is not to replace the human behind the wheel, but to relocate them to a driving simulator. Seltz-Axmacher hopes those drivers will spend more time with their families and friends — and avoid the accidents and injuries that befall long-haul truckers all too often.

Trucking rivals

Starsky isn't the only one working on building this future.

Rival Uber's self-driving trucks have been hauling freight on Arizona highways for several months now. The ride-hailing giant said in March that it's not ready for driverless.

Tesla revealed its hulking hauler, which has electric motors and a 500 mile range, at a splashy unveiling in November 2017. The vehicle made its first cargo trip in March, carrying battery packs from Gigafactory 1 in Nevada to Tesla's Fremont factory in California.

The all-electric truck, called the Semi, isn't supposed to go into production until 2019.

Meanwhile, Tesla has hit something of a rough patch. The electric car juggernaut announced plans to lay off about 9% of its employees on Monday, amid efforts to restructure the organization in order to turn a profit. Tesla has already slashed its Model 3 production targets for the year as it struggles to fill orders.

Even so, Seltz-Axmacher says he has no desire to bad-mouth Tesla's Elon Musk.

"It's all fun to talk about how Goliath sucks when Goliath's doing great, and you're the little David," Seltz-Axmacher said."But when Goliath is like on their knees and can't walk and is using a cane, picking on them — that's not the best use of my time."

SEE ALSO: Elon Musk said the 2 things that stress him out most are Tesla Model 3 production and the dangers of AI

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Changing the world takes vision, grit, and hard work.

And it takes just enough crazy to believe you might actually pull it off.

That's what makes the young generation of innovators so important. Chock-full of fresh ideas and optimism, today's crop of up-and-comers aren't wasting time waiting in line; they're building the companies and products of the future right now.

We've rounded up a list of those ahead of the curve: The entrepreneurs, CEOs, and product gurus, ages 30 and under, who are driving innovation from Silicon Valley to South Africa. To be eligible for this list, the person had to have done something awesome in tech in 2018.

Business Insider combed the tech landscape, from startups and tech giants to venture capital firms and investors, to find the most interesting and noteworthy rising stars. Here they are:

SEE ALSO: Meet the rising stars in New York tech who find hot startup deals and manage millions of dollars

Shruti Merchant's startup takes the hassle out of finding affordable housing in California's ritziest markets.

Title:Cofounder and CEO of HubHaus

Age: 24

As millennials continue to move in droves to expensive cities, startups are hatching creative solutions for helping them find affordable housing. HubHaus leases large homes, typically with five to 10 bedrooms, from owners and finds community-seeking renters to fill them.

Launched by Shruti Merchant and her cofounder Kerry Jones in 2016, the company has expanded to 82 properties in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. It's eyeing an expansion outside California in 2018, thanks to a recent round of $10 million in funding, according to Merchant.

Vitalik Buterin created the blockchain technology for ethereum when he was only a teenager.

Title: Founder of Ethereum

Age: 24

Vitalik Buterin first began working on ethereum when he was still a teenager. Today, the cryptocurrency built on ethereum's blockchain technology, ether, is considered one of the most influential cryptocurrencies in the world— spiking to nearly $1,500 in early 2018. 

Buterin, who stepped away from venture capital earlier this year, has remained an active figure in the cryptocurrency community.  In January, Buterin said that he expects 2018 to be a landmark year for ethereum: Already, the project's technology has spurred numerous blockchain applications and decentralized apps. 

Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone have plans to print rockets on the planet Mars.

Title: Cofounders of Relativity Space

Age: 27, 25

Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone left their jobs as engineers at Blue Origin and SpaceX, respectively, to start their own company, Relativity Space. The pair have developed an enormous 3D printer for manufacturing rocket hardware which they hope will make it possible to build rocketships in just a few days. 

In the future, Ellis and Noone hope their technology will be used to print spacecrafts on the planet Mars. Already, the pair has engineered the largest metal 3D printer in the world, which they say can currently manufacture 95% of the materials for a functioning rocket. In three years, they hope to launch a 3D printed rocket into space.

 So far, the company has raised $45.1 million from investors including Mark Cuban, Social Capital, and Y Combinator. 

• The Muse CEO Kathryn Minshew started the company to give people the kind of career guidance she wished she'd had early on.
• For example, the first time she tried to negotiate a raise, she felt extremely uncomfortable — and threw up afterward.
• So far, The Muse has helped over 50 million people find the right jobs and companies.

Kathryn Minshew was telling me about why she started The Muse, the career-advice and job-search platform she cofounded in 2011.

Mainly, she said, it was the desire to "help unlock some of the mysteries of navigating your career," like finding your dream job or petitioning your boss for a salary bump.

"I also," she confessed, "have my own experience."

Minshew is The Muse's 32-year-old CEO. She's incredibly poised: Her answers to my questions were both thoughtful and easy to understand, and I found myself nodding along, vigorously, as we talked in a tiny conference room at The Muse headquarters in New York City.

The experience Minshew was referring to is the time she tried to negotiate a raise early in her career — which has included stints at McKinsey & Company and at the Clinton Health Access Initiative.

"I was so uncomfortable," she said. "I felt nauseous for the entire day before it happened."

She and her boss were located in different cities, so the exchange took place over the phone. "To go into a conversation with my boss and say, 'Thank you, but I think I'm worth more' — I had no idea how to do it. I didn't really know anybody who could coach me through or walk me through how to do it."

She did not get the raise.

"Afterwards," she said, "I threw up in a toilet."

"Luckily, I learned that the sky doesn't fall when you don't get the raise," she added. "So that was useful."

But the experience stuck with her, and made her realize that even someone smart and competent could completely fumble a standard step in building her career.

Over time, she realized that "a lot of what the modern workplace considered the marks of success were just learned behaviors. Do you know how to stand up, look someone in the eye, and give them a firm handshake when you meet them? Yes or no?"

And she began to consider: "Is that really a marker of 'are you a good professional?' Or is it a marker of 'you've been privileged enough to have someone in your life that told you exactly what to do and how to show up in a way that made you seem like a young person of potential?'"

Minshew realized she wanted to give other young professionals the kind of career guidance she wished she'd had

An idea took root. "I just got fascinated by how the internet could democratize access to career information."

That idea originally manifested in PYP Media, which Minshew described in The Wall Street Journal as "a community platform for career-focused women." But disagreements between the cofounders soon led to the dissolution of the company. One of the other PYP cofounders, Alex Cavoulacos, went on to become a cofounder of The Muse.

As Minshew wrote in The Journal, The Muse reached 20,000 active monthly users in their first month — it had taken PYP a year to hit the same milestone.

Minshew focused on giving young professionals the kind of career guidance she wished she'd had. Today, The Muse features advice on answering interview questions and getting a promotion, as well as personal essays on quitting a job to travel. According to Entrepreneur, the site has also helped over 50 million people find the right jobs for them.

By sharing this kind of information, "you can take an individual and give them a leg up, and give them a better shot at being seen for their skills and their abilities in an interview," Minshew said, "not being seen for how well they know how to play the game."

SEE ALSO: A startup founder who was rejected 148 times before raising almost $30 million made 2 small changes to get investors excited

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• Dreams is a new company that's reformatting TV for smartphones.
• It got $5 million from investors including Box Group, NEA, SV Angel, and Ronny Conway's A Capital Ventures.
• It's made watching TV on your smartphone an intuitive experience by reformatting it to fit a mobile frame.

When you first enter the spare, airy office of Dreams, a new media startup, the first thing you notice is a mid-sized television that's been turned on its side. Propped upright against a wall, the TV plays shows that have been reformatted to fit its new vertical orientation.

There's something about this setup that's deeply disorienting: After all, it's the opposite of just about every other TV you've encountered in your life. It looks different. It looks weird. It looks like it might come from the future.

"Longform, professional vertical video is the next trend in television," says Dreams cofounder Tom Bender, a former Google product manager.

Dreams has so far taken in $5 million from investors including NEA, Box Group, Ronny Conway's A Capital Ventures, and SV Angels, as it works to bring that future to the present. 

But why would anyone go to the trouble of turning TV on its side? The answer to this question lies in Bender's hand. Literally. Bender holds up his smartphone.

"In the future, this is the only device that will matter."

Bender and his cofounder, former Instagram engineer Greg Hochmuth, are betting that television viewership is going to switch to mobile. The issue is that so far, no one's figured out how to do it the right way. For the past two years, Bender and Hochmuth have been re-thinking traditional television. To build a TV app that worked for mobile, they decided to start from the ground up. 

In their first few months of research, Bender and Hochmuth found that despite the continued success of YouTube, Netflix, and all similar apps, people don't really like turning their phones on their side to watch video.

"It's not comfortable for your wrist to hold a phone on its side," said Bender. "When we started thinking about TV for the phone, we decided that it has to be vertical. It has to be formatted for the way that you hold your phone."

When you enter Dreams app on your smartphone, you're greeted with a series of a familiar channels: HGTV, Food Network, Animal Planet, all reformatted into a vertical display. There's no commercials. The design is sparse: A network logo that first appears at the top of the screen and a schedule of upcoming shows at the bottom. You can swipe through channels with your finger, almost like channel surfing with traditional TV. 

On Dreams' app, gratification is instant. Unlike other video streaming platforms, there's no scrolling through hundreds of content options as you try to decide what you're going to watch. The content is already there, you just have to tune in.

"We wanted to lift the burden of choice," said Bender. "Television is such an important medium — it's one of the most important mediums. TV deserves its own home screen icon."

To reformat traditional television programs, Dreams' team of video editors resize content from broadcasters before it airs. There's plenty of challenges in refitting traditional TV for a mobile format, said Bender. 

"We've had to get creative, if there's a horizontal plane or a boat or something," said Bender. "We have to adapt everything so that it works for the device."

Some of Dreams' programming, like its Bloomberg news channel, is reformatted in real time. A video editor is tasked with taking a vertical slice from the newscast and adding captions. 

"We have software that we wrote that takes their signal, figures out who's talking, and then adapts it to the frame and redissolves the graphics," said Bender. "The outcome of that is something that feels really made for the phone."

While plenty of shortform video content has taken over smartphones with apps like Snapchat and Instagram, there's few video options available that have been built with the smartphone in mind. 

"We wanted to give people a form of entertainment on their phone that's not screaming and thirsty for someone's three seconds of attention," said Hochmuth. "We felt that was missing on the phone. All you can do on your phone is scroll through and refresh and see more ephemeral, shortform stuff. Moving into longform video content feels interesting and fulfilling."

Ultimately, while the rest of the world worries about reinventing the media industry, Dreams is trying to expand the experience of watching TV itself — and getting ahead of what it sees as a global trend.

"This is different from YouTube TV or a skinny bundle. We wanted to make new mobile channels for a world where billions of people carry smartphones," said Bender. "The goal for this is international."

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For the fifth year running, Google is the number-one company that college students from leading universities want to work for.

That's according to new data from education software company Piazza, which surveyed 150,000 students from more than 600 schools in North America, including Stanford, Harvard, and MIT, about where they most wanted to work.

Getting a job at Google isn't easy: It's commonly said that it's easier to get into Harvard than it is to get a job at Google. Indeed, the company is notorious for its intensive application process, putting applicants through several rigorous rounds of interviews as it tries to suss out the best of the best. 

And yet, the top tech talent of the future wants to work at Google.

Here's what Google is doing right, according to Piazza: 

It presents a clear mission.

"Students have a very clear idea of what they will do at Google," Piazza vice president of client relationships Sean Celli tells Business Insider. "They know the type of impact they'll have. The mission of the organization is a magnet brand for attracting talent."

Its brand resonates with young people.

Google is twenty years old, but its brand still resonates with college students.

For years, the company has maintained its colorful, quirky branding that's withstood the test of time and continued to attract prospective employees.

"It's a challenge for other companies to compete with that," said Celli. "Some of the older-world companies are not clearly defining their brands, and what we're seeing is that a clear brand presence is really important when you want to interest people in working for you."

Working for Google is more than just a job.

Today's graduates are looking for careers that are both personally and professionally enriching, said Celli.

Google's mission appeals to millennials, who tend to be more idealistic when it comes to picking out their career path, said Celli. 

"What they're focused on as a company really resonates with students," said Celli. 

This has proved especially true when it comes to deeply competitive industries like autonomous vehicles. With Uber, Tesla, and Google spinout Waymo all attempting to attract the same pool of talent, Piazza's data shows that Waymo is still the top choice for engineering students with that specialty. 

The race to snag top tech talent from prominent schools is competitive. Typically, tech giants like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are all vying for the same pool of graduates. 

A recent from study from software company Piazza rounded up the companies that computer science students from schools like MIT, Harvard, Stanford, University of Texas Austin, and Georgia Tech are most interested in working for. Piazza extended its questionnaire to more than 600 schools across North America and surveyed around 150,000 students.

Here's where they said they most wanted to work: 

30) Ebay

29) Visa

28) Samsung

• Coinbase users allege that the company has stolen funds and not responded to their complaints, according to complaints filed with the SEC.
• Coinbase says that it's addressing the complaints, and that it has hired more support staff to respond to user inquiries.

Coinbase has long positioned itself as a trusted trading platform among cryptocurrency enthusiasts, but a series of complaints filed with the SEC reveals that the cryptocurrency exchange is not without its troubles.

According to 164 pages of complaints obtained by Mashable, multiple Coinbase users say that they've had issues with the platform. Among the most egregious allegations are the claims that Coinbase "stole" cryptocurrency holdings from its users, repeatedly ignored customer complaints regarding missing funds, and systematically defrauded its customers.

Here's are a few of the complaints filed with the SEC against the company:

• "I have lost...5000$ [sic] of my investment because they never tried to solve my issue."
• "Coinbase has not credited [$21,000 wired to my account], and has not responded to my multiple attempts to contact them to get this issue resolved. I now believe that they are acting criminally."
• "Coinbase suddenly and erroneously froze...my account [containing more than $100,000 of bitcoin] without explanation more than one month ago...Coinbase does not get back to you...Coinbase effectively cuts off consumers from their rightful property and forces risk of loss and lost profits."
• "Coinbase accepts money from users under the pretense of being able to return gains, but systematically disallows that ability once tested...and then cuts [off] all contact with its customers."

That Coinbase is experiencing issues handling its users' funds isn't all that surprising: Cryptocurrency trading platforms are notoriously difficult to scale, and Coinbase has acknowledged that it's been slow to respond to customer inquiries in the past. 

In an email, a representative for Coinbase told Business Insider that the company was proactively tackling any issues with customer complaints. In the past few months, Coinbase has hired more people for its support team, decreased its average time to respond to inquiries, and addressed a backlog of complaints, the representative said. Now, the company estimates that it responds to users in less than ten hours. 

Read the full story over at Mashable here.

SEE ALSO: The top 30 companies where Ivy League graduates who studied computer science say they most want to work

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The Insider Picks team writes about stuff we think you'll like. Business Insider has affiliate partnerships, so we get a share of the revenue from your purchase.

While some startups are bootstrapped, many others seek external funding to help with operating costs and growth plans. Big venture capital firms like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia Capital and accelerators like Y Combinator dominate most people's conceptions of the "typical" investor. 

A number of popular retail startups, however, have investors who you might recognize from ventures that couldn't be more different from the world of Silicon Valley: movies and TV, music, and sports.

When they're not starring in your favorite shows, singing on stage, or winning championships, these celebrities are funneling their money into up-and-coming companies. They see potential in and care about the startups that are helping people live the lives they want to lead.

Learn more about each startup, its total funding amount, and its celebrity investors below. 

Casper

About the company: Casper is an undisputed leader in the online mattress world, with the sales, funding, and name recognition to prove it. Aside from making really comfortable mattresses, it also makes sheets, pillows, and even dog beds. 

Total funding amount: $239.7 million 

Celebrity investors: 50 Cent, Kevin Spacey, Kyrie Irving, Shaun White, Andre Iguodala, Tobey Maguire, Adam Levine, Leonardo DiCaprio, Scooter Braun 

Stance

About the company:Stance was the NBA's official on-court sock for the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 seasons, so it's not surprising it counts an NBA player among its investors. Its athletic socks are specially designed to help you perform your best, but it also has plenty of comfortable, stylish casual socks you can wear during everyday life. 

Total funding amount: $116 million 

Celebrity investors: Will Smith, Dwayne Wade, Nas, Jay-Z 

Daily Harvest

About the company: Daily Harvest makes sipping on delicious, healthy smoothies easy by sending you pre-portioned cups of ingredients that you can just throw in the blender. Unique flavor combos like Dragonfruit and Lychee, Acai and Cherry, and Pineapple and Matcha confirm these aren't just any smoothies you'd ordinarily put together yourself. 

Total funding amount: $43 million 

Celebrity investors: Bobby Flay, Haylie Duff, Shaun White 

Venture capital-backed companies based out of California are usually recognizable. But what can get lost in the mix are the companies based throughout the rest of the country.

VC research firm Pitchbook compiled every state's most valuable VC-backed startup into an interactive graphic. 

We assembled all 50 startups, including that of Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Take a look below for most valuable startups in every state throughout the US. 

SEE ALSO: 50 startups that will boom in 2018, according to VCs

Alabama: ContinuumRx

Name: ContinuumRx

Valuation: $20 million

Amount of funding raised: $20.5 million

Headquarters: Birmingham, Alabama

ContinuumRx is a health technology startup, partnering with health systems and hospitals to provide home infusion services — basically, intravenous medication administration — to patients transitioning from health centers to their homes. 

Alaska: NordAq Energy

Name: NordAq Energy

Equity funding: $90 million (Note: Pitchbook doesn't have valuation data for startups in Alaska, so it listed the one that had raised the most venture capital, instead)

Headquarters: Anchorage, Alaska

NordAq Energy provides oil and gas exploration services throughout the state of Alaska, specifically tapping into the state's hydrocarbon reserves. 

Note that NordAq's website was "disabled" at the time of writing, per a message that appears when you try to visit it. The company did not respond to repeated requests for information on whether or not it is still in business. 

Arizona: InfusionSoft

Name: InfusionSoft

Valuation: $500 million

Amount of funding raised: $127.9 million

Headquarters: Chandler, Arizona

InfusionSoft is a software company that provides small businesses with an all-in-one set of sales and marketing tools.

• Jay-Z has filed new paperwork for a venture firm called Marcy Venture Partners along with Walden Venture Capital managing director Lawrence Marcus and Roc Nation president Jay Brown.
• Last year, it was reported that Jay-Z was planning on launching a fund along with Sherpa Capital.

Jay-Z is expanding his efforts in venture capital according to new paperwork that was filed with the state of California  sometime last month. 

Along with Walden Venture Capital managing director Lawrence Marcus and Roc Nation president Jay Brown, Jay-Z, otherwise known as Shawn Carter, is creating another fund, called Marcy Venture Partners. 

The fund's name might be a nod to Carter's Brooklyn upbringing in the public housing complex the Marcy Projects, which has been repeatedly referenced in his lyrics in the past.

This isn't the first time the celebrated rap artist has turned his eye to venture capital. In recent years, Carter has backed several high profile companies including luggage company Away, brokerage app Robinhood, and private jet company JetStarter.

Last year, Axios reported that Carter was planning to launch a VC fund along with the San Francisco-based venture firm Sherpa Capital. Plans for the fund failed to materialize after reported complications with Sherpa, although the new filing reveals that the delays haven't caused Jay Z to lose his interest in investing. 

Representatives for Jay-Z did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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• Sequoia Capital has raised $6 billion, the Financial Times reports.
• The firm has plans to raise $2 billion more.
• The firm's $6 billion global-focused fund is the largest in Silicon Valley's history. 

For months, prominent Silicon Valley-based venture firm Sequoia Capital has been quietly amassing a multi-billion dollar fortune to take on global competitors — primarily, the Japanese funding conglomerate Softbank. 

Now, the Financial Times reports that Sequoia has closed its first fundraising efforts for its new fund at $6 billion and has plans to take in $2 billion more in upcoming months.

The fund is the largest raise in Silicon Valley's history, and nearly four times the size of the firm's previous fund.

It's been widely reported that the money will be used to fund emerging companies with multi-million dollar investments worldwide. 

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• Cyan Banister is a self-taught engineer, entrepreneur, and angel investor.
• Banister made early bets on companies like Uber, SpaceX, and Postmates.
• Now, she manages multi-millionaire dollar deals at Peter Thiel's venture firm Founders Fund.
• But Banister didn't have a traditional education: She dropped out of high school as a teenager amid issues at home, and learned through odd jobs and picking up books.

Cyan Banister is a self-taught engineer, entrepreneur, and angel investor who made early bets on companies like Uber, SpaceX, and Postmates. Now, she manages multi-millionaire dollar deals at Founders Fund, Peter Thiel's San Francisco-based venture firm.

Banister's path to success isn't typical for a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist: As a teenager, she dropped out of high school to provide for herself after issues at home forced her to become a ward of the state.

Since she was 15 years old, Banister cobbled together a living working as a sales associate at record shops and as a call-person at tech-support hotlines. Most of Banister's engineering knowledge comes from books she picked up in her early twenties.

"I used to be ashamed about the fact that I never went to college," Banister said in an interview with Business Insider. "Years ago, I'd never speak about it."

Now, however, Banister says she feels differently. Among her Ivy League-educated peers, Banister considers her lack of formal education to be "a badge of honor."

Banister's nontraditional education figured as a compelling selling point when she was in talks with Founders Fund's partners to join the firm. The fund's founder, Peter Thiel, is famous for his unconventional outlook on education and for incentivizing students to drop out of college with his technology-focused fellowship program.

"I think that was one of the things that Founder's Fund really liked about my background and experience," she said. "I don't fit the traditional mold."

Bucking the status quo has long been a defining quality of the longtime investor. She's critical of San Francisco's left-leaning politics and identifies as a socially liberal libertarian.

Two years ago, Banister came out publicly as genderqueer — a move she feared might cut her off from potential business opportunities.

"It's very difficult to be gender fluid and sexually fluid and fit into the business world, because you get excluded from a lot of things," she said in an interview with Wired.

At the office, Banister, who doesn't have a preferred pronoun, goes by her favorite nickname: "dude."

Now, Banister has plans to write a book about what she calls "the power of incrementalism."

In an interview with Business Insider, Banister described the qualities she credits to her success:

1. Be individualistic.

"A lot of people will want to label you. They'll say, 'There's more power when there's all of us together,' but I believe there's more power when you find yourself and when you don't become a part of group think. If you can think with individual thoughts, you're more likely to set yourself apart."

2. Take ownership — even for the things you aren't proud of.

"Let's say you do something you're not proud of. It's so much easier to blame everyone around you. You have to sit and face yourself in the mirror — I've done this many times in my life. There's been times where I said or did something that I wasn't proud of, and took ownership of it internally. I don't believe in blaming others for your circumstances. Individual responsibility is where everything starts."

3. Don't count on other people's praise.

"I don't depend on people to cheer-lead for me. If I do a really awesome thing, I'll take a moment and recognize that I did a great job on it. Maybe people see this as egotistical, but I think it's important to own your successes and feel proud for what you've accomplished."

• After electric scooters descended on San Francisco, city dwellers voiced their outrage over scooters routinely blocking sidewalks and building entrances.
• Parking startup SpotHero says it's in talks with several, unnamed scooter companies to help them move scooters off the sidewalks and into garages.
• The SpotHero CEO said the benefits of doing so are twofold: Scooter users can more easily find the vehicles after parking their cars, while more scooters will find homes in garages instead of taking up street space.

The scooter armageddon in San Francisco was over almost as quickly as it began.

After the city received complaints of scooters routinely blocking sidewalks and building entrances, causing people to trip, and making sidewalks less accessible for people with mobility issues, it slapped the three high-profile scooter companies with cease and desist orders. Those startups are now vying for a limited number of permits from the city.

Now, Mark Lawrence, the CEO of parking startup SpotHero, tells Business Insider that his company is very close to a solution for the complaint that largely led to the scooter crackdown in the first place: The fact that because there's no dedicated scooter parking, they tend to get dumped anywhere and everywhere on streets and sidewalks. 

Several scooter companies are in talks with SpotHero, an app that makes it fast and convenient to book a parking spot across 49 cities, to dock scooters in parking garages or share data to ensure scooters are located where they will most likely be used.

Lawrence said since the drama around scooter-sharing has unfolded, several companies — which he declined to name — approached SpotHero about working together to find a solution for scooter parking.

One of the most well-funded players in the scooter market, Lime, told Business Insider it's in conversation with several partners that will "allow us to extend access of our scooters to more riders."

"SpotHero is an example of an innovative company that would complement Lime's overall rider experience," a Lime spokesperson said.

The other top two scooter companies, Bird and Spin, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bird, the most valuable of the three, is said to be valuing itself at $2 billion as it pursues new funding.

SpotHero works by linking drivers with over 5,000 parking lots, garages, and valets across the US and Canada. In the app, a driver can find, reserve, and pay for a spot with just a few clicks. SpotHero takes a commission on every reservation made.

Lawrence said some commuters want to drive into the city, park somewhere, and book a scooter the rest of the way to their destination. Someday, scooter companies might put scooters in SpotHero locations to make their lives easier and rake in their business.

Data could also help scooter companies be smarter. If SpotHero knows there's a big event coming up and lots of parking spots in a certain radius are booked in advance, the startup could tip off scooter companies to deploy their scooters there, Lawrence said.

"We know where millions of people are already going to pay to park and where they're going to be. A percentage of those are going to need a scooter, and so the question is, is that scooter going to be physically available where people need it?" Lawrence said.

The benefits are twofold: Scooter users can more easily find the vehicles, while more scooters will find homes in garages instead of taking up space on sidewalks.

It would be a surprising twist in the scooter saga, because all of these scooter companies market their vehicles as "dockless." People reserve a local scooter on their phone, ride for a small fee, and at the end of the journey, leave the scooter wherever to be claimed by the next rider. Not having docking stations is part of what makes them convenient.

Lawrence said the talks with scooter companies are still early, but he's optimistic that his startup will partner with others to improve the scooter situation for everybody.

"The way we do it isn't so much important as the why, which is, so we can make mobility better, so we can reduce congestion, so we can get people to move in and out of cities," he said.

SEE ALSO: A startup in the West Coast scooter sharing craze is already worth $1 billion — here's what it's like to ride a Bird scooter

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• GOAT is the world's largest resale marketplace for high-end sneakers, and is valued at $250 million.
• Its cofounder and CEO Eddy Lu spent more than 10 years creating and leading failed startups and business projects before achieving success.
• He credits struggles — and even fights — with his cofounder Daishin Sugano in their early days of working together to their current efficient workflow and mutual understanding.

For more than a decade, Eddy Lu tried to find the next big thing: 99-cent smartphone apps, golf apparel, Japanese desserts. They all flopped, but he wasn't headed back to the Wall Street world he left.

Then he got into high-end sneakers with an online marketplace called GOAT— as in "Greatest of All Time," as they say in sports and rap. And in 2015, on Black Friday, GOAT blew up. It couldn't keep up, and thousands of orders went unfilled. Lu felt sick about it, but he also knew he finally had something worth fighting for.

He told us what that was like, in an episode of Business Insider's podcast, "Success! how I Did It": "We responded to every single customer-service message. I think there were about 4,500 that day. But at that point it was better to be hated than unknown."

Today GOAT is the world's largest sneaker-resale market. It has over $100 million in funding, 7 million users, more than 300 employees, and 400,000 pairs for sale. It raised its latest round of funding at a valuation of $250 million, according to Recode. Earlier this year, it merged with the retail store Flight Club, an iconic reseller in the sneakerhead world, and one that can provide GOAT with the international reach it needs to scale.

Lu's cofounder, Daishin Sugano, has been with him for every failed startup. And Lu says it's thanks to him — and a pair of counterfeit sneakers — that they finally hit the ground running.

Listen to the full episode here:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, or your favorite podcast app. Check out previous episodes with:

• Girl Scouts CEO Sylvia Acevedo
• Best-selling author David Sedaris
• Clique Brands CEO Katherine Power
• Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert

Transcript edited for clarity.

Eddy Lu: My cofounder, he's a huge sneaker enthusiast. He started buying sneakers when his dad bought him his first pair of Jordans, the Jordan 5 Grapes, back in the day.

Rich Feloni: Yeah, with the purple in them.

Lu: Yeah. And 23 years later, because Michael Jordan's number is 23, they rereleased the Jordan 5 Grapes. He went on eBay, bought a pair, and he got them, and they just didn't feel right. They turned out to be fake. He tried to ask the seller for his money back; he tried to contact eBay. It's just an onerous process. We were just, like, "We could build a really great app to help clean up this market." So we built GOAT.

Dropping everything to build anything

Feloni: At what point in your life did you realize you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Lu: After my aspiring basketball career ended. The Lakers didn't draft me out of college. It's not like I had a network of lemonade stands when I was a kid or anything like that.

Feloni: So you're not falling into that mythology there, no?

Lu: For me, I always liked building things, and that's why I did computer science. I graduated in 2003 when CS wasn't in favor. It was after the dot-com bust, and it was just because I liked building things that I wanted to do computer science. I went into the corporate life. I was a consultant. I was an analyst at Lehman Brothers when that still existed.

Feloni: Why did you get into finance if you got a computer-science degree?

Lu: I never wanted to do hardcore programming. I did like building businesses, and thinking about new problems. But going into corporate life, I realized I'm not a good employee, to be honest. Every night, and this is back to when I worked at Lehman, I became roommates with Daishin. Every night after work we would just talk about what we could build on the side, what we could do, how to create a new business. It wasn't a startup back then, it was just, "Let's create a new business while we're young."

Feloni: Why? What do you think drove you to say that?

Lu: I don't know. Besides the fact that we always wanted more, for some reason. I left my job in consulting to do banking because I was just kind of bored. It just wasn't stimulating, so I thought doing a banking job would be a lot more rewarding and challenging. There was a lot more work, but it still wasn't challenging to me and us. We just kept talking about other ideas on the side. Working corporate jobs like that, demanding corporate jobs, it's really hard to try to do another business on the side. Daishin and I quit cold turkey on the same day in 2007. We were just, like, "Let's just quit and figure it out." Much to the chagrin of our parents. My dad was very happy I had a Lehman Brothers job. But we just didn't feel like it was right. We wanted to try something while we were young, so we just quit and started to do stuff. Thankfully Daishin is a designer; I was a developer. That was when the iPhone just came out, so we built a bunch of those 99-cent apps.

Feloni: Like games and stuff?

Lu: Games. Little apps. Little to-do apps. All those types of things to just start our startup journey. That's where we started, and we just never looked back, thankfully. It's been a long, painful, meandering road to GOAT.

Feloni: Do you think that you and Daishin would have quit your jobs cold turkey had you guys not had these conversations? Would you have done it on your own if he had not been in your life?

Lu: Having a cofounder you can trust is so important. You hear it all the time; it's really hard to start a startup by yourself. I've seen it through the years, and believe me, Daishin and I have worked through our issues. We're an old, married couple now, but in the beginning, we had physical fights, we've thrown each other to the ground, there was this one time at a restaurant, I remember. We had a disagreement about some business term, and we were yelling at each other at the restaurant — people were looking at us. He got up and walked away, and I kept on barking at him, walking out the door. We totally forgot to pay. We just walked out the door all mad at each other. But we knew that, just right after that, we were just like, "OK, let's just focus again. Let's just get to it." And that's what's really built the company. Resilience is another one of our core values, and it's because we were able to bounce back so quickly from setbacks. Thankfully, since we've been together, and worked through all those issues for so long, now that we're doing GOAT it's just so much easier. We know our lanes, we know what each other's good at, and we just can execute.

Feloni: Yeah, and in the early years, when you were learning ... you had a bunch of odd businesses like golf apparel, those phone apps, high-end tea, the Japanese cream puff things. What were you trying to accomplish? Were you just throwing things at the wall and seeing what stuck?

Lu: What's funny about the cream-puff franchise is that we were building startups on the side, iPhone apps, stuff like that. We were just, like, "Hey, this is a cool, single product. Easy to do concept." Because it's just a single product cream-puff concept.

Feloni: When was this?

Lu: This was right about '07, '08, when we decided to do these things. We were just, like, "This could be great passive income, because we could just put some money in, hire some good managers, and they can operate the stores, and we can have passive income while we build our startup dream." Nothing is ever passive, if you know about the food-service industry. It quickly went from a passive income to something that was pretty hands-on. Especially during the '08 downturn when things were going down. We operated the store a lot; we worked the store. A lot of friends are always saying, "Oh, I would love to own a coffee shop or a restaurant someday." For me it's just, like, no, don't ever do that, because the chance for success is so hard, we quickly learned. Thankfully, we did it while we were young. But those things scale linearly. There's no exponential growth, so it's like you just have to put in capital, you might make a little bit of money, chances are you won't. We learned that tough lesson for those few years because we were in it, it was not passive, we were spending probably 80% of our time doing that, and 20% working on a startup. After a few years, we sold some, we dissolved some, and we just moved on because we just had to cut our losses. It was a great learning lesson while we were young.

Feloni: Why do you think you have that resilience?

Lu: Me, personally? I'm pretty stubborn, I guess. Yeah, I don't know. I was pretty independent growing up. My parents didn't pay for college, they didn't pay for my car; I just kind of had to figure things out when I was growing up. We had a middle-class upbringing. I just had to figure things out and couldn't just fall back on anyone. I think just because of that, I've been pretty stubborn and focused on really making sure things work.

Feloni: Was there ever a moment when you questioned what you were doing and wondered, "Do I need to go back to an office job?"

Lu: How many thousands of moments are we talking about? When we were doing the cream-puff franchise, and it was '09 when the economy wasn't good, and we were in debt. Every kind of debt possible. I was in credit-card debt, in debt to my ex-girlfriend, my girlfriend at the time. It was a lot of pain. I would wake up in the middle of the night with just pangs of guilt, and I was scared, yeah. I don't think Daishin and I ever thought we ... To be honest, going back to a big corporate job just was probably worse than that. I dreaded every Sunday afternoon when I was working at a big corporate job. I never felt that ever since we started doing our whole entrepreneurship journey. I just think it was not going be in the cards. I think we were just foolish and stupid, but we just thought we would just figure it out.

Getting to GOAT

Feloni: Before you got to GOAT, when you were building GrubWithUs, you raised $7 million for that, right?

Lu: Yes.

Feloni: By the time that you pivoted to GOAT, didn't you have only a million dollars left?

Lu: Yeah. It was a fun journey. We had investors at that point, and we pivoted a couple of times. A few of our investors were antsy, they wanted us to get acqui-hired, they wanted us to return the money. We tried a few times and we didn't work. We did those acqui-hire meetings. We talked to different companies. But again, we just didn't want to be a middle manager at some random company. To be honest, Daishin will be the first person to tell you, we didn't try too hard when we had those acqui-hire conversations because we knew that we wanted to just keep going. At a certain point, we made a decision, and we told our board, "Hey, we have one last go. We're going to try something."

Feloni: So he pitched it first?

Lu: Daishin complained to me a lot about the fake Grape purchase that he had. We looked into the sneaker market, and we didn't know if it was a big enough opportunity at the time. The recent trend is a lot of kids, and especially males, care a lot more about fashion. They're buying street wear, they're buying sneakers. But back then, we were just like, "Oh, it's kind of a still, a smaller market." So we thought about the idea, we put it on the side, and our board member, Greg, at the time, he used to work at eBay. One day at a board meeting, he was just like, "Hey, do you guys know anything about sneakers?" We were like, "Yeah." And he said sneakers are one of the few categories that's growing. People don't collect baseball cards anymore, Magic cards, stamps, coins. But sneakers were a collectible that was growing. So we decided to look into it even further, in collaboration with Greg. We were just like, "Hey, we could build this and do something." That's how GOAT was born.

Feloni: Was this your last shot?

Lu: I don't think it would've been the last shot. We would've figured out a way to keep going.

Feloni: Daishin started as a sneaker fan, but you didn't personally?

Lu: I've always liked sneakers, but I wasn't as crazy as Daishin, having 400 pairs, stuff like that. He definitely was the enthusiast.

Feloni: When you go into a space like this, where there are so many obsessive fans, when you're just starting out, just entering into it, how are you able to offer an authentic experience for people who take this culture so seriously if you were initially coming in as an outsider?

Lu: Daishin had all the product knowledge, so he's our head of product. He's really been driving it. But it was pretty painful in the beginning still. We launched in July 2015, publicly. There was a day in late September, it was about 6 p.m., we still didn't have a sale that whole day. I went in and bought a pair to tell the team, "Hey, guys. We got a sale." It definitely was not easy going. It's a two-sided marketplace. There's a lot of stuff that has to happen for you to be able to scale. We were just figuring out how to make an impact in this market. If you look at our site today, it looks like a retail-like experience, where you only see stock photos. It's a big deviation from the past sneaker marketplaces, especially places like eBay, where you see the seller photos and all these bad and crappy photos that they take. We decided to make it a retail-like experience, because we wanted people to trust GOAT as the single source of truth for authenticity. You don't have to trust the seller for authenticity. Actually, a lot of people in the sneaker market weren't fans of that. Big sneaker influencers in the industry emailed us and said, "Hey, not sure if this is the best way to go, because we really want see the pictures of these sneakers before we buy." We just had a point of view. We said, "No, this is how the future of the sneaker market's going to be, where you want to trust us so that there's as little friction as possible in the market." We went against some of our friends in the sneaker industry.

Feloni: It was a matter of surrounding yourself with the people in the community, but also knowing when to just stick to your own guns?

Lu: Yeah, and the inflection point happened Black Friday 2015. It was funny: Our head of marketing, Sen, it was a week before Black Friday, and he was just, like, "Hey, why don't we create a Black Friday promo?" And we're like, "Of course, just throw something up." We didn't think anything of it; it was just something else we were going to try for growth. We decided to discount all the hottest styles of the year; it was the first year of the Yeezy Turtle Dove, the Supreme 5s. But we said, "Hey, let's discount the 12 hottest styles of the year to retail prices." We put it out there, and the whole internet thought we had thousands and thousands of pairs. We just had sub-100 pairs, but we gained over 100,000 users because of the promo. Every single influential blog picked it up. Complex, Hypebeast, Highsnobiety. Our servers crashed every single day because we've never had scale before. This was the first time we've had scale. I was one of the back-end developers back then, and we never cached any pages, we never optimized queries. It was just such a painful week up until Black Friday. But on Black Friday, as you can imagine, it was so painful because 100,000 users tried to access our app. It just didn't work, and we got so much hate mail and hate Instagrams. I'll show you it later. A comment per second: "F--- you.""Screw this app." All this stuff, and it was a pretty traumatic experience, because we disappointed 100,000 people, when only a few dozen people got shoes. We had this whole apology tour. We responded to every single customer service message. I think there were about 4,500 that day. We just didn't know what happened. But at that point it was better to be hated than unknown. Even though it was so traumatic, I would've done it a thousand times over, because it was that inflection point in our business where people were upset, but they started to realize our value proposition. It's, "Hey, GOAT is this place where I don't have to worry about getting fakes because they authenticate my sneakers." We turned it from something that was bad into something that was good, because we started to educate them about the market, and us, and the industry. What's funny is that to this day we get some random messages that say, "I haven't forgotten about that Black Friday yet." But also we have a couple employees from that. One of our earliest customer-service managers, she participated in that event, and because of all that commotion, she was, like, "I can probably help these guys with their customer service." So she joined us. She's still with us today.

Feloni: Why do you think it is that the sneaker industry, the collectible styles, the more exotic ones, why do you think it's been so big in the last several years, 10 years even?

Lu: I just think when I was a kid, and you would go to a Foot Locker and say, "Hey, I want these Jordan 1s." And they'd be like, "Oh, sorry, we don't have your size, but we have these Pippins for you if you want them." It was just like, "Oh, I'm just gonna play basketball. OK, fine. Let me get these Pippins." This day and age, people crave individuality, and people know what they want. Today, if you walk into a retailer, and they don't have the exact thing that you want, you're going to turn away, you're going to look online, you're going to go somewhere else. I just think that, given that people crave individuality, they crave fashion, they want to be unique, they come to us because of that. You don't want to just go to the store and just get whatever they have left.

Feloni: Do you see it as a trend?

Lu: Yeah, I definitely think it's a growing trend, just because guys haven't cared about fashion for so long. There are a bunch of people, the sneaker enthusiast and the fashion enthusiast, who were the self-starters of that trend, first movers. Now guys are just more fashionable now. They care about what they wear, and it's going to be a trend that lasts a long time.

Feloni: You were the first to market with offering this kind of online marketplace for buyers and sellers, get shoes authenticated.

Lu: We weren't exactly the first to market. Flight Club, which has been around for 13 years, started as a brick-and-mortar consignment shop in New York, and they expanded to LA. They have a huge web presence as well, and they really pioneered this industry. Thankfully, we had the opportunity to merge GOAT and Flight Club together earlier this year, to really create the largest marketplace in the world. It's really from their knowledge and tutelage that GOAT even existed, because we saw that there was a demand for this category in this industry, in terms of resale sneakers. For us, we really looked up to them. I think we have a different vision than some of the other people. We are focusing on sneakers right now. Other companies have gone and said, "Handbags, watches, things like that." For us, sneakers first; let's build the best and most recognizable sneaker company. Let's build our brand. It's because when we did GrubWithUs, one lesson that we learned was that we tried to open so many cities at once. We opened in Chicago, Dallas, Austin, LA, New York, and we didn't even get one city right before we tried to expand into all these other cities. We kind of spread ourselves so thin that we just weren't able to execute anything well. For us, we've barely scratched the surface in terms of selling sneakers. We're still a small player in the sneaker space. Our ideal vision is to be the sneaker market for everyone. So it's not just people who are buying Yeezys, but it's people who just wanna buy that pair of runners or that pair of basketball shoes to wear. We want to service the whole market, and since we've barely scratched the surface, we want to focus on sneakers before we even think about going into other categories.

Resilience above all

Feloni: What do you think the biggest challenge of your career has been?

Lu: I think one of the biggest challenges was winding down all the cream-puff shops that we had. It was not fun. We honestly owed a bunch of money, even to the city and the state. Winding down those products, we had investors that we had to, unfortunately say, "Hey, we lost all your money." Yeah, it was just a big learning lesson into the types of businesses we wanted to create in the future. We never wanted to do something where we were restricted in terms of our vision because it was just much better to set our own path. I think, even though it was a really tough lesson, again, it's one of those things, I think, Daishin and I would've done over, even though it was our most challenging thing, because we learned so much from off-roading that franchise.

Feloni: How did you pull yourself out of that?

Lu: It took a long, long time, just slowly repaying people. I repaid that ex I was talking about over the years, and just repaid the state, repaid a bunch of those debts. It took a while to wind out, but thankfully, like I was saying, we were young. We were able to pull ourselves out of it. I'm so glad it wasn't one of those things where you retire and then you're like, "Hey, I want to open up a coffee shop." Then you put all money into it, and it doesn't work, and you have to go back to work because of it. So thankfully we were young and could afford to repay it.

Feloni: How do you personally define success?

Lu: For me, success is really just happiness and freedom. I think with success comes those, naturally. I think as long as you have the freedom to do what you want and you're enjoying every single day, that's pretty successful.

Feloni: Yeah. What's next for you?

Lu: People ask us this a lot, you know, "Oh, are you gonna sell your company?""What are you gonna do?" Daishin and I know that starting a startup's really hard. Getting product-market fit is so difficult. We tried for so many years to do that. As long as we're having fun, as long as we're successful, we're going to keep going. It's not like I have a better idea. I don't have a better idea, I don't want to be a middle manager somewhere, so let's just run this company, run it well, be happy about it, enjoy every single day, and just like build a big business. And that's what's next.

Feloni: What advice would you give to people who want to have a career like yours?

Lu: Definitely be resilient. I mean, GOAT's had extreme success, thankfully, but it took a long time to get there, and it's really easy to give up. It's really easy to burn out being a startup founder. Thankfully Daishin and I like I was saying are pretty foolish and stupid and never gave up and just kept going, but it is … it's probably very unlikely you're going to get it right on the first time. Or the second time. Or the third time. I think, you know, for us and our team, we're just executors. We, for me, my belief is, let's try something, and if it doesn't work, we can always change. I mean, yeah, it's not heart surgery, so I'm always willing to try something as long as there's a good hypothesis around it. I'm not the type of person where you do a ton of research and then you create a 50-page deck to start something. It's really … and the people who thrive on our team, our executive team, are people who just kind of get stuff done. And so it's just, "Hey, we have a hypothesis — it's grounded in some data-driven thought, it's grounded in some gut feeling. Let's try it. If it doesn't work, let's try something else." And that's why we've never given up. Just because there's always something to try. So let's just keep going.

Feloni: It seems like you've already been in a situation where the worst-case scenario came true, right?

Lu: Yeah. And so it's only up from here.

Feloni: Well thank you so much, Eddy.

Lu: Thanks, Rich.

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NOW WATCH: Sneaker fanatics are driving a massive $1 billion resale market

San Francisco-based startup StyleBee allows clients to book appointments with professional cosmeticians and stylists who come to you, not the other way around.

Since it launched four years ago, StyleBee has earned the moniker "Uber for beauty" for its on-demand styling services that can come to you at your office, home, or anywhere you choose.

A slew of these "beauty on-demand" apps have cropped up in the past few years, including New York-based Glamsquad — arguably the most popular — which is now also available in the Bay Area. The salon-less concept is one that's been around for a while, but the on-demand service via an app is relatively new.

A personal need for one such service arose during a workday recently when I learned that a post-work event I was attending was a tad dressier than I had prepared for. I had packed a change of clothes, but had covered up my bedhead with a hat that morning.

So I booked a conference room in the WeWork building where I work to have a StyleBee stylist come and fix the monstrosity that was my hair.

Here's how it went.

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Though there's a StyleBee app, I actually ended up using the website for the most part.

Frustratingly, the app crashed multiple times while I was trying to use it. Choose the wrong service and want to go back? Too bad, the app will buffer and you'll have to start all over. The same thing happened when I needed to correct my credit card number.

I was a little surprised that the app of a company founded in 2014 was basically nonfunctional. 

When I first logged on to book a 3:45 PM appointment, I fiddled around before securing my spot — and after a few minutes of idling, my 3:45 PM spot had been taken. I chose the 4 PM spot instead.

But it was actually a weird sense of relief that, despite the wishy-washy app performance, the service I'd enlisted to do my hair up was so in-demand, I had lost an appointment slot.

I proceeded to use the website to book my appointment and to upload a headshot and some reference photos of how I'd like my hair to be styled.

For context, I wanted something easy, off-the-face, and geometric, not unlike Daisy Ridley's character in the recent "Star Wars" installments. I wasn't joining an intergalactic resistance that night, but I was on a photo assignment. I needed my hair to behave.

• Camera startup Light plans to introduce its first smartphone later this year, according to the Washington Post.
• The Post reports that the phone will have between five and nine rear camera lenses, not unlike Light's L16 camera, which has 16 camera lenses. 
• There's no word yet on how much the phone will cost, but the L16 camera retails for $1,950.

Light, a startup known for its 16-lens camera, is bringing its futuristic technology to a new smartphone.

The company plans to unveil its first smartphone later this year, according to the Washington Post's Geoffrey A. Fowler.

The phone will have somewhere between five and nine camera lenses on the back, will be capable of capturing 64-megapixel images, and will have better low-light performance and "sophisticated depth effects," the Post reports. 

And unlike most current smartphones, Light's phone will have a circular camera array on the back:

While there's not much more to go on than that, the L16 camera hints at how Light's smartphone would work. The L16 works by collecting light information from the 16 different lenses and sensors mounted haphazardly on its back. Then, that information is stitched together by an algorithm to create a high-resolution image that could theoretically rival a photo captured on a DSLR camera. 

The idea behind the L16 — and by extension, a smartphone with the same technology — is that you're able to capture professional photos without having to lug around an expensive digital camera.

Light plans to announce its smartphone later this year, according to the Post. There's no word yet on how much it will cost, but Light's L16 camera goes for $1,950. 

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Silicon Valley is still the global leader in startup creation, but Chinese cities Beijing and Shanghai are leading the pack over in Asia, hot on the heels of their Western counterparts. 

Most of the "heavyweight hubs"— meaning cities with stable growth startups and a higher concentration of later stage rounds — are in the US, according to a survey conducted by CB Insights, but half of the notably "high growth" cities are located in Asia. The latter is defined by a few characteristics, namely higher dollar investments, and includes big-name cities like Tokyo and New Delhi. However, as this chart from Statista shows, Chinese cities most consistently see the results. 

About 80% of the Asian startups that hit the $1 billion milestone (AKA unicorns) between 2012 and 2017 are based out of China, with Shanghai creating 29 and Beijing creating 17. For some perspective: Silicon Valley created 57 in the same period of time, but New York only created 13.

Beijing startups alone brought in $72 billion in funding since 2012, second only to Silicon Valley's $140 billion; New York brought in $36 billion and Shanghai brought in $23 billion. 

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Nine seasons in and hundreds of products later, the show "Shark Tank" continues to entertain us as well as the panel of celebrity investors with creative pitches. However, that doesn't always mean the products are actually good. Some end up being a little too creative or out-there and border on plain gimmicky or "Who would even use that?"

We looked through all the "Shark Tank" products available for purchase and came away with a selection of star products for the home that made us curse and ask ourselves, "Why didn't we think of this earlier?"

Many solve for the wasteful design of many common products you already use, while others address the annoying inconveniences that everyone experiences. 

Check out the "Shark Tank" home products that are worth buying below.

SEE ALSO: The 20 best gifts that got their start on ‘Shark Tank’

A spring-loaded laundry hamper

This hamper drops down as you add clothes and rises as you remove them, meaning doing laundry will no longer be that uncomfortable chore you never look forward to. It eases the strain on your lower back, so it's especially great for expecting mothers, people with bad backs, and the elderly. 

Household Essentials Lifter Hamper, $29.99, available at Amazon

A self-cleaning dog potty

If you've already tried many indoor potty training systems, your search ends here with the world's first self-cleaning dog potty. You can adjust the timer to automatically change a dirty pad one, two, or three times a day, or manually change it with a push of a button. The machine will wrap and seal the waste, keeping your home clean and odor-free. It's best for dogs under 25 pounds. 

BrilliantPad Self-Cleaning & Automatic Indoor Dog Potty + 1 Roll, $149.99, available at Amazon

Note: Currently only available through third-party sellers

A rapid ramen cooker

Granted ramen is already a pretty convenient meal to make, this tool makes the process even easier. The water line stops you from overfilling the bowl, the bowl doesn't get overly hot, and you don't need to use a pot and stove. It's perfect for anyone who doesn't have access to a kitchen, including students living in dorms and office workers. 

Rapid Ramen Cooker (Red), $6.99, available at Amazon

• Adam Weinstein, a former senior employee at LinkedIn, quit last year to start his own data analytics company, Cursor.
• Cursor lets users inside a company search for data across different departments, databases, and platforms.
• The company launched two months ago, and teams at Apple and Slack already use the program.

Adam Weinstein was a senior employee at LinkedIn when he was asked to teach employees in China about the company's data analytics operation, or how the company uses data to make business decisions.

But the task, he found, was more difficult than he anticipated because there wasn't a unified place to find data across different departments, databases, and platforms.

Weinstein cobbled together a basic tool that could do this, which then became used frequently inside LinkedIn. For analysts, he figured, a system that would allow people to easily cull and keep track of data without bouncing off emails to several departments would make their jobs easier — and it could make for a lucrative business opportunity. 

"I talked to lots of folks and I found that the problem we faced at LinkedIn was not unique to us or the technology sector," Weinstein told Business Insider.

After just three years working at LinkedIn, Weinstien quit in March 2017 and founded Cursor, a software company that allows anyone — not just analysts — to search for data across the entire company inside the same program.

Cursor also keeps track of what data people have asked for, thereby reducing duplicate searches. 

"Analysts are on one side of the market. They're the ones the produce the content, get asked questions and write the code," Weinstein said. "On the other side are the people that are asking the questions, and those tend to be data driven leaders from anywhere in the organization. Both are using Cursor to interface with each other."

The company launched in March with $2 million in seed funding from Toba Capital and Ride Ventures. Teams at Apple, Slack, and of course LinkedIn already use the product. 

'They would write a check for this immediately'

Weinstein started working at LinkedIn in 2014 after Bright, an AI-powered recruiting platform where Weinstien led data analytics, was acquired by the company for $134 million. That wasn't Weinstein's first acquisition, though. He also founded his own greeting-card company in 2009 that was eventually acquired by Designer Greetings.

When Weinstien was mulling whether to officially leave LinkedIn after three years, he first made sure the idea behind Cursor was sound. Weinstien met with several high-ranking data employees at companies around Silicon Valley and asked them if Cursor would be something they could use. The answer, Weinstien found, was a resounding yes.

It was only then that Weinstien decided to quit because he realized that he wasn't the only one running into issues with siloed or fragmented data. 

"A lot of them said they would write a check for this immediately," he said. "Even though you have chief data officers and CIOs whose job it is to help deploy technology to help analysts, they haven't done a great job yet on this collaboration problem of how you help people understand what others are doing and capture that in a way they can see it."

Cursor is free for anyone to download because the startup is focusing on "wide adoption" in its early stages. Eventually, the company will start charging large businesses after it starts to take off with analysts.

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• Over the past few months, the long-standing rivalry between Walmart and Amazon has gotten intense, and one demographic in particular appears to be the battleground: the over-65 crowd. 
• In June, Amazon acquired pharmacy startup PillPack, beating out Walmart for the deal. Walmart for its part has been partnering with Humana, a health insurer that's focused on Medicare plans. 
• The same crowd is clearly a focus for Amazon. PillPack's expertise is great for patients with multiple prescriptions, which tends to be the elderly population. Babak Parviz, a vice president at Amazon, said in February that the elderly was something "we deeply care about." 

The US population is aging. By 2050, the number of people over the age of 65 is expected to be double what it was in 2012.

An aging population means we'll see an increase in health concerns and chronic conditions like heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and cancer that can be costly to manage. It also offers a business opportunity for those companies best placed to meet the healthcare needs of this growing population.

Rivals Amazon and Walmart both seem to have the elderly on their radar, with Amazon's move into the pharmacy business with its acquisition of PillPack, and Walmart's partnerships with a health insurer focused on Medicare plans. 

Indeed, the two had both been interested in buying PillPack. Walmart had offered $700 million for PillPack, but dragged its feet over regulatory concerns, according to CNBC. Amazon stepped in and offered a reported bid of just under $1 billion.

It appears the stage is being set for a battle between Walmart and Amazon for America's elderly. 

Shoring up resources for an aging population

Back in March,multiple news outlets reported that Walmart had held early-stage talks with Humana focused primarily on new partnerships, though an acquisition had been brought up.

While you probably think of Walmart as a giant retail business, it's also one of the largest pharmacy chains in the US, behind only Walgreens and CVS. It's also long had a focus on affordable prescriptions as well, offering some generic medications for $4.

That was followed by reports that Walmart may be interested in PillPack, a pharmacy startup that mails prescriptions that are packaged together based on when they need to be taken.

Walmart's historically had an interest in the Medicare population. For example, Humana and Walmart have a cobranded Medicare drug plan and an initiative that provides healthy-food credits.

Should Walmart and Humana link up on more partnerships, Walmart would become more embedded with Humana's Medicare business, which is the health insurer's main focus.

Amazon's interest in the aging population

While the elderly weren't explicitly cited as the reason for Amazon's acquisition of PillPack, the startup's expertise managing multiple prescriptions could come in handy as Amazon looks to serve that demographic. 

PillPack works with Part D and Medicare Advantage plans to provide prescriptions to members. This can be beneficial to the commercial health plans that can get better reimbursements from Medicare based on making sure members don't lapse in picking up their prescriptions.

People over 55 aren't among the biggest users of Amazon Prime, who are often the ones that use the most healthcare. 

"We note too that the older demographic still under-indexes toward Prime membership...which speaks to the opportunity for Pharma to help Amazon further penetrate the ~80 million 55+ population in the United States," Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a note in November speculating on Amazon's entry into healthcare.

Since then, Amazon's ambitions in healthcare have become clearer. The tech giant is teaming up with JPMorgan and Berkshire Hathaway on a nonprofit healthcare initiative, and it already sells over-the-counter medication, including an exclusive line called Basic Care.

And within healthcare, the aging population has been one of the few healthcare topics Amazon executives have addressed. In February, Babak Parviz, a vice president at Amazon, said at Klick Health's Muse event in New York that the elderly was something "we deeply care about." 

"We have looked at the older population in the context of health obviously, but we know that this group has a lot of issues, a lot of unmet need, some of them relate to health, but their health and the broader issues that they face are all interrelated," Parviz said. 

SEE ALSO: Walmart's talks with an insurance giant could be part of an assault on Amazon Prime

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