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Products Don't Become Interesting Businesses Until They Have 1 Billion Users, Mark Zuckerberg Says

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Mark Zuckerberg

Most startups strive to obtain a few million users. The really successful ones get tens or hundreds of millions of users.

But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg doesn't think any product is a truly compelling business until it hits 1 billion users. It took Facebook eight years to become that big.

The number of products that reach 1 billion users can probably be counted on one hand (Google, Facebook ...). But over the next five years, Zuckerberg says he believes multiple Facebook products will reach that kind of mass scale. WhatsApp, which Facebook recently acquired for $22 billion, already has 600 million monthly active users.

Zuckerberg thinks Search, Newsfeed, Groups, Instagram, and WhatsApp all have the potential to connect 1 billion+ people individually, and it's his near-term mission to make sure that happens.

"This may sound a little ridiculous to say, but for us, products don't really get that interesting to turn into businesses until they have about 1 billion people using them," Zuckerberg said Tuesday during Facebook's third-quarter earnings call. He said News Feed already reaches 1 billion people, and that's why Facebook is focused on making content there better, and its ad products stronger. 

"Over a five-year time frame, we have a number of services, which we think are well on their way to reaching 1 billion people," he said. "Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Search are a number of them. And once we get to that scale, then we think that they will start to become meaningful businesses in their own right. And I think that the right way to think about that, as I've tried to say repeatedly on these calls is, not that we're going to try to monetize them very aggressively in the next year or two, because I really think for each of those categories, the right strategy is to first focus on connecting 1 billion-plus people and reaching the full potential before very aggressively turning them into businesses.

"But I do think that this is such a big opportunity ahead of us. I can't think of that many other companies or products that have multiple lines of products that are on track to reach and connect 1 billion that have a clear path of how we can turn them into a business. So that will be a very fun and exciting challenge to work on over the next five years."

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uBeam Just Raised $10 Million So You Can Charge Your Phone While Walking Around Your House

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Meredith Perry uBeam

If you want to charge your phone without being stuck by a power outlet, you don't have many options.

There's the charging phone case mophie, of course. And there are charging mats, too, but your phone needs to be connected to the mat in order for it to charge.

uBeam is a company that wants to change all that. It's using ultrasound waves to wirelessly charge your phone.

To make that a reality, the company just raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Upfront Ventures with participation from Shawn Fanning, Mark Cuban, Troy Carter, Zappos' Tony Hsieh, Yahoo's Marissa Mayer, Ludlow Ventures, CrunchFund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, TechCrunch reports.

uBeam founder Meredith Perry came up with the idea for uBeam while she was still a student at the University of Pennsylvania. She showed up to class with a dead laptop and without a power cord, and was annoyed enough to think of a solution. 

Perry won an invention contest at Penn, and after graduating, she kept the uBeam momentum going. She raised $1.7 million in seed funding from Ken Seiff, Marissa Mayer, Ellen Levy, Tony Hsieh, CrunchFund, and Andreessen Horowitz in 2012.

After going into stealth mode for a while, the startup reemerged in August with an update about its first functional prototype.

The technology behind uBeam is something that's unprecedented. It converts electricity to inaudible sound waves, which travel through the air. The sound waves get converted back to electricity, which then charges up your devices. In order to work, the uBeam system needs a charger (which can be attached to a wall) and a receiver (which gets put on each device you want to charge). 

"We've developed a powerful and intelligent ultrasonic transmitter that beams high intensity ultrasound through the air," Perry told Business Insider.

"The ultrasound in the air then hits a receiver, which can be in the shape of a case around an electronic device or can be embedded within a device. The receiver vibrates in response to the sound at a frequency too fast for people to feel, and then converts that vibration into electrical power."

The technology has one caveat: it can't beam sound waves through walls. So if you're buying a uBeam system for your house and you want to charge in every room, you'd have to buy a transmitter for each room in which you want to wirelessly charge your phone.

The company is hoping to sell uBeam's products to consumers by 2016. uBeam is making a version for homes and a more industrial version so you could wirelessly charge your phone in an airport or at a conference. It could become as ubiquitous as Wi-Fi.

“If wireless power is everywhere, then the size of your battery can shrink because it’s always charging. You’ll never need a cord again, and you won’t need international charging adapters,” Perry told the New York Times in August.

“We’re going to sell directly to consumers, and we’ll sell them to restaurant chains and hotels — we are going to saturate the market with uBeam transmitters. In addition to your local coffee shop saying it has free Wi-Fi, it will also say it has free uBeam.”

SEE ALSO: All The Cords You Use To Charge Your Phone Might Be Obsolete Soon

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A Startup That Raised $10 Million For Charging Gadgets Through Sound Has Sparked A Giant Debate In Silicon Valley

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Meredith Perry uBeam

Last week, a startup called uBeam, working on way to let you charge your iPhone without plugging anything into a power outlet received a $10 million investment from Upfront Ventures.

It had already recieved about $1.7 million from  a bunch of famous angels.

uBeam is the latest moonshot startup darling in the Valley, founded by 25-year-old Meredith Perry. Angel investors include Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Zappos co-founder Tony Hsieh.

Perry is working on something unprecedented. She is creating a device that will convert electricity into ultrasound, meaning sound waves not audible to the human ear, beam them into a charging device that will convert them back into electricity to power your mobile devices.

The device will require a charger (which can be attached to a wall) and a receiver put on each device you want to charge. You are free to roam about the room with your device, even as it charges.

But a physicist, named "Danny" has posted a blog called "How putting $10M into UBeam illustrates everything that is wrong with tech investing today." He argues that the physics of uBeam at best won't work and at worst, will be unsafe for your family, especially your pets:

Except, here’s the problem. IT’S AN IMPOSSIBLE IDEA.  Having donemy share of ultrasound physics AND wireless charging work in the past, the first thing that struck me about the idea was that, to transmit any appreciable amount of energy through sound waves, those waves would likely burn you, or at least deafen you, and any other small animals in the vicinity.  This is why charging is currently done inside copper wires surrounded by plastic - so you don’t get hurt!

Other folks in the tech industry, also physicists, are already disputing Danny's post.

"There's almost nothing right about his physics. It's mind-boggling," one of them tweeted.

The whole thing has sparked a big discussion on Hacker News,Tumblr and elsewhere on if venture capitalists really have the technical chops to recognize true scientific breakthroughs from ideas that are fundamentally flawed.

When VC Mark Suster wrote about the $10 million investment on Medium, he called it "the most ambitious project I’ve seen since I became a VC." (He joined the firm in 2007 after selling the startup he co-founded, Koral, to Salesforce.com.)

uBeam was the "largest A-round check"Suster ever wrote, he said. So he lined up experts to help him investigate the company and its tech before investing. He wrote:

Did the physics actually work? Check
Was it safe? Well … for starters it is just an inaudible soundwave being transferred – as in the kind also used for women during pregnancy. It also happens to be how your car likely tells the distance to objects when you park or if you have a side assist whether you can change lanes safely. Check

The proof will be in the product. uBeam says it has a few patents. Perry has created a prototype that the Valley has been buzzing about for years.Perry showed it around the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference in 2012. The year before, she gave a demo at the AllThingsD conference. Those demos gained her the attention of the famous angels, which helped land that $10 million investment.

By the way, uBeam isn't the only one trying to safely capture electricity from the air and use it power our mobile products. A company called WiTricity, for instance, is also working on that, with Intel. WiTricity is not using sound but magnetic fields to transfer energy. The company claims that this form of wireless electricity "is safe for operation around people and animals."

We'll leave it to the scientists to figure out how to make all of this – or any of it – work. But it does seem like one day, battery life will not be an issue. Our devices will somehow sip all the electricity they need directly from the air.

SEE ALSO: 'Blended Reality' Is The Next Tech Buzzword And HP's Plans For It Are Really Spectacular

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A 4-Step Startup Plan For Every Aspiring Founder, According To South Park's Eric Cartman

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South Park's first episode of its 18th season is dedicated to founding a startup.

In the episode, Eric Cartman decides to found a company so he can do nothing for the rest of his life. He realizes the trademark "Washington Redskins" has recently become available, and he uses the brand name to create a successful campaign on Kickstarter.

"Washington Redskins" becomes infamous for its tagline, "F*ck You," and for being a startup that raised money for promising to do absolutely nothing in return.

As Cartman is plotting his startup success, he comes up with a four-step plan to follow. It is:

eric cartman south park startup plan

SPOILER ALERT: In the end, Kickstarter's headquarters gets destroyed by the Washington Redskins football team.

Cartman's company pivots to become a Kickstarter rival that takes 5% of all successfully funded projects. This enables Cartmant to continue running a company that collects money in return for doing no work. 

A mob of angry football fans then comes to Cartman's office. The mob demands Cartman's company shuts down. Cartman and his friends go back to school and give up the company.

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The 20 Hottest Startups Founded By Women

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meredith perry

Women may be underrepresented throughout the tech sector, but they're building some incredible startups.

The folks over at Product Hunt have created and curated a list of the best startups and products founded by women. VCs, entrepreneurs, and Product Hunt members have all weighed in on their favorites. 

From uBeam's innovative wireless charging technology to Hopscotch's program for teaching kids how to code, the products women are making are changing the world.

Front

Front lets you collaborate on email responses with your team without cluttering up your inbox with a confusing set of back-and-forth responses. Front also lets you work under a group email address to collaborate on composing emails.

In August, the Y Combinator alum told VentureBeat it had already raised $1.5 million of its $2.5 million funding round from a group of anonymous Silicon Valley investors. Front is led by CEO Mathilde Collin.

 



Mattermark

Danielle Morrill, Kevin Morrill, and Andy Sparks are the dream team behind Mattermark. Mattermark is a data platform that helps VC firms keep tabs on up-and-coming startups. Mattermark's software lets users look at information about startups based on news stories, Twitter, SEC filings, AngelList, CrunchBase, and more.

The company has raised $3.4 million in three rounds from investors including Great Oaks Venture Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Mattermark is led by CEO Danielle Morrill.



Hopscotch

Hopscotch teaches kids how to code in a way that's fun and not intimidating. It's the first programming language that's designed for mobile, too.

Jocelyn Leavitt and Samantha John founded the company in 2011 and have received $1.2 million in two rounds of funding from MESA+, Kapor Capital, Collaborative Fund, and Resolute.vc.

 



See the rest of the story at Business Insider

I Tried Plated, The DIY Food-Delivery Site Started By A Couple Of Wall Street Guys Who Didn't Want To Get Fat

This 14-Year-Old Irish Entrepreneur Just Launched His 3rd Company

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jordancasey

What were you doing when you were 14? Hanging out at the 7-11 and drinking Slushies in the parking lot? Poking around Spencer’s in the local mall?

Well, as reminder of how much you wasted your teenage years, 14-year-old student Jordan Casey has just launched his third company, Eventzy.

During a talk last week at the Web Summit technology conference in Dublin, Casey said the company was in beta but would open to the public early next year. It will offer tools to make it easier to manage events they are hosting and attending, he said.

“We will have a free version for smaller events and a paid version for larger, corporate events,” Casey said, according to the Irish Times. “We won’t be competing with Eventbrite, as they are mainly about tickets. Our software will allow users to manage events and promote them on social media.”

Last year, Casey unveiled a company called Teachware at the Summit, which he says now has more than 300 teachers as users. In a profile last year, VentureBeat also looked at Casey’s game development company, called Casey Games.

Source: Irish Times

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This New Investment Firm Lets You Pay Whatever You Want For Its Service

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andrei cherny aspiration

Aspiration, an online investment firm that launched Tuesday, has a radical idea.

Unlike traditional investment firms, which charge a percentage of the assets invested, the company plans to go in another direction: Pay whatever you think is fair.

"Our fee structure is very revolutionary," explains CEO and founder Andrei Cherny. "It empowers customers to make that decision and gives them the ability to decide whether or not we're doing a good job for them, and whether or not our values are aligned."

He points out that in most investment firms, the people managing your money get paid the same amount whether or not they do a good job, and that hinging the company's livelihood on pleasing customers provides an incentive to serve them well.

Cherny, who has a long history in financial regulation, ranging from a position as a financial fraud prosecutor to working with Senator Elizabeth Warren fighting for the establishment of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, built his investment firm for middle-class investors, who he says are under-served in the current market.

"We're bringing forth a wide range of investment products and investments geared toward the needs of the middle-class investor," he explains. "Look at the customer base of hedge funds and private equity shops. They serve a clientele that's mostly multimillionaires and large institutions. Everyone else is buying stocks and mutual funds, doing it on their own."

Aspiration is so committed to serving the middle-class investor that it has imposed not only the usual minimum investment requirements on its clients (in this case, an unusually low $500), but also a maximum investment: $100,000 per customer, per fund.

Cherny says the cap is to keep the company focused on the under-served investor. "If you have a fund where some people pay $500 and a handful put in $10 million, you're almost naturally focused more on that type of customer." With the investment cap, Aspiration aims to limit that sort of bias.

aspiration dashboard_notebook copyAspiration — whose motto is "Do Well. Do Good." — is also focused on giving back to the community. Through its "Dimes Worth Of Difference" campaign, it donates 10 cents of every dollar of revenue to provide micro-loans to struggling Americans.

Additionally, users are encouraged to give the amount of their choosing to the charity of their choice on the website's dashboard. "It's the TOMS and Warby Parker approach to charitable giving," explains Cherny, "but instead of shoe for shoe, it's economic opportunity for economic opportunity."

aspiration home page

Cherny isn't worried that his clients will refuse to pay. "A lot of behavioral psychology over the past 10 or so years shows that people have a strong sense of moral obligation and reciprocity," he explains. "That's as powerful or more powerful than locking people into a legal contract. If we're not delivering the products we said we would or living up to the values we set up for ourselves, they have the ability to not pay us."

Aspiration is not the only company to use a pay-what-you-want strategy, but it's the first financial company we've come across. Some retailers have had success with the model — a North Carolina diner initially tripled its revenues when it asked customers to pay what God wants— but there's little evidence it's sustainable or that users trying to make the most of their money would choose to fork over fees.

However, Cherny isn't alone in his confidence. The company, which has spent a little over a year getting ready for launch, has raised over $4.5 million in funding and counts eBay founding president Jeff Skoll as a member of its board of advisors. Aspiration's "radical approach to its customers' fees relies on a trust-based model, consistent in spirit with an approach that I saw drive eBay's early success," Skoll said in a press release. "It's a bold bet and one that I believe will shake up a financial industry that could use some positive disruption."

Aspiration is now in an invite-only period, and will allow potential clients to "jump the line" by sharing information about the company on social media.

SEE ALSO: This Startup Wants To Overhaul Your Lackluster Retirement Strategy

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The Panic And Fear That Strikes When You Realize You've Invested Tons Of Money In The Wrong Company

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black friday shopping target tvs

It's usually sinks in after the first board meeting.  

That's when an investor knows he or she has made a grave error and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into a startup that's going to flop.

Like any aggressive shopper, early stage investors scour the tech scene for the Next. Big. Thing. Sometimes they encounter a great salesman disguised as a Googler-turned entrepreneur, or an MIT coding prodigy. They get swept up in the story, pressured to act quickly before a hot deal ends, and experience FOMO — Fear Of Missing Out — if they think just a second too long and decide to pass.

Inevitably, hot early stage deals force investors to open their checkbooks — sometimes without having done much due diligence. Later, they realize they've made an impulse buy and occasionally they experience buyer's remorse.

"That happened to me last week!" one early investor told Business Insider in Dublin last week. "I spent all day with this founder and I thought he was amazing, so I offered to invest $300,000. A few days later I realized I hadn't done due diligence, and I don't really know the guy at all. Maybe I shouldn't have done that."

Another investor says it can be easy to pull the trigger too quickly, especially if VCs don't think to ask founders the right questions about their businesses.

This person recalled one founder he was in deep talks with, who claimed the average deal size among his enterprise clients was a few hundred thousand dollars. Later, the venture capitalist asked for more details and found that one client was a $1,000,000+ outlier. Most other clients, on average, were spending around $3,000.

Presenting the numbers that way isn't technically fraud, but it's a smoke-and-mirrors tactic some founders use to disguise big issues their startups are facing. And those issues usually become apparent during the first board meeting when an investor's money has already been wired and can't be refunded.

Dave McClure is an angel investor who puts money into dozens of startups each year. He recounted a time he made an impulse purchase on stage at Web Summit. 

dave mcclure david tisch josh elman web summit

"There are moments when we meet someone [and immediately invest]," he stated. "I was in Istanbul one month ago for a conference. We listened to ten companies that were pitching on stage. One of them clearly had traction. It was two guys. I had never met them before. They had a couple million users, they had 20% week over week growth, they were already sort of profitable on a $20,000 per month basis. They seemed really sharp. Before I flew out, that evening they drove me to the airport I made them an offer on the spot." That company is now part of McClure's accelerator program, 500 Startups.

While impulse buying — and occasionally buyer's remorse — is real for venture capitalists, not investing can feel worse. Which is why early stage investors are often eager to take a gamble, even when information is limited. For prolific angel investor Ron Conway, the startup deal passed on and regrets was Salesforce. For McClure, it's Uber.

"Me turning [Uber CEO] Travis Kalanick down in 2010 at a $10 million valuation is my single most painful story and I think about it every f*cking week," McClure said on stage.

David Tisch, an angel investor who's also an entrepreneur, knows the feeling. He passed on Zynga and an app that's currently growing quickly called Yik Yak.

"You [can] screw up either saying yes to the wrong company — and a month or so later you say, 'Oh my God, that was a terrible decision,' or on the flip side, you say no to something and then you see it just take off," Tisch said at Web Summit. "You do think, 'What could I have done differently?' You replay those decisions all the time."

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This Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Entrepreneur's Wife Never Wanted Him To Work In Tech

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tristan walker

Today, Tristan Walker is one of the most admired people in the technology industry.

He made a name for himself growing Foursquare's business as one of its first employees, and is now the founder and CEO of Walker & Company, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that makes beauty products for people of color.

And he has done all that despite coming from humble origins— a single-parent home inside a Queens, New York public housing complex.

But none of Walker's success in Silicon Valley would have occurred if his wife, Amoy, had gotten her way.

According to J.J. McCorvey's in-depth profile of Tristan Walker for Fast Company, Amoy Walker was perplexed by her husband's decision to take a sales job at Foursquare instead of a lucrative offer to work at Boston Consulting Group.

Given Tristan Walker's modest upbringing and his status as a minority, Amoy Walker felt he would be better off taking the safe path to financial security offered by an elite consulting firm rather than gambling on a startup that was still in its infancy.

"As a black man, you don't take risks like that," Amoy Walker tells McCorvey. "You don't get your good degrees and go work at a company that makes no sense. You just don't do that!"

Then a student at Stanford Business School, Tristan Walker would become Foursquare's head of business development. He excelled in the job by creating business partnerships with top-tier brands like the NBA, Starbucks, and MTV. By the time he was ready to leave in 2012, prominent venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz offered him a job as its entrepreneur-in-residence.

McCorvey's story also has a number of other fascinating details about Tristan Walker's experience as a black founder in predominantly white Silicon Valley, including an anecdote about a real estate agent Walker was negotiating with other the phone who automatically assumed he was white.

You can read McCorvey's profile of Walker for Fast Company here >>

SEE ALSO: Early Foursquare Employee Tristan Walker Heads To Andreessen Horowitz As An EIR

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Startup CEO Whines That A New Dad Employee Won't Work Late

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4719678156_812a833411_o

As we've previously reported, many tech workers, particularly software developers, are under intense pressure to work insane hours.

The myth is, they should be so passionate about their jobs that working is the only thing they want to do.

This myth doesn't happen to be true. People that work all the time aren't better, more productive or even more passionate workers.

Research shows that productivity typically declines after 40 hours a week. A Stanford student research project specifically found that overworked coders working 60-hour weeks produced less high-quality code than refreshed people working 40-hour weeks.

Nevertheless, the pressure exists, particularly in the startup world where money is tight, deadlines loom and the all-nighter culture rules.

But there may be a glimmer that a backlash against this myth is starting to happen.

A startup CEO got slammed on Quora when he posted a question complaining that his employee, a new dad, insisted on leaving the office between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m.

He wrote:

I manage a young startup company in the valley. My only employee is great but he is also a new father. Which means leaving work between 6 and 7 pm. I understand him but it's hard for a startup that the commitment lasts for work hours only. What would you do as a CEO?

By today, there were 65 answers or so essentially telling the guy something like this, "Ok, so you are upset that he is not working at the stereotypical, and completely inaccurate, 80-100 hours per week. Are you only getting 50-60? Seriously? I find that I get the maximum amount of work done at around 50 hours per week. It falls off sharply after that point."

Or this, "Too many companies think it is natural for developers to work late hours."

Or this:"The new father neglects his kid(s) to work until midnight? Are you going to post a question about your employee not staying around until 1 am or 2 am next?"

The CEO was so universally trounced by his attitude, that he eventually updated the question to clarify: "The problem is not that the guy is leaving early per se ... the question I have is more with the rigidity of the time even when something more urgent is needed."

In other words, the new dad was absolutely insisting that his evenings would be spent with his baby, and not doing "urgent" work when the boss called. The boss was looking for ideas on how to cope.

To that, the people had this simple advice: "If you want a night shift hire somebody else to cover that."

The responses are a good sign that work life balance may soon arrive more broadly in in the tech industry, maybe even at startups. But, sadly, the question also means it hasn't really arrived for everyone.

SEE ALSO: The Stress Of Being A Computer Programmer Is Literally Driving Many Of Them Crazy

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Why Your Job Interview At This Startup Can Last Up To 22 Hours

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Appster team outside

Interviewing for a new job is always a nerve-wracking experience, one fraught with potential mistakes that could ruin your chance at working for your dream company.

But take solace in the fact that the interviews you've been on are relatively short, at least when compared to the Australian mobile app development startup Appster.

There, candidates go through about 20 hours of interviews and tests in a process that requires them to answer questions ranging from "What would you would do if you were made CEO?" to "How would your tutor in college rate you on a scale of 1-10?"

The pressure is enough to make anyone crack, as one prospective employee did when he started yelling at Appster c0-CEO and cofounder Mark McDonald for mispronouncing a name on his résumé.

"You start seeing glimmers of people's personalities they can't hide, things you would never be able to see in a traditional job interview," McDonald tells Business Insider.

These cracks are precisely what Appster is looking for. If you're unfamiliar, the company helps people who have an idea for an app by developing software, asking investors for money, and implementing a business plan for them.

Now three years old, Appster has grown to 150 employees and has offices in Australia, San Francisco, and India. In this crucial hiring phase, choosing the wrong people could be crippling.

McDonald says that he and cofounder Josiah Humphrey initially implemented a fairly standard interview process, only to find that many of the new recruits were not suited to work at Appster and left after about a year.

Two years ago, they decided to try something more rigorous, figuring that if they could get more new hires to stick, it would be a huge advantage to them in the long run.

Appster Team inside, big

Today, McDonald says about 90% of Appster's hires work out in the long run, a number he attributes to the fact that it weeds out people who either do not have the right technical knowledge or are not a good fit for Appster's work-hard, play-hard culture.

The process takes about 12 to 15 hours for entry-level employees, while team leaders and middle managers are interviewed for 22 hours. Senior executives can expect to spend about 150 hours being vetted.

The process begins when Appster develops a list of technical skills and personality traits a "superstar" in a given role will possess, and creates a detailed scorecard to measure applicants on those qualities.

After filling out a short questionnaire and doing a 20-minute screening phone call with human resources, potential hires are brought in to the office for a 90-minute interview with a hiring manager.

If they survive this, candidates move on to the meat of Appster's interview process, the grueling "one-day intensive" at its office, for which candidates are usually asked to block out nine hours of their day and sometimes required to come back a second time.

First, applicants do a series of 30- to 45-minute interviews with about five members of the team they would be working with. The interviewers score the candidates on the skills the interviewers are most expert in.

Then, candidates are taken to dinner and drinks for about 4 hours by two Appster employees — usually a hiring manager and a member of the HR team.

There, the prospective employee is asked a series of 150 questions that test industry knowledge ("What will be the biggest trends in mobile technology over the next five years?"), cultural fit ("What would you do if an employee told you a secret that could hurt the business?"), and past performance ("What were your sales figures at your first job out of college?"). 

Mostly, what Appster wants to hear is that the candidate excelled at every stop along their career, and that their previous bosses would also rate them highly. Of course, Appster follows up with every person an applicant has ever reported to, just to make sure they are telling the truth.

"If you actually ask them about their direct reports with the idea that you'll check this later on, people tend to be really honest," McDonald says.

If someone makes it through all that and Appster still wants to hire them, the person is given about eight hours of work to do on their own time to prove their competence once and for all.

If they succeed at that, and a background check doesn't turn up anything negative, they will at long last receive an offer.

"I've been lucky enough to receive offers for all of the past roles I've applied for, but this was quite a daunting experience," says Dane Matheson, who was hired as the company's head of growth strategy a little more than a year ago. "When you actually get the green light, it's extraordinarily rewarding."

Appster's Dane MathesonDespite his supreme confidence in himself, Matheson says that 17 hours into the process, he began to get nervous about whether his old bosses would provide him with positive references.

Still, Matheson appreciates that Appster goes to great lengths to make sure its talent is top-notch, something he sees as a "badge of honor" for employees.

McDonald says he's never had a strong candidate say they didn't want to do the one-day intensive, adding that "A-plus players" tend to like it because they get to reflect on their achievements.

Another potentially enjoyable aspect of the marathon interview? Since it has already spent so much time making sure candidates are a perfect fit, McDonald says Appster isn't about to haggle over a few dollars after it has made an offer.

"If you're serious about recruiting A-plus players, you need to have this rigorous process," Matheson says. "Otherwise, we won't get people who are the pinnacle of their respective fields — and that's what we need to grow the business properly."

SEE ALSO: Here's What To Say When You're Asked About Salary In A Job Interview

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A New App That Helps You Park Your Car ‘Could Radically Alter How Large Cities Work’

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Traffic jam carsLuxe, a new on-demand valet app promises to eliminate parking woes and revolutionize city planning.

New York Times Technology Columnist Farhad Manjoo says the app will "completely upend" urban life as we know it.

The app functions similar to other mobile on-demand services. Before leaving for your destination, you enter the address where you’d like a Luxe valet to meet you. When you pull up to the predetermined address, a blue-jacketed Luxe valet will be ready and waiting for you by the side of the road.

You hand him your keys, and can even specify if you’d like your car washed (an additional $40) or your tank filled up with gas ($7.99). Your valet then drives off and parks the car to one of the many lots that Luxe has struck a deal with. Luxe works with garage owners to help fill their empty lots on off-peak hours. 

Right now, it's only in San Francisco, and parts of LA. Luxe charges $5 an hour with a max rate of $15 per day. It might sound expensive, but it's a far cry from the steep fees many San Francisco residents are accustomed to paying.  

Summoning your car back is as easy as dropping it off. You open the app, tap in your current location, and a Luxe valet will roll up in your vehicle in about ten minutes.

They’ll return your vehicle anywhere within their service area — not just to the original drop off location. So it’s easy to drive your car to dinner, then have it returned to you outside an event in a different part of town.

Though the idea of an on-demand valet may seem preposterous, Manjoo points out that finding a place to park your car is “one of the most soul-destroying hardships of living or working in San Francisco.”

But the app won’t just relieve the painful hardship of finding a parking spot by your office. Because Luxe drivers are able to immediately relieve drivers of searching for a parking place, fewer cars will be on the road creating congestion by endlessly circling blocks while they hunt for a spot. 

Garage owners are also happy because their underutilized lots are getting use.

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A Startup Called Teespring Has Turned 10 People Into Millionaires, And It Just Raised $35 Million To Kill Excess Inventory

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Teespring Co Founders evan and walker williamsKickstarter for T-shirts.

It sounds like a cliche startup — the kind of pitch that would make an investor cringe. But Teespring, a startup that helps designers crowdfund T-shirt ideas, has had such strong initial traction, it just raised $35 million from the top Silicon Valley firms Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. Khosla's Keith Rabois is joining Teespring's board.

CEO Walker Williams says his product has already turned 10 people into millionaires by helping their T-shirt ideas go viral.

Here's how Teespring works:

Simple tools on Teespring's site allow design novices and pros alike to upload T-shirt ideas and slogans.

The designers can select which quality and type of shirt they would like to print on (American Apparel versus Hanes, and a hoodie versus a tank top).  There are a bunch of fonts and icons to choose from.

steve wars teespring

The creator then selects how many T-shirts he or she hopes to sell and sets a goal. If at least five T-shirts are preordered, Teespring will produce the items and ship them directly to customers.  Teespring shows you how much you'll make if you hit your sales goal.

steve wars teespring

You can add multiple T-shirt designs to sell, too. 

steve wars teespringThen you type in your shirt's description and give it a unique URL. There are share tools to help you spread the word about your shirt. Teespring will also help target ads to your designs to improve sales.

Screesteve wars teespringTada! Your shirt has been made, and the campaign has begun. All campaigns last seven days. We made this sample design for Business Insider reporter Steve Kovach, who is a big Star Wars nut.

steve wars teespringTeespring gets rid of excess inventory by creating demand before a shirt is produced.

For anyone who has ever had a T-shirt idea and tried to sell it, you know the process is painful. First, you have to find a local printer and a wholesale T-shirt provider to order from. You are forced to order at least one or two dozen items, even if you're not sure your slogan will sell.

Then it takes a few weeks to perfect the design, send it to the printer, and get the items made. It takes more time and a lot of money (about $100 bucks) to get that many shirts shipped to your door. Then you have to turn around and ship them to customers.

Teespring does all the work for you. All you need to do is come up with an idea and help market it via social media and word of mouth.

It's not clear how decent the margins on Teespring's business are, because the company must split every sale with the T-shirt designer. And T-shirt designers can make a lot more money producing the shirts themselves. But if you want a painless way to make a few bucks, it could be a decent solution. Most other easy we'll-make-it-for you solutions like BustedTees or CafePress offer a set fee for your design and few or no proceeds later if it goes viral. They also don't help you assess demand before you create a shirt.

Teespring was founded by two Brown graduates who were frustrated when they tried to make a T-shirt in college. Brown's local dive bar, Fish Co., was being shut down. The founders, Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton, wanted to create awareness for the bar and rally fellow students to save it. The pair created a Facebook post titled "Free Fish Co.," which quickly racked up a lot of likes. When they tried to get the shirts produced quickly, they ran into the typical T-shirt production snag. Their idea couldn't be turned around quickly, and they didn't have the funds to produce a bunch of shirts without knowing how well they would sell.  

Stites-Clayton and Williams spent six hours building their own website for the T-shirt. Within a day, the shirt had gone viral in the Brown community, yielding hundreds of preorders. "We got more visits to the website than there were students at Brown," Williams tells Business Insider.

Other students noticed the campaign and asked Williams and Styles-Clayton to build them similar websites for their T-shirt ideas, and their business was born.

Now, Teespring has shipped more than 6 million products. It is using a big chunk of the $35 million to build a printing facility in Kentucky where all of the shirts can be produced and shipped quickly. Williams anticipates Teespring will create 300 jobs there over the next year.

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Male Startup Founders Want To 'Enable Women To Change The Way Their Vaginas Smell'

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peach stripe

Two startup founders, both men, are previewing plans "for a new probiotic supplement that will enable women to change the way their vaginas smell,"according to Inc. Magazine.

Austen Heinz and Gilad Gome, who each have their own biotech startups, joined together to create Sweet Peach, which encourages the idea of biohacking to "alter the code" of our bodies.

Nitasha Tiku of Valleywag points out that there's no clear reasoning behind why vaginas were targeted for change but that "having sex organs that smell like fruit might help women better connect with their bodies, as though the way they smell pre-hacked is a malodorous barrier to body acceptance."

Inc. Magazine reports:

Sweet Peach will have practical benefits, like preventing yeast infections and other health problems caused by microorganisms, Heinz said in his presentation. But the ambition behind it is a loftier one.

'The idea is personal empowerment,' he said. 'All your smells are not human. They're produced by the creatures that live on you.'

Sweet Peach is also working with Petomics, which will "hack" dog and cat feces, making them smell like bananas. The company is also experiencing pushback as it crowdfunds for its venture, citing that it was barred from Kickstarter. It is now raising money on Tilt.

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Practically Every Notable Founder In Silicon Valley Just Invested In This Payroll Startup

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zenpThe payroll-processing startup ZenPayroll just announced more than 50 previously undisclosed angel investors, and the list reads like a who's who of Silicon Valley.

The investors who joined the $20 million Series A round range from celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and Jared Leto to Karen Mills, the former head of the US Small Business Administration, and a laundry list of famed startup CEOs from Evernote, Eventbrite, Stripe, Constant Contact, SurveyMonkey, WordPress, and Instagram.

Founders from PayPal, Yahoo, Reddit, Nest, Twitter, HubSpot, and Mint also contributed.

"When you're building a business for the next fifty years, it's all about the people," Joshua Reeves, CEO and cofounder of ZenPayroll, said in a press release. "This incredible group of leaders built companies from the ground up, and they want to help us solve this problem because they've experienced it firsthand."

"We pretty much got our dream list of investors. And we're really grateful," he told us.

"It's always great to invest alongside great entrepreneurs and VCs," PayPal cofounder Max Levchin told us in an email.

ZenPayroll hopes to eliminate the notorious headache that is payroll processing. The company hopes to streamline the complicated systems of legacy vendors like ADP and Paychex by offering a simpler cloud-based system that can automate all payroll tax calculations and payments, as well as provide direct deposit to employees.

The app also allows for paperless filing of all payroll-related government documents, the ability for employees to donate a portion of their paycheck to charity, and easy-to-read, visually clear pay stubs.

ZenPayroll has more than quadrupled its rate of payroll processing since earlier this year, currently processing over $1.5 billion in annual payroll for thousands of small businesses across the United States.

"Right now we have a very strong focus on small businesses, and sub-100 person companies," Reeves says. "We did not take these investors to convert them to clients, it's about getting a chance to talk to these people who have been in our shoes."

ZenPayroll plans to use this latest round of funding to complete its nationwide expansion and eventually grow to support larger companies.

Here are some of ZenPayroll's new investors:

  • Trip Adler, CEO and cofounder of Scribd
  • Ed Baker, head of growth at Uber
  • Charlie Cheever, cofounder of Quora
  • Patrick Collison, CEO and cofounder of Stripe
  • Dave Goldberg, CEO of SurveyMonkey
  • Gail F. Goodman, CEO of Constant Contact
  • Kevin Hartz, CEO and cofounder of Eventbrite
  • Ryan Holmes, CEO and cofounder of Hootsuite
  • Ashton Kutcher, actor and investor
  • Jared Leto, actor, musician, and investor
  • Max Levchin, cofounder of PayPal
  • Phil Libin, CEO and cofounder of Evernote
  • Steve Loughlin, CEO and cofounder of RelateIQ
  • Tobias Lütke, CEO and cofounder of Shopify
  • Karen Mills, former head of the US Small Business Administration
  • Matt Mullenweg, CEO and cofounder of WordPress
  • Alexis Ohanian, cofounder of Reddit
  • Adam Nash, CEO of WealthFront
  • Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint
  • Matt Rogers, cofounder of Nest
  • Justin Rosenstein, cofounder of Asana
  • Dharmesh Shah, CTO and cofounder of HubSpot
  • Clara Shih, CEO and cofounder of Hearsay Social
  • Josh Silverman, president of US consumer services at AMEX, former CEO of Skype
  • John Suh, CEO of LegalZoom
  • Kevin Systrom, CEO and cofounder of Instagram
  • Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter
  • Jerry Yang, cofounder of Yahoo
  • Marco Zappacosta, CEO and cofounder of Thumbtack 

SEE ALSO: How To Dress Like Silicon Valley's Elite

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LOLCats Creator Ben Huh Explains How His Company Spiraled Out Of Control

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Ignition Conference 2011 Ben Huh

Ben Huh, the creator of LOLCats and CEO of the entertainment company Cheezburger, has had a couple of tough years.

Cheezburger has been around since 2007. In 2011, the company raised $30 million from venture capitalists.

But a combination of bad decisions and bad luck almost drove the company under.

That's because Cheezburger went on a crazy hiring spree and lost sight of their goals, said Huh in a self-reflective Medium post on Thursday

The company was hiring so fast in 2011, Huh writes, that it was too busy to actually build and ship products. 

By 2012, Huh recognized Cheezburger had problems.

"We moved all our sites onto our own platform, but users hated it," he said. "The disagreements with my team escalated. My top executives were either fired or pushed out." 

Then it got blindsided by the shift from desktop to mobile, causing Huh to lay off a third of his employees last year.

To get Cheezburger turned around, Huh hired Amber Dunn as the company's chief revenue officer.

Dunn worked with Huh to create a new business model for Cheezburger, but neither could escape the elephant in the room: Dunn's terminal ovarian cancer.

For a moment, things seemed to be okay.

"We kicked off 2013 with high expectations," said Huh. "We were back in investment mode, but this time with a plan."

Not long after Huh was regaining hope for his company, Dunn's cancer took a turn for the worse.

She passed away within months.

"To this day, I often wonder if I am responsible for shortening her life," said Huh.

By the point the LOLCats creator feared he had lost objectivity and could no longer lead Cheezburger to success.

But instead of shutting down the company, Huh hired a CEO coach, embraced his failures publically, and vowed to move on.

"I felt that learning to persevere and righting my wrongs was the least I could to do for my investors and employees," he said.

After raising more cash and hiring new leaders, Huh geared up for Cheezburger 3.0. He also cofounded Circa, a mobile news app. 

It's too early to tell if Cheezburger is out of the woods for good, but he is hoping that a revamped iPhone app, released today, will be the company's ticket back to relevance.

You can read Huh's whole post over on Medium.

SEE ALSO: The New York Tech Scene Is Buzzing Over The Uber Scandal — Lots Of People Think The CEO Should Be Canned

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This Startup Offers Anyone A Butler For $99 A Month

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butler serving coffee harrods

Imagine living as a middle-class family, with a middle-class income, and having a category in your household spending budget for "butler."

Today, if you live in Boston or New York, you can have a butler for $99 a month.

The startup company Alfred, named after Batman’s lifelong butler, offers a service in which a person will come to your home to deal with all of the household chores that often torment the two-income family, or the single person working their way up the business ladder.

Once a week, "Alfred" offers in-home organizational services like folding laundry and sorting mail, but also serves as a concierge to arrange outside services that take time to set up, like grocery delivery, laundry pickup and delivery, and housecleaning.

While the consumer pays for those services at a standard rate, Alfred arranges all of those services and is there to receive delivered items or let maids into the house.

Alfred will also come back a second time each week if needed, either to deliver items like dry cleaning or to accept deliveries.   

The website asks the question "What if, at the end of a long day, you could come home to laundry done, neatly folded and stacked into drawers, mail sorted and packages waiting, fridge stocked with your favorite foods and drink, (and) your home exactly how you like it?"

Apparently, that is what Alfred can do for you.

Former Harvard Business School mates Marcela Sapone and Jessica Beck created the idea of Alfred for a school project, but then realized it had real business potential and left school to pursue the household spending concept.

"It’s a really good service for parents who work and are juggling a family,’’ Sappone told CNN Money, "and for young professionals putting in a lot of hours (or) entrepreneurs who are busy trying to launch what they are passionate about."

Alfred won a $50,000 prize at the TechCrunch Disrupt competition in San Francisco this year, and has received $2 million in funding to spread the household service to other locations and create an app for reach more customers.

The people who work for the company, who are called "Alfreds," are screened by the company and undergo five interviews before they are hired. The company has almost 100 full-time Alfreds on staff, and they are paid a starting wage of $18 an hour, plus benefits to those who work 30 hours a week.

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Twitter Engineer Turned VC Mike Abbott: How To Get In On A Multi-Billion Market

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Mike AbbottIn the Valley, Mike Abbott is known as the former vice president of engineering at Twitter who grew the team from 80 to more than 350 engineers and cured its "Failed Whale" problem.

Before that he was known for his engineering roles at Palm and Microsoft, for a couple of startups he co-founded, and for some angel investing.

He's been a VC at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers since 2011 and lately he's been focused on the area known as "big data."

Here he shares his thoughts on this hot technology which lets businesses collect massive amounts of data (everything from documents to tweets) and sift through it all to instantly find insights. Much of this advice is good for any startup.

Launching Your Big Data Startup

Big data keeps getting bigger. Last year, VC firms invested $3.6 billion – 75 percent of what they invested in the previous five years combined. The pace has continued this year, with several firms announcing new funding rounds in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

For aspiring big data entrepreneurs, it’s exciting – and intimidating. I meet a lot of smart, talented engineers who want to work in big data but don’t know where to start.

I tell them to focus on an area where you can have a big impact, including feature engineering, mining email for B2B, applications for CRM, data governance, vertical integration, health care solutions – big data can drive health care savings of $300B according to a recent study – and tying into existing consumer properties such as Facebook or LinkedIn to drive sales leads.

Other areas, like data visualization or databases, are important but saturated, though there may be an opportunity to build next-generation databases using time series data. Still others, like personalization technology, are better for established companies like Google and Facebook that have the data to train their image and voice recognition models.

Once you focus and develop your big data idea, how do you turn that idea into a company?

Turning Your Big Data Idea into a Company

My advice in brief: be a painkiller rather than a vitamin, build and sell for enterprise customers, and remember that even with big data, less can be more.

Be a Painkiller, Not a Vitamin

Like so many entrepreneurs, I love the technical challenge of programming. I started coding in fourth grade and have never stopped. So I understand how founders can be enchanted by the technical wizardry behind their products, especially in fields like data and machine learning.

But the corporate customers who are deciding whether to buy the product will be asking a set of questions with a very different focus. Questions like: What’s the ROI here? Will your proposed solution integrate well with our business culture? Will it help move my production workloads?

One way to stay focused is to remind yourself to be a painkiller, not a vitamin. Vitamins are great, but painkillers are vital. Use technology to build a product that customers need – now.

I always ask founders in our first meeting why they made certain technical decisions. If you don’t know why you selected a particular technology and how your decision helps the customer, I would be hard-pressed to back your company.

Build and Sell for the Enterprise

Startups need to sell. In big data and machine learning, most customers will be enterprise customers. And most startups greatly underestimate what it means to be enterprise-ready.

My two bits of advice: First, if you’re an engineer, be sure to work closely with a product person, business person, or CIO so that you understand what it really means to sell to the enterprise. As a venture investor, I often introduce people to one another for precisely this purpose.

Second, manage the gap between perception and reality. There are so many possibilities for big data, but there is also a lot of hype. Manage the expectations of CMOs and CIOs so that you do not under-deliver at the start of what may otherwise be a lucrative long-term relationship.

Understand the “Why” of Data Storage

We all know how easy and efficient it is to store data today. In three decades, the cost of storing a gigabyte has gone from thousands of dollars to a few pennies. But now people have a tendency to store data without knowing how they want to use it. At some point, you enter a “data obesity” state where data storage, maintenance, and upkeep cost too much and slow you down.

Even in a data-driven world, you shouldn’t default to storing every bit of data. Instead, stop and ask yourself: Do I have an idea of how I or somebody else in my company wants to use this data in the future? Data storage still consumes energy and resources. Before you store data, consider whether it will ever help you make a decision or deliver a product or service.

Whether it is the onrush of data from sensors, advances in machine learning and deep-belief nets, or new modes of virtual reality, we are swimming in new information and need to imagine what will create the next wave of extracting knowledge and insights from all of it.

As I learned at Twitter, building tools that allow more people to access and ask questions of the data enables everyone to make better decisions more quickly. As an investor, I often wonder: What are the new opportunities that will be created that we haven’t even thought of?

SEE ALSO: The 25 Best Tech Employers For Women [Ranked]

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It's Insanely Expensive, But There's A Secret Benefit Of Living In San Francisco That Makes It Worth It

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San Francisco Giants

Earlier this week, New York Times technology columnist Farhad Manjoo wrote a column about an app called "Luxe" that helps people park their cars.

The way it works is simple: You punch your driving destination in to Luxe. It estimates when you're going to arrive. Then, a Luxe employee greets you. The Luxe employee takes your car and finds somewhere to park it. 

In San Francisco, where Manjoo lives, parking is a giant pain. Luxe only charges $5 per hour, or $15 per day. The daily rate is half the price it normally costs to park in the city all day. The hourly rate isn't too bad if you value your time properly.

Still! This seems like a silly, frivolous app. 

Manjoo and I do a weekly podcast, and we talked about the app. He thoroughly defended it. He says it's not frivolous, and that it is in fact one of the great, hidden benefits of living in San Francisco.

Here's what he said about living in San Francisco. He's being slightly jokey, but only slightly:

"San Francisco is this amazing place where there are many, many kinds of services that are enabled by smartphones and they just do stuff for you like this. But it's not like they're 1%-er apps, they're cheaper than previous models, and they're cheaper in some way because they are being funded by VCs. We in San Francisco get to — first of all, we have to pay higher real estate prices, but the benefit is that we get all these services at cut rate. So you get all these services that aren't making a profit, you're not paying for them to make a profit, VCs are funding them. But, on the other hand you have to pay real estate prices."

He also said, that there are going to be competitors to this, so they are going to collectively lower the price of parking in San Francisco, which solves a huge dilemma in San Francisco. Lots of people drive to work in the city, and they used to have to pay $30 a day, so Luxe has cut the price of parking in half.

This is a small hidden benefit to living in San Francisco. It's super duper expensive to live there, but new mobile services are cutting down slightly on other costs, and making life better. 

I doubt people who are protesting rising rents really care, but it's an interesting counter view. 

Here's the podcast. We talk about this around the 17:18 mark. 

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