Wanted: a charming plus-one for a cocktail party or wedding.

Sound familiar? It's a regular refrain for single ladies. Sometimes you can rustle up a friend, or find a date. But when that fails, we can now look to options like Rent A Gent, a site that sets you up with a professional platonic date.

No funny business, it claims, just a dependable (and dependably attractive) companion for a few hours.

"We provide a service that's not on the market," Rent A Gent's creative director, Jon, told Business Insider. "It's something different and classy. These are more GQ-type guys."

Unlike the escort options you may be thinking of, the Rent A Gent service is about "empowering women." Rent A Gent prioritizes meaningful conversation, and the service costs $200 an hour.

You may be surprised to hear it isn't the only startup of its kind either. ManServants is a similar service that lets people rent men to wait on them hand and foot, and it costs $125 an hour.

On New York's coldest day of the year so far, I took Rent A Gent for a spin. Our date: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where people flock to find beauty.

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The company, founded three years ago by entrepreneur Sara Shikhman, employs a simple process: They have a listing of available "gents" across many major metropolitan areas in the US, to whom they will match you based on your mutual interests, needs, and availability. Then they'll put you in touch with him, and let everything progress from there.

They have about 150 regular gents across the country, with many hundreds of applicants to sift through. A public voting process helps them choose which ones are worthy of the gig, and each is vetted intensively for quality control. Right now, it's not a huge business; they facilitate a handful of dates a week, with New York and Los Angeles being the most consistent markets.

I had been matched with Aaron, who I knew from the photos on the site would be tall, dark, and handsome. It wasn't hard to find him: Even in the mobbed entrance of the Met Museum, he stood head and shoulders above the crowd.

The CEO of a healthcare startup says she has come up with a formula to help her steal the most talented individuals from large corporates like Bloomberg and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

Melissa Morris is the cofounder and CEO of Network Locum, which provides a platform to help self-employed locum doctors find work at GP practices and to help GP practices find cover when they need it.

"This is what I'm doing to take your talented people," she told an audience of employees from firms such as Barclays, Google, and Shell at the FT Innovate conference in London on Tuesday.

Eight months ago, Network Locum had 10 people at its office in Clerkenwell, London. Now it employs 30, with half of those coming from Oxbridge, according to Morris, who won the Sky TV show "The Pitch" in 2012.

Several of Morris' team members have been poached from consultancy firms like PwC and financial giants like Bloomberg, where Network Locum cofounder William Hoyer Millar hails from. Other members of her team were hired from JustGiving and the London cleaning startup Mopp.

Morris, a University of Bath graduate who worked for the management consultancy firm McKinsey and as a strategist for the NHS in London, said she begins her hiring process by finding six companies that she perceives to have high-calibre employees.

Persistent LinkedIn messaging pays off

She then goes on her £700-a-month LinkedIn Premium account, which she says is cheaper and better than hiring a recruiter, and finds 100 potential individual hires.

Each person on this list is contacted by Morris directly through LinkedIn, which is "by far the best" hiring tool she's ever used. If they don't reply, she'll persist, contacting them up to three times in 72 hours if needed.

"It might sound a bit annoying, but actually my response rate goes four times after messaging three times," she said. "Also, I make sure not to send the same message each time."

About 30 of the 100 people she contacts come back and say they're interested, Morris said. Most of the others respond but say they're not interested.

Morris then meets with each of the interested individuals, who she says are "much smarter" than her, and "whittles them down to one or two" through a series of tests.

Culture-fit test

The first test is a "culture-fit" test. The metric for passing this test is: "Could you sit next to this person on a train for two hours?"

Morris then gets candidates to try to solve a problem that one of the Network Locum project teams has been struggling with for two or three weeks. Candidates will get only two hours, so they're not expected to solve the problem, but they are expected to make progress.

Morris said this tested a candidate's intelligence and ability to "get s--- done."

Anyone left at this stage will be invited in for team drinks with the rest of the Network Locum employees.

Business Insider asked Morris how she persuaded the top employees and the best graduates to come and work for her when they could potentially walk into a company like Google or Facebook, where they could be paid significantly more.

Morris replied that Network Locum salaries were competitive, adding that the company was small enough to give away attractive stock options.

A journalist from The Register also questioned Morris on whether she was looking to hire people who were similar to her, but Morris said there was a lot of diversity across her company.

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For anxious Indian startups seeking to raise capital as their country's tech bubble deflates, the investment plans of companies such as China's Cheetah Mobile could hardly come at a better time.

"The consensus in China seems to be that India will be the next growth engine for the entire global internet market, because of its population, economic growth and rising internet penetration," says Alex Yao, senior vice president at the Beijing-based group, which makes utility software for Android smartphones.

To tap that opportunity, Cheetah is planning a flurry of Indian investments, a process it began last November by leading a Rs880m ($12m) round for GOQii, the wearable fitness device maker founded by Indian entrepreneur Vishal Gondal.

Yao says he plans at least 20 more deals over the next two years, as part of efforts to tie-up with local companies that can help the New York-listed Cheetah's wider expansion plans in India.

Such statements would have drawn little attention in India for most of last year, as the country's tech scene boomed and record capital flooded in, both from Silicon Valley venture groups and technology investors including SoftBank, the Japanese telecoms company.

Yet following a sharp drop-off in Indian deals in the final quarter of last year, industry figures say finding fresh funds has become even tougher in 2016, against the backdrop of a global correction in start-up valuations.

For entrepreneurs and investors gathered last week at Surge, a conference for start-up entrepreneurs in the Indian technology capital of Bangalore, the prominence of companies like Cheetah raised a tantalizing prospect: might Chinese companies step in, just as others were drawing back?

"It is getting harder to raise funds, that is true, but we have seen new sources of funds before," says Vani Kola, managing director at ‎Kalaari Capital, an India-focused venture group, referring to recent moves by global pension funds and investment managers to begin backing local start-ups.

"There are a good number of big Chinese tech players with billions on their balance sheets . . . we know many are looking to India."

The idea that China's internet giants could play a larger roll in India took hold last year with the arrival of Alibaba, the ecommerce group. Founder Jack Ma unveiled an aggressive investment strategy, putting $680m into payments group PayTM while also funding the likes of Snapdeal, India's second-largest ecommerce site.

Alibaba's model of first backing local start-ups rather than launching its own services is one that others have since followed, notably Chinese internet group Tencent, which led a $90m funding round for health technology group Practo last August.

More are now weighing deals. Beijing-based search engine Baidu said last month that it was examining investments in three Indian start-ups including restaurant portal Zomato. Chinese smartphone makers such as Xiaomi have also said they plan to take stakes in local companies, as they target growth in India's fast-growing mobile market.

"More and more Chinese companies seem to see India as a second China. It isn't something we are planning, but many will want to invest," says Peter Lau, co-founder of OnePlus, a Shenzhen-based manufacturer of high-end mobile handsets looking to expand its own operations in India rather than investing in local start-ups.

The hope that Indian start-ups struggling to raise funds could find a Chinese savior may well prove illusory. Chinese companies have so far been choosy over potential deals, with many wary of India's complex business climate and unfamiliar culture.

Others face growing problems at home as China's economy slows, potentially limiting plans for big overseas expansion.

Even Ma is understood to have cooled on some deals of late, for instance putting on ice long-rumoured plans to buy a stake in Micromax, India's largest domestic smartphone maker by sales.

Equally, the Indian start-ups struggling to raise money from other sources are also likely to prove least attractive to Chinese investors as well.

"The idea that Chinese companies will swoop in and save bad businesses - that isn't going to happen," says Kola.

Still, Yao of Cheetah Mobile says India continues to appeal to Chinese tech groups seeking new international opportunities, attracted both by the market's potential size and its likely rapid growth as the country's online population surpasses 500m in a few years' time.

"This is an under-developed market, at least three to five years behind China," he says. "So Chinese companies think we can potentially replicate our successes by investing here, by playing for the long term."

This article was written by James Crabtree from The Financial Times and was legally licensed through the NewsCred publisher network.

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Silicon Valley startups and tech companies are famous for their luxurious employee perks. 

Twitter offers its employees acupuncture, for example. Facebook gives $4,000 cash bonuses to new parents. And Adobe forces employees to take time off by literally shutting down for two weeks each year.

But at least one perk that's been in vogue — expensive, custom bicycles given out as signing bonuses — could be on the way out. And it could be a sign that startups are looking to spend the millions they've raised from investors more responsibly as anxiety over an impending market downturn sets in.

Palo Alto Bicycles is a shop that sells and custom-makes high-end bikes. These bikes, which ranged in price from $1,000 to $15,000, were used by some tech companies as signing bonuses, according to The New York Times.

From NYT's Katie Benner:

The message of more caution is not lost on all start-ups. Some are cutting back on expenses, albeit just a little. Jeff Selzer, the manager of Palo Alto Bicycles, a specialty bike store, said he was seeing fewer start-ups build custom $10,000 bicycles as signing bonuses for new managers.

Business Insider reached out to Palo Alto Bicycles' general manager Jeff Selzer who confirmed that there has been a decline in these types of extravagant purchases over the past couple of years.

Selzer also mentioned a purchase made by a Google employee for 5 or 6 bikes costing upwards of $1,500 a piece. But he says "that kind of purchasing has slowed" and that he's seen a shift in all of his sales from more "disposable income purchases" to utilitarian purchases.

The tightening up of budgets seems to be a trend as startups prepare for investors to close their wallets.

Two New York-based startup investors recently told Business Insider that, beginning in the third quarter of last year, board meeting conversations began shifting significantly at their companies to focus on reaching profitability instead of growth, for example.

How long will the cautious spending last?

"Until we all forget again," one of the investors joked.

SEE ALSO: 'The Great Reset': Venture capitalists and startups have shifted from greed to fear

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Tech companies hired like crazy coming into 2016. Now they're shedding employees as ambitious business growth expectations miss targets. 

HR company Zenefits, which cut 250 employees on Friday, is just one example of the rush to slim down that's sweeping the tech scene. 

According to research prepared by DataFox, at least 18 tech, or tech-related, companies cut ties with employees in February, and those are just the ones that have been publicly reported. 

Yahoo is reducing its staff by 15%, or more than 1,500 jobs. BlackBerry is trimming by 35%, eliminating 200 positions. DataGravity took the pre-emptive step to layoff employees this month as well.

The staff reductions come at a time when the market is slowing and companies are taking a hard look at their finances. Companies with great growth, money in the bank, and manageable burn rates will probably come out OK, but any company that has a weakness in any of those three areas could start looking at places to cut costs. 

While February saw a host of companies slashing headcounts, the trend could continue as the market tightens. On Bloomberg West with Emily Chang, Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois said companies have too many employees for their own good.

"I think maybe technology companies have over-hired over the last four years," Rabois told Bloomberg. "I think the average technology company is between 25% and 50% bloated."

This isn't just a Silicon Valley startup problem. Companies around the country, big and small, are pulling back. Here's a recap from DataFox that shows which companies lost employees:

Any layoffs we haven't heard of? Leave a comment below or email bcarson@businessinsider.com

SEE ALSO: 'The Great Reset': Venture capitalists and startups have shifted from greed to fear

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Is the tech-startup market cratering, or is all the hand-wringing much ado about nothing?

Apparently even those closest to the action can't seem to agree.

Venture capitalists, startup executives, and industry analysts got into a public Twitter spat on Tuesday after a new report said that overall VC deal volume and capital deployment were up during the first two months of 2016.

That report, published by industry research firm Mattermark, was quickly seized upon by some industry insiders as evidence that the much-feared tech downturn was not quite the catastrophe in the making it's been made out to be. That, in turn, drew fire from others.

Here are the headline findings, shared by Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill:

Box's head of strategy and corporate development, Villi Iltchev, weighed in:

That prompted a quick response from Keith Rabois, a partner at VC firm Khosla Ventures and the former COO of digital-payments company Square:

There's been plenty of anecdotal evidence of trouble in the tech industry in recent months, from Fidelity's write-downs of its holdings in hot private companies such as Snapchat and Zenefits, to the layoffs and outright shutdowns of other startups.

Whether these are isolated incidents or part of a broader trend remains unclear, and the issue is clearly a contentious one.

Josh Elman, another valley VC who has worked at Facebook and Twitter, pointed out that the 2016 investments included in Mattermark's data may have been announced recently, but were actually struck much earlier.

Meanwhile, Rabois' comments on the topic quickly turned into a dispute with Mattermark over the quality of the data:

At one point, Rabois even tried to make his case by appearing to argue that he was basically infallible:

The Twitter debate may not have settled much about the current state of the tech industry, but it highlighted the level of uncertainty even within the industry itself.

SEE ALSO: 'The Great Reset': Venture capitalists, startups have shifted from greed to fear

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Jobbatical, an Estonian startup that helps travel enthusiasts get technology jobs around the world, has raised $2 million (£1.4 million) in a funding round that involved LocalGlobe, the venture fund set up by Saul Klein and his father Robin Klein last year, and Union Square Ventures, which has backed the likes of Twitter, SoundCloud, and Funding Circle.

The Tallinn-headquartered company — founded in June 2014 by Karoli Hindriks before gaining support from cofounders Ronald Hindriks (Karoli’s brother) and Allan Mäeots — announced the funding round on Wednesday. Total investment in the company now stands at around $3 million (£2.2 million).

Jobbatical aims to match the skill sets and travel aspirations of tech and startup professionals with companies in search of talent. Companies list jobs on the platform and ambitious travel enthusiasts are invited to apply for them. The startup, which hails from the same country as Skype, makes money by charging a commission on each successful hire.

"Silicon Valley and the other great technology hubs have developed in large part because of the steady stream of highly-skilled individuals they manage to attract," said Karoli Hindriks in a statement. "Our goal with Jobbatical is to help build the world’s next generation of Silicon Valleys, from Lisbon to Kuala Lumpur and beyond, by removing geographical bias from hiring decisions, so that people are employed based on their skills, rather than their passports."

The company claims to have built up a talent pool of 30,000 people that are looking to relocate. Over its first year, 1,200 companies across 40 countries used Jobbatical. During the same time period, there were apparently 7,000 job applications and over 300 job matches.

Jobbatical said it will use the funding to further develop its product and improve the overall user experience. The company also wants to triple the size of its team, which is currently less than 10 people, according to CrunchBase. Specifically, it wants to hire more marketing people. Part of this will involve opening up a new office in Singapore to serve Southeast Asia, which is its fastest-growing destination.

On the day of the funding announcement, the company touted a PwC survey highlighting how 71% of millennials would like to work outside their own country over the course of their career.

Saul Klein, the cofounder of LoveFilm, SeedCamp, Kano, and a number of other companies, told Business Insider that this is the second startup he and his father have publicly backed with their new £45 million venture capital fund.

"We are interested in big themes and the future of work is a big theme," Klein said over the phone ahead of the announcement. "The way people work has changed. Apparently we’re all going to have 11 jobs in our careers now. The notion you have the freedom and flexibility to experience another place, another city, another culture, and not just do that as a tourist, but earn a living while you’re doing it, makes sense to me."

Klein added that he loves working with talented Estonians, pointing to his time at Skype where he worked for just over two years, climbing to VP in the process.

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Asking someone how much they make is still a taboo question, yet it's one thing that's on everyone's mind.

"I could tell you I had cancer and it would be dramatically more uncomfortable if I asked what you were making at your job," said Comparably's cofounder and CEO Jason Nazar.

He knows it's an extreme example, but there's truth to the fact that asking what your peers make is often uncomfortable.

Most people want to know if they're being paid fairly or if they should be commanding higher pay, but don't know how to find out.

Nazar's new company, Comparably, is launching Thursday to bring transparency to not only pay, but also culture in the workplace. 

Workers can anonymously report their salary, experience level, company size, location, and a whole other host of factors to Comparably. In return, the site shows you where you rank compared your peers with the same position and experience level.

It makes it easy to see that an engineer in Los Angeles is paid on average less than one in San Francisco, or a woman in the same position might be making less than a man. For employers, especially startups who see rapid growth, it can be good to check what an operations person is paid when a company is only 10 employees versus their compensation when it grows to be 100. 

While just talking about pay is helpful, another major factor in how happy employees are is how they feel about working at the company.

Comparably has simple quizzes about company culture, from professional development opportunities to how often they get raises. Based on your answers, Comparably gives you a score on how satisfied you are with your job.

While all this data is helpful, one major feedback Nazar got from testing was what to do with it. Early users thought finally having the information was great, but they had no idea what to do with it.

"The most natural inclination was to ask questions like what is it like working at other companies," Nazar said. "There still isn’t a large well known anonymous kind of platform where people could connect with job titles."

The company quickly added an anonymous question-and-answer component to the site as well, similar to what existed on now defunct Secret or the lifestyle-oriented Whisper. 

Nazar's passion for bringing transparency to the workplace stemmed from his experience creating Docstoc, a startup that sold to Intuit in 2013 and was recently shut down. Docstoc provided a resource for small businesses to find the paperwork and information they needed to get up and running. However, paying employees always remained a black box that no one could tap into.

While some companies, like Buffer, have gone as far as posting each employees' salary online, Nazar believes there should be a middle ground in making pay information transparent for both employees and employers. 

"There’s nowhere where you can get really detailed, specific compensation data on what people like you are making," Nazar told Business Insider.

At least until now.

Comparably launches Thursday only for those in the tech industry, but it will eventually move beyond it the narrow vertical. He's hoping Comparably will be that resource going forward and already has raised $6.5 million from investors to build it out.

Even though it's only day one, Nazar has a large vision for the company, and it's not stopping just with engineers and designers. Comparably could one day show how Facebook engineers specifically rate the company and attach a public rating to, in a way Glassdoor does. Companies that have low ratings would hopefully work to improve it, otherwise Comparably would show who the bad actors are. 

"Our mission is to make work better, and the main way we can do that to start is to make work radically transparent around compensation and on culture," Nazar said.

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A high-flying London tech entrepreneur turned up to Prime Minister David Cameron's house on Thursday evening wearing shorts and trainers after being invited to help choose the next "Founders of the Future."

The Founders of the Future initiative — being led by Lastminute.com cofounder Brent Hoberman through Founders Forum, a network of entrepreneurs and business leaders — is designed to uncover and nurture future technology founders across Europe that are aged 16-35.

Matt Miller, or "Mills" as he likes to be known, told Business Insider at Downing Street that he didn't want to pretend to be something he wasn't by wearing a suit.

"It’s about being real," said Mills. "I’m not going to turn up in something I don’t usually wear. If I was going to meet 100 of the future founders, I want them to know who I am."

He added: "These are my smart shorts so I have made an effort, I bought new trainers."

Mills is the cofounder of a digital product studio called ustwo, which was launched in 2004. The company employs approximately 300 people and has created games like Monument Valley and apps like Dice, which has been backed by the cofounders of Google DeepMind.

Digital economy minister Ed Vaizey applauded Mills for his "extremely impressive tech dress down" while giving a speech about tech entrepreneurship at the Founders of the Future reception.

Heading to the @Number10gov crib ~ gonna be smooth pic.twitter.com/SJn0POFj9H

— RODEO ROBOT RANGER (@millsustwo) March 3, 2016

Founders Forum claims the 100 Founders of the Future were selected using an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm and peer recommendations from Mills and the likes of Niklas Zennstrom of Skype, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Dame Natalie Massenet.

Mills selected 24-year-old Rikke Koblauch as one of the Founders of the Future. She is part of the UX/UI team at Ustwo and was also selected by the AI algorithm.

Hoberman said that he hoped the event would encourage the 100 Founders of the Future to start their own businesses. "We're trying to build a community of incredible entrepreneurs that aren't yet entrepreneurs," he said.

The cofounder of one successful startup whose employee attended the event told Business Insider: "It was more like look at the most promising hyped companies, invite the management."

Other Founders of the Future include George Burgess, who has created an education app called Gojimo, Dylan Baker, who used to work as a journalist for Tech City News and is about to join ecommerce startup Yieldify, and Josephine Goube, who is co-directing manager at Girls in Tech UK, which is an organisation aiming to get more young female entrepreneurs into technology. One other notable inclusion was Mustafa Al-Bassam, who at 16 was jailed for 20 months for hacking the computer systems of Sony and the CIA.

After the event, Baker said: "Founders of the Future is great because it is taking a very proactive approach to creating the next generation of high growth businesses in the UK.

"I think there were lots of people in the room last night who previously wouldn't necessarily have considered entrepreneurship as part of their career trajectory but after having felt the buzz that there was at the launch event and having engaged with their peers and established entrepreneurs in the room, will definitely consider it going forward, and that's incredibly important."

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"Mom, Dad, I'm quitting my job to start a tampon company."

That's exactly what Alex Friedman and Jordana Kier told their parents when they decided to team up two years ago to cofound LOLA.

At first, the two women just wanted to solve one problem with tampons: the fact that "we never seem to have them when we really need them," Friedman tells Business Insider.

They wanted to launch a company that would mail women tampons once a month to make their lives a little bit easier.

But Friedman and Kier tell Business Insider that when they started doing their research, they learned that the FDA doesn't require companies to list all the ingredients in tampons, and they were "shocked." Upon digging a little further, they found that most of the big brands use synthetic materials — usually a blend of the artificial fibers rayon and polyester, among others — in their tampons. 

Business Insider reached out to Tampax, Kotex, and Playtex. Kotex and Tampax say the absorbent material of their tampons are a cotton and rayon blend, while Playtex uses a cotton fiber rather than cotton. All three companies say the percentages of each material is proprietary information or not available, and their products meet FDA standards. 

Given that the average American woman is estimated to use more than 16,000 tampons in her lifetime, according to the National Center for Health Research — and that "no research has been conducted on the long-term effects of artificial fibers in tampons"— Friedman and Kier decided to start a company that would also tackle the ingredient problem by offering women a more natural option.

Before launching LOLA, Friedman and Kier conducted about a dozen focus groups with women across the country and asked each group about feminine care, and what they know (or don't know) about the products they are currently using. 

Participants mostly complained about never having enough tampons in the house, and said they don't know what's in the tampons they're using.

Once the focus groups confirmed what Friedman and Kier thought were the two biggest problems with this centuries-old product,they officially got LOLA going.

In July 2015, the women launched their company, which makes biodegradable tampons made of 100% cotton and delivers its products to your front door in recyclable boxes once or twice a month ($10 for one box; $18 for two boxes), depending on the subscription package you choose. 

Friedman and Kier say disrupting the massive tampon market — which is projected to reach $6.2 billion in sales by 2020 and is currently dominated by brands that have been around for hundreds of years — is no easy feat.

"It feels like women have been waiting for a brand like LOLA for a long time but didn't know it because they had never talked about it before," Friedman tells Business Insider.

Currently, the company — which received $1.2 million in seed money last summer (part of which came from supermodel Karlie Kloss) and an additional $3 million earlier this week — is made up of just four employees: Friedman, Kier, and two interns. But they plan to expand soon.

One of the biggest challenges right now is getting women to switch over from the brands they know and trust.

Luckily, they say, their friends, family, and early customers, like Kloss, are very supportive of and passionate about LOLA — and they're spreading the word. 

Friedman and Kier have already sold millions of tampons since launching the company eight months ago — but to continue growing, they say they'll need to up their social media game, connect with lifestyle bloggers, establish B2B relationships, and develop brand partnerships. They're also encouraging customers to "recruit" their friends by offering a "give $5, get $5" referral program. 

"We know a lot of women care about what's best for their bodies — that's why so many demand to know what's in their food and shampoo. But, not surprisingly, they don't really talk about tampons," says Friedman. "So a big part of our mission is to start those conversations."

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In the hills above Hollywood, Arsenic's team of 12 — 10 women and two men — is building a media powerhouse based on being real, raw, and edgy.

In the last two years, Arsenic has transformed from being one woman's hobby to a social-media movement where women of any shape, size, skin color, or location are submitting their own photos and videos for free just because they want to be a part of it.

The startup, which officially launched in June 2015, currently has over 960,000 followers on Instagram, more than Maxim and Esquire combined.

Arsenic's Snapchat channel has around 500,000 people clicking on every photo and video its models post.

Arsenic's meteoric rise comes at a time when social media can make anyone a star and women are being empowered to take control of their bodies.

The tone was set from the second Arsenic shoot ever, when cofounder Amanda Micallef threw the photographer off the set.

He had come in with the typical attitude of "This is my set, you do what I say" and dictated how the girls looked, she explains to Business Insider. That was not going to fly.

"These women wanted to push the envelope. They liked the idea of owning their sexuality," Micallef says. "They liked being provocative, but they didn’t want somebody to tell them how to do that."

They liked being provocative, but they didn’t want somebody to tell them how to do that.

The girls traded places and took photos of themselves, posing however they wanted.

"That was the mantra right off the bat: If you don't like what you're doing, don't do it," Micallef says.

Arsenic doesn't pay for any of its Snapchat content. The entire platform is crowd-sourced, with people volunteering to take over the account and showcase their lives. The up-and-coming models want attention and to be discovered.

Brands are clamoring to have their products, like cars, show up as photo-shoot props. All of the art on display in the Arsenic House is on loan from artists wanting it to be showcased in the background.

Now a generation of men and women who love "the new sexy" have started following Arsenic in droves.

Evening the playing field on Instagram

In 2014, Micallef wanted to start a print magazine.

"I said, Amanda, print is dead," her cofounder Billy Hawkins laughs.

Micallef had started Arsenic as a side project, a hobby to escape the "Hollywood bulls---" that had become increasingly pervasive in her day job as an independent filmmaker.

For the first shoot, she didn't have any money to provide props or secure a location. The models, the photographer, and the makeup artists showed up for free. Hawkins lent Micallef his house.

The resulting images were a byproduct of not having the money to do something more elaborate.

Then came the next shoot, where the photographer was kicked out. The photos were different, and Micallef could tell she had hit on something.

"In a commercial way, there was just this idea of what sexy, beautiful was that was somewhat limiting," Micallef says.

"But more than that, there’s a nuance when you look at a picture of a girl when she’s feeling empowered and beautiful — her hair is the way she wants, she’s wearing what she wants, she’s standing the way she wants — that’s very different than when a guy is like 'stand there, turn your cheek that way,' and projecting what he thinks is sexy."

Hearing her idea of doing a print magazine, Hawkins turned her down, but Micallef is stubborn. She told him she was going to do it with or without his help.

One week later, he came back with an email outlining the pillars of what Arsenic would become.

The most interesting woman in the world and an opportunity

Hawkins and Micallef met years ago, when Hawkins left a career in investment banking to become a mail-room clerk at Creative Arts Agency (CAA).

His boss told him about Micallef, a woman who raced Formula 1 Cars and drove the Gumball 3000 race across the country. She didn't just participate — she got thrown in jail for driving too fast. After her dad bailed her out, she finished in the top 10% of the race. And this was in between her sitting on the boards of several companies.

"This is before the Dos Equis dude, the most interesting man in the world, but that’s kind of how I pictured this woman," Hawkins says about first meeting Micallef.

He knew her side project had struck a nerve, and it seemed like there was a giant opportunity ahead.

Looking at Playboy and Maxim in 2014, they hadn't stayed on top of the digital age, Hawkins thought. MTV had slipped as the tastemaker. Instead, it's Snapchat and YouTube stars dictating pop culture.

"It seemed like there was this unoccupied throne, and there didn’t seem to be a viable contender," Hawkins said. "And I said, 'Amanda, you’re getting these models to shoot for free because you’re hitting on something. There’s something to this.'”

Turning a hobby into a business

The free photo shoots were still just a "hobby accelerated" to Micallef, but more women started approaching her wanting to work for Arsenic. They didn't want to be paid; they just wanted to be a part of it.

Micallef tried to make a WordPress site, but says it was an "utter and total disaster." Then she turned to Instagram.

"Our first hundred followers came from what can only be called extortion," Micallef said with a laugh. "Billy would take someone's phone from them, go to their Instagram and follow Arsenic and hand the phone back."

"It wasn’t a hits business. It was always this slowly accelerating snowball. When it did take off, it had a hockey-stick growth curve."

Moving onto Snapchat

Although Snapchat was a cool new social platform, Micallef and Hawkins weren't sure how to use it at first.

The disappearing photo network initially had a reputation for sexting, with users sending racy anatomy photos back and forth. Arsenic's community of models and photographers hadn't found a safe spot on the social network yet.

But the launch of Snapchat Stories changed that.

Originally, Snapchat only let users send a single image or video to a list of friends, one by one. With Stories, users could publicly share a collection of photos taken during the course of a day. All of their followers could watch the stories over and over, and the experience felt more like broadcasting to the masses than text messaging.

A 19-year-old film student who was volunteering for Arsenic offered to start the company's Snapchat channel. She began broadcasting her day, but having the account run by one model wasn't interesting enough.

Arsenic began to implement "Snapchat takeovers." They would put a call out on Instagram for someone to run the account for a day and then pick a model from the comments section.

Anyone in Arsenic's community could be eligible to run the Snapchat channel, because Micallef and Hawkins didn't want an "Arsenic Girl" to be a definition, like a Victoria's Secret model or Playboy bunny.

"We embrace lots of types of women. It's part of the reason that women engage with it," Micallef said. "You don’t have to be blonde or six feet tall. Our models could be my next-door neighbor. They could be my best friend."

Soon the channel began to take on the lives of a variety of women. One day it might be a dancer shaking it at class. The next, a model preparing for a photo shoot on her bed. Or a walk through of the celebrity's house. A behind-the-scenes look at a concert.

These weren't glossy, retouched models and images. It was real, shaky camera hands and all. And soon, hundreds of thousands people were watching.

"From the early days, we were about pushing the envelope, making noise, not being meek,” Hawkins said, pounding his fist to his hand to proclaim each point, as we sit in the living room of the Arsenic House. “We didn’t care if someone unfollowed us on Instagram. Our theory is that these are the real people, and we don’t want to water it down to make it appealing to everyone.”

In January 2015, six weeks after launching on Snapchat, the videos were already garnering 60,000 views. Now each Arsenic Snapchat video starts with a hand-drawn logo followed by a clip of an old TV show. Whatever comes next is a surprise.

"You tune in because you don't know what you will miss," Micallef said. 

Building it into a business

Despite the early Snapchat and Instagram success, Hawkins and Micallef didn't quit their day jobs until June 1, 2015.

"At a certain point, when you're reaching a certain amount of people, it becomes pretty f------ hard to ignore," Hawkins said.

They incorporated Arsenic and started paying some of the women who had been happily volunteering.

Now they've raised a round of capital from LA-based Arena Ventures and have found ways to grow sponsorships and view counts on Snapchat simultaneously.

Arsenic recently did a takeover of 40 people's accounts, all showing a car-wash photo shoot from different points of view, sponsored by a car company.

The startup has also hired its first developer, an ex-Zynga engineer, to build the crowd-sourced platform they are betting their future on. The key to Arsenic thus far has been its inclusivity, but having volunteers pick over the comments section has been labor intensive.

Arsenic wants to build a home for people looking to exhibit creativity to a community — like a Reddit for up-and-coming models and photographers — no matter where they are or the connections they have.

"It’s really just an outgrowth of a macro change in the world. People spend more time on their phones than they do watching TV — that has nothing to do with us," Hawkins said. "We believe there is an 18-year-old in a third-world country that is just as valuable as Steven Spielberg and JJ Abrams. What we need to do is figure out a way to sort through it.”

To Hawkins, unlocking the potential of ordinary people goes back to his childhood. His mother had always talked about a "them."

Why did they make the remote this way? Why did they do this?

"I’ve always rejected it because it is a construct of language that then has this idea that the power resides outside of yourself. They have the power, not you," Hawkins said.

It wasn't until he gained influence himself in Hollywood that he realized the six major studios are a they. They dictate who gets cast and what stories get made. They control pop culture.

The way women look has also long been in the hands of another they. They, the photographers. They, the men. They, the brands.

That's changing, and Arsenic is on the cusp of it.

"If we had a version of Maxim's top 100 sexiest women, we would ask our audience who they think [should win]" Hawkins says.

"And by the way, it could be you."

SEE ALSO: The 25 hot LA startups you need to watch

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NOW WATCH: Snapchat's new selfie filters are super trippy

Renowned venture capitalist Saul Klein believes technology investors should focus on spotting the "right surfers" instead of just trying to ride the wave.

Speaking to Business Insider ahead of his latest investment, an Estonian startup called Jobbatical that was founded by a pair of siblings and their friend, Klein said it's important to spot talented entrepreneurs building companies in areas where there is market potential.

"It’s not just about spotting waves," said Klein, pointing to verticals such as cloud, mobile, fintech, and artificial intelligence. "It’s about finding the right surfers."

He added: "Pick your wave. There will always be 30 plus companies on it. Our job [as investors] is to pick the surfers. It’s about focusing in on the big market opportunities within these waves and finding the right teams."

Klein — who cofounded movie streaming service LoveFilm, startup accelerator Seedcamp, and computer building startup Kano — left Index Ventures last year to set up a new venture capital fund with his father, Robin Klein.

Klein's company, LocalGlobe, has poached two former Index employees and raised £45 million for its first fund from a variety of sources including university endowments, strategic investors, and corporates. It is based in London's King's Cross neighbourhood, which is also home to an increasing number of Google buildings and Index rival Balderton Capital.

"We're looking for the kind of founders who can build very big meaningful companies," said Klein. "The kind that will become the next Zooplas and TransferWises and Funding Circles. We try and identify as early as possible the founders who have the ability to build something big."

LocalGlobe has also backed a startup that helps people find mortgages called Trussle. "The UK market for mortgages is in the hundreds of billions and it’s highly fragmented," he said Klein. "The largest player has 3-4% of the market so you can potentially make an enormous company in the UK alone."

Klein highlighted how investing is an extremely risky business.

"You have to believe in every investment you’re making." Ultimately, however, the vast majority of investments fail to make any money for the investor. Klein said only 5-10% of the capital that venture capitalists invest "gets the returns."

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NOW WATCH: There’s a super easy way to find your phone using Google search

Nas, one of the greatest rappers of all time, has invested in a company that makes protein bars out of crickets. 

Exo is a Brooklyn-based startup that is trying to change the way we think about eating bugs. The company just closed a $4 million round of Series A funding led by Accel Foods — including Nas — bringing its total funding to $5.6 million.

Exo cofounders Greg Sewitz and Gabi Lewis started experimenting with cricket-based food when they were seniors at Brown University, after reading a United Nations report that said eating insects could help combat world hunger.

They currently have the highest sales in the insect snack space, which admittedly is not particularly crowded.

Exo's pitch is that "cricket flour"— basically ground-up crickets — is much better for the environment that other animal sources. Cows, for example, produce about 100 times the amount of greenhouse gas for the same amount of protein, according to Exo.

A few months back, I tried a sampler pack of their protein bars, which each contain approximately 40 crickets. Here's what it was like:

SEE ALSO: I tried the Soylent competitor that YouTube's cofounder invested in

We got an Exo sampler pack, which costs $13.

It has 4 flavors of bars...

...Peanut Butter and Jelly, Blueberry Vanilla, Cocoa Nut, and Apple Cinnamon.

Everlane might be the next big thing in retail.

This fall, Racked posited that the online retailer might become "the next J. Crew."

And now, Re/Code is reporting that Everlane is supposedly performing very well: Sources claim that the startup raked in roughly $50 million last year, and that it plans to make twice that in revenue this year.

Re/code also reported that Everlane could get another round of funding and that it's looking for a valuation that's bigger than $250 million. (Everlane has raised $18 million as of now.)

So why is Everlane so hot right now?

It's got a few things going for it.

Clear, millennial-friendly values 

The core of Everlane is that it promotes transparency; it wears its ethics on its knit sleeve.

On its website, the retailer breaks down how much it costs to make its clothing (labor, materials, transporting the apparel, and duties). It compares its prices with those of traditional retailers. One dress, for instance, is $98 at Everlane, and Everlane claims traditional retailers would sell the dress for $190.

The transparency raises two points: it hones in on the idea of how consumers hate paying more than they have to, and it also appeals to young people's desire for socially-conscious brands.

"64% of millennials would rather wear a socially-conscious brand than a luxury brand," Rachel Krautkremer, an editorial director for the creative agency Deep Focus, told Racked. "It's a shift in how this generation views their clothing. They want to know where their product is coming from."

As a part of this transparency effort, Everlane has a pay-what-you-want section on its website. In December, the company launched this initiative with a pay-what-you-want sale (the lowest price, of course, comes with a heavy dose of the shame for not helping the ethically-minded company).

The clothes J. Crew's fans miss

Secondly, per Racked's arguments, Everlane seems to do what J. Crew has been failing to do as of late: give consumers quality basics. (J. Crew  returned to basics in the fall, but third quarter sales proved that the apparel failed to resonate with consumers.)

Everlane's clothes are simple and claim to be of high quality. 

"We make products that are timeless in look," Everlane CEO Michael Preysman told Racked in the fall. "The clothing has a current point of view, but can also be worn in 10 years. It's a very tricky thing to pull off. In our view, the best way to be environmentally sustainable is to create really great quality clothing that lasts and that has a lasting time stamp."

Despite the clear emphasis on basics, Everlane also aims to appeal to the fashion-forward set. The company has a well-known trendy fashion executive on its team, not too dissimilar from J. Crew's iconic Jenna Lyons. Everlane hired Rebekka Bay, who was ousted from the Gap despite having a fashion-forward reputation and previously worked at H&M, as head of product and design last year.

It's tech-savvy

Further, Everlane is, at heart, a technologically-minded company. It's an e-commerce-based startup.

It also has a feature called "Everlane Now," an option for people in New York City and San Francisco to order certain items and receive them within one hour.

Everlane also bridges technology and transparency with a Snapchat series called "Transparency Tuesdays," in which Everlane's social media head, Red Gaskell, answers consumers' questions.

SEE ALSO: One retailer is letting customers decide how much to pay — but there's an invisible price if you choose the lowest option

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NOW WATCH: The self-lacing Nike sneakers from 'Back To The Future' are real

Entrepreneur First is looking to raise a £40 million fund to invest in companies that are created on its startup-building course.

Founded by Matt Clifford and Alice Bentinck in 2011, Entrepreneur First provides deeply technical people with £17,000 in pre-seed funding so they can build a technology startup. In return, it takes an 8% equity stake in the company that is created.

The "Next Stage Fund" will allow Entrepreneur First to provide its startups "with an immediate injection of capital" when they reach the end of the programme, which is being expanded from six months to 12 months.

The fund, set to be deployed later this year, will also be used to back Entrepreneur First companies when they raise their seed and series A rounds.

Bentinck told Business Insider on Tuesday that the fund will allow Entrepreneur First to provide better support to the technical founders that she and Clifford look to back.

Clifford, CEO of Entrepreneur First, said a number of "significant commitments" have already been made towards the fund without revealing any of further details.

New general partners

Entrepreneur First, based out of an old biscuit factory in Bermondsey, South London, also announced two new general partners: Wendy Tan White and Joe White. The duo, previously venture partners at Entrepreneur First, are the cofounders of website building software provider Moonfruit, which was acquired by Yell for $29 million (£20 million) in 2012.

Wendy Tan White said: "We believe Entrepreneur First is at an inflection point. Entrepreneur First is at the stage YC was when Sequoia came in. The opportunity of the next stage fund is unique."

Joe White added: "We looked at doing another startup, and were offered investment to do so, we were offered roles in government and strategic consultancies, we started angel investing and we were approached to set up a fund by institutions from the UK and US. Entrepreneur First's philosophy of company building vs. deal selection as a route to generate high performance returns was critical in our choice to join as General Partners and to help hone tomorrow’s technical talent."

The new fund and the appointment of the Whites to general partner status coincided with the latest Entrepreneur First "demo day," which will see 25 startups pitch their businesses to a room full of investors.

The 50 startups that have previously graduated the programme have raised over $60 million (£42 million) in venture capital from global investors, according to Entrepreneur First. Collectively, these startups are now worth more than $250 million (£176 million). The portfolio includes deep tech firms (Magic Pony Technology, Adbrain, and Tractable), marketplaces (Hubble, ClickMechanic), consumer products (Prizeo, Code Kingdoms), and hardware (Blaze, Pi-Top, Speakset).

Clifford and Bentinck announced in January that they were expanding the Entrepreneur First programme to Singapore in a bid to take advantage of the technical talent that exists in South-East Asia.

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NOW WATCH: Scientists made a robot art critic that is able to form its own opinions

Office-sharing startup WeWork is raising $430 million in new funding that places it at around a $16 billion valuation.

Earlier on Wednesday, Fortune had pegged the deal at a $780 million investment at a $17 billion valuation, but a person close to the deal provided Business Insider with more accurate figures.

In a blog entry, WeWork shared that the investors leading the deal were Chinese firms Legend Holdings and Hony Capital — giving the super-hot office-rental company a foot in the door in China.

WeWork, which has already raised $969 million in funding at a $10 billion valuation, was already the 11th most valuable startup in the world without accounting for this round.

The last we heard of WeWork, in November 2015, it was reportedly going after $750 million in debt financing— basically, a loan. It's not clear if WeWork ever actually went through with that move.

Debt financing is structured like a loan to be paid back later, while equity means the lender gets a piece of the company. This round, confirmed by court forms reportedly filed on Tuesday and spotted by VC Experts, would be for equity.

WeWork now has 80 coworking spaces in 23 cities around the globe. WeWork's 50,000 clients range from startups — Business Insider uses a WeWork space out in San Francisco — to big companies like Merck and American Express. Individuals can also buy packages starting at $45 and rent a desk for a day.

More recently, WeWork began experimenting with a co-living space, WeLive, where people rent part of a living space and take part in shared amenities as part of the deal.

But WeWork also has its critics. The company settled a dispute over its custodial services in late 2015. And though WeWork became profitable as of summer 2015, some skeptics believe that its financials may not support its valuation, suggesting it could be part of a new technology bubble.

And there are basic concerns about the sustainability of its business model. WeWork is basically in the real-estate business: It takes out large leases in buildings and then sublets the spaces to smaller companies. And the real-estate business can be risky.

WeWork did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SEE ALSO: $10 billion WeWork is raising $750 million in debt financing

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NOW WATCH: Nissan has created self-parking office chairs

News broke Wednesday that office-space provider WeWork is raising a new round that will value the company at $16 billion. This flies in the face of recent talk about a popping tech bubble and dying billion-dollar "unicorn" startups.

But perhaps this isn't a bubble popping, as happened in the dot-com era, but simply a reshuffling. Startups that can convince investors that their growth prospects are still good and that they have a path to profitability may still find it easy to raise money. It's the struggling companies with slowing growth and no clear path to profits that could find a harder time.

With that reshuffling in mind, Statista has charted the most valuable venture-backed private companies in the world, based on the valuation at their most recent round (this does not include reported downgrades by big institutional investors). WeWork is now in seventh place.

SEE ALSO: Which tech companies are doing best on hiring more women?

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NOW WATCH: There’s a super easy way to find your phone using Google search

Layoffs are rippling through Silicon Valley tech startups as the venture market cools, and today Optimizely joined the list, cutting about 40 workers from its staff of 400.

Optimizely makes software for testing different web site layouts against one another in real time to see which performs best — called A/B testing. It's received $146 million in venture funding, including a $58 million round last October. In a blog post CEO Dan Siroker says it's now the most-used web site optimization platform in the world.

But Siroker also delivered a tough dose of reality in his email to employees about the layoffs.

He wrote (emphasis ours):

In August 2015, we began our journey to Control Our Own Destiny, which means controlling the path we are on as a company without having to depend on anyone but ourselves. In order to do that we must build a business that makes more money than it spends. We set a goal of getting to cash flow breakeven and we have made tremendous progress toward this goal.

Later:

I’m incredibly thankful we embraced this journey in August because on February 5th, our entire industry got a wake up call. On that day, public cloud companies collectively lost $28B in market value on a single day. Some of the market value has recovered since then, but the market has clearly shifted.

February 5 was a brutal day on the markets in which public tech companies Tableau (which helps companies analyze business data) and LinkedIn both lost about half their value after disappointing earnings report.

This doesn't mean that every venture-backed startup will have trouble raising more money at higher valuations — just yesterday, it came out that real estate leasing company WeWork is raising more than $400 million and is now worth $16 billion, the same as Snapchat. 

But WeWork, like Uber, is exceptional. For most tech startups, the time has come to prove that they can build a sustainable business now, rather than depending on the idea that there will be endless rounds of venture funding to help sustain them. 

You can read Siroker's blog post, which includes his entire email to his employees, here>>

SEE ALSO: February was a bad month for tech layoffs

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NOW WATCH: This woman is getting famous for building hilariously terrible robots

Chief among the amazing perks that tech companies offer their employees are crazy offices.

From slides to ballpits, meditation rooms to absurdly themed meeting rooms, many startups have offices that look like something out of Roald Dahl's imagination.

But you have to wonder — how suitable are these zany workspaces when it actually comes down to business? Are hammocks really the best place for resolving a HR dispute? Do you want to be surrounded by video game murals when going through a painful restructuring?

A series of tweets by Chappell Ellison, a New York-based writer and designer, on Thursday night perfectly captured the absurdity of many modern offices. 

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/707986577805479936
"John, as you know, things have been tough."
"Are you firing me?"
"It's just—"
JOHN slams hand on Pacman table. pic.twitter.com/e03Jhl2gRh

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/707987291906641920
"We've been hacked. They found a loop hole."
"It's not possible."
"Gather the team. Let's meet in the Mario room."pic.twitter.com/K8Fi8Zpuee

Tweet Embed:
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/707987702877175809
"The IPO, John. It's...it's failing."
"I don't understand. How?"
"I've called an executive meeting. Ball pit rm #3"pic.twitter.com/VLjZz6WH0o

Today is the beginning of the end, and also the end of the beginning. We announced that we’re shutting down Bucket, the innovative trip planning startup that I’ve been working on for almost three years.

On days like this, I always think it’s helpful to reflect and share our experience with others that might chose to take a similar journey. What inspired you to build this crazy idea in the first place? How did we get here? What happened?

The idea

For those unfamiliar with Bucket, we allow you collect trip ideas from any text source, aggregate it with any other information needed to decide, and go.

Our original inspiration came from friends’ Facebook posts asking for recommendations. Posts like: “I’m going to Paris for a week, I like high end accommodation, shows, and nice restaurants. What should I do?” People who knew the requester’s tastes and had been to Paris offered curated suggestions. These weren’t your run-of-the-mill recommendations from a Lonely Planet book or a TripAdvisor page. These suggestions were personalized, off-the-beaten path, and tailor-made for the recipient. They were the best suggestions.

We thought, wouldn’t it be amazing to have all the information about a potential trip in a few clicks, leverage my social graph, map the suggestions, figure out if they were highly ranked, and make a decision to go right now!

And we built it.

We created a technology that could scan any sort of text source, add in all the other information you’d need to decide and go (photos, ratings and reviews), where it was on a map and you could take it with you on any mobile device.

It was niche, but it was appreciated. People were always asking us for more.

What happened?

When any startup closes its doors, I think people always wonder what happened to it. Here are a few of my thoughts on what happened to Bucket, and what we would do differently if I tried again.

1. People loved the concept. They just didn’t use the product

People loved Bucket’s concept of what we were doing. Whenever we’d demo, people would swoon all over us — the experience was magical. Airbnb and Facebook used us and all the big hotel chains were interested in running a pilot.

We won pitch competitions, we got funding, we had partnerships and earned lots of media attention. What we were doing was revolutionary. The problem though, was that when we looked at the metrics, people were hardly using our parser.

People said they wanted an easy way to collect information and plan trips, but our usage showed that what they really wanted was simply a place to discover unique trip ideas with filtering.

If I were going to do it again:

I’d get a limited version of this into market as soon as possible. We got distracted with the idea that we wanted to parse from any text source which was complicated even in a small physical location — our initial launch was San Francisco Bay Area only. Our international version only allowed you to save from Tripadvisor, Foursquare, Airbnb, and Facebook Places. This was enough for most people and easier to explain.

I also would have prioritized some of the work we’d only started to explore in the last few months — using content around the web to create a bunch of personalized starter buckets on our site. Since it took so long to get nationwide coverage, we didn’t have an easy way to create these starter buckets automatically until recently. But if I could do it all over again, I would have just had our team create them a long time ago. At least then we could have given Tripadvisor a run for their SEO money much earlier.

2. We didn’t move fast enough

We’ve been working on this idea from May 2013, full-time since September of that year. When we started, hardly anyone was competing to become your automated trip assistant and absolutely no one was working on text-to-visual translations of trips. The travel industry has always been crowded but Google Now didn’t provide great information; Pinterest didn’t have actionable data; and Airbnb wasn’t trying to get into the trip planning business. There was an opportunity.

We bootstrapped for more than the first year — partially so I could beef up my design and product skills, and my co-founder could focus on pieces of the engineering stack he was less familiar with. There were also a number of life obstacles that slowed down part of our team.

We wanted to raise ~3 months in, but there was some uncertainty about whether it would work, so against my better judgment, we waited until we had our next version live.

Like most products, this took longer than we expected. Our small team was stretching itself to fill a number of roles that we didn’t have experience in, and we didn’t have the resources to hire in the areas where we were weak.

The tech itself proved to be quite complicated, and testing an asynchronous version where we faked the technology hadn’t proved extremely useful in validating whether or not the idea was sound.

The bottom line is, we missed our opportunity. We could have been first here. As it is, there’s interest in some of the text-based concierges to plug into something like Bucket, but we were just not developed far enough, fast enough.

If I were going to do it again:

In hindsight, I would raise almost immediately, accelerate as fast as I could, and prove out if this was going to work or not. Technology moves quickly. If you don’t move as fast as you can, the landscape will change beneath you. Also, if you can’t raise in your first 3 months, you rapidly lose the opportunity to ever raise.

There’s also an element of wear and tear that happens in startups the longer you’re at it. It really is a practice in resilience and how many times you’re willing to get up after getting knocked down. The longer you’re at it, the more times you get knocked down. Moving faster with the maximum amount of resources will reduce this wear.

Hit the gas, or go home.

3. We needed a more senior team

Since we had limited funding, we always were trying to make it stretch. My co-founder and I took little-to-no money in salary and when we could find someone young and bright to join our team, we often took them since we felt like we rarely could afford the senior talent (it was also just hard to hire, because, you know, Silicon Valley).

Although we had a number of bright, young, talented people, on-boarding took too long and required too many resources. They had good ideas, but rarely the experience to execute. We needed to hire experts who could hit the ground running. These constraints meant we couldn’t build as fast or as high quality as we needed. When we lost a senior tech member late in the game, we struggled to move forward.

If I were going to do it again:

I’d hire the smartest, most senior people I could at ANY cost. I’d also make sure to let go of people early if they weren’t working out. You want a half-million dollars a year to join my team and you’re awesome? Yes, and yes again! You want 10% of the company, of course! If you have senior members on the team, you’ll be able to keep fundraising because investors will believe you’ll keep figuring it out. With a strong team, you’ll also have a better chance at acquisitions. Plus, if someone owns 10% of the company, they’re highly incentivized to make their stock worth something. They have laser focus and the company has a better chance of making it.

What I learned overall

Startups are incredibly painful, even more painful when you don’t succeed. However, they are one of the most effective tools for continuously teaching you new skills and about the world around you. Startups are about the journey, not the destination.

I’ve spent the last few years noodling on these ideas about the general startup experience, so today I’ll share them.

1. People you don’t even know are pulling for you

You often feel like you’re alone in entrepreneurship — you’re navigating a ship without a map and you hope you’re going in the right direction. But I was constantly surprised by how gracious others were at giving us their time. Experts gave time to share their specialties and figure out a strategic plan, fellow entrepreneurs lent their strategies, sentiment, and sympathy, and random people on the street gave us a few minutes to help validate ideas.

I experienced so much empathy and kindness from my network and from other entrepreneurs, when I needed it the most. Almost everyone had a story about how they had been in my shoes at some point, and they made time to be helpful and kind.

We could not have built this company without the help of many people who took the time to give an opinion on a survey, like a Facebook post, and try out our product.

I’m incredibly grateful for all the support we’ve had over the last three years. People want you to win.

2. Startups are hard. It’s even harder for female founders and diverse teams.

It’s fashionable now to say you care about diversity, that you’re funding more diverse teams and hiring more diverse teammates. At its peak, our team’s gender breakdown was 4 women (57%), and 3 men (43%), out of 7 employees. That breakdown is virtually unheard of in a tech startup.

I love and support this idea, but as far as I can tell this isn’t actually a priority for VC funds or other companies. Being a female founder in a startup is one of the toughest things I’ve ever done. I’ve narrowed it down to one factor in my experience — you don’t get the benefit of the doubt as a woman.

In an early stage startup, the only thing you have going for you is the benefit of the doubt. You have a vision, some minor metrics off of a small test, a founding team, and the will, blood, sweat, and tears to make it come alive.

This is where women lose. In a study by MIT, they recently conducted an experiment in which participants evaluated a video pitch from a new company that used slides, an identical script, and either a male or female voice-over. The male voice was 40 percent more likely to receive funding.

Same idea. Same pitch. Different chances of funding.

For the most part, this isn’t intentional gender bias. In my experience, investors are very willing to fund female founded startups if they have killer metrics. However, if investors have to take the leap of faith and make a judgment call, which you often have to do in seed funding, that’s where women get short changed.

As a woman, this means you often end up with less money and less resources to do the same work, thus lessening your chances at success, completing the cycle.

3. Travel is going to be disrupted in the next 5 years

The opportunity we saw three years ago, still exists today. Someone is going to disrupt travel — and I think it’s going to happen soon. We’re moving into a time when nearly everyone is on a mobile device spending $26 billion on travel in 2014, projected to be $68 billion in 2018. Millennials, who spend $217 billion on travel in the U.S. alone, are going to be the biggest travel group within the next 5 years.

Wifi, mobile, and social are going to revolutionize travel. Finally we’ll be in a world where every service will intimately know a traveler and push curated recommendations based on their tastes, timelines, and desires.

In the last year we’ve seen a number of players enter the text messaging e-commerce space from Facebook M, to Operator, to Pana. People know there’s an opportunity to reach people while they’re on the go, provide a personalized experience to them, and have them purchase something.

Our long-term vision was to build your automated trip assistant — there’s still room for this. People still want a plan based on a set of constraints served to them, booking on the go, and personalized suggestions specifically for you.

I still believe this will happen. It just won’t be built by us.

So what’s next for me?

My startup mentor, Sam Odio, once said: “Building a startup is like fumbling around in a pitch-black room for the light. You desperately want to turn it on — and find product-market fit — but you don’t know if the light is right next to you, or across the room. All you can do is continue trying.”

For us this “startup room” will stay dark, and this adventure will end, but it just means a new chapter begins.

This is a hard time, but I’m at peace with the decision knowing we did everything we could.

My next plan is to travel for a few months (surprise!), recharge, and refresh. I have a love of less developed countries and want to spend some extended time in a few places while they’re still relatively untraveled. Burma, Cuba, and a few other places are high on my list. I also take suggestions.

Now that I have the extra time, I’m also planning to release a few more startup-focused blog posts, so subscribe if you want to stay in touch.

After that, it’s back to a bigger company. As thankful as I am for the opportunity to build my own idea from absolute scratch, I’m excited about working on someone else’s idea for awhile in product, business, or go-to-market. I’m excited to work in my strengths and actually be in a “room” where the light is on, and I can see.

To all of our users and supporters, thank you to all who tried out Bucket over the last few years. We appreciate it and hope you liked it. Now onto the next chapter.

SEE ALSO: Bustle CEO explains how to raise in a bad funding environment

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