During the pandemic, there was a surge of Americans who started their own companies. Grant is trying to highlight models for entrepreneurs beyond Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg.

Mostly, Grant started They Got Acquired because she felt there was something missing for people like her.

Beginning about a decade ago, she started and sold two online businesses and helped build another, the financial website The Penny Hoarder. When it was time to sell, Grant felt lost. “I didn’t know where to start or where to find the right professionals to help me,” Grant said.

They Got Acquired is compiling information about start-ups such as their revenue and approximate acquisition price. Grant imagines that the data will help other business owners have a better sense of what their companies might sell for.

Interviews with start-up founders are published on the website and a coming podcast series will feature entrepreneurs sharing practical tactics and strategies. Jodie Cook, who started a social media agency, described for They Got Acquired how she made sure that the business could operate without her.

Grant said that she loved the business story of a mother and daughter team, Marianne Edwards and Anna Maste, who started an online community for recreational vehicle travelers. They sold their company last year for at least $1 million, Grant said, adding that she was encouraged that Maste worked on her business initially for only a few hours a week.

A friend of mine who knows Grant sent me a link to They Got Acquired, and it was an “aha” moment. I’ve written before about the start-up system that shoots for and rewards the biggest ideas possible.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/technology/tech-startups.html

“We understand that African Americans typically live in marginalized communities, and that because of this, disparities continue,” said Ms. Manigault, 48, who is now the director of small-business attraction and retention at the Growth Corporation. “Our intention is to rebuild those neighborhoods by rebuilding our commercial corridors.”

Paul Jones is a director of Invest Detroit, a nonprofit that supports community building projects like Ms. Manigault’s and is fully financed by the New Economy Initiative, a philanthropy focused on small-business development in southeastern Michigan. Last spring, the organization created a $20 million fund to bolster that effort, amid concerns that the pandemic threatened gains that small businesses had made, particularly in neighborhoods where home foreclosures had already eliminated an opportunity for many families to pass along generational wealth.

“The goal is that through these funds, we help 12,000 businesses, half of which are owned by people of color,” said Mr. Jones, 45. The pandemic galvanized community support agencies “to make sure we were working together as an ecosystem, to make sure our restaurants and our employment providers didn’t go away,” he said.

The local drive to stimulate more business success in Detroit’s immigrant communities helped Hamissi Mamba and Nadia Nijimbere open Baobab Fare last year. The restaurant, which specializes in the food of the married couple’s native Burundi, is in the New Center neighborhood, on the same block as the West African-Caribbean restaurant YumVillage.

Baobab Fare and YumVillage — along with enterprises like Warda Patisserie, a bakery in Eastern Market that received early help from FoodLab, and Folk Detroit, a food market and cafe in Corktown — are among a number of new Black-, immigrant- or women-owned businesses that are now thriving downtown.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/01/dining/detroit-restaurants.html

THE FOUNDERS
The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
By Jimmy Soni
474 pages. Simon Schuster. $30.

Dying is easy; dramatizing the dot-com world is hard. Where is the action in people staring at computer screens, pointing and clicking and typing? Even the costumes, hoodies and such worn by coders, the props of empty pizza boxes and foosball tables and sleeping bags under the desk, lack a certain oomph. At least the finance bros of the ’80s had snappy suspenders, martini dinners, strip clubs and buy-sell pads they could wave around between screams on the trading floor.

The development of online “wallets” might seem particularly bloodless — what, those things you use sometimes to buy stuff on the internet and often forget the password to? — and yet “The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley,” by Jimmy Soni, is an intensely magnetic chronicle in which ambitions and emotions run as red-hot as they did in the Facebook movie written by Aaron Sorkin, “The Social Network.” It helps that PayPal’s origin story, though essentially an ensemble piece, features two of the more complicated antiheroes of our time: Peter Thiel, who has become a significant player in right-wing politics, and Elon Musk, currently the richest person in the world, who makes aggressive forays into the cosmos. Each has previously been the subject of big biographies.

Here, though, interviewed along with scores of PayPal personnel — sometimes known as “the PayPal mafia” for their ruthless insularity — they are just two moneyed young men trying to lasso the moon, and often missing. Or crashing, as they did dramatically when Musk drove them to a meeting with Sequoia Capital in the McLaren F1 sports car he acquired after the sale of an early start-up, Zip2. Thiel compared the excursion somewhat opaquely to being “like this Hitchcock movie,” but it suddenly turned more “Dukes of Hazzard”: The car hit an embankment and sailed through the air “like a discus,” Musk recalls. (He and Thiel walked into the meeting separately but unscathed, despite having foregone seatbelts, not even speaking of the incident.)

Thiel initially thought that “beaming” money between PalmPilots, those chunky and short-lived precursors to smartphones, would be the next big thing; a former Stanford classmate convinced him to focus on email payments instead. Thiel comes off in Soni’s telling as pessimistic, occasionally unscrupulous and fiercely competitive, beating nine out of 10 colleagues in chess even after doing a rare celebratory keg stand. “Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you a loser,” he told an early employee, echoing the rhetoric of Donald J. Trump, whose presidential campaign Thiel would later support.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/20/books/review-founders-paypal-jimmy-soni.html

As people get older and responsibilities stack up, they tend to consume less alcohol. “The 40-year-old liver is not the same as a 25-year-old liver,” said Garrett Oliver, the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery, which introduced Fuzzy Details, a hazy I.P.A. that is 2.5 percent alcohol, at its taproom in December. Mr. Oliver fondly recalled the brewery’s Black Light, a 2.2 percent stout. “I could have a pint and just go straight to the gym,” Mr. Oliver said.

When Luc Lafontaine brews, he doesn’t drink much water. “I drink beer,” said Mr. Lafontaine, an owner and the brewmaster of Godspeed Brewery in Toronto. His go-to is Baby Světlý, his Czech-style pale lager that, at 1.5 percent alcohol, is a warm-weather favorite.

Building quality low-alcohol beer is a balancing act. Brewers must use less malt — the grains supplying the sugars that are fermented into alcohol — and too many hops can create clashing bitterness and flavor. Mr. Lafontaine uses imported Czech malt and hops, and carefully adjusts water chemistry. “I want to go as low as 1” percent, he said of Baby Světlý’s alcohol level.

One complaint about low-alcohol beers is that they can taste watery. To brew Buzzard, a 3 percent “hoppy small beer” released in January, Matt Young, the director of brewing operations at the Chicago brewery Half Acre, boosted the body with wheat. He also leaned on fragrant hop extracts and Cosmic Punch, a yeast strain that imparts complementary tropical aromas. Buzzard costs $10.99 for four 16-ounce cans, or $1 less than several stronger I.P.A.s.

“Just because there’s less alcohol doesn’t means that it was cheaper to produce,” Mr. Young said.

Mr. Boisson released two versions of Bella Snow Soft Ale, flavored with mandarin or grapefruit, in four-packs of 12-ounce cans sold for $7.99. “It was a low enough price point where people would try it,” Mr. Boisson said, adding that half the return customers are baby-boomer men. After decades of drinking, “they just know they shouldn’t have as much,” he said.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/11/dining/drinks/low-alcohol-beer.html

You can roam Silicon Valley and collect countless versions of this story.

But if you probe a little further, the real mechanics of venture capital emerge. In the case of Sequoia’s Stripe investment, the key was an early-warning system that flagged Mr. Collison as a hot prospect when he was only 21. Sequoia built this system carefully. It doled out capital to young technologists and invited them to make “angel” investments in promising members of their cohort, thus getting new prospects onto its radar. One year before his meeting with Mr. Moritz, Mr. Collison had raised $30,000 from two Sequoia-linked angels. This, much more than his cool bike, was the key to the Stripe-Sequoia partnership.

Spend time with other sophisticated V.C. shops, and their deliberate methods become clear. Accel, the partnership best known for backing Facebook, developed an approach known as “prepared mind.” You study a coming technology shift — for example, the migration of data from customer devices to the cloud. You figure out the implications: new hardware configurations, new software business models, new security vulnerabilities. Then, when you come across a start-up that is poised to surf the new wave profitably, you are primed to react quickly.

Human beings, as it happens, are wired to approach the world in the opposite fashion. We will gamble to avoid a loss, but are irrationally reluctant to reach for the upside. “Failures don’t matter,” the Kleiner Perkins leaders used to tell each other. “You can only lose one times your capital.”

Vinod Khosla, a former kingmaker at Kleiner Perkins who now runs his own venture capital outfit, once told me of his decision to bet on the meat-free burger company Impossible Foods, a start-up whose ambitions once seemed as over-the-top as that of Theranos. Patrick Brown, Impossible’s founder, had laid out a plan to eliminate the meat-industrial complex. It was an insanely messianic vision. If he fails, Mr. Khosla recalls thinking, “he’ll be mocked.”

Mr. Khosla put that worry aside, and made a bet on Impossible, reckoning that even if Mr. Brown had only a one in a hundred chance, it was a shot worth taking. Eleven years later, while the meat-industrial complex may not have been toppled, Impossible is worth $7 billion. Which is better, Mr. Khosla observed: to try and fail, or to fail to try?

Sebastian Mallaby is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.”

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Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/24/opinion/theranos-venture-capital.html

Astonishing data for 2021 tell the story. U.S. start-ups raised $330 billion, nearly double 2020’s record haul of $167 billion, according to PitchBook, which tracks private financing. More tech start-ups crossed the $1 billion valuation threshold than in the previous five years combined. The median amount of money raised for very young start-ups taking on their first major round of funding grew 30 percent, according to Crunchbase. And the value of start-up exits — a sale or public offering — spiked to $774 billion, nearly tripling the prior year’s returns, according to PitchBook.

The big-money headlines have carried into this year. Over a few days this month, three private start-ups hit eye-popping valuations: Miro, a digital whiteboard company, was valued at $17.75 billion; Checkout.com, a payments company, was valued at $40 billion; and OpenSea, a 90-person start-up that lets people buy and sell nonfungible tokens, known as NFTs, was valued at $13.3 billion.

Investors announced big hauls, too. Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, said it had raised $9 billion in new funds. Khosla Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, two other venture firms, each raised nearly $2 billion.

The good times have been so good that warnings of a pullback inevitably bubble up. Rising interest rates, expected later this year, and uncertainty over the Omicron variant of the coronavirus have deflated tech stock prices. Shares of start-ups that went public through special purpose acquisition vehicles last year have slumped. One of the first start-up initial public offerings expected this year was postponed by Justworks, a provider of human resources software, which cited market conditions. The price of Bitcoin has sunk nearly 40 percent since its peak in November.

But start-up investors said that had not yet affected funding for private companies. “I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a more competitive market,” said Ambar Bhattacharyya, an investor at Maverick Ventures.

Even if things slow down momentarily, investors said, the big picture looks the same. Past moments of outrageous deal making — from Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to the soaring private market valuations of start-ups like Uber and WeWork — have prompted heated debates about a tech bubble for the last decade. Each time, Mr. Bahat said, he thought the frenzy would eventually return to normal.

Instead, he said, “every single time it’s become the new normal.”

Investors and founders have adopted a seize-the-day mentality, believing the pandemic created a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shake things up. Phil Libin, an entrepreneur and investor, said the pandemic had changed every aspect of society so much that start-ups were accomplishing five years of progress in one year.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/technology/tech-startup-funding.html

“I knew she had started a company,” Ms. Stefanek said. “I knew that it had failed. I knew she liked to wear black turtlenecks. That was about it.”

Ms. Holmes’s trial began with opening statements on Sept. 8. That started a new routine for Ms. Stefanek: She often woke up at 5 a.m. to squeeze in some work and pack lunch for her 12-year-old daughter before driving from Mountain View, Calif., where she lives, to the San Jose courthouse.

During testimony, Ms. Stefanek said, she took 541 pages of notes. At times, she said, jurors struggled to stay awake. Other times, they were shocked to see star witnesses like James Mattis, the retired four-star Marine Corps general and former defense secretary, who had served on Theranos’s board.

“When he walked in the door, I kind of felt this rustle in the room and I couldn’t believe it,” Ms. Stefanek said. “I was actually more excited about him than I was about Elizabeth Holmes, just because I knew who he was before.”

Over time, the trial’s schedule became increasingly unpredictable. Judge Edward J. Davila of the Northern District of California, who presided over the case, tacked on extra court sessions and extended days in court, which initially were scheduled to end at 2 p.m., to 3 p.m. and then to 4 p.m.

That “made it hard for me to commit to things at work” and “made it more challenging to get some things done,” Ms. Stefanek said, adding that her manager at Apple was understanding.

After closing arguments concluded in December, the jury began deliberating a verdict. They had a method for discussions, Ms. Stefanek said, recapping each witness’s testimony on sheets of paper that were hung around the fifth-floor courtroom where they spent time when the trial was not in session. They also enlisted the courtroom deputy, Adriana Kratzmann, to make photocopies of one juror’s handmade worksheet that listed the criteria for a conviction on each count.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/10/technology/elizabeth-holmes-trial-jurors.html

Even if you didn’t experience the famine personally you must have been deeply aware of it and affected by it.

A thousand percent. First of all, you have to remember we come from massive families. My mom has 24 siblings. And you grow up very much aware of it. I grew up in a country where fuel was rationed, where food, sugar, toilet paper was rationed no matter who you are. It didn’t matter if you lived in Addis or outside of Addis. When toilet paper shortages happened during Covid and everybody was running to stock up, I was like, “I don’t know why you’re stocking up. I have like 80 rolls of toilet paper.”

People were like, “Why do you have 80 rolls of toilet paper?” And I was like, “Is that not how one lives in life? In fear that things might run out?” But it is how we were raised, very much aware that you can’t take anything for granted, that anything can disappear. We had neighbors that disappeared.

How did you wind up coming to the United States for college?

I studied really, really hard. I wanted to get out. My parents sacrificed absolutely everything to send us to the best school in the country, and I knew every day that my obligation to them was to do well, because they gave up most of their income to make sure we went to that school.

Also, my dad was born in an Italian prison. My grandfather orchestrated the plot to kill General Graziani when Mussolini tried to colonize Ethiopia, and it ended up costing his life. They assassinated my grandfather when my grandmother was pregnant with my dad, and they took her as a prisoner of war to Italy, and she gave birth to my dad in an Italian prison. So I was raised in a pretty strong family, in that fighting for survival kind of way, and I just felt like I owed it to my family to do well in life.

When you joined Morgan Stanley did you figure you wanted to be in finance for the rest of your life, or were you saying, “I got to get out of here as fast as I can”?

I decided that the only job I would take in finance would be to work in commodities. It was the only section of finance that I felt was connected to the real world and all the things I cared about. One day I got up and I decided I was ready to trade. So I went to my boss and said, “Hey, you’re going to hire me to trade natural gas.” He was like, “I’m not hiring.” And I was like, “No, no, you’re going to hire me.” And he did, so I started trading gas, and then he got promoted, and I took over that business.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/07/business/sara-menker-gro-intelligence.html

The video platform that laid off Mr. Zhao, iQiyi, had an abysmal quarter, losing about $268 million. Its share prices fell by 85 percent from its high in 2021, reflecting investors’ concerns that the company, once aspiring to be China’s Netflix, will be short of shows that can attract more subscribers and advertisers.

“The biggest problem for our industry is severe shortage of content supply,” iQiyi’s chief executive, Gong Yu, told analysts in November. He blamed, in part, censors’ slow approval. IQiyi did not respond to requests for comment.

(Mr. Zhao confirmed the details in his social media account, but declined to comment further.)

Many film, TV and streaming projects have been canceled or killed over concerns of increasingly harsh and unpredictable censorship, said people in the industry.

Lilian Li, a writer in Beijing, said that Tencent and a studio working with iQiyi approached her last year about creating a streaming series based on one of her history novels. A few weeks later, both companies told her that they decided not to proceed because there was little hope of getting the censor’s approval for a history series. She said she received far fewer collaboration requests from content providers in 2021.

Chinese content creators always joke that they dance with shackles on, meaning they try to satisfy the censors while appealing to their audiences. By now it’s clear that no matter the creative concessions, there’s no guarantee that their projects can see the light of the day.

One of the most anticipated movies for the 2021 Christmas season had to change its name to “Fire on the Plain,” from “Moses on the Plain,” possibly because of its Christianity reference. Then four days before its release, the production team said it was postponed without giving an explanation.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/business/china-tech-internet-crackdown-layoffs.html

“I get a lot of: ‘I just moved to this city. Can you please open a Portillo’s here?,’” said Nick Scarpino, the chain’s vice president for marketing and off-premises dining.

Italian-beef fans are particular about the sandwich’s trifecta of critical components — moist, thinly sliced beef; a hearty roll; and the spicy relish known as giardiniera or sweet peppers that top it, or both. To keep the Italian-beef critics happy, many of these out-of-town restaurants order ingredients from Chicago-based companies associated with the sandwich, including Vienna Beef for the meat, Turano Baking Company for the bread and Marconi for the giardiniera.

“Some people try to make their own beef broth,” Mr. Boyle said. “They say, ‘I’m going to make this a special sandwich.’ But it’s a working man’s sandwich. It’s straightforward. We try to keep it the same traditional way that it was.”

Mazen Muna, the founder of the Dogg Haus, said that as long as you honor the classic Chicago model, you can make Italian beef anywhere. “I don’t think that it is difficult,” he said. “If a person is buying the correct products and not skimping on quality, geographic location doesn’t make a difference.”

Mr. Caudill, of Roy’s Chicago Dogs in California, believes that the only thing standing between the sandwich and national fame is customer comprehension beyond Cook County.

“It’s kind of funny,” he said. “I’m surprised more people are not doing it. Philly cheesesteak is popular everywhere, but Italian beef is kind of a learning curve.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/dining/italian-beef-restaurants.html