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Kubeark raises $2.8m pre-seed to scale software products and speed up cloud adoption

by Anamaria Iuga
This post is by Anamaria Iuga from Seedcamp

The pandemic has been one of the most powerful accelerants for digital transformation in recent years. At record speed, CIOs, CFOs, and CTOs were forced to adopt flexible cloud strategies and tools that enabled them and their teams to take control of their mission-critical workloads and data management. However, fast adoption is only the first step in the process of delivering software products at scale.

This is why we are excited to back Kubeark, an early-stage startup founded in April 2022. Based in New York and Bucharest, the company’s mission is to support enterprises fix their scalability, delivery, and lifecycle management challenges.

Bogdan Nedelcov, Kubeark’s CEO and co-founder, emphasizes:

“Software vendors currently struggle with their hybrid cloud infrastructure and the transformation of products from on-premises to cloud on a large scale. Kubeark helps them achieve operational excellence regardless of where their infrastructure resides: on-prem, public cloud, or private cloud. Our platform ushers in a new era in which software products are delivered as true Saas products, helping vendors speed time-to-value, hyper-scale their distribution, and SaaSify any piece of software instantly.”

On why we invested, our Managing Partner Reshma Sohoni comments:

“We are excited to back Kubeark, a company founded by an incredibly experienced team with roots at Seedcamp-backed UIPath. Their holistic yet versatile solution has the potential to supercharge scalability in an efficient and secure way.”

The six-strong founders’ team includes CEO Bogdan Nedelcov, CTO Teofil Harapcea, VP of Engineering Adrian Tudoran, VP of Customer Success George Dumitrascu, (Read more...)

The Give First podcast playlists

by David Cohen
This post is by David Cohen from Hi, I'm David G. Cohen

Brad Feld and I started the Give First podcast in May of 2019. We’re approaching our 80th episode, and we’ve had some awesome guests and great insights for startups.

In case you’re new to the podcast or missed a few episodes, here are a few playlists on Spotify based on different themes that you may be interested in.

We hope you enjoy listening to a few episodes and subscribing as we head into 2023 together!

The post The Give First podcast playlists appeared first on Hi, I'm David G. Cohen.

The Type of Business Every Country Wants to Start

by Carmen Ang
This post is by Carmen Ang from Visual Capitalist

View a higher resolution version of this map.

Map of the most searched businesses by region

The Type of Business Every Country Wants to Start

View a higher resolution version of this map.

Every year, millions of new businesses are started across the world—in 2021, nearly 5.4 million new business applications were filed in the U.S. alone.

And since startups and new businesses play a significant role in shaping a country’s economic growth, encouraging entrepreneurship is vital. But what types of businesses around the world are people most interested in starting?

These maps by ZenBusiness show the most popular types of businesses that entrepreneurs in nearly every country want to start, based on analyzing relevant internet search results.

Most Searched Businesses Around the World

To source the data, ZenBusiness analyzed searches from Ahrefs, specifically looking for the term “start a business” and its equivalents in local languages as of February 2022.

They then found the relevant topic or keyword with the highest search volume, and organized the results into 11 different industries:

  • Beauty & Cosmetics
  • Food & Drink
  • Logistics & Infrastructure
  • Personal Services
  • Recycling
  • Software Development
  • Business & Financial
  • Leisure & Tourism
  • Marketing
  • Real Estate
  • Retail & E-Commerce

The data showed that the industries entrepreneurs are most attracted to vary greatly from country to country, depending on a variety of factors such as infrastructure, business climate, and culture.

Here’s a breakdown of the most searched businesses around the world, broken down by region.

Africa

Map of the most searched businesses in Africa

From cooking gas refills in South Africa to supplements in the Gambia, entrepreneurs across (Read more...)

Charging access is still the “new” problem for Electric Vehicle commercial fleets

by Anamaria Iuga
This post is by Anamaria Iuga from Seedcamp

Our Managing Partner Carlos Espinal’s Q & A with Niall Riddell and André Pinho, founders of Paua, on the interoperability of an ever-expanding yet fractured charging network and making Electric Vehicle (EV) charging user-friendly 

On a recent epic road trip across the UK this summer, I had my high hopes of a seamless charging experience shattered. Besides having to queue up at some stations, finding others out of service, and installing at least 15 apps to cover all the services on offer, I found the cost of electricity for EV charging to be all over the map – ranging from 28p to nearly £1 depending on where the stations were based and their speed of charge.

This cost variance is much wider than in petrol/diesel vehicles and feels like an unfair penalty for those wishing to help the environment through cleaner vehicles. To aggravate things further, charging speeds range from dead slow to 50x faster depending on where the charger is. These further exacerbate the problem of range and cost anxiety for EV owners – after all, time is money. The reality is most people and businesses care more about their time when they are travelling from A to B than p/kWh.

Despite current geopolitical and energy market developments, the demand for Electric Vehicles is on the rise. Customers’ demands are also changing, putting pressure on EV infrastructure providers to offer higher-quality services. In particular, for commercial fleets, for which reliability and cost efficiency are make-or-break factors, improved (Read more...)

Which is more important: a big vision or a specific focus?

by David Cohen
This post is by David Cohen from Hi, I'm David G. Cohen

Eight years ago, I wrote what continues to be one of my best-read blog posts, entitled “Reconciling Vision and Focus.”

The question it sought to answer is one that still resonates with founders today:

Which is more important for your startup–a big vision or a specific focus?

It’s a question that consistently comes up in my conversations with entrepreneurs both within the Techstars universe and those I meet via my “Office Hours” conversations.

What I wrote in 2014 could have been written today:

Companies have mentors or advisors telling them they need a big, bold vision to draw others to the company, attract investors and be viewed as thought leaders.

At the same time, they are also being told they need to focus–they need to do something very specific and really build up a dominant market share with good revenue in a specific area.

Many view this as conflicting advice. It causes them to thrash about, between big vision and specific focus. In reality, it’s not conflicting at all.

This played out in a conversation with a recent founder who had a big vision to expand his company beyond his current focus.

At the same time, his company’s name actually highlighted the area of current focus, not the broader vision, something I cautioned him could be seen as a “market limiter.”

By all means, start your company by focusing in an area that can best validate your capabilities and potential. Chances are, this will be an area (Read more...)

The Power of Mentorship

by David Cohen
This post is by David Cohen from Hi, I'm David G. Cohen

Techstars recently graduated its 3,000th company. We’ve helped our portfolio to raise $23.5 billion in total funding—and this year we’ll fund 700+ new companies through 54 accelerators around the world.

As many in the startup world already know, mentors are a key element of the success of Techstars-funded companies.

When I reflect on how we got here, I think it’s important to reflect on how important mentors have been to Techstars itself.

One of my key early mentors was Bill Warner. If you’ve ever edited a video, you’ve likely used the technology that he developed at Avid.

One night, when Techstars was barely one year old, I told Bill over dinner that I was unclear about how we would make money long-term. Perhaps Techstars was just a fun summer gig, I suggested.

Right then, Bill said something to me that truly resonated and has stuck with me ever since.

He told me that as long as Techstars stayed focused on its “center flow,” other “co-flows” would appear around it.

What did that mean?

What he explained to me was that the “center flow” was crucial. It was the passion or the “why” of Techstars.

I told him that our “center flow” was helping entrepreneurs succeed and that was the “why” behind creating Techstars.

Great, he said. Focus hard on that and stay focused over time and watch the co-flows appear around it.

And that’s the true power of mentorship.

A few words delivered at the exact right moment—and fully (Read more...)

The Biggest Tech Talent Hubs in the U.S. and Canada

by Nick Routley
This post is by Nick Routley from Visual Capitalist

Visualizing the biggest tech talent hubs in the U.S. and Canada

The Biggest Tech Talent Hubs in the U.S. and Canada

The tech workforce just keeps growing. In fact, there are now an estimated 6.5 million tech workers between the U.S. and Canada — 5.5 million of which work in the United States.

This infographic draws from a report by CBRE to determine which tech talent markets in the U.S. and Canada are the largest. The data looks at total workforce in the sector, as well as the change in tech worker population over time in various cities.

The report also classifies which metro areas and regions can rightly be considered tech hubs in the first place, by looking at a variety of factors including cost of living, average educational attainment, and tech employment levels as a share of different industries.

The Top Tech Hubs in the U.S.

Silicon Valley, in California’s Bay Area, remains the most prominent (and expensive) U.S. tech hub, with a talent pool of nearly 380,000 tech workers.

Here’s a look at the top tech talent markets in the country in terms of total worker population:

🇺🇸 MarketTotal Tech Talent% Talent Growth (2016-2021)
SF Bay Area378,87013%
New York Metro344,5203%
Washington D.C.259,3106%
Los Angeles235,80010%
Seattle189,57032%
Dallas/Ft. Worth187,95015%
Chicago167,5606%
Boston166,4502%
Atlanta145,0807%
Denver117,62023%
Philadelphia115,4507%
Minneapolis100,9905%
Phoenix99,60018%
Houston98,930-2%
Detroit93,7705%
Austin84,68021%
Baltimore79,0008%
San Diego77,78016%
Raleigh/Durham (Read more...)

[Video] Bill Gurley on Surviving Downturns

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

No matter where you look, the technology industry — from stalwarts to startups — is going through a reset. And that has led many companies to lay off people, cut costs and pare back their ambitions.

For so many of our startup founders, this is a new experience — a whole generation of entrepreneurs hasn’t experienced a bear market. And as a result, they don’t have frameworks to deal with this new reality. It is not as if they don’t want to deal with the situation. It is just that most founders are biased towards optimism (as they should) and have a hard time optimizing for the realities of tough times.

One of the toughest tasks for founders is figuring out how to tighten their belts. It is hard to decide how many people to cut from the company payrolls. People make incremental cuts to their teams — and these cuts don’t have a real impact and lead to more cuts.

Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, is a venture investor who has been through a few ups and downs. He recently tweeted:

(Read more...)

[Video] Bill Gurley on Surviving Downturns

by Om Malik
This post is by Om Malik from On my Om

No matter where you look, the technology industry — from stalwarts to startups — is going through a reset. And that has led many companies to lay off people, cut costs and pare back their ambitions.

For so many of our startup founders, this is a new experience — a whole generation of entrepreneurs hasn’t experienced a bear market. And as a result, they don’t have frameworks to deal with this new reality. It is not as if they don’t want to deal with the situation. It is just that most founders are biased towards optimism (as they should) and have a hard time optimizing for the realities of tough times.

One of the toughest tasks for founders is figuring out how to tighten their belts. It is hard to decide how many people to cut from the company payrolls. People make incremental cuts to their teams — and these cuts don’t have a real impact and lead to more cuts.

Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital, is a venture investor who has been through a few ups and downs. He recently tweeted:

(Read more...)

What Freedom Looks Like

by Makisha Boothe

Black women are the fastest-growing but still the least funded segment of the entrepreneur universe. That’s why, this Juneteenth, I’ve invited Makisha Boothe, Founder and Head Business Coach of Sistahbiz Global Network, a business accelerator for Black women entrepreneurs, to write this guest post which I invite you to help amplify. Makisha shares her thoughts on the unique challenges facing Black female entrepreneurs–and the work that still needs to be done to give Black women full access to the freedom that entrepreneurship can open up. – David

As we approach Juneteenth this year,  I reflect on the past two years of civil unrest that have happened in service of racial justice in the U.S. I am led to pause and honor the word freedom. I think about what it is supposed to mean in America versus how it actually looks.

I think about the efforts of so many in the economic opportunity and justice space and acknowledge that much of our “why” is about fighting for a dream of freedom that our country’s forefathers claimed to birth, that my ancestors fought to realize but that we have yet to see. 

I’ve led political coalitions, run for office, written policy, managed grassroots and grass tops work in healthcare, education, and criminal justice reform. So how did I land here in the later years of my career with laser-like focus on economic equality, closing the wealth gap, and creating more access to capital for Black women entrepreneurs at Sistahbiz Global (Read more...)