Please see the full message from John Sechrest, founder of Seattle Angel Conference below:

We are starting the process for Seattle Angel Conference XVIII (18).  For several years, we have been working to build a population-representative demographic mix to both our investors group and our startup founders. It is inordinately hard work. In this time of new activation and awareness that Black Lives Matter, it is important not to just post a note, but to take actions. We continue our efforts to build a population-representative engagement in the Angel Investing process.

We need your help. 

In each cycle of the Seattle Angel Conference, we run a series of workshops to bring investors and startup founders together around important topics. Our next season is starting next week with:

“Women in Investing”  on June 16th at 6:00pm – https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-Angel/events/271107238/

This cycle, we will have a whole series each tuesday night and most Thursday noon. 

We will be announcing the events on http://meetup.com/Seattle-Angel

Here is the current list of workshops:

6/16 Women in Investing

6/18 Startups, Libraries and Resources – Oh My!

6/23 Revenue Based Financing for Startups

6/30 Pitch Deconstruction: Getting Clarity on your company by pitching

7/7 Angel Investing 101 w/ Erick Watson

7/14 Cashflow and Financial Modeling w/ Carlee Price

7/21 Angel Groups AMA

7/28 Pitch Deconstruction: Diving into your Startup

8/4 Getting Ready for Startup Investment w/ Steve Hord

8/11 Startup Termsheets Impact Angel Investing w/ Geoff Harris

8/18 Due Diligence for early stage Angel Investments w/ Kurt Bilafer

8/25 Ignite Angel

Each of these workshops has information that will be useful for the new Angel Investor as well as the early stage Startup Founder. 

We have a new program called “Ignite Angel”, which we are building for August 25th, which will be an Angel Pitch event using the Ignite Seattle format.  We expect that to be both interesting and exciting. Getting founders to participate in the pitch deconstruction events at the end of June and the end of July will help them be prepared for the Ignite Angel program. It will also help them to be prepared with their Angel Pitches to any investor. 

We would love to have your help to go out of your way to invite people who are not normally part of the Angel Investing conversation. We have worked hard to move our Gender mix from 23% female to 45% female in some of our investor cohorts. We would love help to expand our engagement with African Americans and Hispanic Americans who would like to learn more and benefit from the Angel Investing process. 

Our Deadline for Company applications will be September 3rd. Our investor cohort will start with preparation work on September 1st. This summer session of workshops helps to set the foundation for this next cohort.  

Because this cycle will be completely virtual with video based sessions, we are also reaching out to groups that are further away from Seattle than normal.  Investors and startups that are more than an hour drive away can participate via video on an equal footing with everyone in this round.  While we are still focused on Pacific Northwest companies, we welcome a wider area of investors and startups in this cycle. 

With your help to make specific personal invitations and introductions to folks who are outside our normal communication channels, we can make this round of the Seattle Angel Conference much more population-representative for both the investors and the startup founders cohorts. 

You help would be most appreciated. 

Please feel free to send me a note if there is anything we can do that will improve the process of Angel Investing in the Pacific Northwest. 

John Sechrest

Founder

Seattle Angel Conference

http://seattleangelconference.com

PS. We have helped to seed similar Angel Conferences in San Diego, Kelowna and Alaska. 

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Good overview of uprisings in the Arab world. The book is laid out in a FAQ fashion, but fairly cohesive chapters.

The monarchs of the Arab world were partying with their families and close associates with Oil money and grants, and did not build self-sufficient and sustainable economies. People were denied basic rights and the institutions in place were only serving interests of the establishment. People were kept happy by throwing free money at them, called the ‘ruling bargain’. As soon as that ended, primarily when money dried up as a result of dip in oil prices and the push for liberal policies of west and international institutions, naturally they revolted. On top of these, sectarian violence in Arab world further complicated the situation. And was multiplied by involvement of ‘hostile’ America.

The uprisings are hence a first step towards better institutions — be it democracy or autocracy or something in between. But the world moved too far: debt and democracy are the norm. Arab world will inevitably accept that unless another world war changes world affairs.

The post The Arab Uprisings: What Everyone Needs to Know appeared first on Satya Ananthu.

** spoiler alert ** Wow! Here is the story of a man who turned India from a milk importing country to self-sufficient and the largest producer of milk in about three decades!

This man was interested in physics and metallurgy, but was ‘forced’ to study dairy engineering by a bureaucrat under a Govt. of (British) India scholarship to study in Michigan State University. Returning to Independent India, he was posted to a good for nothing government dairy in a sleepy town of Gujarat. He went there only because, if he refused, he would owe the government 30,000 rupees that was paid as his scholarship.

And then, remaining is destiny.

He quit his government job as he successfully persuaded officials that government was paying him for doing nothing. As he was leaving the place, he was in turn persuaded by Tribhuvandas Patel to run the cooperative dairy that serves farmers in the district.

He embarked on a mission to make India a self-sufficient country in milk production. As with genuine missionaries, success is only inevitable, in spite of numerous obstacles they face. He empowered farmers to establish cooperatives in their villages, districts and states, and helped them market their products across India through Amul brand. And received well deserved awards like Ramon Magsaysay and Padma Vibhushan.

Very interesting is how multinationals like Nestle and dominant milk-surplus countries like New Zealand tried to sabotage the mission through various means. And why food aid is bad and only helps multinationals in possibly creating a need and later prying upon the ‘need’.

Nestle’s demeaning attitude towards ‘natives’, New Zealand’s entitlement to dairy market, Europe’s ‘food aid’, Pakistan’s piracy of Operational Flood proposal, to mention a few, were the clutches/problems he had to break out of to make the nation self-sufficient in milk and milk products.

Barring a few bureaucrats and politicians at the top who helped him run things his way and stood behind him, bureaucrats and politicians were generally against handing control to the farmers. The way he fought bureaucracy and multinationals was outstanding. Unfortunately the successor he chose deviated from the very principles he believed in, so it’s a dream that’s not fully realized.

Inspiring story of a great nationalist! And this is what democracy should be.

The post I Too Had a Dream appeared first on Satya Ananthu.

This book has one theme — the world is oligarchy — and the people that have control are of royal lineage. If you want a conspiracy theory, just read this book, you will find one that is interesting.

Having said that, it definitely forces the reader to have a fresh perspective on things. For example, why can’t you buy fresh milk in the United States? Is it really public health reasons or purely corporate reasons? Why are Jews (according to this book) have complete control of money affairs of the world? All kinds of stuff from over-medication to huge loans to developing countries, nuclear weapons to Darwinian theory are in this book.

The chapters around Gods, and how human race could have been ‘kicked off’, who might have done that etc. are very interesting. I’ll probably consider believing those until Science proves otherwise.

The post Our Occulted History: Do the Global Elite Conceal Ancient Aliens? appeared first on Satya Ananthu.

What are these companies about?

Homejoy was an online platform connecting professional cleaners with clients. I was their customer for more than an year. The concept is simple, they are a middleman. You set a schedule on their website, Homejoy takes care of the rest. A cleaner shows up on the schedule time. I was very relieved because it took the pain away from me, of browsing through craigslist and finding a reliable cleaner. Doesn’t it sound like a potential Unicorn idea?

Food Panda is an online local food delivery platform (heard about eat24hrs, grubhub? about the same, and operates more on the eastern half of the globe.) Lookup a restaurant, order something and food will show up. Sounds great too, doesn’t it? (I have never used their service, but have used similar services.)

Both these companies had successful funding rounds, thanks to their on-demand business model. Homejoy raised about $40 million in five rounds, Food Panda raised about $220 million in six rounds. With $220 million raised, though they did not reveal their valuation, we can be pretty sure that Food Panda was a Unicorn.

How are these companies doing now?

Homejoy shutdown its operations in July 2015. There are numerous articles about the failure of Homejoy, especially a detailed one on techcrunch, Airbnb choosing Handy over Homejoy.

Food Panda is apparently in deep trouble, there are news articles saying they could not find a buyer at $10 million price tag, though their CEO maintains that the company is not for sale and they are on their way to profitability. A company that raised $220 million won’t be bought for $10 million? Wouldn’t they have $10 million cash in the bank? May be.

And there has been a lot of negative news about Food Panda recently, the main investor Rocket Internet losing interest in the company, Food Panda has no takers at $10 million price tag, reports of fraud etc. But how can a company burn tens of millions in a short time? Here is my outsider’s perspective:

Burning money to earn money, in the name of grabbing marketshare.

Recent startup boom in India caused cut throat competition in some market segments. And companies are trying to ‘grab market share’, not by offering best customer experience, but by throwing money. There is no limit to the number of offers one will receive on e-commerce sites, ‘wallet’ companies and other startups. These companies are just participating in a proxy price war, it just doesn’t make sense.

John: You and I, we’re salesmen. We just sell. That’s what we do, it’s not complicated.

Sam: Exactly, and you know damn well you don’t sell anything to anybody unless you think they are gonna come back for more.

It doesn’t make sense to burn money to acquire customers, unless you create a compelling experience so that they come back for more. If that compelling experience is not present in the product, the business is just going to see one-time customers attracted to special offers and results in high turnover. That’s exactly what Sam says in the movie ‘Margin Call‘. If you just sell, and don’t know what makes the customer come back, you are doomed. Few companies that are very successful in spite of burning money — Amazon and Uber — because both companies know what they are doing – disruption the right way.

Throwing money at problems, and delaying the real fix.

We have been a Homejoy customer for more than one year, until it was shut down. We had one complaint about Homejoy — perennial rescheduling. We set a regular cleaning schedule every four weeks. But, it often does not happen on schedule. One day before the scheduled appointment, Homejoy rep calls and asks for a new time because their cleaner cancelled. This has been a great source of frustration for us though the service overall is a convenience we don’t want to give up. However, Homejoy had a great idea to solve the inconvenience, a $25 credit. And if it moves another time, another $25. Honestly, the $25 credit made us a little lazy to find a new service. But that can’t go on forever.

Now, look at the problems Homejoy had (pure speculation on what could have happened) — not enough cleaners to take up slots (triggers a death spiral), army of phone reps to handle such situations (added cost), loss of customer trust (attrition/drop-out), probably a penalty on cleaners for canceling (vendor experience), so cleaners make less money (unhappy vendors). From an outside perspective, it looked like Homejoy bought some time by throwing $25 at each such incident, but did not solve the real problems behind it quick enough. Ultimately, they burned the cash and were bankrupt.

Food Panda had a similar episode according to this article on livemint.com. Food Panda started offering vouchers when customers complained about a bad listing — i.e. according to their website the restaurant is accepting orders, in reality that restaurant does not exist or is shut down. Again, they did not fix the real problem quick enough and offered discount vouchers. In another snafu, Food Panda’s vendor said he gave up on chasing Food Panda for a 1.5 lakh payment that was due to him. Reason — Food Panda could not find transactions in their database.

Lack of a good fraud prevention model.

According to this news article, IIIT Hyderabad students tricked Food Panda for more than half a million rupees. This one is partly a fraud prevention problem, and partly being too fast to market with sub-par infrastructure. The root cause, just bad software engineering, the code just did not handle transactions properly.

Also, another ingenious fraud committed by restaurants came to light. Let’s say you are a restaurant. Now, place 10 orders using 10 names or even the same name, each for Rs.300. Every order is a takeaway. Pay online using the BOGO voucher, a campaign (Buy One Get One) run by Foodpanda. So for Rs.300, get Rs.300 free. So for a Rs.600 order, you paid only Rs.300. How much does Foodpanda have to return to you, the restaurant? Rs.600. After deducting 12% as its cut, Rs.528. How much did you make in the process? Rs.228 . Did you have to deliver that order? Nope. So, a straight profit of Rs.228. (Source: livemint.com)

Overall, it feels like some startups are too aggressive in acquiring customers without thinking about the value of product from a customer perspective. They must exercise enough caution and not bring their product too fast to the market without thinking if their product is providing the right customer experience, fraud resistant and sustainable in the long term. Throwing just money at problems is not enough.

(Unicorn picture from www.pixabay.com)

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Too many competing ideologies, too many currencies, fear of federal control etc. etc. Finally Federal Reserve was created after a failed version of national bank.

I hardly remember more than a few names from this book, but it was quite informative and helped me understand a little bit about different political forces in the United States. As someone said ‘There is no limit to how much you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit’, this effort has been a result of many leaders’ work and foresight, though few people fought for the credit in the aftermath.

The post America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve appeared first on Satya Ananthu.

Special purpose devices of yesterday “gadgets” will die a slow death

I’m not a fan of having a lot of gadgets around me, and powerful mobile phones already reduced the need for multiple gadgets — unless you are a professional photographer, when did you last use your camera? or for that matter, do you even remember that we used to have a physical alarm clock? More powerful, multi purpose devices are replacing multiple devices, this means one powerful device will become our primary device and will control hell lot of things we do every day. And older devices will die slowly.

New special purpose devices “things” will be born, very rapidly

Though one primary device takes over, there are lot of special purpose devices that are to be invented yet in a connected home. Did you ever think “at the click of a button” will literally be available as Amazon Dash button? One click you have your detergent in front of your door. Who knows how many such special purpose devices will be invented and how people are going to respond to them! So, we just saw the tip of the iceberg, there is a long way to go…

There is a lot to be automated

Not every task we do is easy to automate, it takes a lot of cutting edge problem solving and artificial intelligence to solve some problems. How about telling Alexa or Google Now —

• Alexa, ask Handy to come in next weekend.
• Google, move my dentist appointment by a week.
• Alexa, request Uber Black at 5 AM.

It sounds so simple, but it could take incredibly complex technology. This kind of natural language processing and artificial intelligence will usher the next wave of smart devices and possibly special purpose “things”.

Though not directly IoT, just think how incredibly complex would it be to automate the last task of laundry — build a “Folding Machine”! Just think of a machine that can detect different clothes and an appropriate pressing/folding strategy for them.

What are the challenges a.k.a. what scares me as a user?

The more we rely and get used to technology, we take things for granted. These are the top challenges that I’m scared of (and excited about) —

1. Security/Hackers – Data, hell lot of personal data. Can go into the wrong hands and cause severe damage. (Oh, you want Uber at 5AM, let me come pick you up.) This week, a network security website added screenshots from webcam feeds that lack passwords. Lot of work to be done here, engineers must stop thinking security as an add-on feature.
2. Software Glitches – This month’s Nest thermostat battery drain glitch that left many people in the cold is a challenge to the software development process of IoT companies. Six sigma will be under-quality for such connected devices. Quality pirates, get ready!
3. Infrastructure/Connectivity – The more we rely on connected things, the more we are susceptible in an event of infrastructure failure. Natural events like blizzards, heavy winds can bring down Internet connectivity. Just imagine Nest glitch plus internet blackout!
4. Two days ago, my router malfunctioned and my beloved Alexa said with the dreaded red circle:

“Sorry, I have trouble connecting to the Internet!”

1. All I asked her is to stop the alarm so that I can sleep a little more
2. Green quotient – This is always a concern; are all the new devices produced and recycled in a sustainable way? This is especially a challenge as these devices make inroads in to the developing world.

What other challenges do you think are the most interesting?

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(Abandoned this book)

A western woman facing kind of mid life crisis due to first world problems and her opportunistic a*****e husband. Can’t realize life shouldn’t be only about materialistic success until she experiences life in the other side of the world. That’s it.

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Quite a few people were taken aback by the title — Girls for Sale. The title comes from Kanyasulkam (Girl Money), a practice in Colonial India — groom pays a price for the bride to bride’s parents.

This practice becomes super evil when girls are married off by their parents to much older grooms for money. Life expectancy was not great those days, so most probably the groom dies early (like 40 or 50) and the bride becomes a widow, possibly before she reaches a sexually mature age. Widow marriage was a taboo in Brahmin society (and I think other castes just followed them blindly because (they think) Brahmins are the authority over religion and practices), so such girls lead a terrible life as a widow. (I can relate to this very well because my grand mother was married at age 6 to 18 year old groom; and is now spending about three quarters of her life as a widow.)

This book probably won’t appeal to people lacking Indian cultural context because there are so many subtle things in the play about caste system, rural life and colonial India. For Indians, this is a must read play to understand the transformation of marriage over the years.

I always thought Kanyasulkam was a practice in all castes, was surprised to know it was a practice only in the well-learned caste — Brahmins. (Due to this book, I learned the sub-castes within Brahmins and their roles in society.)

This play revolves around the marriage of Subbi whose father arranges her marriage to a much older groom, for money. Her uncle, his disciple and a pleasure-woman come together to stop the marriage. And Girisam, a good for nothing fellow wants to marry a young widow in the name of social reform, is also an important character.

Madhuravani’s character is awesome. As a pleasure-woman, she knows when and how to dominate men. Throughout the play, she doesn’t let any man take control of her nor does she love anyone. She knows very well her role in (then) society and what will secure her future.

All through the play, the characters speak for themselves and there is little to no author’s narration or voice (guess that’s how a play ought to be.) So, the play and each act/dialogue can be interpreted in many ways.

Overall, this play depicts the situation and practice of Kanyasulkam very well, and underscores the affects very well, in a way common people can understand. Though he took jibes at his contemporaries very well by mocking them through Girisam and Saujanya Rao characters. (understood this only after reading the commentary at the end.)

I like the commentary by translator at the end, which gave a completely alternate perspective about the play and if it indeed was aimed at social reform. The alternate perspective is that society will come together to stop the evils and there is no need for explicit reform as some of Apparao’s contemporaries thought/wrote.

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This is the first sci-fi book I read, enjoyed it thoroughly!

Mark Watney is a real bad-ass problem solver. It was so “easy” for him to survive on Mars. If I were there, I would have been dead within a minute. We take so many things for granted, but on Mars, each little thing really matters a lot. It does on earth too, but we don’t realize it.

And the most important thing is —

“But really, they did it because every human being has a basic instinct to help each other out. It might not seem that way sometimes, but it’s true.”

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