Yesterday Mike Butcher twittered that he had forgotten to get a prize for the winner of the startup competition at the Geek’n’rolla conference today. Reading that, we at DFJ Esprit scratched our heads to see if we could help and thought it would be kind of cool to offer the winner a £50k investment. Mike also thought it was a good idea, and a plan was hatched.
I’m happy to say that the winner turned out to by DueDil which is a pretty cool company, that by chance we have started to get to know recently. Hopefully they will take up our offer and become part of the DFJ family.
For those of you that want the technical details – the precise offer is of a £50k loan convertible into the next round at the price of the next round, subject to legal due diligence, but no strings beyond that. I wish we could’ve made a clean promise without a ‘subject to’ but we need to make sure that the company and principles are bona fide before we invest.
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The feds have extracted a settlement from Google over its botched foray into social networking, called Buzz, which infuriated privacy advocates and prompted a public apology from the company.
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Consumer confidence fell in March and remains “fairly fragile,” according to Starbucks Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz. “Every business small and large has to be incredibly thoughtful and disciplined right now about trying to create relevancy and loyalty with the consumer, who is under tremendous pressure right now.” That said, Schultz isn’t worried about competition [...]
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In his essential book Labyrinths of Prosperity, Canadian economist Reuven Brenner noted that for measuring country-specific economic growth, “Macroeconomics is a tautology and a myth, a dangerous one at that, sustaining the illusion that prosperity is necessarily linked with territory, national units, and government spending in general.” The human and economic tragedy in Japan has revealed yet again the wisdom of Brenner’s thinking, and it serves to discredit the artificial absurdity of Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
Indeed, while economists regularly wax rhapsodically about the…
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In the past 12 months, Starbucks reported record revenue and profits, as well as the best quarter in its history. At around $37 per share currently, the firm’s stock is up more—than 350% from its 2008 lows. In the accompanying video, Chairman and CEO Howard Schultz recounts the story of how Starbucks recovered from both [...]
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Provided by the Business Insider’s Alana Horowitz Think about the craziest purchase you’ve ever made. Maybe it was a flat screen TV or a pair of designer boots. Heck, one blogger even gave his three-year-old an iPhone. If you’ve ever felt buyer’s remorse, don’t. At least you’re not Bono, who bought a first-class plane ticket [...]
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By its very definition, fiat money is something created out of thin air: the word “fiat” is Latin for “let it be done” (as in, by decree). But the convenience that such a currency system offers central bankers is paid at the expense of savers. With nothing of real or lasting value on which to anchor, the value of fiat currencies can always blow away like ashes on a windy day.
For the past 40 years or so, every country on the planet has relied on fiat money. To a very large extent, this means that the national economies are far more exposed to the whims of their central…
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Amid continuing partisan strife over the federal deficit, health care, and the EPA, buttressed by fanciful dreams and expenditures for “green technologies” and other budget-busting “investments in America’s future,” Congress, with strong support from the Obama administration, may well be on the verge of passing legislation that truly will enhance future U.S innovation and economic growth. On March 8, the Senate passed the “America Invents Act (S. 23) by a vote of 95-5. In the coming weeks, the House Judiciary Committee will process a companion bill; and if the…
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The clock is ticking on Washington to come up with a budget compromise. The Federal government runs out of funding on April 8. If both sides of the aisle can’t bridge the budget gap a government shutdown may be in our future. Democrats are now offering to cut another $20 billion from the budget, bringing [...]
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President Obama said Monday evening he authorized the use of force in Libya to prevent “a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.” The speech, Obama’s first major address about U.S. military action in Libya, was aimed at several different audiences: The American public, Congress, our NATO [...]
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BlueBeat.com, the company that tried to sell ‘remastered’ Beatles tracks online before they became officially available, has agreed to pay nearly $1 million to settle a lawsuit filed by three music labels. The move comes more than a year after a federal judge issued a restraining order and then an injunction against the company, and does not yet include any attorney’s fees or other damages involved in the lawsuit.
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Darpa wants to create a digital spy technology that is encoded into the genes of a living bug. It will apparently record and report on any modifications being made to the bug itself – kind of like the Track Changes option in your Word document.
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GE is a global corporation with 287,000 employees, $150 billion of revenue, and $12 billion of net profit. But last year, this massive and wildly profitable company paid less in U.S. income taxes than you did, says the New York Times. Specifically, the New York Times says GE’s U.S. tax bill last year was “none.” [...]
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I’m very pleased to say that the UK is becoming an incredibly entrepreneur friendly place, largely courtesy of a number of government initiatives. The statistic being bandied around Whitehall is that 1.3m of the last 2.4m jobs created in the UK were created by startups, and something like 80% of those were created by top 6% of startups (more exact stats would be welcome). Ergo the UK needs more high quality startups and government should be doing everything it can to create the best environment for that to happen.
There is nothing new about this argument (except maybe the statistic) but for the first time government seems to really believe in it.
The first evidence of this new government attitude came back in November when Prime Minister David Cameron launched the East London ‘tech city’ intitative, got a boost earlier this month with the tech-friendly Startup Visa and then we saw a whole lot more in the budget last week:
- Tax relief for angel investors under the EIS scheme increased from 20% to 30%
- Restrictions on size of EIS and investments by VCTs into individual companies increased from £1m to £10m
- Restrictions on size of qualifying companies to relaxed in a 2102 Finance Bill
- Big increases in the R&D tax credits
- 100% increase in entrepreneurs relief to £10m (lifetime limit)
And on top of these financial measurements it appears the government might finally be getting serious about reducing red tape for business.
Then yesterday was also a good day for UK entrepreneurs:
It will take time to build an entrepreneurial culture here in the UK, and the government can be a big help by making it easier for businesses to succeed and by publicly supporting the idea that the entrepreneur is to be valued. It is great to see that they are doing a good job in this regard.
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On Tuesday , when the Supreme Court opens for oral arguments, employees across the country — especially women — should be very interested. The high court is hearing arguments on a long-running gender discrimination lawsuit against Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer. At issue: whether women who have worked at the company will be granted class-action [...]
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