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‘Huge’ opportunities await women entrepreneurs, venture capitalist says. Here’s what to do

Obiex — Tue, 11 May 2021 22:09:02 +0000

Women entrepreneurs have long gotten a small slice of the venture-capital funding pie.

Female VC leaders are trying to change that.

In fact, opportunities abound for “wontrepreneurs,” said Julie Sandler, managing director at startup studio and venture capital fund Pioneer Square Labs, based in Seattle. She spends most of her time running the VC arm, PSL Ventures.

“First, the financing market for startups has truly never been more favorable to founders than it is today,” she said.

“Second, there has never been a moment in this generation that has created as much change or opportunity for innovation as what we are experiencing in the world right now, coming out of the pandemic.”

In 2020, all-female founding teams got 2.4% of all venture capital dollars in the U.S., down from a high of 3.4% in 2019, according to business platform Crunchbase.

One of the challenges is the base of investors making the decisions, since many tend to invest in founders who remind them of other founders who have been successful, Sandler said.

“The problem is you have an entire industry that only invested in men, generation after generation,” she said.

“This is one of the reasons it is so important for diversity in the ranks of decision-makers in venture funds to accelerate.”

Only 13% of decision makers at U.S.-based venture capital firms with greater than $25 million in assets under management are women, according to All Raise.

Advice for women entrepreneurs

Due to that disproportionate representation, women may need to change their way of pitching their business to VCs.

One of the most important things Sandler tells female founders is to bring their most boastful, bombastic version of themselves into the meeting. The vast majority of their competitors are pretty close to the “Silicon bro” profile — a 35-year-old white male who’s been conditioned to pound on his chest.

“If you are going into that pitch feeling like the most obnoxiously confident version of yourself, then you haven’t even come close to what the entrepreneur before you did,” noted Sandler, who said the majority of investments during her career were in women-led businesses.

Women should also take a multi-tiered approach to fundraising, said Lindsey Taylor Wood, founder and CEO of New York-based The Helm, an early-stage venture firm that invests in female founders.

In addition to approaching firms that have the ability to back your business, get creative with the type of angel investor you are willing to take on, she said. Look at a variety of paths, including equity crowdfunding or a small-business loan.

“If you can bring in a number of strategic investors with smaller checks, it may be a pain early on but, if you need it to get off the ground, that is what you do,” said Taylor Wood.

The Helm’s Lindsey Taylor Wood speaks at a Sept. 5, 2019 In Charge Luncheon hosted by Diane von Furstenberg and LinkedIn in New York.

Craig Barritt | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images

Her firm is focused not only on funding female founders, but bringing in women investors, as well. Last month, The Helm launched a membership program that allows its investor community to make investments into early-stage female-founded companies for an annual fee of $750.

If you get rejected, don’t let it stop you. Instead, remember that it is a sign of progress because it means you are getting feedback, Sandler said.

“If you don’t put yourself out there, if you don’t ask for what you really want, the answer is no anyway,” she said.

“So collect a bunch of ‘nos.’ Be proud of collecting a bunch of ‘nos.’ Then, the better the ‘yes’ will be when it comes.”

Opportunities

Women should be starting businesses in every single category, for every single customer, Sandler advised.

That said, there are certain areas that are ripe with opportunity. One focuses on easing the burden on women family members trying to juggle work and home life, Sandler said.

“Responsibilities in families need to balance out,” she said. “In the meantime, new technology can help build toward that balance, making communication, schedule management, household and financial tasks easier to see and coordinate.”

Sandler also sees room for new business in the “wildly massive and wildly underserved” female technology category, such as reproductive health. That includes puberty, fertility, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause and beyond. She also sees room for new ventures in mental health and holistic wellness.

Women of color and LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning, intersex and asexual/aromantic/agender) individuals have been the most adversely impacted by the lack of resources in this area, Sandler said.

“The opportunity for entrepreneurs to create rich solutions is not only relatively untapped, it’s huge,” she said.

Fintech firm Checkout.com crowned Europe’s top unicorn after tripling valuation to $15 billion

Obiex — Fri, 07 May 2021 23:03:40 +0000

LONDON — Online payments firm Checkout.com is now Europe’s top tech unicorn.

Checkout.com said Tuesday that it had raised $450 million in an investment led by Tiger Global Management — which is also an investor in rival payments giant Stripe — lifting its valuation to $15 billion.

That’s almost three times the $5.5 billion Checkout.com was worth in a $150 million funding round nearly seven months ago. It also makes Checkout.com the fourth-most valuable privately-held fintech business globally.

Checkout.com’s platform integrates electronic payments, analytics and fraud monitoring into one platform. The London-headquartered company processes payments for big clients including Pizza Hut, H&M and Farfetch, as well as fintechs like Coinbase, Klarna and Revolut.

The company is vying for a leading role in the $2 trillion payments industry. It competes with U.S. company Stripe and Dutch rival Adyen. Investors are betting these firms will continue to benefit from the blistering growth of digital payments and e-commerce, which has only been accelerated by the coronavirus pandemic.

“Nobody would have expected at the beginning of the year that 2020 would have been this way,” Checkout.com’s CEO and founder Guillaume Pousaz told CNBC in a November interview.

Checkout.com has raised an eye-watering $830 million in the last two years. With another $450 million in the bank, the company says it plans to further expand in the U.S. with a newly opened office in New York and another office set to open in Denver. A U.S. push would see Checkout.com ramp up its competition with San Francisco-based Stripe.

The firm now has 1,000 staff worldwide and expects to hire another 700 people this year. Pousaz said Checkout.com now mimics Stripe when it comes to considering key new hires. Stripe last year poached General Motors’ Chief Financial Officer Dhivya Suryadevara, hinting at plans for an eventual initial public offering.

“We’re taking the Stripe approach of poaching people from the absolute best companies globally,” Pousaz told CNBC. He added Checkout.com would soon announce two significant C-suite hires with experience at leading global companies.

“I spend a lot of my time on this, thinking not only about the headcount of the company but also the right leadership at the top,” Pousaz said.

Europe’s top unicorn

With a $15 billion market value, Checkout.com has overtaken data center operator Global Switch as Europe’s most valuable unicorn company, and beaten “buy now, payer later” firm Klarna to become the most valuable fintech in the region, according to data from CB Insights. Unicorns are privately-held start-ups worth $1 billion or more.

Checkout.com has gone from relative obscurity to becoming one of the world’s most valuable private tech companies. Founded in 2012, the firm tapped external investors for the first time to raise $230 million at a $2 billion valuation in 2019. A year later, it had tripled its market value to $5.5 billion.

The company still has some catching up to do when it comes to matching the valuations of its payment peers. Stripe was valued at $36 billion in its most recent private funding round, and is reportedly hoping to fetch a market value of as much as $100 billion in a new investment deal. Stripe declined to comment.

Meanwhile, Adyen has a stock market value of over $65 billion. The Amsterdam-based company’s shares have roughly quadrupled since its IPO in 2018.

Checkout.com is one of a rare breed of fintechs that has been consistently profitable for years. The company told CNBC that revenues at its European operations almost doubled in 2019 to $146.4 million, up from $74.8 million the year before.

The company’s accounts had been flagged as being overdue on the U.K. registrar’s website, but were filed in time to meet new allowances from the government due to Covid-19. The firm has tripled its transaction volumes for three consecutive years.

Given those metrics, you’d think Checkout.com would be a prime IPO candidate. Pousaz says the long-term goal is for a stock market listing, but added it’s under no pressure from investors to do so.

“We’re going to be a public company,” he told CNBC. “There’s no other alternative at this point, given the size of the business.”

Google Pay now lets U.S. users send money to India and Singapore

Obiex — Sat, 01 May 2021 22:41:30 +0000

Google is jumping into the massive remittances market.

The tech giant’s mobile payments service Google Pay announced Tuesday that users in the U.S. will now be able to send money to India and Singapore.

The company has teamed up money transfer firms Wise and Western Union on the feature, integrating their platforms into the Google Pay app. Users can choose between Wise or Western Union to move their money abroad. Google will take a small cut of the cross-border transactions made through its app.

Google Pay launched a new version of its app in the U.S. last year, marking a push into banking services with the addition of checking accounts from lenders like Citi, as well as rewards and budgeting insights.

Google is one of many large tech firms pushing deeper into the financial world. Apple launched its own credit card in partnership with Goldman Sachs in 2019. Facebook is making a number of moves in digital currency and payments. In China, Alibaba affiliate Ant Financial and Tencent have become formidable players in the digital payments space.

Still, these Big Tech companies have no apparent ambitions to become banks.

“We’re not planning to become a bank or a remittance provider,” Josh Woodward, Google Pay’s director of product management, said in an interview with CNBC. “We work with the ecosystem that already exists to build these products.”

Google’s latest financial services push will see it enter the huge remittances market. The World Bank forecasts that remittances into low- and middle-income countries were worth $508 billion in 2020. That’s actually down 7% from 2019, a decrease the bank attributed to the Covid pandemic’s impact on migration.

The news is a big win for Wise. The London-based fintech firm, formerly known as TransferWise, is increasingly selling its platform as a service to banks like France’s Groupe BPCE, Britain’s Monzo and Germany’s N26. Rival Western Union has been upping its digital strategy lately to ward off upstarts like Wise and WorldRemit.

Going forward, Google wants to expand its remittances feature into the 80 countries Wise operates in and, eventually, the 200 nations Western Union covers.

Unemployed Americans thought they’d receive benefits until September. Now that aid is in jeopardy

Obiex — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 22:36:10 +0000

While Justin Mackey worked to rebuild his locksmith business, the 38-year-old was relying on getting a $420-a-week unemployment check for another four months.

That money was a fraction of what he brought home before the coronavirus pandemic shut down his business in Arkansas, but at least it kept his mortgage and other bills paid. And it allowed him to buy clothes and school supplies for his three young children: Camdyn, 14, Connor, 7, and Charlie, 3.

“It’s better than losing everything,” Mackey said.

But last week, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson said the state would be ending the federal unemployment programs early, including the $300 weekly boost. Those benefits will now expire at the end of June, more than two months earlier than Mackey had expected.

“Continuing these programs until the planned expiration date of Sept. 4, 2021, is not necessary and actually interferes with the ability of employers to fill over 40,000 job vacancies in Arkansas,” Hutchinson wrote in a letter. He joins Republican governors in Montana, South Carolina and Mississippi, who have also announced an early end to the aid, saying that it’s stopping people from taking jobs. Other states could follow.

As a result, many jobless people in these states will soon receive only their state benefit. The average weekly check is $248 in Arkansas; in Mississippi, it’s $195.

Rebecca Dixon, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said leaving people with smaller benefits is shortsighted and dangerous.

“We’re going to see family hardship,” Dixon said. “We’re looking at a tsunami of debt, evictions and food insecurity on the horizon, and it’s mostly women and people of color who will bear the brunt of that.”

What’s more, because the federal programs expanded the pool of workers who are eligible for unemployment benefits, many self-employed, gig workers and freelancers will be entirely cut off from aid come July.

Mackey is one such worker.

His unemployment benefits have allowed him to keep his locksmith business, Jonesboro Lock & Key, running. He’s owned it for more than a decade.

But if that aid ends early, he might have to grab a job and abandon the shop. He said the wages on offer in his area were often unsustainable.

“I couldn’t afford to work in a fast-food place,” Mackey said. “I was making that money in high school.” (The minimum wage in Arkansas is $11.)

Most Americans have just a few days left to file 2020 taxes. Here’s what to know

Obiex — Wed, 28 Apr 2021 22:18:13 +0000

If you haven’t filed your 2020 tax return, the clock is ticking.

The deadline for 2020 returns is Monday, May 17. In March, the IRS pushed back the date for individual returns due to the coronavirus pandemic, giving most Americans an extra month to file.

Even with the additional time, many Americans procrastinate preparing and filing, an often-confusing task made more complicated by the health crisis and legislation passed in the middle of this year’s filing season.

“It’s always important to file your taxes, it’s your obligation,” said Allison Koester, a former CPA and associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.

Money owed

One of the most important reasons to file a tax return is to claim any refund you’re owed by the IRS. Through April 30, the IRS has received more than 121 million individual tax returns and processed more than 110 million. So far, the agency has sent out more than 81 million tax refunds to Americans with an average check of $2,865.

That refund is often the largest windfall families receive throughout the entire year and can be helpful in paying down debt, boosting savings and more. This year especially, after the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, Americans should claim any money they’re owed.

It’s important to remember that a refund isn’t free money, according to Rebecca Thompson, director of the Taxpayer Opportunity Network at Prosperity Now, a nonprofit. It’s money that you’ve overpaid the U.S. government, basically an interest-free loan. You are entitled to get it back and should do so.

While May 17 is the deadline for this year’s taxes, it’s also the date by which you must claim any refunds from 2017. Taxpayers have three years to claim refunds from the IRS. In April, the IRS said they still have $1.3 billion in unclaimed refunds from 2017.

“If they don’t [file] then that money is lost and it becomes a donation to the treasury,” said Thompson.

Claim those credits and more

This year there are other reasons why submitting information to the IRS is important, even for those who don’t traditionally file.

For one, filing a return and claiming the recovery rebate credit is the only way to get any economic impact payment that you may be owed, or get a “topped up” amount if your circumstances changed – like if you had a baby in 2020 that was eligible for a stimulus check.

The American Rescue Plan also made some tax changes. For the millions of Americans that lost work due to Covid, the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits is now exempt from federal taxes for those with income under $150,000. The exemption is $20,400 for a couple with the same income.

Parents also need to file a 2020 tax return to make sure that the IRS has accurate information for them to claim the enhanced child tax credit, which is scheduled to begin monthly payments in July.

Penalties and Extensions

If you fail to file, you could miss out on refund money and potentially accrue penalties and interest if you owe the IRS.

“It is imperative for anybody who thinks they will owe to make sure that they get that tax return in or that they file an extension and it’s accepted by the IRS and that they do that by the filing deadline,” said Thompson. “If not, they will get hit with penalties for failing to file and failing to pay.”

Of course, even if you file an extension, you may still face penalties for not paying your taxes, she said. The deadline for payment is May 17 regardless if you file an extension or not.

Still, filing an extension can be helpful to some, and the penalty for paying what you owe late is generally small.

“There is no shame in filing an extension,” said Koester. To get an extension, you must submit form 4868 to the IRS. You then have until Oct. 15 to file.

Just get it done

In some ways it has never been easier to file taxes due to several online programs that help people prepare and submit their returns.

“You still have time to collect your documents and file before the deadline,” said Lisa Greene-Lewis, a CPA and tax expert for TurboTax.

There is no shame in filing an extension

Allison Koester

ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR AT GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY’S MCDONOUGH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS

To ensure preparing and filing your return goes smoothly, she recommends gathering all income statements, accurate Social Security numbers for you and any dependents, correct bank information and receipts for charitable donations or items to deduct.

She also recommends filing online and selecting direct deposit for any refund you’re owed as it’s the fastest way to submit your information and get your money back.

Thompson agrees. “The IRS doesn’t want your paper return,” she said.

Ethereum, the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency, soars above $4,000 for the first time

Obiex — Fri, 23 Apr 2021 22:52:54 +0000

LONDON — Ether surged past $4,000 Monday to hit a new record high, extending a stunning rally for the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency.

Ether, the digital token of the Ethereum blockchain, rose to an all-time high of $4,196.63 at 12:15 p.m. ET, according to Coin Metrics. It now has a total market value of $483.4 billion, less than half bitcoin’s $1.09 trillion.

As of around 12:30 p.m. ET, ether was up 8.1% at a price of $4,187.32. Bitcoin, on the other hand, inched up 1.1% to $57,962.18.

Once in bitcoin’s shadow, ether has seen parabolic gains recently as investors look to other cryptocurrencies for returns. Bitcoin fell over 2% in April, while ether rose more than 40%. The entire crypto market is currently worth around $2.5 trillion, according to CoinMarketCap, on the back of growing interest in the space.

Mainstream investors and some corporate buyers like Tesla flocked to bitcoin earlier this year, viewing the digital coin as a potential inflation hedge as central banks around the globe print money to relieve coronavirus-battered economies. Major Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have also sought to provide their wealthy clients with bitcoin exposure.

However, some investors still aren’t buying the crypto craze. Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America Securities, said bitcoin’s rally looks like the “mother of all bubbles,” while Alvine Capital’s Stephen Isaacs said there are “no fundamentals with this product, period.”

Ethereum vs. bitcoin

Founded in 2013 by Vitalik Buterin and a host of other software developers, the Ethereum network lets people build applications on top of it. Ether is the network’s native currency.

Bitcoin and ether are similar in that they are both digital currencies. But they have their differences.

Whereas bitcoin is viewed by its proponents as a store of value akin to gold, Ethereum aims to be the infrastructure for a kind of decentralized internet that isn’t maintained by any central authorities.

It’s formed the basis for an increasingly popular trend in crypto known as “decentralized finance,” which aims to recreate traditional financial products with blockchain technology, the distributed computer system that underpins many cryptocurrencies.

Ethereum is also benefiting from the rise of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, digital assets designed to represent ownership of unique virtual items like art and sports memorabilia. Many NFTs, such as CryptoKitties and CryptoPunks, run on Ethereum.

However, this boom in activity has led to congestion on the Ethereum network. Ethereum is currently undergoing an ambitious upgrade that will, in theory, allow for faster transaction times and reduce the amount of power required to process transactions. Both bitcoin and Ethereum have attracted criticism from environmentalists over the impact of crypto mining on the climate.