firehose

At their previous jobs at venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners, respectively, Neha Singh and Abhishek Goyal often had to help identify prospective startups and make investment decisions.

But it wasn’t always easy.

Startups usually don’t disclose information about themselves, since they are privately held firms and are under no compulsion to share data publicly. So, Singh and Goyal had to constantly struggle to collate information from multiple sources.

Eventually, fed up with the lack of a single source for data, the Indian Institute of Technology graduates quit their jobs in 2013 to start an analytics firm, Tracxn!. Their ambition: To become the Gartner—the go-to firm for information technology research—of the startup ecosystem.

“It’s almost surprising,” Singh told Quartz in an email interview, “that despite billions of dollars invested in each of the sectors (be in foodtech or mobile commerce, or payments, etc), thousands of people employed in this ecosystem and many more aspiring to start something here, there is not a single source which tracks and provides insights into these private markets.”

Tracxn! started operations in May 2013, working from Lightspeed Venture Partners’ office in Menlo Park, California, with angel funding from founders of e-commerce companies like Flipkart and Delhivery. In 2014, the startup began its emerging markets operation with focus on India and China.

“After our first launch in April last year, we scaled the revenues quickly and turned profitable last September, (and) grew to a team of 40,” Singh said. Most of its analysts are based in Bengaluru.

Tracxn! follows a SaaS (software as a service) business model, charging subscribers between $20,000 and $90,000 per year. With a database of over 7,000 Indian and 21,000 US startups, Singh and Goyal now count over 50 venture capital funds among their clients, which also include mergers and acquisitions specialists, product managers, founders and aspiring entrepreneurs.

While firms like Mattermark, Datafox and CB Insights provide similar services, Tracxn! allows investors to get an overview of a sector within the ecosystem before drilling down to individual companies.

“For many funds, we have become a primary source of their deal discovery,” said Singh. “We want to become the default research platform for anyone looking for information and trends on these private markets and companies.”

In April this year, Tracxn! received $3.5 million in funding from private equity firm, SAIF Partners, which it plans to use to ramp up its analyst strength to 150 by the end of the year.

“We keep getting inquiries from investors across various countries (like from Europe, parts of Southeast Asia, etc),” explained Singh. “But we cannot launch them because we don’t have analyst teams for it.”

But with money on its way, Tracxn! now wants to expand coverage into Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Vietnam and Europe to build its global database.

This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

Zimmerman did not fire a gun in the Monday incident, his latest brush with law enforcement since his 2013 trial, according to police. No charges were immediately filed in the shooting, which took place on a roadway in Lake Mary, Florida, a suburb of Orlando. The other man involved was Matthew Apperson, police said. Apperson previously accused Zimmerman of threatening to kill him during a September 2014 roadside dispute, but declined to press charges.

The Seattle Seahawks continue to face scrutiny for drafting Michigan defensive end Frank Clark in the second round, and it only intensified with a report that emerged in the Seattle Times late last week. According to court documents obtained by the Times, Clark, who was dismissed from Michigan in November after a domestic violence arrest, threatened to hit a female hotel manager and admitted to hitting his girlfriend. In a statement to police in Sandusky, Ohio, the day after the incident, manager Stephanie Burkhardt wrote that soon after she entered the couple’s hotel room Clark told her, “I will hit you like I hit her” and shouldered her out of the way before leaving. The documents, obtained by The Seattle Times via public-records request, supplement the initial police report.

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The Patriots owner isn't ready to accept the punishments over DeflateGate.

New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft condemned the punishment handed down by the league to the team and quarterback Tom Brady on Monday. In a statement, Kraft said that it was originally his intention to accept any discipline handed down by the league, but that the league "far exceeded any reasonable expectation."

The league fined the team $1 million, docked it a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-round pick in 2017 and suspended Brady for the first four games of the coming season. The league's investigation into the "DeflateGate" incident concluded that the Patriots illegally deflated footballs during the AFC Championship against the Indianapolis Colts.

"Despite our conviction that there was no tampering with footballs, it was our intention to accept any discipline levied by the league," Kraft said. "Today's punishment, however, far exceeded any reasonable expectation. It was based completely on circumstantial rather than hard or conclusive evidence."

Kraft went on to thank the fans for support, and said that he shares with them in their "disappointment in how this one-sided investigation was handled, as well as the dismissal of the scientific evidence supported by the Ideal Gas Law in the final report."

Given the statement, it's fairly clear that the Patriots will appeal the decision in some form. It was reported that the Patriots would accept a reasonable punishment, but that Brady was always going to appeal any kind of suspension handed down to him. The Wells report could not prove conclusively that the footballs were deflated by order of Brady, but did conclude that there was enough evidence supporting the thought that Brady was aware the violations were occurring.

The statement finishes with Kraft saying the organization offers Brady its "unconditional support," and that their "belief in him has not wavered." Barring a successful appeal, the Patriots will be without Brady for five weeks (four games and a bye), including games against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills, Jacksonville Jaguars and Dallas Cowboys.

A Subway franchise in Knoxville, Tenn. is the first US business to arm itself with “intruder spray,” which tags would-be robbers with a product called SelectaDNA. According to the manufacturer, the solution contains “a unique DNA code which can be used to uniquely mark and trace both items of property and criminals.” The spray is “traceable for weeks” and is “only visible with a glow under ultraviolet light."

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New Delhi’s startup ecosystem is booming. Companies in the national capital received almost $1.5 billion in startup funding last year, and a rash of new firms, including Zomato, Paytm, Snapdeal and Delhivery, have been making news.

But Delhi, it seems, is no place for women entrepreneurs compared to the country’s tech hub, Bengaluru (formerly Bangalore).

Patriarchal mindsets, restrictive families, gender discrimination while accessing finance, government policy, entry into networking groups, and concerns of safety in the National Capital Region (NCR) are preventing women entrepreneurship from thriving, according to a report by consulting firm, Athena Infonomics Research.

The NCR consists of Delhi, and its two suburbs—Noida and Gurgaon.

On a women entrepreneurial ecosystem index, Bengaluru scored 62 out of 100, compared to Delhi’s 47.

The index is based on the insights of women entrepreneurs on how friendly a city is to their businesses—in terms of policy, access to finance, among others—and the social and cultural perceptions of people around them. In Bengaluru, 200 women were surveyed for the study in 2013, while 125 women were polled in Delhi last year.

In Delhi and its suburbs, about 45% of women said family consent was critical in starting a business, working during evening hours and attending networking and social events. Safety concerns “affected the mobility and ability to work in the evening hours,” according to one woman entrepreneur who was interviewed for the report.

Moreover, some 66% of women polled were averse to taking risks of expanding their businesses, because of their responsibility towards their family. In addition, many others faced discrimination while dealing with clients and customers, and thus “leading to exclusion from their procurement channels.”

This is how women scored on different facets of doing business in NCR, followed by Delhi, on a scale of 100.

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Among other factors, what works in Bengaluru’s favour is experience.

“A support system has existed in Bengaluru, with a very strong entrepreneurial setting, and that accelerated (the growth of) women entrepreneurs,” said Anupama Ramaswamy, a co-author of the report. “There were networking organisations, venture capitals… But in Delhi, there were fewer support systems. A woman entrepreneur was viewed as someone who was doing it as her hobby.”

The outcome is evident in how companies run by women in Delhi and Bengaluru fared in terms of the growth of their startups. For instance, 7% of enterprises in Bengaluru have a workforce of more than 100 employees, compared to Delhi’s 1%.

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This article is a part of Quartz India. For more, follow this link.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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In Charlotte, North Carolina, people who have a history of homelessness, as well as physical or mental disabilities, can get their own apartment at a non-profit-run, 85-unit complex called Moore Place. The development runs on the “housing-first” approach to homelessness: give people the keys to their own residence, then try to resolve the issues that led them to lose their homes. The model essentially flips a more longstanding approach that many people call the “treatment-first” model, which focuses on fixing the problems before providing the housing.

Despite its limited applications, the housing-first approach has been successful in a number of cities, and a new study suggests Moore Place is no exception. Researchers at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte report that not only do housing projects like Moore Place dramatically help the homeless population, but they also help cities save money and free up civic resources.

“Putting a person in housing as an early step in the intervention process actually creates a foundation for health and well-being and for them to actually begin to address the issues that they’ve struggled with over time,” Lori Thomas, a professor of social work in the College of Health and Human Services at UNC-Charlotte, tells CityLab. “It really upends the model that we’ve used for so long.”

Some Cost and Many Benefits

At Moore Place, it costs around $14,000 per year to house someone. About 30 percent of this cost comes from tenant incomes. The rest is covered by donations and public funding, the new report explains.

The positive returns have been quite dramatic. A study team led by Thomas surveyed Moore Place tenants four times: right when they moved in, then at six months, a year, and two years later. They found that, after two years, 81 percent of tenants who participated in the survey remained in permanent housing. Before they’d moved into Moore Place, these tenants had been homeless an average of 7 years.

Not only did Moore Place tenants maintain the roof over their head, but their relationships with the health care system started to change, Thomas explains. Two years into their stay, emergency room visits and hospital visits decreased by 81 percent and 62 percent, respectively (below, top); they also used the county medics 76 percent less. Their total hospital billing decreased by $2.4 million—that’s a 70 percent reduction (bottom).

When they did go to the hospital, Moore Place tenants did so in an outpatient setting, which Thomas says is a “more efficient use of funding.” They were also better able to pay for the medical services through third-party sponsors (usually Medicaid) rather than having the hospital system and the community bear the cost of treatment, she explains. Here’s a chart from the study showing how outpatient visits increased over time and ER visits dropped:

The study also found that since Moore Place residents stayed off the streets, they stayed out of jail. Arrests for petty street offenses and small crimes decreased by 80 percent, and nights in prison came down by almost 89 percent.

This Isn’t The Only Successful Housing-First Program

As far back as 2001, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania declared that providing housing to the homeless is a “solution that can pay for itself.” Seattle, for instance, saved a lot of money with its housing-first program for recovering alcoholics. The Pathways to Housing program, which started in 1992 in New York City and was one of the initial housing-first programs, saved the public up to $42,893 per year, according to a 2011 report.

Utah and Colorado have also seen dramatic success. Utah has seen almost a 90 percent decrease in homelessness since its implementation of the housing-first model in 2005, the Christian Science Monitor recently reported. Colorado’s housing-first programs report a 96 percent rate of home-retention. Both states have also saved a lot of money. Here’s the New Yorker’s James Surowiecki to explain:

Homeless people are not cheap to take care of. The cost of shelters, emergency-room visits, ambulances, police, and so on quickly piles up. Lloyd Pendleton, the director of Utah’s Homeless Task Force, told me of one individual whose care one year cost nearly a million dollars, and said that, with the traditional approach, the average chronically homeless person used to cost Salt Lake City more than twenty thousand dollars a year. Putting someone into permanent housing costs the state just eight thousand dollars, and that’s after you include the cost of the case managers who work with the formerly homeless to help them adjust.

Still, the housing-first model still has its opponents, partly because people assume that “housing-first” means “housing-only,” Thomas says. That's not the case. Many Moore Place tenants still work with social workers, therapists, and medical workers. But this help comes after their housing arrangement has been sorted out.

The other problem is flipping the way homelessness services are traditionally provided—help first, home second—isn’t easy.

“You’re making the assumption that a person needs to get sober, and be compliant on their medication, and get a job before they can become stably housed, and then you have a model that says, ‘No, you really don’t, you can work it the other direction and have much better outcomes,’” says Thomas. “When funding and entire program structures are based on those assumptions, it’s really hard to change it.”

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OED Word of the Day: polyhistor, n. A person of great or varied learning; a great scholar

“I love the way you take down men on the show. Keep up the good work, and stay alive” - Snoop Dogg to Brienne x

_{Jennifer Lawrence - X-Men: Days of Future Past (behind the scenes)}

jtotheizzoe:

skunkbear:

Here’s the orbital period of our solar system’s 8 major planets (how long it takes each to travel around the sun). Their size is to scale and their speed is accurate relative to Earth’s. The repetition of each GIF is proportional to their orbital period. Mercury takes less than 3 months to zoom around Sol, Neptune takes nearly 165 years.  

Fun fact: Neptune has only made one complete orbit since its discovery in 1846, which, in a way, means we only discovered it a year ago.

wilwheaton:

kateordie:

I don’t understand how she doesn’t have an Emmy. YOU CAN ALWAYS TELL WHICH CLONE IT REALLY IS!

And when she’s Cosima being Cosima, or Sarah being Sarah, it’s distinctly different from all of these characters. I think Tat is so mind-blowingly talented that the Television Academy literally can’t even.

Personally and politically, Whedon is definitely a feminist. He frequently labels himself as such, he works with groups like Equality Now, and he's been a frequent public supporter of figures like Anita Sarkeesian, whose Feminist Frequency YouTube series has been the target of misogynistic outrage.

But artistically, things are more complicated. Whedon's work trends toward feminism, but his true great cause is storytelling, and he always prioritizes the latter if it makes for a better story. Whedon likes to tell stories that test the strength of communities, stories where horrific actions are often forgiven and written off because the larger community requires it. And though this is why his stories are so frequently good, it also has a tendency to clash with his fictional feminism. (More on this in a bit.)

As he told BuzzFeed's Adam B. Vary when explaining that he'd left Twitter to concentrate on his writing, not because he was being attacked by militant feminists (as some had assumed from his timing):

I’ve said before, when you declare yourself politically, you destroy yourself artistically. Because suddenly that’s the litmus test for everything you do — for example, in my case, feminism. If you don’t live up to the litmus test of feminism in this one instance, then you’re a misogynist. It circles directly back upon you.