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Spark Capital
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City. History Spark Capital was launched in 2005 by Paul Conway, Santo Politi, and Todd Dagres. They have raised six early-stage funds and three growth funds. * The first fund, for $265 million, was raised in 2005. * The second fund, for $360 million, was raised in 2008. * The third fund, for $360 million, was raised in 2010. * The fourth fund, for $450 million, was raised in 2013 and its closure was announced in late February. Partner Bijan Sabet told ''TechCrunch'' that this brought Spark Capital's money under management to $3 billion. * The fifth fund, for $400 million, was raised in 2016. * The sixth fund, for $450 million, was raised in 2020. Spark Capital also raised three growth funds. * The first Growth fund, for $375 million, was raised ...
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Private Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned, traded, exchanged privately, or Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter. In the case of a closed corporation, there are a relatively small number of shareholders or company members. Related terms are closely-held corporation, unquoted company, and unlisted company. Though less visible than their public company, publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for ($1.8 trillion) in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on ...
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Social Trading
Social trading is a form of investing that allows investors to observe the trading behavior of their peers and expert traders. The primary objective is to follow their investment strategies using copy trading or mirror trading. Social trading requires little or no knowledge about financial markets. History One of the first social trading platforms was eToro in 2010, followed by Wikifolio in 2012. Europe-baseNAGA listed on Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2017, claims more than EUR 27 billion was traded on its platform in the second half of 2019. Some of the contemporary social trading platforms other than mentioned already are Zulu Trade, Trading Motion, iSystems, FX Junction and Collective2. Research MIT Computer Scientist and researcher Yaniv Altshuler described social trading networks as complex adaptive systems, and in his 2014 research on eToro's OpenBook, wrote that "Having the inherent ability to share ideas and information between each others, OpenBook’s users are given ...
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Discord (software)
Discord is a VoIP and instant messaging social platform. Users have the ability to communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media and files in private chats or as part of communities called "servers".The developer documentation refers to servers as "guilds". A server is a collection of persistent chat rooms and voice channels which can be accessed via invite links. Discord runs on Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, iPadOS, Linux, and in web browsers. , the service has over 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users. History The concept of Discord came from Jason Citron, who had founded OpenFeint, a social gaming platform for mobile games, and Stanislav Vishnevskiy, who had founded Guildwork, another social gaming platform. Citron sold OpenFeint to GREE in 2011 for million, which he used to found Hammer & Chisel, a game development studio, in 2012. Their first product was ''Fates Forever'', released in 2014, which Citron anticipate ...
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Coinbase
Coinbase Global, Inc., branded Coinbase, is an American publicly traded company that operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform. Coinbase is a distributed company; all employees operate via remote work and the company lacks a physical headquarters. It is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States by trading volume. The company was founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam. In May 2020, Coinbase announced it would shut its San Francisco, California headquarters and change operations to remote-first, part of a wave of several major tech companies closing headquarters in San Francisco in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. History 2012–2019: founding and early years Coinbase was founded in June 2012 by Brian Armstrong, a former Airbnb engineer. Armstrong enrolled in the Y Combinator startup incubator program and received a $150,000 cash infusion. Fred Ehrsam, a former Goldman Sachs trader, later joined as a co-founder after noticing Armstrong's posts o ...
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Oculus VR
Reality Labs is a business of Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook Inc.) that produces virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) hardware and software, including virtual reality headsets such as Quest, and online platforms such as Horizon Worlds. Reality Labs is the corporate successor to Oculus, a company that was founded in 2012 by Palmer Luckey, Brendan Iribe, Michael Antonov and Nate Mitchell to develop a VR headset for video gaming known as the Oculus Rift. Before the acquisition, Oculus raised over $2.4 million for the project via a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter—nearly ten times the original goal of $250,000. Oculus was acquired by Facebook in March 2014. The company partnered with Samsung Electronics to release the Gear VR accessory for Samsung Galaxy smartphones in 2015. In March 2016, Oculus released the first consumer version of the Rift headset. In 2017, the company released a standalone mobile headset known as Oculus Go, produced by Xiaomi. In 2019, i ...
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Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Globe'' is the oldest and largest daily newspaper in Boston. Founded in 1872, the paper was mainly controlled by Irish Catholic interests before being sold to Charles H. Taylor and his family. After being privately held until 1973, it was sold to ''The New York Times'' in 1993 for $1.1billion, making it one of the most expensive print purchases in U.S. history. The newspaper was purchased in 2013 by Boston Red Sox and Liverpool owner John W. Henry for $70million from The New York Times Company, having lost over 90% of its value in 20 years. The newspaper has been noted as "one of the nation's most prestigious papers." In 1967, ''The Boston Globe'' became the first major paper in the U.S. to come out against the Vietnam War. The paper's 2002 ...
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Business Insider
''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publishing house Axel Springer. It operates several international editions, including one in the United Kingdom. ''Insider'' publishes original reporting and aggregates material from other outlets. , it maintained a liberal policy on the use of anonymous sources. It has also published native advertising and granted sponsors editorial control of its content. The outlet has been nominated for several awards, but is criticized for using factually incorrect clickbait headlines to attract viewership. In 2015, Axel Springer SE acquired 88 percent of the stake in Insider Inc. for $343 million (€306 million), implying a total valuation of $442 million. In February 2021, the brand was renamed simply ''Insider''. History ''Busi ...
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Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Management and 10% by Verizon Communications. It provides a web portal, search engine Yahoo Search, and related services, including My Yahoo!, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports and its advertising platform, Yahoo! Native. Yahoo was established by Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994 and was one of the pioneers of the early Internet era in the 1990s. However, usage declined in the late 2000s as some services discontinued and it lost market share to Facebook and Google. History Founding In January 1994, Yang and Filo were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University, when they created a website named "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web". The site was a human-edited web directory, or ...
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Initial Public Offering
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment banks, who also arrange for the shares to be listed on one or more stock exchanges. Through this process, colloquially known as ''floating'', or ''going public'', a privately held company is transformed into a public company. Initial public offerings can be used to raise new equity capital for companies, to monetize the investments of private shareholders such as company founders or private equity investors, and to enable easy trading of existing holdings or future capital raising by becoming publicly traded. After the IPO, shares are traded freely in the open market at what is known as the free float. Stock exchanges stipulate a minimum free float both in absolute terms (the total value as determined by the share price multiplied by the ...
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Dick Costolo
Richard William Costolo (pronounced: ) (born September 10, 1963) is an American businessman. He was the CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2010 to 2015; he also served as the COO before becoming CEO. He took over as CEO from Evan Williams in October 2010. On June 11, 2015, it was announced that Costolo would step down as CEO on July 1, 2015, and would be replaced by Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey on an interim basis until the Board of Directors could find a replacement. On August 8, 2015, ''The New York Times'' reported that Costolo would be leaving Twitter's Board of Directors by the end of the year or when a new CEO was appointed. Career Costolo was born in Royal Oak, Michigan. In 1985, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in computer and communication sciences from the University of Michigan. Upon graduation, he decided not to accept offers from technology companies and instead moved to Chicago to work in improvisational comedy. After his improv career in Chicago, Costo ...
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Evan Williams (Internet Entrepreneur)
Evan "Ev" Clark Williams (born March 31, 1972) is an American billionaire technology entrepreneur and executive. He is a co-founder of Twitter, and served as CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2008 to 2010 and as a member of its board from 2007 to 2019. He founded Blogger and Medium, two of the largest blogging internet platforms. In 2014, he co-founded the venture capital firm Obvious Ventures. , his net worth is estimated at US$2.1 billion. Early life and education Williams was born in Clarks, Nebraska, as the third child of Laurie Howe and Monte Williams. He grew up on a farm in Clarks, where he assisted with crop irrigation during the summers. He attended the University of Nebraska–Lincoln for a year and a half, where he joined FarmHouse fraternity, then left the school to pursue his career. Career Early career After leaving college, Williams worked at various technology jobs and start-up firms in Key West, Florida, and in Dallas and Austin, Texas, before returning to his famil ...
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