2021

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Tough hiring market? Make it easier to be a parent at your company.

This is going to be BIG.

After 80 long days in the NICU, my 10 week early daughter Mirren has finally come home. We’re overjoyed and we’ve begun the task of learning how to manage all the logistics of her care—while somehow doing the bare minimum of that for ourselves. We both showered in the last 24 hours, which is a major moral victory for the team. TFW you’re small and slippery and you realize your parents have no idea how to give you a bath.

Startups 179
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Seed Rounds At $100mm Post Money

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

We have been seeing quite a few seed rounds getting done in and around $100mm post-money and that concerns me for a few reasons: Seed stage is when a company has a good team, a good idea, but has not yet proven product market fit and a go to market model, and has not yet demonstrated a sustainable business model. These investments have a high failure rate.

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Trending Sources

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ESG shares underperform oil and gas in 2021

Financial Times: Moral Money

Green stocks were ‘leading the show’ last year but energy companies and funds have roared ahead

Funds 98
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How to Make a Good First Impression With New LinkedIn Connections (Video)

Indigo Marketing Agency

If you’re like most financial advisors, you want to make the best impression possible on LinkedIn. And this may have you wondering: What should I do when I get a new LinkedIn connection? What protocol is there for following up and staying engaged? Well, that’s exactly what we’ll talk about today. As part of our Total Marketing Package, we help advisors grow their networks by making new connections on LinkedIn for them.

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Our DIY Heat Pump Install – Free Heating and Cooling for Life?

Mr. Money Mustache

A work of art. To most of the Internet, Mr. Money Mustache is known as the quirky early retirement financial guy, and this is a blog about Money. But really, I’m not a finance guy – someone who devotes most of his time to optimizing money. I’m more of a general Life Engineer – someone who tries to optimize everything that is fun and interesting in life, and money is just one of those things.

Taxes 55
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Google Local Search Algorithm Update – Vicinity

Advisor Rankings

Google recently confirmed a major update to its local search algorithm. The update – named Vicinity by the SEO community – rolled out between November 30th and December 8th, 2021. It is the largest change to the Local Algorithm since the Possum update in 2016. The update is different from the usual algorithm update as it isn’t fixing bugs or targeting spam.

More Trending

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Jim Cramer and Stock Picking Performance… Booyah?

Dear Mr. Market

Dear Mr. Market: It’s that time of year. Everyone has some stinkers in their portfolio and in a taxable account it’s a great time to evaluate whether one should offset that loss by taking some gains on your winners. If you followed any of Jim Cramer’s advice this past year you have some serious evaluating to do! The aim of this article is not a hit piece of Mr.

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Learn How to Invest Outside of the Stock Market

Fortune Financial

Inflation is affecting businesses and individuals worldwide and it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. The pandemic has forced factories in parts of Asia to shut down, along with trucking and staffing shortages at ports is slowing the U.S. port facility operations. Due to this, inflation has become part of daily conversations causing investors to consider alternative investments outside of the stock market.

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How to Grow on Twitter as a Financial Advisor

Tucker Advisors

How to Grow on Twitter as a Financial Advisor. By Jordan Collins Tucker Advisors Senior Digital Marketing Specialist. Follow Follow Follow Follow Follow Follow. Table of Contents . Click the links below to jump to a client appreciation event page section specific to your needs. Why Twitter? Setting Up Your Twitter Account. Who Should You Follow On Twitter.

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“Days Can Be Sunny for Bunnies and Money” Now Available for Purchase

C2P Enterprises

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE. AdvisorPR® (702) 685-7450. “Days Can Be Sunny for Bunnies and Money” Now Available for Purchase. The children’s book is inspired by Clarity 2 Prosperity’s signature financial planning process and the bestselling book, “The Bucket Plan: Protecting and Growing Your Assets for a Worry-Free Retirement”. Cleveland [.]. The post “Days Can Be Sunny for Bunnies and Money” Now Available for Purchase appeared first on Clarity 2 Prosperity.

Assets 52
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How to Create a Healthy Local Startup and Tech Community

This is going to be BIG.

In 2010, Antonio Garcia Martinez, the founder of AdGrok, wrote, “New York will always be a tech backwater, I don’t care what Chris Dixon or Ron Conway or Paul Graham say.” That prediction obviously turned out pretty wrong, but it did drum up a whole lot of chatter about the right ingredients for building a startup community—about New York vs Boston on the East Coast and whether cities like Austin and Seattle would ever break through.

Startups 172
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The Opening

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

I like to think of investing in new things a bit like a football running play. Imagine you are the running back. You’ve been handed the football and you are looking for a hole to open up and run through. What you really want is some running room beyond the opening. We’ve known for a while that crypto is the next big tech architecture. We’ve known that once the wave breaks on the shore, there will be enormous opportunities unleashed.

Companies 145
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What You Should Know About the Alternative Minimum Tax and Incentive Stock Options

Zajac Group

Most people understand that taxes can be a little more complicated when you have incentives stock options and other equity compensation. What they may not know is that income tax isn’t just about tax brackets to calculate your regular taxable income. The federal income tax system has a sister system that figures how much tax you may owe due to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).

Taxes 52
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Why Do People Hire a Financial Advisor? (Video)

Indigo Marketing Agency

Why do people really hire a financial advisor? As a financial professional, I’m sure this question has crossed your mind at least a dozen times. But in order to answer it, you have to look at why people buy any type of product or service. I once heard it said, “People buy aspirin. They don’t buy vitamins.” In other words, people are more concerned about solving their short-term ailments than they are about their long-term well-being.

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The Margin Loan: How to Make a $400,000 Impulse Purchase

Mr. Money Mustache

So, I kind of just bought the house next door to me. We’ve already gotten straight into the renovations with a symbolic first step: a new front door. This is already somewhat amazing, for a small-town boy who refuses to even buy himself a new car. But even stranger are the details that surround this deal: I’m not moving into it. I don’t really need or want a second house.

Taxes 53
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How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Your Advisor Blog

Advisor Rankings

Google would like all of us to become a publisher – or at least to “think like a publisher.” Many financial firms are embracing this concept, planning and writing content at an unprecedented pace. But what does it really mean to “think like a publisher?” Magazine and newspaper publishers—online and off—are responsible for the bottom line.

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Demystifying Systematic Fixed Income Investing

ClearMoney

The following is provided by Dimensional Fund Advisors. Systematic, or factor-based, investing has become quite common in equities. Investor adoption in fixed income has lagged, at least when measured by the assets under management (AUM) in mutual funds and ETFs. At the end of 2020, $1.35 trillion in equity fund AUM1 was categorized as strategic beta by Morningstar.

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Don’t be Gone Phishing

Dear Mr. Market

Dear Mr. Market: This isn’t the type of letter we like to write you. Our brief note today will not center around anything of stock market or economic interest. Mr. Market dupes people with his manic, unpredictable, and volatile ways but one thing that we can guard ourselves from is the ever growing threat of phishing. What exactly is “phishing”?

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How to Protect Yourself From Identity Theft

Fortune Financial

As our identities and personal information become more regularly available on the internet, our risk of having our identities stolen increases. According to the Insurance Information Institute , there were 4.8 million identity theft and fraud reports received by the FTC in 2020, up 45% from 3.3 million in 2019. From an organizational standpoint, the number was equally as shocking, with a new company experiencing identity theft every 14 seconds. .

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How to Get Qualified Leads from Facebook

Tucker Advisors

How to Get Qualified Leads from Facebook. By Jordan Collins Tucker Advisors Senior Digital Marketing Specialist. Follow Follow Follow Follow Follow Follow. Table of Contents . Click the links below to jump to a client appreciation event page section specific to your needs. Setting Up Your Facebook Business Page. Facebook Ads Manager. Create a Facebook Ad Campaign.

Bidding 52
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Both Things Can Be True: Bias and Bad Fundraising Advice

This is going to be BIG.

Fundraising takes a long time. I’m a female founder. I don’t have a technical co-founder. I don’t have enough traction. These are all of the things I heard from a founder that I recently backed. She was pitching for a pre-seed round of $400k. I committed to the round, but I wanted to see her raise a bit more—at least $750k, but perhaps up to $1.5mm.

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Playing Startup Versus Building a Company

This is going to be BIG.

Figuring out how to build and run a business isn’t easy—and a lot of the moves you need to make aren’t intuitive. However, too many people approach it by just copying what it seems like everyone else is doing without taking a hard look at what your actual goals are and really learning how to go about the job of Founder and CEO. They’re “playing startup” as opposed to actually building a company.

Startups 145
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Betting On The Price Of Carbon

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

My partner Albert shared this article yesterday which suggests that the price of carbon will have to reach $150/ton by 2030 in order to create the conditions for the world to get to zero carbon by 2050. The current price of a ton of carbon on the EU’s Emission Trading System is about $60/ton and you can buy carbon offsets for much less than that although you may be purchasing junk credits if you are not careful.

Returns 145
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Anti-fragile Systems

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

The Internet was developed by the US Defense Department to create a network that was capable of surviving a military attack. They accomplished that with a design where no part of the system was central to its operation. You can take out any part of the Internet and it will still operate. When I read the Bitcoin White Paper for the first time, I was struck by the similarity of its design to the Internet.

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The Great Formation

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

On Friday, the US jobs report produced a confusing result. From Bloomberg : The jobs report is composed of two surveys — one of employers and the other of households. The employer survey, which determines the payroll and wage figures, showed hiring slowed across industries, including declines at automakers and retail outlets. The household survey, which determines the jobless and participation rates, showed employment surged by 1.14 million people and many came off the sidelines.

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How This Ends

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

We are in the middle of one of the great asset bubbles of modern times. It has been brought on by the easy money policies of central banks around the world aimed at weathering the global Covid 19 pandemic. Interest rates are near zero or negative in most developed economies and asset prices have gone way up as a result. When interest rates are zero or negative, the value of future cash flows is huge and that is how you get PE and EBITDA ratios of over 100 and price/revenue multiples approaching

Banks 145
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Computer Science Is For Everyone

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Many/most of you know that a lot of my philanthropic time and energy is dedicated to making sure that all K12 students, but particularly young women and students of color, have access to a high quality computer science education. When I started this work a decade or more ago, I would regularly run into well-meaning people in the education system who would say something like “oh, that’s not for my students” and it would p**s me off and I would try to explain that anyone can lear

Education 145
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Decentralized Media

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Back in the early 2000s, it was exciting to blog and use social networks to create our own media and move away from the traditional media outlets. That was the pull that got me into blogging and got me investing in Twitter. It was a powerful feeling. But a decade and a half later, it is obvious that we just replaced one type of media company for another and that we don’t really control our own media yet.

Companies 141
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Why Founders Have No Clue How They Raised (Or Failed To)

This is going to be BIG.

Sometimes it all seems like magic. In the beginning of my venture career, I knew of a firm that was involved in a highly competitive funding round that they ultimately failed to win. It was a clearly hot space and they felt like they had missed out on an opportunity to place their bet in it—and worst of all, they lost the deal to what they considered a rival firm.

Funds 127
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Funding Friday: Pattern Alphabet cards for exploring nature

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Longtime AVC reader Alex Wolf has a Kickstarter project that I think is awesome. She has long been working on a “pattern alphabet” to encode the patterns of nature and life. This project turns this alphabet into cards that can be used by kids in school and at home to learn. I backed the project this morning and I hope and expect she will do great with this Kickstarter project.

Funds 140
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How Not To Regulate Innovation

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

The Secretary Of Treasury, in his last month in office, is giving us a textbook case of how not to regulate important technology innovation. The issue is “unhosted wallets” and how regulated exchanges and other “hosted wallets” interact with them. Let’s start with why this is important. Our current financial systems are old, creaky, expensive, and do not serve enough people.

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NYC’s Tech Resurgence (continued)

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

A few weeks ago, I wrote about NYC’s Tech Resurgence. I observed that NYC continues to develop as one of the world’s leading centers of tech innovation. And then yesterday, I saw this tweet : NYC startups are getting funded at 2/3 the rate of Silicon Valley startups. That’s a huge change from where NYC was even two or three years ago.

Startups 131
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The David Prize

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

Are you a New Yorker doing something amazing and could use $200,000 to support your work? If so, you should apply for a David Prize. I have written about this program before so you might remember. But for those who haven’t heard about it, here’s the deal: Here are the most recent cohort of David Prize winners : ? Cesar Vargas : Fighting for immigrants in the armed forces and their right to stay in the U.S. ?

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Office Utilization

A VC: Musings of a VC in NYC

I saw a statistic from one of our larger portfolio companies yesterday. They have had their offices around the world open for some time now with office usage optional. They are seeing office utilization rates of around “20-30%.” They are also seeing “flexibility” as the number one issue in recruiting new talent. That was interesting to me because we are seeing a much higher office utilization at USV.

Startups 130