jsherry

This may be a naive question. But is there a way to embed a chat bot like this that only queries the data we feed it, and not the universe of other stuff in gpt? Like I don’t want people using the chatbot in our product to query a good strawberry shortcake recipe. We just want them to query about data we allow it to query which is native to our business.

Is this feasible? Thx.

I’m shocked at all the suggestions to get a lawyer as step one. Yes you will need a lawyer at some point to get the terms into writing but what you need is business advice to prepare you for a convo w your employer.

That sort of advice is hard to provide without thorough context but few things to think about:

1. How key are you the sales process? If technical due diligence is a big part of the sales process then you have leverage. 2. Are you a key employee that the acquirer will want to put under contract for a couple years to ensure continuity? If so, you have leverage. 3. Do you generally get along w your employer? If so, you have soft leverage.

As an earlier commenter said, it’s all about leverage, leverage, leverage. No (or almost no) owner is going to give you a significant portion of his or her windfall because it’s “the nice thing to do”. This will only get done if you have leverage and the courage to use it.

P.s. there are all sorts of expensive tax implications here too when it comes to ownership transfer. Lawyers and accountants will be needed but not until you’ve neared some agreement in principle.

In short: Hubspot.

Much of the marketing automation we do now flows through a single system which tracks user activity end to end with minimal integration work. For example, this means that if a user signs up to receive a white paper it's much easier for us to customize the messaging based on their individual history. It can be done by integrating separate systems together but it gets messy.

I should add that I think we benefited hugely by doing things "the hard way" to start. By learning each and every digital marketing discipline separately we were much better equipped to deploy a big box solution like Hubspot in the end.

I'm more than happy to go deeper on this if you wish. Ping me at jsherry at cbinsights dot com.

Hi there. I'm Jonathan - co-founder of CB Insights and co-author of this post.

A lot has changed in our stack since we originally published this, but happy to answer any questions.

Also, we recently raised $10M and are hiring like mad: https://www.cbinsights.com/jobs

Surprised this article mentioned chat only once. The secret sauce to Bloomberg's stickiness is their collaboration features via what's know as Instant Bloomberg.

Here's an article about a bunch of banks actually working together to unseat Bloomberg's chat: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-bloomberg...

CB Insights | Lead QA Engineer | NYC | Onsite | Visas Welcome

CB Insights is seeking an experienced QA engineer to build out our automated testing suite and ultimately build a team to own all aspects of QA.

By way of background, CB Insights is a National Science Foundation backed software-as-a-service company that uses data science, machine learning and predictive analytics to help our customers predict what's next—their next investment, the next market they should attack, the next move of their competitor, their next customer, or the next company they should acquire.

The world's leading global corporations including the likes of Cisco, Salesforce, Castrol and Gartner as well as top tier VCs including NEA, Upfront Ventures, RRE, and FirstMark Capital rely on CB Insights to make decisions based on data, not decibels.

If interesting, please contact me (Jonathan) directly at jsherry@cbinsights.com.

Thanks.

If you have a taste for stories that span the spectrum of airport carpeting fanboys to those with more historical significance such as the story here, I cannot recommend the 99% invisible podcast enough.

Web - http://feeds.99percentinvisible.org/99percentinvisible

iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id394775318

In NYC, GA conducts nighttime Meet & Greets with their "graduating" classes. As an employer, this is an efficient way to recruit. I attended one a couple weeks ago and thought it was fairly well organized. If GA can help people get placed into companies, then that's a huge advantage / differentiator for them versus online-only course providers.

So without speaking the quality of the classes themselves - GA specifically, or the concept of online v. in-person - this is a perspective worth considering before slamming the in-person education model altogether. Execution of the actually classes is obviously a separate discussion, but as I said one I'm not prepared to address.

Veeva Systems is another that flew under the radar. B2B Life Sciences software company that raised $4M five years ago from Emergence Capital - a stake which was worth $1.2B at the time of their IPO in October.(1)

Good on Dan Primack to shed some light on the "boring" side of VC.

(1) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-16/veeva-ipo-generates...

Jonathan from CB Insights here. We published this report in partnership with Silicon Valley Bank and Orrick. For startups, investors and advisors interested in the NY ecosystem, we hope it is helpful.

Terrible headline for sure. But in sushi restaurants, this mislabeling is actually very common. More often than not, escolar is labeled white tuna. You know it is escolar when it's a pure white and opaque fish with a buttery taste, which although mislabeled, is not at all unpleasant. Rumor has it that of you eat too much, it also gives you diarrhea but fortunately I've never had enough of it to test that theory.

As for real white tuna, there is such a thing and it's called albacore. Aside from being found prevalently in cans, it can also be had at many finer sushi restaurants and it's delicious. White but lightly translucent and often served with a bit of horseradish.

Buyer beware if you have a case on your phone - it states in the FAQ on his Kickstarter page that this will only work with low-profile cases (which is hard to gauge qualitatively).

In fact, an AED does not restart the heart. It's used in the case of cardiac arrhythmia. CPR is the proper protocol for a flat-lined patient.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_external_defibrillato...

Whereas your first comment came off as a bit pithy, this was a really informative one. Thank you for the lesson on r-value and its importance. Not an avid camper, but I sometimes do overnights in the cold and today I learned something important about air pad insulation. Thanks again.

Per REI's page on the topic, here's what they have to say about R-value: "Insulation is measured according to its capacity to resist (that's the "R") heat flow. The higher a pad's R-value, the better you can expect it to insulate you from cold surfaces. The R-values shown on REI.com product pages are provided by the manufacturers and range from 1.0 (minimally insulated) to 9.5 (well insulated). Thicker pads generally offer higher R-values."

Source: http://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/right-sleeping-pad.ht...

While much of what you're saying is true in general, what you fail to point out - and that the author also covered - is that Manhattan is already littered with street food vendors. The problem is that they all suck, and there's a racket (i.e. the commissaries) that's keeping it that way.

I don't begrudge this author his wealth or his page views. But this piece isn't the least bit serious. Ten times out of ten, he'd take his buyout over again. The only thing that concerns me is that somebody might actually take this post to heart and destroy his or her chances of joining the ranks of the author should the right opportunity present itself.

CB Insights | www.cbinsights.com | New York, NY

CB Insights is a National Science Foundation-funded tech firm assessing the health of private companies using public data. We're currently hiring for the following full-time positions:

Full Stack Developer: http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/full-stack-developer Tech Business Reporter: http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/tech-business-reporter Product Adoption Manager: http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/product-adoption-manager

Our entire jobs page: http://www.cbinsights.com/jobs/

The ROI on antibiotics is much lower than that of a "lifetime drug" such as an anti-depressant that a patient will take for years and years. Pharmaceuticals are mostly privatized and that's not changing, so the government is going to have to find some ways to incentivize innovation in the antibiotics market. Counting on government isn't a popular option these days, but this is the perfect role for them actually.

I have a networked HP printer (or perhaps I shouldn't admit that). Does anybody have a dummies guide on how to protect myself while maintaining connection to the internet? Thanks!

For point of reference, Little Boy (the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) was 16 kilotons and 90k+ people. I'm sure there are a ton of other factors besides kilotons that determine how destructive the bomb is, but it's a data point to understand the potential magnitude.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Boy

"Hands down the people who are most concerned about this trend are the angel investors."

Wrong. This is not an investor's problem. This is an entrepreneur's problem. The angels and VCs will shake this off as all of the combined seed dollars invested over the past couple of years are a relative fart in the wind compared to the greater startup investing arena, which doesn't become really capital-intensive until at least the Series A, and more often Series B stages.

It's the entrepreneurs who are (or at least should be) most concerned. Not the investors.

Edit: here's some cold, hard stats on the Seed VC phenomenon witnessed as of late: https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/seed-investm.... Seed investing continues to be a very real, growing trend, and yes - many startups will be left in the dust come Series A time.

I think that a better explanation of the problem you're facing is that you're wasting your time taking conversations with people who you quite obviously don't have an opportunity for at GoCardless. For example, your jobs page is filled with engineering roles. Unless you're talking to someone who is an engineer, who might just happen to also have an MBA, why are you taking the conversation?

Disclaimer: I have an MBA from a top tier school, and despite that fact, I have the utmost respect for execution. I clean data, I test, I write database queries that include all sorts of joins and I even code a little. The big data company I co-founded in NYC (CB Insights http://www.cbinsights.com) is aggressively seeking talented PHP / MySQL developers. If you happen to have an MBA, that's cool, but regardless we take all shapes and sizes so long as you like to code and ship weekly. Email me at the address in my profile if interested.

Ahhh - there it is - you're right! Pretty lousy.

Whether or not it was his intention, Dave McClure successfully framed 500 in the discussion of the premier accelerator program - YC. And he also sent a battle cry to his portfolio, pitting them as the underdogs. I'd say this post was pretty well done regardless of whether you agree with his points.

If a merchant does at least $13,000 per month in credit card revenue, this is a good deal (read on for assumptions).

Quick and dirty math here: Stripe charges $275 per month for card revenues up to $21,000 per month. I took a look at http://truecostofcredit.com (courtesy of FeeFighters) and the merchant fees per transaction vary widely based on the type of merchant as well as card type. For the sake of argument, let's say the average Visa/MC transactions costs the merchant 1.75%. And let's say that the average AmEx transaction costs the merchant 3.5%. Now let's assume it's an 80%/20% distribution between MC/Visa and AmEx transactions, respectively, bringing a blended rate of 2.1%. Assuming that the merchant is charged 2.1% per transaction by their credit card company, the tipping point is $13,095 of revenue per month. Anything above and beyond that and this is a good deal. Below it, it's not (aside from the fact that's a fixed cost versus a variable one which is worth something).

My initial impression was that this wouldn't be commercially viable in the US due to prohibitive bicycle helmet laws. Well to my surprise, bike helmet laws in the US are actually pretty lax, with only 21 states requiring them (and usually only for younger riders): http://www.iihs.org/laws/HelmetUseCurrent.aspx

360 feedback is good. But if you want to use this to remain anonymous, then this excerpt from their "Promises" section doesn't instill the greatest level of confidence:

"If you do not use insults, verbal abuse or foul language, we will do everything in our power to keep your identity hidden. In other words, don't be mean and we'll have your back."

If you can secure the patent, sounds like licensing might be the way to go here. Competing on the quality of the headphone is an entirely different (and expensive) problem, crowded with a ton of established companies. And if the headphones you produce aren't of decent quality, my hunch is that people won't buy them b/c sound is going to trump the inconvenience of tangled wires.

Very cool. Pearl Jam tried this in the 90's but didn't have the stomach for it. Let's see if Louis has better luck.

Not everyone agrees. This one is rated pretty highly and apparently selling quite well: http://www.amazon.com/AmazonBasics-Touchscreen-Including-Mot...