Vertical Platforms. 401Ks. Lemonade Insurance. The weekly SMH. & more!
Edition #1 ... it's going down!
Ah, LinkedIn, the platform we all love-and-hate! But why?
You ever get those random recruiter requests on LinkedIn asking for an interview for a job that has nothing to do with your background? Or how about the political rant on your feed? Oh, wait … what about the slide-in-to-your-LinkedIn-DMs saying how good looking you are?
What started as a platform that was truly meant to revolutionize the way professionals, grow and connect, online, has turned into a love-and-hate platform that’s being pulled in several directions. Given its one-size-fits-all model, essentially anyone from any industry can join, connect, post, etc, which removes the focus from the platform and ruins the overall user experience.
I think the next great opportunity for an online, professional, social network, will be vertical-specific and will provide specific tools, communities, and business models for its respective candidates and employers. For example, a legal social network will have tools to verify if a potential employee has passed the bar, and the jobs on the platform will only be from law firms, corporations, private practices, courts, etc.
New individualized companies are slowly starting to prop up — from engineering (Hired) to healthcare (Incredible Health) to Finance (Vettery) — but we need more!
📰 Weekly Speed Read!
🚀 Virgin Galactic’s next spaceflight test remains on track to launch in the coming weeks
TL’DR: Virgin Galactic’s planning two spaceflights, on the SpaceShipTwo, and the first one is happening later this fall. This is the first selection of a private-sector researcher to fly using NASA funding.
Dr. Alan Stern will be one of the first researchers to fly to space and will oversee two experiments while on board the flight (one about the stars, and another about the Sun). The company has flown other people and has conducted research experiments before, but this is the first time Virgin’s sending an actual researcher on the SpaceShipTwo.
Why does this matter? If both test flights succeed, Virgin Galactic expects to fly founder Sir Richard Branson in the first quarter of 2021 - a milestone that’ll mark the beginning of the companies commercial tourism service.
🤢 401K Fees Are Eating Your Retirement Saving
TL’DR: The fees inside of your 401K are based on a % of your assets.
Example: A 25-year-old who has $25K in a retirement account, adds $10K per year, and earns 7% annual returns, and plans to retire at 65. Paying 1% in fees would result in $590K in sacrificed returns over 40 years of saving.
Some startups are slowly disrupting this space. Guideline works with businesses and charges a SaaS fee instead of assets under management fee. FeeX identifies hidden fees in users’ retirement accounts.
👩⚕️ Particle Health Announces Quark To Deliver Actionable Healthcare Data Nationwide
TL’DR: Quark by Particle Health is taking a big leap forward in the healthcare space by providing an intermediary layer of technology to enable healthcare records to be passed from old established institutions to health-tech companies.
Within three months alone Particle has signed 25 contracts and is on target to exchange 5K records per day. They’ve onboarded healthcare customers like OakStreet Health, Cliexa, and Medly Pharmacy, while establishing partnerships with Ribbon Health and Cureatr to consolidate new, innovative API solutions into its offering.
Example: Cureatr, the medication management company, recently used Particle Health’s C-CDA technology (Consolidated Clinical Document Architecture) to pass clinical healthcare records into its robust real-time Rx fill data to provide clinical context around a patients medication.
🤑 Funding Announcements
Seed Stage: Juggernaut provides analysis on South Asian news. They charge $3.99/annually, $9.99/monthly, and $249.99/lifetime. They’ve grown 20-30% month-over-month resulting in $2M in venture funding led by Precursor Ventures which they will use to hire editors and marketers.
Early Stage: Common the NYC-based residential brand that designs, leases, and manages multifamily properties for today’s renters raised $50M in series D funding led by Kinnevik. The money will be used to expand into 26 cities globally. They expect to have over 6K units under management by the end of 2020.
Late Stage: Lead Edge Capital, the growth equity venture fund behind the financing of Uber, Alibaba’s IPO, Spotify’s IPO, the sale of Duo Security to Cisco, among many other deals, has raised $950M into its 5th fund, and largest fund, to date. “People want us for our LP network”, says Green, the founder of the fund. “That’s what we’re known for, 100%”.
📲 App Teardown
This week I’ll be looking at the onboarding of Lemonade Insurance to show how buying insurance can feel like a fun game!
Lemonade has a very simple and delightful onboarding. Users answer a few simple questions and they are instantly offered coverage details.
Unlike traditional insurers like Travelers, with Lemonade, users don’t have to visit a physical insurance agent, nor visit them at a brick-and-mortar location. With Lemonade, consumers save time, and Lemonade saves money because of the lack of investment they need to spend on a call-center as well as physical real estate, and instead make investments into AI and ML to offer a smarter and personalized service.
Within 4 years of existence, Lemonade has expanded into 24+ states, has insured 425K+ customers, is expecting sales of over $57M+, offers a loveable brand for millennials, and allows consumers to donate leftover money to causes of their choice.
🤦♂️ The weekly “SMH”
Adam Neumann, former WeWork CEO, who was forced out of his coworking company last year is back-in-action!
… This time it's through his family investment office. He invested $30M in Alfred, the startup that offers apartment buildings with concierge staffers and software services for rent payments and maintenance requests.
After WeWork failed to go public last year, Neumann has stayed relatively quiet. And in the meantime, WeWork has accepted a bailout package from SoftBank and has announced the company is changing its name back to WeWork from “The We Company”. (lol).
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