Startups & Venture
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Gusto’s path to $1 billion in revenue, milestone-by-milestone
After closing, a San Francisco flower market isn’t exactly idyllic. But in 2012, Eddie Kim and Tomer London, cofounders of HR software startup Gusto, were there to see Christina Stembel. The owner of Farmgirl Flowers, Stembel needed to hire her first employee and, accordingly, had to set up payroll for the first time. She’d been…
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The ‘PayPal Mafia’ built a $1.5 billion fintech pioneer. The company they left behind is on life support
Nineteen years ago, in a Fortune cover storythat christened the group, the so-called “PayPal Mafia” gathered in San Francisco for a photo shoot. There were gold chains, tracksuits, Maker’s Mark, Sinatra singing through the Wurlitzer. Peter Thiel had a butler, Fortune’s Jeffrey O’Brien discovered—“holy cannoli”—while Max Levchin wore mismatched freebie shorts. Elon Musk skipped the…
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Exclusive: AI grocery startup Vori raises $22 million to help independent retailers compete with Walmart and Amazon
Brandon Hill’s parents met and fell in love in an independent grocery store. Decades later, the startup founder is trying to make sure stores like that don’t get swallowed up by Walmart and Amazon. Hill is the cofounder and CEO of Vori, a San Francisco company building “the self-driving operating system for supermarkets.” The company…
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‘He wanted to be CEO’: Early OpenAI VC Vinod Khosla says Elon Musk’s bid for control led to the Sam Altman feud and his major investment
When Vinod Khosla sat down with Fortune‘s Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in early March, he offered some key context for one of the most consequential tech trials in American history: Musk vs. Altman. “He wanted to be CEO,” Khosla said of Elon Musk on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. He explained the context around…
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Exclusive: AI-powered recruiting startup Dex raises $5.3 million seed round
Paddy Lambros spent two and a half years advising roughly 100 European startups on hiring at the London-based venture capital firm Atomico. During that time, he kept coming back to the same observation: nearly every business problem at a young company could be traced to a hiring decision. “It was either not having the right…
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A Mark Cuban-backed AI startup is helping families turn conversations with their elderly relatives into lasting memories
Charlie Greene, the cofounder and CEO of Remento, first learned about the importance of recording memories when his father, Don Greene, died during the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on 9/11. A 10-year-old boy at the time of the terrorist attack, which resulted in his father’s plane crashing in Shanksville, Penn., the now 34-year-old…
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A 19-year-old Thiel fellow just raised $7.3 million to build an African ‘super app’
If he hadn’t dropped out, Aubrey Niederhoffer would be nearing the end of his sophomore year at UC Berkeley. Instead, the 19 year-old from the New York area is living in Lagos, Nigeria, where he just launched his food delivery app, Swoop. The 28 person company just booked $7.3 million in seed funding, and the…
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The internet isn’t just like real life, a top VC says — it is real life. For a16z, that’s not philosophy, it’s an investment
The phrase “touch grass” has become the internet’s way of telling someone to log off and rejoin the real world. Erik Torenberg, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, thinks the phrase has it exactly backward — and that getting the philosophy right has enormous economic consequences. In a new essay published through a16z, Torenberg makes…
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Exclusive: Eigen raises a seed round from Benchmark to build the world’s first ‘mutual friend’
More than 600 million people watched the moon landing live in 1969. When NASA’s Artemis program returned astronauts to the lunar surface, an estimated 27 million tuned in, even as the world’s population had doubled. The shared cultural experience, the kind that once stitched strangers together, has quietly collapsed—and Paul Scherer thinks AI is about…
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Harvey’s 30-year-old CEO says failing is a ‘good way to learn’ and says ‘destroying your ego’ led him to an $11 billion success
How do you build an $11 billion startup? For Winston Weinberg, CEO and co-founder of AI legal startup Harvey, it’s all about failure. “I think it’s really hard to figure this out without failing. You just have to fail a million times,” Weinberg said on a recent episode of Fortune’s Term Sheet podcast. The 30-year-old…