Venture Capital & Emerging Companies

In this Podcast, Jeremy Glaser, speaks with Mike Krenn about how he advises entrepreneurs to identify and approach angel investors and venture capitalists and his recommended best practices for writing pitch decks and executive summaries.

The Series limited liability company (the “Series LLC”) is more nuanced than an ordinary limited liability company, and for the right user, it provides flexibility that will streamline administration better than other alternative entities.

After being in the insurance industry for several decades in a variety of roles, I frequently get asked which insurtechs I think are going to be successful.

Words are very powerful and the language we use often frames a discussion. For example, the term “shareholder activist” sounds like a consumer friendly person who has everyone’s best interests at heart, when in fact the term “shareholder activist” is a phrase invented to cast corporate raiders in a better light. Such semantic gamesmanship often masks the reality of a particular situation.

Since its beginnings in early 2015, quip, the Brooklyn-based dental start-up co-founded by former industrial product designers Simon Enever and Bill May, has swiftly reinvented the archaic dental healthcare industry. From its superbly designed electric toothbrushes to its subscription toothbrush-head and toothpaste replacement service, and its “dental connect” digital platform for customers and dental professionals, quip has made it easier, more enjoyable, and more affordable for customers to keep their smiles bright and healthy. For these achievements, quip has received unprecedented dental industry and press coverage, including recognition as one of TIME Magazine’s 25 Best Inventions of 2016, a place on the O, The Oprah Magazine “O-List,” and a 2016 GQ Grooming Award. With such accolades and its robust social media following, quip is revolutionizing the way people around the world approach oral healthcare.

Historically, most startup companies were funded either by the offering of equity or by loans in the form of convertible promissory notes. Recently, however, there have been some hybrid instruments created to fund startups.

The potential to disrupt the historic insurance industry model has made insurtech one of the hottest new areas of innovation and investment, with entrepreneurs developing technologies at a breakneck pace and venture capital firms seeking to put investment dollars behind an exciting range of new products and services aimed at efficiencies and cost savings.

The current edition of MintzTech Connect includes an article relating to investing in hot secondary securities and an article on some of the pitfalls in our “gig economy” under New York law when hiring independent contractors. We also highlight a very cool young company called Kinnos, which is raising the standard of infectious disease decontamination to protect healthcare workers, patients, and the general public.

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission member Michael Piwowar on Tuesday urged investors to be wary of the pitfalls of so-called SAFE investments — a sophisticated financing instrument for startup companies — that are increasingly being marketed to the broader retail investing public.

There is little doubt that activity in the trading of secondary shares of private companies remains robust. Private companies are staying private longer and there seems to be an unlimited demand to buy into the newest “Unicorn” anointed each week. As the market for secondary shares stays strong, valuations seem not to matter much to most buyers.

Kinnos Inc. is a New York-based company that is raising the standard of infectious disease decontamination to protect healthcare workers, patients, and the general public. Their first product, Highlight®, is an additive for disinfectants that eliminates human error and allows even untrained end-users, such as healthcare workers, housekeeping staff, and biosafety personnel, to immediately use disinfectants effectively.

Creating a business in the gig economy (on-demand work) is advantageous for startups because when they are able to classify their workers as independent contractors, the startups can avoid paying benefits, payroll taxes, unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and disability. Startups, however, need to carefully classify their workers as misclassification can lead to investigations, penalties, and lawsuits, which are becoming increasingly common.

Decisions you make when founding and/or investing in an insurtech venture can dictate your regulatory obligations, tax liability, operational structure and, ultimately, profitability. Here are five seemingly simple questions to ask when launching an insurtech venture:

This issue includes two articles that challenge conventional thinking. The first, called “Software is Still Patent Eligible,” makes the case that software patents can still be obtained. IP generally accretes in value over time and is critically important to the value proposition of many enterprises. While some commentators believe that software patents are no longer worth trying to obtain, we disagree. The second article is about a novel way to construct a more balanced approach to the share ownership of founders and investors. People often forget that the NVCA (National Venture Capital Association) forms are created by counsel to the venture capital industry and as such are generally biased in favor of the investor. Our article proposes a novel solution to mitigate this bias and the solution is both simple and equitable.

Recognizing that physical therapy will always be in demand, Dr. Stephen Fealy MD, a leading orthopedic surgeon at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS), and Greg Peters, a leading health and fitness expert, joined forces to make the overall physical therapy industry and experience more effective and efficient, thus BetterPT was conceived.

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in New York City, T-REX’s secure, enterprise SaaS-based analytics, risk, and portfolio management platform standardizes and provides transparency to the complex structured products evaluation process, increasing liquidity and creating significant investment opportunities for the hundreds of billions of dollars of capital across various esoteric, non-commoditized asset classes.

Our client, Benji Cohen, was running an Energy Markets Division at Macquarie when he had a lightbulb moment. Everywhere he looked valuation models were being put together in the most laborious way imaginable, with Excel tables containing hundreds of columns and thousands of rows. Benji saw a real point of pain in the marketplace and acted on it. Thus, in 2012, Benji created T-REX as a subscription-based, SaaS, FinTech platform that could compress the time for the valuation process to make the process 50 times faster and more accurate as well. And, the focus would be in a growing niche — the renewable energy sector. Benji was able to see the size of the opportunity, the point of pain in the marketplace, and the solution. With much hard work and great execution, T-REX is now a leader in this part of the FinTech space. In this edition of TechConnect, we highlight T-REX in our Innovator Profile.

If there is one common theme that entrepreneurs tend to have, it is fire – meaning, many entrepreneurs are passionate about an exciting idea that they seek to turn into a business. However, entrepreneurs often quickly realize that, in order to make their fire glow high and bright for the world to see, they need fuel – meaning, capital.

The world of raising capital for emerging companies has experienced a revolution. Prior to the enactment of the JOBS Act in 2012, raising capital for private companies was limited to offline communications and was dominated by professional venture capitalists; now the capital raising process has been democratized. Capital can be raised online directly by companies or through intermediaries. It can be accomplished by crowd sourcing to “accredited investors” or, in limited amounts, by crowdfunding to everyone. Additionally, companies can raise capital in an “IPO lite” manner by using the new Reg A+.

Vidrovr can index, search, and recommend video content in a cost-effective, automatic, and accurate manner. Vidrovr addresses three key market needs: 1. Domain and customer-specific automatic metadata generation for videos, 2. Video Content Management solutions that enable automatic placement and recommendation of video clips for across a company’s digital products, and 3. Automatically linking and sourcing visual social media content that is relevant to a particular video or online article before it is published. Vidrovr was recently named as one of the winners of the prestigious Publicis90 competition, which entails investment and mentorship from Publicis Groupe.