The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. | | | | "We're really bothered by the fact that so much attention is being given to only a few entrepreneurs in a few places." - Steve Case, on the reasoning behind investment fund "Rise Of The Rest."
(Revolution) | | | | | |  | "The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity."
| | | | | | rantnrave:// AOL Co-founder and REVOLUTION Chairman and CEO STEVE CASE is correct. About what? That there's lots of entrepreneurial gold in cities outside of CALIFORNIA, NEW YORK, and MASSACHUSETTS. That's the point of the seed fund Revolution powers, RISE OF THE REST. It's a $150 million fund, one of Revolution's three funds which have $1.5 billion under management. Some of these facts may depress others: More than 75% of venture capital goes to CALIFORNIA, NEW YORK, Massachusetts. Over 50% goes just to California. FLORIDA is the 3rd largest state but gets less than 2% of venture capital. Less than 10% of venture capital investments go to women-led ventures. Only 1% to African Americans. But Steve, J.D. VANCE, ANNA MASON and the entire team at ROTR see a big opportunity. How do they invest? They go on tour. They pick cities and go on road trips in a remixed political campaign bus. Each stop ending in a pitch competition from local entrepreneurs in front of a big crowd of fellow local entrepreneurs. The winner at each stop gets $100k. In its first five years, their tours have hit more than 40 cities. Traveled 10,000 miles. The fund has invested in 115 early-stage companies that span across 60 cities. They invited me to join them to kick off their Florida tour. I met them MONDAY in ORLANDO. This week, road trip 8.0 will also visit SPACE COAST, TAMPA, MIAMI, and SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO. Lots of people not a lot of VC dollars. The tours bring out politicians, commerce officials, investors, local business leaders, media, and entrepreneurs. On the bus, different mixtures of them school us on local opportunity from stop to stop. We visited exciting local businesses and learned why they chose Orlando. How they are continuing to grow and what their challenges are. EA SPORTS (where we learned about FLORIDA INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT ACADEMY that nurtures local game developers), LAKE NONA (prototype future community, where we saw WHIT, a wellness home built with every detail designed to inspire and empower a healthier life), LUMINAR (advanced sensor technologies for the autonomous vehicle industry), FATTMERCHANT (payment technology company, a local startup on the rise) and more. We spent time with the CEO of DISNEY WORLD (started as a busboy at a park resort over 48 years ago). Orlando is known for hospitality, they do it as well any place. But there's a lot more going on. ROTR is skating "to where the puck is going, not where it has been." Just like the early days of AOL when they were on the ropes, Case knows he's right. I agree. Lots of divisiveness in the country right now. Cities that ROTR visits feel neglected. That pisses Case off. "We're really bothered by the fact that so much attention is being given to only a few entrepreneurs in a few places." There's something beyond profit here. I think it's virtuous. In the best way. Who won on this stop? AIREHEALTH, a connected-portable nebulizer designed to help catch and prevent worsening respiratory symptoms. Watch the tour on TWITTER as it happens... One other note: There is no REDEF without AOL. I told Steve this during our fireside chat. My first email account. First time on the internet. My first internship with the first record label online, WARNER BROS. RECORDS. The first discussions I ever had online were on USENET. All of this happened on AOL. That service sparked the interest which became my career... Congrats to my friend JON STEINBERG and the CHEDDAR team. They made a lot of cheese. And they took it in cash. He's no dummy. Jon's hustle is without compare... My recent pledge... MARGARET HOOVER takes on STEPHEN MOORE on FIRING LINE. She's awesome... Happy Birthday MARK BEAVEN, ALEX ZUBILLAGA, SCOTT MOORE, and SCOTT EHRLICH. | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator | | | |  | The New Yorker | | Can Trump's national-security adviser sell the isolationist President on military force? | | | |  | BBC Four | | Film shining a spotlight on the untold story of the sidemen, the musicians behind some of the greatest artists of all time. The sidemen are the forgotten 'guns for hire' that changed musical history. Featuring interviews with Mick Jagger, Billy Joel and Keith Richards, taking viewers from the 1960s to today, via global stars such as Prince, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones and Beyonce. | | | |  | AlFranken.com | | The Mueller Report is not an invitation for the House to impeach and the Senate to convict Donald Trump. It is an instruction. "No man is above the law," Mueller wrote, for a reason.But Democrats find themselves in an agonizing dilemma. A majority of Americans are against impeaching Trump. We h | | | |  | Wired | | Yuval Noah Harari, historian and best-selling author of Sapiens, Homo Deus and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Tristan Harris, co-founder and executive director of the Center for Humane Technology, speak with WIRED Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson. | | | |  | The Washington Post | | How a big crime in a small town produced a whodunit as gripping and colorful as "The Wizard of Oz" itself. | | | |  | McKinsey & Company | | Organizations can mitigate advanced-analytics and AI risks by embracing three principles. | | | |  | Pacific Standard | | Young artists are finding creative ways to carve a space in Portland's lively-if fractious and often ignored-hip-hop scene. | | | |  | The Atlantic | | How an obsolete medical device with a security flaw became a must-have for some patients with type 1 diabetes. | | | |  | Conversations with Tyler | | Turns out, Canada is really big. | | | |  | Lawfare | | This is the first in a new series of posts about developments in Justice Department efforts to combat transnational organized criminal groups. | | | |  | Foreign Policy | | How Brexit could spell the end of Britain's famed advantage in intelligence. | | | |  | Bloomberg | | With distracted driving on the rise, phone-tracking startups try to show us we're the problem. It's not quite working. | | | |  | RogerEbert.com | | "Avengers: Endgame" is not just the culmination of the 22-movie Marvel Cinematic Universe. It also represents the decisive defeat of "cinema" by "content." | | | |  | POLITICO Magazine | | The national security site has found fresh energy as a savvy, progressive attack dog in national politics. But is it undermining its own side? | | | |  | BuzzFeed News | | "Worst reviewed" videos inadvertently shine a light on how subjective Yelp reviews really are. | | | |  | Literary Hub | | If you had to group pitches into two categories, you would choose "fastball" and "other." The "other" makes pitching interesting. If the ball went straight every time, pitchers would essentially be functionaries, existing merely to serve the hitters. Long ago, that is just what they were, as the name implies. | | | |  | Fast Company | | Rest has become the ultimate luxury. | | | |  | Stratechery | | It is difficult to discuss enterprise software without at least mentioning Microsoft, and there is no better time than now: last week the company (briefly) became the third U.S. company, after Apple and Amazon, to achieve a market capitalization of over $1 trillion, and is currently the most valuable publicly-listed company in the world. | | | |  | Aeon Magazine | | One of the hallmarks of existentialism is its particular emphasis on the concept of 'anguish', understood as the feeling we experience when we grasp our radical responsibility in defining who we are -- individually and as a species. | | | |  | Rolling Stone | | What if the major music companies teamed with Merlin -- the body that represents the recorded interests of the largest independent labels worldwide -- and raised the capital to buy Spotify? | | | |  | Vox | | What incels believe -- and the dangers they pose. | | | |  | Open Culture | | At the height of the Harry Potter novels' popularity, I asked a number of people why those books in particular enjoyed such a devoted readership. Everyone gave almost the same answer: that author J.K. Rowling "tells a good story." | | | | |  | | YouTube | | | | | | | | Prince and the Revolution | | | | | | | | | | | © Copyright 2019, The REDEF Group | | |
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