Startup Reading List - Ant Financial, JFrog, Lending, and APIs

Issue #121 • September 8 • View online • Suggest a link

Startup Reading List

A weekly curated newsletter on startups and technology.

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Welcome to this week’s edition of the Startup Digest Reading List featuring stories I found interesting on startups, technology, and venture capital.

Excited to curate this second edition for you as your new (old?) curator. I was one of the original founders of Startup Digest and happy to be back curating this reading list.

Tell your friends and colleagues to signup using this direct subscribe link here> https://startups.startupdigest.com/.

Onto this week’s articles!

See where AI is headed at NVIDIA GTC

Hear from leading experts on what markets AI is going to disrupt next, attend interactive training sessions led by NVIDIA solutions architects, and network with fellow startup CEOs, VCs, and enterprise executives at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) October 5-9. The startup track will be hosted by NVIDIA Inception, an acceleration program that nurtures cutting-edge AI startups and scaleups with go-to-market support, expertise, and technology. Register for 20% off with code CMSTARTUPS.

Differentiated Lending

The best way to build a defensible lending business is to have some combination of: proprietary data, lower acquisition cost, lower cost of capital, ability to get paid back synchronously with the borrower.

Ayo Omojola, the former product lead at Square’s Cash App, details how these dynamics play into Square Capital and their lending business.

www.kunle.app • Share

How Ant Financial Can Dominate A Post-COVID World

Ant Financial, one of the largest fintech companies worldwide, is massive. They have over 1B users, are doing $17T (yes trillion) in payment volume, and did a reported $3B in net profit for the first half of 2020.

Here is a quick primer on what Ant Financial is and here is a deeper dive analysis by Ian Karr of Fintech Today about why Ant Financial is so dominant in all of the verticals they operate, including payments, lending, investing, insurance, etc.

fintechtoday.substack.com • Share

Designing Delightful and Effective APIs

An API is an “application interface” for developers; however, developers are quite the fickle crowd to design products for.

Michelle Bu, product tech lead at Stripe, shares her tips for designing for developers. TLDR the main takeaways include:

Get to the main value prop/demo-able product in the quickest time possible.
Pay attention to naming conventions
Make it simple to get started but customizable enough for implementation complexity.
“User testing” is fundamentally different with API businesses.

increment.com • Share

JFrog S-1

Company Description: JFrog is an end to end developer operations (DevOps) platform.
Founded: 2009
Customers: 5,800
Customer Notes:
JFrog has 286 customers contributing over $100K+ ARR.
10 largest customers represented 8% of total revenue.
91% of their revenue is SaaS subscription revenue.
Featured Customers: AMEX, Bank of America, Visa, Morgan Stanley, Blizzard, Washington Post, Box, Google, Microsoft, Twilio, T-Mobile, Target, HP, Qualcomm, Splunk, Atlassian
Revenue: $138M (2020 projected)
Revenue Growth (YoY): 50%
Gross Margin: 81%
International: 36% International Revenue, 64% US Revenue
Largest VC holders: Gemini Israel Ventures (15%), Scale Ventures (10%), Sapphire Ventures (10%), Insight Partners (9%), Qumra Capital (5%)

Deeper dive into JFrog’s S-1 Filing: https://medium.com/memory-leak/jfrogs-s-1-analysis-leaping-forward-bc07bcfcae9

See where AI is headed at NVIDIA GTC

Hear from leading experts on what markets AI is going to disrupt next, attend interactive training sessions led by NVIDIA solutions architects, and network with fellow startup CEOs, VCs, and enterprise executives at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC) October 5-9. The startup track will be hosted by NVIDIA Inception, an acceleration program that nurtures cutting-edge AI startups and scaleups with go-to-market support, expertise, and technology. Register for 20% off with code CMSTARTUPS.

Techstars Startup Digest Startup Reading List is curated by:

Chris McCann - General Partner @ Race Capital, former Greylock Partners
chris@startupdigest.com

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Startup Reading List - Ant Financial, JFrog, Lending, and APIs

See where AI is headed at NVIDIA GTC

See where AI is headed at NVIDIA GTC

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